Baktuns & Uinals

Sometimes our family home evenings are really bad. This usually happens when someone is anxious about some school assignment that is due the next day and they haven't started it yet, or someone was called home from playing with friends and we are just uselessly taking up their time when they could be doing other more productive things and they make it known through every step of our family night. Occassionally (and it happens when you least expect it) there is a spiritual moment, or a moment of laughter and bonding. You can never plan for these moments, and if you do, they just don't happen for us. A couple of weeks ago we had one of the laughter/bonding variety.

I find it fascinating to research our travel plans and I can spend hours researching an area, studying it on Google Earth, reading hotel/excursion reviews, etc. (I used to spend hours studying the road atlas for our annual trips to California.) In preparation for our trip to Cancun over Thanksgiving, I've been doing some research on Mayan hieroglyphics. Our TiVo recorded a really fascinating NOVA program on deciphering the mayan code and I became intrigued. I did some reading and went through the online tutorials and then decided it would be fun to share my new found knowledge with Becky and the kids. Since we would need to do it before school started and Sara went back to college, we planned it for FHE a couple of weeks ago. I made up some worksheets to teach how to recognize numbers in the glyphs and we went through this exercise in family night. I don't think everyone was quite as excited about it as I was, and Sara and Daniel started cracking jokes.

After learning how to spot numbers, we then moved on to the Mayan Calendar (since we will be visiting the ruins where the code was found that provided the missing link to decipher the calendar). The Mayans counted their time in 20 day intervals, with larger sets of 20 days called Baktuns, Katuns, Tuns, and Uinals. Yes, Uinals. And you probably misread this word like everyone in our house did, and it immediately turned into uproarious laughter. No matter what anyone said, it had some reference to a (an?) uinal and evoked even more laughter. Even Becky inadvertently got into the act when she found a number in a glyph and said, "There it is....the second one up from the 'bottom'!" and everyone again erupted in laughter. (Granted, everyone who knows Becky knows that she would never intentionally stoop to this level of "uinal" humor.) While it may not have been the educational lesson I had it intended it to be, it was a fun evening filled with a lot of humor, and Sara laughed so hard she almost did a "Grandma Kate".

At least I tried. I think they will appreciate it more when they are able to look at the hierogylphs and pick out the numbers and be able to spot the "uinals".