As part of our homeschooling we are doing a literature unit study on Charlotte's Web. Today, we took our Venn diagrams on "country" and "city" and wrote "Diamante Poetry". Essentially, it is a seven line poem with contrasting objects. The first line is one line, a noun. The second is two words, adjectives; the third is three participles, the fourth begins with two nouns and ends with two nouns as well. The first three lines, as well as the first two nouns of the fourth line describe the initial noun. The second two nouns in the fourth line, as well as the following lines, describe the contrasting noun of the seventh line.

I know, this may be a little confusing to explain in a blog post, but really, there is a point.

The kids had to do two poems...one using "country" and "city", and another using a set of words of their choice words. Maira chose "mom" and "dad". She decided to start with Mom, and when she was choosing her adjectives to describe me, she started with "happy". I asked, "You think that I am happy?" To which she responded, "Yes, most of the time!" Then Reiley chimed in with "Yeah, you are pretty much happy all of the time!"

WOW!!! That of course brought a smile to my face. Not that I think I am a huge grump ALL of the time, but I was sure that my kids thought I was a total ogre.

Today was a good day!

....A little background info...We are building a fence in our back yard, or should I say that Kyle is building it....beside the point. We have a few bags of cement in our garage still, one of which is a little broken open, so there is "dust" on the ground. So...we spent most of the afternoon hanging out in the front yard today because it was such a beautiful day, and at one point Arami walked out of the garage with a dusty white head. She thought it would be fun the take a cement dust shower.

Can you say FREAK OUT! I was thinking...what do I do? If I try to wash it, won't it turn hard? Well, thankfully I had a sane friend present who calmly stated that I should just go wash it out.

Who'd a thought!