How We Spent Columbus Day

Note: This was written on Columbus Day and not published until now.

We met friends at a big wooden playscape yesterday morning. It was in a cute town about half an hour away. The kids played there for about an hour and a half. Later in the afternoon, at home, they played outside for about an hour. I was happy with their outside play time and so were they.

My friend, the mother of the boys' friends, had crocheted a little robot for Nick. Nick loooooooves it. Robots are a topic of interest to him right now and he does like to play with stuffed animals, so it's a good match. He has been feeding, reading to, and caring for his little robot. The best I can tell, the robot's name is Plackman. Or something like that.

When we got home from the playground, I fed the kids and put Nick down for nap. I began to read aloud school books to Xander. He was about to doze off as I finished, so I let him nap instead of doing the other things like math activities, practicing the recorder, and writing.

As far as Columbus Day goes, we had previously read the account of Christopher Columbus's discoveries in This Country of Ours. We had checked his route on the map. We had also read Pocahontas by the D'Aulaires because I wanted to introduce another perspective of the discovery of the Americas - when people had already been living there for a very long time. At Xander's age, I think the appropriate thing to do is to give kid-friendly Native American perspectives rather than going into detail about the atrocities and deaths that occurred as a result of the meeting of European explorers and native Americans. He does need to know about Columbus as part of his history studies.

At dinner, Erik asked Xander a question about Christopher Columbus and Xander gave him a detailed account of what he had learned. He answered all of Erik's questions to Erik's satisfaction. It is really nice for me to see this because I don't always get the detailed answers Erik gets.

On to another subject. It is too early to make an evaluation of the wisdom of getting Xander's tonsils and adenoids out, but here are my thoughts so far:

1. Snoring has ceased. Completely.

2. He was starting to sleep better and longer, and to be more cooperative and cheerful as a result, before he had the procedure. The difference was homeschooling and thus not getting up early. (He usually gets up at 8:00. If he were going to the school he went to last year, he would have to get up at 6:30.) I can't tell if he is sleeping any better after getting his tonsils and adenoids out because he had already shown such an improvement a couple of months ago.

3. There has not been time to test if he gets sick easily or not after the procedure. Normally, at this point in the year, he would have had strep throat one time. According to the ENT doctor, there is almost no chance he will get strep throat again.
Update: At this point in the year (in November, when I'm actually publishing this post), he would normally have gotten strep twice. Still hasn't gotten it. :)

4. He still has a higher-than-usual voice as a side effect of the procedure. It has not been a month yet, which is the amount of time that some children experience this side effect.
Update: His voice still seems higher to me, but not as high as right after the procedure. It has been over a month.