Travel Log: 17 October 2011 - 18 October 2011

Today would mark the start of "normal" school days for the remainder of our time in California. We would reserve our excursions for the weekends when Josh could join us. By this Monday, our time change wake ups were starting to wear off and the kids were getting back to their normal 7am wake-up (vs. the 5am of the week before, oy!).

I have never been a stickler for waking up early as I have never been a morning person. However, I have also read a lot of articles about children needing more sleep, especially teenagers, and I happily let my kids sleep-in, no matter the day. If we start our school day between 8:30-9am, I'm happy. :)!

I tell you what though, it's always a rough go when we get back to "normal" after having an amazing week of "unconventional" school days. We all love the "unconventional" days, we all prefer the "unconventional" school days, but it was time. I wanted to make certain we were faithful with all we reported we would do for our school year and not have to finish some subjects into June, :)!

As I mentioned, we did have our history lined up with our big adventure and our The Story of the USA books were ready to start us at the California gold rush. Our science lessons were also more geared toward studying the earth and earthquakes. Our other subjects we had worked on during the previous week but we were now back into extended teaching lessons of new concepts. 

Yep... that first day back was rough... but the promise of going to play at the beach was a great reward!

In the cute shirt she hand drew, :)!

Tuesday was quite the similar day but had two rewards: going to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, our final event on our City Pass, and going to Chinatown to buy a set of daggers. The museum was quite a distance from us but thankfully we had one more day to use our transit pass, too!

I do love museums. For me, the most fascinating things about seeing art in person is experiencing the scale of the pieces and noticing the details that photos don't do justice, whether it be the shock of how tiny Salvador Dali's paintings are or studying the brush strokes on a Frida Kahlo. Modern art is also something that is fun to experience with children. Josh's mom had once told me while we were at a MOMA, "Modern art can be anything the creator or the viewer wants it to be." The kids could see Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and really discuss what it means to question art establishment authority via a simple gesture as placing a urinal on its side. They all agreed it was plain silly.

And like I said, with this, our final full day in the city, we HAD to go to Chinatown for one last time. Wo/Man, do my kids love Chinatown. We took the bus instead of the tourist-filled cable cars in order to make our trip there "quick." Our bus was entirely filled with Chinese dialect speaking people and the kids were loving every single minute of it. They felt as if they had traveled to China and it was a wonderful cultural experience!

These last two days in the city were wonderful and made us get a great sense of what it would be like to actually live in the heart of the city full time. We all agreed it would be awesome. 

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