Learning at Home and Everywhere Else

So this weird thing happens when anyone asks me about homeschooling.

I make it sound all lame.

Some mom at the playground innocently asks how homeschooling is going, and I get all excited and talk on and on and on, and I can see the mom's face sort of getting a funny kind of "oh, dear!" look on it as I talk, so I go on even more excitedly about even more great stuff, and then they ask a question about curriculum, and down it goes from there.

And they leave to go home and tell their partners, "Remember Julie? Well, she homeschools now, and I'm pretty sure that her kids just sit around and watch Spongebob all day."

We do not watch Spongebob. Well, the girls watch Spongebob, but only at the dentist, and they think that he's a piece of cheese, not a sponge. If you don't want your kids to watch Spongebob, you have to go to the pediatric dentist in Bedford, which is a half-hour drive from here.

One of the problems, I think, is that what excites me most about homeschooling, and thus what I talk on and on about, is often not what would excite most other parents about their children's education.

It excites me that the girls get to play pretend ponies for as long as they want, and never get interrupted.

It excites me that most days we bicycle to the park, and that park that's a block away is generally a three-hour trip, door to door.

It excites me that Willow doesn't even bother to ask for my help with Zoo Tycoon anymore, because she's way better at it than I am--"No, Momma, the spotted hyena needs a den to sleep in, not the bamboo bungalo!"

It excites me that sometimes the girls don't even get dressed all day, because they're too busy drawing, and playing, and listening to audiobooks, and lying on top of their bed staring out the window. If they don't feel like going anywhere or doing anything in particular, then we don't.

It excites me that I don't have to try to make the girls go to sleep at night if they're not sleepy, and I don't have to wake them up in the morning if they are.

It excites me that we can spend the whole day at the library, including the half-hour bike ride there and back, and we can stop at the park on the way, too, and at lunchtime we can walk over to another park to hear a concert.

Are those things nothing? They seem vitally important to me.

I always forget to bring up the stuff that I probably should be telling everyone about.

Willow can read anything you put in front of her--is there a certain grade level associated with that?

The girls have listened to the Magic Tree House audiobooks so many times that they can tell you all about Pompeii, the Titanic, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, the shoguns of China, and one-room schoolhouses.

They're quite looking forward to the Disaster Dioramas of Pompeii and the Titanic that I told them that we could make next week.

Willow is fascinated by human evolution. We all watched Ape to Man the other day when it was her turn to choose the movie, then we checked out the interactive timeline on the Smithsonian website, and then we had Matt print a bunch of pre-human bios to put on our basement timeline.

We're also building a miniature log cabin with twigs and hot glue, and a chia farm in the pony playset.

Sydney and I made half a dozen pinwheels that spin in the wind, and the next time we get to Lowe's we have a list of supplies that will improve our design immensely.

Every time we're in the car, we listen to The Story of the World, and it's the first time that I've really understood world history.

We took a field trip to an apple orchard. We took a field trip to a famous fossil site. We took a field trip to a different apple orchard.

On the two-hour drive to fossil site, Willow read Shel Silverstein poems out loud to Sydney, and both girls laughed and laughed and laughed.

Today we collected pinecones.

We also made bracelets out of UV-reactive beads, so that we'll know when to put sunscreen on.

Tomorrow we're going to bake a chocolate cake just for the hell of it.

Is that what I should be explaining about homeschooling?

Halloween Project: Monster Bread

Look what's hiding amongst the vegan hamburger buns:

GRRR! ARGH!

You can sculpt faces out of any low-rising bread dough, and bake it for the same amount of time that you'd bake rolls.

Don't even worry about the monster part--the oven will take care of that for you.

Ballet Girl, Baseball Girl

For the past several Saturdays, we've found ourselves enmeshed in an all-too-common, and fortunately for us, temporary, insanity--we've spent Saturday mornings, the ENTIRE morning, driving our children to and from their various activities, and cooling our heels while they perform them.

One activity is a definite keeper:

Our Sydney is a ballet girl, wouldn't you agree? She demonstrates one of those truths that I know about children and yet sometimes allow myself to forget--children, just like everyone, learn best when they're doing what they love. Sydney pays attention to her teachers, she follows directions, she takes turns, she tries her hardest--just what we want her to be learning. The ballet part is her business.

Willow comes with us to Sydney's ballet class, wearing her orange Sports Shorties team shirt that exactly matches the orange elevator down to the ballet studios:

She's happy to hang out in the hallway during Sydney's class, reading her latest Nancy Drew novel:

Then we head over to her sport:

 

Enjoy those photos, because those pictures of Willow, warming up with her dad, may be the only pictures that you ever see of that child playing baseball, for Willow has reminded us of another truth about children--children, like everyone else, do not learn well when they are not doing what they love. And what Sports Shorties has taught Willow is that she does NOT like team sports. She does NOT pay attention to her coach. She does NOT follow directions. She does NOT try at all. As soon as the coach starts to talk, a sweet, sweet man who is revered by all other children, just so you know, Willow retreats in a sulk to the sidelines, where she stays, facing in the direction opposite team play, until, exasperated, we drag her out.

Willow will not be showing up to the rest of her Sports Shorties classes. I don't have a problem with taking her there each week and letting her either participate or sit out, but watching her do it just makes ME too mad, so I'm calling that tuition done and gone in the name of making me a better parent. And, hey, our Saturday kid-shuttle just has to transport one kid now--yay!

In a few weeks Willow's ice skating classes will resume for the season. Ice skating, now, is a sport that Will LOVES. It's a solo sport, you know, and it moves you fast, and she's very good at it. It also has the virtue of taking place on a weekday afternoon, so it's not during family time, but part of normal homeschool time.

I doubt very much, however, that I'll have a performer in the ice show this year, but there is always Sydney's spring ballet recital to look forward to...

Fresh and New

There, now--don't these photos look so much fresher and happier than my old, blurry pics?

Little Dinosaur on a Vintage Dictionary Page

Skull and Crossbones on a Vintage Dictionary Page



Shout-out to Webster's! Of COURSE that is the exact dictionary that I use when I make my pinbacks.

And then, a for-real brand-new listing:

Original Crayon Rocket Pops



I might reshoot that one after I make my next batch of pops.

Willow Teaches Science: Watch Out, Solids!

In this episode, Willow teaches us about solids:

Remember, friends, that to change a solid's shape by throwing it against the wall? Well, that's just cheating.

To see the rest of Willow's five-part series explaining the states of matter, check out my shethecougar youtube channel.

Etsy Reshoots, or, Welcome to the Light Tent

Instead of doing the etsy work and craft fair work that perhaps I ought to have done this week, I spent it housecleaning, watching movies with the girlies (Ballet Shoes with one, and Ape to Man with the other--want to guess which kid is which?), joining them in all their little projects and fantasies, bicycling around the park, playing on the playground, reading and reading and reading, and planning some plans for the education of October.

However, now I'm beginning to feel the panic that is entitled "I MUST MUST MUST Get My Etsy Holiday Updates Done!".

So of course my Matty took the girlies off for a good long while today to watch football (football must be watched in an empty classroom on campus, on account of we don't have viewable TV here), and the perfect opportunity presented itself to get in a good, long etsy photoshoot.

If only it wasn't rainy and gross and overcast outside.

In other news, did I already tell you about my light tent? I found the plans, years ago, for an excellent DIY light tent to make out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon and it just, you know, never got done. Familiar tale. Anyway, at a garage sale this summer what do I see, but the exact same light tent that I was going to make, handmade very well out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon! I want to say it cost five dollars, but Matt says that it cost two, and he's the one who holds the money when we go to garage sales, so I guess he would know.

Storing this light tent is an absolute bitch, and yet I love it so.

Back to today--gross day outside, out comes the light tent inside. Want to see what it can make of a shot taken inside my dark living room on a dark day? Here you go:

For shooting pictures inside our house, which has absolutely no natural light to speak of, it's a dream.

The little tree pinback photos are much improved:

I'd tell you that tomorrow I'm going to keep updating my pumpkinbear etsy shop with even more pinback reshoots and list some new pinbacks and the red, white, and blue crayon rocket pops, but...

Tomorrow, we're going to the apple orchard. We're going to play more games and do more projects. We may make pinwheels out of watercolor paintings. We'll go to the park, and Willow might bring her skateboard instead of her bike. We'll make pumpkin bread. Perhaps we'll sponge paint orange pumpkins and black bats on the windows.

In other words, business will happen when it happens.

Willow Teaches Science: We're Lucky Air is Gaseous

Willow's Grandma Janie recently mailed her a copy of Science on a Shoestring, by Herb Strongin. The book contains loads of wonderful experiments that use really cheap and/or really readily available (circa 1970...I mean, mealworms???) materials. Will unwrapped it, flipped through it, picked out an experiment that she wanted to do, and, noticing that she seemed especially intrigued by the teacher's script offered in each lesson, I suggested that she be the teacher and I the student.

Will told me the supplies that she needed, we gathered them, and within ten minutes from the mailman leaving the book at our door, we were ready to roll. Here is Willow's first lesson, which will make you appreciate the wonderment that is a gaseous atmosphere:

I'm a little claustrophobic, so I'm gonna tell you right now that my nightmare tonight is going to be about being trapped in a solid atmosphere in which I cannot move or breathe.

And that's science.

Rikers Island Carrot Cake, to You I Say "Meh"

In our house, you get exactly the kind of cake that you want on your birthday.

This year, Sydney had a rainbow cake. Willow had a candy cake. I had a cookie cake. And our Matt, whose favorite cake is carrot cake, had the Rikers Island carrot cake.

Have you heard this story? It's not really an urban legend, since it was in the New York Times and all, but the story, uncovered by professional journalists, is that Rikers Island has delicious carrot cake.

Now, I don't know if there's something truly special about the Rikers Island carrot cake, or if it's, you know, just really good. I mean, the chocolate chip cookies at my elementary school were REALLY good, but it was nothing to interview the cafeteria ladies on Live at Five about or anything.

Anyway, the other obnoxious thing about this carrot cake is that the recipe, thoughtfully printed by the New York Times, is the exact recipe used in the jail. The EXACT recipe. It calls for 25 pounds of sugar! Unless you've got a contract with SYSCO, you're not making this recipe.

Matt broke the recipe down, dividing it into 1/25 of the original, and he and the babes baked it for his birthday. And then it was lovingly doused in cream cheese frosting by Miss Sous Chef #1--

--and Miss Sous Chef #2:

Unfortunately, we were all sadly disappointed by this cake. I don't know if perhaps it just doesn't divide well, and I am NOT going to make the full recipe to see, but it was eggy, and had a weird flavor, and just generally not nummy-licious like a birthday cake should be.

If I was in jail I bet it'd taste better.

Homeschool Field Trip: Musgrave Orchard

Chocolate Mint Really Smells Like Chocolate Mint



Apple Trees

Bees! (Behind Miss Goofy There)

Time to Think About Stuff

Freedom to Poke Grass Blades into Mysterious Holes

Sampling Cider

The Reddest, Most Delicious Apple Ever Eaten

We are also now experts on the workings of the cider press.

Craft Fair Tutorial: Display on a Stick

Things sell better if you don't just throw a pile of them on a platter on a table.

This has been a huge struggle for me, as I have pretty much zero design sense. It has been a lot of work, and a lot of thinking, and a lot of doing stuff wrong, and a lot of willingness to toss bad displays and make new ones, and a lot more thinking, and a lot more willingness to toss those new displays when they didn't work either, blah, blah, blah, but slowly, like YEARS slowly, my craft fair displays are starting, and I mean just starting, to come together nicely.

My main hindrance has always been a fear of spending money. Every nice craft fair display that I've ever seen seems to have incorporated a lot of purchased elements, and I am not even willing to thrift stuff to use just for a display. A lot of my display mistakes over time have come from me trying to cobble together something from what I already own that ends up looking cobbled together, or me trying to put something together as cheaply as possible that ends up looking cheap.

Ironically, a lot of the stuff that I've done that I've liked the most--the record bowl shopping cart display, the spray-painted EZ-Up, have been cheaper than those cheap-o projects. They tend to use found elements that fit my needs perfectly, and supplies that have other purposes in my art, crafting, or homeschooling, etc.

This stand-up display for any craft on a stick--flags, pinwheels, or my rocket pop crayons--came together just the same way. It utilizes an old cardboard box lid for a base, some of the plaster of Paris that the girls and I do craft and homeschool projects with, more popsicle sticks from our thrifted supply, and our artist's acrylic paints.

The first step is to fill the box lid with plaster of Paris. I wasn't sure how much to make, so I mixed up one batch at a time and poured it on top of the previous batch. Alternately, you could fill the lid with water and pour it off into a measuring cup to ascertain the volume of plaster that you'll want to mix.

As the plaster sets, you'll need to supervise it in order to make the holes that your sticks will fit into. Use exactly the same sticks as you use in your craft, although these sticks will end up with plaster and paint on them, and so they won't be suitable for your crafting afterwards.

Watch the plaster as it hardens (I brought a book, and a four-year-old who wanted to chat), and as soon as it will hold your stick upright, place all your sticks upright in it, exactly where you want the holes to be. I made more holes and closer together than will actually fit my rocket pops, so that I can rearrange my display in a larger variety of ways.

Keep watching the plaster, and when it's relatively stiff, but not fully hard, try to pull one of your sticks out. It should come out cleanly, if a little wet. If it takes a bit of plaster with it as it comes, hurry and get the rest of the sticks out, because that means that you've let the plaster set a little too long, and the last thing you want is a display full of sticks that won't come out.

As soon as the plaster is fully hard, put the sticks back in, because otherwise the holes will shrink as the plaster contracts. Every little while, pull the sticks out and put them back in to keep the holes clean and perfectly sized. Be mindful as you do this to put the sticks in and pull them out perfectly straight--until the plaster is fully cured, you can damage the holes by wiggling the sticks in their holes or pulling them at an angle.

When the plaster is fully cured, you should be able to put the sticks in and out of their holes cleanly and easily, and they should fit snugly. If any holes are imperfect, then cover them up when you paint--customers often want to pick something up and look at it and then put it back, and they'll be frustrated or worried if they can't put your craft back the way it came (if they're the kind that care about that sort of thing, and not the kind that'll just toss it anywhere. Ugh).

After the plaster has cured the amount of time called for in the instructions, put all the sticks back in their holes and grab your acrylic paints for some prettying:

And yes, I'm sorry, you do have to paint in the nude. It's sorta required.

Homeschool Science: Ack! It's Gak!

In other words, we love ourselves some polymers.

I've been wanting to make gak ever since we began having so much fun with oobleck, but even though borax lives in the grocery store, you would not believe how many months of regular shopping trips it took me to finally happen upon it. Don't be stubbon like me--just ask someone. Ask someone old enough not to look at you blankly when you say "borax" to them.

You will need:

• borax. Seriously, just ask.You only need 1/2 teaspoon of borax, but the store will make you buy an entire freaking box of it. Fortunately, borax is an excellent natural cleaner, and I've been using mine for laundry, on the bathtub, etc.
• 4 oz. bottle of Elmer's glue. I bought an absurd number of these glue bottles during the very good back-to-school sales, and they've been serving me well since.
• warm water, like warm from the tap, not warm from the teakettle.
• food coloring. It's fun.

1. Empty the entire 4 oz. bottle of glue into a mixing bowl:

The kiddos had trouble getting every last bit of glue out of the bottle, but the rest of the steps were no problem.

2. Fill the bottle back up with warm water from the tap, screw the lid on, shake it like a Polaroid picture, then take the cap back off and pour the warm glue-water into the bowl with the glue.

3. Find a cup or another small container, pour another 1/4 cup of warm water into it, then pour in 1/2 teaspoon of borax and stir to dissolve it.

4. Dump the borax water into the glue water and stir like mad for the precious few seconds that you'll have until the borax causes the glue molecules to link together in long chains. When that happens, you'll want to start kneading the mixture with your hands until it's an even consistency:

And then you play and play and play:

The gak is vastly less messy than oobleck, but it's still fascinating on a tactile level. The babes squished it and mooshed it and tore it and slammed it and stuffed into containers and unstuffed it and sculpted with it and spelled with it:

And then they put it in a Ziplock bag so that they can do it all again later.

Strange Folk 2010: A Novel in Several Chapters

Set-Up

Because you can't have enough tinsel.

Rocket Pops

This is a newbie craft, developed after I figured out how to do layered melted crayon molds. I was all freaking out before Strange Folk, on account of I ran out of white crayons (still plenty of reds and blues) after making only four true-to-life rocket pop crayons, and you can't just bring FOUR of something to Strange Folk, unless it's four, like, four hundred dollar somethings. Anyway, I finally figured that I'd just make a ton of randomly-colored rocket pops, too, just to fill out the display.

By Sunday tear-down, wanna guess how many rocket pops I had left?

Four. Every one of them was red, white, and blue.

I Bet She'd Also Like a Record Bowl...

So Matt was sitting at the picnic benches over by the World's Largest Sandbox, watching the girls play, and some guy sitting near him commented to some other women that he'd bought the exact same journal that she was holding. The woman replied that she'd bought the journal for her niece, who liked to write songs. The guy told her that he'd bought his journal for his daughter, an anthropologist, because it was "kinda Indiana Jones-looking" (nota bene: Indiana Jones isn't an anthropologist).

The woman said that her niece travels around the country. "She has an album coming out this month," she added.

The guy said, "Oh, wow. That must be exciting for her."

The woman said, "You might have heard of her. Her name is Taylor Swift."

The guy said, "That doesn't sound familiar. I'll look her up tonight."

My own reply would have been: "Oh, yeah? My daughter's name is Temperance Brennan."

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia!

Or, as one customer squealed upon sighting them, "Look! It's a cup full of happiness!"

Go Away!

Do you know what hay means at an outdoor craft fair? Rain, that's what it means. Standing outside our tents in the rain, chatting (on account of there was nothing else to do, like, you know, wait on customers or anything of that nature), I told the guy who had the tent next to me that it had rained at every single craft fair that I have done this year. Because it has.

"What?!?" He shouted.

I was about to reply, "I know, right?", when he exclaimed, "Me, too!!! I thought it was just me!" And he's full-time--he does WAY more craft fairs than I do.

It used to never rain on me. I used to never even own a tent. And now, in the midwest at least, it only rains when I have a craft fair.

Future One-Car Family?

On the way home in the middle of the night, AGAIN in Effingham, something horrible happened to the van. Matt got us home by driving 45 mph the whole way, the maximum speed at which the car would travel before the horrible things happened, and fortunately the highway's minimum posted speed limit.

We can't afford to have any work done to that car, and I mean ANY work, no new tires, no oil changes, nothing, but fortunately I come from a people who know that a non-working vehicle is just four cinderblocks away from being yard art.

Stuff!

I plan to put all the proceeds from Strange Folk toward making Pumpkin+Bear an official biz, so I couldn't do much shopping there, but I did allow myself one spree, at Circa Ceramics across from my tent:

Say hello to my new most favorite coffee mug ever! It has a typewriter on it! Because I'm a writer! Although I don't use a typewriter! That would suck! I love my new mug!

On the last afternoon of the festival, the awesome folks at Rainbow Swirlz organized a little trade. I gave them a baby bag made from a vintage superheroes T-shirt for this great little four-month-old superhero that they happen to have birthed, and they gave me...

Can you see it? In the middle, next to Miss Island of the Blue Dolphins there? Here's a close-up:

It's my new most favorite bag ever. I love it so much that I was wearing it around yesterday before it even had anything in it. Not only is it super, but it reminds me of my family. Willow is the dinosaur. Sydney is the pink. Matt is the RAR.

Or should that be RAWR?

Day 1 of 2

Strange Folk says hi!

Outdoor Girls

At the Hoosier Outdoor Experience, sponsored by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources  (the fishing folks), the girlies indeed had lots of new and precious outdoor experiences:

Bow Hunting



Pony Rides

Shotgun



Motorcycle (see the training wheels?)

Fishing

Bow Fishing

Handmade Instruments and Wood Chip Necklaces

New experiences. Precious memories. And a free coloring book!

How Does My Chia Garden Grow?

Very well, thank you.