"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.

New...residents? employees? pets?

Last night, I scurried up to Madison for a class at Olbrich Botanical Garden about Vermicomposting. It was an interesting class. She demonstrated setting up a worm bin using a small storage container and talked about caring for and maintaining the worms and bin, as well as finding supplies around town. With her description, it would have been quite straightforward to get the parts together and set up a worm bin, but she had sample bins for sale for $10 at the class. I figured that the convenience of not having to run errands up in Madison to collect parts and to find the time to put the pieces together made the price seem like a pretty good deal, so I came home with a worm bin complete with worms and a first bit of food for them to eat.
The bin:

and one of the residents:

We added some coffee grounds and scraps from prepping tomatoes for canning tomato today. We will still be feeding our compost bin in the yard, but picking out the choice bits to feed the worms. Especially this time of year when there is a whole lotta canning going on, we generate a ton of compost! All three kids are pretty excited about it, but my bug boy Beeb is especially taken by them. Before bed last night, he came up to me and said, "Thank you for getting us worms, Mommy."
So are they merely new residents in our household? Employees who are producing some fantastic soil amendments in exchange for room and board? Or pets that we have to check on and talk to regularly throughout the day?

Chaos and Mayhem on a Budget

The kids have long been fond of swinging any sorts of sticks at each other for, well, pretty much as long as they could hold them in their tiny little hands.  The most recent incarnation has been pseudo-martial arts and fencing using broom and mop sticks.  After a few too many stray whacks and the resulting dramas, I decided we needed something softer.  I had seen swords and such made out of pool noodles at some of our homeschool park days and we set to work.  Since my troop is clearly made up of space geeks and not swashbuckling pirates or professional fencers, the obvious route was lightsabers.

They each selected their favorite color from the pool noodle selection at a discount store ($0.99 each), we stopped at the hardware store for a 3/4” PVC pipe ($2.79) and PVC end caps for the pipe ($0.49 each).  From our personal stash, we contributed silver duct tape for the handles and bits from red and black duct tape sheets for the buttons.  For an extra $0.39, we added a PVC pipe coupler and used the last little bit of leftover PVC so we can convert one of the lightsabers into a double ended lightsaber a la Darth Maul in Episode I.

Total project budget for three lightsabers: $7.23 or $2.41 apiece and $0.39 plus leftovers to make the other end of the double lightsaber.

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!