...but the ants finally arrived for the ant farm--yay! :)  I hope it's not too late to do the butterfly "garden" when we get back from FL.

Some of our tadpoles are getting close to popping our their front legs, I think.  I am totally fascinated by them.  The kids and I sit and watch them for a while a couple times a day.  But the water *stinks*.  I've been doing a half-tank change daily just to keep the smell down.  I think it's the frog food my friend gave me to feed them.  Acky.

So the boys went up to Nana and Grampy's for the night.  They went to a year-end bash thrown by the principal of the school for which my mom works.  The boys had the time of their lives!  They went  for rides on golf carts, hay/wagon rides, paddle boat rides--all with older kids (mostly boys). :)  Mom said they stayed for 5 hours (until 10pm last night) and the boys were begging to go back today (obviously not an option).  *grins*  I just wish I'd been there (or at least had pictures!). :)

I got some organizing done with the math programs, but not a ton.  Thanks to online searching, found a huge list of things I need to go get today from the libarary, including two opera CDs made for kids--I am *so* excited, given how much they love the Beethoven's Wig CD (gads I wish the library had CDs 2 & 3 in that series).  The funny thing is, I hated opera.  The music theory classes I took in college had a listening requirement (20 hours of classical and opera) and at the end of the semester you were given a "drop" test--a random sampling of 15 seconds of a piece and we had to write down the composer, the piece, etc.  Well, the first semester there was quite a lot of opera given for the listening requirement.  I decided I'd take my chances on guessing.  *lol*  Yeah...that didn't go so well.  I failed.  Dr. Barton asked if I'd even listened to the music once all the way through.  I hadn't.  I couldn't.  It was awful.  Unbearable.  Torture.  Please, please, please--let me do something...ANYTHING...to make up for the F?  He informed me that I must get at least 80% on the listening test to pass the class.  Period.  Ugh.  So I put the tapes in my car and tried to listen to them that way.  At first, I hated it.  Eventually it just got to be background noise.  Then I found myself humming along.  Soon I was singing stuff in the shower.  Who knew?

So here's my thinking...if I can introduce the kids to it now, maybe they won't have the "Ew, this is crap" response I had at first.   Don't get me wrong;  I've still never seen a full length opera in person because there's plenty of other things I'd rather pay to see/do, but maybe they will come to appreciate it and maybe it will open them up to still other things :)  And who knows, maybe one day we'll find ourselves down at the dress rehearsal for the opera down in Indy one of these days (it's free to 'home educators' to attend--and you get front row seats! :) ).