Oh yeah, there are boys in the house, too...

Now that I have finally gotten back to blogging, I have been so absorbed in getting Miss Bean's art class posted and up to date, that I haven't said anything about those two boys that live with us!  We have all been keeping busy with classes and interests.

I posted earlier about fencing.  Miss Bean quit fencing at the end of March, but Bug has been going strong.  He loves it and is raring to go every Tuesday and Thursday.  I had wondered if twice a week would get to be too much, but I think he would be tickled if he could go seven days a week.  Most practices are doing drills and practice bouts that give everyone a chance to both fence and referee for each other.  For a while he was thrilled just to get a touch in a bout now and then, but in the last couple of weeks he has won several one-touch bouts.  It is great fun for me seeing him gaining skills and confidence and getting some nice compliments from the coach.

He is also very active playing Minecraft.  We finally got the version for the computer in February and all three kids are having a blast with it.  I enjoy seeing him learning about computers, solving problems, and collaborating with his siblings while building worlds.  As he starts working with friends, I imagine he may be designing maps and mods and all kinds of stuff.

Another interest of his that, while not up on his radar constantly, has been sneaking in here and there is Mythology.  A while ago we read Edith Hamilton's Mythology as a bedtime read.  It was a little bit dense for him to be reading right now (I used it as a textbook for two classes: one in high school and one in college), but reading it aloud in small doses, he enjoyed it a lot and we read with the iPad close at hand so we could look things up if we needed.  Recently, we started reading the Iliad.  It started out like some of our other bedtime reading with me reading aloud, but in the last couple of weeks, he decided that he wanted to read some of it aloud, too.  So, we take turns, alternating pages, each night.  We're about halfway through and are planning on tackling the Odyssey next.

Beeb is still small enough that most of his "work" looks like playing, but he has been trying out things too.  He started tumbling and trampoline class after the first of year and seems to be having a good time.  Miss Bean has joined him since she decided to stop fencing.  He continues to love turtles and bugs and playing on the computer or video games with his older siblings.

One thing that he has been consistently interested in recently is playing the accordion.  I'm not entirely sure where he came up with the idea (not that it matters), but he announced one day that he wants to do it.  Since then, he reminds me periodically that he still wants to play the accordion.  In April, our public library had a nice little accordion recital that he and I attended.  He was completely enchanted by the music from the start, but started getting ants in his pants when the performer was talking between numbers.  While he was pretty fidgety during the second half-hour (the whole recital was about an hour), he still managed to mind his manners until the end.  We got to look at the accordion close-up at the end and he is still gung-ho to play.  We'll have to look into a student-sized instrument though as we learned that the accordion that was being played at the recital weighs about five pounds more than Beeb does.  Meanwhile, I got the iPod he uses set up with Pandora stations for zydeco and polka, both of which have accordion, so he can listen when he wants to.

Other than her art class, Bean started taking piano last fall.  She is a bit lukewarm about lessons as playing piano doesn't come as naturally to her as drawing and painting does.  She has also been taking tumbling with Beeb this session.  While she mostly enjoyed fencing while she was doing it, she was at a disadvantage to Bug as she just isn't as physically mature and coordinated since she is two years younger.  She was a hard worker and doing her best, but it just wasn't coming along as naturally or as easily as it was for Bug and was starting to get frustrating for her.  She can try again in a couple of years if she feels like it or maybe she'll decide that it just isn't her cup of tea.

Artist Girl

Bean has been the resident artist for a long time now (this picture still cracks me up).  This year, she has been taking a homeschool art class at the Monroe Street Arts Center up in Madison.  In the class, they focus on one artist each month.  They learn a little art history, see some famous examples of their art, and do art projects either copying famous pictures or doing their own take in the style of the artist.  It will come as a surprise to no one who has me the girl that she ADORES the class!  Her only complaint was that some of her classmates were more interested in talking to each other than making art and were disturbing her.  My vivid imagination is imagining the top picture from the link above.  Since the first of the year, the class size has gotten smaller and she is better able to concentrate, and even when the class was bigger, I don't think the noise was a make-or-break deal.

Anyway, today the sun was out for a change (no clouds, rain, or snow for a change), so I finally got all of her class art projects hauled out into the sun to take pictures.  Over the next week or two, I'm planning on posting her pictures by month, so watch this space.

The other fun part about the class is the other things it has led to outside the class.  She and I have been hauling artist biographies and stories and picture out from the library.  We read three out of four volumes of a nice kid-level art history series (the fourth volume isn't in our library system, or more precisely, is but the only copy is lost) and watched an older PBS art history series (Art of the Western World).  Currently, we have segued off the beaten path to read about illustrators.  Along with the monstrous pile of books we have been hauling home from the library each week, one was Talking With Artists, which, for each of fourteen artists, gives a short biography and then has each artist's answers to eight questions that are commonly asked when folks like these talk to students or do a reading.  In addition to reading from the book we have also put holds on several books by each illustrator, so we read and look at pictures after we read about one of the illustrators.  We are currently a couple of illustrators in to the second volume and I just discovered a third volume.  I guess we'd better get reading!

The sad thing?  First, we have already read down the pile by at least a dozen books since the beginning of the week.  Second, this stack doesn't even finish off the second book. It's a good thing the librarians like us, or they would be hating us with all the holds we have been picking up!  We'll whittle down this pile a bit before putting holds on books by the last few illustrators in Volume Two.

Anyhoo, more pictures, less blabbing in the next several posts as I get Miss Bean's masterpieces posted.

"Spring" Break

Alternate title: Denial Runs Deep
Although we don't give a fig for the school calendar most of the time, we have really noticed Spring Break this year. For one, we are having a week with no art class, no fencing, no piano lessons, and no tumbling. Further, Spring weather has been unusually conspicuous in its absence. At a certain point all you can do is throw up your hands and say "To heck with it." So, we did, and went to the park.

Yes, there is still (significant) snow on the ground. Yes, the temps topped out on the 40's. Yes, she's wearing short sleeves.

Yes, my choice of footwear may not have been the most appropriate.

Yes, we had a great time.

Yes, it was just what we needed. There was even a rumor going around to the effect of an eyewitness sighting of my sense of humor. Imagine that.

And still more crystals

Our sudden interest in crystals turned out to be extremely timely, as last Saturday was the Friends of the Geology Museum's Winter Workshop. The topic was "Bubbles of gas in lava that solidified as they cooled and then are gradually filled by the crystallization of impurities in ground water seeping through." If that's too complicated for you, you can go with the museum's title: Geodes.

We learned how geodes form (see bubbles, lava, and impurities, above), saw pictures of geodes big enough to be a bathtub (but the sharp edges of the crystals would be ever so unpleasant on the backsides, so not recommended), learned that completely filled in geodes are agates, learned that beautiful purple geodes can be found in both South America and Africa from a place where they split apart from when they were part of the super-continent Pangaea, and were informed that when illustrating the part of of a talk about unearthing geodes in Chihuahua, Mexico, an Internet search for images almost uniformly yields small canines.

The highlight of the whole thing was cracking geodes:

And a bonus picture of Beeb rockin' the safety glasses (and badly needing a haircut).




Aren't they pretty?

The clear, sparkly stuff in the one on the right (belonging, appropriately princess-like Bean) is quartz. Four quartz make a gallon doncha know. The one on the left is Beeb's and has layers of chalcedony (the milky, bumpy stuff) over quartz. The one in the middle is mine and has a wonderful combination of chalcedony bumps and worms and sparkly quartz. Bug squirreled his away into his lair long before the photo shoot, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was equally cool.

Here's a close-up of mine:

The grand finally was getting to see these Trancas geodes under short-wave ultraviolet, which made them fluoresce green!

More Crystals!

Our rock candy ended up in the win column. Mom learned a few things to make the process go more smoothly next time and the kids got a tasty examples of crystals to admire.

I'm a bit behind the times as these pictures were taken several days before Valentine's Day. We have even been continuing the crystally fun...more on that soon!

En Garde!

Bug and Bean both joined a local fencing club just after the first of the year.  Bug adored it from day one, practicing advances and retreats and lunges as he moves around the house.  Bean was a bit more skeptical.  She is at the young end of the club and things weren’t falling in place as easily for her as they were for Bug, who is both older and more agile.  But we have been sticking to it and keeping on and last week they were rewarded with getting equipment to use and getting to fence in their first bouts. 

  

Both of them were very nervous about being shish-kebabbed and half convinced that they were going to die from stab wounds, so I was curious to see how it would go.  Their opponents were a brother and sister pair that were the next newest of the newbies. They fought valiantly:

Miss Bean was a bit tentative (which isn’t exactly a huge surprise for those who know her personality), but nevertheless managed to back her opponent almost to his end of the strip twice, but still lost three touches to zero.

Bug jumped right in (which is also not a big surprise to those who know him) and scored two touches before his opponent got her bearings and ended up beating him three to two.

I remembered to get a picture of Bug shaking his opponents hand after the match:

I will admit a bit of trepidation after the matches as some of us are not known for being gracious losers and were very nervous about the whole thing to start with, but, after I checked for stab wounds that might leak when drinking water, I was very pleased with the verdict:  Huge smiles, sparkling eyes, and unanimous declarations of “That was SO awesome!”

Game Day

We are loving going to game day with our local homeschool group. We meet at a library meeting room or a cafe and bring our favorite games to share with our friends and hang out for a couple of hours.


It isn't as effective as park day in getting the wiggles out, but we sure wouldn't pass up an opportunity to hang out with friends. Even if we have to remember to share the space with others and keep our voices down.

Crystals

With temperatures yesterday topping out at a balmy 11°F (and that was at midnight, it just fell from there), we've been thinking about snow and ice.  We had tried making ice marbles once earlier this winter, but it didn't go well.  We got our water balloons food colored and set out and two of the four froze overnight, but by the time we went out to take the balloons off, it had warmed up to the mid 30s and they were back to water.  Then we had a warmish week or so where our nice big snowfall gradually melted off the lawn and the liquid water balloons looked at us reproachfully every time we went by in hoodies rather than parkas.  It did eventually get below freezing again, but with daytime temps hovering around freezing and bright sun, they didn't stick around very long.  So we decided to try again now that it is cold and will hopefully stay that way for a bit.  It went much better this time:

The blue one is tiny since it was the first one filled.  I took it off the faucet to see if it looked full enough.  Since there was plenty give left in the balloon, I tried to put more water in and promptly learned that it isn't a good idea to put a water balloon with food coloring in it back on the spigot.  Fortunately, it cleaned up pretty easily and I managed to evade the nickname "Smurfette."

Before we got in the kitchen to make our marbles, we had been watching Arthur on Netflix and saw an episode where Francine tried to make rock candy.  Miss Bean perked right up and wanted to try herself.  I Googled madly for a few minutes and determined that we didn't have all the supplies to get rock candy started last night, but while I was looking, I recalled an interesting project I had pinned on Pinterest a while back.  We did have everything we needed for borax crystal snowflakes so we started those instead.  We diddled with pipe cleaners, borax and boiling water and the next morning we woke up to these:

After they dried, we hung them in the front window so they can sparkle in the sun and sparkle, they do.  This was a quick, easy, and fun project.  We even read about crystals on the web for a while and saw how the smooth facets reflect the close-packed internal atomic structure.

So after we did our grocery shopping (and got some clothes pins), we were ready to make some rock candy.  We had planned on making four jars, so I did four times the quantities in the recipe we used, but it ended up with enough super-saturated sugar solution for six 12 oz. canning jars.

This one is going to take a lot more patience.  Most of the directions say 3-7 days for crystals to form, so we'll be checking them regularly.  Good thing we have lots of other fun stuff to keep us busy!

Taking advantage

One of the biggest benefits of homeschooling is having the flexibility to take advantage of gorgeous weather when it comes. Today is sunny and clear. It's warm in the sun and cool in the shade. Just about perfect.

So we started with the library after lunch, where Mr. Beeb got a shiny new library card (in our family, the magic age is five though the library will issue cards earlier). Next, we picked up a few things from the Co-op, followed by a trip to our favorite bakery. However, today we got our doughnuts to go and headed to the park.

As a bonus, we have the state park almost to ourselves. We can listen to the birds, climb the "mountain", look at the trees and flowers, talk to the bugs, build fairy houses, throw rocks in the lake, or just sit quietly and knit a sock and enjoy the view.

Homeschooling Conference

The beginning of May brings the WPA Homeschooling Conference.  This has become an annual trek to Oshkosh for our family.  I think that this was our fifth year going.  They have hands-on workshops that the kids enjoy and sit-and-listen talks for the grown ups.  There is a wide variety of people ranging from people just starting to think about homeschooling to folks that have grown-up former homeschoolers to share encouragement.

Since Daddy took Friday off of work, we went up early and spent the afternoon in Appleton at the Paper Discovery Center.  The museum is in an old hydro-powered paper mill on the Fox River.  Our Madison Children’s Museum membership got us in, so we spent some time learning about how paper was made and making some ourselves:

Then we headed back to Oshkosh to do more fun things.  We learned about baking and acting and paper airplanes and gravity powered cars and playing games and letterboxing and making things with duct-tape:

 

and tying knots:

One of the knots was a handcuff knot and, conveniently, we came away with three pieces of rope.  Mama is thinking smooth sailing from here on out.

A dear friend took our little Mollie dog while we were gone and when we came back, she had a new boyfriend (if you ask him) or a new stalker (if you ask her).  So now, when she pulls attitude and tells me that Melinda took her for better walks or had more time for cuddling, I just remind her that Melinda also has her main squeeze living in.

We came home expecting to finish the weekend off with a potluck picnic that wraps up another (local) conference I attended, but it was postponed due to rain and thunderstorms.  It worked out well though.  We still have a potluck with unschooling friends to look forward to and had a gray rainy day at home to unwind from our trip!

Tempus fugit!

One of the fun things about unschooling is that we don’t have a set schedule or a list of tasks that need to be done at any given place or time.  If something comes up, we can run with it.  Last weekend Miss Bean and I were reading a book that was talking about a park with a sundial.  She asked what a sundial is and we looked it up on Wikipedia and found some pictures of sundials.  I tried to explain how they worked, but it was pretty clear that it just wasn’t clicking, so I promised her that we would make a sundial on the next sunny day.

Sadly, we went through several gray, cloudy days, but today the sun was shining brightly, so we dug out the chalk bucket and had some fun.  When we started, I drew around her feet so she could stand in the same place every time.  Then I traced around her shadow.  We set an alarm clock to ring every hour and then ran outside to draw a silhouette.  Little brother didn’t want to be left out so we did him too.  The picture is actually Beeb’s sundial since it ended up to be a bit easier to photograph.  Bean’s outlines crossed between the sidewalk and the driveway and I just couldn’t get a decent picture.  As it was, I had to crank up the contrast on Beeb’s to be able to see the chalk.

She now understands better how the sun moves across the sky during the day and how the shadows get longer as the sun moves from more overhead to closer to the horizon.  If the sun cooperates tomorrow and it doesn’t rain and wash the chalk away overnight, we’re going to try and go outside at a random time and see how close we can get to guessing what time it is by comparing the shadow to the chalk outlines.

Wildlife, Part One: Neigh, I say

Miss Bean has been obsessing about horses for about as long as she has been able to obsess.  I have to admit, that I didn’t quite understand the whole concept.  My entire history with horses goes something like this.  Hmmm, horses are kinda pretty.  Yeah, I guess it looks like fun riding them.  And that was pretty much the extent of it until I went to a week long camp in junior high that included some horseback riding.  Putting on the tack (with someone else telling me what to do) I added the idea of “Whoa, these things are kind of large.”  Getting up into the saddle, I amended that to “Holy Crap these things are humongous.”  When the horse started walking, I added “Hmmm, not too bad.  I don’t get it, but I suppose I can see the appeal.”  Then we trotted.  From then on my thought train was pretty much “Get me off this thing!”  Fortunately the camp had other redeeming qualities so the week wasn’t a total wash.

Now, fast forward a few decades.  I have a little girl with boxes full of plastic horses that she spreads out on the living room floor with barns and fences.  A bed full of stuffed horses to snuggle as she falls to sleep.  Cowboy hats, cowboy boots, bandanas, stacks of horse books coming from the library.  Long discussions about the horse farm she was going to have when she grows up.  Not surprisingly, I find myself rather ill equipped to deal with this.  Well, except the dream farm.  Since she promised to also have a sheep or alpaca or two, I am fully behind this dream.  The addition of barn cats got Bug on board and Beeb was persuaded with a turtle and frog pond.  Otherwise, pretty much “Hmm.  Horses.  Nice.” and a bit of smiling and nodding.  But not long after Christmas, the newsletter from one of our local homeschooling groups had an item advertising a Homeschool Horse Camp.  It was going to be for three hours on Monday mornings for six weeks at a cost that I thought was reasonable.  I emailed back and forth with the folks at the Country View Equestrian Center for a while and further learned that a good chunk of the time would be doing chores and learning how to take care of horses in addition to riding.  For the most part, the camp met my criteria:  enough hard work to be a reality check, a chance to try out riding on a real horse, once a week to not be completely disruptive to our schedule, a commitment that was short enough while still allowing a real taste for horses, price that I considered reasonable.  The only downside is that it is in Monroe, which is home to some fabulous cheeses, but a bit of a hike from our house.  Since it would be just six sessions, we took the plunge.

Here she is during the first week.  I have to confess that I was kind of hoping that she would take after her mama.  Embiggen and draw your own conclusions.

This one is actually a bit more focused, but she’s too busy concentrating.

Week two and she’s already looking more confident getting settled into the saddle.

The third week she got to ride on a humongous horse.  The woman had been there training and let some of the campers take turns while she walked her horse around to get her cooled down

When she got back on one of the ponies, it’s pretty clear who is boss now!
We have two more weeks left and I’m sorry to report that she is not a bit like her mama when it comes to horses.  I guess now we will have to start looking for something closer to home.  While we both are happy with the stable the camp is at, I have to admit that I am getting tired of driving an hour each way to get there.  Hopefully, we can find something reasonably priced and a bit closer to home.  Until then, I suspect we will have a sad little cowgirl.

Making changes

2011 appears to be declaring itself the year of home improvement.  With three kids, we are living in constant chaos and I feel like I go into cranky-mommy meltdown mode fairly regularly to try and restore some order.  There have been times in my life where home was basically a place to eat meals and fall asleep between hectic here-and-there-ing.  As a homeschooling mom, I am finding that we need our house to be a place that is more conducive to creating and learning and just plain old living.  I am reading Shelter for the Spirit:  How to Make you Home a Haven in a Hectic World by Victoria Moran.  This book was recommended in one of the sessions I went to at the homeschooling conference last spring and has turned out to be just the right book at the right time to make our space more livable.

Being in a rental, there are some things that just aren’t going to happen.  It makes no sense for us to invest time and money in making things more like we like them only to have nothing to show for them when we move out.  So, early last month, I went through our place, room by room to figure out what we need to live with and what changes we can make to make things work.  A few things clearly fall in the need-to-live-with category are the dishwasher and washing machine.  Each has significant personality issues and after several requests to the landlord are as fixed as they are going to get.  So if you could send a good word to the deity of your choice for them to die completely so the landlord HAS to do something, I would appreciate it.

So I have developed my big list which includes simplifying and reducing stuff where we can and getting the stuff we have better organized, as well as creating spaces for our living to happen.  There is also a whole category of things that I am doing to keep things that were a problem when we moved in from getting worse and quick and dirty cosmetic fixes I can do to make things look nicer.

So far, I have made a bit of progress in our upstairs bathroom and in the basement.  Most of the bathroom had crumbly caulk and clear evidence of mildew under the linoleum.  After fight the futility of trying to keep water inside the bathtub for too long, I finally got it fixed.  Really the lino needs to be replaced, with some work on the floorboards underneath, but I did the best I could to get everything sealed tight so we can have splashes without aggravating the problem.  We also finally replaced the light bulbs above the sink with CFLs.  The bulbs were gradually burning out and I didn’t feel the love for having two types of bulbs going on, so we waited until half of them were gone and then replaced them all.  It is now possible to see in the bathroom again.  Very exciting stuff.  Since I have my fancy pants white caulk, I will probably go in and recaulk the sink just so it looks better at some point, too.

The basement has also been getting my attention.  We spent the better part of a weekend planning out shelves.  We currently have a mish-mash of shelves and storage containers and have accumulated just too many toys.  So the first job was upgrading storage.  Since we don’t expect to be in this place forever, we decided that it made more sense to go with something modular that can be taken apart to be moved or to be repurposed.  We have some of these shelves in the garage, so we spent a weekend planning out how many and what size of shelves we wanted and had our pantry shelves put up a couple of days later.  Now I have a good place for canning supplies and equipment, as well as a place to keep the full jars.

We also mapped out shelves for the play area, but the end pieces had to be special ordered, so we didn’t get them until just last weekend.  I have been working on them since.  Putting the parts together is easy.  The shelves themselves, however are a bit fiddly.  The narrower shelves above only needed a chunk about 1” x 1/8” taken off the sides at both the front and back edge.  After having done the ones in the garage, I have gotten pretty good at whacking out what I need to with the Dremel.  And the pantry shelves have only two shelves with a grand total of eight corners, so it went pretty quickly.  However, the shelves for the toy area are taking longer.  For the wider shelves, the premade shelves we are using are a bit too wide, so in addition to the four corners, I also have to take 15/16” of the long edge.  I wish I lived closer to family members who have a table saw or a radial arm saw, but I have gotten pretty handy with my Skil saw, so I am working away.  The other part that is taking much longer is that there are seven shelves, so that means sawing off seven edges and shaping twenty-eight freakin’ corners.  I finished four of the shelves today.  The bad news, however, is the reward for finishing the other three is that the next job is going through all the toys and getting rid of everything that is broken and winnowing down things that don’t get played with.  It is very likely to be not pretty as neither Bug nor Bean parts easily with belonging.

I am once again hoping to get back into the habit of blogging, but I’ve made that promise before, so don’t hold your breath!

Preparation and Mounting

I couldn’t find the master list that the scientists made before departing when I was taking pictures last night, but it showed up in the laboratory this morning.  Everything was duly checked off as the bags were packed:

After soaking and some additional gentle cleaning, the fossilized bones were laid out to be assembled:

The lead paleontologist did the actual assembly, while his able assistants documented the process and looked things up on the computer:

  

Bug did most of the assembly, but Mom-the-muscle had to be called in occasionally to snap together a stubborn joint.  My big clumsy thumbs also cracked the large claw on one foot, but it wasn’t completely broken and didn’t fall off, so I think it will be fine as a museum model if it isn’t touched too much!  The lead paleontologist poses with the finished skeleton:

And, finally, the display is assembled on the museum shelf:

There is a map of Asia, some information about Velociraptors and the finished skeleton.  Museum staff are duly impressed by the new exhibit.