B spends a lot of time poring over his DK Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of the Human Body. I'm not sure if he's reading it or just looking at the pictures. I'm not sure what he can read, to be honest, because he's a bit secretive about it and he hates performing. All I know is that he knows a lot about the human body and he never asks me to read this book to him.

So I offered to read it to him the other day and he accepted. At his request, I read the following pages: Muscles 1, Muscles 2, Hands, Feet, Nose-Mouth-and-Throat, Urinary System, and Reproductive System. I enjoyed reading to him and chatting with him, but it's exhausting, because he understands it the first time it's read and then he wants more detail, followed by more detail, , more detail...I felt drained by the end.

Wrt muscles, the book addressed skeletal muscles, smooth muscles and cardiac muscles. In the illustration, B was convinced that the whitish looking muscles were the skeletal muscles, but all the muscles shown were skeletal. I'm not sure what the white indicates. We talked about how the smooth muscles are the ones around the organs that make them function, e.g. muscles that move food through the intestines. He wants to know if the tongue is a skeletal muscle or a smooth muscle, because it's not really near any organs, but it moves food down the throat. I have no earthly idea, but I plan on finding out. My sister is really good at this sort of thing, so I should probably call her.

In the nose-mouth-throat page, we talked about how taste buds work and how the tongue facilitates that process. He chatted about how the nose, mouth and throat are connected. He was very chatty throughout the reading of the book.

On the urinary system page, he basically showed me how the kidneys connect to the bladder; he apparently knows that the red arteries carry blood in and the blue veins take it away. He showed me the progression through the ureters (he didn't know the term) and how it goes through the uretha, etc. I admit that I really didn't know all of that; it's not anything that I've ever paid much attention to. He knew more about how kidneys worked that I did, tbh. I then had a flashback of all the anatomy art that he's done in the past month (from memory, mind you) and I realized that the stuff he's been making has been very accurate. When he made his massive paper human body, he had attached the kidneys to the bladder by strips of black paper; those strips are essentially the ureters.

He drew intestines the other day with a rectangular blob protruding from them on one side. “What's that?”, I asked him, to which he replied,”It's the organ we don't use anymore, the grass-eating organ.” “The appendix, B?”, I asked. “Yes.”, he confirmed. I thought it was cute that he drew it how he imagined it might look. Thinking back on this, I hastily turned to the digestive system page and saw what he had drawn was accurate, even down to the side of the intestines that it's on. So I asked him what that blob was and he gave me the same answer. “How do you know that's the appendix, B?”, I asked. “I don't know.”, he said, “It just looks like it should be.” Of course, right next to it is the label “appendix” so perhaps he is reading it and just not realizing that he is reading it. He knows a lot of anatomy stuff that neither dh nor I recall reading to him.

Looking at the bladder, he said, “That's a boy's bladder.” I asked him how he knew that (it did say “male bladder”) and he said, “Because it's not squished. Girls' bladders are always squished because babies grow on top of them.” Then, he said, “Oh! Now I know why there's a hole in the bottom of the pelvis! It's because the bladder lies there.” It was a very enlightening book discussion. Sometimes, I watch him playing and I feel slightly insecure, because we don't do school at home. But then a discussion like this shows me that he really has been working on something on his own and he is learning an incredible amount about what interests him.

We had a talk about where babies come from, based on our chat about the reproductive system page. I refrained from giving him the mechanical details, because he is simply not ready for it. But we talked about how conception occurs on the inside; I'm surprised he didn't ask him how sperm get from point A to point B. He was more interested in how the cells combine and how the ball of cells grows. Based on his keen interest in this, I borrowed a book from the library, “Being Born” by Sheila Kitzinger. Again, I skipped over the outward mechanical details during conception. But we read everything else to the end and we looked at all the pictures. The photography in the book by Leonard Nilson is phenomenal. Both kids enjoyed the book.

On the day that I got that book from the library, I also picked up one that I saw: the DK Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of the Skeleton. I wish I had found this book years earlier, although parts of it would have probably freaked B out. But it was the perfect B book. I think I'm going to have to buy it. It has photographs of skeletons of tons of animals: penguins, turtles, frogs, elephants....He really loved the book and he's been taking in the car. everywhere we go.

I haven't really read it to him, but I pointed a few things out. I talked about endoskeletons vs exoskeletons. He said that he would rather use the word “vertebrate” for something with an endoskeleton. He's funny like that. If I say it once, as long as it's in his area of interest, he remembers it and that's it. He excitedly pointed out that some animal at the Science Center had an “exoskeleton”. He's good with those terms now.

The book also talks about a third type of skeleton that worms have. I'm a bit lost on it. I automatically think of skeletons being crunchy things. The book defines a skeleton as simply the structure that gives an organism its shape and protects the insides. So, it argues that leaves have skeletons. I'm not really sold on that. I think it dilutes things a bit. But apparently worms have some sort of inner structure that is fluid filled and the book is calling it a skeleton. I had to throughly explain that to B, because he thought that worms had bones, basically.

At the library, T picked out a Magic Schoolbus book and B picked out a picture book about rockets. I read the rocket book to them when we got home. It had great illustrations. I asked B to help me read the last word in each sentence. I don't know why I did that; it annoyed him a little. I was struck that he read words like “built” effortlessly. He hasn't been taught phonics. He turns from instruction. He's just figured it out somehow. At the same time, I can tell that it's work for him every time he sees a word. He can read quite a lot, but he has not put the practice in that would make these words familiar each time he sees them. Therefore, he's not fluent; he has to work each word every time. I'm sure that at some point, he'll feel motivated to do it. He loves books so much.

He listened to “Henry Huggins and the Paper Route” on tape the other day. It took him 3 consecutive hours of laying in the floor to get through it. Actually, I did make him stop it for 15 minutes so we could have lunch; he complained about that. He wanted to listen to the whole thing again the next day. That's when we headed out to the library and I picked up some more audio books for him: Henry Huggins (the original) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He keeps asking me to listen to them, but we've been so busy this weekend. I'm thinking about getting him his own small CD player. I could give him my old personal CD player, but it skips if you don't hold it exactly level. He needs something, but then T would probably be into it.

I meant to say that when we read the rocket picture book, T also wanted to read the words at the ends of sentences. I figured we'd humor him. Imagine my surprise when he sounded out “dahy” or “die” for the word “day”. He didn't sound any others out, but we think it's starting to click for him. The other day at the park, he was staring at a sign and he said, “That says 'exit'.” I also meant to say that my curiosity got the best of me and I had asked him to help me write some words a week ago. This was after the joking/chicken exchange. I said the words slowly and helped him sound them out. He wrote them. For “joking”, T wrote “jokk”. He wrote “ht” for “hat” and “bid” for “bed”.

I think that's everything we've done in this past week. Tomorrow, we meet up with friends for the day.