At Home with Momma Skyla

Oh, Motherhood. I'll never quite get it!

2012-01-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

I have something kind of hilarious and kind of pathetic to confess. Yesterday Hannah Jane was a complete and total mess. She was a public menace. She felt like a stranger. After a long talk, I thought I had unearthed all of these pearls of motherly wisdom about riding out the rough patches and accepting that kids are ever changing and somewhat unkowable, and then I wrote this poignant post about motherhood and how much wiser I suddenly felt. Haha.

For some reason I never hit "publish" on that post. Maybe it was because it was especially long and I like to read through every post top to bottom at least once before I publish and I couldn't do that because crabby Hannah Jane kept wandering past and I, feeling like I needed to heal her with nurturing, kept going overboard on the "Who are you today and what can I do to help you meet your new emotional needs?" junk that a mother does in desperation when she thinks her kid is going through some inner struggle that she hasn't mustered the courage to share yet.

It was an emotionally exhausting day for everyone who encountered us (which included all of our culture club friends who witnessed the first public showing of HJ's full on attitude. Silent treatment alternating with obnoxious yelling) but finally it was over. Everyone was tucked safely into bed, Joe was out late at a Chamber of Commerce dinner, and I had a few silent moments to ponder on my new insights into motherhood. And then...

Hannah Jane woke up sick. LOL! All of those hours spent trying to figure out what was around this new corner were simply me once again failing to realize that she was sick and just hadn't manifested all the symptoms yet. I always miss it.

One time when she was a toddler she woke up and did this cry that she used to do right before she would throw up. It was her sick cry. But this time while she did the sick cry, she said, "Mom, I feel bad about who I am as a person..." I freaked out! What is wrong with my child? What is she dealing with to say something so extremely intense and introspective at the ripe old age of 2? Joe was saying, "Sky! That's her sick cry! Get her to the bathroom! She's going to throw up! That's the cry!" I kept saying no, she was having some psychological crisis and she needed love! Not a toilet! And about that time she threw up down my back, said she felt better, and went back to bed. It's like I never learn!

I always hesitate to assume she's sick if she's moody. My dear friend Sarah once said, when a guest toddler was flipping out at her house, "She must be sick! Or allergic to the dog! Or hungry! Or tired! Because it can't possibly be that being with me isn't enough to make her happy!" LOL! I loved this bit of ironic humor and I think about it every time I want to make an excuse for one of my kids. It can't be that I've raised them to be anything other than perfect angels! They must just be hungry and therefore incapable of accessing their higher nature! Assuming she's sick when she's moody just seems too convenient. And I like to abuse myself in the mothering department, so I go with she's turning a corner and that just means that she needs a different kind of mother from the one I've been! I can do this. I can completely transform myself to meet the needs of this new daughter I suddenly have! Talk about self-torment!

So that poignant blog post I typed about the daily transformations that mothers have to make from who they truly are to who is needed at the moment was just a bunch of hooey. It was pretty good hooey, but hooey none the less. Motherhood is far less dramatic than it felt yesterday. It's pretty much about keeping people alive, educated, entertained, and hopefully a bit enlightened and I feel confident I have mastered most those things. So I can't help but laugh at myself and feel seriously grateful that I never got around to clicking that publish button!

For the record, Hannah Jane was back on top of the world today, only slightly sleepy from having been up sick in the night. I felt a little sick for a few hours and bounced right back. We canceled our dinner plans at a friends' house just to be on the safe safe side and to keep our germs to ourselves.

Colonists and Natives

2012-01-25T19:17:00.000-08:00

We've been working on Colonial America FOREVER!!! Tomorrow is culture club and there's still so much we wanted to do that we haven't yet. But I'm confident that we'll move on to the Revolutionary War when CC is done rather than back tracking in order to cover more random details. CC seems like a good crowning occasion on which to wrap things up. So today we hurried through a few last minute things we wanted to make and got down to business organizing our thoughts for presentation day. So here's a quick overview of some of the things we've made along the way as we've learned about life in colonial America! Most people would have made this 5 separate posts, but not this momma! Grab a cup of tea, because we're going to be here a while!

The kids took turns trying their hand at covering a pickle jar in needle hitching. You know when you go to seafood restaurants and they have those giant glass balls wrapped in woven rope? That's needle hitching! And the native Americans taught the colonists how to do it! They would needle hitch around the oars of their boats so that the whales wouldn't hear them coming. I had no idea whales were a part of colonial life!

Still in jammies, building a wigwam in mom's bed!

We set out just to study the colonists, found that their story was inseparable from the story of the native people, and ended up spending a ton of time on Native American culture too. You know how one idea leads to another, one fact leads to a question, which leads to another fact? Yeah, well after watching the Song of Hiawatha, we decided that we needed to build a wigwam. Then as we looked up wigwam construction facts, we found all sorts of other types of native dwellings and soon we had decided to construct an entire village of native housing from all around North America. We didn't do a long house because we figured it was pretty much just a giant wigwam, and we didn't do an igloo because we made one back during our igloo unit. But the rest that we found got built!

Here's Hannah Jane giving a guided tour of our housing complex! We found all of this information at this great site! If you're ever in need of native housing information, this is a one stop shop!

Hannah Jane tried her hand at writing with a quill pen. Apparently she loved it because she's been using it ever since to write notes to people and draw pictures. Instead of following the directions for making messy berry ink, I diluted some acrylic paints. We made berry ink to paint our hieroglyphs back in Oregon when we were studying Egypt. It was a mess! Granted, the kids were a solid 4 years younger than they are now. But still been there, done that, no need to go back!

We made our own butter by shaking a baby food jar full of whipping cream like crazy until it made a nice thick spread. I will admit that it tasted like fluffy cardboard. And maybe colonial food really did all taste like cardboard, but my kids aren't real colonial kids so we want to make something with an actual taste. That said, because we made it in a baby food jar, Haven called it "baby butter" and had it on bread about 4 times today. So one of my kids can eat cardboard!

I knew I had seen something on a blog last year with a variety of recipe ideas for this small scale butter making. I went to find it and - you're going to love me for this! - it was a Valentines post for making adorable Valentines butters! So stinking cute! I remember now that this was on my to-dolist last year and I just never found the time! But now that we can call it school work? Oh, yeah! We're making some butter! Tomorrow at Culture Club we'll be making a better butter than we made today.

We also made trenchers by carving soap bars. Apparently plates were not a thing yet, so they had these wooden blocks that had been hollowed out and they slopped all of their food right in the one hole and got down to business! Parent's would share a trencher, 2 siblings would share a trencher. If you were rich, your table had trenchers carved right in and every night you'd just wash down the entire table! And apparently Harvard would buy trenchers by the dozen-dozen. I guess if you get into Harvard, you no longer have to share a trencher! Talk about motivation to get an education. I can't imagine eating with my hands from the same hole of food as Joe! Sorry, Joe. It's not you. You know I have only child issues with sharing!

Okay, before I show you this last video, I some explaining to do. We always dress up for culture club and I feel like I always end up doing more talking than I should, so I asked the boys to write a play that could be their contribution to CC. That way I don't talk too much during their part and it's totally their own thoughts on the time. Well, Haven developed a funny obsession with Radcliff's dog in Pocahontas, so his character had to have a "prissy dog." And Hunter liked that the rich men who came looking for gold weren't going to work at all (don't worry. we covered John Smith's "No work, no food" law). So the play they wrote is all about these 2 rich guys in wigs that refuse to work and have a prissy dog. It was really important to Haven for us to know that his prissy dog wasn't going to work either! LOL! "My dog is too prissy to dig for gold!"

Once they wrote the play, I typed it out in a big font without changing any of their words unless they picked a word I knew they wouldn't be able to read, in which case we consulted on an alternate word that was more phonetically kind. So, again, this is their interpretation of snooty, rich colonists. Haven gets more than a little hung up looking at his script towards the end, but he makes a fine recover after ~~a few~~ a ton of hints from mom. This is agonizingly adorable to watch. So enjoy!

Tomorrow's the big day! Hannah Jane is going dressed as Minnehaha (sounds like mini - haha and means laughing waters) who was Hiawatha's wife. The boys are obviously going as rich prospectors. We're taking corn bread and supplies to let everyone make some butter. Should be serious fun!

Toy Jail

2012-01-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure I stole this idea from someone else's blog. But being that I filed it away in the back of my mind as something I should someday get around to, and apparently failed to pin because it just seemed so obvious, I have no idea who to credit it to. I Googled the term "toy jail" and got a bunch of results trying to sell me an actual toy. So, if this is yours and I'm stealing your thunder, by all means, drop me a note and I'll link to you.

Anyway, we have started using toy jail as an all around chore motivating tool and I have to say how awesome it has been! I LOVE TOY JAIL! Basically, toy jail is a card board box where I put toys that have been left out. If I've asked the kids to clean their rooms and they've declared them clean, I'll go in and everything that wasn't put away goes in toy jail. If I step on a toy in the bathroom floor, toy jail. That pile of stuffed animals in the kitchen floor that had been part of a tea party, but were forgotten when the kids moved on to board games? Toy jail.

To get a toy out of toy jail, the kids have to do a chore. Not just any chore. I have a list of possible chores on the jail itself, but the kids have to get approval first so that I know it's something that actually needs to be done. If I just took out the bathroom trash, Haven can't make that his chore because it doesn't need to be done.

On Fridays, any toy still in toy jail goes in the donation box. This little fact is crucial to toy jail success. I say, if you didn't love it enough to do the work to get it out, we should give it to someone who will. The original rule was that anything left in jail for a week or more went to jail, but that meant I had to write down dates instead of recklessly tossing toys in jail. That's too much work. The point of toy jail is to make mom's life easier and her children more civilized. It is NOT meant to make more work for mom. So we came up with the Friday rule.

This has been so awesome. First it was funny to see the kids' reactions to the idea. They all agreed that it wasn't fair for mom to clean up their toys all the time. But jail? So serious. Hannah Jane actually said, "Mom, it's not fair to send the toys to jail because WE didn't pick them up. They toys didn't do anything, yet still they are punished." Nice try, kiddo. But you're too smart to even buy that story yourself and I know it!

The first few days of toy jail, there was so much stuff going in and being earned out that I ran out of chores to give the kids. Everything was clean, plants watered,animals cared for and still there were toys needing to be liberated. At first I thought this was a flaw in the toy jail system, but then I just said, "Hey, it's not my fault you left out more toys than there are chores. You'll just have to wait until tomorrow when there are more chores to be done and get your toy then." Whoa. This felt serious. And suddenly they were being very careful not to leave anything out because tomorrow's chores were going to be needed for today's toys.

They got the hang of it pretty fast and things have stayed consistently tidier since we instated this plan on December 26th. And there have been some unanticipated positive side effects of toy jail too! The kids will do chores on each others' behalf and get a toy out for someone else. It's darling. Hannah Jane is innately more tidy than the boys when it come to toys. Probably because if she doesn't put her toys up, the boys get them and break them. So she's pretty careful. The whole time we've had toy jail, she's only had maybe 4 items in jail. But she still does chores to pull her own weight around the house and when she does them, she'll ask if she can transfer her toy credit to one of the boys if she can see that they have something particularly dear to them in jail. The boys have both done this for each other too. They tried to do it for Hannah Jane but she didn't have any toys to get. So toy jail has become a way for the kids to give each other a little gift for no reason. Such a great surprise!

So I'm quite pleased with this little form of mommy manipulation. There's more cooperation around the house and less things being left out. It's a win all the way around!

Bob and Miranda

2012-01-20T10:33:00.000-08:00

So there's this kid, Bob. Bob says he's 18, but he looks more like 4. And his best friend is this grown woman named Miranda. Bob's mom threw him out of a window, naked, with no parachute and his teacher wrote a tell-all book about it, so Bob asked his mom if he could move in with Miranda and be home schooled at her house. This meant he was safe from being thrown naked out of a window with no parachute and that he wouldn't have to deal with that nosy teacher and her tabloid writing ways anymore. And Bob's mom, Heather, said yes.

Bob likes it at Miranda's house because he can hang out with her kids Hunter and Hannah Jane and help keep them busy when Miranda cooks. He lets Hunter pretend to be his pet dragon and Hunter really likes that. He can listen to Hannah Jane read her chapter books and report back to Miranda that her daughter isn't slacking. Bob does Hunter's school work with him. Not because at age 18 he really needs to learn first grader stuff, but because he knows it makes Hunter feel good to have an older pal to look up to.

Have you caught on yet? A week or so ago Haven came in the bathroom while I was rolling my hair and said, "Hey, mom, let's pretend we're friends. Okay?" "But we are friends already." "No mom! We're family that like each other a lot. I mean let's be friends that aren't family. I'll be Bob. Who are you going to be?" "Well, I guess I'll be Miranda then." And that's how it all began. Haven's alter ego, Bob was born.

Over the next few days, Bob would show up at breakfast. Hannah Jane and Hunter would ask why he was at our house instead of his. That's when we learned about his mom and the naked, no parachute incident. LOL! When he said that his teacher wrote a book about it, Hannah Jane said, "Wow. I bet that embarrassed your mom for the whole world to read about her bad behavior in a book!" And that's when Bob told us that he had gotten permission to drop out of school and move in with us. He looked Miranda in the eyes and said, "I could help out with your kids. You know? Make sure they're on task and keep an eye on things." He tried giving Miranda's kids new names and ages too, but they liked their names and ages, so he had no choice but to overlook their lack of creativity.

We've all realized that Bob will do just about anything as a favor to Miranda. She's so much nicer to deal with than his mom, Heather, but I'm sure you've read the book. Hannah Jane will say, "Bob, will you walk me out to feed the dogs? Miranda is busy." And he goes! Had we asked Haven to help feed the dogs, he'd have said no. Bob is much more amenable than Haven. And for that, we really like having Bob around.

Maybe this is the first step into multiple personalities, land. But I think it's pretty adorable and as long as Bob is well behaved, we'll let him stay. We like him more than Luke, Buzz, or the original alter ego, Dustin. And it's a lot less stressful than when Hannah Jane was his age and her imaginary friends would get together and play only to exclude her. You have no idea how many hours I spent wondering what emotional trauma caused her to have mean imaginary friends that would play in her room and kick her out. I must have driven her preschool teacher crazy. "Is something going on at school? Is she being bullied? This just seems like really weird 4 year old behavior if something's not going on." But it wasn't. Apparently she just had so little drama in her real life that she needed to imagine some. Anyway, Bob is so much easier to deal with than imaginary rude kids! Ha! Hunter just likes to play Momma Bear and Baby Bear all day every day. This requires absolutely no effort on my part because apparently Momma bears don't growl or anything. They simply refer to their kid as Baby Bear while they do regular human stuff like phonics and making banana bread.

So now you know Bob, who actually just came in and said, "What are you typing?" I said, "I'm blogging about Bob and Miranda." His eye's lit up. "Did you tell everyone about that book his teacher wrote?" "Yes, Bob. They know everything."

Valentines Crafts, Snow, Rain, and Totally Bummed Out Kids

2012-01-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we got around to making some pretty Valentines stuff for the house. And it felt like the perfect day to do it. Snow finally drifted out of the sky, long overdue and much anticipated. I tell you, I miss just about every place we've ever lived, but this little valley in Utah seems more bearable on account of the fantastic amounts of snow it gets in the winter. But a winter here without snow? A winter with a ton of back to back bad air days and no snow? Well, it's enough to make me dream of heading back to the soggy Oregon winters where at least I could pop over and get a hotel room on the ocean and get my zen on in the middle of winter. I need the snow if I'm to survive being so far from the ocean. Even if I rarely hit the beach in winter, it was calming just knowing it was there for me when I needed it. Anyway, the snow finally came down yesterday and it was nothing short of poetic. Crisp, gray skies interrupted by bare tree limbs and a little hint of Rocky Mountains through the dense fog. Poetic.

The kids all grabbed their snow shovels, pretending to do a good deed by shoveling the driveway, but their whirling and giggling and snow plow sound effects made it clear that this was simply a joyous celebration of the season under the guise of selfless charity. And the snow fell so fast that the lines they plowed off the cement were promptly recovered by the time they reached the other end.

While they played snow plow, I ventured over to clip some branches from a beautiful shrubby plant that grows along our canal. I thought its bright red wood would make for a lovely Valentines tree. I was right!

Once inside, I set to work hot gluing conversation hearts to my small bits of red tree while the kids worked on a little yarn wrapped wire project for the dining room walls. When told that they could make any 3 word statement to express their inner most loving feelings, the above is what they came up with. Heart felt words of daddy love are now yarned large and fuzzy across the dining room wall.

This is the base of our Valentines tree. I think the red wood looks lovely all covered in small candy hearts. Looks kind of like little spring buds. My vision is that we'll make some sort of small paper heart decorations that will have loving messages for the world on them. Or maybe hearts with love themed Baha'i verses on them. Who knows? I'm sure this tree's destiny will be fulfilled in the next day or so.

To add to our love theme, we tried the home made window gel thing that has popped up all over the internet. I first found the idea here. The drill is that you add acrylic paint to Elmer's glue (because lets face it. Glue sticks are simply superior and somewhere along the line you made the mistake of buying bottled glue because every classroom has it, but you can't bear to watch the mess that your kids make with it on account of their inability to believe you when you say "A little dab will do!" But you can't throw it out because you paid good money for it (okay, is was only 79 cents, but still...) and so there it sits, taking up space while you wait for some brilliant use for inferior glue comes along. This was supposed to be that use!) and then use the colored glue to make shapes and words on wax paper. In theory, when this dries, it makes something akin to a window gel. Having done it, I can now tell you that when they say "akin to a window gel," what they really mean is that these are related so distantly to a window gel that they could legally marry a window gel in all 50 states and their babies would be healthy, adorable, and look more like Papa Glue than Momma Window Gel. Although, to be fair, now that I look back at the site I eventually used to guide our activity, she calls them window "clings" not "gels" like the other sites. And that's really a more honest appraisal
of the activity.

So after a night of drying, they were ready. That's one of the window thingies that we made, stuck to the front window, snapped a picture of, and then watched curl up and fall right off. I don't know if we did something wrong, or what. We wet the backs like the Almost Unschooling mom said to, and that did help momentarily, but little by little about half of them have fallen off the windows and the kids are annoyed and over them. Bummer. But they were fun to make even if they weren't fun to display.

And maybe you noticed the weather difference between the top picture of yesterday's winter wonderland and this one of today's bleak mush. Last night it rained a warm rain and took away a significant amount of snow. Total bummer. Not only that, but now we have little ponds all around the house. It's nuts how much standing water there is out there. We've been in this house for, oh, 3 years or so? And we've never had this kind of standing water all around the house. I called my dad to ask if I should be flipping out and bailing the water away from the house with a pail because I am a stupid, know nothing sort of home owner. The house could wash away down the river and I'd probably hang out a window yelling, "Wheeee!!!!" all the way to Colorado! Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration. But only slight. Knowing my complete ability to ignore the urgent on account of my not knowing what is and is not urgent in the world of home ownership (like the time I called the HVAC guy because our thermostat wasn't working and it turned out that we failed to change the air filter for that full 3 years I mentioned and all of the yuck on the filter was causing the burners tooverheat), I tend to now just call my dad in Tennessee every time I think the house might collapse, or float away, or explode, or whatever else might happen, and ask him if I need to flip out or not. So far, that plan has worked out alright! Thanks, Daddy! LOL!

And on this dreary day, we a play date scheduled. A few weeks ago we went to one of the the kids' online school social gatherings. It was a winter games party and there were quite a few kids of every age there who all do public school online either full or part time. I started chatting with a mom and she mentioned that her daughter was 8 and was hoping to make a new friend at this activity. Well, hooray! My daughter is 8 too, and her usual buddy at these gatherings is MIA so we should hook them up! Before the mom and I could play puppet master, the girls had already found each other and hit it off. They were stuck to each other for the duration of the party. So before it was over, we exchanged numbers and set up a play date. Well, today was that day. We rushed through school work, cleaned the house from top to bottom, and got a banana bread in the oven to be ready right after their arrival. The time came and went, and there we sat for 20 minutes in our unusually clean house with our unusually nice afternoon snack and no guests. I went digging through my coat pockets to find the crumpled up bingo game card on the back of which Anna May had written their phone number, but I never found it. Maybe she never found the crumpled up bingo card with our address on it either. So, Anna May, if you ever come across this blog, we were excited! We made you banana bread! And now we just hope that you show up at the roller skating party next month so we can try again! This already dreary afternoon is now complete with 3 kids who were very excited about their new friends coming to play and are now wandering around the house like ghosts, aimless and disappointed. Total bummer!

So, I better get off here and go find some way to cheer the troops' hearts! Maybe a board game or making some of those decorations for our love tree? I'm off! Wish me luck!

8 hours supervising cookie sales will really make ya think!

2012-01-14T20:36:00.000-08:00

That is Hannah Jane in front of last year's pile of sold cookies before she happily delivered them. It was her first year as a girl scout and she set a goal of selling 300 boxes. This really stressed me out. I know she's a goal driven kind of gal, and always meets her goals and being that she was just 7, this meant that I was suddenly responsible for supervising her for however many hours it took to sell 300 boxes. And by golly she did it.

Today was the first day of Utah cookie sales, meaning she went door to door taking pre-orders, and she kind of reminded me of a new mom a year or so after giving birth to a child. It's like she totally forgot how much work she put in last year. She upped her goal to 500 boxes, which is totally not going to happen. Totally. And I fear the anguish which will pour forth from her cute and tiny little girl scout self when she finally realizes that it ain't gonna happen. It's not that I don't have faith in her salesmanship. It's simply that I don't have the time to drive her around for that many hours. Nor could we expect the boys to tolerate that many hours in car seats.

Last year we spent two half days selling and she met her 300 box goal. Since her second day was much slower than her first, and most houses said they had already bought from someone else by then, we decided that we were just going to go as long as it took on day one for her to feel satisfied and then not go out again. Well, she hit the streets promptly at 10, went to all of her favorite customers' homes (it's amazing how she can remember which complete strangers bought how many and what kind) and then just kept going. By 2 we had to stop and let the boys eat lunch before they lost their minds, but it was right back to work after only a 20 minute break. We went until the sun went down. We're talking about 8 hours in the van, watching her skip door to door. And at the end of the day she had sold 144 boxes. I thought this was fantastic, but could see why she was disappointed considering how many she sold in less time last year. This is why I'm thinking that 500 is simply off the table.

Anyway, you make a lot of random observations while you sit in a van for 8 hours watching an 8 year old like a hawk as people try to convince her to step inside while they write a check. Well, that's observation #1. Middle aged men seem really offended that she won't come inside. The women, on the other hand, all seemed really happy for her that she had learned and wasn't willing to bend any safety rules. One man just kept telling her to come in. He said, "Your mom can see me. She's smiling. Just step in!" I can see that it's a touchy subject for men, always viewed as a potential predator, but come on, man! Accept that she's following the rules and just go get your checkbook already!

On that same note, last year she had a little girl about her age who was offended that she wouldn't come inside. While her parents got their check book, the girl just kept saying, "Uhh...if kidnappers or something lived here, do you think I'd still live here? No way. So if I'm here, you know it's a safe house. Want some gum?" Hannah Jane politely declined the gum from a stranger (albeit an innocent 6 year old stranger) which outraged this pint sized little bottle of rage. She said, "What? You think I'm going to poison you with my gum? I just ate the gum, didn't I? I mean if I poisoned the gum, I'm not going to go on and eat the gum right? Just have some gum!" Ha! Hannah Jane never did take the gum, and thankfully the dad showed up with the check. We laughed about that kid for months! She had so much personality for such a small thing. I imagine that she's what Nancy Grace might have been like as a kid!

Observation #2, the elderly cookie buyers seem to fall neatly into 2 categories. Those who want to buy a box for every grandchild (we love that kind) and those who think you're a hoodlum and you're going to take their money and never bring them cookies ( we kind of enjoy that kind too)! We had one woman refuse to pay up front for her cookies. She just wouldn't do it. Hannah Jane kept running back to the van asking what to do. She was just a sweet, fearful old thing and I told Hannah Jane just to take her order, and if we never saw her money we'd chalk it up to some of our charity boxes. Poor thing. I mean Hannah Jane is tiny and elf like in her little girl scout beanie hat, and this little lady looked terrified of her, never opening the door more than a crack.

Observation #3, people are so torn between being energy efficient by shutting the door on a child while they dig for their checkbook and being polite while all of their heat flies out the door. After watching a few people struggle with this, looking guilty but horrified at the loss of heat, we took a second to discuss how Hannah Jane could maybe say to them, "Hey, I'm good out here, so it's fine to close the door and keep your heat in." Once she employed delivered the line, people seemed more at ease.

Observation #4, January is the worst month of the entire year to sell cookies. Every state has different sales times and I have to say that we got the short end of the stick here! Every woman on the continent, and about half of the men, just vowed, not two weeks ago, to cut their calories. It's too soon! Their will power is still strong! We really should be giving them a few more weeks to fail at their diet on their own before we come by like the devil in a brownie suit, tempting them with our resolution breaking treats! That was the most common reason sited for not buying.

The highlight of my day was ~~the boys getting bored and eventually removing their dirty socks and throwing them at the back of my head~~ when we were in a neighborhood far from where we began, the sun was about to go down and we knew we were on our last house. All of the sudden this woman pulled up beside me and rolled down her window. "Hi there! You were at my house this morning and I was so impressed with her! How could you say no to that? And now I'm up here dropping my mom off at her house hours later and here you are! She's still going! I'm just so impressed. And my mom is impressed too, so she asked me to give you her address so you can make sure you don't miss her house before you go home." How awesome is that? We went to the mom's house even though we had planned to go home, and what do you know? She was the buy a box for every grand kid kind of lady. She made such a big deal out of Hannah Jane's hard work. Her compliments were so much more exciting than her cookie purchase!

So, I'd say it was a good day. The economy isn't going to be good for cookie sales, and we keep reminding Little Miss that every person who buys a box is basically engaging in an act of charity because they aren't exactly cheap cookies! And so each sale is a gift from that person to her and we shouldn't be all down because it's not 500 boxes. We should feel really honored that that many people contributed to her horse camp this summer. She tried hard to look okay with the total for the day, but I could tell she was trying to cover bummed out with noble. I suppose we'll probably be hitting the streets a few more times before it's all said and done. No longer aiming for 500, but at least letting her feel like she gave it her best effort.

Look at me causing alarm with my listening skills!

2012-01-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Gail just called me. She had a very serious tone, which she often does, so I didn't worry too much. But then she said, "Skyla, I would like to drop by tomorrow to pick up my potholders and to chat for a few moments." Okay...scheduling chat time in a serious voice concerned me. I'm thinking, Oh, dear! She has cancer. Someone has cancer, or has died, or she's moving. Something big! and terrible!!! Of course I couldn't wait for tomorrow. "What's going on, Gail?"

She goes on to say that she and her husband would like to send Joe and I to Hamilton's (a very nice Steakhouse here in town) and watch the kids for us. Okay..."Well, that's very nice, but why?" Still sounding very serious, she says, "Skyla, your stress is tangible. I can just feel your tension. During our interfaith meeting the other night, you were so quiet. You are our leader, Skyla. You are peppy and wise and you guide our discussion with confidence. You are simply not quiet. But then you were. And it concerns me deeply. I can only imagine the stress you are under for you to be so reserved."

That's my dear friend Gail in the pink scarf!

Ba-ha-ha-ha! Seriously, I laughed out loud! "Gail, I'm not stressed at all! It was one of my resolutions for the new year to be a better listener, and I simply can't listen if I'm always flapping my jaws! You guys at the interfaith are some of the people I want most to listen to and learn from! I wasn't stressed, I was absorbing YOUR wisdom because you have so much to share! And it was your night to lead discussion, so of course I was going to back off a little! You are our meditation guru, and I stink at meditation so I wanted to listen and learn some things that I could incorporate into my own failing attempts at meditation."

I've never heard Gail experience such audible relief! What a great friend she is that she would worry over my quietness. I feel really blessed to have a friend like that, but also really terrible for worrying her. She is the kind who will worry so efficiently over a friend that I can only imagine how long she must have sat there and schemed over how she was going to help me relieve my tension and get me all loud again. I can also imagine Ned, her sweet husband (and Joe's former boss) having to listen to her stress. "Dear, we should send them to dinner! We should watch the kids for them! They need this, Ned. I can just feel it." Ha! Poor Ned! Asked to watch 3 rowdy kids in his art gallery of a home! What amazing friends they are!

Finally I said, "About tomorrow, we have plans in the afternoon, but you can come by in the morning if you want." She laughed. "No need. If you're just a better listener, then everything is settled!" "You mean you don't have a potholder emergency and that was all a schemed to get me perked up?" It was. Sweet woman! I just love her to pieces!

And just to show you how stressed I was at the interfaith dinner, this is a picture taken by Haven with Gail's camera of me doing my best fish face before we started our group meditation. Don't I just look all full of tension? Or is my wisdom and leadership showing through? LOL! I can't believe I'm actually publishing that picture! There are almost no pictures of me on this blog and that's the one I'm going to go with? Well, enjoy it because it's the only horrid picture of me you're ever going to see here. To compensate, I'm going to have to dig out pictures from my Jr. High trip to Glamor Shots!

It's so great to have these amazing people in our lives! That whole interfaith bunch are just dear, lovely souls! And someday I'm sure their wisdom will rub off on me and I'll finally get the hang of this whole meditation thing. Next month's topic? Spiritual solutions to material problems. Should be good! With lot's of opportunities for fish faces!

Wampum Belt

2012-01-11T10:18:00.000-08:00

original, completely non-authentic wampum art

Our K-12 art curriculum had a lesson on Wampum Belts that had the kids design their own belt on a piece of grid paper. Wampum belts were valuable bead belts that told stories with pictures because the people didn't have a written language. And much to Hunter's excitement, they only came in white and purple! We designed their Wampum belts on paper, but that was a little boring. Boring, but what else could we do?

This was one of those weeks where things just randomly came together in a way that I could never have planned. We checked out a movie from the library called the Song of Hiawatha, which ended up being a fabulous and beautifully done movie. At one point in the movie, Hiawatha goes to the greatest arrowhead maker to trade for arrow heads and the maker asks him, "What do you have for trade? I won't trade with just anyone." Hiawatha offers him a Wampum belt and that seals the deal. The kids were way excited at this small detail because they knew a little something about the belts and understood in a meaningful way why this one belt was a good enough offering to get the man's finest arrowheads.

Then, in a completely random search through some art teacher blogs, I found a tutorial on Wampum weaving! I wasn't even looking for it, so this was fortune at it's finest. I bookmarked the tute, planning to come back tomorrow with the kids. Then again, without looking, I found a home schooler blog that happened to use the very same art teacher's blog, but used rolled paper to make the beads in white and purple! Score! It's like the planets aligned in favor of a decent lesson on wampum belts because the first had been so very insufficient.

So today we sat down and made our paper beads, our cardboard loom, and took turns weaving rows of wampum beads. So fun! And result was really cool! It gave the kids a new appreciation for how hard it must have been to weave 6 ft. long belts from very small, hand made beads. They just wove a few rows of very large beads and they were worn out immediately!

Hannah Jane was the only one with any staying power and even she sighed with relief when her last row was done. Then she saw that her next task was alphabetizing her spelling list and she was immediately ready to make more beads to weave in order to get out of the dreaded alphabetizing!

A tip for anyone who decides to give this a go, construction paper wrapped around skewers makes for pathetic beads. It's too thick and doesn't want to stay all rolled up. Printer paper, all thin and flimsy, seems to apprecait being made into a bead and stays all rolled quite nicely. When I looked at the other woman's blog and saw that her kids had actually colored purple paper for beads, I thought Ha! Too much work! Purple construction paper! But now I see that i didn't really outsmart anyone but myself. Our purple beads are all fat and unrolled and our white are nice and tight. So, learn from my mistake and go with coloring the printer paper!

Big fun! Tomorrow the plan is to build models of Native American housing. Whoo-Hoo!

Hunter's Quandary

2012-01-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

That's my little man, Hunter-Roo. Cute, huh? And that's what he looks like most days. Crown on his head, wild long hair flopping over the top, and something purple on if he can find it. He's all himself. And that's what I love about him (among other things). He has always been his own man. Sometimes it can be frustrating that he won't even pretend to care about the things other people think he should care about, but most of the time I love that he knows what he likes and he just doesn't worry about what other people think.

But lately I've seen a little shift in his ability to completely disregard other people's judgments. His favorite color is purple. It has been for a long time now. But when it came time to make those cute "Me in January" pictures with a list of the kids' favorite things, Hunter said, "Mom, I'm afraid to put my favorite color as purple because I think they'll say that it is a girl color and I'm a boy." Having assumed that someday someone would say something to him about his favorite color being a girl color, I have been making mental note whenever I hear about men who love purple. I tell him that it's a color only worn by the confident, by the rock stars and royalty of the world. That not just any guy can pull it off, so he must be a really cool dude if that's his favorite color. He likes this, but still hesitates to say it out loud to people outside of the family.

And then there's his hair. He likes it long. I like it long. If I do say so myself, Hunter has amazing hair! But then he is always called a girl by strangers. And he's never seemed to mind that. But yesterday a woman at the antique store told him what a beautiful girl he was. He snapped back like I've never seen. He said, "I'm not a girl! I'm a boy with good hair! I'm in a dragon suit! Do you ever see girls in dragon suits?" Whoa, Nelly! He's never done that. In fact, he usually hides from strangers. He almost never looks at them. But he looked that lady square in the eye and told her exactly who he was. I was proud, and a little horrified. She took it well enough and told him that when her son was that age, he had long hair too. This seems to be what most people say when we tell them that Hunter is a boy. I wonder if their boys ever did have long hair or if it's just a way of apologizing.

So I'm watching this story closely, waiting for new developments. Will he cave to societal pressure and start saying blue is his favorite color and cut his hair? Will be be a tough guy who punches anyone who calls him girlie? Will he cry about people making fun of his style? I have no idea what is to come. I just want his fragile little ego to be protected from the world a little longer. I don't want him to consider what other people think when he picks out his clothes for the day or styles his hair. I just want him to be himself. He's an awesome little dude! He should feel like King Hunter, wearer of purple with long royal locks of blond hair and confidence to spare!

Completely unrelated to outward appearance...Hunter, who used to feel very frustrated and avoid any sort of school work, has recently decided that he's the smartest kid on earth. It's hilarious how he talks about himself now. He says things like, "You can't stump me. Know why? Because of my awesome brain! Yeah. My brain is a really good one. So I protect it and keep it awesome. When other kids wrestle and bang their head around, I say, 'No. I need to keep my brain safe.' " It's so adorable. While I might normally encourage him to be a little more humble, he's wedged between 2 academically over achieving siblings, so we've always worried about his school-esteem and are really excited to see this sort of brain pride. And that's the sort of thing I'd rather him feel is important. I'd rather him be feeling good about his reading and math than worrying about his hair and his purple shirt.

So there you have it. My musings about Hunter, his fragile little feelings and his totally unique self, all purple and brainy! I love that little man!

School Pictures (sort of) and Reading Nooks

2012-01-06T13:50:00.000-08:00

I'm finding it impossible to get fully back in gear after the holidays. I don't know what it is! I've never felt so stuck and sluggish with regards to routine daily tasks. I'm operating at about 80% on housework and school work. I tell myself that since we are generally type-A overachievers in the school work department, we're fine at 80%. But in the housework department I really don't have any ground to lose!

When I did try to buckle down and clean up the playroom a bit, I had an unfortunate interaction with the toy box. If you're my fb friend, you know that my initial reaction to getting walloped on the eyebrow with the toy box lid was to freak out! I cried like a baby, which made Haven cry. Then I brushed myself off to get back to work when I saw blood drip on to my hand. I turned to Hunter, with tears still in my eyes, and asked, "Am I bleeding? Is my eye actually bleeding?" Being a very serious guy, he calmly said, "Mom. Your eye is not bleeding." I sighed of relief and confusion about the blood before he said, "but your eyeBROW is bleeding a lot." Then I headed for the mirror. It was all swollen and instantly a different color and there was a fair amount of blood. I called to see if I needed stitches, thinking that there simply isn't much flesh to tear through on that part of the face, and then decided after talking to the nurse to try and hold it closed with a band-aid so it would have a chance to heal pretty. By the time Joe got home for dinner, I took off the band-aid to take a peek at the horror and, to my embarrassment, it wasn't at all bad. Practically a scrape with some bruising on all sides. All that fuss for nothing. But I maintain that when it was swollen, that itty bitty cut looked like a gash. It still hurts too much to cover with make-up, so I still feel a bit like a battered woman when I go out, but it only hurts when I touch it and my ego is what is most bruised after having freaked out over what ended up being almost nothing. Ha!

I have done a few oddball things on my to-do list, though, and I'm going to cling to those as if they were major accomplishment! I took the kids out for their first ever "Me In January" photo. I saw this on Pinterest and had to do a modified version for us home schooly types who have no definite first and last days of grades or school years. Hannah Jane has some 2nd grade classes and some 4th grade classes so she's always a little glazed over when people ask her what grade she's in. I've set Hunter up for the same problem, as today he formally enrolled in online public school part time and the grade levels for his classes are all over the place. So instead of first day of school photos (which we do sort of take in a photo booth at the mall in June!) we decided to go with "Me in January!" I mean, you can never have enough annual, "look at me and how much I've changed" photos can you? So now we've got strips in June and specs in January! I won't bore you with all of them, but here's Haven's just so you can see how adorable they layout is!

Behold his first picture in 2 YEARS!!! without a scab on his face! I'm so happy!!!

I made 4X6's of these to send to family in the kids' thank-you cards from Christmas. Yeah, those still need to go out in the mail! I'm so good at having the kids make them, but I'm terrible about actually putting them in the mail. I actually found a sealed envelope addressed to their god parents from I don't know when, set it out to put in the mail after writing a little note on the back that said something like, "I have no idea what this is or when it was from, but I'm finally putting it in the mail!" Then you know what? I lost it again before I could mail it. Over the course of 2 years, that envelope has shown up, had apology notes added to the back, and lost again several times! So, um...sorry Taylors. When it turns up again, I promise to give it my all. I mean, what's so hard about putting an envelope in the mail box, anyway? I think there has to be some sort of diagnosis associated with my utter inability to put things in the mail box. Internet bill pay has changed my life!

Also among my accomplishments for the week, I got the school room organized (mostly), creating a workspace for myself in the closet and making another reading nook for the kids. Why is it that kids love a small hiding space in which to read? I don't get it, but I remember loving it when I was a kid too. We had an extra camo curtain panel hanging around from when Hunter had his own safari themed bedroom so I pinned it up above the closet door (which is now stuck open on account of my workspace) and let it hang over a set of drawers to create a little tent-like hideaway. I didn't even mention it to the kids, but after a day or so of it being there, when it was reading time they just naturally crawled in with a pillow.

I think the key to increasing America's literacy is to just create more small reading nooks. If you nook it, readers will come. This is my plan for the future of educations. We'll call it, "Just nook it!"

Sadly, that is absolutely all I got done this week! So sad. But hey, it's a step up from what I did the week before, so it's progress! Have a fantastical weekend!

the Manifesto

2012-01-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

The word MANIFESTO seems to be following me around this week. I find myself saying it in some weird accent. Manifeeeeestoooo... imagine it maybe with an Italian lilt. That's how I hear it in my head. Anyway, the word has been following me around like a lost puppy. It's everywhere. And I kind of like it. It's a proud word, puffed up and all self-important. And while we, as individuals, are never supposed to be puffed up and self important, I can very much appreciate a word that carries with it such an attitude. An attitude that I, myself, could never get away with flaunting like the word manifesto does when it scrawls itself in ink across a page. Manifeeeeestooooo...

At Feast on Saturday a friend shared this crazy, radical video called the Way Seer Manifesto, which is apparently some kind of movement some guy is starting, which you can join for a mere 9 bucks (as if any real movement ever had an enrollment fee! LOL!) I get that it's some oddball money making scheme, but the video itself, the manifesto as it were, it really striking. Okay, well a lot of it makes me cringe because I love rules (don't judge me) and I'm not a fan of drug use or celebrity imagery. That said, this video has its moments. Don't watch it with your kids, though.

I hate to hitch my cart to the craziest mule in the group, and as I said, I'm not in any way a follwer of this "movement," but there are some lines in this thing (between the ones that make me cringe) that make me want to shout, "YES!"

The idea of how vastly we are over-medicating ourselves grabs me! I often wonder how many of the great visionaries that we teach our children to revere, the philosophers, the scientists, the artists, the people who challenged popular ways of thinking, who risked their very lives to expose truth and beauty, would be taking a pill to blur all of that passion if they lived in today's society. I'm just wondering out loud here. I'm not making a statement against medication, so don't misunderstand. I'm just pondering the idea of over-medication.

The part about "They can’t tell you why or how they arrived at the right answer. They just know it in their core. They can’t show their work. So don’t ask. Their minds simply resonate with the Way, " is awesome! I can relate that to so many things in life! But then you'd be bored and stop reading, so I'll let you relate it to whatever you want. It's just plain awesomeness!

At the end of the day, I'm trying not to be alarmed by how many videos that overlay inspiring words with random scenes from the Wall have attracted me lately. If you're interested, there's an fabulous speech from a Charlie Chaplain movie dubbed over similar imagery! It's pretty stinking cool, but doesn't contain the word MANIFESTO so it's not going to get air time today! LOL!

Back to the topic at hand, I was browsing the very addictive Pinterest and saw this cute print up of a woman's New Year's Resolutions. She claims that her list was so long that it was not longer a list and required to be in a MANIFESTO! It was adorable!

That post led me to the Holstee Manifesto, which is all at once endearing and somewhat horrible advice. Yes, if you don't have enough time, stop watching TV. Yes, do things that you love! But if you don't like your job, don't just quit it! That was clearly written by some single person with no one else depending on them to put food on the table! And life isn't simple! If people keep making inspiring posters to convince people that life is simple, we'll have an entire generation of bewildered and disappointed people running around mumbling, "But life is supposed to be simple." It isn't. It's complicated an beautiful and don't you forget it! *NOTE* None of that crabby reality junk made its way into my personal manifesto! I'm keeping it happy. And keeping it REAL!

And since MANIFESTO is the word of the week (and to think it's only Tuesday!) I decided I should take a stab at my own graphic manifesto, copied almost directly from the chick on top, whose work I LOVE! I stole a couple of her words directly and added a few of my own. Don't worry...her blog gives you permission to completely rip her off and she'll even give you tips on how to do it if you click on that link up there! But I'm a colorful person (if I may for a second be all puffed up like the word Manifesto!) and so black and white just wouldn't do. And nothing self centered like quitting a job to travel made it into my manifesto. No. Simple, everyday resolutions for a better year. And I already made real progress on these! After I printed it out on photo paper and hung it in the dining room, I lovingly said no to a favor that I really didn't have time to do, I danced with some perky girl on a dvd (sadly, that's my workout for the day!), cleaned out the van (still need to vacuum) and I chose to eat herb crusted fish instead of the macaroni and peas I served to the children! How's that for progress? One day down...360 something days to go (I got started a day late on this whole manifesto thingy)!

Happy January, friends! What's on your manifesto?

Whoa, Momma! Lots to Catch Up On!

2012-01-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Hello, friends! It has been a marvelous couple of weeks with extra family time, holiday giving, and home projects galore! Even as I sit here to play catch up online, I have a tinge of guilt about all of the catch up in the house I'm not doing while I blog. But I could use the break for a few minutes, so I thought I'd check in with my web friends!

Let's see...the most obvious starting place is Christmas. Right? We had a lovely holiday! This was easily the most laid back and relaxed Christmas we've ever had (if you don't count the weeks before spent crafting like a mad woman for the whole hand-made holiday thing we tried out)!

Can you spot your gift?

I crocheted gifts for just about everyone I gave to. One friend got an embroidered gift, but that's just because I found the perfect idea for her and ran with it long before I ever sat down to work on Christmas gifts. Now I'm thinking about a hand made Ayyam-i-Ha and I have such a fun idea for that! But I won't share just yet. All that crocheting kept me busy for quite some time. The kids did hand made gifts too, and spent a lot of time talking amongst themselves about how good it is for the earth to make your gifts instead of having them made in a polluting factory and shipped here from China. Ha! That had not been my motivation at all, but I'm glad they were thinking in those terms! I simply knew that there's nothing I could buy that the people in my life would actually want. I figure with the gift of my time, at least they know they are loved enough for me to spend time (which is my most taxed resource!) on their gift.

Joe made a comment that he was sure I wouldn't be putting as much time into his gift as I was everyone else's. I'm pretty sure it was a smarty-pants remark on how much of my time was pouring into hand made gifts instead of into our usual chit chat and movie time. And honestly, what in the world would I ever crochet that Joe would actually leave the house in? Huh? Yeah. Nothing! And in the past he has scoffed at the silly hand made gifts I have made him, so I wasn't even considering making him anything until he said that. But his comment felt a little like a challenge. I never pass up a challenge. So instead of crocheting him some awful scarf that I know he'll never wear, I went for something totally ridiculous! Something completely without function. Ready?

I crocheted him a Ninja Turtle! This was the movie that defined his childhood and we recently sat down to watch it with our kids and realized that his childhood was...um...how shall I say it? Flawed. There was a ton of bad language. There were kids smoking cigarettes. You name it, it was in there. So we turned off the movie half way through and he spent the next few days sulking about the things he was exposed to as a child. But still, it was his childhood, and so he still loves those pizza eating little turtles! So I decided to make a Ninja Turtle as a gift for his inner child. One that doesn't hang out with kids who swear or smoke, and that he can play with the kids with. And it took a whole lot longer than any scarf would have!

We did family gifts on Christmas Eve and Santa gifts on Christmas morning. We skyped with my dad and his wife shortly after gift opening time. That was the most chaotic skype session ever. The kids just kept holding toys way too close to the camera and talking over each other. There were no complete sentences or complete thoughts. Just total show off mode. I suppose since none of them have ever had the show and tell experience at school, this was their chance!

The favorite gifts of the year? Well, Pa got them an arcade style (and size) air hockey table that takes up half the playroom. Joe and I have woken up to the sounds of the air horns and cheering crowds more than a few mornings since we got it. So that's been a big family hit! And then there's the guitars the boys got. They play them all the time and write the funniest songs about all kinds of oddball things. It's been a little like living in a very out of tune musical! And then there were the fishing poles!

My Paw Paw got them all fishing poles for Christmas and on Christmas day we went out to the reservoir for some casting practice. I'm actually quite surprised at how good they are at casting already. They've got Joe and I beat! Several people came up to ask what they were fishing for before they realized that they just had cute little casting weights on their lines and no real hooks.

After Christmas, Joe and I decided to remodel the closets on a whim! When we moved into this house, we painted in a hurry (probably shouldn't have done that) and when it came to closets, we kinds of slacked and just roughly painted in far enough that you couldn't see the lines when the closet doors were closed. Big mistake. Those ugly roller lines in our closets have bugged us every day since. And our house is an old house (a year older than me!) which means that it was built before the dawn of the super closets! We each have one shorter than standard, reach-in closet. So once we painted, we decided to build in some shelving and get a little more folding space inside. Best 2 day project EVER!!!

Our Bed is under there somewhere!

I'm not the kind of blogger that ever remembers to take before and after pictures, but I will show you the gigantic mess we made emptying out 2 closets on a whim. Nice, huh? That's closet doors, shelves, clothes, shoes, boxes, and a whole lot of other junk! Needless to say, Joe and I slept in the kids' beds that night!

We had some friends over for dinner. We went to some friends' homes for dinner. We went to a party to meet my friend Gail's family in from London! We ate a lot of food! We did the basic holiday break over eating, over sleeping, jammies all day kind of thing. It was good.

The Card Fairies, hard at work!

A few of their creations!

Hannah Jane had a friend over for a card making party! This turned out to be a spectacular way to get her to actually sit down and make her thank you cards from the holidays! I set up a paper station with stamps, markers, die cut letters, and cute patterned paper. Then I set up my window pane dry erase organizer with a sample thank-you card with blanks for appropriate names and gifts. In the bottom pane was a list of words they might need to know how to spell that related to the holiday or the gifts they received. A little music, some cookies, and they were off making cards for a full 2 hours! Hooray! I think we're going to make this an annual event and maybe invite more friends next time because the usually mundane task of thank-you card writing was suddenly festive! What they normally resist, they looked forward to! Score!

The last few days have been weirdly sunny and snow free. Lack of snow depresses me, but the kids love it because it means easier outdoor play. So to make the most of our last sunny day on Joe's break, we drove down to the Salt Lake City Zoo! It was a perfect day for the zoo and Joe never gets to do any of the fun stuff with us on account of being gainfully employed and all, so we enjoyed doing a schooly fun thing with dad along!

Today we got back on the school wagon. Well, half back on the school wagon. Hannah Jane's friend from across the street showed up around 1 asking to play. Initially I said that they could play after the kids finished their school work, but that instantly felt cruel and unusual (and I needed to build a storage container, iron a week's worth of laundry, and blog, of course!) so I immediately yelled, "Go catch Madison before she crosses the street and have fun!" Ahh...sigh of relief. So glad I loosened up and let them run frolic in the sunshine rather than conjugate Latin and make their January calendars. There will be time for that tomorrow.

But before they ran off to play, we did get an epic amount of school work done for one morning. Over the break I hauled all of our school stuff back down to the school room (which has now been Hunter's bedroom, a school room, my craft room, a mess, and now a school room once more!) and so we made our way down this morning to begin our study of Colonial America. I was so excited about being back in the school room for this! Yesterday I snuck down and made a giant illustration on our cool round chalk board of a colonial family so that there would be something exciting linked to our new studies when the kids walked in. They loved it!

We started the History Pockets book for Colonial America, we did math, spelling, poetry, reading and grammar. After lunch we headed out to the library to return our very overdue books (clearly I forgot EVERYTHING over the break!) only to find that it is closed today for New Year. Silly me. I didn't realize that when a holiday falls on the weekend, they still take the Monday off. I should have known, but New Years seems like such an insignificant occasion. It makes me wonder if Joe was supposed to have the day off today too and just didn't realize. Oh well. One more day with our books. Which is good. I had a movie checked out that I never got around to watching, so I watched it this afternoon while I built a giant piece of storage furniture for the playroom (to store the toys that used to occupy the space that the air hockey table has now taken over) and it was actually really great, so I'm glad I didn't turn it in unwatched! I'll watch the last half here in a minute when I do everyone's ironing for the week!

Well, I think that about covers it! hope you had a lovely holiday, however and whatever you were celebrating and with any luck, I'll be here a bit more regularly now that it's all said and done! Happy New Year!

We interrupt this blog for...

2011-12-30T21:52:00.000-08:00

LIFE! Joe has had the week off and we've been wallowing in family time. Just wanted you (and by you, I mostly mean my dad. LOL!) to know I haven't died in a car crash! In times of sparse phone calls, this is how he determines I'm still alive :) And as soon as this charming husband of mine goes back to work and the all day every day party is over (meaning Monday), I'll be back with lots of holiday photos and fun to share. Hugs to my readers (and Daddy)!

Hanukkah/Solstice Blogstravaganza!

2011-12-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

It's a big day! Pop versions of old Hebrew standbys were softly playing in the cd player before the kids ever woke up. I will admit to reliving my childhood a little this morning, challenging myself to see how many words of Mi Yemalel I could recall from way back when my mom would play the karaoke version of the Children's Hanukkah Classics in the car on long drives and we'd rudely and irreverently scream out the Hebrew words, proud of our abilities and unphased by our own ignorance of their meaning. Yes, folks! Those are the memories I'm passing down. Ignorant parroting of ancient Hebrew verses, now set to a Shakira like sound track to interest the modern child. Sounds heinous, but I love it!

My mom sent along a ton of Hanukkah gifts, which you will be able to spy in the background of the Nebra Disc picture farther down in this post. Among them was a set of 3 paint-your-own dreidels. We painted those last week so they would be dry for today and on a trip to Joanne's I found a bag of chocolate gilt near the checkout line. Score!

Today I made cheater latkes for lunch, setting off the smoke detector for a 3rd consecutive Hanukkah. I should really work on that, but instead I tell myself what a good thing it is to test your smoke detecting system every now and again. If you're into cheating on Hanukkah food, 2 cups of hash browns mushed up, 1 egg, a ton of salt, fried in a skillet, drained on paper towels, and sprinkled with garlic salt. Done!

The kids gave the lunch a thumbs up. Maybe that's because this is the only occasion on which I am willing to go to the trouble of cooking anything on the stove in the middle of the day. Hannah Jane asked if I would make latkes once a day for all 8 days. Umm...no.

Being Winter Solstice, we've also got those activities all over the house. Last year we had a smallish party with our dear friends. It was kind of fun, but nothing to write home about. Our friends, in turn, took on Summer Solstice and invited us and their sister in law, who is an actual pagan, to lead everyone in the real pagan solstice ritual. One of our crew was sick so we missed it, but it was reportedly very dry, long, and wordy, leaving the kids crying for it to be over so they could eat cookies. There's quite a picture painted in my mind when I envision an upbeat Mormon family around a firepit with their pagan aunt droning on as the kids beg for cookies and the serious pagan being unwilling to cut things short in honor of snack time. Haha! Needless to say, none of us are planning to celebrate it in true pagan style after that! But this time we're going to their house for Disco Karaoke (in honor of the return of the great disc!), ample snack eating, and a white elephant gift exchange.

Before the sun was even up, they were building Stonehenge!

Since the party has very little to do with actual solstice observances, we spent our morning learning a little about more ancient accounts of the sky. I enlarged a sketch of Harvard's 1:50 scale model of Stonehenge and we built upon it with sugar cubes. Then we used yarn to get a straight line of sight from the center to where the sun would rise and set on important sun related occasions.

Sunrise and Sunset

Then we looked at the Goseck Circle for the first time. I had never even heard of this until yesterday. It is basically a series of concentric ditches that dates back much earlier than Stonehenge and also marks the sunrise and set points at Winter Solstice. Its center was found to be littered with human bones, possibly human sacrifices made while asking the gods to bring back the sun so the harsh, killing winters would end.

We talked about what kind of power you could exert over the common man if you were merely aware of the sun and its habits. How what was simply the result of intense observation could be conveyed as magic, wisdom, of favor by the gods. Hunter said, "I could have been king if I knew all of that!" Hannah Jane said, "Who wants to be king? If you're king, then when things go wrong - and they always do - you're going to have a ton of people mad at you!" Wow. That's pretty darn wise, in this age of power lust. Hunter wants to dominate the world and Hannah Jane wants to fly under the radar and avoid conflict. It wasn't clear yet what Haven would favor. He just kept saying, "Fake magic. Science is just fake magic." Ha!

Oh, Look! There are those cool Hanukkah things my mom sent!

Our studies of the Goseck Circle led us to another neat solstice related relic, the Nebra Sky Disc. This was a disc created in the Bronze Age during a time when historians always assumed people were just ignorant brutes, not really paying much attention to matters of observation and science. But this disc has constellations and the exact position of the setting and rising sun on winter solstice for the region where it was found. We watched a neat little video about a museum curator who tracked it down and became obsessed with the disc. Then we made our own.

This afternoon, once all of the more standard school subjects have been covered, we'll listen to this cool Hanukkah story I heard on NPR the other night, about the origins of Hanukkah and how it has been elevated in social status to compete with Christmas even though it's not honestly that significant of a holiday in comparison to some others. We'll play dreidel and eat some coins. And we'll probably watch the Paul Winter Solstice concert as soon as it goes online. That is quite a show!

So to friends near and far, celebrating Hanukkah or Solstice or nothing at all, have a fantastic shortest day of the year!

Hannah Jane's Roanoke

2011-12-19T14:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm still crocheting up a storm over here, getting ready for the handmade holiday, so I don't have much time for posting right now. But Hannah Jane posted her report on Roanoke, which is her absolute favorite thing all of the sudden. So enjoy this poast from my guest blogger, Hannah Jane, age 8, history enthusiast! Thanks for filling in for mom, Hannah Jane!

Roanoke was one of the longest unsolved mysteries in American History. It was island off the coast of what is now North Carolina in the New World, that the Queen of England, Elizabeth, wanted to colonize. Two groups of colonists vanished and I have a theory about why.

There was a group of 100 men led to Roanoke by Ralph Lane, whose attitude towards the natives was one of enemies. They started building a fort surrounded by little cabins for the people to live in. They should have been planting crops. As winter came, they needed food so they sent some ships back to England to get supplies that they needed to survive the winter. While the people were gone trying to get food, Sir Francis Drake sailed by and the people left went with him back home to England. Soon after, the supply ship came back and they found that none of the people were there. Fifteen people from the supply ship stayed behind in search of the colonists.

Years later, John White led a second group of colonists, this time 150 men, women, and children, back to Roanoke. When they arrived they found nothing but human bones of the15 people left behind. Of the three tribes on the island one tribe was friendly, the Croaton. The Croaton told the English that another tribe had killed the 15 men. The English were enraged and they went to the neighboring island where the other tribe lived. When they arrived, the Croaton were already there to help, but the English made the mistake of killing the Croaton that were there trying to help them because they didn't realize who they were. This did not help their relationship with the Croaton.

Soon John White's daughter had a daughter named Virginian Dare. John White left for England again to get more supplies. He was in a hurry to get back because he now had a grandchild in Roanoke. While he was there, a war started between the Spanish and the English and the English needed all of their ships to fight so he couldn't get a ship to go back to Roanoke. It took White two years to get back. When he arrived, he didn't find anyone there. He and some other sailors started looking for all of them. He saw smoke and was hoping it was from the settlement, but it was just from a wildfire. He went to where the fort had been and it was completely gone. The people with him couldn't find the cross, the symbol that the colonists agreed to carve if they were in trouble. He went to where he had put his family heirlooms and he couldn't find them. They were all gone and all that was there was a book without a cover and torn up maps. He tried going to the place that the Croaton lived but there was a storm whose wind blew them back towards England.

There are two theories about what happened to the colonists. Some people reported seeing a settlement on the mainland and others reported seeing fair skinned Croatons, leaving them to believe that the colonists merged with the Croaton. I believe that they were killed too fast to carve the distress symbol and the Croaton killed them because the colonists had killed some of their people in the big mistake.

As you now know, many groups of people tried to build a colony at Roanoke and there are several theories about what happened to them. No one knows for sure what happened to the people. From this we can learn to always bring the supplies we need when we go someplace and that we need to be nice to the natives of new places we visit.

Shhh...I'm listening...or trying to listen

2011-12-12T21:57:00.000-08:00

Long, rambling, random thoughts post coming your way!

It seems as though God is hinting at me to be quiet these days. And admittedly I stink at being quiet. I admire quiet people, am drawn to quiet people (perhaps because they leave more room for my noise), and want very much to be a quiet person. I often wonder if it is possible to actually be as reverent as I feel while still, as a friend once put it, emanating white noise.

Even when outwardly I look quiet, inwardly I'm talking God's figurative head off. I never shut up in my head/heart and am at every second telling the Divine Organizing Force of the Universe what I think, how I feel, my opinion on the chicken marinade I used last night. Perhaps I'm a bad listener because I've always felt a little opposed to asking God for anything. I figure that I know nothing in comparison, and so it would be foolish to ask for anything to be one way or another when my perspective is so narrow. Seriously, on the rare occasion that I break down and say, "God, please (fill in the blank)" if have serious guilt for days and the ask, "God, please ignore that. It was a moment of weakness. Really. Apologies."

I know answers aren't the only things worth listening for, and I'm pretty sure I miss barrels of guidance with my internal God chatter. But I like God. He's kind of my pal. And isn't there a quote about how when we love someone, we can't resist speaking his name and how much more so should we feel that way for God? Well, that's my excuse to myself every time I think Gee, Sky, you must be making God nuts with all this blabbering. I just justify it with that magical little Ruhi book1 quote and bounce on my merry way.

But I think I've been getting hints. Or maybe my conscience is making me place too much meaning on the ample amounts of what I'm calling, SHUT UP ALREADY VIBES that have been coming my way.

First, a very wise acquaintance of mine had for his facebook status this quote, "The essence of true safety is to observe silence..." Now, I'm sure it wasn't aimed at me, but it sure spoke to me. I'm always getting myself into little jams because I said the wrong thing (or typed the wrong thing) and if I would just observe silence, my quality of life would be significantly increased!

Next, my mom sent me her annual gigantic produce box filled with Hanukkah goodies on top and odds and ends that she couldn't bare to throw away after having saved since my arrival on the planet underneath. My baby clothes, a dolphin necklace I got in 7th grade, my tub toys, and odd and end paper things that she thought I might like. Among the paper things was a beautiful quote in calligraphy that says:

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common -- this is my symphony. ~Channing

My mom and I share a love of words. Her house is covered in words. Every plant pot has a pretty inspirational word sticking out of it on a stick, her walls are covered in quotes and words of serenity, her fridge and bulletin boards are papered over with inspiration, words are framed and needle pointed and cross stitched on every surface of her home. So, I'm sure this was just a kind of passing on of a nice set of words. But those words...There's a lot about listening and being quiet in there and it's all spot on. When is the last time I listened to birds or sages (I listen to babes all day, so don't you worry about that one!)? In case you are wondering, I share the love of words but when I nail a giant serene word on my wall and then I lose my patience, that word glares at me and reminds me of my shortcomings and how far I still have to go on this eternal path and I feel like having it there is like acting. Pretending to be a more serene person than I am. And then I take it down out of guilt. My secret desire, however, is to live in a word filled house like my mother's. I just have to mellow myself out enough to appreciate the words rather than feel mocked by them! LOL!

Then tonight I ran across this article on Africa and the art of listening. Last Thanksgiving was one of the best on Christison family record. My Granny flew out and we had 2 LDS missionaries and our dear friend Bereket (originally from Eritrea) and his friend from...I believe it was Egypt? Maybe? Anyway, Bereket and his friend spoke at length about how depressing America is in that strangers don't really see each other. They spoke about cafes where you go buy a drink and grab any open chair, even if it's at a table where a bunch of strangers are sitting. You just sit. And when you get up, you are no longer strangers. It sounded magic to me. Intimidating and magic. And it explains a lot about Bereket, a young man who can speak to anyone with ease and who has an air of humble confidence about him. In this article, the writer speaks of sitting on a bench with strangers in Mozambique and hearing their stories. Everyone is a story teller. And everyone is a listener. He tells of all there is to be gained from listening.

My last thought on being quiet is from Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert, who apparently went through a similar struggle for quiet, was forgiven for all of her blatant crimes against morality when she wrote these words that I so very much identified with:

“I decide that I’ve been talking too much. To be honest, I’ve been talking too much my whole life….This has been the story of my life. It’s how I am. But I’ve been thinking lately that this is maybe a spiritual liability. Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss….

I’ve always been so fascinated by these wraith-like, delicate souls. Always wanted to be the quiet girl. Probably precisely because I’m not. It’s the same reason I think that thick, dark hair is so beautiful — precisely because I don’t have it, because I can’t have it. But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn’t.”

Is there any chance I'm not meant to fight my inner chatter box? That I'm not missing the big picture? That I'm not driving God mad with noise? Probably not, but as I repeatedly lose my battle to be quiet, the idea of that comforts me a little.

Who knows? I'm still working on quiet today. Probably will be for a long time. Maybe, when I'm very old and have lost all of the energy I now pour into talking, I will sit still and quiet and internally celebrate my quietness, pretending that I have finally mastered my tongue and am not just to tired to go on.

Gypsy Culture Club

2011-12-09T11:00:00.001-08:00

Our friend Dave loaned us a giant book about gypsies, which we all instantly fell in love with and used as the foundation for our culture club presentation this month. I honestly always thought that a gypsy was anyone who traveled around Europe in carnival like shows. Like the carnies of Europe. I had no idea they were an actual ethnic group with serious traditions all their own. So this was a big education for me as well.

We learned about their conflicting stories of origin. There are gypsies on every continent and apparently they don't know for sure where they came from. One legend says that they were cast out of India over a dispute about who could and could not be married, and when they were cast out a powerful sorceress was hired to curse them that they "may never sleep in the same place twice, drink from the same well twice, or ever find peace with another people." Seems like that has been fulfilled as they have been cast out of most every place they've ever been, abused and mistreated, rarely settling down in permanent villages and when they do, it's always in the worst parcels of land that no other person would bother to inhabit. So sad. As the author explained to a gypsy man what his plans were for the book, the man took the author's face in his hands, and with tears in his eyes said, "If you find out that we really are from India, would you ask them if they would have us back so that we can all be together again?" Oh my gosh! I cried my eyes out as I read that. How very sad!

As part of our studies, we built a gypsy wagon, decorated the outsides, and layered the insides with lavish fabrics and appropriate furniture and storage.

We visited a covered wagon that sits in front of a new restaurant here in town called Chuck-O-Rama (seriously, that's the name. I can't make up stuff that good. Makes me think of a ton of people throwing up all at once!) to see all the details of real wagon construction. It was admittedly a little smaller than the average gypsy wagon, but we talked about how it might feel to live in just a wagon - even one 2X that size - with three generations of your family! Forget ever having your own room or even your own bed. And since their culture only bathes for very special occasions and fairs, it could get pretty ripe in there.

We learned about their wedding customs and had a little incestuous gypsy wedding in our living room. The bride and groom kneel faceing one another and the best man places bread on each knee, sprinkles it with salt, and then without using their hands, the bride and groom eat the bread from each others' knee. The lines Haven is trying to say are, "May you love one another as bread loves salt. And if ever salt and bread become enemies, may you still love one another." Joe and I had a little fun imagining scenarios under which that last sentence was tacked on. Like maybe one too many times some drunken wedding guest shouted, "Well what if bread and salt stop loving each other? Huh? Then what?" Haha!

Since every gypsy woman is supposed be understand at least the basics of palm reading, we learned a little about that. We made paint prints of our hands and decorated them like the palm in the book, but then we also looked at what all the lines are supposed to mean. I assured the kids that this was only playing around and that if in fact there is anyone who actually has a gift for telling anything about you by looking at your hand, it certainly would never be mom while she looks it all up in a book. Interestingly, we had a guest at our interfaith dinner the evening after we made our hand prints who asked about them and who believes very deeply that it is an essential art, so it was fun to listen to her take on palms. Me? I don't really know what to believe, nor do I spend much time thinking about it. But it was fun to look at in a very lighthearted way. Hannah Jane kept saying, "That's right! That's me! This is all so true!" Hunter, on the other hand, actually got very agitated and yelled, "This is all wrong! This is fake stuff because this is not true about me!" Which is funny, because if the book said anything negative as it related to their hands, I intentionally left that out so as not to upset anyone. Still, Hunter was generally annoyed that anyone would have the audacity to summarize his personality into something as small as the palm of his little hand.

Hunter has a recent obsession with cobras. He asks every single day to watch you tube videos of cobras, cobras fighting different animals, cobras with multiple heads...if there's a cobra, Hunter wants to see it! So he was delighted to learn that one of the 3 major gypsy tribes is known for snake charming and carrying around cobras in baskets! It seems they are the primary source of anti-venom in their region and so they are exulted as essential medical professionals whose services are both life saving and mystical because not just anyone has been given the gift of snake charming. Hunter promptly stuck his cobra in a toy basket and got a paper towel tube for his flute and got to work charming the pants off of play snakes far and wide!

Hannah Jane was tasked with cooking a gypsy food to share with her Culture Club friends. The only problem was that half of Culture Club participants are vegetarians and meat it the main staple of the gypsy diet, as they mainly hunt as they go and never stay in one place long enough to grow a crop. They are often seasonal crop laborers, but still, it's not their food they harvest. One of the weirdest things we saw in our book was a man proudly serving hedgehog to his honored guest. That alone isn't all that odd, but how he killed the hedgehog had us all giggling and gagging. He sticks a straw up the rear end of the hedgehog and blows air into its rectum until it dies. Supposedly, this method separates the skin from the meat and leaves it tender when cooked. We all wondered how they discovered this method in the first place! I mean, who is going to fess up to being the first person to stick a straw in the behind of a hedge hog? LOL!

Needless to say, we weren't going to be serving inflated hedgehog! In order to accommodate our veggie friends, Hannah Jane made corn bread and we pretended that it was from the crop we harvested for someone else and they were merciful in giving us a bag of corn. Hannah Jane made it entirely herself, and for the first time ever, was allowed to crack eggs into the food. I've been a tyrant about her cracking eggs, worried that shell would get into the food. I usually crack them into a bowl and let her pour them in from that. Lame. I know. I'm a bacteria fearing freak! But she did it and I was there to snap her picture as some got on her hands and she freaked out a little over the sliminess.

We had so much fun with this one! So, thanks to Mr. Bee for loaning us the most comprehensive book on any culture I've ever had the pleasure of looking at! We made the most of it!

Weird Science, Handwriting Help, and the Janitorial Staff

2011-12-07T20:00:00.001-08:00

I've been so busy with my whole hand made only Christmas list that I haven't been blogging much. Partly because I've been busy making the stuff, but more because when I make something cool, I want to blog about it and I can't since most of my gift recipients are also readers. Total bummer. Today I worked all afternoon on what I thought was a very thoughtful and beautiful piece of textile art for my bestest girl friend and Joe took one look at it and burst out laughing. Then he said,"I wouldn't actually give that to anyone if I were you." He's still alive, but now I'm second guessing my gift making and totally stumped on what to do for the friend who was to receive the hideous gift I was so proud of. Okay, on to what I can share with you!

We are studying the human body in our science right now and this week has been bones and muscles. I used to think this was a lousy, below grade level sort of curriculum, but now that Hannah Jane is a grade level ahead of her same aged peers, the content is very fun and interesting! I've learned so much. It's got me wondering if we have an unusually rigorous curriculum all of the sudden, if schools are just expecting way more these days, or if my school was totally lousy because I had never heard of half of this until I got to college and the other half I just learned right along side the kiddos. Now that I've said that, I'm embarrassed to give a list of the cool random factoids I never knew in case I'm the only one who missed it!

Today we were talking about bones and cartilage. Hunter and Haven immediately connected the content back to our fish study and kept yelling out, "Cartilaginous Fish!" every time I mentioned cartilage. We've learned that babies have more vertebrae than adults because some of them fuse together as we age. We never saw exactly what age they fuse, so we sat around the bar and pondered the fact that all 4 of us could very well have different amounts of bones in our spine. That blew Hunter's mind. He tried to count everyone's back bones, but didn't give us a definitive answer.

We were learning about the little cartilage pads between the vertebrae and how they absorb a little shock for us when we jump up and down and keep our bones from grinding together. The kids weren't seeing why that was so important, so I came up with a little off the cuff demonstration. I sent the boys out to the garden to get a couple of large rocks and asked Hannah Jane to fill a baggie with craisins. I grabbed an old towel to protect the kitchen counters and set about demonstrating why a cushion is important. First I dropped one of the large rocks on the other. Ouch! Then I put the baggie between then and did it again. Not as bad of a sound. The kids jumped up and down to feel how their bones don't bang together when their spine compresses on impact. Then they each had a turn testing the craisins and rocks in different motions.

Hunter would contort himself in some random way and Hannah Jane and Haven would make the rocks and craisins imitate his motions to see if the cartilage is really necessary. They all agreed that having your bones grind against each other when you move, or slam into each other when you jump would be no good.

In other news, the boys' handwriting progress has been excruciatingly slow and although Hunter has been using the Zaner Bloser series for a while now, he can't seem to make his letters between the correct lines on that annoyingly lined kindergarten writing paper. Haven can't either, but he's 4 so I cut him a little extra slack. I came up with a plan a long time ago when Hannah Jane was learning to write sans workbook and just didn't think to introduce it to the boys because they have the luxury of real handwriting books that Hannah Jane never had. But what do you know? Momma knew best! LOL! I seem to have outmaneuvered even the great Zaner Bloser and my little trick has got the boys writing legibly on the correct lines!

I decided that the problem was in the amount of lines on the page and not being able to discriminate between the spaces for making letters and the spaces between the spaces for making letters. Their handwriting is more legible on college rule notebook paper than it is on the kid paper. So what I did was put a dot in each of the spaces that are not for writing in - the between spaces - then I had the boys color those spaces in blue all the way across the page. Then we talked a little bit about how only a few letters like to get their feet wet, like p, q, g and so one. All the others need to stay between the other lines.

Haven is a forward thinking little guy who is sure that by the time he's grown up, no one will be writing by hand anymore and it is a nuisanceto hold a pencil. He actually said, "Mom, I only do school on the computer now. I decided that and the government says it's okay. So I'm not doing handwriting." Nice try, little man, but I called the government and they assure me that pencils are still very much in use. So he was extremely grumpy about having to participate in this silly wet letters thing. That said, once those in between lines were filled in with blue, his handwriting was a lot better!

After this we had a talk about backing up before you spray. Now he stands a good 6 feet away!

Last but certainly not least, we've hired a new janitor! LOL! Haven is obsessed with the spray bottle and he'll clean anything to get to use it! He ran through an entire bottle of my Melaleauca cleaning spray in about a half hour, but I didn't mind one bit because all the footprints and hand prints were off the walls the kitchen floor was clean, and I quit Melaleuca months ago and still have gallons of their non toxic concentrate to spare why not let him go crazy doing the work I'm too lazy to do? I am going to make him his own bottle of cleaning solution from kitchen products, though. I know they claim it's the kid friendly, all natural cleaner but I really only trust it if I make it myself. I mean, he's not licking the walls clean, but a full bottle in a half hour? You know his little rag was saturated and so his hands were all over the stuff. A little baking soda and lemon juice dilution would do the trick and he'd still get to do all that fun spraying.

Hannah Jane got a little jealous and said, "Oh, Haven, brother. You are working so hard! Let me help you for a while. I'll spray and you can use the rag to wipe." He protested, "You just want to do the fun part. that's not helping. If you want to help, I'll spray and you can wipe." When she backed off her offer, he shot me a look like Did you see that? I've got her number. She never did get to spray. But she did get to water the plants, so she got over it.

That's all the news from the past few days! Now it's off to Culture Club!!!

Yes...Another Shriners Trip

2011-12-05T16:06:00.001-08:00

Hannah Jane's prosthetic broke last Wednesday night - thankfully AFTER her choir show - and I've been carrying her on my back every place we go ever since. Finally today we were able to get in to Shriners for a fix-it appointment. I have to say that our new prosthetician, Eric, is just about the nicest, most thorough guy we've ever worked with at a Shriners (and we've had quite a few)! He doesn't mind repairs, he doesn't want us to wait until she's in pain before he starts a new one, he is liberal with the socks (some prostheticians have expected her to live on 4 socks for a year! Can you even imagine?!?!), and he puts in the work to make the most perfect and functional prosthetics we've ever seen! I stayed up late last night making some holiday goodies (fantastic how to here!) for the staff and Hannah Jane passed them out while Eric got going on her foot repairs. He got it fixed in record time and we were off for our last visit to Tree House Museum before our membership expires!

As we drove to Tree House I explained that this would be our last visit for a few years because our membership expires at Christmas and we want to give them time to get some new exhibits before we go back. Well, wouldn't you know that today they actually had new exhibits? Hooray for us!

There was a Chagall for Children exhibit and at each station, they could listen to an audio presentation on the piece in front of them and then recreate it in their own way right beside the print. There were stations with weaving, stain glass window design, and collage work. It was fantastic!

The name Chagall makes me think of Shigellah and the outbreak my elementary school had, which they handled by lining up the entire school to get a rectal swab from the school nurse. Unless, of course, you were one of the lucky few to have already contracted a confirmed case, in which case your privates could remain private and you'd get a few weeks out of school. Come on DA kids. I know you remember the trauma! A Chagall exhibit will never be the same after you have a brush with the Shigellah swab! LOL!

The other new little detail that they added was a life size cutout of Obama which now resides in the Oval Office. Today, near the end of his first term, there Obama appeared. It makes me wonder if there is a reason he appeared when he did. I've been surprised to hear local friends expressing discomfort with the idea of one of their own being president. They say things like, "You'll understand when a Baha'i runs for office. Everyone will be watching him and judging your religion based on what he does." It almost sounds like they wouldn't want it to happen. I always explain that a Baha'i wouldn't likely run for office in the US because they wouldn't be able to win without participating in backbiting partisan politics and so I won't have to worry about that particular problem. Anyway, it seemed an odd time for Obama to suddenly appear in the Oval Office of a seriously red state, but we had fun with him, whispering into his ear what we think he should do, and guiding him through an invasion of a Little Tyke Town. Funny stuff!

On the way home we stopped at a taco stand in Ogden for tamales! What a treat! The kids are in love with the idea of eating food made on a truck. It was the most exciting part of the day for Haven! I have to wonder, though, how in the world they can sell tamales for a buck and still make a living! I can't make them that cheap at home, and mine would never in a million years be as good. We happily filled the tip jar as a thank you and sat in the van, silently stuffing our cold cheeks with warm tamales! Soooooo good!

That's all the adventure we could squeeze into one day! And it was certainly enough!

Hunter's Kentucky Rose

2011-12-02T19:01:00.001-08:00

That look kind of says it all, doesn't it?

Tonight Hunter and I had one of those completely random conversations that I just want to remember forever. It so sums up his conflicted little personality. I've never ever met a boy who wanted so much to be sweet, but was so inclined to be mischievous. He simply can't help himself, but he tries so hard. I'm laughing just typing this because it's just so adorably pitiful.

I recently ran across a very old CD from the hey day of my youth when I was a super duper evangelical and didn't listen to anything at all but Christian pop. I know I've mentioned my love of abstinence themed rap (I seriously LOVED this song when I was about 13 and I still can't help but sing along and bust a move when I hear it). But I also have a special place in my heart for over enthusiastic Michael W. Smith music. Yes sir! Love it. So I was crazy excited to run across my old Michael W. Smith greatest hits CD and share it with the kids. Guess what! They love it too. LOL! I know...listening to early 90's Christian pop is social suicide, but I listened to Dion Warwick with my dad as he relived his glory days and I turned out just fine, so what's the worst that could happen?

Hunter has developed quite a love for the song Kentucky Rose, about a preacher who was kind and honorable and eventually died saving a boy trapped under a bridge. It's not my most favorite song on the disc, but Hunter loves it so we've been listening to a lot of it over the past week. Before I tell the story, here's someone's home made music video for the song so you can get in Hunter's head.

Tonight, as we were driving to pick Hannah Jane up from girl scouts, Hunter said, "Mom, when I grow up I want to be just like Kentucky Rose."

I said, "Yeah? How do you want to be like him?"

"I want to be so kind that when I die, everyone remembers me for being the nicest person who helped everybody!"

"Ohh...I see. Well, you know that you don't have to wait to be grown up to be like that."

"Really? "

"Yeah, really. You can be unbelievably nice even when you're a kid. People from all around would say, 'you know that Hunter kid? I know! He's like the kindest kid ever!'"

Hunter was quiet for a few seconds and he said, "I really want to mom, but it just sounds so hard. Maybe when I'm older I'll see someone trapped under a bridge and I'll save them and people will just remember me for that. It's just so hard to be nice all the time."

I tried really hard not to laugh and said, "Yeah, I get that. Sometimes we've been not so nice before we even realize it, huh? Well, I'll make you a deal. If you really want to be like Kentucky Rose, I'll do it with you and we can help each other remember to be nice. How does that sound?" I thought this was a brilliant play on my part. I was momentarily feeling super proud of my mothering skills. Then...

He literally cracked up. "Mooooom! That's silly! It's not as hard for you and you know it! You're nice all the time already! You're just trying to trick me into being nice before I grow up. I'm smart, you know. I know you're tricking me."

Well, holy cow. He's on to me. I'm going to have to up my mommy game. This stinks.

"There's no tricking you, is there? But I really do find it hard to be nice sometimes. Sometimes it's really, really hard not to say something mean, or just take what I want, but I practice a lot. And sometimes, no matter how hard I practice, I still say something not so nice and feel really bad about it. But you're right. It probably is a little easier for me. I can still help you though."

"That's okay. I'll just watch for kids under snowy bridges."

Fair enough, little man.

Oh the Drama of it All!

2011-12-02T10:03:00.001-08:00

It's over. My love affair with fcaebook fell off of a cliff. I'm ready to campaign for my friends to move over to Goggle + so I still have a digital social life without having to deal with really random drama. Want the soap opera style dish? You know? Just so it doesn't happen to you?

Yesterday I posted that I had apple pie in the oven. Innocent enough. Yes? Then my apple pie post had a comment from a friend's husband calling someone I've never heard of "stupid" for "hating farmers and calling them murderers." What in the world??? I was totally confused. I replied that I had no idea what he was talking about, but that calling this person stupid in public was probably the worst way ever to get them to appreciate farmers. Did I mention that I had NO CLUE what was going on?

This morning I woke up to an e-mail from the angry farmer defender saying that he was responding to my friend, we'll call her Jane Doe, who made an "ignorant comment" on my post about Obama. What? I've never posted about Obama. Have I been hacked??? I was even more confused. Oh, wait...an acquaintance had posted a link about new child labor concerns on farms. Did that have something to do with Obama? I didn't know because I hadn't even read the actual link. But even so, he had no way of knowing the Oregon acquaintance, so he couldn't have seen her link. Right?

Wrong. When I commented on her link, I guess it appeared in his feed and he automatically assumed that I knew everyone who commented on it because it looked to him like I had posted it. When he couldn't call out the girl who offended him directly on the post, he decided to tell her off on my apple pie post, assuming that the girl would see it there.

This whole weird experience taught me a few things:

~People are way too concerned about what complete strangers think and far to quick to get offended. Note to self: Never get worked up about complete strangers' mindless comments on fb.

~Maybe I should not only consider whether someone is "safe" when I approve their virtual friendship, but also their temperament. I certainly don't want drama from across the continent to irritate me from afar. And I don't really care for my apple pie to become a source of hate speech. Ya know? It reflects poorly on my pie. I make a very kind and peaceful pie.

~The ambiguity about who posts things could really misconstrue what I believe in or support. Ya know? I mean, if this guy thinks I'm posting about Obama, he's really got no idea where I stand on things. If other people's ideals can so easily become confused with my own, I've lost a little bit of my real identity.

~I have been less than enthusiastic about Google + only because so few friends are there and there's not as much dialogue as there is on facebook. But maybe fewer people, more carefully selected, is better than a lot of people who are chatting just to pass time. Quality over quantity, ya know?

I love blogging because I know mostly who reads and I am also aware that strangers will read from time to time, so I choose my words carefully (unless I'm blogging sleepy, which is always a bad idea). I watch my stats closely, I've learned how to protect my photos, how to trace where links are coming from, where content goes, etc. I loved facebook even a little more because it felt even safer because I could approve who would and would not read what I wrote. I could speak a little more carelessly because I knew I was among friends. But that was a bit of an illusion. This little incident has caused me to realize that complete strangers can read what I type, and friends can mistake other people's posts for my own. Perhaps + being more private is an illusion also, but I'm sure people more in the know than myself are about to weigh in. For now, I'm heading that direction. I'll choose friends more carefully and try to minimize the drama. I have 3 kids, after all, so we're all stocked up on drama. So if I know you and love you, come find me on + so we can keep hanging out!

Snow Man Forever

2011-11-30T06:28:00.001-08:00

I grabbed a really cute holiday crafting magazine a while back, dreaming of my totally hand made holiday season. My goal this year is to hand make all of my Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha gifts, and so far it's coming along quite nicely. But it's starting to feel like crunch time on the Christmas gifts! Anyway, there was a tutorial for making a clay snowman with an aluminum foil base and it looked like a nice jumping off point for teaching the kids about sculpting around hollow frames. It looked so easy. It was not.

I demonstrated rolling aluminum foil into a large log shape for the body, two small logs for arms, and a ball for a head, and then attaching them all with toothpicks. I found it to be a bit tricky just demonstrating. The kids found it near impossible!

When we finally had our foil bases, we started adding salt dough to the surface. This is when it all fell apart. Toothpicks and aluminum foil don't make for much of a base unless you have a really light touch - which the kids do not. Their limbs were falling off all over the place and they all quickly became frustrated. They decided to make plain old salt dough snowmen that would never ever dry all the way through. Haven made his a dinosaur with toothpick spikes and gave it to his speech teacher.

I kept at it and soon the kids were gathered around, excited that one of us was going to make it work. It never was as cute as the one in the tutorial, but it did resemble a snowman to some degree, so the kids thought it was fantastic. After they went to bed, I colored in is hat and set him up beside the beautiful book, the Snowman, where the kids eat breakfast. Haven was giddy with delight when we woke up and saw the book and the real snowman by his breakfast plate. It was so adorable! He ran in and got Hunter and said, "Hunter, you have to see! The snow man is in our kitchen! The one from the book!" Yay!

So the craft was a flop from the teaching perspective, and I figure I might as well blog the flops as well as the successes. But from a breakfast cheer, book lover's perspective, it was a glowing success. The kids love that book because there are no words and they can take turns telling the story just as they think it should be. Now, when they tell it, they act it out with my lumpy dough snowman.

Day of the Covenant!

2011-11-27T17:44:00.001-08:00

We hosted the Day of the Covenant at our place again this year. It's funny, every year I've been a Baha'i I've played hostess for that holy day. A dear friend, Vida, invited me and another new Baha'i to co-host with her right after I declared and she wrote a little skit for us to do in which we learned about the history of the day and its significance. It was her way of helping us feel a part of the community and I felt so privileged to be invited to host something under the wing of the fabulous Vida! I think it got me off on the right foot for hosting Baha'i events just before we shipped off for a new community.

Since we've lived in our current community I've reused the skit that Vida wrote, changing the names for friends here in town. I still have my original copy with her notes in the margins and it is quite dear to my heart. I remember making a banner for the day back in Eugene and displaying it proudly on the wall in the Baha'i center. When we've gone back for visits, kind friends have mentioned how it stayed up after I moved away and makes a reappearance every now and again. Last year I invited a young woman in our community to make a banner with me for the Day of the Covenant. This year she is the one who has moved away and when guests arrived for the occasion, the banner caused several of them to comment on Liz and her creativity, and those who never met Liz had a chance to hear her name.

Joe and Kim go head to head as the first contestants in Day of the Covenant Trivia!

This year I let go of the skit - my Day of the Covenant security blanket - and made a Day of the Covenant trivia game. I brought out a bell on a folding table and we divided into teams, Family Feud Style, to compete for a chance to answer the questions. When I first mentioned at Feast that I was planning a trivia game, one friend said that he loved the idea because he would know all the right answers. In his honor, I dug deep for some really obscure Day of the Covenant fun facts and each time his turn came up, I asked if he wanted a challenge! LOL! He enjoyed being had with questions he had never heard before. The young woman he went face to face with is quite a scholar as well, so it seemed fair :) We got a little rowdy as Joe tried to slide the bell closer to himself than his opponent, Kim. And a few times we couldn't agree as to whether a half answer was worth credit and in the end, we stopped keeping score and just laughed like hyenas.

Tom and Christine in the scholar round!

Somehow, the post game conversation turned gross and we ended up sitting around for an hour or so talking about horrific accidents, throwing up, and all manner of other gross out topics. I laughed so hard that my face felt hot for a long time after everyone left. It was nice to relax and spend time having fun as a group, being friends and not just Baha'is that live in the same town. Sometimes we get in a rut of mega serious gatherings and that makes these random evenings when we get a little loud with a race to list the other titles of Abdul Baha before having a hearty laugh about that time my dad cut off his pinky finger in the greenhouse door feel like something special. ( I know, Dad. Not funny. But how many people can say they actually carried their dad's finger in a tupperware full of ice? Not many!)

Mother vs. daughter in the final round!

Oh, and if we're face book friends or if you're on the Baha'i homeschooler's forum, you listened to me whine and worry about cupcake toppers for the occasion and maybe gave some advice. It was interesting how DIFFERENT the feedback was from those two groups! Facebook Baha'is were so supportive and said, "Go for it!It's artistic!" while the home schooling Baha'is said, "Whoa Nelly! Maybe you better rethink your plans!" Home schoolers, as a rule, tend to be a little more cautious about the nuances of dignified conduct whereas most of my facebook Baha'i peeps reside somewhere in the great state of Oregon and tend to be on the artistic and liberal leaning side of life (I know. Shocking!) so the difference shouldn't have surprised me one bit. In the end, I couldn't shake my own inclination to over think and glimpse into a possible future moment where some life-long Baha'i would take one look at the paper flowers sticking out of my cupcakes and say, "You know that in the 1982 Ridvan Message, the Universal House of Justice specifically ruled against writing anything remotely holy on anything that would ever touch a food product," or something obscure along those lines (That was NOT in the 1982 Ridvan Message, by the way. I think. Maybe I better check)! I know that no one would ever say that out loud, but I have an inner perfectionist who fears being the fool, most especially in a room full of people who are too kind to ever tell you that you've made a fool of yourself. LOL! So, in the end, I went with 12 identical flowers that simply stated the occasion.

So, that was our fun evening! We had Thanksgiving leftovers, a make your own sushi station, fancy cupcakes, games, and laughs! It was a fun evening and I think we all went home (or stayed home, in my case) a little lighter of heart.

Daily Purposeful Work

2011-11-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

The name sounds a little wordy for my taste, but "daily purposeful work" is a little piece of Waldorf education that I think makes practical sense in any home- homeschooling or otherwise. You may have read about our daily and seasonal rhythms, also very much Waldorf inspired. That post has been my most linked to, pinned, and viewed post ever. That tells me that the kind of people who read this blog, like me, seek natural flow from moment to moment with their kids. So, I thought you might like a peek at our daily purposeful work charts which have both rhythm and beauty and a heavy dose of practicality.

Each of the kids has their own copy of the family's daily purposeful work that they made themselves. We made water colored backgrounds because if we're going to look at it every day, it may as well be nice to look at. Right? Then they copied the days of the week and each days' work on top of their artwork.

Our work is not done in the same way each day, but it is done one way or the other. If one of the kids is having a tough day with school work (meaning they haven't quite accomplished as much as they should) then perhaps the others offer to do the work themselves so that whoever has fallen behind can use that time to catch up. Occasionally, when they are sucking up a bit, they will go ahead and do the next day's work in advance. If they did this too often, I might be more rigid about keeping things regular and avoiding burnout, but it is only the rare occasion when they feel the need to be exceedingly industrious.

I set this in motion only after we had a somewhat difficult week during which all of the grumbles the kids sent my way were a result of being asked to do something, anything, of mutual benefit. Put my dishes away? Can't you do it? You're standing right there. Why do I have to put all the shoes on the shoe rack? Most of these aren't even mine! That's not what I wanted for dinner! Then make my own? uh...no.

I had had it! I actually googled "dealing with lazy kids" and got a brilliant idea. I read an article about how kids in bygone centuries were regularly required to memorize this poem by Issac Watts so they could use the industrious honey bee as their role models. I will admit that some of the language is over the top, but in times of great need, over the top cuts through the problem quite nicely.

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower!

How skillfully she builds her cell!

How neat she spreads the wax!

And labours hard to store it well

With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill,

I would be busy too;

For Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play,

Let my first years be passed,

That I may give for every day

Some good account at last.

The kids all have this memorized now and they get quite a kick out of it. Haven says, very seriously, "You know, the devil isn't actually a person. That's what they call it when your bad wolf gets fed." He says this because he LOVES the Native American wise tale that goes : "Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog, all of the time." When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied "The one I feed the most."

After Haven offered his softening explanation for what he considers a minor disagreement of terminology, I didn't feel quite as bad about the harsh nature of that one section. In fact, I get quite a kick out of a 4 year old who concerns himself with explaining away the devil. Pretty adorable.

Once we had focused on the importance of being busy, we tied that last part about giving good account at last into a lesson on the Baha'i guidance to: Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning." We've been starting each day, this week, with an account of what we've rocked and what we've failed to rock in the moral conduct department and set goals for the day ahead.

Believe it or not, with all of that behind us, I was faced with this: It says "works of labour or of skill," and "books or work or healthful play." So what are our works of labour? Hmmm...works of labour? Why let's make a list! So I looked back at some blogs I had pinned to examine the beautiful and artistic way that a Waldorfian would tackle purposeful work with kids. And what you see above is what we came up with.

Over the course of the last week or so, the poem combined with the Baha'i quotes and our new list of purposeful work has really been a blessing! The kids made all the right connections, combined their efforts to tackle household chores, and even jabbed at each other a bit when catching someone whining, saying things like, "Gee, you're not being much of a bee right now." I don't normally let such jabbing pass, but suddenly I've come to appreciate positive peer pressure. And since we've talked so much about that little bee, the offender usually smacks his or her hand to the forehead before giving a little buzz and correcting the behavior! Score one for the busy bees! We do live in the beehive state, after all!

Super Museum Weekend

2011-11-20T11:23:00.001-08:00

I know I keep saying that we're going to stop going on trips and stay home, but Joe just had to get out one last time before the snow came. Actually, the mega snow finally arrived while we were gone and we came home to a winter wonderland. I'd say that there's a solid foot out there right now and there's still more glitter falling from the sky. I love our valley in the winter. Love it! While all of my friends get the blues and start holing themselves up for a grumpy season of misery, my heart gets lighter and I feel ready to head out and have some fun! Well, first I'll have to dig out my snow pants and find my missing boot, but soon I'm going to be out there digging tunnels and building forts. My vision for this winter is a series if igloos connected by tunnels dotted with turrets. Joe rolled his eyes at this vision, but I'm totally feeling it!

Haven as Charlie's Angel???

Okay, back to my original train of thought. We went on a little mini vacation through Utah this weekend and hit the prehistoric museum in Price and the brand spankin' new Rio Tinto Center's Museum of Natural History. In between, we spent the night at a hotel with an indoor pool (which is the only realreason Joe wanted to go on this little excursion).

The museum in Price was a modest museum. From the road, the building looked huge and I felt confident in admitting to Joe, "Oh, phew! I secretly suspect that you were bringing us all this way to visit some dank little wing of a building used for other things. This looks like a legitimate museum!" Just as I said it, I realized that it was in fact a wing of the library building and then I felt horrible for divulging my suspicions.

So, yes, it was small. But it was big on charm and dinosaur bones! The best part was the little old fellow who ran the place. He was a character! They have a corner called "living fossils" with reptiles that haven't much changed since the time of dinosaurs and the man pulled some of the reptiles out and let the kids touch them. One was a monitor that had an amputated tail, which everyone thought was adorable!

We loitered around until the Friday Feeding Time, during which the character of a man fed the alligator and water turtle live rats, and the monitors live mice. This was quite a graphic and exciting show.

After feeding time, we headed back to the hotel and splashed around in the pool before heading to bed. The next morning we filled up on breakfast, hit the pool again, went back for more breakfast, and finally headed to the premier Museum in Salt Lake City. This was an architectural wonder that cost millions. No expense was spared and it totally shows.

Right when you walk in there is a 3 or 4 story glass case with an artistic display of a sampling of items from all the different museum collections. It was breathtaking and you could walk behind it on the different floors and look through, over the area they called the canyon.

There was an area called "In your back yard," with caves to crawl through that had lizards and snakes inside, a stream you could splash around in, and little terrariums across the stream filled with little critters native to Utah.

You could walk on glass above what looked like a dig site full of bones as you walked among the giant skeletons and skulls.

There were all kind of neat displays where you could guess what the animal would eat, what a particular tool was used for, which kind of animal pollinated each kind of plant, etc. that the kid could use on their own and when they guessed right the animal would make a sound or the tool would light up. Haven really enjoyed those. He sent lots of time after the others had moved on, seeing if he could get the sound or the light.

You could build a structure and then choose a particular historic earthquake to simulate and see how your structure held up. We could never quite get the earthquake going so Joe just shook the display, causing a loud collapse and making people look at us like we were destroying museum property!

This was a neat display of skulls from the pre-human friends throughout history. I will admit to feeling a bit awkward about discussing this display with Hannah Jane for fear of offending passers by, but the Salt Lake museum crowd seemed a little more science embracing than what we're used to here in the valley, so it could have been worse. The display was really interesting, with a picture of a reconstructed face beside each one. Joe kept saying, "What happened to all of those species? It's just amazing."

The collections rooms and labs were temporarily open to the public and this picture is just one shelf of maybe 15 more filled with specimen jars. We're talking snakes, lizards, turtles and frog with every kind of deformity, conjoined, pregnant, eggs falling out after years in a jar. Every kind of gross reptilian oddity you could ask for was here.

The boys were still a little shorter on attention span than I would like for making the most of this sort of museum. There was one really cool display with a giant globe and you could press a button to choose a time period and it would shift the continents accordingly. Haven was annoyed at how long the continents were taking to shift and kept resetting the show because pressing buttons was more fun than watching the slow demise of Pangea. Joe and I kept pleading with him to stop and let the show progress, but eventually we realized it was never going to happen and moved on. So, there was lots to learn and this will certainly be high atop our list of places to revisit when the boys are a bit older. If you are within a few hours drive, this is a must see!!!