New Baby, Owls, and Ancient Sumerians

I had started this post two days ago, exactly one month since my last post, but I lost it, though I thought it was saved.  After my last post I dropped Jaden's book work down to only his 5-day-a-week handwriting and two pages almost-daily out of his math Daily Word Problems book, then later the latter was also dropped.  His work around the house increased, though, in order to give me a rest.

We stopped our almost-daily walks together, but I started walking by myself; the kids stayed at home with Nathan.  My walking stopped, though, six days before the baby was born, because I fell and hurt my knee when I was nearly home that day.

I continued reading to the kids most days.  I read to them their daily devotionals from Bible Study Planet, except on the days I didn't approve the overall message (which is rare), a chapter from Proverbs, their nature magazines, and Weekly Readers.

One of the things we studied was owls.  We've read about a few different types of owls in their magazines over time, but last month we learned about snowy owls:

I read aloud about different kinds of owls in one of our encyclopedias and showed them pictures, and I made a playlist of owl Youtube videos for them to watch while I folded laundry, including some fun ones…I always throw in something animated, preferably a moral tale or a song.

The featured treat for the month in Big Backyard was of snowy owls. I changed up the ingredients only slightly.  I made them owl treats with apple cinnamon rice cakes, melted marshmallows (b/c marshmallow cream was unavailable), peanut butter, raisins, and blood orange-flavored hard candies (I substituted the latter with banana slices for Liv's, not pictured):

Jaden's, w/o peanut butter (Oops!  Sorry about the camera strap!)

Trusten's, w/ peanut butter

We concluded our owl study by dissecting owl pellets, which are balls of hair and bones that owls hack up after eating their prey.  We could tell the "pellets" we dissected were mice:

Loupes, owl pellets, and nitrile gloves

Jade carefully inspecting the outside of a pellet with a loupe

Mouse bones!

Skull is still whole, along with the teeth

Mouse teeth still attached to the skull

Stinky!  I commented to the kids that it was a real lesson in how brutal things were in the wild and reminded them that animals will not behave that way when God's Kingdom is established on this earth.  Owls will eat plants then.

 Six days after I injured my knee (thankful I had somewhat of a healing time), I gave birth to my fifth-born child, my second girl—Elizabeth Annmarie.  Jaden, Trusten, and Olivia all love her very much!  She's a sweet little blessing.  So far she has seemed more like Jaden William as a baby (or Asher, as he was also pleasant) than last two.  Here are a couple pictures of her:

Elizabeth, two days old

Elizabeth, nine days old

Before Elizabeth was born, we read about the Tower of Babel in a Mystery of History lesson.  We looked at ziggurats on Google Images, and he built one of his own with wooden blocks.  Since she was born we've picked back up on history and read about the ancient Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh.  When Jaden is a bit older I'll allow him to read or listen to that Babylonian story.  It has been just over a year since Nathan and I listened to the entire epic on Youtube.  What a strange tale!  There were some things that I found would be inappropriate for Jade at his age.  Of course, I guess some would say the same thing of some things in the holy scriptures, but the wording of the things (sexual content) in Gilgamesh I don't like for an eight-year-old. 

We read about the Sumerians' written language—cuneiform.  I encouraged Jaden to write real cuneiform symbols in clay, but Jade did his own made-up written language on a small clay piece he made (from clay he found outside and then dried afterward to keep; he didn't want to use modeling clay):

I also reminded him of the time he wrote his name William in Chinese.  We then went to Google Images and looked at cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Hebrew, Greek, Telugu, Arabic, and perhaps some other non-Roman-alphabet languages that I can't recall.  I reminded him of the bible study articles I've written that our brother Manasseh in India has had translated into Telugu to distribute throughout his region in India.  Manasseh sent some copies once, one of which I gave to Jaden to keep:

Manasseh has also sent us newspaper clippings in Telugu:

I finally explained to Jaden that all languages evolve as well, and our Modern English has changed from Middle English, Old English, etc.  I showed him what English looked like exactly four-hundred years ago by pulling our copy of the 1611 Edition of the King James Bible…

…and opened it to compare the chapter in Proverbs we had just read from the modern King James bible.  The u's were v's and the v's u's, the s's were f's, there are more e's on the ends of words and doubles of many other letters, etc. and I also pointed out that their chapter headings were done in Roman numerals, rather than Arabic numerals:

I'm now easing back into our [new] normal routine, and I'll soon have more to report about all the three oldest children, but this is it for now, except a couple fun shots of Olivia in her new dress-up dress that my momma got for her (and her play silk that I got for her a quite some time ago):

Until next time...