We made our own chewing gum yesterday! I bought a kit from a friend of mine and it had a bunch of different ingredients for us to mix together. There was corn syrup, confectioners sugar, fruit flavoring, peppermint flavoring, and chicle. Chicle looks like the pellets you feed the animals at the petting zoo, but it's real sticky once melted. J and W each took a flavor and mooshed all the melted ingredients together. The sugar acts like flour in that it keeps all the sticky in so it's not all over you. Then they rolled it out with a rolling pin and cut it into small pieces. We all tasted it on the count of 3. It wasn't bad. It was strange in taste and texture, but it was definitely gum.

W was reeling off some more multiplication facts today - some of the 2x and 3x tables. He's starting with the philosophical questions again. He usually does this when we're alone together. J went over her friend A's house early this afternoon, so it was just the 2 of us today. He askes about really big, interesting things he wants to understand and offers his own take on why things are the way they are. We played a few games of Triominoes and afterwards he sat on my bed with a Richard Scarry book before we picked up K.

I'm reading Guerilla Learning again. It's reminding me not to be the kind of parent who is over-involved in K's schooling. I'll admit, I can hover. I have been known to email teachers, nag about homework, tests, and projects, and basically be Big Brother with her school happenings. The new me needs to let her have school as her own endeavor, to do with what she pleases. I want to start keeping my focus on providing an amazingly wonderful home-life for my kids and stop worrying so much about what's theirs. School is K's outlet and getaway. The more "on her" I get about things, the less it remains hers. She loses the enthusiasm to put full effort towards it and keeps quiet about what goes on. Since the new me has emerged, she has started doing more than what's asked of her at school and relates tons of great stories about her day. High school is a time of greater independence, privacy, and maturity. She needs it. No more hovering, nagging, or worrying. She can come home to my hugs, my ear, my smiles, and my homemade eggnog - all for her.