Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 1, We Drink Moonshine and Learn about Boy Meets World

For Matt's 45th birthday, I decided to take advantage of having two nearly grown teenagers who can drive themselves to school and work and cook their own meals and keep the house tidy and presumably handle any small emergency that arises, and leave them alone at home to do just that while Matt and I took ourselves on a quick little road trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee!

Okay, fine. I'm still seething with jealousy at the super fun trip Matt and Will took to Peru and I wanted to go on a super fun trip, too, but my children are too busy to go with me and the only way I could get Matt to take off work for yet another vacation was to tell him it was his birthday present. Ahem.

And I had an absolutely wonderful time, thank you very much! I leaned fully into the road trip aesthetic, with car snacks and 1,000 podcasts (we ended up binging Pod Meets World, because who doesn't love Topanga?). Matt drove the entire way, leaving me more time to peruse the handfuls of travel brochures that I gathered at every rest stop. I now have a collection of brochures for every tourable cave between here and Georgia, and one day I AM GOING TO SEE THEM ALL!

I missed the kids terribly, but I texted them photos of every cute dog and gas station novelty food I saw:

If the kids had been with me I'd definitely have gone for these.

We'd also have 100% bought ourselves $1 Slurpees. Instead, I bought myself a 59-cent soda and a bag of Sour Patch candies that was ALL CHERRIES!

It's a six-hour drive from here to Chattanooga, but there are a couple of interesting-looking distilleries about halfway there, and we enjoyed our last distillery tour so much that we picked one to stop at. 

Casey Jones Distillery offers a guided tour and a bourbon tasting, and we wisely did the bourbon tasting first so that we wouldn't be too tipsy to drive, although it did mean that we didn't know as much about what we wanted to taste as we would have if we'd done the tour first. But even without the full history lesson we'd get during the tour, I got a kick (both a "Kentucky hug" and a historical thrill!) out of tasting Casey's Cut, the original moonshine recipe that the original "Casey" Jones developed when he was a moonshiner hiding out from the revenuers. Matt really liked this one, and that's actually what we ended up buying a bottle of. 

Casey Jones Distillery is a LOT smaller than Member's Mark, so it was interesting to see the contrasts during our guided tour. The history of how the two companies developed is also completely different, and although I had been interested in hearing about the scientific process of choosing the perfect grain combination, I was flat-out fascinated hearing about the history of illegal moonshine production in rural Kentucky. I'm amazed that economically and educationally disenfranchised people could have figured out the chemical and mechanical requirements to create stills from scratch, with no blueprints or written instructions, but Matt noted that many Kentuckians had emigrated from Scotland, with its own history of whisky, so possibly there was some word-of-mouth instruction or even memories of that process. In the 1600s, Scotland even had its own version of revenuers and black market whisky manufactured in small, hidden stills!

I wish the kids could have come with us on the tour of the working still, because look at all that lovely fermenting bacteria that Syd could have seen!

Hmmm, maybe we should try to catch some wild yeast and make our own sourdough again. That would be another good culinary extension to her biology study!

Here's an original Casey Jones still. He built it for the FBI, at their request, after his imprisonment and subsequent retirement, and it's now a display piece above the distillery's bar:

And here's a working model of that still, a copy built by Casey's grandson, AJ:

This is the still that makes all of the bourbon sold by Casey Jones Distillery. They were running the still while we were there, so we got to watch the glass jugs being filled--

--AND we got to taste some moonshine fresh from the still!

Casey Jones doesn't have a rickhouse or big bottling area like Member's Mark. Here's its storage and bottling area in one:

We got another history lesson just on the handcrafted wooden barrels used to age bourbon:

The cooperage will even fire the inside according to the distillery's specifications, and it's the burnt inside of the barrel that colors the finished bourbon:

You can apparently buy used staves, complete with the burned side and the devil's cut of bourbon saturated inside. Our tour guide said they're awesome for smoking meat.

It probably didn't help that I was tipsy, but I got SUPER into the history of moonshining and its impact on the local economies here. Here's a display of artifacts that I pored over:

And here's a $35, spiral-bound, self-published book written by Casey Jones, himself, that I REALLY wanted but did not buy:

It was so awesome. It was essentially all photocopied from original typewritten pages, and the preface consisted of Jones, with lots of spelling errors and grammar mistakes, writing about how now that he was old he wished he'd taken his education more seriously, but also, it was brilliant and had such a vivid authorial voice. My favorite kind of outsider art! I had the thought that maybe I could interlibrary loan it when I got home, but of course it has no ISBN or Worldcat or OCLC entry. I'll just have to go back to Hopkinsville one day and buy it!

After the distillery, we were both starving and frankly, I was still a little tipsy, so we ate barbecue. It was freaking delicious, and I'm still sad that I ate so much pulled pork that I didn't have room for pie. 

On a previous family road trip years ago, we very briefly detoured into Chattanooga, but it didn't help us with wayfinding AT ALL. Genuinely helpful was our hotel's location just across the street from a minor league baseball field, and imagine my delight when at the conclusion of that evening's game, they had a fireworks show!

And because I'd planned the trip, I'd been able to pick a much nicer hotel than Matt would have been happy springing for. BUT it was in easy walking distance of almost everything we wanted to do and was super roomy and comfy.

Matt definitely made fun of me for having my name on the TV, though...

And I got to text the kids to show them that no matter where you go, you'll always have an Office marathon!

When my Girl Scout troop was in Montgomery, Alabama, some of the kids had really wanted to order Mellow Mushroom pizza, but it was closed. I was excited, then, to see that not only was there a Mellow Mushroom in Chattanooga, BUT it was open AND it was only a couple of blocks from our hotel!

Unfortunately, it tasted really gross, soft and almost undercooked:

Good thing I had the foresight to pack all those car snacks! 

The Harper Tunic: My First Try

 

The good news: this Harper Tunic is easily the most comfortable item of clothing that I own, second only to my four-year-old Black Panther-branded jersey knit jammy pants.

The bad news: it's so roomy that it's probably unwearable on any occasion in which I care what I look like. That's not many occasions, true, but it's not none occasions!

Even though I've been sewing constantly for 18 years (my first project was a ring sling for tiny baby Will!), I can count on one hand the articles of clothing that I have actually sewn for myself---including that ring sling! I've sewn countless garments for the kids, and even a few things for Matt, but I am very much a novice, still, at sewing for my own body.

For the Harper Tunic, I'm on the cusp between the OSP and OSP2 sizes. The Chest measurement for the OSP is 38"-45", and the OSP2 is 45"-52"; my chest measurement is 45". I'm solidly in the OSP2 range with a Waist measurement of 42.5", but I'm again on the cusp between two sizes with my Hip measurement of 49"; the OSP is 42"-49", and the OSP2 is 49"-56". I read somewhere as I was researching this pattern that I should opt for the larger size if I was between measurements, so that's what I did. 

I sewed this tunic from an $8 cotton sheet from Goodwill--Goodwill's prices have gotten RIDICULOUS, so please don't tell them that their sheet prices are still reasonable, lest they up those, too, and I lose my favorite source of affordable fabric! This was mostly intended to be a muslin, so I'm not super sad that I don't love it. Instead, it's like a bonus that it's wearable at all, even if its entire lifespan will be spent with me doing kitchen and yardwork.

Because look at those pockets!

I added a matching pocket on the opposite side of the tunic, and now I have enough room in my pockets to fit five five-week-old kittens:

I mean, they don't hate it...

My next step will be to cut down my pattern to the smaller size and try it again--I've got a $4 dark red sheet already picked out for it, so I'm pretty stoked. Will is still in the process of assembling her Harper Tunic pattern--so far, her sewing lessons have consisted of the fact that cutting and assembling pdf patterns SUCK!!!!!--but I think I'm going to have her cut her pattern down another size, too, as she is also on the cusp of two sizes and unlike me, she would majorly loathe wearing an oversized shirt.

I mean, she's also probably going to loathe wearing matching shirts with her mother, but to be honest, she's kind of oblivious so there's a good chance she won't even notice...

Week 2 with the Foster Kittens: Five Weeks Old and Full of Trouble!

Socks

Whenever I look back at photos of all of our former litters of foster kittens, I ask myself why on earth I didn't take MORE photos of them? They're so cute and little! Did I not appreciate what I had while I had it?!?

I appreciated it all right. I just keep forgetting that it is nearly impossible to take a decent photo of a small kitten, much less five of them. Someone is always in motion, always blurry, always running out of frame. 

That's not my vibe so much. Everyone else can play with them, wrestle and dangle ribbons and toss curly strips of paper towel tube for them to chase. All I want is a kitten to sleep on my lap and purr while I pet it.

And when that happens, I take a photo!

Socks and Anchovy

Athena

Pickle

We've been moving them between their nighttime accommodations, the children's bathroom, and their daytime accommodations, my bathroom, since for several days they seemed happy enough to use the litter box, but also happy enough to simply squat wherever they were and pee on my floor.

This means we got a lot of fun bathroom floor photos in between doing a sanitary load of laundry and deep cleaning two bathrooms every single day!

Anchovy and Taboo

Taboo

Athena

They're more reliable in the past couple of days (although that back corner under my desk remains an unholy temptation...), so they've gotten to also hang out in my bedroom and nap on the bed, and every now and then a lucky kitten gets to come out and sit on the couch with us.

Anchovy

Anchovy

And sometimes a couple of them get to ride around the rest of the house in a shirt pocket...

Taboo and Athena

They are not very helpful when I'm trying to get some work done:

Pickle

So then you've got to distract them like you do any other ipad baby:

Socks

I still prefer when they lie on me and sleep and purr, though. Obviously, when you're catlocked, you have to stop doing all your productive things and instead play on your phone or nap while the baby's napping.

Socks

They've all been very good kittens this week and hit the one-pound mark, even little Pickle, who had insisted on remaining 15 ounces after all the other babies blew past her. For some reason, a few days ago all the kittens decided that they hated their canned kitten food, so Syd fixed up her go-to Plan B of baked chicken pureed in a blender with a little water, famous as the food that finally got Buttons, the runt from her last foster litter, to decide that eating solid food was a route she wanted to pursue. The kittens are ALL ABOUT the pureed chicken now, but now that they're all over a pound, Syd's next big challenge is to wean them off it and back onto regular kitten food. 

Chicken is too expensive to be feeding it to kittens that could eat their nice kibble perfectly well if they weren't so picky!

Holiday World, and the Magic of Local Amusement Parks

One of the family traditions that I cherish the most is our yearly day trip to Holiday World, a semi-local indie theme park. It started many years ago, solely because two tickets to Holiday World has always been a prize choice for selling 600 boxes of Girl Scout cookies (this year that prize moved up to 650 boxes, because inflation). The first year that the kids sold over 600 boxes of cookies, they excitedly picked out those tickets as prizes, and we had SO much fun there that they've made it a point to choose that prize every year since.

When I was a kid, some of my favorite vacations were trips to semi-local indie theme parks. Dogpatch USA had better theming, but Silver Dollar City had better rides. I was a nervous kid who had trouble learning social scripts, so I particularly adored the feeling of visiting one of these parks a second or third time in my childhood, already knowing the best rides and what I wanted to see the most and what the day, in general, would look like. I no longer have any of those connections with where I grew up, but I really love seeing my kids have a similar relationship to this theme park. It's a cozy, familiar feeling, and it makes me happy to feel like their childhoods have this connection with mine.

The Theming

The theming is pretty brilliant, because holidays aren't copyrighted! It also makes for a fun game of trying to think of new holiday-based lands and rides that should be added. While waiting in line for Wildebeest this year, Matt, Will and I fully fleshed out the New Year's Eve land that the park should totally do--there could be a Tower of Terror-esque drop ride, and an all-ages dance club, and it could be the one area in the park that serves alcohol. We also need a Land of Lesser Holidays, with a St. Patrick's Day dark ride with a leprechaun playing tricks, and an Easter Space Ranger Spin-based dark ride where you can hunt Easter eggs. 

The actual Holiday World decorations are kind of cheezy, because I don't know when they were last updated but it was certainly before we started going--also, I think this cat used to move?

But I swear that it's part of the charm! 

The Rides

I'm not a particular coaster enthusiast, but I know that many of the roller coasters at Holiday World are considered quite special. Three of the four big coaster are wooden, which is apparently a big deal, although to me, a wooden roller coaster mostly means that you're going to get the crap beat out of you while you ride it. I literally have bruises today from riding The Legend this weekend!

I LOVE the chalkboard drawing of the Headless Horseman, and the way that one of the ride operators rings a giant school bell every time the coaster launches, and all the covered bridges that you go through.

With The Raven, I like checking on my car in the parking lot from the top of the lift hill, and I like flying over the pond. 

I also like to ride it again on our way out, because the path from the back to the front of the park is entirely uphill OMG, but The Raven's exit is a little closer to the park entrance than where you get on, so you've 1) saved some steps, 2) had a little rest, and 3) got your adrenalin up for the last bit of the walk.

The Voyage is Will's favorite coaster, and she said this weekend that her personal goal is to ride it four times every visit.

This one in particular about scared the ever-loving snot out of me the first time I rode it, because I had no idea it was going to go THROUGH the ground, then off into the woods, and then I just kept riding it and riding it and thinking, "Surely the ride should have been over by now? Did I die and now I'm riding a roller coaster forever?"

The Thunderbird is Matt's favorite roller coaster. He likes it because it's smooth and it's over quickly, because he doesn't actually like roller coasters:

I think The Thunderbird is super disorienting, because I have to take my glasses off and then it's just flipping me all over the place.

The Holiday World gift shop was offering very nifty little metal models of all of their roller coaster tracks this year, and I LOVED them and thought they would be awesome souvenirs, but just between us, I ain't paying 35 dollars for a spontaneous souvenir. We already spent 35 dollars on a drive-through McDonald's breakfast that morning, something that's so infrequent that when the kids were looking through the McDonald's breakfast menu on my phone, Will literally read the description of the McGriddle out loud to us, her mind blown at the miracle of modern fast food technology. I will cherish in my heart forever the memory of her exclaiming from the backseat, "It's got pancake buns!!! With MAPLE SYRUP FLAVORING!!!" Like, what magic will the world offer her next?

Anyway, I wanted a tiny metal roller coaster model and I didn't buy one. I did find the company that makes them, though, and see? They're super cute! 

The Shows

I was VERY SAD to learn that this year, Holiday World didn't have a full-on original musical production going on, but instead had a comedy juggler and a comedy magician. We went to see the comedy magician, and it was miserable. I was so bummed! He kept bringing small children onto the stage and then coaching them through some small-scale trick and then coaching the audience to loudly applaud them so that they could feel like real magicians. I complied, but, I mean, I have spent the past 18 years of my life loudly applauding children performing middling feats of adequacy--I really don't need to also have to do it for strange children in my free time. Especially not when I knew that I was supposed to be watching a full-on original musical production, and it was supposed to be one of my favorite things about the day! Seriously, I kid you not when I tell you that I bring up one or other of the past Holiday World shows in some capacity several times a year; they are EPIC AND I LOVE THEM.

Like an inside joke, these are probably nearly unwatchable if you weren't there at the time, but I have to share them anyway. I will be the first to admit that the actors are not always perfectly on pitch, but that just means that they're singing live, and on whatever random day we happened to visit, at whatever random showtime of the many they had that day, they were absolutely singing and dancing their hearts out. They were all extremely well-rehearsed, and their sincerity and enthusiasm shown through.

Here's the 2019 show, an original jukebox musical with a fun plot and tons of magic tricks:

The 2021 show was less well-crafted, and an unbiased eye would objectively call it bad, but in my VERY biased opinion, it cycled right back around from awful to AMAZING. Some of the song choices were hilariously off-topic (Midwestern boy singing Bruno Mars with 1000% camp enthusiasm? That's me sitting fourth row center, beaming at him and clapping enthusiastically!), and the circus components kept getting more and more ridiculously over-the-top (they don't do it in this video, but when we watched it live, at the end of the opening number some actors came rolling out on top of giant balls like circus bears of yore, and I burst into silent but hysterical laughter and did not stop until twenty minutes after the curtain dropped), but I kid you not when I tell you that I had not enjoyed myself so much since before March 2020. 

I think I've mentioned before how much I love outsider art--art, that is, that isn't "professional," isn't studied, isn't, perhaps, polished, but IS nevertheless skilled, sincere, and fresh. I love fanfiction, fan art, folk art, all the lovingly handcrafted bits and bobs on etsy, and, apparently, large-cast productions at local amusement parks.

Also, super randomly, there's a diving pool and they do a diving stunt show several times a day? YOU CANNOT NOT GO TO THE DIVING STUNT SHOW IT IS AWESOME.

The Associated Media

Obviously something isn't fun unless you study for it, so on the drive to Holiday World we listen to episodes from their official podcast:

"The One with the Cat's Meow" was surprising, because they randomly got one of the founders of Meow Wolf as a guest? I LOVE Meow Wolf, so I was stoked. Will and I went to a similar immersive art experience in Columbus, Ohio, so now all I need to do now is plan a trip to Denver, Las Vegas, or Santa Fe!

On the way home that night, I remembered that one of my favorite This American Life episodes revolves around a theme park, so I streamed it for us. My favorite segment from the episode isn't so much about theme parks, but about what is clearly the kindest, most inspiring, and most skilled boss probably anyone has had the privilege to work for. 

Okay, I just looked him up, and he has his own website! Looks like he's got a public speaking side hustle, and I say more power to him--if he ever motivationally spoke at an event I attended, I bet anything he would be the first motivational speaker I ever found motivational. Way better than the guy at a Girl Scout all-day thing a few years ago who advised us to let cars cut in front of us because life is too short. Like, Sir. I am a woman. If I let everyone who wanted to cut in front of me cut in front of me, I would never get there.

When the kids were a little younger, I'd sometimes do a theme park physics unit with them around the time of our yearly visit to Holiday World. I'd introduce them to the always amazing Rollercoaster Tycoon, or I'd have them build paper coasters, or sometimes we'd just watch some of these Disney Science of Imagineering videos. It was a little weird not to turn this year's trip into a homeschool lesson!

You know how the mommy bloggers' favorite summertime guilt trip is saying that you only get eighteen summers with your children before they're grown, so MAKE EVERY SECOND COUNT DO NOT REST UNTIL MAGIC PERMEATES EVERY MEMORY? Well, that yearly trip to Holiday World was the final hurrah of Will's eighteenth summer. I'm lucky enough to get one more fall and half a winter with her, still, as she's not heading off to college until January, but the bittersweetness is already there. She won't be selling Girl Scout cookies this winter. We don't even know what adventures she'll be having next summer, or whether they'll include a trip to her favorite little Southern Indiana theme park with her old mum. 

I hope they will. I mean, she only managed to ride The Voyage twice this time, so she's got some catching up to do!

Homeschool High School Biology: Prepared Slides of Protists

 

The Amscope prepared slides of bacteria were garbage, but the prepared slides of protists are MUCH better!

They can't replace the real-life observation that we'll be doing later, when we look at lake water through the microscope (OMG don't ever drink lake water, because it is chock-full of protists!!!), but looking at prepared slides is a good way for a student to study anatomy, and specifically to get used to--and see the differences between!--an illustrated diagram of an organism and an actual example of that organism. Real-life critters never look exactly like their diagrams!

In 2017, when the kids were still older elementary/middle school but it was becoming clear that Will, at least would likely want to homeschool through high school, I did OMG TONS of research before buying this microscope, the Levenhuk 320, and I have been so happy with it! This specific model is actually discontinued now, I bought it so long ago, but honestly I'd trust anything from the Levenhuk site. A year later, I even bought the digital camera attachment, and it is also so great. The user interface is very dated, a little clunky, and extremely non-intuitive--

--but once you click around enough to figure out what you're supposed to do, it's fairly seamless to switch between the optical eyepiece and the camera, and to take both photos and videos of the cool stuff you're looking at.

At each magnification, I like to use the optical eyepiece to observe first, then pull that eyepiece out and switch in the camera eyepiece, already plugged into my laptop and set up in the software. Then I can adjust the focus if I need to, and then I can start taking photos and videos.

Here's an example of the genus Euglena at 400x:

If you scroll to the bottom of this Wikipedia article, you can see a video of a Euglena that looks very similar to this slide. It would be better if the slide had additional examples of Euglena when it's not a sphere, though.

Here's a Volvox at 100x:

The large encasement isn't a single cell, like a prokaryote, but instead a gelatinous structure that the cells hang out in. The staining on this slide is a little weird, because Volvox would usually be green.

The best prepared slide in this group is the Spirogyra. Here it is at 40x:

And here it is at 100x:

There are some other really good examples of Spirogyra here.

I sourced an illustrated diagram of Euglena, Volvox, and Spirogyra, and Syd's assignment will be to sketch the microscope views at 40x and 100x of each slide, then label the sketches with the features she can identify, using the diagrams as references. I think this will be a good refresher on how to use the microscope and how to sketch microscope observations.

And then it's off to the lake!

If You Can't Get a Hole in the Head, Get Five Four-Week-Old Foster Kittens

Syd and I are going to be playing around with idioms next week in her Creative Writing study, so it's relevant that I tell you that I needed five four-week-old kittens like I needed a hole in the head.

But to be fair, I did tell her that she needed to choose a regular volunteer commitment this year, and I did tell her that it should be something that she's passionate about. After all, those college application essays aren't going to be writing themselves!

She'd been making some noise about going back to volunteer at the little local food pantry we used to volunteer at weekly when she was a tot, so I thought that's what she'd be doing. Now that she's fully licensed she can even drive herself, so I could just sit my butt down in a quiet home for two hours a week while she built her leadership skills and logged service learning hours and created the foundation of a kick-ass college application essay about food insecurity.

But instead, somehow I found myself putting my name on a quite different volunteer application that she filled out, and then somehow I found myself going with her to pick up a litter of foster kittens. Another volunteer had already claimed the litter of four six-week-old kittens we'd originally planned to pick up, but the staffer said that another litter of five six-week-old kittens had just been dropped off that morning; would we perhaps like to take them, instead?

Five isn't that different from four, so fine.

As the staffer was examining them, though, she was all, "Hmmm... these don't look like they're six weeks old. I think they're more like five weeks."

Five weeks instead of six weeks means they'd spend just one more extra week in our care, so... okay, fine.

A few more minutes, and that became, "Actually, five weeks might be a stretch. I'm going to write them down as four weeks old."

And of course, by then I'd already been petting them, and seen that one is a tortoiseshell and one is a TORBIE!!!!!, so the news that we'd be coming home with one more kitten than planned and keeping them all at least two more weeks than planned sailed right over my head. An hour later, I was sitting on my playroom floor, holding both that tortoiseshell AND that torbie in my hands and giving them kisses on their little fuzzy foreheads!

Here are Socks, a tuxedo, and Athena, the torbie, the bravest of the litter and the first ones out of their travel crate:

The shelter gave them their first set of vaccinations before we took them home, so here are the other three tired babies sleeping off their shots in their travel crate:

And then Socks laid down for a nap, too:

Eventually, everyone was awake at the same time and whoa. It's been wild ever since!

Foster kittens are a LOT more work than it would be to spend two hours a week unloading produce at the food pantry. We've got to keep them isolated from the other household pets, and just sanitizing their area and keeping them cleaned up takes tons of time. They'll happily use the litterbox, but they'll also just as happily use the floor or their bedding--you will not BELIEVE what the kids' bathroom looked like this morning! I gagged, Syd literally almost fainted, and then five bad kitties had to get stuffed back into their travel crate while we spray cleaned and steam mopped and Lysoled the floor and walls. 

Seriously, the WALLS!!!! And then we had to come at each of the kittens with a warm washcloth, too. They were furious.

Thankfully, these guys are acting wolfishly healthy so far, wrestling and scampering and growling at each other over the bowl of wet cat food:

And they flock to Syd. Check them out sleeping and sprawling and fighting all over her lap:

A few years ago, a young friend's cat died, and in the condolence letter that I wrote to her, I told her that I believed that cats could sense when you were a person who had been loved by a cat, and she shouldn't be surprised if she found that cats were drawn to her even more now. Of course I didn't actually believe that; it was mostly just a pretty way to express to her that love is never wasted, and I wanted her to still feel like her Lavender's love was with her.

But looking at these five little foster kittens, happy and snug in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms--

--I swear I can almost feel the invisible spirit of Gracie standing there, telling five scared kittens, "Go over and climb on that kid right there. You're going to be so safe and happy with her."

And so they did. And I know that Syd actually has smiled since Gracie died--we've told jokes and had fun and things have, mostly, gone back to normal. She's definitely smiled and laughed, and she's definitely had her happy moments. But she hasn't yet been as happy as she'd been with Gracie, I don't think. I think she always misses her, and I think that remembering Gracie hurts her. I know it hurts me, and it hurts me to see my kid's grief, always just right there below the surface. 

So I'd like to imagine that the invisible spirit of Gracie really was there, that first time that those five foster kittens curled up in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms. I'd like to think that in some way Gracie, too, got to be there to see her beloved kid really, truly, genuinely happy again. 

Homeschool High School Biology: Fermentation of Sauerkraut

Welcome to Honors Biology: Year 2!

During my kid's brief foray into the public school system a couple of years ago, I discovered, to my dismay, that the entire full-year high school Honors Biology class didn't get past ecology! They studied ecosystems, cells, the cell cycle, ecology, and evolution... and then they were done. The kids then had to take a state-mandated standardized test on those topics, and I imagine that for many of them, that was the end of their biology studies.

No plants. No animals. One lab. No MICROSCOPE!!! Like, don't get me wrong, cells and ecosystems and ecology are all super important, and hallelujah my state is at least teaching evolution, but... aren't plants and animals the fun parts of biology? Aren't labs and microscopes the high-interest activities that inspire kids to love science?

Anyway, that's why I feel perfectly justified in turning our homeschool biology study into a two-year course, rounded out with lots of plants, lots of animals, lots of labs, and LOTS of microscope time. 

Honors Biology: Year 2 begins with a study of prokaryotes. Please read all of the sections about bacteria in your biology textbook, and master the practice problems, but then, for the love of all that's good and holy and engaging and enriching, let's go do a lab or look through the microscope. Or SOMETHING!!!

My set of AmScope prepared slides does have a few bacteria slides, but I don't love them. The AmScope prepared slides can be really hit or miss--some are absolutely fabulous, including the protist slides we'll look at next, but the bacteria ones weren't worth trying to incorporate into a lesson. Instead, we looked at illustrated diagrams of bacteria, and played around with growing our own.

Which means... sauerkraut!!!!!

Here's the biology lab that I wrote to lead Syd through the scientific process of making sauerkraut. My favorite parts are calculating the correct grams of table salt and testing the sauerkraut's pH. Most sauerkraut recipes call for a cabbage by the head and a specific measurement of salt, usually in tablespoons. There is some wiggle room in the amount of salt in a sauerkraut recipe, but it's much more accurate to weigh the cabbage, then add 2.5% of that weight in as salt.

Because it can sometimes be kind of lonesome to do a lab alone, I recruited a second biology student for this activity:

Which means that we'll get a yummy two quarts and one pint of sauerkraut out of this lab!

If you've never made sauerkraut before, I really like this walkthrough.

I've never had a problem with my sauerkraut spoiling, but if the thought worries you, an airlock system pretty much guarantees success. 

To see an example of a scientific paper written on the subject of sauerkraut, check this out. There is a lot of sophisticated study that an interested student could make from sauerkraut!

If you're interested in other ways of incorporating food preservation into a kid's homeschool studies, check out my totally made-up Girl Scout Homesteading badge. So many practical life skills in evidence!

And to follow along with all my homeschool and crafty adventures and mishaps--and to see how yummy our sauerkraut looks when it's done!!!--check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!