Dissecting a Honeycomb: The Yummies Live Inside

Whenever the girls ask what's in a particular dish and I don't want to tell them--either I don't feel like reciting a list of eighteen spices, for instance, or I know that a revelation that the dreaded SUN-DRIED TOMATO or the horrible PEANUT BUTTER or the villainous GINGER or the monstrous PEPPER live inside the recipe will mean that I'm eating dinner alone tonight--I tell them that the dish contains "yummies," as in:

"Momma, what's in the pasta?"
"Hmmm...noodles, and tomato sauce, and garlic."
[Suspiciously eyeing what is, in fact, a sun-dried tomato]: "What else?"
"Oh...just yummies. Want a serving or a taste?"
"Serving, please!"

The only thing this has to do with our honeycomb dissection is that...know what lives inside the honeycomb? Um, bee spit and the occasional bee part and beeswax, etc. You know, yummies!

Here's our honeycomb piece, bought from Hunter's Honey Farm on our recent field trip:

As we learned on our tour, the hexagonal cells are made by the bees from their wax, are filled with honey by the bees, and then sealed by them with more wax.

You can cut it open for a cross-section, and to verify that, yes indeedy, there's sticky honey inside of there!

And of COURSE you can eat it!

Even if you're not too sure about the wax and the spit, etc.

After all, it's apparently MUCH tastier than a sun-dried tomato, sigh.

How Many Pennies in One Dollar?

I re-branded the hundred grid as a dollar grid, so let's see...

This many!

It looks so cool that I considered having Sydney glue the pennies down to the grid so that we could keep it...

And then I thought, "Heck, no! I'm not wasting a whole dollar!"

The girls have recently wearied of all this talk of coins and commerce, so our math is moving on to geometry. Geomags, constructive triangles, spirograph, geoboard, patterns blocks and mirrors--that ought to hold us for a while!

Brownie Batter Bake-off

You knew we'd do it again. The bake-off has become our go-to way to do up desserts around here.

Following in the steps of the cookie bake-off and the carrot cupcake bake-off, I mixed up a batch of extra fudgy brownies using my library copy of The Good Neighbor Cookbook, then divided it into three bowls and laid out every single thing in the pantry:

I figured that I had a sure winner with my peanut butter, lingonberry jam, and wheat germ brownies, but they--and I can't believe that I'm about to say this!--had too much peanut butter. Who knew there could be such a thing?

In my opinion, the best mix-ins were the tart lingonberry jam, the little dried date pieces, carob chips, and wheat germ. It doesn't matter, though--even the brownies with marshmallows, peanut butter, raisins, cream cheese, candied ginger, almonds and poppy seeds got this same reaction:

Delicious.

We used:

At Hunter's Honey Farm

It's that time of the year when our homeschool group seems to have the best field trips! After a few chilly, rainy weeks, it was perfect weather at Hunter's Honey Farm for our field trip there:

Outdoor field trips on beautiful days are the best, wouldn't you agree?

The hive tour was set up so cleverly. One beehive stood on a table in a grassy area, underneath a tent with mesh walls. All the families stood just outside the tent peering in, and the beekeeper stood inside the tent with the hive. He lectured us on the finer points of bees, then took the hive apart frame by frame, found all the interesting things on that frame (pollen! cells with honey! empty cells! the queen!), and walked it around the inside perimeter of the tent so that everyone could see:

He took care to make sure that every single child saw every single fascinating thing:

Inside, we took another tour of the processing area. Mmmm, raw, unwashed honey!

The girls felt pretty fine, indeed, to already be expert crafters of rolled beeswax candles:

But I do believe that the most THRILLING thing for each of them was when they each got to fill their very own honey bear:

Each girl has a honey bear of her own!

Each honey bear is quite sticky by now, as you can imagine.

Let's see...I took home:

• one jar of raw honey (full of protein, and good for your immune system!)
• one half-gallon jug of wildflower honey, because the girls sure as heck aren't going to let me share their honey bears
• one one-pound chunk of beeswax, soon to coat the outsides of autumn leaves, in just the first of its MANY uses around here
• one small section of honeycomb, just this afternoon dissected and then devoured by the children

That may have possibly been this week's grocery budget, but hey--everyone loves honey on toast, no matter how many meals they eat it in a row!

The Great Room Switch: Painting the Study

When Will was a toddler and we first bought this house, we moved all her toys into the second of the house's three bedrooms, really just an enlarged pass-through from the hallway into our own bedroom. It's big enough for a full-sized bed if you keep it low so that it doesn't block the window (although having that window sill above the bed has been the reason for one child's visit to the emergency room so far), has a couple of good walls to build shelves on to hold the girls' ridiculous amount of toys, and it's just a doorway away from our bedroom, so that when little girls make a peep, the Momma and the Dadda are just a doorway away.

Just a doorway. No door. Ahem.

Add to THAT the issue that the girls are early birds and turn on the lights in their room before the sun comes up, AND that they don't want to share a bed anymore, and you have the storm that caused me to hatch the plan that I sometimes see as brilliant and sometimes see as hare-brained:

We're switching the girls' bedroom with the third small bedroom that lives in the front of the house, a room otherwise know as our Study/Studio.

Can you think of two rooms that are MORE full of a truckload of crap to have to exchange? Nope, you can't.

Friends, this move has been ridiculous. Absurd. Worthy of a nervous breakdown. First, we moved all the girls' stuff down to the playroom, where you can no longer even walk due to the accumulation of that on top of the playroom nonsense. I went through a bunch of our stuff. We had a garage sale. I went through a bunch more of our stuff. We took a load to Goodwill. I went through a bunch MORE of our stuff, and we put some stuff out by the side of the road with a sign that read "FREE."

We still have a bunch of stuff.

When we first moved into this house, we were in a big hurry, and so we didn't change anything or make anything look nice. We also had this toddler, so there wasn't really much time to do a good job on whatever we did try to do, like painting or gardening. And then we had another kid just a few months later--you should have seen the lousy paint job that I slopped on their bedroom walls, with them rolling around my feet making messes and getting into trouble.

This time around, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is the chance to make each room look...nice. Do a little planning. Use a little forethought.

And then I went ahead and painted our new study silver anyway:

And I let the girls help:

No, it's not turquoise like the studios of all the famous crafty ladies, and it doesn't make the room in this already very dark-ish house any brighter, but that's what track lighting is for, and I love how the walls are shiny--it's like living in a treasure chest, or a magpie's brain.

The former gigantic toy shelves are getting all set up with homeschool supplies, and I wrenched my back moving our brand-new IKEA table, and the fabric looks all neat and tidy so far, and you would not BELIEVE the number of fights that Matt and I have had so far about super-important details, like the locations of power strips...

This study is going to be so excellent.

Painting the Salt Dough Maps of Egypt

The Nile is blue, and runs to the Delta and then into the Mediterranean (which they finally remembered!):

Willow decided that the Nile is in flood during the time of her map, so that's more blue:

Sydney is representing the rest of Egypt as one great, sandy beach:

Will has a reputation for grousing a bit whenever I want her to begin a new project (or brush her teeth, or leave the house, or do anything, really), primarily because she never wants to stop whatever it is that she's currently engrossed in. However, she also has a reputation for then becoming completely engrossed in that new project, and thus enjoying it, too, immensely.

Therefore, although there was a fit of gripes when I asked her to come over and paint her map, since Syd was already painting hers and so all the paints were already out and Usborne Quicklinks would still be there when she'd finished--a fit of gripes, I tell you--Willow's map has not just land and water painted, but also the Nile flood plain, representations of the areas ruled by the Red Crown and the White Crown of Egypt, the white limestone covering the pyramids, and the gold capstones:

And no, we're still not finished! Currently, the girls are having a fabulous time putting together a set of little lapbook minit books about Ancient Egypt, and they don't know it yet, but my papyrus order just arrived, so there are many more good times ahead, indeed.

Rainbow Play Dough Love Fest

Goes something like this: "Hey, girls, I made something like ten pounds of rainbow play dough. Want to go to the park and play with ALL of it?"

Boy, did they!

I sell play dough by the pound, including this rainbow play dough set, in my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Whenever anybody orders some, I make another ten pounds for my girls.