We Can Stay All Day

We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo!

How about you, you, you?

You can come, too, too, too!

Well, actually you can't, because we already went. Yay, day at the zoo! Having Matt come with us on a Sunday, even though it was CRAZY-crowded, caused the trip to not be the mom-chore that I had anticipated for tomorrow, but pure pleasure for today. We looked at stuff, I brought the zoom lens, I drooled over the Zoobooks in the gift shop (did you guys have those when you were little? They RULE!), there were butterflies, and then we came home.

And now I'm recharged and ready to get back to being super-busy tomorrow. Well, since it's a school holiday tomorrow make that super-SUPER-busy. So I'm not only planting in our community garden, and cleaning the bathroom, and finishing a dinosaur quilt, and putting some cloth diapers for sale on ebay, and making a rainbow felt bunting, but also playing LOTS of Uncle Wiggily, and going to the playground, and painting in the backyard, and baking cookies, and doing some Legos...

You know, your typical Monday stuff.

These Dinosaurs are for Monetary Gain

We are FINALLY back in the groove of business as usual over here. Meaning, of course, LOTS of business and good things that happen. We got the morning pain meds and antibiotics and bandage change done, with only one tantrum (big improvement!!!), and hit up our Montessori garage sale (and bought toy ponies and stuffed kitties and a board game about musical instruments and a wooden map of Europe puzzle and several children's craft magazines and a felt book about animal habitats with loads of little felt animals to put in it and a remote control T-Rex and another kit to paint a plaster T-Rex that I've been eyeing in the stores but it's been too expensive but this one is pretty much BRAND-NEW, SCORE!) and went to the Bakehouse for breakfast for Matt and the littles and coffee for me, and got free cookies and coffee cake there on account of our food took half an hour to come, and I love you, Bakehouse, and thanks for the goodies, but I am NEVER going in on a Saturday morning again.

And then Matt went to work out and the kidlets got so involved in that I actually got the chance to sew, which I have not done for a while now, THANK you infected lymph node.

I made:

 

and:

and:

Ah, bliss! You'll likely notice that these dinosaurs are also T-shirt fronts stitched to quilter's cotton in a log cabin pattern (Courthouse Steps, to be precise). These, however, are to be sewn into a quilt for my pumpkinbear etsy shop, or perhaps my May craft fair, for the season is again nigh.

Then, of course, I had to suck it up and submit to an item that the girls requested be put on the calendar almost a week ago, and I put if off as long as possible, but I could reasonably put it off no longer...

We ate lunch at China Buffet. Barf.

However, after China Buffet (the girls' favorite food items there? Macaroni and cheese, and ice cream. See? Barf!), we came back home, and while the girls and I picked interesting violets and followed the paths of bees and stared at spiders and pestered slugs, my Matt fixed up the compost bin and then assembled my most favorite item of summer infrastructure:

See, what did I tell you?

Bliss.

Dandelion Stir-Fry

My poor little lamb:It's been a bit of a job keeping her comfortable and content after the operation to drain and clean out that infected lymph node. She can breathe and think now, with the displacement of her trachea and the blockage of one jugular eased, but replacing those dangers are the active discomfort of that huge bandage around her neck, and the constant itching.

Oh, that itching!

We do have many distractions. We have Legos. We have Netflix (While her sister was at school, Willow and I watched a three-part Nova special on the evolution of humans. We are now experts on the subject). We have party planning. We have bubbles. We have our garden, in which we have just planted sunflower seeds:And we have dandelions. I have been wanting to cook with dandelions since last summer, just after dandelion season here, when dandelion season struck at 5 Orange Potatoes--seriously, dandelion syrup! Dandelion jelly! The awesomeness was overwhelming.

In consultation with Willow and I picked a mess of dandelion greens from our yard: Willow actually does this off and on all day, and so I tend to keep a Ziplock baggie of dandelion greens in the vegetable crisper for her. The greens are really the tenderest and tastiest BEFORE the dandelion flower emerges, but Will also honors no such distinctions, and so our greens contain a mixture of young, tender flowers, and the older, tougher, more bitter ones. No matter, really, as they're all going to be cooked.

Last night for dinner, I made Steve Brill's dandelion saute: There are loads of carrots and onions to go with the dandelion greens, and I added a sweet potsticker sauce to counter the bitterness of the greens until there was only tastiness left:And the saute was enjoyed with leftover pasta.

The little lamb has her huge bandage off now, although being left with a large, open incision, the large, sticky band-aid over which has to be peeled off and changed twice a day, is not exponentially better, IMHO, but as I always say, baby steps, my friends. Baby steps.

Oh, and hooray for narcotic pain meds!

Blowing Bubbles in the Garden with My Girl

While Sydney was at school the other day, Willow and I spent a calm afternoon out in the yard blowing bubbles:I don't know if you can see the big lump on the side of her neck, but it's about the size of Willow's fist. Late the other night she woke up crying and feverish, screaming that her neck hurt. Since I secretly read all those scare-tactic parenting magazines at the library, I immediately figured that it was meningitis and that she was going to die. I asked Willow to turn her head so that I could see if her neck was stiff, and as she turned I saw revealed that huge lump, which was not there when we put her to bed two hours previously, and I was forced to hasten the mental timeline leading to my child's death by quite a bit.

Fortunately, I am great in an emergency. Seriously, I am exactly the person that you want around you in a crisis. So ten minutes later, having driven under the speed limit and obeyed all traffic signs and signals, with wallet and insurance card and cell phone and ipod loaded with PBS Kids videos and Wee Sing mp3s, we were in the emergency room.

NOT meningitis, hallelujah. Lots of waiting and morphine and CAT scans and medical staff with questionable bedside manners and staff with great bedside manners and eavesdropping on other patients (this one guy accidentally stuck himself with his babymama's syringe! And she came to the ER with him! And they brought the baby! And then they yelled at each other!) and IV drugs later, the verdict became an infected lymph node. We got loaded up with drugs and sent home, and had one nice day to goof around in the garden--

--before we decided, in consultation with an ear-nose-throat surgeon the next morning, to submit Will to outpatient surgery that same day to drain the infected lymph node and clean it out. It was NOT fun, obviously, and I didn't tell Willow that it would be, but fortunately nothing has been too scary or too painful, and Will's big unhappiness today is primarily directed at the uncomfiness of the HUGE bandage on her neck and the itchiness that she can't touch just under it.

So our big plans for the near future include lots of Mythbusters, party planning for Sydney's birthday, and maybe some coloring pages. Oh, and apples. Lots of apples.

Easter Eggs are No Match for These Two

Painted wooden eggs hiding in the hay:Felted wool eggs hiding (sort of) on the wall:I covered some of the wooden eggs with a few coats of gesso before we painted them----which makes them look just a little more "eggy," don't you think?We made ample use of the plastic Easter eggs that we received in our Dinosaur Swap package from Craftster (thanks, 6iggle!):They were light enough to score some pretty sweet hiding spots:Of course, all of this was no match for my little bunnies----who are, as it turns out, VERY good egg finders:Yay for spring:
The girls are at a playdate and Matt is at work, so that means that any leftover chocolate rabbits belong, by rights, to me.

Nifty!

So all I needed to do was take a couple of photos of these Knifty Knitter lap looms so that I could list them in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:
And then I was all, "Wow! These looms are gorgeous!" And then I got REALLY carried away:

There's a possibility that I might start Willow with a this summer when we're in the car so much, and I, of course, have my Ravenclaw scarf that will likely be finished when I'm an old, old lady, but these Knifty Knitter looms are, alas, nothing but eye candy for me.

Although it is nice to have a photographic model that doesn't whine or make weird faces just as I'm snapping a photo.

Tulips in the Window

Willow has been very much her own girl lately, what with I Spy Fantasy, on cassette, and her guitar, leaving Syd and Momma with plenty of time on their hands for Syd and Momma stuff--paper chains, blueberry muffins, books about seeds and coloring pages about Easter, and other miscellany.

One of the novelties that we play with every so often is a set of window markers that I bought at deep discount sometime or other. They're not super-satisfying (I'm betting you could get better color saturation with straight dry-erase markers; must check sometime on a larger multi-color set of those), but we've been making a point lately to use what we have on hand, and that's why we've been baking with white flour after the whole wheat ran out and decorating our windows with these sort of pale window markers:As an experiment, I taped a stained glass coloring page to the other side of the window and traced it, thinking that Syd might like to color it in like a coloring page. That also wasn't super-satisfying, unfortunately, since you'd have to stay in the lines really well to make it work. Syd discovered that coloring over a previous mark would erase that mark--eh, just scribbling does just happen to be super-fun, so all was still well:And then my Matt brought me flowers home, also in pretty candy colors, and those get to go by the window, too:And did you notice? There's sunshine! Good for window decorations AND candy-colored flowers in a vase.

The Great Backyard Camping Adventure

No, we didn't rough it. If we had just a tent and an air mattress and some blankets, then we might have roughed it. But when we also have an extension cord and a power strip...well...

I read magazines by the light of a desk lamp that I brought outside and plugged in:
The girls played I Spy Fantasy on the computer:
Matt dropped by and brought us pizza, and stayed to watch a movie--

--although later he left. Wuss.

And for hours after the girls fell asleep, I hung out and read magazines and watched more Netflix, snuggled under our nice, big electric blanket, set to its hottest setting.

Ooh, but I didn't get enough sleep, because Willow snores, and my back hurts this morning, because the air mattress wasn't pumped up firm enough. That's probably roughing it, right?

Um, right?

A Montessori Family

We are going to be a Montessori family even as we homeschool. To that end, at our last family night together at this school, I asked the girls to show me their very favorite works, so that we can be sure to recreate them together at home.

Here we have the geo board with rubber bands:
I've been wanting to make one of those forever, anyway, and I also have instructions from a recent issue of for turning it into a small marble maze.

LOTS of scooping and transferring works:Sydney loves her sensory experiences, so I see lots of sand tables and rice tables and dried bean tables and river rock tables in our future.

Willow loves her photography, especially catching her sister:Sydney likes to smile for Willow just until Willow is a second away from clicking the shutter button, and then she'll hide her face as quick as she can, but Willow caught her this time.

Neither of the girls bring home these labelling works very often, but aren't they wonderful?

I'd like to have a large assortment of these kinds of activities at the ready to bring out whenever a child shows an interest in a relevant topic.

Willow loves the scrubbing station, which changes often--sometimes a gourd, sometimes a pumpkin, sometimes a big piece of driftwood, and sometimes this wonderful, large conch shell:

Sometimes Willow has the responsibility for washing some dishes at the kitchen sink, but one of the first things that I'd like to accomplish when we homeschool full-time is to rearrange the kitchen so that each child can be responsible for (and successful at) washing her own cups and plates after every use.

I have the making of lots of these types of geometry puzzles and manipulatives in mind:

There's a space in the living room that seems as if it would be a pretty good spot for temporary installations of a week or so. The electric football game hung out there for a while, for instance, before I got sick of it and it had to go live back in the playroom. Sometimes, instead of electric football, I imagine that a little science experiment could hang out there, such as this "Will It Float?" work that so absorbs the girls:And the math manipulatives!!!I don't think that I'll be doing number beads exactly the way Montessori does them, but I will be doing them, and yep, we'll be going all the way up to 9,000, too, because I find the visualization of this simple concept to be both amazing, and one of the foundations that makes the Montessori program itself so amazing.

Sydney also loves this little game:You each have a little basket of things, and there is a stack of cards in front of you. Taking turns, you draw a number, not letting your playmates see it, and count out the appropriate number of things in front of you. Then your playmates have to count those things and tell you what number you have. The kids LOVE it.

As they love dancing. Here they're all doing one of my favorites, Jump Jim Joe: The dance begins with one pair of children. After every verse, each child who danced must find a new partner, and then they dance again. So two children become four, who become eight, who become sixteen. By the fifth verse all the children in the class are dancing, and then they still do several more verses, because it's equally fun to mill around in the circle to procure your new partner as it is to Jump Jim Joe.

Since you're not under-the-rock dwellers, I'm sure you can imagine that we have taken a lot of heat for our decision to homeschool the girls after this year. And it's good to have these conversations, because our children's education is something that we should always participate in thoughtfully. But the one argument, and perhaps the only one that I've heard so far, that I find actually offensive is that I should send my children to public school in order to support public school. If everyone just pulled their kids out, public school would crash. Instead, parents should work to make a difference in their schools.

It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to support public school, and I do. It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to work to make a difference in my community's public schools, and I try. All citizens, whether or not they are parents, should do the same.

It is my responsibility as a parent to choose the best method of schooling for my own children. I firmly believe in a child's right to a free education, but I won't sacrifice my own children to that political ideal if I don't believe that the free education that they will receive will be the best education for them. Yes, I'll work for a better educational system, but I won't submit my own children to education that isn't already the best.

My children adore their Montessori school, and it is, for them, a terrific method of schooling. If we could afford to send them back next year, we would. If our public schools worked exactly like that Montessori school, we'd be even happier to send them there. But you know what? The girls are also going to ADORE homeschooling, and it is going to be, for them, also terrific.

But oh, we have been very happy in this place, too.

The Paper Chain Corollary: Numbers are Also for Writing

You thought I'd be done after the baby and I made a 40-link paper chain, didn't you? Well, I'm not! There's more learnin' to be had over here!

While Matt took the girls to a birthday party, I watched an episode of Weeds (season 2, a new addition to Netflix Watch Instant), and made flashcards using a Sharpie and 80 blank notecards. I wrote each number from 1-40 on one notecard, its number word on another notecard, stuck them back-to-back with a glue stick, laminated them, cut them out, and punched a hole in the top left corner of each one.

Now, every morning after Sydney tears a link off of her paper chain (it's quite fabulous, now that she's made her peace with it) and I tell her how many days there are until her birthday, I lay out maybe five of these flashcards, and Sydney finds the one that matches her number. Then I give her a fine-point dry erase marker and let her trace and draw on the flashcard for a while:

The plastic laminate allows the dry erase ink to be wiped off with a corner of dishtowel (or a sleeve, sigh).

When she's done playing, I give her the bookring, and she adds that flashcard to the others that she's collected. In 38 more days, she'll have the whole set!