Labeling maps is one of the hallmarks of Montessori work, and even now, after over a year of homeschooling in which they have the pleasure of choosing all their own school activities, mapwork is still something that both the girls really enjoy.
Fortunately, free maps of the thirteen British colonies in colonial America are easily available online:
I printed this printable of each colony on its own page (from A Kid's Heart) at 1/4 size so that the girls could make it into a mini coloring book, to later be mounted into their Independence Day unit study book (I order these big bare books in bulk straight from their web site).
I recopied the names of the colonies onto a separate sheet of paper, but otherwise, the printout was perfect for an old-school Montessori map-labeling activity. After it Willow, who admittedly has done a lot of extra reading on the subject, could recite nearly all of the colonies, and Syd of course will learn more with repetition, which she enjoys.
Other 13 colonies resources that were much enjoyed:
Nobody, and I mean nobody, matches socks around here.
A giant hamper of clean socks lives in the closet. When Matt and I need clean socks, we dig through the hamper until we find a matching pair--it's very annoying. The girls are far less troubled, since when they need clean socks, they simply dig through the hamper until they find two socks that fit--no matching necessary, apparently. Well, Sydney, who is our clothes horse, does tend to search until she finds two "pretty" socks, but again, they definitely won't match.
For a long time it's been my dream to make sock matching an occupation of the past. To that end, for the past year or so I've allowed our sock supply to dwindle drastically, neglecting to replace holey or outgrown socks, until we each have just a few left. Then, I restocked us all with plain white socks from Dharma Trading Company.
Then, I set up the fabric dye in squeeze bottles--
--and spent an afternoon on the living room carpet with the girls tying off socks with rubber bands, and then we dragged them all outside and off we went:
The girlies each also tie-dyed white turtlenecks, hand-me-downs from an acquaintance that had just a couple of light stains on them:
Yes, I accept free stuff even if it's messed up. That's how my kids will be wearing tie-dyed turtlenecks this winter!
Poor Matt arrived home from work that afternoon to the horror of a backyard full of fabric dye and mess and just more mess. I won't say that he was thrilled to jump in, but he let himself be persuaded, taking just long enough that we wouldn't know that he was secretly going to enjoy himself:
Did I mention that tie-dye is messy?
I know you're supposed to wear gloves and all, but I don't like the feel of them, and what am I supposed to do with the girls? Encase them in head-to-toe plastic aprons like serial killers wear to chop up their prey?
Eh, we were just colorful for a while:
I let them fester in plastic bags in the yard for 24 hours, then gave them a good rinse--look how pretty!
And after a wash and a dry, we have a new season of socks!
To try it for yourself, you can check out my tie-dye tutorial over at Crafting a Green World--if you dare!!! Be forewarned that once again, I horrify my fellow green crafters by not using butterflies and flower petals for dyes--green crafters can be so cute with their righteous indignation.
MATT!!! Because it's a sure bet that the girlies and I are going to make our Matt booth-sit for us so that we can spend our weekend doing this:
Craft Faire, inside Maker Faire, is hosted by Handmade Detroit, and I was super-bummed because I actually didn't get in at first, but thank you to whatever crafter did get in and then turned down their spot, and yay for me for apparently being high up on the waitlist, which is almost as good as getting in outright, because I got in anyway!
I am especially thrilled to be going because Maker Faire is one of those events that I have always really, really, REALLY wanted to go to anyway. Since I've written for MAKE magazine, I got free tickets to the Maker Faire Bay Area, and I was super bummed that I could not think of a single legitimate method to get us all on a plane to California without putting a second mortgage on the house.
Detroit, however, is vastly more do-able, and with a Pumpkin+Bear booth for Matt to sit at and vend handmade homeschool crafts for us, the girls and I will have a place to keep our water bottles and drop off our cardboard robots and personal hovercrafts and other awesome stuff that we've made.
And I'm not even going to start telling you about the Maker Mixer, or the Ignite session, or the marshmallow shooters that the girls are going to make, or the fire-breathing pony, or the dragon dump truck jungle gym, or the giant Rube Goldberg machines, or the Bellagio-style Coke and Mentos fountain show, or how I'm totally going to do the iron pour, and get my picture taken on the recumbent tricycle, and rock out to nerdcore...
I really don't cook. I don't enjoy it--in fact, I find cooking tedious and uninteresting, requiring too much clean-up and fuss.
Mind you, I think nothing of doing plaster of Paris at the living room table, or tie-dyeing with the girls in the backyard WITHOUT GLOVES, so clean-up and fuss aren't in fact issues for me. I just don't enjoy cooking.
I mean, why cook when you can just make a sandwich?
The other moms who I know who don't cook happen to have partners who DO cook, but I happen to have a partner who needs me to tell him, every single night, "Just ask the girls if they want a peanut butter sandwich or a grilled cheese sandwich or a smoothie, and there's canned applesauce and frozen corn or blueberries, and see if they'll eat a carton of yogurt with it." Seriously, every single night he needs me to tell him options for a quick and suitable dinner for two children. I think he eats baked chicken for dinner every night, I don't bother to ask.
And no, we're not one of those families who eat dinner together, with the tablecloths and napkin rings and candles and crap. Sue us.
That being said, I do get a lot of pleasure out of an in-season fruit salad:
It doesn't require cooking!
I don't tend to cook normal stuff every day, like a nice pot of spaghetti or a brown rice stir-fry or whatever normal people stand around in the kitchen for an hour and cook for dinner every single day, but every now and then I will try out a recipe, especially if it sounds just crazy:
The Pioneer Woman's Knock You Naked Brownies were CRAZY. I didn't put all the fuss into them that she did, but yeah, they turned out just a smidge over-the-top. Insanely tasty, and unlikely to be baked again unless I'm ever invited to a potluck at which people would be impressed by over-the-top sweet desserts. That potluck would probably be in Arkansas.
I got bored with baking bread every day, so now I pretty much only make the occasional pizza crust, but after the instruction of my friend Cake, I do now officially know how to make pie crust--
--although it's kind of a lot of work. Still, the family praised and praised and praised the strawberry pie that the crust turned into, and although I'm pretty sure that all the praise every time I cook something is a not-so-subtle strategy to simply get me to cook a little more, I do have plans to make that pie crust again soon, this time for quiche, and also to at some point to get around to trying out both zucchini fries and overnight cinnamon rolls.
Or, you know, we could just continue eating sandwiches. It could go either way, really...
Life-size family, with all their clothes and accessories
Roman gladiator gameboard, which stretches ALL THE WAY across the basketball court
it's like hopscotch, but with swords and horses and rivers to cross
We have a date to make more sidewalk chalk this week, because Will thinks that this game would also be pretty great if you used Ancient Egyptians instead of Romans.
Her correctness about this particular issue is a sure thing, wouldn't you agree?
Matt accused me of homeschooling solely for the moment that occurred last week, when I turned around in my seat in the car and asked my daughter, "Quis es?"
"Willow sum," she promptly replied, and Matt is, of course, perfectly correct.
I am a Latin nerd.
With Will's permission, I've added Latin (and typing, but that's a different post) to her list of daily responsibilities. So far she's really enjoying it, mostly because her textbook, Minimus, is so ridiculously super-cute. Witness:
Later that day, I explained to her that the cat's name, literal translation something like "Vibrate to the Utmost," was probably due to the fact that the Romans might have thought of cat's purring as vibrating (which it is), and thus the cat's name could be more accurately translated, then, as Purrsy or some such.
Last year during our big Boston trip, Matt's parents took all of us for a day at Plimoth Plantation. Honestly, Plimoth itself was not my favorite tourist spot--it's one of those recreated villages, and I am just not comfortable walking up to a stranger minding her own business grinding corn and being all, "Hello, who are you? What are you doing? How long will that corn last? What's your preferred method for making corn pone?" like you were supposed to do.
Mostly I tooled around and took in the kitchen gardens, and snuck into people's huts to stare after they had walked out of them, and the Wampanoag village was actually pretty awesome, but I did do some damage in the gift shop. I bought the girls little porcelain Pilgrim dolls (and I wish now that I'd bought Sydney the big ones, too), and a cornhusk doll-making kit, and seeds to grow a Three Sisters garden, and lots of postcards for scrapbooks, and a quill pen making and writing kit.
When I buy stuff that's on big sale, or stuff that's unique in that way, I throw it all into my Magic Craft Cupboard, and whenever the time is right it comes back out again.
Let's see...the girls still play with the Pilgrim dolls, we made the cornhusk dolls back in the winter, we didn't end up doing the Three Sisters garden this summer because the Tom Thumb popcorn looked more exciting in the seed packet than the Plimoth Plantation corn did (but I think the seeds will keep for another year, so def a Three Sisters garden next year), the postcards will probably come out again this fall when we'll study pilgrims again, and that quill pen kit just happened to look mighty tasty just recently when Sydney and I were reading some book or other about the Declaration of Independence (Independence Day has been an area of interest lately, obviously), and she said that she wished that she could write with the pretty feather, too.
You do, huh? Well, let's take a trip to the Magic Craft Cupboard and see what we find!
I used my x-acto knife in dangerous ways to cut each girl's quill at an angle, carve it into a nib, angle the nib, then slit it up the middle a little, while the girls used eye droppers to drip water into their powdered ink to rehydrate it. Then I handed each girl her quill and a giant piece of textured artist's paper, attempted to demonstrate how to properly hold the quill (they weren't such good listeners, sigh), and let them go:
I did ask each girl to write her name with the quill pen--we'll crop them later and put them in their Independence Day scrapbooks:
Ignore the fact that they both keep holding their quills backwards--my theory is that kids these days only ever use writing instruments with rotational symmetry, and thus the concept of one specific pen grip is too foreign to get right away.
Writing all kinds of words was fun--
--but Willow, especially, got really into the artistry of pen and ink, and covered a whole huge page just beautifully, in my opinion:
Everybody loved using the quill pens, but all I can tell you is that after using quill pens as one's sole writing instrument, the using for the first time an ink pen that didn't require pausing to dip it into ink every few letters must have felt AMAZING.
Ink pens just aren't this pretty, however:
Here are some other Declaration of Independence resources that we've been enjoying this month:
When I labored with Sydney, I didn't have jack shit to help me out, because my doula, my birthing ball, my essential oils, my rice sock, my hot shower, my midwife, and my friends who were going to babysit Willow were all several hours away back home in Indiana, while I was in Michigan going into labor six weeks early. Oops.
When I labored with Willow, however, although I only wish that I'd had a doula, I did have my birthing ball, my essential oils, my hot shower, my midwife, and this really awesome tube sock filled with rice that I'd made at my natural birthing class.
Good lord, I loved that rice sock. I would have married it if I didn't already have this guy next to me who'd gone and knocked me up. He's the reason that I got introduced to the rice sock, however, so he and I are still good.
The joy of a rice sock (or a rice pillow, as you'll see in a bit), is that rice holds its heat really, really well, and it's a kind of steamy, very soothing heat, as well, far better than a heating pad, similar to a hot water bottle but much longer-lasting. You simply microwave the rice sock for about a minute, and then you've got around an hour's worth of heat, packaged in this soft, hefty container that, because of the weight of the rice, really seems to penetrate. Mmmmmm.....get the idea?
Of course, I giant tube sock filled with several pounds of dried rice is really best suited for pregnant people with their giant bellies, so I did eventually pass on my precious, butt-ugly rice sock to a pregnant cousin, and to replace it I made a family's worth of flannel rice pillows, smaller but still hefty, as sturdy as a tube sock but with much softer, MUCH prettier fabric. Goofy fabric, for the most part, since the girls mostly chose it.
And one day last week, Sydney helped me photograph them to list in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:
for quill pen pics
