Meet our New House

It finally happened.

I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from the park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.

It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.

I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:

The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:

The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.

I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.

The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year:

The current owner says that this field used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.

The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--

I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?

--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1930s general store:

Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.

We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:

Yes, I'm serious about this one, too. The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. Matt and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then Matt and I would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us. 

My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?

Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!

This is the foyer: 

It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original 1940s portion. It opens up to the main door from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.

From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the 1940s part of the house:

I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.

The kitchen has its own table!

Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:

The video game stuff that Matt and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the girls are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.

The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--

--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.

The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:

On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?

I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?

Perhaps here, in the big family room?

We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:

It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.

Matt and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:

We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.

This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.

So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.

Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...

Work Plans for the Week of March 31, 2014: Out!

Last week was knocked a little off-kilter when Syd came down with a fever on Tuesday. Fortunately, she was feeling all better the next day, but by the end of the week, *I* had a cold, and, of course, I still have it. But nevertheless, there was a lot of building and playing and cooking and balloon animal making and hiking and reading and a respectable amount of schoolwork done for the week, so whatever we didn't get done, I kept on the schedule for this week!

MONDAY: I don't know what's not appealing about building the skip counting board--I have all the materials temptingly out and ready, AND both kids spent most of Thursday morning with the woodworking tools, building swords out of PVC pipes for themselves and a friend's birthday, so clearly the concept is a winner, but it still hasn't happened. To be fair, Syd's Math Mammoth units last week were all hands-on measurement tasks (which threw me for a loop, since I don't usually scan them ahead of time, AND I often bring them with us to do when we're out and about--not too helpful to pull it out midway through a hike, only to discover that Syd actually needs a quart jar, pint jar, and measuring cup to do her math that day, sigh...), so she was pretty full up on hands-on math enrichment and practical construction without it.

Frankly, we didn't get much done last Monday--I may have to rethink this day's schedule. We've got that two-hour volunteer gig, then when we get home we're wiped out for at least an hour, and today we're actually at the public library right now, where the kids just collected another stack of children's books for their Early Literacy Center from the library bookstore's free day, but they're reading Snoopy comics instead of doing any schoolwork because I didn't think ahead and plan anything portable-to-the-library for this day. If we don't have a productive afternoon after our volunteer gig later today, I'll have to think about what I can shift to make Mondays work better for us.

TUESDAY: I DID plan portable schoolwork for this day, because the goal is to spend what's supposed to be a gorgeous day completely out and about. Will is hoping to plan a multi-cach geocaching adventure along a popular cross-town biking and walking trail (the geocaching expert we met a few weeks ago assured us that there are many geocaches to be found there), and then we'll likely spend the rest of the day at the local hands-on science museum. Fortunately, First Language Lessons is extremely portable; I had the foresight to check Syd's Math Mammoth ahead of time and switch a couple of lessons so that her math on this day is portable; and you can memorize a Latin translation of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" anywhere.

Will is still on Kumon multiplication drills, although her memorization is coming along really quickly now that she's realized that I won't let her calculate her way out of it any longer. She's a big project planner, too, although not always a great project completer, so I've asked her to write her own lists of projects that she'd like to complete this week, as well as note any of the schoolwork that Syd and I are doing that she'd like to participate in. I'm hoping, this way, to get a little-more follow-through, and push past her "Oh, I know I said I wanted to do such-and-such, but I actually can't bear to put down my book for long enough to do it for real, and if you make me then I'll pitch a giant fit" inclinations.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons, Magic Tree House Club, LEGO Club, and hopefully lots of time leftover for catapult building and toy dinosaur taming and tire swinging (and playroom cleaning?).

THURSDAY: Syd's almost finished earning her Potter badge! This day's task is to make some art pieces; I think that we're going to try forming beads around paper clips. Last Thursday, the whole day was spent making swords, playing at our homeschool group's playgroup, and then dropping Will off at the library for several hours, so the rest of Thursday's activities are leftovers from last week. There are supposed to be thunderstorms THIS Thursday, though, so we'll either be super productive because of the rainy day, or spend the day in the basement watching movies to distract the kids from tornado sirens. Coin flip!

Hopefully, the storms won't spoil the kids' first 4H meeting on this night. I have a feeling that Will might really like to be on the Hippology Bowl team. ( I know, right? Hippology Bowl!)

FRIDAY: Math class is always a big hit (On the way home from last week's class, Will said, dismissively, "I understand negative numbers quite well"), and last week it turned out that A History of US was a big hit, too! I'm really liking it, as well, and I think it's going to be very useful for our Indiana study and the studies of the states that we'll be visiting on our big road trip this summer.

Syd's been planning to bake the cats a treat from a cat food cookbook that we own, but hasn't gotten around to it, so I put it on this day's work plan as a pleasant surprise. I'm also planning on having her start some more regular creative writing, and I'm hoping to tempt Will to join us. Incidentally, I'm researching non-writing methods of storytelling--videotape? Tape recorder? Stop-action film?

I really like the clip art in the Eyewitness books--they're great for timeline images!--so as Hammurabi's last hurrah, I think that Syd will really like choosing images from Eyewitness Mesopotamia to put on our big timeline.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: A Girl Scout program, perhaps a roller derby game, and Syd's first Trashion/Refashion Show rehearsal are all on the schedule, but this last weekend was so hectic (Birthday party! Nature class! Earth Hour! World Cultures Festival! My terrible, horrible, no good, very bad COLD!!!) that I may insist that when we're not with the Girl Scouts, or at the roller derby, or on the runway, we all just sit quietly on our butts on the couch.

And I better NOT be still sick!

Chicken Portraits

Our boys finally started practicing their little baby crows, which means we had to re-home them back to my friend. I could have probably kept them for a few more days, until the first real (loud!) crows came, but Grumpy Neighbor is still actively trying to manipulate us into getting rid of our chickens (Did I tell you that he offered to pay us $500 to get rid of them? Sigh), and so I think he'd probably call 911 or run over with a shotgun if heard so much as a single crow--so off the boys must go.

Before the two boys left, however, we took an afternoon to take portraits with them. These are in the same vein as our foster kitten portraits, only with chickens, they're even more silly:

Fluffball

Cluck and Peck, our two boys

 Cluck

Peck

Arrow

all four 

 watching them forage while out on a "field trip" from their yard

The girls held Cluck and Peck on their laps the whole trip out to my friend's farm to leave them. She'll wait to harvest them until they've grown up a bit more and she can be entirely sure that they're boys, and in the meantime she sometimes sends us photos of the two sitting on her porch rail and looking quite pleased with this free-range life that they've made their way into.

Our girls, meanwhile, don't seem to miss the boys a bit. Their coop and yard is perfectly comfy for the two of them, although they escape just often enough to drive poor Matt to distraction as he cobbles on yet another fence rail or wire bit to try to foil them--the good new is that he's perfectly on board now with my conviction that we must buy a new house that we can afford to double mortgage with this one while we prepare it to sell. A cobbled-together chicken yard just outside the master bedroom window is the last straw, really. A buyer could perhaps overlook the kid-painted front door, perhaps overlook the seashells glued to the bathroom door frame, perhaps overlook the big basement timeline, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to buy a home that has a chicken yard right outside the master bedroom window.

Except for me, of course, I adore it. And when we find a new house, I might do it again!

Recreating Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in Clay

The kids have been excited about this project for a REALLY long while. I told them about it, but then made them burn through a few weeks of Story of the World review questions, map work, and timeline cards.

But finally, FINALLY the review questions were memorized, the maps were filled out and colored, and the timeline cards were glued to our big basement timeline. We'd seen documentaries and read books on cuneiform, and I'd received several nice jpegs of cuneiform artifacts in the British Museum's collection (including some of the actual Code of Hammurabi, so woot!), so when I dragged out the clay bin and printed some word and alphabet charts from Google, the kids were ready to dig right in.

I suggested that they could carve themselves the correct triangle-shaped stylus, but after looking through all our clay tools, the little kid tried out a screwdriver--

-- and then switched to a toothpick, and the big kid started right off with a toothpick. There's a nice awl in the clay tools that also would have worked, but I think the toothpicks fit their hands better and looked less intimidating to use.

On this particular day, I just wanted them to explore writing cuneiform on clay. The big kid tried several figures but got frustrated when they didn't turn out as she wanted, and ended up with just one, but the little kid really took off and ended up with several nice slabs of writing: 

They looked pretty well like the cuneiform characters, too!

I think we'll use these slabs for the experiment found in the Story of the World activity book, but on another day I'd like to set the activity up again, along with a cuneiform alphabet, and have the kids create their names as keepsakes.

We'll do that in a couple of months though, after our road trip, because we're going to see Gettysburg, and until then, we're officially Civil War buffs!

Here are some of the resources that we used to study cuneiform:

• The Lifeboat That Saved the World: a Mesopotamian myth retold by the Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum.
• Hands-on History Mesopotamia: we didn't do any of the hands-on projects this time, but this series always includes a ton.
• DK Eyewitness Mesopotamia: the kids love the graphics and the bite-sized bits of information.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Biology: Horse Evolution on the Timeline

Our science right now consists of both horse biology and chicken biology--the kids are taking horseback riding lessons, and we have chicks!

It's mostly memory work stuff, these topics, because I still have my eye on starting an in-depth study of human biology later this summer, so the plan is to study classification, evolution, labeling of internal and external parts, life cycle, breeds, and stewardship for both creatures. Because horses and chicks are of special interest to the kids right now, their interest and engagement will aid their learning, while interacting with and caring for the actual creatures add depth and context and increase their capacity for taking in the material. But much of the actual content that they'll be exploring are actually foundational biology concepts that will build their overall knowledge base and enable me to add increasing depth and sophistication to their further studies.

Classification of horses made for a great research project (and how stoked were we when we finally learned what "odd-toed ungulate" means!), labeling is something that the kids work on every day as part of their memory work (their riding instructor also includes this, briefly, into their lessons), horse care is also covered during their lessons and through library books and videos, breed study is mostly still to come, although the kids have written reports about the horse breed that each rides during her lessons, life cycle is still to come (birthing videos on YouTube--yay!), and evolution was studied last week!

Our horse anatomy coloring book has a page on horse evolution, which the kids colored, cut out, and organized chronologically, then we added in a ton more modern horse ancestors using this online, interactive fossil map. I printed each ancestor off, then the kids cut out the images and important information and added each one to its proper place in the chronology:

I read out loud the info about each ancestor, we discussed how each one represented a change, and then it was downstairs to the big basement timeline, with stacks of horse ancestors, a pot of Mod Podge, and two foam paintbrushes.

It tortures me that our basement timeline isn't perfect--there's not enough room for everything (the lack of space in the Modern Age is critical), the layout of the epochs isn't even, and because it's so busy, it's too easy to accidentally place something in the incorrect decade, or even, in the prehistoric era, the incorrect millennium.

I don't know how you would fix that, though, without standardizing the entries beyond what would be fun for the kids. They like giant pictures, and entire coloring pages, and images printed from the internet, and large, messily-handwritten captions.

And so they glued up their links in the evolution of the horse more or less in the correct spots:

You can at least gather some facts from the messy timeline--horses come after the dinosaurs, and begin to overlap, towards this end of their evolution, with the beginnings of our record of human evolution. Much further down towards the present, we also record the horse's extinction in North America, and then its reintroduction.

And THAT leads to some interesting exploration of human history, and geography, and then leads pretty logically to breed study.

But first I think that we're going to watch those horse birthing videos on YouTube.

Story of the World Chapter Two Timeline Review

Our Story of the World Study looks mostly like this:

1. Week One: Listen to our current chapter on audiobook. Answer the quiz questions and review all prior quiz questions. Add the current quiz questions to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
2. Week Two: Listen again to our current chapter on audiobook. Complete the map work from the Story of the World Activity Book. Compare the completed map to our other geography references--Google Earth, our Montessori puzzle maps, our family atlas, etc.
3. Week Three: Read a picture book or watch a documentary related to our current study. Add new timeline cards to our materials, and glue them to our big basement timeline. Order all the timeline cards covered so far, and add ordering the timeline cards to the girls' list of material to practice daily that week.
4. Weeks Four and Beyond: Read more picture books, watch more documentaries, and complete other unit-based hands-on studies and related memory work until at least one of the kids feels ready to move on.

I always think it's exciting to add new material to our big basement timeline: 

It's still not a project that the girls ever show a lot of interest in outside of the school-time study that we do with it (although they do always perk up when I suggest putting something that they're otherwise interested in, some book or myth, on the timeline), but it makes me, personally, very happy to have it, and I think that one of these days they'll grow into it and get excited about it and take ownership of it.

Since we come back to Egypt again in Chapter 4, for Chapter 2 we'll be doing projects that deal specifically with the geography and mythology of Ancient Egypt. For books, I've checked out every single story about Egyptian gods and goddesses from our public library (yes, I AM that obnoxious!), and my hope is to have the girls record some sort of family tree/genealogy for each figure, as well as a summary of some of their stories. I'm not yet sure how this will work--a homemade book with a page for each figure and brief summaries, as well as video recordings of the girls re-telling their stories, perhaps?

Other projects that are in the running, as long as interest holds out:

• cookie map of Egypt--The girls are CONSTANTLY on the lookout for things to recreate in cookie form! I think we'll do a cookie of modern Egypt, and decorate with frosting and candy to represent the boundaries of Ancient Egypt, the Nile, and the location of major ancient monuments.
• A Coloring Book of Ancient Egypt depicting tomb art (we can do more of these in Chapter 4, when the pyramids are discussed)
• map of Ancient Egypt flip book
• labeled map of Ancient Egypt coloring page
• interpretations of the myths--I want to keep encouraging the girls to think about how stories are continually re-interpreted and used to give different meanings to different times (this will help when SOTW begins to avidly re-tell the Christian myths), so I'm considering having us watch Stargate all together, or listen to the audiobook of The Red Pyramid, which both contain some really fun re-interpretations of Egyptian mythology.
• paper models of the Egyptian gods and goddesses
• posters of the Egyptian gods and goddesses for matching games and memory work
• I SUPER want to buy these Egyptian gods and goddesses toys!!! I won't, though.
• Egyptian gods and goddesses coloring pages--these would be perfect for the book that I want the girls to make.

Okay, that's a crazy amount of projects, but it's okay, because we only have to do the fun ones.

And two chapters later, we can start mummifying things!