on recipes, movies, and homeschooling (by Krista)

I seem to have much less time than Lawr has to blog.

So here are some highlights of the last couple days:

•Isabel and I went to a fabulous museum of PreColumbian art day before yesterday. http://museoarqueologicoperuano.museolarco.org/museo_en.html

My favorites were the Mochican pottery/sculptures—wonderfully realistic water birds, long necks curved , a duck shaped pitcher; cups with expressive (human) faces. All somewhere close to 1000 years old. Isabel loved seeing the gold “earrings” (ear plugs) Inca nobles wore—as thick as my finger and six inches in diameter—and the amazing shell and silver jewelry.

Yesterday Sophia was watching “Mama Mia” with Isabel while I was cooking Cornflake Crumb Chicken. (If you haven’t tried this, it’s a kid pleaser. Crushed cornflake crumbs are available on your US grocery store shelf. Recipe on the back of the box. Here in Peru we crush our own cornflakes. Oh, and for those of you who read Lawr's blog regularly, when “we” deglaze the pan with Coke Zero, it does taste really good. I got the idea from an NPR piece—the chef/author of a cookbook had a recipe in honor of her mother’s CocaCola Ham or some such thing).

I walked into the bedroom where the girls were curled up, and Sophia asks why the mom, Meryl Streep, is crying if her daughter is having a wedding. It’s near the end of the movie and the mom and daughter are walking down the aisle. “Well, because when people get married they usually don’t live with their parents anymore and sometimes that makes the parents sad.” What was I thinking? I’d already disappointed her by telling her she couldn’t marry Isabel. (She’d asked if two girls could get married; I said yes. She joyously announced that she would marry Isabel.) Sophia in tears…“Do I HAVE to get married, Mom? I don’t EVER want to live somewhere else.” It took us a while to get her calmed down. For the record, I told her she doesn’t ever have to get married, and Isabel and I have added “Mama Mia” to the growing list of movies that are on Sophia’s “DON’T SHOW” list.

The DON’T SHOW list includes among others: “Homeward Bound” about two dogs and a cat who run away in search of their humans (who went on vacation)—SK review: “But where is MYYY DOOOOG?”; and “Monster’s Inc.” Little girl arrives on the wrong side of the closet door, wrecks havoc among the monsters, and then is finaly returned safely to her room; friendly monsters promise to visit soon—SK review: “But WHYYY does he (the monster) have to leave?”)

Isabel and I have been working on percentages and exponential numbers and multiplying decimals in math. I have proudly bucked the Everyday Math system and given her a new “algorithm” (I.E. I showed her how to multiply numbers with multiple digits the way everyone who went to school in the 70’s did).

We are also reading a book called Peeled. One of minor characters, who owns a restaurant in the story, had parents and grandparents who participated in the shipyard workers protests in Poland in the 1980s. So now we’re both going to learn a little history of the former Eastern bloc. Maps will be in order.

We all took a walk yesterday afternoon to the postoffice. It only took us a month to buy stamps and send the postcards. Now we know it costs almost $2 (U.S.) to send a postcard. Only a very few of you will be lucky enough to receive one—who will be the lucky winners?!

Sophia, Isabel, and I all took photos on the way there: Q’oricancha is an Inca temple that the Spanish tried to tear down. They ended up building a huge monastery and church on top of the Inca temple foundations.

The mural is also on the way to the post office--the photo above only shows a small fraction of it.

Isabel and I didn’t have her camera in the San Pedro market earlier in the day—she helped me buy a bunch of fresh vegetables and tried to close her eyes as we walked past the squid and frogs and whole pig carcasses. Yum. We’ll take those photos another time.

I fear I may have shrunk my photos down so small that they won't show up well on the blog--but I have to go to sleep! Sophia woke me up at 5:30 this morning and never went back to bed.

Tomorrow we are planning to head off to Ollantaytambo. We will see some ruins there and huge circular agricultural terraces at Moray this weekend. Maybe even go horseback riding!