Uniformly unique

My boys have definite opinions about their clothes. Their favorite outfits change every few years and are completely different from one another and from their parents. Though I will do all I can not to go shoe shopping with my oldest boy again (well, for at least a season - or after some therapy) I really do appreciate each boy's unique style. Gillen has wide feet but prefers style to comfort and.. I may have some shoe issues.

Below is one of the many pajama outfits that Jesse wears when he knows we are not getting in the car all day.
Here was the outfit he chose to do his Shakespearean Yorick monologue (when Hamlet speaks to the skull of his father's dead jester) today in his final Renaissance class. It worked. Here they are all acting out Shakespeare's "Seven Stages of Man".
I can't remember which stage of Man the dramatic de-hatting and de-caping was all about. His classmate seems perplexed.

See the blond, skateboard shoe-wearing camouflaged boy in the back? That would be the visiting brother who did not want to take this class and who "hates theater". He was only able to sit back and watch for ten minutes before throwing himself into the fray. There were lots of opportunities for death scenes and none were as dramatic as Gillen's. He wants to take the class next fall.

Old geocentric theories, and new life

While Jesse and I were in his Living History Renaissance class, learning about geocentric world views before the discovery of the telescope, new life was being discovered by farmer Gillen. Only two turkey eggs had survived and today, two poults emerged while he was there working. But first, let's go back to life before the telescope. When Renaissance-man could only make sense of the universe with the naked eye, he saw the planets and sun as revolving around "the Earth", with Mercury doing a strange back step as it circled. Sure they were wrong, but how amazing is it that they were able to see planets with the naked eye?The girl above in blue with the blue balloon was representing the Earth, stock still in the middle of the moving planets. Jesse was Saturn. His friend Royce was Mercury and got to do the retrograde shuffle (one step back for every two forward). The little girl eating the white balloon as she stands next to Earth girl, is the moon. And below, a representation of what happens when a comet enters the scene. Joyful chaos of course.
But my favorite fact in class today was learning that the guy who invented the flushing toilet was named "Crapper". The links I found about him say that he did not in fact invent the toilet but was a plumber and aided and abetted in the process. Still fun to know. Jesse and I had seen an outhouse yesterday while looking at an old house for sale with a friend. So we had been appreciating the flushing toilet for the past many hours.

One of the sweet new poults:
His/her wary parents: