Kindergarten Week 1

This is a picture of Gemma on what should have been her first day of kindergarten. I took it outside, in the late afternoon sunshine.

She spent the day playing. This is the part where I express gratitude that my husband is the stay-at-home parent, and that my husband and I have different personality types, and that my husband doesn't feel a need to keep our daughter busy because he knows she will busy herself.

After being in a classroom for eight hours, I was in need of some time outdoors. My husband went to run some errands, and Gemma and I walked down to a food truck lot and shared a grilled cheese and fries. Gemma, of course, had dessert first: a scoop of gourmet vanilla bean ice cream. It was horribly overpriced, but very good.

Gemma rolled around on the grass, stared at the sky, and ran around with other picnicking children. I made small talk with mothers. While the mothers were lovely, I really, really dislike small talk. The first day of school was the big topic of conversation. "We're homeschooling," I replied a few times, "but, yes, she's in kindergarten." To the question of "why," I said what I thought would end the inquiry, "She's a few years advanced in reading and math," and it did. I didn't want to get into a long explanation of my beliefs about education, or the public school system, or why we're on earth. I just wanted to be somewhere without a ceiling and eat food I didn't cook.

My John Muir Laws nature journaling book finally arrived!

I ordered it from a Barnes and Noble only 10 miles away, two weeks ago. It wasn't available on the B&N website, and the store within walking distance from me didn't have it in stock, so I purchased it from a store 10 miles away, over the phone, and had it shipped to me.

I could have had the book the same day, but I didn't want to sit in traffic for two hours. After waiting for the book 12 days, I realized that I'd made the mistake of not getting a tracking number, so I called B&N and asked if they could tell me where my book was.

The manager tracked it down. UPS had sent my book to a UPS hub in Jacksonville, Florida. The book had then traveled back this way, through Texas, to Los Angeles - where it had started - so it could go out for delivery to me in Santa Monica. If I were UPS, and I were looking to cut costs, because I would think that if I were a business I would always be looking to cut costs, it seems to me that I would want parcels to travel the fewest number of miles possible, for example: 10 instead of 6,000. But then again, I'm not UPS.

Another way UPS could have saved money is if they had just paid me to drive to Barnes & Noble myself, to pick up my own package.

Gemma thinks the John Muir Laws book is awesome. She was inspired to paint this dragonfly.

What else happened this week? We're still s-l-o-w-l-y reading Prince Caspian and Little House in the Big Woods. We're working our way through Training Hearts. In piano, she practiced "Boogie Woogie Beat," which introduced sharps. In Cherub Choir, the little ones are learning "Only You," which they'll sing on "Kick-off Sunday." She did at least one Duolingo lesson, and read some Jewel Thieves. We're on chapter 8 of Life of Fred: Goldfish; she begged me to read 3 of those chapters in one sitting, while she swam in the bathtub. She watched a video about how pretzels are made and learned half of the U.S. Presidents song. And Daddy took her to play at the beach.