The Price of Rice in China

...or rather, the price of apple juice in Los Angeles. I guess there must have been a bad crop or something last year because all of a sudden I went to Ralphs for a quick juice and bread run (the girls went through both at more than the usual pace this past couple of weeks and I couldn't wait until Monday's normal grocery trip), and store-brand apple juice was the cheapest but was $1.99 a bottle. This is not normal! I ended up wandering over to the frozen juice instead, where store-brand concentrate was on for $1 a can, not bad. So I picked up five of those, instead. But I was a little stunned, store-brand juice hasn't been that high in my recent memory and all of a sudden it just got hiked! While I was in the freezer section, though, I picked up an Edward's chocolate cream pie, a rare luxury in our house; regular price $9.99, sale price $5.99, I had a coupon for $1 off and Ralphs doubles coupons so it was only $3.99. At 60% off I figured we'd get it and have a treat. (They are actually pretty high in protein and I cut them in tenths, not sixths, so the calories aren't quite as bad per serving. Not a horrid dessert when compared to some other favorites.)

We also stopped by the library in the afternoon and I scrounged for ideas for tomorrow's class (I know attendance will be light because of the holiday Monday) and came up with On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World's Weather and a "weather" theme. It's kind of a neat book and talks about weather all over the world on one day, how different parts of the world have different seasons, things like that. We'll read the book, talk about the weather, paint a big huge group painting of what the outside sky looks like, then make kites out of paper bags (a favorite when I was little. I'll just have them decorate the bags, I'll do the rest for them.) Next week we are doing architecture, I've had them bringing in cereal boxes and such for a while and we will build a castle together after reading about great buildings and talking about architecture as art.

We've been trying to clean and I am amazed at how messy Emma can get one room while we are cleaning another. Grrr. Also, my girls have entirely too many toys. If you know anyone who needs some... ;)

So, that's what's been going on today, pretty much. Potty training has run into some difficulty; I've decided to take my mom's advice and let Emma be completely in charge of changing herself and everything, and see how that goes. I'm going to have to bite my tongue not to give her any attention when she wets herself and only pay a lot of attention when she uses the potty but I'm gonna try! After all, it worked pretty well with us, for the most part.