W stayed home from school today because he has a fever. He also stayed home from dance class. He was upset about both, but understood (I think). Tomorrow he is going on a class trip and he needed to rest today. I gave him half a Tylenol this morning (he prefers swallowing pills to taking liquid or chewables) and although the fever came back a few hours later, it seems gone again. My kids always get the "one-day fever", rarely any other symptoms. So we spent a lot of time together today snuggling and playing computer games. We found some cool ones, including gamegoo.com which he liked. He did a lot of reading on these sites, as well as alphabetizing letters, remembering order, and catching all the letters in a given word. He learned about the different types of poems (rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm) in a fun game where monsters turned into keys after you guessed the right type. he used the map to keep track of where he was and at the end he knew he had to get to the dragon's lair (I didn't know that). I had so much fun with him today.

J and K are interested in entering a kiddy pageant. Like there isn't enough stuff going on. The timing of it works for us and it's not expensive, so we'll see. K had a trip to the New York Hall of Science today with school. She loves that place. She tried the surfing experiment, where you try and balance on the surfboard while it simulates being in waves. I gotta take J there soon. She's been asking for months. K got a progress report the other day and although there is some improvement, there's still a talking and missing homework problem. I told her that as long as she is choosing to be in school she might as well try and play the game well and get the most she can out of it. Otherwise it's such a waste of her time. I told her I could think of dozens of things she could be doing instead, but she said she really likes school - even the work. Some things I mentioned as examples piqued her interest, though, so maybe I got her thinking about homeschooling a little more. I told my mom about the difficulty I'm having choosing a high school for K and her only advice was to move. Sigh. She's so damn hellbent on Long Island and I so don't want to live there. I think I'll keep my thoughts to myself from now on.

Link of the day:
http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm