Bat & Cat Week

There were two problems with Bat & Cat Week. The first problem was that Rocket Boy was out of town the entire week (came back tonight, thank goodness). So I was Nervous, as I always am when he is out of town. Yes, we know a few more people in Ridgecrest now, but I still feel as though if something bad happened, I would really be in trouble. Also, I always feel that our meth-using, pedophile, psychopath neighbors somehow KNOW that Rocket Boy is not home. (NOTE: I really don't think we have any meth-using, pedophile, psychopath neighbors, we have very nice neighbors. There's just this strange transformation that takes place when Rocket Boy is out of town.)

Rocket Boy is almost never at home when we are doing homeschool preschool activities, he's at work, so his absence shouldn't have affected our mornings. But it did.

The second problem was that Pie Bear, our cat, refused to make any appearances during Bat & Cat Week, since he does not like the twins. So with Exhibit A missing, the week was somewhat lackluster.

We did a few worksheets. My attitude toward worksheets now is that I will only use them if they look like they would be fun. For instance, the twins like doing mazes, and dot-to-dot pictures, and they also enjoyed the worksheets in the photo above. One had a cat surrounded by objects and you were supposed to circle the ones a cat might use. Boos circled all the objects. The instructions said to accept "any logical answer," but I really argued against the cat using a lamp. "If it was dark," Baby A argued back, "the cat would need to turn on a lamp!" I pointed out that cats do not know how to turn on lamps. "Someone could help him!" Oh, all right.

The other worksheet was just a blank drawing of a house and yard, and I gave them a bunch of cat stickers and asked them to put a cat on the roof, on the fence, at the front door, etc. Then they could color the picture and put cats in other places, such as the sun, if desired.

Wednesday found us making cat and bat sugar cookies, of course (with a few pumpkins and mice thrown in for good measure). I can't think when in my life I've ever made so many cookies (as the last two months). My grandmother would be proud.

As the week progressed, I did what I always do when Rocket Boy is out of town -- got more nervous, stayed up later at night doing nothing, was more tired in the morning. Wednesday night I needed to prepare the materials to make foam bats on Thursday, but I was just too tired (and nervous). So on Thursday morning I got out the playdough, told the boos they could play with it (it's their favorite), and then sat down at the big table (just a couple feet from their little table) and proceeded to try to make a foam bat. Of course, within minutes the playdough was abandoned and they came over to see what I was doing.

And I began to realize that I don't have to have everything all perfectly worked out ahead of time -- they're old enough that we can kind of work along together, experimenting with things. I made bats (it was really too hard for them), and they cut out random pieces of foam and stuck them together in interesting ways. At the end of the morning, we had three foam bats, a car (I helped make the wheels), and an unidentified brown thing, and we were all happy.

According to the twins, the bats' names are Stellaluna (the black one), Teeter Tot (the purple & brown one), and Neepy (the Cal colors one).

And on Friday we went to the special program on bats at the Maturango Museum which had inspired the week's theme. That was fun, and they sent us home with materials to make a bat mobile. But I kind of like our bats better.