Birthday Waffles are Pink and Blue

On the morning of her fifth birthday (Fifth!!! FIFTH!!!), Sydney requested waffles for breakfast.

But oh, no--not just any waffles!

 Five-year-old Sydney wanted pink and blue waffles.

To make, mix up your favorite waffle batter, substituting organic white flour for the usual white whole wheat amount. Divide the batter into two bowls, and color each half separately, whatever color you choose.

Get out two ladles or measuring cups with handles, and scoop one color of batter into one cup, and the other color of batter into another. With one cup of batter in each hand, pour them at the same time into your waffle maker, swirling the colors or simply making them go halfsies:

 When you're finished, you'll have a nice, warm stack of two-toned waffles:

 And the birthday girl will pronounce her birthday breakfast a complete success.

FIVE. Can you even believe it?

Swimming

Sure, we didn't get to stay in Florida long enough to see the space shuttle launch (and nope, we're not going back for it, either, else we'd miss our theater date for "A Year with Frog and Toad").

We did see the shuttle on the launch pad, however, which is at least one dream come true.

We built sandcastles.

We spent hours listening to books together in the car (that reminds me that, now that we're back at our home public library, Willow needs the rest of those Kingdom Keepers books!).

We learned a LOT about seashells.

We learned that we do NOT like outlet malls.

We ate authentic key lime pie (dream come true!).

And somehow, in the hours every single day that we spent at beaches on both sides of the peninsula and at pools in every single hotel and motel we stayed at on our trip, both of my girls became pretty good swimmers. Considering that Willow only learned to swim with struggling strokes in the middle of last summer, and Sydney only taught herself those same struggling strokes this winter, this is no mean feat.

Sydney can swim with her face in the water (I cannot do this):


She can tread water (I CAN do this, but not so fancy):


She can swim on her back (nope, not me), and Willow, who I watched practice this over and over and over again day after day after day on our vacation, can perform the unimaginable-to-me act of diving underwater and TOUCHING THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL:


Thank goodness we're homeschoolers. Thank goodness that in the two weeks that we were gone, we didn't "miss" school, but instead did some of the best learning that we've done all year.

Thank goodness for audiobooks.

Thank goodness for ocean documentaries and Bill Nye and Space Buddies.

Thank goodness for sand, and buckets and shovels to dig and carry and sculpt with.

Thank goodness for swimming.

But most of all, thank goodness for being home! We've jumped right back in again, with gardening and painting and the baking of sweet cornbread. We have a birthday party coming up, which means rainbow cake, and an international fair next month, and just this afternoon I bought the girls a beginner's chemistry set.

Thank goodness for chemistry sets is what I HOPE I'll be saying soon!

In Dinosaur World

I've always wanted to take the girls to Dinosaur World in Kentucky, but it's just far enough from here to make it a little too long for a day trip, and a little too short for an overnight expedition.

However, it turns out that right off the highway, on the drive from Ft. Myers back to Orlando, is where Dinosaur World Florida lives!

There's fossil digging, a playground, a museum, a gift shop (from which Willow now proudly sports a Dinosaur World baseball cap), and other such niceness, but the big draw to Dinosaur World is the hiking--there are many, MANY dinosaur statues to walk by:

Willow took a photograph of every single dinosaur that she saw. She was that excited. I took some photos of Willow taking photos, but every shot that she's not in is one of her own:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Oh, yes, there ARE some bloody ones:

And that's just a drop in the bucket of the 147 dinosaur photos that Willow shot that day. If you want to see the rest, invite yourself over to take a look at her dinosaur scrapbook--it's becoming quite the masterpiece.

At the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum

It was an air-conditioned break from Florida's late-April sun, and so fun! A docent approached the girls as we wandered the exhibits--

--and led them on a private scavenger hunt, showing them how to find the entire alphabet on an alphabet shell, and teaching them to identify fig shells, and banded shells, and the treasured junonia. Finally, he bestowed upon them pencils, coloring books, and stickers! The girls were thrilled.

Willow shows off her skill in identifying most of the shells seen here. How many do you know?

We watched a super-dry but nevertheless fascinating documentary on mollusks, and spent loads of time kneeling down over the shallow live mollusk tank, our noses nearly touching the water, watching mollusks slowly do fabulous things:

The girls loved every part of the museum absolutely, but of course you know what my favorite part was, right?

Shell crafts!

Modern sailor's valentines:

And antique ones:

And another D.I.Y. sailor's valentine kit purchased in the gift shop to take home with me and try.

Oh, wait...the girls did have a favorite part of the museum, actually:

Hence the sight that I happened to spy that night, a few minutes after bedtime:

Treasure, indeed.

At the Imaginarium

Would you like to hold Miss Fuzzy Feet?

Or how about this sweet girl?

Perhaps you'd prefer to touch a starfish:

Pet a horseshoe crab?

Or are these animals more to your liking?

Ft. Meyers has more than just beaches--who knew?

On Sanibel Island

After we ditched Matt at the Orlando airport so that he could go back to his day job (I like my day job better!), the girls and I drove across the peninsula and down a ways so that we could make a few visits to Sanibel Island.

Sanibel Island is located in the Gulf of Mexico, so when it's not windy, the water is calm and smooth and gentle. Oh, and after Daytona Beach, which we did love, it was so quiet on Sanibel Island! The beach is a bit of a walk from the parking area (about which the two small children, who were required to carry nothing but their light-as-air inner tubes, nevertheless complained mightily), and as soon as you start down the last dune you immediately notice that, other than the shouts of a few happy kids playing in the sand, there's nothing to be heard but the ocean and the birds. So refreshing.

Sydney wonders about this lack of activity. Hmmmm.....will she like it?

She likes it!

Seriously, the water was SO calm. It's the first time that I've ever swam in the ocean, frankly, and the first time for the girls:

Of course, Sanibel Island's real claim to fame is the fact of its east-west orientation in the Gulf of Mexico, due north of some very interesting ocean environments. Because of this, it's one of the top beaches in the world to collect seashells. When I wasn't goofing around in the gulf with the girls, I was contentedly collecting an entire pail-full of seashells at every visit, thinking happy thoughts about all the seashell crafting awaiting me back home.

The girls collected a very many seashells, too. Their shells, however, had a far more important purpose than mine did:

A million more sandcastles for the memory books.

As you may have heard, Endeavor's launch has been delayed even further while the auxiliary heating units are repaired. I am devastatingly disappointed, but obviously I much prefer to know that the astronauts will be safe on their journey. After listening to me on the phone spinning out all of the dire scenarios that could occur for a space shuttle whose fuel lines are frozen due to a malfunctioning auxiliary heating unit, Matt agreed. The children and I couldn't simply live in Florida until the shuttle launch, however--Willow was down to her swim trunks as her last clean pair of shorts, for one thing--and so...

It's so good to be home.

Top 25 Homeschooling Blogs

Yep, we're STILL in Florida! Endeavor's launch got scrubbed, so while we're waiting to see if the auxiliary heaters will get fixed in time for us to still see the launch before I HAVE to head home (cloth diapering classes don't teach themselves, apparently), we're hanging out in Orlando in a motel/water park. Orlando is weird.

In other news, check out my blog (and vote for me!) in the Top 25 Homeschooling Blogs search over at Circle of Moms. There are some great other homeschool blogs represented, so I highly recommend that you check it out.

Ignore the intro paragraph to the contest, however, because it is offensive:

When choices for your children's school come down to a badly run public school or an over-priced private school, sometimes your best option is to educate them at home.


Um, no. 


Homeschool isn't the last-ditch best option only for people who are unfortunate enough to have crap choices among educational institutions. 


Homeschool isn't better than public school only if the public school is badly-run.


Homeschool isn't better than private school only if the private school is expensive.


(I also have issues with referring to a private school as "over-priced"--just because a private school costs more than I can pay does not mean that the private school charges more for tuition than it provides in education).


Homeschool isn't the last-ditch choice, and it isn't THE best choice, and neither are well-run or poorly-run public schools, and neither are expensive or inexpensive private schools. 


Homeschool is a choice, just like all the others, and it's up to you to not simply default into a choice, but to research it, to think about it, and to MAKE that choice for your own family. If you choose to put your children into public school, then you can provide them supplementary educational experiences if you don't feel that the school is run well. If you choose to put your children into private school, then you can work more to pay more for an expensive school.


And if you homeschool...well, then you've got a billion more choices to make, every day. What will you learn? Where will you go? What shall we read? What games should we play? What would you like to make for lunch? Should we stay for an extra three days in Florida, to see if we can watch the shuttle launch?


Us homeschoolers, we have a word for those choices:


We call it freedom.