Salt Dough Fossils with the Magic Tree House Club

The girls have been having a fabulous time in their Currclick Magic Tree House club, their first online class:

Every month in Magic Tree House Club there are quizzes, small presentations based on facts from the books, and a project. Both girls LOVE it! Will has a little buddy who's also in the club, and they chat together in the club's chat room (each on their own computer in their own house across town from each other) before the meeting. During the meeting, the leader, who is live on her webcam, asks questions to the kids, and they can answer by typing. She'll often acknowledge individual children and their answers, and both girls seem to think it's pretty darn great to get your name said live on webcam. The club meets once a week, but all the meetings in the same month cover the exact same material from the exact same book; this is actually pretty convenient, because although Willow attended the first week's meeting in March, Syd was napping during that hour. Syd wanted to attend the second week's meeting instead, but it turned out to be gorgeous outside that day and I didn't have the heart to call her inside to sit at the computer for an hour when the club's meeting time rolled around. Instead, Syd attended the third week's meeting, and Willow, who'd already done the entire thing weeks ago, was still drawn back in and stood beside her the entire time, helping her type her answers.

For March, the club read Dinosaurs before Dark--there were presentations on Pennsylvania and a few of the dinosaurs mentioned in the book, and a demonstration on making salt dough fossils. We waited to do these until after Syd had attended her club meeting, too, but in the week since, we have done this project THREE TIMES!

Yeah, it's fun.

You can probably figure out the premise on your own: fossils are impressions left by organisms or artifacts, and salt dough, since it's transformed by baking to be solid (reminiscent, sort of, to the way that fossils are made permanent in nature--not by the same process, of course, but it gives you the idea of how it can come about), can be used as a model to make impressions and show off the resulting fossils.

You'll need plenty of salt dough (here's my favorite salt dough recipe). While the salt dough shouldn't be crumbly, of course, it should be on the dry side, since if it's at all sticky it will pull at the artifact as you're lifting it up and thus won't make a true impression. Using my favorite recipe, I still kneaded in at least another 1/4 cup after it was otherwise mixed, until the salt dough felt perfectly smooth and slightly stiff. It also helps to refrigerate the dough for a few hours first, so you can feel free to make it ahead of time.

Tear off a piece of salt dough, roll it into a ball between your hands, and then flatten it with your hand right onto the baking sheet that you'll dry it on. Then you can press whatever artifacts you like--leaves, shells, toys, etc.--right into the dough, and lift them straight up again.

The girls did a few leaves and flowers, but it turns out that game piece fossils was really where the fun was at:

dominoes

Scrabble tile

We poked a straw completely through the dough at the top of the fossils to make a hole in case we wanted to hang them later, and then we dried them in a 200-degree oven for over two hours. 

I like my salt dough to be REALLY dry, so I let these actually begin to brown before I took them out:

And when they're finished, you can paint them!

Have I mentioned yet this Spring how thrilled I am to be back to doing all our messy crafts OUTDOORS?!? I remember when Sydney was a baby and how I'd never felt more joyful than I did at simply being able to allow her to eat her yogurt outside.

Because the baking is a little unpredictable, the salt dough fossils don't always turn out perfectly. Some, for example, can rise a bit, distorting the impression. It's great when this happens, though, because it demonstrates the fact that real fossils DO distort, and the result can look very different from the original impression.

periwinkle flower, now nearly unidentifiable

Do you like this little table that Matt dumpster-dived for me a few weeks ago?

Of course, I have to be over-the-top, so I added glitter to my fossils while the paint was still wet:

That particular fossil is now hanging from our key rack.

As for the other fossils, I'm not sure if we'll actually DO anything with them, but don't they look marvelous, all lined up in a row?

I can't believe it, but we made salt dough fossils AGAIN yesterday. This time, the kittens helped, but that's a story for another post.

Skipping

Sydney's been working hard at her skip counting lately. She can skip count by fives--


--and tens:


I've moved her to a first grade arithmetic workbook for math drills for a bit before we tackle more skipping, but Will, who thrives on rote memorization (go figure), is going to do the 25s and 50s and hundreds before she starts on money math drills.

As further proof of Willow's pleasure in verbal patterning and recall, I present to you this lovely ditty that she created:


Doesn't that just make you want to...I don't know, not eat breakfast?

Still Life for Sydney

Yes, there really is all that magenta:

In their shared bedroom, each of the girls has one long shelf that is for her stuff alone. They put their favorite toys there, their favorite artwork, their favorite natural finds, their various little ribbons and medals, etc. Sydney also has quite a stash of make-up and jewelry on her shelf, but that's the subject of another post, sigh.

I recently wrote a review for Inca-Eco yarn for Crafting a Green World; I allowed Sydney to choose the color of yarn that we received, and since her choice, Wine, complemented not only the paint on that bedroom wall (and our tulips!) but many of Sydney's treasures, AND fit her own personal color palette so well, I wrapped her special shelf with the yarn to make a better display for treasures such as this:

It looks so nice (in my humble opinion), that I'm now officially on the garage sale/thrift store lookout for other yarns in which to wrap the rest of the girls' shelves.

Skip Counting with Coins on the Hundred Grid

Our family is going to be participating in Lemonade Day in our town this Spring, and to that end I've reintroduced the money math unit that we first began some months ago when Willow got interested in coin collecting for a while.

My goal is (taking extra care with pricing, of course) for Willow to be able to do all the math and make all her own change at the girls' lemonade stand--whether or not this goal is realistic, I have no idea!

First step: skip counting by each of the coin denominations, followed immediately by keying the counting to the denomination. In other words, I want both girls to be able to easily skip count by fives, tens, and 25s at least up to 100, to count by hundreds up to at least 1,000, and to recognize that skip counting by fives, say, is the same as counting nickels.

The girls have been creating their own skip counting reference sheets using, of COURSE, our ubiquitous hundred grid. For nickels, for example, one day's schoolwork was simply to count off the fives and color in each five in their hundred grid. The next day's schoolwork (and the next!) was to memorize the fives, until they could recite it easily.

When a girl had her fives down cold, I gave her a new hundred grid, asked her to put a nickel down on each five, and then use the chart as a reference to solve a page of math problems:

The problems are all just iterations of how much a certain number of nickels equals. To solve the problem, the kid can either skip count over that many nickels, or just count over that many nickels, and then move aside that nickel. The number underneath is the correct answer!

Once the kiddos have all the skip counting and coin denominations memorized, I'm going to send them through the math drills in our Kumon money math workbook as well as some fun projects from my Money Math pinboard. And then when Lemonade Day comes around, providing I can convince the children not to price their lemonade at 63 cents or $1.07 or something else that will require a child to do twenty minutes of abacus work for every transaction, I think we may just have it made!

P.S. It's just occurred to me that I should also teach them to count by tens when beginning at 5. AND I should be mixing more subtraction drills into the prep work, especially two-digit subtraction.

Or I could just encourage the girls to price everything they make at one dollar?

Make Your Own Gummies Kit Giveaway

One of my favorite things about blogging "professionally" over at Crafting a Green World is the occasional treat that a sponsored review or giveaway brings to us. Basically, every now and then a company sends me a free something or other to play with and then write about at CAGW, and then they offer a second thing as a prize for a giveaway that I also host there. My girlies and I have reviewed craft kits and ebooks, and I actually have next to my desk right now two different yarns and an eco-friendly paint set that I also need to get my butt into gear and review soon, and a couple of days ago we played with the Make Your Own Gummies kit from Glee Gum:

smoothing out the cornstarch bed

digging out molds with her fingers

 stirring together the carageenan gel and the sugar/dye powder

dripping the melted mixture into the molds

yum!!!

Anyway, all that is to say that I'm currently hosting a Make Your Own Gummies kit giveaway over at Crafting a Green World. You should enter!

Foster the Kittens

We have some new houseguests:

Dustbunny, Septra, Lord Pounce, Lady Whiskers, and Hearty are visiting us from our local Humane Association. They were weaned from their mother the moment they were lifted out of her enclosure and into our carrier, but they've been solid food champs from the beginning, they're darn good with the litter box as long as the girls remember to change it every morning...

...Oh, and we love them a lot:

 Being babies, they do a lot of sleeping-- 

But being babies, they're also lively and playful and fun and just stinkin' adorable and they make us so happy:

Our jobs as foster parents are not just to keep the kittens in fresh food and clean water and to change their litter, but also to socialize them to family life. By the time they're ready to go back to the Humane Association for neutering and adoption, they should be disciplined about their litter box, they should know that biting and scratching humans is unacceptable, they should be comfortable with as many different types of people and animals and noises and environments as we can introduce them to, they should welcome human affection, and they should be very, very, very used to being handled:

We've got that part nailed down already, don't you think?

We always love our foster kittens so much. We're their first family, in a life in which we hope they'll only need one other, and even knowing that we'll be giving them back in a month, we love them wholeheartedly. And more than all the training, all the discipline, all the discouragement from scratching our hands or pooping on our carpets, it's that background of being so loved (as well as their luck in being cute little kittens) that is our gift to them, that gives us hope that when we send them back and they're left to negotiate the world without us, they'll be okay. 

Huh. Not terribly far off from raising kids, is it?

P.S. If you're curious, this is why we choose to foster kittens.

Walking on Rainbows, or, I Let My Kid Paint My Sidewalk

Sydney had a Big Idea.

If you don't know by now that 1) I don't give a flip about our property value, and 2) I let my kids do really weird things in the name of art, then you don't read my blog, but you clearly do read my blog, so it therefore will not surprise you that Sydney wanted to paint our sidewalk like a giant rainbow.

I thought it was a brilliant idea, frankly, and together we mixed up a rainbow's worth of tempera (plus pink, because that's just how the kid rolls).

It was a beautiful, mild, March afternoon, so Sydney started painting. She painted--

--and painted--

--and painted!!!

We live about a half-block from a wonderful park, and thus always have lots of friendly neighbors passing by. I hope they've gotten somewhat accustomed, over the years, to seeing naked children painting each other in the yard, or painting vehicles in the driveway, or plucking dandelion leaves and popping them into their mouths, or climbing six feet into the fork of our silver maple and then LEAPING to the ground, etc., but I'm afraid that our property is never one that just simply blends into the neighborhood.

As Syd worked all afternoon, and I went back and forth from keeping her company in the yard to making dinner to getting some writing done to tidying up in the living room (again), I could see the foot traffic notice Syd's work. Most people just took a long look as they passed, but some people stopped to watch Sydney paint for a while, one couple took some photos, and a few folks paused to chat for a bit--at one point, as I was writing on my laptop near an open window, I heard someone say something to Sydney that I didn't catch, but then she responded, "Oh, I'm allowed to talk to you; I just can't come up to you in case you snatch me."

That at least roughly approximates what I actually told her about interacting with adults outside of my presence, so I'll take it for now!

By the end of the afternoon, just in time for Daddy to come home and be surprised, and with ample time left to tidy away the paint cups before we walked over to Chocolate Moose after dinner for a Thin Mint blizz, the sidewalk was indeed painted like a giant rainbow:

It's bright and vivid and super-saturated, and won't rub off on your shoes as you dance on it:

The paint is student-grade powdered tempera, mixed a little thicker than the directions call for in order to get those vivid colors, and so of course it will wash off eventually. A rain shower or two, a week or so of steady wear, and then it will be a whole other pleasant game to spray the rest of it off with the garden hose while watching the colors run together and dissipate into the grass.

But of course, that's later, when the novelty of the artist's temporary installation has worn off. For now, Sydney is flush with pride at her major accomplishment, happy in the many sincere compliments that come her way from us and from total strangers on the street. She also likes her rainbow sidewalk pretty well herself, as you can see:

That kid is a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.

We used:

Franklin's Sub-Par Cookies

We have a happy history of making the recipes featured in storybooks. The big kid has actually made Amelia Bedelia's cake several times over the past 18 months or so, checking out the book each time to get the recipe, and the kids often ask to make food from their Dr. Seuss Cookbook (We've never actually made the green eggs and ham, but we did make the Pink Ink Yink Drink last week).

A couple of days ago I read Franklin and the Cookies to the little kid, and behold! In the back of the book was a recipe for FRANKLIN'S COOKIES!!! Even more amazingly, we actually had all the ingredients for the cookies (sugar and chocolate chips are hard to keep in our house, because we tend to use them up as soon as we buy them, and then we're just out until the next grocery store run), so we hopped to it almost immediately.

I was a little suspicious of the recipe because it called for a LOT of sugar, and it did some weird things, like not asking the child to cream together the butter and sugar, or instructing her to mix the dry and wet ingredients separately--reminds me of how I used to cook before I knew better, actually, which is why I was suspicious.

And, yeah...

The bad news is that it's not a good cookie recipe. The cookies spread beyond all reason, so that the spacing that you see above resulted in basically a giant cookie cake-type creature. They were WAY too sweet, and since the sugar was never creamed, you could actually see the sugar crystals in each cookie.

But of course, that's just my boring adult perspective. To the little kid, of course, and as it should be, these cookies were perfect. They were sweet, they were chocolate, they were Franklin's own freakin' cookies!

And she made them all by herself. How good does that taste?

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!

Goodbye, Mothering

I almost feel like I'm selling my babies' babyhood:



I'm selling endless mornings hanging out in the playroom at Bloomington Area Birth Services, flipping through their Mothering magazines, engaging in fascinating conversation with other new mothers about the all the minutiae of our precious babies.

I'm selling a second round of those endless mornings, flipping through the same Mothering magazines, this time much less fascinated by the minutiae discussed by the first-time mommies around me. Diapering? Sleeping? Is she eating enough? Eh, I worried about all that stuff the first time around.

I bought my own subscription, I read every single article, I looked up the authors to read what else they'd written, I examined every ad, then looked up those web sites--it was my first (not nearly last) experience of feeling aghast at the prices put on unfinished wooden toys, or the kinds of woolens that can't be put in your washing machine.

I'd mark certain articles for Matt to read, and he'd come back to me, magazine in hand, saying things like "One of their kids had chicken pox and so they got all the other kids in their playgroup sick ON PURPOSE?!?". Ah, silly boy, with his own first (not nearly last) experience of some unique parenting perspectives.

I kept these magazines what feels like forever, gathering more, lending them out to pregnant friends, getting them back a year later sometimes and rediscovering them myself.

It's always sad to give away something else that signifies, to you, that you don't intend to have more children (especially if you kind of maybe might want more, just a little). Selling our cloth diapers felt the same, as did putting out the turtle sandbox, and the Duplos, and the board books at our last garage sale.

Of course, when I was looking through these magazines to write their description for my ebay listing and I found the magazine for Sydney's birth month and year, I set that one aside from the sell stack altogether. When she's a great grown-up girl and she reads for herself the parenting magazine that I was reading the month that I gave birth to her, will she be touched? Amused?

Or horrified like her poor father?

Deep Breath

I'm pleased to confess that my yesterday ended much better than it began. 

I'm supposed to remember that if I'm having a bad day, we should just leave the house, and unfortunately I did not remember that, but fortunately a good friend texted me not long after I finished writing my post to tell me that she and her kiddos were hanging at the park just down the street from us. When I got that message, I tell you, we were out of the house thirty seconds later and at the park the next minute.

Fresh air always helps, the girls and I were thrilled to get away from each other in the wide open spaces, and whether or not, in the running around and shrieking and pretend kitty games that my kids played with their little friend, they took the time to confess to her what a nightmare their mom had been all day, I certainly found relief in confessing to my dear friend what a nightmare those kids of mine had been (and, yes, what I nightmare I had been, as well). She comforted me by confessing all the nightmare things that she and her own kids had been up to lately, and then we settled down for a couple of hours of happy conversation while following her toddler around on the grass. 

We stayed at the park until dark, by which time Matt had come home, too, and heard the whole story. After we walked back home I shut the door of our study/studio and finished my etsy orders while watching re-runs of The Colbert Report; in the other room, I do believe that Matt clarified some very important issues of policy and procedure with the children, and together they tidied the living room and kitchen, figured out what to eat for dinner, and steam mopped those sticky floors!

Here's my current work in progress, now that (I can't believe it!) school and work are done for the day (what did Matt SAY to those children? Frankly, I don't even want to know...), and the only other activities on the docket are baking cookies, playing outside, and attending our online Magic Tree House Club meeting later:

Two dozen sets of rainbow birthday candles--that's 168 candles! I might get completely caught up on my entire Hulu queue with this order.

The Symbolic Smoothie

I have this fantasy of my days:

I wake up, and while I enjoy my morning coffee and newspaper, my girls fix themselves breakfast and then begin their schoolwork. After the newspaper has been read and the coffee drunk, I join them, and with many a break to read or play or just relax, together we work through the approximately two or so hours of schoolwork and household chores that make up the entirety of our daily responsibilities. After that we're free as birds for the rest of the day--to the park? To the creek? To the garden to plant some beets? The girls play while I finish up etsy orders and writing jobs, and with that out of the way, perhaps we get out the art supplies, or bake some cookies. Later that afternoon, dinner prep is easy in our clean and tidy kitchen, and the girls are excited to help steam vegetables or shape bread dough into rolls to bake. When my guy gets home, he finishes dinner while I finish my mile on the treadmill, then we eat together, have a quick family clean-up time, and then do something fun before the girls go to bed and Matt and I get some time to ourselves.


This is a total fantasy. It has never happened.

The reality is this:

Today I wake up early and groggy, after not having slept well (I often don't sleep well). Over my morning coffee and newspaper, Syd whines about what she did NOT want for breakfast--not frozen waffles, not cereal with milk, not yogurt with granola, not frozen smoothie pops, not a peanut butter sandwich--while Willow, naked, drags the library books out all over the carpet and then sits down to read in a big pile.

After I finish, I clean the remains of last night's dinner off of the table (which is supposed to be Matt's job) while Syd, who has just now figured out what she'd like to eat, sets out a gigantic breakfast for herself and her sister, including four separate glasses (which I'll have to wash) of the exact same kind of juice. Even though my rule is that you must eat at a table or outside, she overturns the recycling bin, spilling paper and cardboard across the floor, and sets three glasses of juice on the overturned bin, and one on the floor. I walk by, ask her to move everything to a table, and as I am in the act of speaking to her she steps backward, knocking the glass of juice on the floor all over the floor. She then attempts to blame her sister so that she won't have to wipe it up.

When that doesn't work, Syd goes to the kitchen for the spray cleaner and comes back with the spray bottle of Murphy's Wood Soap solution that doesn't work well on sticky messes, so I offer to trade her for the vinegar spray and go to the kitchen to get it, seeing that in the middle of the kitchen floor is the empty bottle of juice, with yet another juice spill, totally abandoned, on the floor beside it.

Syd does a lousy job wiping up the messes so that both floors are still sticky when she's done, so I ask her to do it again, whereupon she throws a big fit and then does another lousy job, so now I need to steam mop both the kitchen and the living room.

During this, Will has wandered outside. I look out the window to see that she's STILL not wearing pants, so I yell for her to come back inside and get dressed. Of course, she leaves the back door open, which is currently a dangerous practice since we have five foster kittens in the house.

I ask the girls if they'd rather do schoolwork or chores first, and schoolwork is the winner, so Will works on her presidents poem (she's got them memorized up through Grover Cleveland so far) without throwing a fit, and Sydney works on putting the months of the year in order with the goal of getting them memorized. She DOES throw a fit because she doesn't like to get them wrong, but she does it, and then reads me a Bob book, and then I read to her a chapter from a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., while Will plays in her room. Will offers to read to her for a while after that, so I work for nearly an hour on a few huge etsy orders while they read together peacefully.

When I can hear that they're done reading, I tell them I'm going to take a shower, and ask them to put their books away and get started on their chores while I'm showering. Somehow, in the space of the two minutes that it takes me to undress, the girls manage to get into a giant fight and Willow, angry at her sister, announces that she's going to take a bath, then gets mad when I tell her that I'm going to shower first and she's going to do her chores.

Obviously, when I'm done with my shower, no chores have been completed--not only is their room not cleaned (something that they do every single day, so how they can wreck it every single day is beyond me, and the dishwasher not emptied, and their teeth and hair not brushed, but their toys are still all over the living room, their dishes and uneaten food from the last two meals are still all over the kitchen counters and the table that I've already cleaned off once today, their library books are still all over the floor, their schoolwork stuff that I've stacked neatly on the coffee table is somehow scattered all over (but not completed, of course), and those juice glasses are still on that overturned recycling bin, with paper scattered everywhere. Have I mentioned that everyone is supposed to clean up after themselves?

I send them to their room to spend the entire five minutes that it should take the two of them to clean it together while I clean around their messes in the living room and the kitchen, because I'll be damned if I'm going to pick up after two such capable children like a maid. Of course, such cleaning is basically ineffective, since I can't vacuum or mop with their crap all over the floor, and I can't load the dishwasher while it's still full, and I can't even throw away yesterday's newspaper since the recycling bin is overturned with juice glasses on top of it. And off course the back door is open again, so there has to be another kitten count.


I'm hungry for lunch, so I remind the girls that they need to stop playing in their room and get it cleaned, and ask if they'd like smoothies. They both say they would, so I make smoothies, dish them out, clean the blender, tell the girls that their smoothies are on the counter for them, and drink my own smoothie while doing some work on the computer.

After lunch I really want to get out and enjoy the lovely day, but I can't stand the fact that the kids still have not done the things that I've asked them to do, so I do the thing where I move my computer work to where they are and nag at them every time they stop working until even I get utterly weary of my own voice. In retaliation, the girls are doing the thing where they work as slowly and inefficiently as possible and stop working the second I stop nagging them, so their bedroom is still wrecked, the living room is still wrecked, and the dishwasher is still full. The library books do get put away, but only by ignoring the fact that it takes Willow a full hour to do so, as she stops to basically read every single book as she puts it away.

It's now 3 pm, and the day, in my opinion, is in ruins. I'm unhappy, the kids are unhappy, the house is wrecked, the etsy orders are unfilled, the schoolwork is not done, the day has not been enjoyed, and I haven't even unfolded the treadmill. I go into the kitchen to get some water and here is where I spy my breaking point:

Willow's smoothie, the smoothie that she said she'd like me to make for her, the smoothie that I did make for her, the smoothie that I set out for her and told her was ready to eat, the smoothie made in the blender that I washed, the smoothie in the glass that I'll wash later, with the straw that will likely be left somewhere for me to pick up and throw away and wipe under, the smoothie containing the expensive frozen fruit and the homemade nutella that I made yesterday, is sitting on the counter, hours later, completely untouched. Sydney's smoothie, as I discover when I go searching for it, has been partially drunk, but it's sitting out on the back deck, glass not rinsed and put in the sink, straw not thrown away, leftover smoothie not poured into a popsicle mold and put in the freezer to enjoy later.

I know, I know--I have happy, healthy, bright children who enjoy their lives. I have a lovely little house that I should enjoy keeping tidy, and a little extra income from those etsy orders and writing jobs. If I'm a crap disciplinarian and I can't keep my floors unsticky, well, that's my own fault, and if I can't get my kids to settle down to memorize their months in order or their five times table, well, they're probably better off unschooling anyway. You don't have to tell me how silly my own personal little pity party is.

Eh, maybe I'll just get my own work done and ignore the little hellions for the rest of the day while they happily raise hell, I'll walk on sticky floors, I'll eat a bowl of yogurt and granola for dinner and let Matt figure out what he can cook in a dirty kitchen with no clean dishes, then when the girls go to bed, it's margaritas and a Toddlers and Tiaras marathon on Netflix for me. And tomorrow, my fantasy of the perfect homeschooling day will certain come true, won't it?

Um...won't it?

Checkmate!

I normally don't let my kids win when we play games. In most board games, like Sorry or Monopoly, or games of chance, like War, they've got enough of a fighting chance without me throwing the game, and in other games, like Scrabble or Quirkle, we don't keep score at all, and in games of skill or logic, like chess or poker, I don't think it's reasonable for them to expect to win the majority of the time when playing adults, and instead I encourage them to focus on the pleasure of a game well played, and the etiquette of good sportsmanship. Syd still throws the occasional fit when she loses a game, and needs to be reminded that a competitive game requires an opponent with the same skill set, and a game of chance chooses its own winners, and good sportsmanship is a behavioral requirement in our family.

It's funny, then, that before Will's latest chess competition, I spent several weeks deliberately throwing games to her. Will loves to play, and has great strategy for a kid her age, but she doesn't tend to aim for checkmate, which means that she tends to lose games against kids who may be less adept players, but who focus all the strength of their young wills into mating her king. Of course Will doesn't care, because she just likes the play, but before this latest competition I wanted to gently, very gently, encourage her to play more aggressively for checkmate.

Argh, such a fine line to walk! Should I focus her at all, or just let her be? Was I sending the message that good sportsmanship means that you can't be competitive? Am I now sending the message that a game isn't fun unless you're trying to win? What message does it also send that 99.9% of the other children at these competitions are boys?

I still can't decide.

Nevertheless, for a few weeks before the competition, Will and I played chess games in which she had a special assignment: checkmate Momma! To take the dive while not make moves so ridiculous as to ruin her good strategies (which depend on logical counter-moves), I pretended that I was playing speed chess, giving myself zero time to contemplate before moving.

And it was--as chess ALWAYS is--fun!

Will has a special skill for eating away her competitor's pieces, whether or not she's gunning for checkmate, so that often her opponents with their laser focus on checkmate don't even really notice the attrition until they suddenly realize that they've basically been forced into a draw:

 How fun!

Also fun, it turns out? That elusive and long sought-after checkmate!

Will had a lot of fun in her chess competition and did well there, but without another competition on the horizon until September, we're back to our normal play. My new chess goals for Will are to encourage her to play more games with the children at her bi-monthly chess club, and to begin learning some formal opening, endgame, and piece-specific strategies that she can then have in her memory to utilize during play.

However...when I think about some of the child (and adult!) behavior that I've witnessed at chess competitions, I'm hugely grateful for my non-competitive kid, whose love of simply playing the game helps me remember to de-emphasize winning in my own life, as well.

Of course, I'm more of a work in progress on that one...

I Understand that You're Jealous of My Super Mario Bros. Coasters

It's a handmade gift that I didn't have to make myself!

It's quite pleasant to have a mother who has the patience for cross stitch.

A Big Map of Africa

Lisa over at 5 Orange Potatoes got us WAY hooked on Africam. It's a set of 24-hour webcams located at watering holes in South Africa--our favorite is located at Tembe National Elephant Park.

The first thing that I do in the morning is set up one of our laptops to the Tembe camera, where it sits all day on the living room table; the last thing that Matt does at night is shut that laptop down. In between times, birds and bats and animals of all sizes come to visit us through the camera--someone is forever and always shouting out "Giraffe!!!" or "Elephants!!!" or "Hurry, lion!", and we'll all run over to see. We've seen a lazy lion lounging on the dirt like a giant kittycat, and a baby wildebeest tromping along behind its Momma, and once, late at night after the girls had gone to bad, Matt and I totally saw two elephants have sex.

As such things always do, the Africam has inspired an educational foray into all things Africa. We checked out lots of African animal encyclopedias, because we wanted to identify the animals at the watering hole, and we checked out some children's atlases, because we wanted to see where the watering holes were located, and then, since we already know Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and thus already have a little context for Africa, I decided to go whole-hog into an Africa study.

For that, you need a map. A BIG map.

I'm forever going on about Megamaps, I know (it's because they're really GOOD!), and this is another shameless plug for their free site, since our big Africa map is a 4x4 map printed straight from their site. Willow put it together like a puzzle--

--I taped all the joints from the back side, and then we duct taped it right to the wall, because I'm from Arkansas and I duct tape EVERYTHING.

I asked Willow to color in Egypt and draw the Nile River, but she was so excited that she colored all the countries right then, matching the colors to our children's atlas:

She also drew the Nile in wrong, so we'll have to fix that tomorrow. Oops! I needed to do some fact-checking, anyway, to make sure all the countries and their borders are still accurate.

Syd had the job of painting the oceans:

 I imagine that we'll keep our big map up for at least two months (it'll be a handy ready-made project for our homeschool group's International Fair later this Spring--yay!), and I have lots of ideas of other things that we can add to it, if the girls are willing:

• Fertile Crescent and other locations from The Story of the World volume 1, which we're also studying
• all the locations from our Ancient Egypt studies
• the locations of the Africam web cams
• images of the typical animals found in various locations
• thumbnail-sized images of the picture books that we'll be reading that are set in Africa
• thumbnail-sized images of the chapter books that Willow reads that are set in Africa
• labels of all the countries (which is good handwriting copywork!)
• copies of the short book reports that the girls are beginning to learn how to do
• the Great Rift Valley, and images/info of the best finds from that area

Okay...we may have this map up longer than two months!

Chess Player, Ice Skaters

In a life in which I consider us "busy" if we have a total of two places to go in the course of one day, late winter has been a particularly busy time for us. Ice skating, gymnastics, gym days with our homeschool group--why, one day there was a homeschool Valentine's Day party AND gymnastics class AND ice skating class!

This past weekend was (I hope) the culmination, with a Saturday in which Syd and I stayed in town to run all our other errands (Spring Ice Show dress rehearsal,ballet class, Lemonade Day registration, 4-H Open House, etc.) while Will and Matt road tripped to Indianapolis for a chess tournament--

(she didn't do half-bad against this twelfth grader!)

--and then a Sunday that contained the much-anticipated, proudly performed Spring Ice Show:

This week's goal is peace and quiet: lots of Magic Tree House, some research for next's month's Science Fair, maybe a little grocery shopping, and lots and lots of sitting on the carpet putting together puzzles.