Once Upon a Time There was a Fairy Tale Birthday Party

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved birthday parties. Every year she had a birthday party with a different theme, and she got so much pleasure out of making her party fit that theme, from invitations to decorations to games to food, that the whole family loved to chip in and help her, just to see how happy she was.

Of course, it didn't bother her mother terribly much when this little girl grew up some and could do MUCH more of the planning and prep work all by herself!

For instance, guess who baked this entire cake all by herself? Who assembled it and decorated it completely independently?



The birthday girl herself!



Matt carved the watermelon into the shape of a crown, and I assembled the fruit wands:



My plan had been to use those watermelon cut-outs there as the wand toppers but let me tell you--cut watermelon is MESSY! It was dripping sticky juice down the entire wand, and while I'm not squeamish about kids getting messy when they're at my house, the line must be drawn somewhere.

To round out the dinner, we also made a tray of cheese sandwiches and peanut butter sandwiches, all cut out with a crown cookie cutter, and then some chips and mini un-iced cupcakes (from the leftover birthday cake batter). The party guests demolished the lot, so I think they liked it!

When the children arrived, I taught them how to make balloon swords--

--and another kid knew how to make balloon dogs, so we all happily played with balloons for a very long time before I was able to heard them into the playroom for our first game: Pin the Kiss on the Frog Prince:



Matt drew the frog, Will painted it, and Syd drew and cut out all of the kisses. Competitive games stress Syd out, so the kids just took turns for fun, and there were no prizes.

One of my favorite things about Syd's group of friends is how engaged they are. They love everything! Every activity you introduce, they're super into it. Every game you play, they give it their all. And what's more, they're so connected, as well--they love watching every other kid take her own turn, shouting advice as she wanders way to the left of the frog, laughing when she puts her kiss on its butt, congratulating her when she takes off the blindfold, over and over and over, for every kid, for every single turn. And some kids took several turns!

After giving that frog prince many, many, MANY kisses, we broke for dinner, and then came back to the playroom for the game that I had been looking forward to the most:



Yes, we played Toilet Paper Princess!



This game was just about the cutest thing that I have ever seen. We had enough guests to make three groups, each with a princess and two ladies in waiting. The ladies in waiting had approximately ten minutes to dress their princess for the ball, and then we had a princess fashion show.

I had planned on doing this once, but you know we ended up doing it three times in a row. Surprise, surprise--all the little girls wanted a turn at Princess!

And here's the token male, sitting in the corner looking bemused:


This game took a full hour, and after all of that shrieking and giggling I am not ashamed to tell you that I sent every single one of those children outside, taking the dog with them, and told them not to come in until they were ready for cake.

Of course they were all in and out and all around, shrieking and giggling and fighting with balloon swords, but it gave me time to swallow some ibuprofin and sit down in the kitchen with Matt for a while. I'd had a nice, long break by the time the pack of them came barreling in for good, reporting that there'd been some drama with the Freeze Tag game, and I declared that if there were some tempers that needed to be sweetened, then it must be time for cake!

I can't get over that perfect, perfect cake that she made for herself, all by herself:



And her sweet face, surrounded by her family and friends, just having been sung to, just about to make a wish:


She couldn't have had a better birthday--


--or a better bunch of kids to share it with.

I'm curious how her birthday parties will change as she gets older. The last time that Will requested a birthday party, she was nine (and there were also balloon swords at that party, and a kid-decorated castle cake, AND the candles on this cake are the same ones that I made for that first castle cake!). I'll happily have giant birthday parties for Syd as long as she wants them, then, with the sure proof that one day, whenever that day may come, she will no longer want her mommy to throw her a birthday party. I did suggest to Syd, though, that perhaps next year she might want to host her birthday party all by herself, without Mommy to organize the games and demonstrate the craft.

As soon as I said that, though, I bit my tongue in regret. Because sure, I'd have an easier week the week of her party, if I didn't have to do the prep work for games and activities, and an easier day the day of, if I wasn't cutting out a million little sandwiches into cute shapes and making fruit wands and watching yet another balloon sword-making tutorial on YouTube, but to not be there to watch every single kid take her turn at kissing the Frog Prince? To not be the emcee for the Toilet Paper Princess runway walk, for every single princess?

Not having to take double the dose of ibuprofin that night would NOT be worth missing out on all of that sweetness.

The Ballerina, on Her Eleventh Birthday

As far as I can tell, this is the first picture that I ever took of Syd dancing ballet:



She is four years old, and her teacher is helping her leap over the alligator pit.

Even then, she had excellent form.

Over the years, she first wore the pink uniform of the youngest dancers (they've since changed that level's color to white, and thank goodness that was after our time, because I cannot even fathom having to keep a three-, four-, and five-year-old's leotard WHITE for an entire school year...)--

Spring 2012

--and then graduated to the blue uniform of the beginning ballet student--

Spring 2015

--and as of this year, wears the much more sophisticated black uniform of the intermediate ballet student:





Except for during this year's spring recital, when everyone wore white:



The spring ballet recital always conveniently takes place near Syd's birthday and Mother's Day, so it makes for a handy occasion to take some decent photos of the lot of us when our hair is brushed and we're not wearing clothes with paint stains or muddy knees:





Watching the relationship between these two is my absolute favorite thing about parenting sisters. Never remembering a time without the other, they're best friends, near constant companions, and supporting their relationship so that they'll always have each other even when they don't have Matt or me, is one of my most important jobs:



It's a job that comes with some pretty great perks, fortunately, because there's nothing that could ever be better than these two kids:





Even when their father can't manage to get a decent shot of the three of us all looking decent, sigh.

Work Plans for the Week of May 8, 2017: King Arthur, Telling Temperature, and the Authentic Greek Experience

Last week was probably the last week of busy prep for kid events that we'll have for a while. Because now that Girl Scout cookie season, the Trashion/Refashion Show, Syd's birthday party, AND her ballet recital are complete, we can relax until my Junior Girl Scouts begin to ramp up their work to earn the Bronze Award.

That should give me a few weeks, at least, to kick back and get some stuff done for ME!!!

After getting too stressed with this prep work plus a heavy school load the week before last, school the last week was more manageable, as I made a point to communicate more with both kids, asking their opinions and getting their buy-in, making sure they knew that they could tell me if they simply wanted to skip an assignment, and enforcing the rule that on a school day, Syd is done with schoolwork after three hours, and Will after four. That's how the kids finally admitted that they simply didn't want to make the next project in their cooking curriculum, so we're taking a break from that this week to make a traditional Greek breakfast instead, and how they exhibited so much enthusiasm during our futhorc lesson about the thought of engraving runes--possibly even making words!!!--that I separated the activity out into its own lesson for this week. I need to buy more rocks, for one thing, and perhaps cut wood slices and ask for my wood burner back from the friend who's borrowing it.

This week, I'm keeping our school load fairly light. I, for one, would like some time to rest from birthday party prep and driving a kid back and forth to hours of ballet rehearsals every night, and I'm sure the kids won't say no to extra free time! We've got three more weeks after this one to get more academics done before the summer activities start.

Books of the Day for this week include Norse myths, this novel for Will, a couple of leftover books on the Civil War, and a couple of books about the Girl Scouts and Juliette Gordon Low. Memory work for the week includes reviews of Sonnet 116, helping verbs, the Greek alphabet, and the Platonic Solids, and more work on the most common prepositions, the Pythagorean Triplets, and the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon. Other daily work consists of ten minutes of journaling for Syd and some cursive copywork for Will (who has once again decided that she's done with creative writing, sigh...), typing practice on Typing.com, SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will, Wordly Wise for Will and a word ladder for Syd, and progress on the kids' MENSA reading lists.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: In Math Mammoth this week, Will is graphing equations, and Syd is doing more with fractions--converting them to decimals, exploring ratios, etc. We had to bring out the Cuisenaire rods last week to help her understand dividing fractions, but now that she's got that figured out the rest should follow more easily.

Syd is almost done with Junior Analytical Grammar, and doesn't always complete an entire lesson a day, because she sometimes gets VERY frustrated with that parsing and diagramming. Will is still between Seasons in Analytical Grammar, and so on this day she's working a mind bender for a little logic reinforcement. I'm going to give her a mind bender from the middle of the book today, and if that one is too easy for her, too, I'll have to buy her the next book up, dang it.

On this day, as well, the kids are expected to take a new music lesson from Hoffman Academy. Syd is fairly into the keyboard, and sometimes even spends her time trying to learn a pop song or composing, but Will is the most reluctant pianist who ever half-heartedly tickled the keys. She and I were goofing around and exploring the buildings on our university campus this weekend, when we came across a piano and I asked her to play her most recent song. Here you go!



Two years of learning keyboard, and she can half-heartedly, and without musicality, pick out "Hot Cross Buns." She claims that she's willing to continue her Hoffman Academy lessons, but you can believe I'm glad that I haven't been shelling out real money for lessons from a real human!

We're learning about the physics of temperature and temperature change this week, and the Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin scales, but as we'll be doing plenty of hands-on experimentation with temperature in the next few weeks, I also want to make absolutely certain that both kids can read a thermometer with complete accuracy, so I'm having them make a model thermometer today, using a clear straw, pipe cleaner, and thermometer printable, so that I can test them.

We're still catching up on the history of Ancient Greece with Story of the World before we pick back up with Story of Science. We'll move through this more quickly starting next week, but for this week,  we're just going to cover the exit of the Mycenaeans and the Dark Ages, reinforcing the lesson with the quiz questions from the Activity Book and the mapwork, done on the actual map of Greece that we'll be taking with us TO Greece! Although we could take a deeper look at Homer here, we studied Homer for the National Mythology Exam, and considering that both kids bombed that section in the exam, those poems are still too complicated for them--might as well save the fun for later, when they can really enjoy the literature.

For fun this morning, when both kids get up (it's already after 9:00, but my post-birthday and post-ballet girl is sleeping in!) we're going to prepare and eat a traditional Greek breakfast of yogurt, fruit, walnuts, and honey. I was supposed to start bread dough last night so that we could also have fresh bread, but oops! Perhaps tomorrow...

The kids are working faster on their Greek language practice than our family can take Greek language lessons from our curriculum (Matt is the weak link!), so for their daily Greek practice they can choose to work ahead in the online tutor, or work on workbook or Greek handwriting pages, or watch some of these Greek alphabet pronunciation videos. I'd also love to find some live-action children's programming in Greek on YouTube, if any of you have any suggestions.

As part of her Girl Scout Junior Scribe badge, last week Syd set up a SurveyMonkey survey to interview her friends. This week, she needs to write a newspaper-style article on the information from this survey in order to complete her badge. She'd rather start her Art in 3D retired badge, because girls would always rather do the first two fun activities of a badge than the last two not-as-fun activities, so I'll see if I have the energy to redirect her, or if I'll just let her go. I'm feeling a little draggy this morning, myself.

TUESDAY: For the culminating activity of Will's Budgeting badge, we played around a bit with the idea of asking her to create a budget for saving for Greece, but as I was, in my own free time, playing around with the necessity of creating a budget for usefully utilizing our Girl Scout troop's cookie profits, I had the epiphany that the Girl Scout who's meant to be becoming proficient in budgeting should of COURSE create her Girl Scout troop's budget! So this week I'm now playing around with how much assistance she'll need--I'm going to see how it goes to ask her to independently obtain the skills in Microsoft Excel to create a simple budget that calculates percentages. This is how adults manage--we figure out what we need to do, figure out how to get the skills we need to do it, then get the skills, then do the thing--so I want her to try, but if she struggles, then I'll mentor her more next week.

Since Will is between Seasons in Analytical Grammar, she's also working through the first season's review work in her Review and Reinforcement book by completing two review lessons a week. They're going smoothly, and introducing her to some good books that she hasn't yet read, so it's a success all around.

For the next couple of weekends in their art classes, Matt is going to be exploring the art of Ancient Greek vases with the kids, and in conjunction with that, the kids and I are going to be making model Greek vases out of air-dry terracotta clay. A lot of projects have the children make mock vases out of papier mache, because it's challenging to make a larger clay coil vase, but we're at least going to try, because both kids love working with clay. We can always resort to making the papier mache models or two-dimensional mock-ups when it comes  time for the kids to place their designs.

Although Will doesn't usually love baking, she's enthusiastic about this project of baking dog treats. I've never baked animal treats before, so I'm curious to see how they turn out--they're made of wholesome, real food ingredients, so I'm also curious to see if *we* like them!

On this evening, Syd has a webinar that should teach her how to go about earning the Bronze award. She has some preparation for that, and the webinar itself will be another new experience for her.

WEDNESDAY: The kids are both really excited about making moveable alphabets for the futhorc. As part of our lesson on the futhorc last week, I also showed them how some people use the runes to pretend to tell fortunes, and we watched a few YouTube videos on the subject with much entertainment, so that may be part of their enthusiasm. I'll talk more about pronunciation of the runes as we work, and show them some more works that are written in runes.

We can't leave the Anglo-Saxon period without discussing King Arthur! The kids are familiar with his legends, and we've even listened to one of my favorite books, The Once and Future King, years ago, so all we really need to do on this day is discuss him further and place his mythology into geohistorical context. I'll also remind the kids of contemporary works that we've explored that deal with Arthurian legend, The Dark is Rising series being the most recent.

THURSDAY: As part of our explorations of the physics of temperature, I'm going to show the children how to make a working model of a thermometer on this day. We'll use it in the coming weeks as the kids begin to take their own temperature readings and come to their own conclusions.

Syd has her baking project on this day, as well. I don't yet know what she'll create, although she's required to figure it out by early in the day on the day before, so that we can buy any needed ingredients. Last week, she made us blueberry scones, the last of which I ate this morning with my coffee. They were absolutely delicious!

FRIDAY/SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Friday, the kids have their all-day nature class that means that I can get some real work done while they're gone. On Saturday, the only one of us with an extracurricular is this girl--



--whom Will and Matt are taking to her first day of obedience school. Sunday is Mother's Day, and although we usually just celebrate it with breakfast in bed, a couple of presents, and a day in the garden, if you don't hear from me next week it means that my family has instead decided to surprise me with a trip to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

A girl can dream!

2017 Trashion/Refashion Show: Supergirl of the Night

Syd had big dreams for her Trashion/Refashion Show design this year. She wanted it to have a wrap skirt that she'd unwrap, mid-runway walk, to reveal as wings. A giant hood. Black velvet and silver sparkles.

And she wanted it to be covered in twinkle lights.

We went through several iterations of this dream, she and I, in between selling Girl Scout cookies like our lives depended on it, especially with that skirt. Twinkle lights, AND a transformation from wrap-around to wings, which means that we obviously needed two skirts, because she can't be skirt-less when her wings are revealed.

I did eventually figure out a way to make it happen using prodigious amounts of Velcro, but in the meantime I transformed a pair of black pants and a fancy dress into an underskirt so nice that Syd decided that maybe the wrap-around skirt part of the wings (and most particularly, with the wing fabric being so plain) could be ditched. The outfit, to be sure, did already have enough going on.

Instead, Syd cut out wearable wings--



--and decided on a runway move that would hide them until a big reveal.

Fortunately, the rest of the outfit went more according to plan. Syd thrifted a couple of pairs of black velvet pants and a single silver blouse that I used every inch of for the hooded shirt that I sewed her--I'm especially proud of the epaulets that used to be part of the shirt's bottom hem. The rest of that hem was used to flesh out the hood, and I cut the shirt's body into two three-quarters-length sleeves.

The twinkle lights were also tricky. For the photo shoot to accompany our application, I safety-pinned on a couple of packs of battery-operated twinkle lights, but it didn't give the effect that Syd really wanted:





She wanted white lights, and more of them. I got the idea to perhaps hook up a long string of conventional plug-in lights to a converter and then a battery pack, a set-up that's not very energy efficient but is upcycled and would, I believed, give the effect that Syd wanted. The problem, though, is that it was also heavy, with a converter box and two 6v lantern batteries. A friend helped me set the rig up, but when I tested it I realized that I'd need at least one more battery for a workable system, and the rig was already so heavy that I had to toss the plan altogether.

That night, another friend messaged me to tell me that she actually had a couple of strands of battery-operated white LED twinkle lights. Did I want to borrow them?

Reader, I DID!

For the first time this year, Syd filled out her own application. I don't know why it never occurred to me before to ask her to do that part, since it's her design through-and-through--some things only seem obvious in retrospect.

And I *should* have been having her fill out her application all along, because the kid nailed it! Here's what she wrote when asked to describe her design:

While average super heroes wear capes, REAL super heroes wear wings! Supergirl of the Night is crafted from four different pieces of thrift-store clothing including velvet pants transformed into a skirt and hooded shirt, shirts repurposed into silver sleeves, and wings made from an old blanket. The hood allows cover from rain and helps blend into the shadows. The sparkly silver sleeves reflect all bullet blasts and blend into day as well as night. The wings allow easy gliding and provide a cover of darkness for surprising enemies. The black shiny skirt hides many epic weapons to protect the innocent. Finally, Supergirl of the Night has a multi-colored string of lights to light up the night, from old Christmas lights with portable battery packs.

I tried to convince Syd that she should paint an old pair of black tights that I'd cut the feet out of back when the kids were modeling The Awesomes, but she had her heart set on wearing the tacky fishnet tights that I've owned ever since I went to that Halloween street party with Mac at least twenty years ago, probably 21 or 22 years ago by now. He dressed as John Hinckley Jr. in a bloodstained T-shirt that he'd used iron-on letters to put "I LOVE JODIE" on. I was dressed as... I don't even know what I was supposed to be, but a friend let me borrow this weird net dress that she said she'd got in Mexico, and I put on black lipstick and fishnet tights, so I think I was supposed to be some sort of sexy murder Goth or something? I have a photo that she took just before we left, with me attempting to vamp in a sexy murder Goth sort of way (I had no idea what I was doing, bless my heart) and Mac standing next to me looking bemused.

I miss him so much. I miss him all the time, so much.

So Syd wore the fishnet tights, and I bought her a pair of black Chucks to go with them (I bought myself a gorgeous pair of blue Chucks at the same time, and they're fabulous and I love them). And when I got the email that we were accepted in the show, we were in our hotel room in Atlanta, and Syd was so excited that she hyperventilated and I thought she was going to pass out for a second.

Even after you've completed your garment and you're accepted in to the show, there's still so much to do! It works best for Syd as a model if she creates and then practices an actual runway routine--and yes, I DID get this idea from watching Toddlers and Tiaras on Netflix, but I swear, it works so well! When we lived in town, Syd would draw a runway in chalk on the basketball court of the local park and we'd practice there every day, but now we have enough room that we can have a chalk runway on our own driveway, and a miniature masking tape runway in our family room. At our first rehearsal for the show,  the showrunner demonstrates a proper walk, including the points where she'd like every model to stop and for how long--I videotape that as a reference, and we use that to help Syd craft her routine. When she gets the routine the way she likes it, I videotape that, as well, and she watches it before she practices every day.

It's a lot of work being a runway model!

Syd also had to figure out her hair and makeup. Her hair, she was disappointed to realize, wasn't going to show from underneath her wide hood, so she focused her attention on Googling makeup ideas, and asked the volunteer makeup artist from Tricoci University to give her smoky eyes.

Which she did!



The rest of the makeup--blush and black lipstick with a silver vertical line running down the middle of her bottom lip (which people remarked upon the most out of anything, even though it took me five seconds to do with a small paintbrush and our clown makeup palette)--we did backstage before the show.

Even though the show doesn't start until 7 pm, Syd and I spend the whole day together, first getting her hair and makeup done, then at the theater:



The dress rehearsal takes FOREVER (and this year we rebelled by making Syd the only model who didn't dress for the dress rehearsal--in my mind, it's just one more chance to mess her garment or her makeup up and to wear down the batteries in her twinkle lights), and then we watch the opening act's dress rehearsal, and then we find somewhere to hang out and watch a movie (Beauty and the Beast this year) while doing each other's nails, and then pizza is delivered so Syd chows down on that for a while--


and then, surprisingly, it's already time to get Syd dressed and get the rest of her makeup on.

While we're doing that last bit, the rest of our family is doing this!



The Trashion/Refashion Show is recorded and plays on our local public access TV station a few times a year, but Matt always makes a bootleg video recording of Syd's walk from his spot in the audience. I present to you, then, Supergirl of the Night!


 My heart can hardly handle watching Syd perform. I love watching how enthusiastic the audience is, and how happy they are to cheer her on. Every year she's more confident on the stage, and every year she enjoys it more.

Me, though? My favorite moment is this--



Because we do that photo at intermission, when we are DONE! We just have to walk around and schmooze, show off the battery packs to interested audience members, let Syd answer questions about her process and the materials she's used, have her pose for photos with people, and then we get to sit and watch the runway show dedicated to the Trashion designs.

And even later than that, we get to walk down the streets of our town with one of us looking like this:



And because our town is the way it is, nobody even bats an eye. I don't even think we were the weirdest-looking group out there that night.

Syd has already told me that next year, she wants to apply for the Trashion part of the show. This worries me, because Trashion design is trickier, using more unusual materials that can be harder to source (although really, I suppose that we should have been put in the Trashion half that year that I made Syd's garment out of a sheet). Syd has also, however, told me something else that makes me far, far, far happier.

Next year, she says that she wants to sew her garment herself.

Hallelujah!

Homeschool Math: How to Model Algebraic Equations with the Decanomial Square

Math can start getting really abstract when a kid begins algebra, so it's nice to take the time for plenty of hands-on modeling to reinforce the fact that those equations? They're all REAL numbers!

Well, until they aren't. That will be a whole new level of fun!

As always, the kids start by building the decanomial square. The first few times they did this, it took them a while to figure out where everything goes, but now they're old hands at it and can do it seamlessly. They don't know this, but they've internalized the visual patterning of the multiplication table, mwa-ha-ha!



You probably can't read the little squares, but we've labeled the rows and columns of the decanomial square. The row and column for 1 is a, 2 is b, 3 is c, etc.

I then gave the kids graph paper, had them frame out a 10x10 grid, and label every piece of the decanomial square with its designation, by row then column. The little 1x1 piece is a squared. The 1x2 piece is ab. the 10x1 piece is ja. The 10x4 piece is jd. The 10x10 piece is j squared.



After Will looked at her finished chart, she said, "It's like chess notation!"

And that's why they call it algebraic notation! Just another reason why chess is such a great game.

Now that the kids have a reference for all of their labels, they can begin to make equations using the notation:

Notice that Will's top equation, (a+b)b=cb is incorrect. She reworked it when I pointed it out. Below that, Syd is modeling an equation that she wants to write. It will end up reading (cb)b=fb. Is she correct?

 This turned out to be an excellent hands-on exercise. Syd, a fifth grader, happily wrote and solved algebraic equations. Will, a seventh grader, happily multiplied polynomials. They're both internalizing big, intimidating concepts before they can even start to be intimidated by them.

Hopefully, that intimidation will never make itself known!

Work Plans for the Week of May 1, 2017: Ballet, a Birthday, and Britain

I rearranged our priorities last week. The kids are fondest of doing their schoolwork off and on all day--there's no push to complete their work by a specific time each day, except that I don't allow them their hour of screen time until their schoolwork is finished. They're content with this system and it works well for them, but it doesn't really always work well for ME. There's often a kid asking me for a lesson or to help with a project long after I'm longing to turn my brain off for the day--sometimes as late as 9 pm, or later, when I'm already hanging out on my bed with a glass of wine and a Captain America graphic novel.

Last week, then, to start to get a handle on the problem, I asked the kids to meet me at the school table at 10:00 (yes, they're late starters--they like to veg out until 9:00, then do animal chores and have breakfast, then Will has to make herself a cup of tea and veg out some more while she drinks it), and then to work with their best effort for three full hours, with no slacking and no breaks, and we would finish school for the day promptly at 1:00, no matter if we'd completed work plans or not. There was still some slacking and some breaks, which means that Syd didn't always finish, and realistically, I want Will to work for more like 4 hours, not 3, so she didn't always finish, either, but since my goals were to get them accustomed to working for an extended period of time and to remind them of how lovely it is to finish school and have a whole afternoon and evening of freedom, the schedule suited my purposes.

I've also had some difficulty with the kids protesting at our lessons, and inconsistently, as well. First they love food-related projects, and then they don't. First they want to study such-and-such, and then they fuss at the actual assignment. So over the weekend, as I made our lesson plans for this week, I called each kid in individually, showed her every single thing that she didn't complete last week, and asked her if she wanted to complete it this week. If she didn't, I dropped it from the schedule, because it's not worth the fight. Then I went through every single assignment that I had planned for this week, and got their buy-in on every single thing. Will, most particularly, had to be made to understand that for every lesson, I have to see some sort of output from her; she cannot simply read a text and move on with her life. This got her buy-in for some of this week's hands-on projects, when I asked her what she'd rather provide me for output and she drew a blank. It's for sure time, though, to start thinking of more self-directed studies to give her for eighth grade.

After all that, then, it was more fun than I had anticipated to drop all of our responsibilities and head out to an overnight trip that our Girl Scout council put on as a Girl Scout Leader/Daughter Appreciation Event. Staff hosted us at one of the Girl Scout camps and provided fun activities--





--and a catered dinner--



--and prizes--



--and then let us enjoy having the camp all to ourselves for the rest of the day and night:

Camp Dellwood has an amazing wildflower hike, interspersed with exercise equipment. The kids LOVED it!

It was the perfect relaxing weekend before we start a week that will end in maybe a little more relaxing, but will also contain a birthday party and a ballet recital.

Whew!

Daily work is the same this week, with both kids' buy-in: ten minutes of journaling or writing to a prompt; practice on Typing.com; reading from their MENSA reading lists; Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd; a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice; and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will. Syd will also be expected to help me with party prep every day this week, whether it's putting together the games and crafts or preparing the food or cleaning the house, AND she has hours of ballet rehearsal every night for her upcoming recital. She's going to be a busy girl!

Books of the Day consist of a couple of selections from the MENSA reading list that I have to be a little more encouraging about, a couple of non-fiction books on Ancient Greece, and a couple of things that I just thought they'd enjoy--a much more in-depth book on backyard chickens for Will, and the complete collection of Madeleine stories for Syd.

I'm not adding anything new to Memory Work this week, so it's still reviews of Platonic Solids, helping verbs, and Sonnet 116; and common prepositions, Pythagorean triples, the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, and the apostles of Jesus.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Syd is getting close to the end of Junior Analytical Grammar, which she's pretty thrilled about, as it's not a curriculum that she's loving. Too bad for her, as it's also a curriculum that is for sure teaching her the grammar concepts that I want her to have. When she's finished Junior Analytical Grammar, I'll likely give her a month or two off, and then it's on to Analytical Grammar! Will had a mind bender on this day--she's making such short work of them that I might skip to the middle of the book for her next one.

For now, we're moving very slowly through the Middle Ages, partly because there's so much more to explore than is there in Story of the World volume 2, which I'm using as a spine mostly for the chronology, and partly because we have so much more to do than Medieval history. There's no rush, though, and the kids are loving the study, so crawling away we go! This week, we're still in chapter two of Story of the World, because the kids remain interested in the Anglo-Saxon period and there's a lot more that we can cover. On this day, we're going to learn more about the Sutton Hoo ship burial. You can request free high-resolution images of artifacts held in the British Museum, but for efficiency's sake, they've also prepared a Powerpoint slide of Sutton Hoo artifacts, and that's what I'll be showing the children. Sutton Hoo isn't the first ship burial that we've encountered (there's also one in Beowulf), so we'll be discussing ship burial and burning in a little more depth, as well, using this dissertation as my resource. The kids then have the opportunity to make their own Viking longship, if they'd like, using either this tutorial or this printable, and we can either bury it or fill a Rubbermaid bin with water and burn it--gee, I wonder which they'll choose?

The kids really like completing Junior Ranger badges by mail, so even though it's a bit of work on the weekends, finding a badge program that 1) accepts badge books by mail and 2) has badge books that can be downloaded and can be well completed using internet research, it's worth it. For this week, I found that the Juan Batista de Anza National Trail has a badge program that can be completed online--score!

After loads of research, I finally bought the Level One curriculum in modern Greek from Greek123. If you're interested, I can tell you another time how I figured out which curriculum would be best, but for now I'll just tell you that the philosophy is to learn to read and write the language the way that a native child would; you can move more quickly, of course, using the same texts and workbooks,  and once you have around a third-grade reading knowledge, you can begin to read children's books written in the language, which will improve your skills even more. To make it more fun, and because you can't take a vacation unless you've studied for it, we're doing our Greek lessons nightly as a family, all four of us squeezed around the textbook, all four of us coloring the picture of μαμὰ in our workbooks. The curriculum includes access to an online tutor, so that's what the children will be practicing with every day as part of their work plans. and as it's also very important to expose ourselves to Greek daily (remember how many words a young child needs to hear before kindergarten? That's us!), right now we're listening to a lot of Greek pop hits on Spotify, although I'm hoping to also find some good Greek programming on Youtube.

I'm hoping that Will can finish up her Budgeting badge this week--starting a badge is always the most fun, but if Girl Scouts had their way, they'd do the funnest three activities from each badge, then drop it and start the fun activities for another badge. You've always got to encourage them to finish a badge by giving them more attention for the last couple of activities and making them more fun. For Step 4 of the Budgeting badge, then, I'm encouraging Will to complete the first activity, which is to make a list of her interests, then look for non-profits that are related to that interest. This will also open her up to more possibilities for a Take Action Project for the Breathe Journey that she's working through.

Will didn't do the temperature project last week, but says that she does want to do it this week. Since she's doing that, I won't move forward with our weather unit this week.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to explore binomial squares was an activity that we didn't get to last week, but both children said that they did want to do it this week... we'll see. Syd also didn't interview her friends at playgroup last week, because most of them weren't there--the end of spring semester is a busy time for everyone, even homeschoolers! Rather than try a different activity to meet the badge's requirements, Syd said that she really wanted to try again this week... we'll see. Will could possibly finish her Budgeting badge on this day, by creating a workable budget and savings plan for our upcoming vacation to Greece. At first, I thought that I'd just have her plan for her own spending money, but now I'm thinking that it would be a more valuable experience to ask her to plan a family-wide budget and savings plan. We saved a lot to be able to pay for the vacation before we booked it (we don't carry credit card balances, which is a whole other discussion for a whole other day), but we could certainly do with more money for the trip itself!

Since Will is between seasons of Analytical Grammar, she has a worksheet in her Review and Reinforcement book on Tuesday and Thursday.

WEDNESDAY: Since I want to emphasize Greece even more in our applicable studies, I've decided to pause our Story of Science unit just before our chapter on Ptolemy and use Story of the World volume 1 to cover Greek history to that point. This week, we're covering Ancient Crete, Minos, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Daedalus and Icarus. On this day, the kids will read/listen to the chapter, answer the quiz questions, and we'll do the mapwork directly on our travel map of Greece--when we take this map with us to Greece, the kids will have an easy reference for what happened where! I also have some Youtube videos to show them of bull jumping, the Palace at Knossos, and Crete, etc.

The kids have been oddly reluctant to complete their current Your Kids: Cooking lesson, but they both insist that they don't want to skip it. Maybe this week we'll have quiche for dinner? Normally, Syd also has a separate baking assignment just for her, and she LOVES it, but this week her baking assignment is wrapped into party prep--she's going to bake all of the components for her castle cake herself.

THURSDAY: The National Mythology Exam didn't cover Theseus, although I'm sure the kids read that chapter for fun. Nevertheless, they'll read it again on this day, and make a trading card for Theseus.

Will didn't do her Beowulf translation yesterday, but I got out some of my Old English and Middle Welsh texts this weekend to show her, and she was enthusiastic about looking at them, and claims that she does want to try the translation this week. I hope she does, as I'm really looking forward to what she comes up with!

FRIDAY: We'll probably spend a majority of the day in party prep for the next day's fairy tale-themed birthday party, but we'll set aside some time for a lesson on the futhorc, the runic language of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We'll have a lesson and look at some examples, and then the children can create a moveable alphabet of runes, if they wish. When I showed this activity to Will, she claimed that she'd be willing to do it (despite grousing about every single activity that we did last week), but Syd is more likely my sure thing.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Birthday presents. Ballet recital dress rehearsal. Birthday lunch. Party prep. Fairy tale birthday party. Sleep. Wake up. Ballet recital. Frozen yogurt afterwards, perhaps, if we're not already too sugared out from the birthday party.

What are YOUR plans for the week?