Blueberries and Black Raspberries

The u-pick blueberry farm is a VERY important part of our summer.

The children's personalities really come into focus here. Sydney, whose penchants for fine clothing and hair pretties and small toy ponies might fool you into thinking her frivolous, steadily picked blueberries for two entire hours:

She ended up with three pounds of blueberries picked all by herself:

Willow, whose penchants for book work and dinosaur study and guitar practice might fool you into thinking that she's solidly industrious, picked perhaps fifteen blueberries, and then spent two hours happily floundering in various mudpits:

She collected this summer's stock of pampered tadpole babies to come live in our fish tank:

She's out on the back deck reading out loud to them right now, actually...

I forbade Willow to pick more blueberries after she got her hands so filthy in tadpole muck and refused to wash them. Fortunately, the child is a problem-solver:

We've never had the luck in our side-of-the-trail black raspberry picking that my blog friend cake has. We don't come home with many black raspberries, but this is probably a good thing since we seem to collect an equal number of chiggers as raspberries. The yearly outing does have two good things going for it, however, that our blueberry picking lacks...

Wildflowers:

And Daddy:

He's even better at collecting chiggers than the rest of us are.

Homeschool Science: Mason Jar Butter (and Whipped Cream!)

How one thing leads to another...

We're going to Niagara Falls in a couple of weeks, did I tell you? I am SOOOPER excited. Our house is chock-full of books and media products and activities and experiments and art projects having to do with the humongous road trip (such preparation has taken precedence over other mundane necessities as finding a cat sitter, a front garden waterer, and a community garden waterer, none of which we have, yet, yikes!), including one CD reader entitled Manny's Cows: The Niagara Falls Tale, which the girls listen to over and over and over again.

In the story, the cows discover how to make butter, and the book includes a recipe for Mason jar butter. Willow says, "I want to make Mason jar butter." And so we do.

You will need:

• clean Mason jar with tight-fitting lid
• heavy whipping cream

1. Fill the Mason jar about 3/4-ish full of cream.
2. Shake the crap out of it until it turns to butter with a little buttermilk on the side:

This project was actually a perfect complement to the oil vs. water science experiment that Sydney initiated the other week, because it's another example of the way that oil (or butterfat) wants to separate. If you unscrew the lid fairly often, you can watch the transition from milk to butter in several discrete steps. The girls were only interested in one of these steps:

Whipped cream! The air that gets shaken into the mixture as a preface to its separation is yummy, little scientists discovered, on chocolate chip cookies, ginger muffins, and, it turns out, straight from the spoon.

I've read that Mason jar butter requires perhaps 10-15 minutes of straight shaking. I wouldn't know, as we spent a good hour on this project. I dutifully shook when it was my turn, but I must report that the larger child merely gave the jar a desultory shake or two while reading comic books when it was her turn, and the smaller child refused to shake at all, merely letting the Mason jar keep her company as she watercolor painted on the floor when it was her turn.

The fate of the butter rested in my hands, then, but I'm happy to tell you...

...that it tasted simply delicious with my vegan blueberry/ginger spelt muffins.

This is What All the Fuss Was About

A friend of mine, who also was homeschooled as a child, warned me recently that summer is the busiest season for homeschoolers. In summer, you not only have all the regular active homeschooler stuff--and there's a lot of regular active homeschooler stuff!--but you also have all the out-of school schoolkid stuff, the day camps and reading programs and sports classes, etc., not to mention the super-fun extra summer stuff.

And that's how it's been this past week. We've had not just the regular active homeschooler stuff--guitar class and science experiments and playdates and art activities and workbooks--but the out-of school schoolkid stuff--swim class and library programs and movie screenings--and the summer stuff! Berry picking! Ice cream eating! Even more swimming!

The momma stuff, therefore--crafting and blogging and book writing--has been waaaaaaaaay on the back burner. I basically shoved a week's worth of work into a couple of stressful evenings, but the Crafting a Green World articles have been written, the babywearing class has been taught, and the baby bags...

Ah, the baby bags...

They're killing me, I love them so much. I mean, seriously--Guns 'n Roses?!? How could you NOT dress your newborn in a Guns 'n Roses gown?

Anyway, I actually have about four more baby bags all cut out and ready to be sewn, and I need to prep and upload a big update to my pumpkinbear etsy shop with the stuff from my new handmade homeschool line, AND I need to get my application in to Strange Folk 2010 pronto, and I'm totally going to get right on that, but for the next couple of days I think I have more pressing business to accomplish.

I should probably make several meals of stir-fried rice.

And watch this totally insane documentary about Dr. Bronner that I checked out of the library.

And paint the basement hallway in several shades of pink and purple.

Right now, however, there's a summer storm brewing, and I really need to go stand out in the middle of the street and watch it.

Til tomorrow...

What Have I Been Making This Week?

Baby bags!!!

Bring it on, emo babies!

The Sturdiest Comforter on the Block

Do you know how long it takes to sew decorative/reinforced stitching around the perimeter of a king-sized down comforter?

It takes a loooooong time. But man, that comforter has been with us for a long time, too, and man, it had lots of holes around the seams.

And hauling it triumphantly back to the bedroom when I was finished, finding Matt laid out on the bed playing video games, and flopping the comforter on top of him, watching him first flinch back and hold his breath in anticipation of the expected cloud of downy little feathers, then smile happily and say, "Hey, you fixed the comforter!"--totally worth the trouble.

Secondhand Sand

This weekend was all about the thrifting. Of course, we did also go to the zoo this weekend and have Father's Day and watch Toy Story 3 at the drive-in, and last weekend we had the Monroe County History Center garage sale, so that was thrifting, too...

Just go with me, here. This weekend was all about the thrifting.

First, of course, are the Friday morning garage sales. We don't often hit these, but we were on our way over to the Community Garden, anyway, and I did just happen to have a little cash money in my pocket, and that's how we ended up with a Belgian waffle maker, a Ziplock baggie full of little plastic cowboys 'n Indians, and Sydney's new best friend:

For four dollars.

But of course, we all know that there is no thrifting like the thrifting that is the Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale. I bought T-shirts to remake into baby bags, a sorely-needed new pair of blue jeans, subtraction flash cards for Willow + road trip, several pounds of that colored sand that you layer into jars to make shelf pretties, two dinosaur books, etc.

Sydney's mania for all things pretty has nearly driven me out of my gourd. I am SO tired of the child's refusal to wear anything but dresses and skirts and tights and leggings and hairbows and barrettes. I have to braid her hair into two pigtails and put a bow barrette at the bottom of each pigtail every morning. Every morning! All the people who are reading this and who knew me as a child--I'm talking to you, Aunt Pam!--are laughing their asses off right now. I didn't even wear make-up to my own wedding, and here I am with a house full of pigtail braids and bow barrettes.

Anyway...this was the last storewide sale until September, which means that it's time to look into the fall wardrobe. I thought about buying Sydney some practical long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and then I thought, "Aw, screw it," and ended up buying her a big stack of party dresses:

Yep, party dresses. Lace and tulle and smocking and petticoats and  puffs and velvet and ribbons:

The child now has party dresses for play clothes. Whatever, she can wear leggings and tights with them when it gets cold.

Willow has her own methods for driving me nuts, but thankfully clothing is not one of them. A while ago now she tried for a couple of months to insist on "pretty" clothes, as well, but she couldn't stick it. She basically pulls her clothing from the top of her clothing drawers, and as long as she can climb trees in it and get it muddy, she's good to go.

I actually do take pleasure in choosing the children's clothes--even digging through acres of party dresses was fun when I anticipated Sydney's joy in being presented with them, and even though Will doesn't much care about what she wears, I take a lot of pleasure in choosing clothing that is centered on what she does like--dinosaurs, horses, farms, outer space--and clothing that is centered on what I like. That's why my kid is occasionally seen wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.

Usually, however, my clothing choices look more like this:

Or perhaps this:

Five years isn't too early for a kid to dress a little skater punk, is it?

Here's Our Homeschool This Week

This week-ish, we:

painted our canvas shoes (more on that later)--

--layered colored sand into glass jars; drew a few Father's Day banners and cards; did a little watercolor al fresco--

--took some photographs, and drew tons and tons and tons of pictures

read out loud; Willow read to herself almost constantly; listened to CD readers (Manny's Cows: The Niagara Falls Tale has been a big favorite) and books on CD; spent a goodly amount of time at various bookstores; examined all the diagrams in the Gnomes book and spent a lot of time asking Momma if gnomes are real; and looked at books and fought over books and just plain loved books a lot

took swim class and went swimming; played in a couple of IU fountains (Is this legal? No idea)--

--walked and biked and rollerbladed; played at the playground and played at the yard; hiked and hiked and hiked at Squire Boone Caverns; and helped the Momma with innumerable errands and chores, including one big craft fair

worked the lever on the button machine and lots of other tasty mechanical tools; Sydney upgraded to the next level of her connect-the-dots books; played some inane Dragon Tales computer game; put together puzzles and Legos and Lincoln Logs and blocks off all sorts and sizes; and helped with cooking and baking and breakfast-making

explored an atlas on CD-Rom and marveled at geographic marvels and found shipwreck sites

played The Magic School Bus Discovers Flight and watched Dinosaur Train and Nova and Billy Nye the Science Guy and other dinosaur documentaries; performed the oil versus water science experiment; read books about shells and books about dinosaurs and books abour rainbows and books about tornadoes; had a few tornado warnings of our own; helped the Momma (sort of) with the gardens--

--had lots of hands-on fun with candle-making and gem mining and caves and a grist mill; and visited the zoo to spend time with the elephants, cheetahs, dolphins, and bears, and to pet the sharks:

And that's how we homeschooled this week. Next week, I hope for blueberry picking, an on-the-wall timeline, making butter in a Mason jar, and the beginning of the dinosaur atlas.