"You got to MOVE it, MOVE it!"

Last week in preschool was "percussion week" on our month long journey through the instrument families. Each instrument family has "rules," like criteria you have to meet to belong to the club. To be in the brass family you have to be 1) made of metal, 2) have 3 buttons, and 3) you have to go "ppppppppp" to play it (they love to do this - imagine that). To be in the string family you have to 1) have strings, and 2) pluck or bow the strings to play them. Sometimes the families will feel sorry for certain instruments and allow them into the club even though they break the rules, but overall the rules stand firm.

So I started each class this week explaining the rules of the percussion family, which only had one rule - you have to hit it or shake it. Since this was such an easy rule, I went ahead and asked them what kinds of instruments would be percussion instruments. In most classes, the kids went right for the instruments that we've already talked about in class, such as a drum, triangle, xylophone, maracas, etc. Then I would lead them to figuring out that we can use pretty much anything as a percussion instrument, like the floor or a garbage can or something fun.

Remember my cute class from the penguin blog? Well, here they are making blog news again. When I asked them what kind of things could be percussion instruments, right away they went for non conventional items. In fact, the first answer I got was:

"WE can be percussion instruments, because we can hit us AND we can SHAKE it!"

It's Mini!

If you read my "Jack In the Box" post from a few months ago, then you know how much I hate their food. They must be throwing all their money into their ad campaign, though, because this commercial is a riot! And since all my Illinois friends probably haven't seen it (consider yourselves blessed to not have JITB's in your area), here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Ad tactics

I have recently decided to give vegetarianism a try again. But not the way I did it last time where I only excluded actual meat, and instead lived on pasta and cheese and sugar. No, no. I'm actually excluding ALL animal product from my diet and replacing milk and hamburger with rice milk and tofu. I don't know how long it will last, but for the time being I'm enjoying trying new foods and I'm losing a little weight, so right on.

I was a little nervous about doing it at first because I thought that Josh would just kind of roll his eyes and think the whole idea was just another silly phase, but he's been very supportive. In fact, last night at the grocery store he even decided to try trading in his regular chocolate milk for soy chocolate milk (which he says is pretty good!). Since I had gotten rice milk last time I didn't pay attention to what was on the soy milk carton until now:



I suppose that's one way to boost sales.

"Well, the carton says to 'buy often,' so I guess I better go out and get some more."