Advent ~ Days 1 - 3

Our first three days of advent have been wonderful! I love having these scheduled activities to do each day. It makes for some really great memories!

Day #1: Put up lights with daddy

We added 4 blue lights and one green light to honor the officers who were murdered last year at this time. It is a small supportive gesture during a hard part of the year without those men and women in blue.

Day #2: Journey to Bethlehem.

If you have never done the Journey to Bethlehem experience, I highly suggest it! It is a live action play that you are invited to take part in. Become part of a family who is on their way to seek the baby Jesus in his manger on that day so long ago. Hear the angels sing his praises and see the gifts of the 3 Kings for yourself. An amazing experience!

Day #3: Making wool felt hearts for the Christmas tree.

Just a simple blanket stitch around a felted sweater heart with some fun buttons thrown in for flare. But what a cute ornament they make!

Happy Holiday Season folks! More to come!

It's Advent time again!!

Our advent list for this year includes:

1. Put up lights with daddy
2. Journey to Bethlehem
3. Wool Felt Heart ornaments
4. Breakfast with Santa at the Station
5. Make beeswax heart ornaments for the tree
6. Pick out Christmas tree with daddy
7. Recycled wrapping projects
8. Make snowglobe soaps for gifts
9. Paper star and ball ornaments with friends
10. Watching Christmas movie with popcorn and a treat
11. A surprise outing!
12. Go shopping for mommy with daddy
13. Zoo lights with hot cider
14. Paper hearts and bake something yummy!
15. Gingerbread houses
16. Paper snowflakes
17. Popcan gifts for friends
18. Special chocolate
19. Skating at the roller rink
20. Fantasy lights with hot cocoa
21. Christmas cookies for the neighbors
22. Fruit and Nuts dipped in Chocolate
23. Wrap gifts with mommy
24. Have a gnome bonfire with s’mores
25. Open Stocking!

Tomorrow, the fun begins!

Last years advent list, just in case more inspiration is desired.

Logan's newest skill

He's drawing. :) Before it was a scribble that he figured out what it was afterwards. Yesterday, it magically morphed into a lucid thought of what he is going to draw before hand. He came up to me with 'guys' and 'monsters' and 'monsters coming out of water' and each one was a beautiful stick drawing that had too many arms, but always the basic elements of a 'guy'. Eye, legs, arms, body, feet and hands (and most of the time this little tuft of hair like from a Dr Suess book). It was a really beautiful moment.

It is a mind shift that I noticed pretty much the day it happened with all of my children. Alex's first drawing of "guys" as he called it, was so beautiful it made me cry. He was about 4 1/2, and he had sat down at the table to draw while I was cooking dinner. He came up to me, and there were four distinct different drawings on his paper, and with this huge light in his eyes he told me "Look mama! I made guys!" Then I saw it... the circles he had made had legs, arms, and a face! One even had a hat. I stopped and turned off the stove and we sat there and 'made guys' together for the next half hour. I honestly don't remember what happened to dinner. But that first picture where he depicted something real it safely tucked away in his baby book so he can look at it and remember those moments with his own kids.

With Cyan it was a harder thing to tell. She always had more purpose in her drawings and she always wanted them to be a certain way. I do remember when she was able to make the pen do what she wanted, but it was more of weeks and months of her getting frustrated and then all of a sudden it came, like a flash, and she was making people. People with 12 fingers, and everyone had pointy feet, but people just the same... oh, she drew a horse that day, too. This moment is also tucked away in her memory box.

Sometimes, homeschooling isn't so much about 'education' as it is about being there for every second of a child's development. Knowing when these shifts happen and being able to see the subtle things that you would miss if you had to be away from them 10 hours each day. That is the main reason I started homeschooling. I couldn't stand the thought that some of these seemingly insignificant moments would be missed or glossed over, or perhaps, if I was lucky to find a good caregiver, told to me afterwards. There is real struggle with having your children with you all the time, but the beauty you find in being able to talk about the day that he learned to draw and knowing how incredible that was is something you can not replace later in life. I could never get over the idea of someone else having those moments with my children and not understanding how amazing and fantastic they truly are. So they are home with me... where they belong.

More Facebook Funnies (ie: My daughter, Snow White)

Oct 28th, 2010

I just found cyan in the bathroom with one sock off and one sock on, shining a flashlight and whispering into the drain. "It's ok. You can come out".... Ummmmm... So I ask her what the heck she is doing just as a tiny moth comes flying out of the drain and into her hair.

True story.

After it left her hair it settled on the wall next to the big light. And she said "oh good!" and scuttled off to bed. When I went to tuck her in she said it flew down there when she was brushing her teeth and she didn't want alex to brush his teeth and accidentally kill it. So she shined the light in there to get him to come out.

Nothin' to say to that.

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Nov 12th, 2010

"It would be good if that was a toy... A toy that blows fire!" -Logan

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Nov 20th, 2010

"I've been looking for you!" says my daughter to the spider I asked her to remove from the dining room. lol....

Facebook funnies

School has been boring. Book work, after handwriting lesson, after spelling lesson, and then a bit more book work. Poetry class was AWESOME! But I don't have those pictures downloaded yet (bad me). So instead, I will share with you some of my recent Facebook Funnies, brought to you by my kids:

Logan: "Hey mama... when my little brother comes out of your belly, can I play my gameboy?"

A little bit of teen mama humor: "Teenage attitude adjustment took 64 push ups and 30 sit ups tonight. Equally amazed and totally annoyed."

And Logan again: ‎"Mama, dees muffins taste like... um like.... solid ROCK! ..........Or fish."

The new corn muffin recipe was a go with everyone else. :P

This one stars Logan again: It is a good day when your 3 year old asks: "Mama, I all done with my squash, can I have more of those vegetables?" (meaning roasted root veggies including everything from rutabaga to fingerling potatoes.) It just proves that some of these children actually are mine. :)

Cyan's posts have all been about her recent dental drama that includes an abscess and a root canal. Not much for the funnies. But I did get to update that the tooth next to the root canal is NOT dead and that is wonderful news!

Completely adorable!

Alex's Kitchen Science Lesson #1 ~ Braising

Braising = cooking with liquid

Recipe: Grandma Shari's Pot Roast with Peas

Chapter 3 "Braising" in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food

Searing the meat.

(This was our last pot roast from our half a cow we buy each year. What an awesome way to use it!)

Cutting the veggies. He got a little knife lesson in here too and did a wonderful job! Uniform potato bits is not the easiest trick to learn.

Making the cooking liquid. First, he added a Bullion cube to the water...

And the finished dinner! Man, it was good! I am going to keep this recipe in our stocks so we can try 'braising' again!

Around our City ~ Farm Tour #3

Today is a beautiful day! In fact, it is the ONLY beautiful day we have had in over a week now. And, unfortunately, the only one in the forecast future. So we decided to take advantage of it. Don took the day off and we headed out on our Pumpkin Patch farm tour. The first farm we visited Picha's farm in Puyallup, was closed until 3pm (which is during nap time in this house)... so we decided to look for another one. And we found Scholtz Farm!

They had all sorts of features out for the harvest season. Their animals were all ready to be petted and watched, and one of the hands told a story about one of the pigs escaping into the corn field (which is a maze) only to come home a bit late for dinner when they were sure 'Mrs Piggy' was gone for good.

But of course, what fun with animals can be complete without Cyan having a close encounter or two:

The pony nibbled her hand pretty good and although it was scary, he was looking for apples, not little girl fingers, so she was fine. After a brief hug from mom and then dad, she was able to go make up with the pony again and feed him some dandelions she found in the pumpkin patch.

We picked up some beautiful pumpkins and quite a few of my favorite squash.

The Delicata!

It was a great sunny day trip!

Science Everywhere

Alex is starting up with a good dose of Science this year and that had me searching through books and cookbooks, looking for kitchen chemistry concepts on which to base future lessons for him. Which led me to find a book I had stashed away: Janice VanCleave's Biology for Every Kid.

This book is a gem for those Science impaired homeschoolers like me. She has laid out 101 experiments that are simple, easy, and take mostly household items. And best of all, most of them don't make a mess!

I paired it with this wonderful simple science ditto:

which can be found here (there are two pages) and were super easy for Cyan to translate her experiment this afternoon to the sheet. On the second sheet, there is a place to draw a picture of what she had done or the results of her experiment.

Today we did the experiment "Limp Spuds" and we talked about Osmosis. Both my kids are excited about doing more Science this year. Alex actually was able to set up Cyan's experiment for her before he moved on to his written briefing about kitchen safety for his Grandma on Thursday. He says to me as he is reading about osmosis and setting out the table salt "Haha! This is fun!"

Creative Writing and Poetry Class ~ Similes

Today we did a big review of what the kids had learned in the previous three lessons. I was thrilled with how much they have remembered and are able to use in real writing applications!

The second half of the class was dedicated to Similes. Comparison sentences using 'like' or 'as'. Our enrichment project was to take a rainbow, and for each color, create a simile. We had what colors looked like, felt like, smelled like, sounded like, and even tasted like. The sentences were awesome! "Purple tastes like a ripe plum bursting in my mouth on a warm summer day." These kids have a heck of an imagination. Even the youngegest in the class really enjoyed this activity and were able to bring some really great sentences to the table.

Cyan and Tucker the squirrel

Tucker is still around. And now he brings his friend 'Hank' over as well. They had another friend for a couple weeks, but Tucker chased him away. Big family drama, apparently.

Alex decided to film Cyan feeding and petting Tucker... and although she hardly got to touch him here, you can see how comfortable he is with her. It's just amazing!

Please try to ignore the mouth breathing of the videotographer... he's new. ;)

Some of our recent drama of our own... my poor daughter is going through some dental issues. But she is well on the mend and we are currently canning away!

Alex's kitchen science inventory

My mom, Alex, and I are starting to implement the Alton Brown science stuff we have worked out over the past few weeks. My mom had two fantastic ideas which have taken up our first week with this science curriculum. #1: a kitchen inventory and #2: a kitchen safety briefing

Here is Alex's inventory:

I think he did a fantastic job! He said he wants to take pictures of the toaster and coffee maker too, but I told him that was unnecessary as long as he remembered he had them to use if he needed to.

(Just for my own sanity, I feel the need to point out that we had just made pizza with the mixer when he decided to do this. It doesn't just sit that dirty. ;) )