Under Quarantine

Well, not really but we ought to be! We have been so sick!!! It sounds like a tuberculosis ward around here at night, G-d forbid. DH is out buying two new vaporizers right now. So interesting, I know. But such is the extent of our (very) little daily lives right now. We were really feeling thankful yesterday that it's not 100 years ago and we're not farmers. Can you imagine having to go out and take care of business anyway or risk losing your entire year's income?? (Well, maybe not this time of year, but there sure still are many obligations in an agrarian existence...) We have the luxury of DH calling in sick and all of us just hunkering down to recover. So, while the yom tov food was either non-existent or consisting of scrambled eggs, we still felt the clouds of Hashem protecting us. And we looked longingly into our sukkah which generally was either too cold or wet for a bunch of sick people. We managed one meal in there on Friday night, hopefully more to come. OY. I couldn't even look at or smell food until Sunday. I think it will likely be the end of the week before we're all back in our groove.

To pass the time, we've been doing as many readalouds as we can, given our wheezy voices. The Guardians of Ga'Hoole series has really held up. We're just about to start Book 8 of 12, and the action and character development has not waned for a moment yet. Great series. And last week, Eli suddenly developed a huge interest in longer chapter books and has roamed far outside his usual truck books. He's really enjoying a reading of Ralph S. Mouse by Beverly Cleary with papa, and with mama we started The House at Pooh Corner after having finished Winnie-the-Pooh last week. His new interest all started when a friend of ours passed on a book to us called A Mouse Called Wolf and I brought it home and showed him the new book I had brought home for him. He immediately took it and spent the hour before dinner thoroughly poring over the pictures. We read the whole book that night and he just couldn't get enough after that.

Eli has also been having a great time with the Explode the Code series. It's a combination reading/writing primer that didn't work at all for Amirah, but for Eli it's been a perfect fit. He'll sit down and do 20 pages in a row with very little help from me and he loves it. I'm so glad all those workbooks didn't go to waste after not working for Amirah! He's also doing well in the Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. We're doing math more informally, but he sure seems to have his math facts for 1-5 down pretty well (as in adding together quickly any numbers that are 5 and under). Our alef bet book is going well too and he's basically expanding his vocabulary, learning 5-7 new Hebrew words for every letter of the alef bet. He should finish his current book by December, then on to Hebrew reading (kriyah). Anyway... that's a little about what Eli is learning right now. He learns so differently from Amirah in that he takes a giant leap then putts along, then another giant leap, whereas Amirah does a steady climb. He's also ready much earlier than Amirah was for lots of small-motor movement, which makes learning writing SO much easier. And Raizel seems even more ready than Eli! Crazy girl! Has held her pencil PERFECTLY since the first time she picked one up. It's very funny. You can just see the lightning crackle in that girl's brain.

Well, that was a nice distraction from my wheezy life, but back to the couch for a while now!