Questions Better Left Unanswered

1. How did the child with the broken leg fall behind the couch?
2. What was the child with the broken leg doing on top of the couch's back? Sitting? Standing on one leg? Standing on one leg while reaching for something up high?
3. Why did the child with the broken leg not call out for help? Clearly, there is not enough room behind the couch for a child with a broken leg. How did falling on one's back behind the couch, without hope of getting up or out unassisted, NOT constitute an emergency requiring one to screech at the top of one's lungs for Momma, and yet breaking one's pretzel, or not finding one's favorite pair of shoes, DOES constitute this kind of emergency?
4. When I walked past the living room and spied one bare foot and one casted foot sticking up from behind the couch, and I therefore walked over, climbed over the couch, and asked the child with the broken leg if I could help her up, why did the child with the broken leg act as if I was doing her a favor by hauling her 40+poundage PLUS cast up in a non-ergonomically-correct position, thus straining my back? How would she have liked to have stayed down there all afternoon, perhaps, maybe with a bag of pretzels and a Boxcar Children novel?
5. How well do you think my sanity is holding up, in company with this child with a broken leg?

The Bread Baker's Apprentices

Willow mentioned only in passing that she wanted to learn how to make bread, but it immediately struck me as such a perfect activity (math! science! hands-on!) that I made a note of it, checked out some cookbooks, and added it to the litany of activities that I suggest whenever a child wanders up to me feeling a bit lost-ish ("Should we clean your room? Should we look through the microscope? Should we play a game? Should we bake some bread?").

At the moment, Syd's a little more the girl who wants to do stuff with Momma than Will, perennially immersed in a book, is, and so it was she and I who made the house's first loaves of French bread:

We used the very clear instructions from Knead It, Punch It, Bake It!: The Ultimate Breadmaking Book for Parents and Kids (then checked out from the library, but since obtained for free from Amazon using my swagbucks, yay!), but unfortunately I didn't have any white flour on hand, and so substituted white wheat flour, and the results were merely satisfying. Of course, Sydney had a brilliant time kneading and punching and baking, so our dry loaves of rough white wheat bread were well worth the effort.

A few days later, I had bought white bread flour, Cake-approved!, AND I found Willow curled up on the couch, reading over and over the recipe for French bread, so when she declared that she wanted to bake French bread ALL by herself, with no hands-on help from the Momma, I said, "You betcha!"

And so she did:

I helped her interpret the directions, of course, and I got out the ingredients, and Will has enough experience with cooking that she knows how to level off measuring spoons and measure to the line that I show her on the measuring cup, etc. And she did do everything herself, just as she had requested. She stirred every stir and kneaded every knead and formed the loaves and poured the teakettle of boiling water in a pan at the bottom of the stove to fill the oven with steam and even put the pan with its loaves into the oven, although her father had to hold her around the middle to keep her balanced on her sound right leg.

Still, though, I'm not at all sure about how much flour she actually put in, because I'm pretty sure she lost count, and the salt spilled, and I think that the dough was more goofed off with than kneaded, per se, and that's all to explain to you that the loaves...

They were perfect. Exquisite. We took them with us to the drive-in to see Despicable Me (which Willow HATED, by the way, and cried and begged to go home until I walked her in my arms like a baby so that Sydney and Matt could finish the movie), along with some Earth Balance, and everyone agreed that, in Willow's words, "This is the best bread in the world."

Those two hands that made it are pretty perfect, too.

I Spy Four Kittens

Sydney's I Spy quilt took a LOT longer to quilt and put a mock binding on than I had anticipated. I just kept having all this parenting to do, and homeschool parenting, etc., so I have not had nearly as much hands-on just-the-Momma craft time that I'm accustomed to.

I've had a lot of Momma/baby craft time, in which Sydney sticks lots of random open safety pins into a quilt as I'm pinning it, until I run out of safety pins. I've had a lot of Momma/baby baking time, which I'll post about a little later, but just know that French bread? Yum. Chocolate cookies six different ways? YUM! Scrubbing the table and scrubbing the chairs and scrubbing the floors and washing every mixing bowl that I own four times every day for four days straight? Not so yum, but it is a hazard of the house.

And I've had a little, little bit of just-the-Momma craft time, thank goodness for Magic Tree House audiobooks, and in that little bit of just-the-Momma craft time, I finally finished quilting and putting a mock binding on Sydney's I Spy quilt, and laid it nicely and neatly out on her bed:

Two minutes in, it was already looking loved:

Of course, loved as Sydney's new I Spy quilt is, it really isn't even today's big news. Here's today's big news:

Four new foster kittens, come to stay with us until they're big and fat and ready to be adopted. We're already smitten with them:

And they seem pretty happy with us, too:

Kittens plus kiddos? I think my wild ride's going to keep going for a while.

Lofty Plans

Okay, I'm going to give you a look at my planner, but you have to promise not to laugh.

Seriously. I mean it. Do NOT laugh at me.

Okay...here goes:

Y'all! I mean it! Stop laughing!

It may be the most chaotic-looking Moleskine planner in the world, but in my own defense, this isn't my crazy-manic list of a billion appointments that HAVE to be kept and a billion things that HAVE to be done. It's mainly a crazy-manic list of possibilities, and plans, and notes to myself.

On the calendar pages, I tend to write down both appointments that have to be kept and everything that's going on at any particular day, just in case we feel like going to something. So, for instance, I kept our appointment at the orthopedic clinic for the big kid, and we went to see The Little Mermaid at the library, and I taught a cloth diaper workshop and picked up our county fair entries, but I don't think we did anything else--we didn't go to the Civil War encampment, or any of the concerts in the park, or storytime at the public library. I knew about it all if we wanted to go, but we didn't.

The list pages are a little wackier. There I keep notes of things that I MUST do--register for Strange Folk, call Pappa--and things to check into--Is the once-yearly sale at Learning Treasures happening yet? Is the registration info for Pre-College Ballet up on their web site yet?--and activities to suggest to the kids--microscope, balancing butterflies--and priorities for the next craft fair--I Spy quilts!--and grocery lists and web sites or books to check out and stuff to plan for--garage sale!--and stuff that the kids express an interest in that I ought to get on--playdates, temporary tattooes, etc.,--and chores--can the peaches, can the tomatoes, hoe the garden, harvest the basil--and post ideas for Crafting a Green World--school supply round-up?--and stuff that I happen to think about that I want to do so I write it down in case I get some time or it strikes my fancy--sprout some more seeds, sew a new camera strap, etc.

When I've done something or I decide not to do it or I didn't do it I mark it out, and I tend to flip back and forth through a month's worth of pages at any given time, if I'm trying to remember the name of the horse book that the big kid saw at the bookstore and wanted to get from the library, for instance, or if I bought the whole wheat pastry flour last week or not, etc., so it's not like I'm trying to do all that business every single week, or anything. It's mostly just that every passing fancy or little idea gets out of my head and into that book before it goes away.

See? Once I explain it, then it makes so much sense, doesn't it? Right?

Fine. It looks crazy, I know it. But, you know...

Welcome to my mind.

Mildenhall, and a Treasure

Last month, the girlies and I attended a screening of Fantastic Mr. Fox at the public library. The next day, I requested the complete works of Roald Dahl for check-out.

Our public library spoils us, by the way. From the comfort of your home, you can peruse our library's online catalog, everything from children's comic books to the newest novels to feature films to software to entire seasons of TV series. You can request any item from that online catalog--if it's checked out, it will be held for you upon its return, and if it's in the building, an employee will pull it off the shelf for you. You can request that the item be held for you to pick up either at the check-out desk indoors, or AT THE DRIVE-UP, WHERE YOU DO NOT EVEN HAVE TO GET OUT OF YOUR CAR. I, on account of we homeschool and walk and I routinely (as in every other day) want more library materials than I can carry, make AMPLE use of these services.

And that's how Matt, on his way home from work the next evening, drove by the library and picked up the complete works of Roald Dahl for us, as well as other miscellaneous novels and picture books and DVDs and software, etc.

Mostly the books have sat on the library bookshelf (because yes, we have an ENTIRE BOOKSHELF solely for library books--the CDs and DVDS and software programs are kept elsewhere), but they're there for the girls if they become interested, and the other evening, while Syd and the dad were out running some errands, Willow found Roald Dahl's The Mildenhall Treasure and asked me to read it to her.

And so I did.

If you have not read about the Mildenhall Treasure before, specifically Dahl's account of it, I recommend that you do. Wow.

The book, however, is illustrated by an Artist, and although there are several very evocative renditions of the treasure, there are none in the book that actually, you know, show what the treasure looks like really.

And so we went online.

The book notes that the treasure was acquired by the British Museum, so that's where we went. Virtually. On the British Museum web site there's a brief account of the Mildenhall Treasure (although not the scandalous story that Dahl relates), a notation of exactly where in the museum one can go to gaze upon the treasure (insert jealous sigh here), and a few nice images that, if you didn't quite get while you were reading the tale exactly what the big deal is with a bunch of silver platters and plates, you get it now. Again, wow.

Okay, so blah, blah, blah, research, research, research, but then the two of us, Will and I, get the bright idea that we want to put the Mildenhall Treasure on our timeline, and wouldn't it be great to get a copy of those images to go with it?

And here's where we make an awesome discovery.

The British Museum has a free digital image service, for which you can register, and then request high-quality digital images of anything in the British Museums's collections that they have high-quality digital images of. The British Museum will then get some interns or someone to find those images and email them to you. Can you freaking imagine the awesomeness of that?

And that's how we got Mildenhall on our timeline:

And now I'm going to go request myself some more art.

Here's Our Homeschool This Week

It's that time again! This week, we:

read books out loud and books independently and books online:

listened to audiobooks of the entire rest of the Magic Tree House series, I think (I'm talking several hours, here, as in at least one entire day of little people camped out on the floor next to the CD player); and played ourselves some Scrabble. Sydney and I pored over all her Valentines from last February AGAIN, and one night, after Matt read her Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, she spent the entire evening with a glow stick taped between her eyes. I taught Willow how to use the Primary Search database (available through our university library system for teacher training) and she had a happy time looking up Ranger Rick articles and having them read to her by a tinny digital voice.

spent some time (not as much as in previous weeks, thank gawd this phase is passing) on PBSKids.org; made and played with balancing butterflies; and played and played with our newish Cuisenaire rods. Willow masterminded the very successful butterfly snack of the weekend. Sydney ventured a maze or two, and watched her first episode of Cyberchase, which she liked only okay.

took many more photographs--

--and drew and created and imagined. Sydney did all of the decorating of the balancing butterflies, painted many pictures from the icky Disney Princess coloring book that she bought with her Christmas money--

--painted her nails in a gorgeous amplitude of colors, and helped me make her a butterfly wand.

read children's comics about the Boston Tea Party and the creation of the Star-Spangled Banner, and played with the timeline. Willow and I read Roald Dahl's book about the discovery of the Mildenhall Treasure, then researched it at the British Museum web site and added it to the timeline, too. I realized as I was pasting up some photos that I didn't leave much space for the world wars--we'll figure that out later.

watched just a little Syd the Science Kid (he's pro-vaccination); played with our brand-new stethoscope a LOT; attended a Demolition Derby with Daddy; worked in the garden; explored the local farmer's co-op with me and bought some bulk seeds appropriate for a fall garden; visited the Humane Society to love on the animals; and played a heck of a lot of Petz (Will has spent almost the entire day on this game today, adopting and caring for and training and taking digital photos of and playing with some inane, big-eyed computer Dalmatian puppies). Willow watched an episode of Life with me; researched whether or not umbrellas could be used as parachutes (youtube evidence is to the contrary); experimented with whether or not umbrellas could be used as boats (yes, if it's something super-light); read A Seed is a Promise, and was so moved by the part about the prehistoric seeds that are sprouted thousands of years later that she read the passage to us all at the dinner table; and read a lot of Ranger Rick. Syd had done a lot of cooking and baking with me this week, everything from lentils to French bread:

In the process, she's had a lot of flour and water play, making her own concoctions--

--and drawing pictures in a layer of cornmeal spread out on the table:

attended the county fair, riding the rides and seeing the sights; played in the dirt; played with friends; played on crutches; and hiked downtown. Will's newest method of getting around is to hop on her sound leg, and she has developed this skill to stunning heights. She can also go up and down stairs and inclines on her crutches, now, which is a pretty big deal. Sydney is again rocking Level 1 of swim class (sigh), is my go-to girl when I need some basil picked, and has taken it upon herself to keep all the household pencils nice and sharp.

Will has been heavy into creating signage this week, and Sydney is painstakingly working through copying out a letter to a friend that she dictated to me earlier this week, inviting said friend to go swimming with her:

Sydney is also a rock star:

And that's how we homeschooled this week!

P.S. Nope, all those photos of Sydney were not taken on the same day. She just likes that dress!

Our Enchanting, and Balancing, Butterflies

Inspired by the internet (as I often am), the girlies and I have spent a week or so making balancing butterflies. We didn't make a week's worth of butterflies, mind you, but we did work off and on for a week. Unlike in the cozier, more contemplative winter, when we can seemingly spend an entire day crafting felt food, summer projects tend to be worked on for several minutes, then set aside for several days, then worked on again. No matter, as all the project materials made themselves at home on a corner of the living room table, and eventually, we turned them into butterflies:

You can use the templates that I linked to above, but any symmetrical shape, with a wide wingspan that's forward of the front of the body, will do. You can also use any material that's slightly stiff, just enough so to bend a tiny little, but only a tiny little, under the weight of the penny hot glued to each wingtip:

I have one interior design project ongoing with these little beauties, involving some cardboard record album covers, some carpet tacks, and the ceiling of our living room, and another project altogether, an educational one, the reasoning being that if pretend butterflies balance, then why not real ones?

Rather, why not balancing copies of real balancing butterflies? I mean, balancing butterflies that are real butterflies.

Eh, just wait and see.