Out West 2014: Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore is not my favorite national park/monument/memorial/whatever. I'm pretty dubious, frankly, about the idea of messing up a perfectly good mountain by putting a sculpture on it, especially considering that the historical Lakota, from whom the Black Hills were stolen, would SO not have been okay with having one of their special mountains messed up with sculptures.

I also think that it's pretty low that the NPS does not charge admission to Mount Rushmore, but instead charges an $11 parking fee. Parking fees, of course, are not covered by the yearly national park pass the way that admissions are--way to get money even from passholders, y'all! You think I can't figure that one out?

However, if you're in the area, Mount Rushmore remains something that you've got to do, even just once:

And I admit that there's more to do there than I remembered from my childhood visit (childhood memory: we drove there, we looked at it, it was hot, we drove away). I should have brought everyone along earlier, so that we could have hiked, but nevertheless, yes, we looked at it--

--but the kids also, of course, worked on their Junior Ranger badges--

--and we saw rocky mountain goats!

Awww, look at her sweet, mountain goat-loving face!

 There's a giant amphitheater facing the sculpture, and that's where we hung out with a billion+ other people come sunset, because we all wanted to see the sculpture lit up at night. And oh, my lord, Syd was sooooo badly behaved here! She wasn't as badly behaved as the two children behind us, mind you, who were a misery to just have to listen to ("I'm bored!" "When can we go?" "Can I have ice cream?" "How much longer?" etc. etc. ETC!!!), nor was she wearing a complete Day-glo yellow short set with matching sweatshirt like the two children in front of us, but nevertheless, she wanted to go back to the museum and finish her Junior Ranger badge, but when I took her back to the museum she did not want to actually complete any of the activities for the badge, but instead just look at them and feign stupidity and confusion and cry about them (she was tired), so I took her back to sit in the amphitheater, but she did not want to sit in the amphitheater. She wanted to work on her badge! And so on.

Fortunately, once Matt and I had bravely tuned out her low-voiced kvetching, we had a nerdgasm's worth of nerdy evening entertainment. First, a park ranger came out and told jokes and riddles about the presidents, and THEN he gave a giant lecture about Constitutionality and the Founding Fathers' view of the Constitution--fascinating! And THEN there was a really long documentary that gave a biography of each of the sculpted presidents in turn, and then a history of the creation of the sculpture!

Syd was beside herself. I had a fabulous time.

Finally, we all got to stand and sing the national anthem (Have I shared with you before the Fact about Me that I LOVE singing the national anthem? I always sing when it's played, even if nobody else does), and they lit up Mount Rushmore for our wonder and edification:

We stayed afterwards to clap when the ranger called up all the current and former members of the Armed Forces to the stage, but sneaked out when it became clear that this was going to lead to the very drawn-out tradition of every single person on stage getting to introduce themselves and tell their service history (dood, there was a lot of military there!). I was very anxious about taking the kids over to the ranger to turn in their Junior Ranger books, because although Will had finished her Junior Ranger activities and was simply bursting to tell the ranger all about them (Will told her all about the sculptor's vision of light and shadow as dynamic forces, and the ranger had a big ole' conversation with her about that), Syd had not finished, and was looking very baleful, indeed. I told the ranger that she had tried her best, though (even though she hadn't, ahem), and Syd was able to tell her some things that's she'd learned, so badges were duly handed out and oaths duly administered.

I probably shouldn't have kept Syd up that late, honestly, just because I wanted to see Mount Rushmore at night, but we had a bit of a drive on the next day for her to keep resting during, and then we were at Devil's tower, and oh, my goodness.

Syd LOVED Devil's Tower.

Work Plans for the Week of August 11, 2014

MONDAY: The kids both have some hands-on review before their upcoming math week--Will will be working multi-digit multiplication problems, so I've got her playing this Arithmetiles game that requires all four operations; Syd will be subtracting in columns, so she and I are going to draw a 100-square hopscotch grid down our giant driveway, then play with it and a 20-sided die (mental note: figure out how to DIY a GIANT 20-sided die!).

I did assign Will's book to her for her reading this week; there's tons of historical fiction for kids related to our pioneers unit study, and Will rarely protests a reading assignment. Dog Diaries was a HUGE success for Syd last week--I had to encourage her to finish it over the weekend, but hours after she'd finished she came up to me and announced, "I can't stop thinking about Ginger!" She's got another Dog Diaries this week, and then we might do Horse Diaries for the next couple of weeks, or I might try one of those historical fictions that seems suited to her interest and reading level.

Will has an experiment that she's eager to complete to finish up her Animal Habitats badge; Syd has only my extra assigned activities to complete to finish her Bugs badge. And then I have to figure out where I packed the patches so I can sew them on!

This week's horse breed is the Norwegian fjord. Thanks, Tina, for linking your horse geography worksheets for me--we're absolutely using those now! This will be our first week doing so, so I think I'll have the kids trade off researching the horse with researching the country each week.

TUESDAY: For spelling, I'll give each of the kids an oral test of last week's words, delete the words that they've spelled correctly, add some new words, and then set them loose on Spelling City. Spelling City is more fun than productive for them, but it gives them exposure to their words, at least, which is often all that they need to correctly spell them. Still, though, I doubt that I'll renew our subscription when it expires in the next month or two.

The cursive spot-testing went well last week, if only in that it taught me that the kids are NOT remembering their letters well! Spot-testing and frequent reinforcement will solve that, hopefully.

It's been rainy since Friday, so if it's dry tomorrow the ground should be perfectly suited to discovering animal tracks in the woods and fields behind our house. I plan to teach the kids how to field-cast tracks, then we can study them and use them to make predictions about the animals that they came from, just as paleontologists do.

Syd liked her Draw Write Now assignment last week, but Will put zero effort into it, so we'll move into Waldorf-style form drawing this week, after all. It's guided, so it will require Will's attention, it's simple, so she should feel successful at it, and I think it will be great for her fine motor skills and will improve her drawing abilities.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons!

THURSDAY: Syd wanted to throw a party, so in the past couple of weeks she's written out an elaborate invitation to a couple of friends and mailed it, nagged me until I messaged her friends' mother to schedule a date and time, planned the menu, shopped for the supplies (with her father, so they're a LOT junkier than I would have allowed, but oh, well...), discussed with me every single piece of her two tea sets and how each should be used for the party, made alternate seating arrangements in case it rains, decided on frosting colors (why we need frosting for a cupcake mix that looks so sickly sweet already, I don't know), and has planned when she'll need to prepare all the food.

I've mostly just gotten out of her way.

With a hot chocolate party and our homeschool group's Park Day both on Thursday, I chose the quickest and most efficient school works for that day--math, grammar, and postcard writing.

FRIDAY: Some family is coming into town for the weekend and arriving on this afternoon, so I've possibly got our school day too full here, but I've planned for the coming Monday to be a vacation/catch-up day.

The kids did NOT like last week's fun geography game--in fact, they both pitched a fit and lost their hour's after-school screen time that is only earned by completing all schoolwork with a good attitude--so I decided to screw trying to make memorizing the states and capitals fun for them. They can trace and label maps for a while, the rascals, and then we'll see if playing a geography game sounds fun! The DO love How the States Got Their Shapes, however. Love. It.

They also didn't love making the lapbook for By the Shores of Silver Lake, and since the lapbook was really more about reading comprehension than the pioneer history that I wanted to teach, anyway, I'm going to drop it. Instead, we've got a chapter from A History of Us, and instead of studying the Ingalls' emigration to Dakota Territory, specifically, I think we'll cover the Oregon Trail--very applicable to the Ingalls, and there's loads of information for teaching it to these ages.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY/MONDAY: Family will be in town, so there will likely be some sight-seeing, some house-admiring, some how-do-we-fit-all-these-people-around-our-tiny-tabling, some drive-in movie-watching, etc.

P.S. I found this photo of Spots as a kitten back in 2010:

On Friday night, some college-aged women called Matt and told him that they'd found a cat that looked like Spots, so they'd captured her for him. Matt pulled on some clothes and drove over there, only to find that the cat that they'd kindly captured and put in a cage (gerbil cage?) in their kitchen wasn't Spots--more of a ginger tabby, really. He thanked them profusely and left as one said to the others, "So, did we just steal someone's cat?"

Probably, but thanks for your help!

My Latest: Furniture Refinishing and Pee Gardening

a round-up of upcycled playing card crafts

a round-up of the most important furniture refinishing skills

yes, another discussion of wastewater gardening

and my new fabric storage bin, made from an antique shipping container

Although it was quite interesting having a real estate empire, on Friday Matt and I closed on our old house. I'm alternately thrilled at having the extra set of hands to move and unpack here, since prior to this most of Matt's attention was spent prepping our old house for the sale, and horrified that with that set of hands comes a mind with its own opinions about where things should go and how they should look--the nerve!!!

At the moment, Matt and I are locked in a battle of wills regarding the dresser that I painted chalkboard grey. It's solid wood and awesome, and I set it at the foot of our bed with our TV on top and our DVDs and my exercise equipment in its drawers. The TV doesn't have a lazy susan, however, and I need to be able to turn it so that I can exercise on the floor opposite while watching it, so Matt found, also on the side of the road, a cheapo, particle board and laminate TV stand that's ugly as hell and that I didn't spend a billion hours painting, BUT that does already have casters on for easy rotation. He wants to put that cheap-ass TV stand there in our bedroom, at the foot of our bed, instead of my gorgeous dresser.

Crazy, right? I know!

Ooh, I know! Matt's at the gym right now--before he gets back, I think I'll go lift the dresser up and set it ON TOP OF the TV stand. He'll just love it, I'm sure.

Out West 2014: Black Hills, South Dakota

Keystone is a tourist hell-hole. It's where intellectually engaged tourists go to die and be reincarnated as Indian taco-eating, chainsaw sculpture-buying, "boardwalk"-walking, hokey tourist trap-visiting tourists.

It also has motel vacancies at reasonable prices during the heavy tourist season, however, and it's conveniently located near all the Black Hills sites that you want to see, so that's where we stayed for two freakin' nights. Blurgh.

I wanted to see Mount Rushmore lit at night, which they do during the summer, so we had the day free here on purpose to visit the paleontology museum of our choice. Our options were the Mammoth Site (mammoth and other remains still preserved in large part in situ), the Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (huge collection, research-oriented), and the Museum @ Black Hills Institute (run by the guys behind the Sue controversy). Of the three, although the Museum @ Black Hills Institute is the smallest, we'd never seen a paleontology museum that wasn't run by an educational institute, and Matt and I were gossipily interested in seeing the place behind the people behind Sue, so we went there.

In retrospect, the Museum of Geology would have been a better choice, but the Museum @ Black Hills was still really interesting--imagine several lifetimes' worth of major fossil finds and casts, priceless both monetarily and to scholarly interest... set up all pell-mell in an old auditorium.

It was disorienting and overwhelming, with little flow or organization or contextual layout, so your response wants to be like that of a kid in a candy store, a lot of "OOH, look at that!" and then darting over to "Wow! Look over there!" and back over again to "Oh, check THAT out!"

It was interesting to see a collection that, although I'm sure it's carefully curated (I heard that there's an exponential amount of specimens in storage compared to what's on display), doesn't *look* as neatly and professionally curated, and therefore as sanitized, as a museum's collection always is. Many fossils are still partly encased in their field jackets, which, yes, looks really cool, but also cuts way down on the prep hours for each fossil:

It's a great choice, really, because it lets you see the muddle that a fossil often is found in. Check out the disorder in this skull:

It's overwhelming, though. How can you possibly look at all of this? You can't even SEE much of it!

Nevertheless, of course, we managed to spend a very happy time browsing and exclaiming and finding our favorites of all sorts of things:

Swag related to the Sue controversy!

Although I thought that Meteor Crater was too expensive, I do love that everywhere we go, we find fragments of that meteor displayed, and we have the context for them.

Edmontosaurus skeleton! This complete cast was compiled from bones from multiple skeletons.

One aspect of this particular museum that I really liked was that its information, when presented, was not written for the lowest common denominator. Here is information that someone who already has some knowledge of paleontology will still find really interesting!

anatomy of a T. rex skull

dinosaurs local to this area

After the museum, we tooled around the Black Hills for a few hours--Will and I wanted to visit a rock shop, so we did (I bought a big piece of petrified wood that I'm going to figure out how to polish, Will bought a big piece of obsidian, and Syd bought a set of rocks that will spark if you strike them together in a dark place), Matt and I wanted to visit a winery, so we did (this is why I may have drunk half a bottle of wine every night for the next week), and I wanted to check out the progress on the Crazy Horse sculpture, so we did:

We came home to drink wine, let the kids swim in the motel swimming pool, and pack them a dinner to take with us to Mount Rushmore that evening. 

I may have also taken a nap. Yay, wine!

Out West 2014: Wall Drug

Obviously, you've got to stop at Wall Drug.

Well, perhaps if your parents never took YOU out west when you were a kid, you can squeak by with not stopping at Wall Drug, but if your parents took you out west, they obviously took you to Wall Drug and snapped a photo of you on the jackalope, so you've got to stop at Wall Drug with your own kids.

And snap photos of them on the jackalope:

Even the bathroom graffiti is jackalope-themed!

And yourselves, too, of course!

I solicited a kind stranger to take this photo of us. I had to remind her what an eyepiece and lens are after she held my camera out in front of her, then frowned at it and hollered over to me, "It's not showing the picture! Is it on?"

Wall Drug is technically the kind of giant, indoor shopping mall that I abhor (Go ahead, ask me how many souvenirs I bought on this trip!), but fortunately... okay, here's another story--

I sort of remember the layout of the Wall Drug Backyard, where all the cool stuff is, from my childhood (it's one of those random, nearly useless pieces of information that combine with every theme song that I've ever heard to bully out all the important knowledge in my brain), so I direct Matt to park in a nearly vacant parking lot just across the street from the entrance to the backyard, and then I start walking us back there.

But Matt doesn't want to go this way, because he says that the front door is in the other direction and there's no way to get right to the backyard, because they want you to weave your way through all the stuff to buy first, and he doesn't want to have to walk all the way around the building just to have to go in the front door because we're all tired--we've just come from the Badlands, you know.

Now, here's my secret that Matt has never figured out, but I'm telling YOU, because I like you: If you and I are ever on the verge of a disagreement, and then I all of a sudden just cave without a fight and agree to do it your way, you'd better change your tune immediately and do it my way after all, because the only, only time that I will not fight you to the death when I think that I'm right (it's my most adorable personality trait) is when I know for a fact that I won't have to, because I am about to be proven right, and it's even more fun to be proven right when I have not just been spending the past twenty minutes going on like a douchebag about how I'm right. 

So Matt starts to argue that I'm wrong and the door's the other way, and I mildly say, "Okay, we can go your way," and follow him, and like a lamb to the slaughter he leads the way, naively pleased that he's finally won an argument with me this year. In we go through the front door, weave through all the stuff to buy first, and find our way out to the backyard, just to see that at the entrance to the backyard there's an alley, and that alley leads out to the street. You can basically see our car from there. 

Therefore, AS I WAS SAYING, there's fortunately a way to go straight to the backyard so that you don't have to walk through a bunch of stuff for sale.

There are photos to take of the kids with the same stuff that someone took photos of you with when you were a kid:

--and, of course, you've got to have your free ice water--

--but this addition is new to me:

And thank goodness for it! After a long, hot day hiking in the Badlands, and another couple of hours in the car before we reach the touristy hellhole that is Keystone, South Dakota, a refreshing romp in the water is just what we all needed. 

Ooh, and the kids going on and on and on about how much shorter the walk back to the car was than the walk into the Wall Drug Backyard didn't hurt, either (at least to me!).

Out West 2014: Badlands National Park

We didn't stop after our dinosaur dig! After a tearful goodbye to my edmontosaurus tibia, another dinner of pizza rolls (seriously, three pounds! With all that digging and hiking!), and a final night in Faith, we drove southwest to spend a day at Badlands National Park:

Yes, in about half of my photos that take place in national parks or monuments, you'll see the kids clutching workbooks--they're Junior Ranger books, and the kids LOVED them!

The Junior Ranger books are basically mini unit studies of each national park, encouraging active exploration of the place (usually through scavenger hunts or BINGO games), deeper immersion into some specific aspect (through the requirement to view a film or attend a ranger program), and cross-curricular research and study (the books cover varying subjects, but often history, culture, geology, biology, creative writing, etc.).

When a kid completes her Junior Ranger book, she goes back to any ranger in any of the visitor centers and turns the book in, goes over her work with that ranger and discusses it (and usually, in the case of Will, has a giant conversation about it), and is then awarded an official Junior Ranger badge to wear on her shirt, and is administered the official Junior Ranger oath.

Thrilling, right? And oh, the kids took this so seriously, and were so thrilled to earn each badge. And my favorite part (other than how into it the kids were) is that the rangers clearly took the project equally seriously. Several times we had rangers approach the children in the various national parks as they were working on a specific activity and converse with them about it--like CONVERSE converse, not just quiz them or "help" them. The rangers who went over the children's completed workbooks with them always also engaged the kids in conversation about them; they'd ask the kid to walk through the process of coming to a particular conclusion, correct erroneous information and explain the answer, ask them about their favorite activities or the most interesting things they'd learned, etc. I actually kind of sweated it a couple of times, listening to these conversations--reminded me of my PhD oral exams that I failed!

And you have not seen cute until you've seen my kids' earnest little faces as they repeat, right hands raised, their Junior Ranger oaths. They always put on their badges immediately, of course (Will liked to wear ALL of hers, for days), and when wearing their badges, they were invariably greeted by rangers with "Hello, Junior Ranger!"

Truly, this program just made the park experience for the kids.

And so, Junior Ranger books in two hands, we spent the day walking around the Badlands and climbing on stuff:

There are fossils to discover here, too, particularly some interesting fossils in the evolution of the horse. If you discover a fossil eroding out of the rock, you're to take a photo of it with something standard in the frame (coin, bill, house key, etc.), record its GPS coordinates with your smartphone, then fill out a form about it back in the visitor center. We didn't find any fossils, but we certainly kept a lookout!

Whenever Matt takes my camera, he always snaps cute photos of me--


--but he also takes sneaky photos like these:

That kid and I can't see each other, but clearly we're related!

And here I am on a different hike, once again sunning myself on a rock. Like a lizard.

We spent most of our day at the bottoms of these hills and cliffs and peaks, clambering up and then sliding back down, but toward the end of the day, noses pointed ever westward, our journey through the park took us to an area where we were looking down across vast vistas of Badlands:

Narrow walkway between two huge drops? Gallop across it, of course!

Or, you know, scramble over to the edge of it, sigh.

I love myself some sedimentary layers!

After exploring all this natural beauty all day, hiking and eating sandwiches and climbing on stuff, we settled ourselves back in the car for a drive to what may be the tackiest place in the West.

Stay tuned for Wall Drug!