Mardi Gras

It got wild here tonight! We had an impromptu Mardi Gras party in our house. M loves New Orleans, especially the food and the music. He made red beans and rice for dinner, and also baked a king cake. I had a few decorations and masks squirreled away so we surprised him by taking down our Valentine's decorations and putting up green, gold and purple streamers and tinsel. We even had a sazarac before dinner.

At dinner time we were talking about the power outages in Texas and the kids turned out all the lights and lit candles. A show of solidarity, or perhaps a rehearsal since it is not unheard of to lose power around here during the winter. The water mains also burst all the time. M put on some music and it suddenly became very festive. The kids ran upstairs and put their best clothes on. Everyone was wearing a mask and we danced for an hour. Shadow the Cat woke up for her all-day nap and was shocked to see how noisy the house was and that our faces were covered in feathers. She immediately retreated. The king cake was delicious.

Earlier in the day, I took the two older kids to the eye doctor. Marko's eyes are fine, but Laurel's prescription changed again. After that, even though the temperature was plummeting, Laurel still wanted to go on her lunch/walk with her friend who lives down the street. She invited Marko to join them and treated everyone to pizza and ice cream with her allowance money. I can't believe they were game for eating pizza outside in 20 degree weather, but they were in great moods when they came back. (And had very wind-chapped cheeks.) 

Max had his science class. Today they did some exploration of states of matter using balloons that were filled with ice, water or air. It was slightly messy, but they were all making good observations (Max said the water used to be the shape of the balloon, but when he popped it, it became the shape of the bowl). I've enjoyed watching her teaching strategies, as I think she does a really outstanding job of keeping the kids involved. She uses their names a lot, and asks specific questions of each kid. She gives a lot of wait time for them to answer, without appearing impatient. Thirty minutes seems to be a good amount of time for this kind of engagement. 

We had to move poetry teatime to tomorrow. Hopefully there will be leftover king cake.