Mother's Day Gifts that This Mother Actually Wants

Fun fact: some mothers don't wear jewelry or perfume.

Some mothers don't get their hair and nails done, and the idea of a stranger massaging them makes them want to crawl out of their skin.

Some mothers hate the idea of presents altogether, and want only the gift of family time.

I am none of those mothers. I like stuff! But, like, particular stuff. Not jewelry and perfume and makeup stuff. And please don't massage me.

In case you, too, know a mother who likes stuff, but maybe not jewelry and perfume and makeup stuff, and they don't want strangers to touch them, it might be tricky figuring out what stuff will appeal to them, in the lead-up to Mother's Day when all the stuff that's being marketed to mothers (as it is in all the other days, sigh) is jewelry and perfume and makeup.

So here's the kind of stuff that I like, and if you know someone who's also into books and music and being comfy and has interesting hobbies and weird obsessions, then they might like this stuff, too!

DELICIOUS DRINKS THAT WON'T GET COLD

Matt bought this for me for my birthday last year, and it has changed my life for the better. It keeps your coffee or tea HOT FOREVER. Seriously, one time I was unpacking my backpack after a previous day's adventure, noticed that there was still a little coffee leftover in this mug, and on a whim took a sip. It was still hot!

I'm not even ashamed to tell you that I happily sat down and drank the rest of that day-old coffee right then and there. Nobody should turn down a second cup of still-hot coffee!

I'm the only person in the family who drinks coffee (currently, at least--I mean, I DO have two teenagers in the house now!), so I'd never splurge on anything more bulky or expensive than the French press that I currently own. But if someone just GAVE me a fancy coffee maker with a timer and lots of features and it makes a bunch of different kinds of coffee...

Well, you can't exactly turn down a present, now can you?

BAGS THAT HOLD ALL THE THINGS

Because I'm surely not the only person still using the same backpack that I carried in college, right? And hauling my picnic supplies in whatever reusable shopping bags that I got free from random stores?

I LONG for a backpack that doesn't have a Jansport label!

If you prefer messenger bags to backpacks, there are grown-up options for you, too! I adore my pink messenger back with a dinosaur screen-printed on it, but it probably wouldn't hurt to have a messenger back that I can carry when I'm wearing dress pants...

HOBBY SUPPLIES

I'm also surely not the only person who never buys anything that's just for me unless it's actually for someone else? Like, sewing supplies so I can make a kid some clothes, or scrapbook supplies to make the family photo album look cute?

Photography is one of those hobbies that I enjoy, but feel like I don't spend enough time learning about or practicing to really improve my skills. Whatever, though--it's still fun, and piddling away with new tools makes it even more fun, especially because new and better equipment makes it look like it's MY skills that have improved!

WARM SOCKS, CUTE SOCKS AND FUZZY SLIPPERS

Socks and slippers are DEEPLY important to me, as they should be to you, too! My feet are always cold in the winter, and unless my toes are tucked two layers deep into wool socks, or nestling inside my fuzzy dinosaur slippers, I legit worry that they're going to get frostbite and gangrene and have to be amputated.

I bought these dinosaur slippers for myself for Christmas Eve, at the same time that I bought wolf slippers for Will and monster slippers for Syd and Matt. And I LOVE them! They're soft and floofy and I swear, my toes can be absolutely numb because I'm walking around the cold house barefoot like a fool, but I put them on and within minutes they begin tingling as the circulation starts to return.

DELIGHTFUL SHEETS

I bought the sheets above technically for Matt, and technically for Valentine's Day, but really because all three of our sheet sets are old and horrible and I wanted new ones. I bought one set of flannel and one set of jersey cotton, and then when I decided that I loved them I bought a second set of each, and I am quite comfy and happy with them!

Also, in my mind the perfect Mother's Day gift would be new sheets, a bottle of wine, the promise of homemade brownies, and a brand-new book.

BOOKS AND MUSIC

I get all my media from the library, which is awesome and I'll never not use the library, but Dude, how I wish for my very own box set of the Master and Commander series, with that Navy ship scene across the spines!

For a Mother's Day years ago, Matt bought me this Harry Potter set with a scene of Hogwarts castle across the spines, and it's so beloved that I keep it here on my desk so I can look at it constantly.

Colored pencils don't exactly match my love of music, because you can't really link to the vinyl versions of current Broadway original cast recordings (go to your local indie record store and tell them that you want the OBCR of Hadestown and Six on vinyl, please!), but check out how they've given all the colors Broadway names! There are several little places that do this--I sent a care package to my best friend once that included crayons with Golden Girl-themed wrappers, and they were so baller I can't even tell you.

Whether you're in the market for Mother's Day stuff or not, I'd be so curious to know what YOUR favorite stuff is! What are your most delicious beverages? What do you most like to carry your belongings around in? What are YOUR favorite books and albums? What do you wish you had for your fun hobbies?

P.S. Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I promise that I do NOT spend all my time expressing my longing for the Master and Commander box set with the Naval ship scene across the spines.

I mean, I don't NOT spend all my time expressing my longing for it...

Homeschool Science: Field Trip to a Landfill!!!

Want to see some frustratingly low-quality photographs of a landfill, taken on a foggy, snowy day through the window of a 12-passenger van by a person sitting in the middle of the back row?

Of COURSE you do! It's a LANDFILL!!!

This particular landfill has been in operation since 1971, and was sold to its current owners when expansive legislative changes meant that the landfill would have to make a lot of improvements to its infrastructure that the original owners balked at. One of those improvements is the cut-off wall that extends underground more than 91 feet until it reaches shale. It's intended to isolate the landfill from the surrounding ground and the watershed, so that leachate--remember Syd's adventures with leachate?!?--can't escape and contaminate the community. The wall doesn't extend above-ground, but you can see occasional markers that show it is.

The incinerator is a different waste disposal company next door; you can see their smokestack in this photo:

Fun fact: incinerators, themselves, are not waste-free. The ash leftover from incineration is toxic and also must be disposed of in a sanitary landfill such as this one.

Second fun fact: yesterday, the kids and I took a field trip to a recycling facility in this same city. When they get materials that they can't recycle, they send them to this incinerator!

Third fun fact: there might be a field trip to that incinerator in the works...

You can also see in the photo above the mesh netting that surrounds the landfill. That keeps the wind from blowing trash away.

Because the landfill is saving space for future municipal solid waste storage, they have some land that they lease to other companies. Below is a working quarry within the landfill; it supplies, among other things, the gravel for the roads that go over and around the landfill:

And here's the working section of the landfill! There's a specific grade to the sides of the landfill that must be maintained, and that's what limits the landfill's height. Here, a truck has just finished dumping another load of municipal solid waste onto the top of this section:

 And now the compactor is spreading the waste and then rolling over it to compact it. The compactor is VERY heavy and huge:

There would be a lot more to see if it wasn't snowy and foggy and grey, alas, but still, this was enough of a taste to get the idea, and the kids have a little more context for their understanding of municipal solid waste and how it's handled in a community setting.

It was VERY different from the recycling facility that we toured this week!

Homeschool Science: Make a Model Landfill, Fill it with Municipal Solid Waste, and Try Not to Poison Your Community

AP Environmental Science has SO MANY fabulous possibilities for labs and other hands-on activities. I am absolutely loving mentoring this study for Will, and hauling Syd along for the ride!

This particular hands-on activity comes from AP Environmental Science Unit 8: Aquatic and Terrestrial Pollution. For Syd, it also works for Honors Biology, using CK-12 Biology Chapter 12: Communities and Populations as a spine. Will read Living in the Environment Chapter 21: Solid and Hazardous Waste as her spine.

The main idea is that currently, there is no way to completely rid ourselves of solid waste, and therefore, it's important to find the most efficient, least environmentally impactful method to store municipal solid waste.

For that, you need a landfill! But what kind of landfill should you make? Ideally, your landfill should hold all of the municipal solid waste that your community produces, should have a barrier in place to keep all leachate from contaminating the ground or water, and should be capped to prevent scavengers and wind from spreading waste and rainfall from entering the landfill and therefore becoming contaminated, as well.

Here's a good diagram of a landfill.

Designing your dream landfill, building a model of it, and then testing that model is a fun STEM activity and hands-on science enrichment. I planned out a more casual version of this lesson, and the kids loved it!

The basic idea is that the kids each get a plastic bin, to which they add a 1"-2" sand layer and a 1"-2" soil layer. I provided the following supplies:

• Monopoly houses
• more sand and soil
• popsicle sticks (these are a trap!)
• homemade play dough (already portioned, and definitely not enough to solely use to make a landfill
• paper
• plastic grocery bags

I filled a pint Mason jar with cotton balls, then added green food coloring and water to the 2-cup line. This is our municipal solid waste!

The kids' challenge was the following:

1. Using the provided supplies, create a community that includes a landfill. The community should have at least a dozen houses.
2. The landfill should be impervious to rain and scavengers entering it, and impervious to solids and liquids leaving it. 
3. The landfill should hold at least one cup of municipal solid waste, which includes both solids and liquids.
4. The landfill should be able to survive a rainstorm and high winds without destruction or leakage.

Will had already read her AP Environmental Science chapter and watched most of the relevant videos in our AP Environmental Science playlist, so she had an advantage over Syd, who had only looked at the landfill anatomy diagram and read about solid waste storage more generally in her CK-12 Biology chapter. Regardless of background knowledge, though, this is still a fun engineering challenge, and I think you can see on the kids' faces how much fun they had with it!

Syd prepares the liner for her landfill.

Will falls into the trap by using popsicle sticks. They're a terrible choice for building a leak-free landfill!

At times, I felt more like a preschool teacher mediating children's work with sensory bins. After a long winter, the kids seemed to adore getting their hands dirty!

All those popsicle sticks! 

Syd's landfill is far larger than she needs for this challenge. I appreciate the room for growth, but it's going to suck trying to keep that whole landfill leak-free.

We add one cup of sopping wet cotton balls and green water.

Next, Will has to cover it and build a cap.

Popsicle sticks AGAIN!!!

Alas! The landfill has sprung a leak!

The engineer observes the problem and starts troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, in the next town over, the world's largest landfill receives its first cup of municipal solid waste.

Oh, dear! This community has just experienced a terrible rainstorm, and the cap on their landfill has taken a LOT of damage!

Syd adds the last dregs of municipal solid waste to her community's landfill.

Will the landfill hold?!?

It... will not. See that leakage? Syd has apparently foregone a liner entirely and instead relied just on the sand to hold the leachate.

This is a disaster! She's delighted.

If the landfill is this leaky already, what on earth is going to happen when it rains?

Wow. That's an environmental disaster, all right!

There seems to be a LOT of leakage. I wonder what the underlying ground looks like?

Oh, no! The soil of the entire community has been contaminated!

Chaos ensues, as the goddess of this little community seemingly decides to just give up and turn evil:

Will, her own landfill safely recapped with plastic, thought that Syd's crash-and-burn trainwreck of a landfill was HILARIOUS.

That plastic cap, though? Worked perfectly! Perhaps her community can take in the survivors from the other plastic bin.

Lessons were definitely learned about the importance of a leak-free landfill!

At the conclusion of this challenge, the kids washed the Monopoly houses and returned them to the game, threw away the play dough and plastic bags, and then dumped the rest of their landfill community--sand, soil, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls--into our compost. 

If you wanted to extend this activity, you could try to design and test landfills that deal with a variety of environmental challenges: a tornado or hurricane using a fan, a flood using more water, an earthquake using a shaker table, a population growth using more cups of municipal solid waste, etc. For us, though, this was a super fun way to always remember the importance of good design in a landfill, and what can happen when that design fails.

And the next day, we took a field trip to a REAL landfill!!!

Homeschool Science: Dissect a Sheep Brain

Here's a photograph of Jones snuggling me on a Sunday:



Stop reading here if you don't want to see photos of my teenager dissecting a sheep brain at our kitchen table.

Chapter 2 of Will's AP Psychology text, Myers' Psychology, is all about the biology of the mind. I'll share more of what both kids did as part of our entire biology of the mind study, but only Will chose to dissect a sheep brain.

For resources, we used this book, which has an appendix covering the dissection of a sheep brain--



--and this video that we watched three times, once the first time Will studied the biology of the mind chapter, once right before the dissection, and once during the dissection, pausing as often as we needed for Will to follow along:



We didn't find this next video nearly as helpful overall, as it goes REALLY fast, but it was helpful to see how to remove the dura mater, as the previous video starts with it already snipped away:



Here's Will attempting to snip through her own sheep's dura mater:

The cerebrum is a little easier to expose--

--but the cerebellum is quite tough to expose, so she left it covered while she worked on identifying the parts of the cerebrum. Sheep don't have a large frontal lobe--I guess they don't do a lot of planning?

Between these two photos you should be able to identify the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes, as well as easily see the gyri and sulci and the longitudinal fissure:

Okay, time to expose the cerebellum and cut the brain in half! Will cut the cerebrum down the longitudinal fissure, but the cerebellum doesn't have the fissure, so she just had to carefully slice it in half:

She's cut through the corpus callosum, so the sheep should be seizure-free now... if, you know, it had survived:

Some of the ventricles are harder to identify, but you can use the corpus callosum to help you identify the lateral ventricle. It was interesting to me how much of the visual identification of these parts relies on very minute color, texture, or physical changes. That's something that you might not think about if you only look at diagrams of the brain with everything color-coded like a map!

With the brain cut in half, Will was able to identify the superior and inferior colliculi, the pineal and pituitary glands, and the midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata on the brain stem.

The nerves were harder to find, especially as Will had accidentally removed the optic chiasm with the dura mater (oops!), but you can't miss the olfactory bulbs!

To get really familiar with the parts of the brain, one really ought to dissect lots of brains, and lots of different types of brains. This singular dissection, however, suits both Will's needs for AP Psychology and our kitchen table venue. Interestingly, there's not an AP Anatomy and Physiology exam offered, so I doubt that Will's dissection needs will expand much beyond the singular organ or very small animal (the kitchen table has already handled a shark dissection, after all!).

If she wants to study more advanced life sciences, however, particularly anatomy and physiology, our local university has a program that allows successful high school applicants admission to their lower-level classes. I'm sure there's some grad student somewhere who would just LOVE to teach Will and a whole lab of her +2 peers alllllll about how to dissect all of the things!

Will and I both found video demonstrations to be MUCH more helpful than a written walk-through, but if you're looking for even more resources, there are some written descriptions here:

• anatomy and physiology dissection. This guide IS geared to an anatomy and physiology class, so has several more parts to identify than the most basic dissection guides. If you're going through the time, expense, and trouble of a sheep brain dissection, you might as well get the most out of it!
• dissection lab manual. The photos here are very good--much better than that dissection manual I checked out of the library, humph!
• multi-grade sheep dissection. Here are some activities to guide much younger students through a sheep brain dissection.