Life lessons

Today we discussed the structure of a tooth, and what happens when decay gets to the middle of the tooth and infects the root. Know why?? Do ya, do ya, do ya??? Because Mommy has to go to the dentist tomorrow for a root canal!! LOL Yes, the boys and I spent some time looking at my poor half-dissolved tooth, drawing a diagram of a tooth and discussing the root canal procedure as explained to me by my dentist, and then looking at DaddyO's tooth that had a root canal and crown applied about 10 years ago.

Tex and I read some of a dinosaur library book today. He gets really annoyed if I just try to read to him what the book says, so he looks at the pictures and says things like "What do you notice about this guy? What do you think is cool about him?" and I ask it back to him and then find little bits of the text to throw out as additional information to go with our observations. Today we noticed the depressions in the skin of 3 drawings of carnosaurs, and then spotted them a couple of pages later as openings in the actual skull of an Allosaurus. Tex is very interested in paleoartistry, where artists have to gather information from the fossils of a dinosaur such as where its ligaments were attached and any remaining skin evidence to create what they think is the most accurate picture of that creature.

Noodle and I worked up a new science experiment at Table Time today. It's the old standby of the celery in the food coloring. I've never done it before but DaddyO has and said it's pretty cool. We should have blueish celery in the morning. Hope it works!!!

At bedtime last night I introduced the concept of myths, not in the Mythbusters sense, but as legends. We were reading a book about insects that Noodle got from the library last week and I mentioned how spiders got their name (the story of Arachne and Athena) and told the myth as I remembered it from grade school. I explained that legends are stories that are so amazing and exciting that they pass down through the years simply because people enjoy them, true or not, while myths are something people use to explain why or how things happen. The boys were already familiar with the legend of the sun-god riding his chariot across the sky after watching Fantasia, so I was able to relate back to that.