So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...

Teenager-Friendly Wholesome Family Activities: Hunt a Killer

Do y'all have any weird, low-impact parenting things that you nevertheless feel a ton of constant guilt about?

Mine is the fact that I don't really like playing games.

Like, I played games with the kids all the time when they were little, and did the whole Family Game Night thing semi-regularly. Late night games are part of our New Year's Eve tradition, etc. But in those cases, playing the game is mostly about playing the game WITH THE KIDS, or, you know, AS A FAMILY. I wouldn't necessarily choose to play any given game if it wasn't a #wholesomefamilyactivity. 

I mean, I'd rather be reading?

So we don't really play games unless I feel like it's one of those super special #wholesomefamilyactivity moments, and I constantly feel guilty about this. 

Will and Matt are pretty amiable about games and like to play them, but Syd has, I think, a similar game mindset. 

And yet, she found a game that we're obsessed with.

Syd and I are both into true crime shows--although to be honest the Intro to Serial Killers class that Syd is currently taking at the local community college might have broken us of this. It's... a lot of graphic details. Like, a LOT. And there's, like, a huge list of paraphilias whose definitions Syd was tested on and so now I can't get them out of my head.

Did you know that there's a whole thing involving somebody wanting somebody else to... you know what? You're probably better of not knowing.

ANYWAY, because we both like true crime shows (although maybe not as much now as we used to...), Syd gave me this Hunt a Killer game for Mother's Day. 

It was already the perfect Mother's Day gift, because it was an activity that we could do together. Syd is particularly good at the Mother's Day version of #wholesomefamilyactivity. 

But even better? The game is SO GOOD!

You play the role of a baby detective trying to solve their first crime. You're given the set up and circumstances and all the evidence, although some evidence is locked or password-protected and some evidence isn't evident that it's evidence and some evidence is unclear because the suspects used ciphers or other ways to conceal it. And some isn't even evidence, but stuff that might be evidence. 

So you're given all that, and then you just... solve the crime! In this particular game, Syd and I had to figure out if a beloved bar owner's death was murder or an accident, and if it was murder, who did it? How and why?

Syd and I made a whole evening out of it. We bought ourselves snacks and drinks and set up at the big family room table, and exiled Matt and Will elsewhere so that they didn't get any spoilers that would ruin the fun when they want to try the game.

We'd kind of thought that the game would only take an hour or so, because it's apparently one of the easiest in the entire Hunt a Killer collection, but, ummm... I think it took us nearly four hours to solve? And the whole time we were completely absorbed, absentmindedly eating Goldfish crackers (these giant Cheddar Jalapeno ones are the best) and figuring out clues and having stunning revelations and arguing over alibis and trying out different substitution ciphers and having an absolute ball.

Ooh, and there were awesome surprises! At one point I figured that just for a laugh I would Do a Thing and Syd was all, "OMG don't Do That Thing! Surely it's not a real thing, just a game thing, or if it is a real thing it's a different real thing and it will be so embarrassing!" But then, I Did the Thing and it WAS a real thing AND it was a game thing and Syd and I were shocked and delighted and I screamed out loud because I'm excitable and we're still talking about it. 

We LOVED it. It was SO FUN. 

The only downside to the game is that there's zero replay value because, you know, we solved the crime! But if you consider it a #wholesomefamilyactivity rather than a product, the spendiness is easier to bear, in the same way that I happily spend more on theater or concert tickets. And at some point Syd and I will successfully convince Matt and Will to play it (and then secretly time them so we can decide whether or not they're better detectives than us, but only tell them that we timed them if we win, of course), so that's double the value, and then if I get really lucky, maybe somebody on Craigslist has a different Hunt a Killer game and would be willing to trade. 

Or, I don't know... y'all got any mysteries that I can solve? I prefer mysteries with lots of interesting clues, a few ciphers, and zero paraphilias or horrifyingly traumatic details of graphic murders. My birthday is in August!

Puzzle Games That Teenagers Like: Izzi

I didn't actually mean for this to turn into a series, but the kids and I messed around with SO many logic games and puzzles and fidgets recently as we absolutely burned through The Great Gatsby audiobook (if you can listen to a book read by Sean Astin, LISTEN TO A BOOK READ BY SEAN ASTIN!) that it really got me thinking about them and the place that they've held in our homeschool high school. 

That place has been central. Absolutely essential. I know I've said this before, but so much of homeschooling high school is having conversations together, or absorbing content together that you're then going to have conversations about. Just last week, which was a short school week interrupted by some service learning and a day trip, we finished The Great Gatsby audiobook, then talked about it endlessly since, and watched a two-hour documentary on Frida Kahlo, then talked about it endlessly since. This week we'll be reading some history together, so we can talk about it endlessly, and some short fiction, which, yes, we'll then talk about endlessly. Over the past 10+ years of interacting with these two kids in meaningful conversation and the consumption of educational content, I've noticed that they pay more attention when they have something to do with their hands, and that they demonstrate more intellectual engagement when their hands are also engaged.

If they're the only people in their college lecture halls with drawing pads and crochet projects and fidgets, then so be it.

This puzzle, Izzi, is currently out of print (although ThinkFun has a different puzzle by the same name. Did they buy Izzi and rework it? Dunno!), but I have learned that it is a pattern puzzle--more specifically, an edge-matching pattern puzzle--and it's quite good on several levels. The colors and patterns are appealing, and like Shashibo, you can make interesting patterns and shapes with pleasing symmetry:

But like those pesky pentominoes that the kids and I also love, this beautiful pattern puzzle is also a legitimately challenging puzzle, with endless ways to just almost solve it... except for that one last piece!

I know that these puzzles have academic value, but I'd love to isolate the specific values that intersect with their appeal, and use those to tempt my teenagers into adjacent areas of study. I can clearly see the possibilities in computer programming and mathematics, but I haven't yet found a specific connection that would serve as a direct step from puzzle to further exploration.

And that's why I have so many books on puzzles, logic, and recreational mathematics on hold for me at my local university's library!

Logic Games Teenagers Like: Rush Hour

This game has just about endless replay value, which is great because it's made entirely of plastic and so will exist until the death of the Sun.

Syd discovered Rush Hour at a hands-on museum a few years ago. It was possibly our gateway into ThinkFun games, all of which we're obsessed with...

...and Rush Hour is no different!

Syd, especially, has always been SUPER into logic games, and she's solved every puzzle in the basic deck a couple of times. I actually check this game out from the local university's library and keep it for a couple of months until everyone is done playing with it, then I return it. Inevitably, I remember it again in a couple of years and check it out again and we play it all over again! I feel like this is a good way to get around the gross fact that this game is all plastic, and now I'm realizing that perhaps my great goal in life is to organize a local homeschool library of manipulatives and games so more families can share out their plastic crap instead of everyone buying their own plastic crap.

In our family homeschool, we've always played logic games or done handwork while listening to audiobooks. Syd, especially, absolutely has to multitask if she's going to be able to pay attention, and I think this is a nice way to incorporate some logic and reasoning study into our schoolwork. Logic and reasoning skills are terrific for math and writing!

If your kid, too, gets super obsessed with Rush Hour, reading about the history of its development is interesting and would be a good intro into encouraging them to design their own original game, or a different version of Rush Hour. The game varieties, like Rush Hour Safari or the two-player game, would also probably be high-interest and expand their skill set. 

Even if this game stood entirely alone, I still think it would have decent replay value because the basic card deck is large enough that you probably can't memorize the solutions between games. However, I'm also VERY interested in the expansion decks, and if we actually owned it, I'd be tempted to invest in this hard case that apparently holds a couple of the expansion decks as well as the full game, lets you travel with it (something that Syd would have been VERY up for when she was younger), and can replace entirely the crappy cardboard box that definitely actively tries to fall apart. 

Things I Bought for My Teenagers and They Liked: Shashibo

When I buy gifts for the kids Christmas stockings, I still like to include a sensory/open-ended fidget-type toy. Both of my kids are sensory seekers, and one, in particular, is also a fidgeter. They both like patterns and love logic games, although the logic games that they each prefer are very different.

These Shashibo, thanks to being embarrassingly spendy, were a bit of a gamble. The kids haven't aged out of a lot of sensory toys as much as they've aged out of the packaging and marketing for those toys, so I was having a hard time coming up with something that filled a sensorial need but would appeal to a couple of jaded teenagers. The Shashibo looked sophisticated--with a price point to match!--and when I researched I did note a lot of older kids and adults playing with them.

So I bought a set of four. And my teenagers like them!

Here's what we like about them:

They're fiddly.

You can make specific shapes and patterns, but you can also literally just fiddle with the Shashibo, and beautiful shapes and patterns just appear. The flipping and folding feel nice, as does the little tug to separate the magnets.

The patterns are appealing.

The way the color schemes work, there's always an interesting visual pattern to look at as you fiddle with the Shashibo. And when you land on a shape that you like, that's pretty, too, as is the color combo that makes up that shape. 

The Shashibo fit together to make bigger patterns.

This is personally my favorite part of the Shashibo, and the fuel of my great desire to own MORE SETS! The shape that you make with one cube will often work symmetrically with the same shape made with one or more of the other cubes, or different shapes will somehow nest interestingly inside another shape. If you're a pattern lover, it will make you very happy!

Repeating the patterns is challenging.

Syd is, like, a visual-spatial genius, so she usually helps me mimic a particular shape when I get stuck, since my own method for mimicking a shape is just to fiddle with it like I fiddled with the previous cube to get the previous shape.

Since we've got four cubes, whenever one of us lands on an interesting shape by fiddling with a single cube, there's always the question of how can we make that shape with the other cubes, too? But because whoever made the cool shape was usually just doing it through mindless fiddling, it's quite a lot of mental work, sometimes, to figure out how to purposefully mimic it with another cube.

Here's what I don't like about them:

They're EXPENSIVE!

OMG I'm literally embarrassed at how much I paid for these, and I will forever scour garage sales and thrift stores to add to my collection rather than buy anymore new, because I need that money for college tuition now.

They might not be super durable?

This isn't a complaint that I have about them, but a complaint that I've seen in some reviews. Some people say the stickers peeled off of theirs after a while, making the cubes unusable since the stickers are what make the folding possible. I dunno, though--we handle ours quite a bit, but we are always super careful with them, and we've made it to May with them looking brand-new still.

What I really need is for Shashibo to get into the educational supply game, like some of my other fun building toys have. I'd probably manage to justify a large set that was discounted for use in my homeschool, especially if it came with lesson plans and extension activities, something like what Zometools has. I have a BIG set of Zometools AND a bunch of their lesson plans and books of extension activities, and I didn't feel guilty at all about blowing my homeschool budget on them because (turn on the homeschool parent voice) they're EdUcAtIoNaL!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Bought a Vintage Disney Puzzle off of Ebay

So, you know, that's about how I'm doing during this pandemic!

I've actually been looking for this Disney Fantasy puzzle, manufactured in 1981, for decades. I don't really remember gobs and gobs from my childhood, but one of my most vivid--and happiest!--memories is working this puzzle with some of the adults in my life at my grandparents' giant wooden dining room table.

The funny thing is that I remember the puzzle being super challenging--like, it had EVERY Disney character on it! So many Disney characters!--but I was probably only about 5 or 6 years old. 

And the puzzle actually only has 300 pieces!

Fridays after our school day and Matt's work day have ended are what I've come to think of as Happy Hour. I set up a new puzzle and a podcast (Welcome to Night Vale or The Magnus Archives are current family favorites), or some coloring and an audiobook (we're currently medium-way through Dracula), or just crosswords and Syd's Spotify playlist (she's no longer heavy on the Billie Eilish!), and, most importantly for getting the kids' buy-in, SNACKS. Matt makes the adults cocktails, and we just hang out around the table and chill. 

It turns out that a 300-piece puzzle is just about perfect for chilling around a big table on a Friday night, with margaritas and Cheez-Its and Zebra Cakes (because SNACKS!).

It took one to two adults and one to two kids about two-and-a-half hours to put together this puzzle--

--and it's just as adorable and interesting as I remembered!

Syd asked, "Where are all the princesses?", and that's one of the most interesting things, because in 1981, there weren't many princesses! 1981's Disney was still very much associated with anthropomorphized cartoon animals:

Alas, all the racist characters are present--see the crows from Dumbo? And the Br'er animals from Song of the South?

But you've also got some pretty deep cuts from the other Disney cartoons. When is the last time you've seen Clarabelle Cow?

Syd also noticed this one--why the snot is Tinkerbell's dress PINK?!?

Ugh I love it SO MUCH!!! I don't know what happened to the one that I had when I was six, but this one I am keeping forever, and I am FOR SURE going to put it together again while watching Disney movies when we buy a month of Disney+ later this summer (HAMILTON IS COMING TO DISNEY+!!!!!!!!!).

But only the movies that came out by 1981. And not the racist ones.

I'll let you know what color Tinkerbell's dress is!

P.S. If you, too, remember liking Disney circa 1981, this 1981 Disney newspaper is hella cool. I *might* have gone to Disney World the first time around then (although the only thing that I remember about that trip is the Main Street Electrical Parade, particularly Pete's Dragon scaring the shit out of me), so it's interesting to see what was going on!