Transporting Cupcakes

Yesterday, Ciara made cupcakes to take to school today to celebrate her birthday.  Since she has 17 kids in her class including herself, and 1 teacher, we needed to pack up 18 frosted cupcakes without ruining the frosting.  I don't own one of those fancy cupcake holder containers, which is maybe why my kids have never taken cupcakes to school before.  So I have this covered tray that would fit 18 cupcakes perfectly, but I would need to stack some on top of each other.  I realized that I could use Lego to make a platform for the second layer of cupcakes.  My husband and kids thought I was crazy.  I thought that it was pretty ingenious.  See pictures below:

A fine piece of engineering

So today, everyone in Ciara's class got to enjoy a cupcake with frosting intact!  I wonder if I should send this picture into the Lego magazine? 

New Toys

Ciara loves to rollerblade.  When we still lived in Canada she received an old pair of rollerblades from a  family friend.  She used them until the wheels were no longer round, they were more like squares.  Then she started using my rollerblades.  Nathan used to wear my rollerblades and now he uses Bob's rollerblades.  Needless to say both Bob and I may never rollerblade again.  Ciara used my blades every day.  The latches broke, so I used duct tape (my best friend) to attach velcro straps so that she could continue to wear them.  Last week, I noticed that the entire outer casing of the rollerblades was falling off.

On Saturday I told Ciara that we would have to throw them away, but that I would buy her a new pair for her birthday.  Oddly enough, she protested.  She did not want to get rid of my old rollerblades.  Fortunately, the German school, which is just down the street from us, was having its semi-annual yard sale.  It's a huge affair and so I convinced Ciara to come with me to check it out.  Cole also came because he needed a scooter.  He destroyed our old scooter a few weeks ago.  Seems like our kids are really rough on recreational equipment.  We were very lucky to grab a pair of rollerblades for Ciara in great condition for 5€.  We found an old beat-up scooter for Cole for 2€!

It was a beautiful day and I had promised Nathan awhile back that we could go to the beach.   We headed towards Castelldefels, which is about 20min away.  On the way we stopped at Decathlon because they were having a sale on all their summer stuff.   The kids ran in to look at the skateboards.  Ciara decided to use the birthday money she got from her aunt to buy a penny board, which is a small sturdy plastic skateboard.  I assume that she had some pressure from Nathan, who has been interested in getting a penny board for some time now.

At Castelldefels there is a very long concrete walkway that goes along the beach.  The kids got to try out all their new toys: the rollerblades, the scooter, and the penny board.  I had never seen a penny board before Saturday.  It was actually much more fun and easy to use than I expected.  It feels safer than a skateboard.  So there you go, another thing that we have tried in Barcelona!

Ciara on the new penny board

Ciara's Birthday

Today was a PD day, so no school for our kids.  It was also Ciara's birthday.  To celebrate we invited a few friends to have lunch at Ciara's favourite Japanese restaurant in Barcelona.  Here's a link to the review I wrote on yelp.com:  http://www.yelp.com/biz/chi-ei-barcelona?hrid=AZvypDe5zdlZhV_2IVeFUw#src:self.  It's the cheapest sushi in town!

After stuffing ourselves, we headed to Parc de Joan Miró to burn off a few calories.  It was a beautiful day, an unbelievable 26 degrees and it's almost November.

Ciara's Second Day of School

All 4 kids headed out the door this morning for school and I wouldn't see them again until 4:05pm.  So now I was faced with 7 hours of unscheduled time.   I began my first free day by wasting time on the Internet.  It's amazing how much interesting stuff you can find, when you aren't looking for anything in particular.  My plan was to head out shortly after the kids went to school to do some grocery shopping, but I actually ended up leaving at around 11:30am.  Since I was not on a schedule, I decided to head to Alcampo (kind of like a Walmart Supercentre) which is part of a huge shopping complex in Sant Boi.   There is also a Decathlon (my favourite sporting goods store) in the complex.  So between Decathlon and Alcampo, I took my time to shop carefully and didn't get home until 2:45pm.  When I was homeschooling I would try to get to the store, shop, and get home within an hour.

So ironically even though I have way more time, I'm not necessarily getting more done.  I am going to have to discipline myself and try to stick to some kind of schedule because there is lots of stuff I need to do.

Ciara was fine when she got home from school.  She told me briefly about her day, and it was all pretty positive.  Ciara has judo every Tuesday and Thursday at 6:30pm, Nathan does his judo class right after at 7:30pm.  Ciara never complains about doing judo, but she doesn't seem to interact much with the other kids in the class.  I challenged her last week to at least say good-bye to her classmates. When I picked up Ciara after her class today, she told me that she said "Adios" to all the girls and smiled before leaving.   It's just a small thing, but it's a big improvement :)

I'm still trying to figure out what will be the purpose of my blog because I no longer have to track what we are doing for homeschooling.  I guess I can just blog about our day to day life in Barcelona, but I definitely won't blog daily, once a week should be enough.  Stay tuned!

Ciara's First Day Back in School

This morning everyone got up fairly early, so I decided since it was Ciara's first day back at school I would make a special breakfast.  I make big breakfasts for the kids quite often, mostly because I don't like making bag lunches.  I figure if they get a nice big breakfast, it won't matter so much what they take for lunch.  Ciara wanted pancakes, so I made pancakes with whipped cream and strawberries and bacon on the side.

The boys left for school together and I walked Ciara to the front of the school. Ciara seemed pretty calm.  We waited outside the elementary school until all the other kids had gone inside, then we made our way to the reception desk.  The secretary took Ciara to her new class.  Ciara looked a little nervous, and I could tell just by the way that she interacted with the secretary that she was back into her just-smile-and-say-nothing-mode.  Ironically her first period back at school was an assembly with guest speaker Bob Love, former NBA star.  I learned that Bob Love had a terrible stuttering problem and could not even put two words together, but later overcame his disability and became a great public speaker.  Ciara loved this presentation.

It felt really strange to be at home all by myself after dropping Ciara off at school.  I realized that it was probably my first time alone in the house since the kids finished school last June.  I only had until 12:50pm, then I would need to pick Ciara up from school as Wednesdays are half day school, half day homeschool.  I decided that now is the time to start reorganizing my blog.  I probably should have used the time to reorganize the house, which has not had a good cleaning in many weeks, but revamping the blog is so much more interesting.  I added 2 new pages!

When I picked Ciara up at 12:50, I got to meet her teacher Miss Natalie for the first time.  She seems really nice and gentle, I think that Ciara felt at ease with her right away.  Ciara didn't have too much to say about her first half day of school.  I kept asking questions about the kids in the class, but she just said that they were okay.  Ciara is really good at giving vague answers.

Right after a quick lunch Arantxa came to give Ciara her Spanish lesson.  Ciara will have Spanish in school too, but I know that she will learn a lot faster working one on one with Arantxa.   Normally Ciara will do Discovery with Verina Monday and Wednesday afternoons, but today Verina was sick, so we took the opportunity to read some of the book they are readying in class.  The book is "Hatchet" by Gary Paulson.  Nathan read it last year and loved it.

We'll see how Ciara fares tomorrow, it will be her first full day back at school.

Week 6, Tuesday

This morning we were greeted by the noise of some kind of street work in our complex.  The smell that accompanied the noise told me that someone was working on the sewers.   It's something that we have kind of gotten used to over the past year.  The smell of raw sewage permeates the air in several areas around the city and once in a while in our neighbourhood as well.  After the boys left for school, I decided that it would be best for Ciara and I to go out for awhile.

I thought about all the interesting outings that Ciara and I didn't get the chance to do.  Over the past month I was so concerned about keeping up with the curriculum that I forgot to plan any real field trips.  It's a shame, as Ciara goes back to school tomorrow, it will be more difficult to do any outings together.   Our outing this morning consisted of going to the gas station and then we made a run to Lidl, which is a grocery store that sells a very eclectic selection of food item.  The purpose of our trip was to buy pretzel buns (the only grocery store I know that sells them), but we always need something else and so we ended up with a basket full of groceries.

By the time we got home, the smell of sewage was gone, yippee!! We worked on multiplying and dividing fractions, had a lesson on how to fix run-on sentences and coma splices, made brownies and then learned about cells.  While I was looking for some resources to use for our writing class, I came across this website: http://www.time4writing.com/free-writing-resources/.  There are a whole bunch of free mini-lessons on writing that you can use to supplement your writing curriculum.

Tonight after Ciara and I read together, we talked a bit about going back to school.   She has not shown any apprehension or nervousness since I started telling her that it would be a probability.  Tonight for the first time, she told me that she didn't want to go back to school.  I told her that it would be much easier this time as she will be going back into grade 5 and she will already know pretty much everything.   She seemed okay with that and went to bed.

I think tomorrow I will have to change the title of this blog as "Homeschooling in Barcelona" seems a bit of a misnomer now.

Week 6, Monday

I sent the boys off to school this morning and although Ciara was up at the same time as the boys, she was clearly not ready to start working.  We did some of her discovery homework and then that was it until Arantxa came to do her Spanish class at 10:30.  Fortunately, Arantxa is really good at keeping Ciara motivated and speaking Spanish.  After lunch we did math.  Along with our daily lesson, Ciara also goes on Math Magician and does a few challenges.  I  will share the link, it's a free resource that is great for all ages and helps to improve your mental math skills http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/mathmagician/cathymath.html.

Another activity that Ciara has never really shown interest in, is board games and card games.  All the boys love playing any kind of game, but in the past whenever we played a game together as a family, Ciara would usually not want to participate.  Lately though, she has been asking to play cards or other games.  Today we played "Alarm" which is a more challenging type of memory game.  Last week we played "Quiddler" which is a great game for improving vocabulary, spelling and math skills too.

Quick update on our pansies, we have been watering them daily since we planted them 2 weeks ago.  Here is what they look like now:

The seeds planted outside

The seeds planted indoors