K has been in Florida with my dad and sis since Thursday. She's at the beach and pool every day, taking everglade boat rides, other boat rides on newly-rich-cousin's newly bought boat, and seeing old friends from grammar school who moved there 5 years ago. Restaurants, manicures, and shopping make up the remainder of the day. I talk to her on the phone every day and she's loving it down there. I miss her, though. Yesterday, after she finished telling me how nice the beach was, how much color she's getting, and how the boardwalk has this great restaurant on it, I told her my plans for the day were mainly going to revolve around the nor'easter storm we're getting, LOL. We were both cracking up.

Today the kids practiced some life-skills since we were homebound. J folded and sorted laundry, W helped do the laundry, and both kids helped B with food shopping.

They played V-Smile and some computer games together - very nicely, might I add - and watched a few of their favorite tv shows. J played with her Tomagochi and DS Lite. W played with the hamsters and took a long bath. In the evening we all watched a cool documentary on dinosaurs.

Before bed, J and I read a short biography of Mozart. We alternated reading the pages until she got tired and wanted me to read the last half to her. She liked the oil paintings in the story of Mozart and his family as well as the pencil and cartoon drawings. After that she brought over K's pre-algebra text book from 8th-grade and we looked at the first couple of pages. It was about integers, absolute value, the number line, negative numbers, and ><=. One read-through was all it took for her to understand the concepts. She loves it when she "gets" math, and consequently wants to do a bunch of examples to really make sure. Or maybe just to show me what she knows.