Field Trip to Tibet

You might not know that Bloomington, our hometown, has a special place in its heart for Tibet. The brother and some other family of His Holiness the Dalai Lama live here, which means that not only does he visit pretty often and we get to see him, but we have a kick-ass Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center. The other day, a group of Gomang monks visited the cultural center, on a teaching and fund-raising tour from their own monastery in South India, and homeschoolers were invited to spend the day with them.

Does that sound amazing? It was.

When you meet someone who genuinely loves and understands children, you know it, and your children know it. My girls LOVED the monks, and the monks seemed to love them, too. Sydney was not at all taken aback the first time that a monk scooped her up into his arms--she understands that being the center of one's attention is her rightful place in this world. Nobody attempted to scoop up Willow, who's a little more of a handful, but the monks, not many of whom could share many words in conversation with her, seemed to appreciate how seriously she took each of the projects that they all did together.

They made little prayer flags together:

Sydney ended up wearing hers, and this was acceptable:

The sand art was a huge hit. This one monk in particular took Willow aside and spent the longest time focusing with her on the technique involved in the practice, and my usually VERY prickly around strangers little girl just soaked it all in contentedly:

My most favorite part of this day, however, is checking back in with Willow several minutes later and finding her, lesson concluded, studiously drawing away with her sand tools and her instructor, like any proud mamma, snapping photo after photo:

Sydney also got the hang of sand art:

The girls also got to try "butter sculpture" with the monks, although thankfully they used play dough instead of butter.

Guess who made these?

Not us! Although the monk who created the horse, above, did give his creation to Willow at the end of the day. She was THRILLED. Of course, I like the horse that she created even more:

After the exciting morning, there was a break for lunch, after which the monks intended to do some chanting and dancing and other performances for us. I contemplated leaving at lunch, because chanting and ceremonial dance can sometimes be a little, um...slow.

Ultimately, I opted to stay, which was a VERY smart choice, because among the performances that the monks wanted to show us was something called The Snow Lion Dance. First, a monk enchanted the children with a description of the mythical snow lion. Then, from out of another room and into the performance space, danced--

--The Snow Lion!!! All the children were absolutely hysterical with delight (I thought it was pretty awesome, too). The Snow Lion danced around to the music of the drum and cymbal, then as the music slowed down it lay down and was about to fall asleep. Just as its eyes drifted shut, the music hit another crescendo, and the snow lion shot awake and bounded up to dance some more. The children laughed so hard at this that the snow lion repeated these moves several times.

All the children were sitting in a large group on the floor of the hall, with adults around the perimeter. In the next part of the dance, all of a sudden the Snow Lion leapt and danced right into the middle of the group of children. The children scattered, shrieking and laughing and tumbling all over each other, only to race right back when the Snow Lion settled down amongst them and almost fell asleep again:

The children patted the Snow Lion as it drifted off, but then the music hit another crescendo, and the Snow Lion leapt to its feet and scattered the children again. The children all shrieked and ran around as the Snow Lion danced blissfully in their midst. At one point Willow couldn't get away in time and I watched the Snow Lion turn in a circle, Willow directly underneath it doing her best duck-and-cover between its front and back legs.

It was basically the best time that they'd ever had in their lives.

We don't do as much "peace work" together as the girls did at Montessori, and I'm not a good peaceful role model: I scream, I blame other people for my own faults, I don't give money to beggars on the street, I rarely make eye contact with those with whom I am not intimate. But I want the girls to be peaceful, and to want peace for others. I want the girls to hate war, to fight injustice, to love peacemakers. I want them to be able to find Tibet on the map:

On this day, I did a good job with that.

Cookie Solar System

Most days, the girls and I do a project together at some point in the day. The girls have numerous ongoing pursuits--Magic Tree House, dinosaurs, ballet, space, the desert biome, Tibet, etc.--and I usually have a few projects relating to these subjects, or to stuff that I'd like them to do (nature activities, art projects, science experiments), or to stuff that needs to be done (bread baking, pumpkin preserving, holiday prep) already figured out, with materials obtained and instructions at the ready, for whenever the mood hits.

Some days, the mood never hits. Some days, Willow reads all day, and Sydney plays JumpStart all day. Some days, they just play all day. Some days, we all decide to have a Land of the Lost marathon.

Other days, however, we just may do something extraordinary.

Like this day, when we made a cookie solar system.

The idea for our cookie solar system came from the article "Cosmic Cuisine" in the July-August 2010 issue of Home Education Magazine, which I read at the library. The article was handy because I was able to copy all the pertinent numbers from it into my planner (where most extraordinary ideas reside until their time comes for fruition), but really, it wouldn't be hard to recreate: let the diameter of the Earth=1", then adjust the diameter of all the other planets accordingly. Give each planet the correct number of moons, but do not attempt to measure distance from each other or from the sun, and don't attempt to recreate the sun. If Earth=1", then the sun is as big as your kitchen. It's bigger than my kitchen.

The girls and I used our favorite vegan sugar cookie recipe from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar (I actually just got this book for free from Amazon thanks to my swagbucks, so the library can FINALLY have its copy back), and I made the vegan icing from John & Kristie again. Srsly, that is THE best icing to use with this, on account of it dries so nice and firm.

I divided the icing into four parts, and used professional-quality food coloring to do each of the primary colors, and I left one part white. With that, we can do EVERY color that we'll need!

Yes, you can see cookie Jupiter in that photo. Yes, it is over 11" in diameter. 'Nough said about how cool this project is?

With their research books and vividly-colored illustrations at their sides, the girls got to work:

 Syd did Neptune while Will worked on Jupiter, and Jupiter took so long that Syd got to do Saturn, too:

Since it was afternoon by the time we finished decorating the cookies, I decided that we'd use the afternoon sun shining through our living room window as The Sun. One by one, Willow read the entry for each planet out loud from her research guide--

--and then we place it in its spot:

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars (and a little of the asteroid belt)



Jupiter, with its Many Moons and its Cookie-Crumb Ring

Saturn, Also with Lots of Moons and an Even Better Ring

 Uranus and Neptune

 It was such a beautiful art installation, there on the table in the evening sun--

--that it was almost half an hour before we could bring ourselves to eat it.

Most delicious solar system EVER!

P.S. We're doing weird stuff like this ALL the time. Want to follow along? Follow me on Facebook!

2010 Holiday Market

My fingers and toes went numb, but at least it wasn't sleeting or anything, and it was a GREAT day to go holiday shopping in the freezing sunshine:

 
 
 
 
And I didn't even get pictures of the reindeer and the carolers and the TubaSantas and the chestnuts roasting over an open fire and the sock monkey hats...

Ornament Advent Calendar

Take two big ornament coloring books, bought after Christmas last year at 90% off.

Color them. Also draw and color your own ornaments, such as "a rearing horse in front of a cactus," and "Santa getting married to Mrs. Santa," etc.

Cut roughly around the ornaments, then stick them to adhesive-backed cardstock.

Now cut them out nicely. Turns out that nobody wants to do this job, so you all have to take turns.

Punch a hole in the top for a hanger, and stamp a number on the back from 1-24:

 Repeat until everything is good and messy and finished--

--and you'll have made an ornament advent calendar! I planned out all the fun activities, one for each day, and wrote them on the back of each ornament, just below the number. Every morning in December, the little children will take turns finding the right ornament, reading the day's activity, and then putting it on the Christmas tree. Here's my master list:

• Decorate the Christmas tree.
• Make Christmas cards.
• Ornament party! (with our local homeschool group)
• Christmas Lowe's workshop (They're making Christmas trains, I do believe.)
• Nutcracker, performed by the IU School of Ballet
• Write a letter to Santa.
• Christmas shopping for Daddy.
• hot chocolate, popcorn, and Christmas movies
• Make Christmas presents for Gracie and Spots. (I'm going to take the girls to one of those pottery painting stores, and let them paint cat bowls. Wish me luck!)
• Christmas coloring and activity pages (We'll be in the car.)
• Make presents for friends and cousins.
• Make presents for grandparents.
• Storytime with Santa at the library
• Decorate a Christmas tree for the wild animals (peanut butter pinecones and all that).
• Go Christmas shopping for your sister (I don't yet know how I'm going to finagle that one...).
• Bake cherry bread with Daddy (It's a tradition on his side of the family).
• We're all going ice skating!
• Read Christmas books all day long (because Momma needs a break).
• Bake and decorate gingerbread houses.
• Drive around and look at Christmas lights (We'll be in my Arkansas hometown then, where the displays are spectacular).
• Bake cookies for Santa.

And then it's Christmas!

You'll notice that I don't actually have 24 activities going on--a couple of days we'll be in Cleveland for Bazaar Bizarre, and then another day we'll be driving home to Arkansas, blah blah, but I do plan on bringing the last couple of ornaments with us to hang on my family's tree in Arkansas.

If nothing else, I need the reminder, because last year I seriously almost forgot Santa's cookies.

An Illustrated Life

While we were in California, I was talking to my in-laws about the girls, and I mentioned that although Willow is a natural and avid reader, I was a bit stymied in my efforts to encourage her to write more.

I'd like the girls to be able creative writers, but the mechanical skills that I was attempting to de-emphasize in order to focus on the act of creation were the very skills that Willow, because she reads so well, was focusing on to great detriment. She couldn't get so much as a single sentence down because her writing looked wrong to her--misspelled, imperfect punctuation--but the effort to have every word spelled for her, to even know what capital letters and periods and commas are, not to mention where they should go so that the sentence would look like it was supposed to...could a child even remember what she was writing about with all those distractions?

I'd introduced invented spelling to Willow quite a while ago, but I was having trouble getting her to use it, and I told my in-laws that what I really needed was a way to get Willow excited enough about writing that she'd be willing to try out invented spelling long enough to learn that she liked it, because I thought that she'd like it.

"Journaling," said Grandma Janie. "Willow would like to journal."

And you know what? She does.

During my big Lakeshore Learning shopping spree (I did have a coupon, but still...that may have been January's grocery budget that got consumed there), I bought one journal for each of the girls. Each page of Sydney's journal has a big space for a picture, and a couple of lines underneath it for writing. Each page of Willow's journal as a smaller space for a picture and more lines for writing. The girls began to journal on our trip and we've continued it at home. I keep the journals and some fine-point markers at our living room table, and every evening after the girls have finished dinner and have cleared their places, but while we're all still at the table on account of Matt and I haven't finished gossiping, I pass out the journals and the markers and the girls begin to think about their day.

They write about what they've been reading:

Magic School Bus, by Sydney

 Where they've been that day:

I Walked in the Petrified Forest, by Willow

 Who they've played with:

Grandma Beck, by Sydney

What they've seen:

I Saw the Stars, by Willow

What they wish they'd seen:

This is Gracie Doing a Cartwheel, by Sydney

Their pets--they write a LOT about their pets:

This is Spots and Gracie, by Willow

And their greatest accomplishments:

We Cooked a Turkey, by Sydney

When I first introduced this activity to them, back in that hotel room just south of the Grand Canyon (the subject of Sydney's first-ever journal entry), Willow asked why we were doing this.

I did not tell her that it was to improve her writing skills.

Instead, I said, when you're great grown-up ladies, you'll want to know what your life was like back when you were a little girl. You'll look through this journal then, when you're all grown up, and you'll remember.

You'll be so happy, then, that your mother made you keep a journal. Now get to it!

A Life with Less Spillage and More Color Mixing

When we were in California, at the very start of our impromptu and unruly road trip, I dumped the girlies off with their grandparents for an evening and did myself some California shopping. You might be surprised to know that the Silicon Valley has stores that America's Corn Basket does not. Shocking, no?

Ahem.

On that particular night, I had a coupon, and thus I did a lot of damage at Lakeshore Learning. I bought a couple of fun little stocking stuffers for the girls, but I tried to keep my cart stocked only with homeschool supplies that I thought would be truly useful for us in the coming year--math stuff, reading and writing stuff, no science stuff because the science stuff that I'd had my eye on was REALLY expensive, supplies and materials, etc.

I admit that I splurged a little on the no-spill paint cups, since they weren't exactly on my must-have list, but I have always wanted a set for the girls, and these were a better price than others I'd seen, AND the store was also selling a set of paintbrushes that exactly matched the cups. Soooooo organized!

A recent rainy day was the perfect time to set up our new paint supplies. I have a set of basic colors of tempera paint in gallon containers (one of the reasons that I'd wanted these no-spill paint cups was to save me the hassle of getting out six gallon jugs of paint and pouring them into small containers every time the girls want to paint, especially considering that the dispensers that came with the gallon jugs and are supposed to make paint dispensing a breeze do NOT make dispensing a breeze, and actually make dispensing impossible unless you take off the dispenser), but the no-spill cups allow for more colors, the secondary colors plus brown, so we also got to do a practical color-mixing project in order to get everything all set up nicely:

We've owned the Dick Blick student-grade tempera paint for about a year and a half now, and we're about halfway through each of our gallon jugs. Whenever I need to restock, I am definitely buying a higher-quality tempera, because one of the many little niggling things that bother me about this particular tempera is how unusual its color-mixing is. When the girls mixed together blue and red and stirred it up, they got brown instead of purple. Fortunately, when Willow mixed red and green and a little black in order to make brown-- 

she ended up with purple! Yay, because then I just switched the lids on the two containers so now we have the correct colors, but boo, not the best color-mixing homeschool lesson.

After a lot of mixing and a lot of mess--

--and yes, that's MY messy hand, not even a child's, of course we had to get down on the floor and try out our brand-new art supplies. I threw down loads of newspaper (which didn't do a thing; we still had to scrub the floor afterwards, which was perfectly fine with me, as then we had a clean floor) and got out our super-big Strathmore newsprint pads, and off the girls went to create and create and create.

 See the matching paintbrushes? I'm a big fan. I'm also glad that I got a picture of Sydney's beautiful, and accurate, rainbow, because you'll never believe what she did next:

 Night falls, apparently.

Part of the reason for the rainbow's demise, I believe, was an effort to mimic Willow's painting. She painted her entire canvas black, let it dry, then added her space scene:

 A clever composition, don't you think?

Painting kept the girls educated and entertained during that last hour or so before Matt got home, when I'm typically trying to cook dinner while fending off fights and kitchen invasions. Then we all cleaned up the paint, scrubbed the floor spic-and-span, cleaned the table, ate, cleared the table, and finally scrubbed the girls spic-and-span--paint in the hair, sure, but behind the ears?!?

After drying the girls off and combing their hair, Matt got distracted and neglected to finish putting the girls to bed right away. A little while later he grabbed the toothbrushes and went looking for kiddos. Willow was found pretty easily, but Sydney? Hmmm, where did that little Sydney get to?

We found her in the bin of felt scraps, fast asleep. She can brush her teeth in the morning, I suppose.

For This, Let Us be Truly Thankful

For the first time in our entire family's existence, we are:

1. Celebrating Thanksgiving.
2. Celebrating together, just us four.
3. Eating at home.

And thus Thanksgiving this year, like everything else in our lives of late, was a true adventure.

It wasn't as elaborate or as long-term as I'd originally planned, in light of our impromptu cross-country road trip, but the girls and I did make the much-desired thankful tree:

 A much-desired and enthusiastically-produced thankful tree, I should say:

Those no-spill paint cups that the girls are using? I've wanted them since the girls were born, I bought them while we were away on our trip, I LOVE them, and I'm going to tell you about them tomorrow.

Some years we eat Thanksgiving dinner with family, some years we go out to eat, one year we ate one of those Stouffer's family-sized lasagnas and then went to a sci-fi convention, but this year we cooked our own Thanksgiving feast. The menu consisted of:

Made-from-Scratch Yeast Rolls

 Honey Butter

Matt's Amazing Entire Turkey

 Including One Turkey Leg for Each Child

 Miso-Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Potatoes

 And, of Course, Two Kinds of Pie

Pie #1, obviously, was pumpkin, baked with my own fresh pumpkin puree. Pie #2 was, briefly, a pumpkin-brownie pie, until Matt opened the refrigerator door with too much emphasis and Pie #2 took a suicidal nose-dive onto the filthy kitchen floor. The little sous chefs and I were very sad, until Matt surprised us with a very non-traditional pumpkin-chocolate pie combination that was so insanely delicious that I'm going to ask him to make it again for me tomorrow so that we can write down the recipe and eat pumpkin-chocolate pie FOREVER!

I Did Mention the Entire Turkey, Yes?

Matt made the entire turkey, since I do not cook meat. I am dang grateful, however, that Matty and the kids have several weeks' worth of lunch meat in the freezer, and I do believe that tomorrow my suggestion that the carcass (ugh!) be boiled into turkey stock will be followed up upon by those who are willing to perform such kitchenly duties.

It was a happy, happy day. Some memories, such as the translation of Willow's thanksgiving leaf (which reads, by the way, "I am thankful that Gracie is purrsy"--ah, invented spelling!), may eventually fade--

-

--but other memories, happily, will be written into Life's Little Recipe Book to keep forever:

 So it's turkey carcass and pumpkin-chocolate pie tomorrow, but tonight, I think we may order pizza.