Botanical Gardens, Fiber Arts, and Cooking- oh my!

 What a week! We managed to pack in extra amounts of fun this week, combining our history lesson from Story of The World about the middle age era of Japan, China, and Korea with our art, science, and weekly outing! Of course we found many books to read about life and myths of Asian culture.

Monday we spent at home, studying our history lesson, doing our pages of math and writing. The boys were a bit sniffly, so we spent the rest of the day reading and watching movies. Tuesday we felt better and headed off on an all day adventure. We left at 7am starting with a medical appointment, then headed into Portland to visit the Boy Scout Shop and pick up the remainder of our activity books and uniforms. Then we met a friend at Lan Su Chinese Garden and explored the Chinese style of gardening, architecture, and delicacies in the tea shop. After our friend suggested a place for lunch and we all stuffed ourselves at Boka Bowl. I was super excited to have a Ramen style soup with grain free noodles!!

We parted ways with our friends and headed to our favorite Asian store, Uwajimaya. The boys really wanted some new trainer chop sticks as our old ones had broken and the market we visited last week had none. Equipped for chopstick eating, we then went straight onto Cub Scouts. Emmet's group met at the pool to earn a swimming merit badge this week, and everyone got to swim during open swim time. Then we had our regular scouts meeting for Michael, who learned knife safety and practiced carving on a bar of soap, and Avery and I led his group learning about community duty by cleaning up the park and ended by learning about community service members. All three boys earn merit badges next week at our meeting and are all super excited.

After Tuesday we needed more rest and spent Wednesday pursuing our own hobbies and interests at home after doing our reading lesson with All About Reading and pre Reading. We also worked on adding drawings to our nature journals of elements we saw as unique to Lan Su. Soon we will visit the Japanese garden in Portland and compare the two sites. We skipped our Village Home classes in leui of resting and the boys unpacked and set up their new loom. It is so tiny! But a perfect little loom. Crocheting has proved to be impossible; two boys outright refuse to try and the youngest doesn't have the dexterity for it yet. However, the loom has captured ALL their attention (I think it is the moving parts) and they have spent a few hours this week creating patches of woven yarn.

Thursday was a back in the saddle day and we met a new home school friend for a walk at a park. The older two practiced piano and played Prodigy for more math. Today is Friday and we had yet again another long day at town. The boys had dentist appointments, one of their favorite activities ironically, and are proud to report no cavities. We met more friends at another park and played for several hours until the Oregon sky did it's fall thing and went from bright and sunny to dark and windy and dumped rained on us before we could run for cover. Since we have the YMCA membership we decided we might as well jump in. Off we went across town again and the boys joined the kids club to play games and then swim while I enjoyed what felt like a very luxurious 1.5 hours to work out.

To top off our Asian culture study we also made our own Gyoza (or potstickers) completely from scratch, made a Asian style soup, and learned how to call someone "poo poo head" in Chinese, a phrase I doubted they would remember but has, of course, come to haunt me.

Cheers to Pumpkin season!

The Dillmans.