This week the majority of the family was there, which hasn’t really happened since one of the first weeks. It was exciting to see so many generations together, because this time even two of what seemed like grandparents were there! They also keep getting a new piece of furniture each week… this time they had a new lovely coffee table and a cool elephant plant holder with a fake fern. We were served apples and chai tea, which was delicious.

The girls all needed help with math homework, which as you know is not my forte. It’s also really hard to explain how to do it when I barely remember what I’m talking about. Thankfully Priya mostly helped with the equation solving and graphing the y-intercepts… which I started to remember how to do as she was explaining it to the middle school aged girl.  I then helped the 11-ish age girl with some easier equation solving and questions about population and sampling. I do not remember learning that at that age! After that the 7 year old needed help with multiplication, which I also found difficult to explain… thankfully it was just to practice using the multiplication table so that was easier.

I’m happy that things have gotten a lot more comfortable with the family! It’s still slightly awkward when we first get there, because we’re like ‘hmm what are we supposed to do?’ It’s also hard to tell if the mom wants us to help her with her English, because we don’t really know how to broach the subject. Hopefully we can ask the girls this week and help as much as we can!

This past weekend we took our family to the Lincoln park zoo. We had gone a few days previous to the zoo visit and just hung out and helped with homework. While there we brought up the idea of a trip to the zoo or a local park and the family got super excited. The day of the trip we were greeted at the door by one of Mrs. D’s grandson’s R. He was practically bouncing off the walls he was so excited to go to the zoo. After an exhausting bus ride we finally made it to the zoo and had a blast walking around looking at all the different animals. Hopefully when the weather gets nicer we can take more excursions outside and hopefully some of the adults will come with. Other then the trip to the market, this was the first time that we have been able to go somewhere with the D’s and it was such a great experience. It was nice to break up the routine of the visits, which usually just consist of homework help and games. In the coming weeks I hope to continue to try and get the family out of the apartment but the weather has to cooperate first.