Six Weeks Early, Five and a Half Years Later

six weeks early

Actually, that picture was taken a little over a week after Sydney's precipitous, premature birth. We didn't bring a camera on that quickie weekend road trip to visit some of Matt's relatives, and it simply never occurred to me to ask Matt's extended family for a camera so that I could take photos of our unexpected baby girl. 

Some dear friends of ours drove ten hours to bring us some things from home, using a house key that Matt overnighted to them the day that Sydney was born, digging around in our basement for the Rubbermaid bins of baby clothes that I hadn't even begun to sort through. When they stopped by to visit us, they brought their camera! It was the kindest, most thoughtful, most generous thing that's ever been done for me.

Sydney took a turn for the better right before our friends arrived (oh, the turns that a preemie will take! Better, then worse, then better, then much worse...I was terrified to leave her alone), so they didn't have to see the CPAP that took up her whole face, and in this photo you can't see the needles stuck in her body or the wires glued all over her. I regret not having photos of my labor to show her now, but I don't miss having those first days of her life on film--having the memories haunts me enough.

five and a half years later

Is it indulgent to have a surprise half-birthday party for a five-and-a-half-year-old? Sure.

Is she worth every simple pleasure, every indulgent little surprise, five and a half years after she needed a machine to help her breathe, and a tube down her throat to feed her, and a team of neonatologists to treat her, and a $200,000, three-week NICU stay?

Oh, you bet she is. I'd give that kid a flying pink unicorn for her half-birthday, if only I could get my hands on one, I'm so thankful to have her.

Today is World Prematurity Day. Who are you thankful to have?

Sydney Masters the Hundred Grid

We're big fans of the hundred grid around here--it's such a versatile math tool! You can use it to help you add and subtract, with skip counting, with coin calculations. Because Sydney likes puzzles, she also occasionally enjoys using our big laminated hundred grid with some overhead transparency number tiles that, even though I bought them at different times and places, happen to be exactly the same size--score!

I especially like the transparency of the overhead tiles, because if a child is still working on number recognition (and, as I learned while assisting Sydney through the most tedious three games of BINGO ever played at their 4-H club holiday party this week, we ARE still working on number recognition!), then that transparency allows instant self-correction.

During our most recent play with this board, I witnessed Sydney unlock one of the patterns implicit in the number grid. No more random seek-and-find for her--watch this girl go!

I was pretty thrilled that I was there to see it happen.

Syd has a lot of focus, and although she wearied a bit of the task near the end, she kept working, because she wanted to see it through:

Success!

Pretty proud kid, right?

We have an old garage sale BINGO set of our own, and I think that we'll be playing a lot of fun at-home BINGO games this week, because not only is Syd clearly ready for number recognition up to 100, but I'm not taking her near another BINGO party game until she has it down--geez Louise, what a nightmare!

Five Things to Paint with Watercolors, OTHER than Paper

salt dough, play dough, or cornstarch dough, wet or dry

I didn't get a picture of Sydney's finished work, mostly because by then we were deep in the process of all things watercolor, but every homemade kind of dough that I've ever worked with has taken watercolor like a champ, and doesn't seem to get wet or sticky as a result.

popsicle sticks

The watercolor ends up looking like a vibrant wood stain with these. As a matter of fact, watching the girls paint these, and seeing how vivid the colors stayed, I was left with an idea for an upcoming project... Stay tuned!

coffee filters

And nope, you don't have to cut them into novelty shapes first! The fun with these is watching the colors bleed and blend, which is why it's so great to use an eyedropper--you can drip and observe, drip and observe...very contemplative.

unfinished wood of all sorts

We have a grab bag of random wood objects that we're ever so often painting, in preparation for a gigantic and ridiculous free-form sculpture project that I'll introduce at some point in the future, but any unfinished wood, such as tree branches with the bark peeled off, or lumber scraps, is very fun to paint and takes the paint well. Again, the paint will bleed at the edges, so I haven't found watercolor good for detail work on wood, but it's great for abstracts.

ice

Eyedroppers are the tool of choice here, as well. Now that the weather is cool I put whatever ice the girls want to paint and sprinkle salt on in an aluminum baking pan on the table inside--when they're done or the ice has completely melted, it's easy to pour out into the sink and then rinse for re-use.

We happen to use these liquid watercolors, and we're lavish with them--no watering down for us! However, you can use whatever watercolor floats your boat, and it's not going to bother me. I'm going to be too busy working on my secret liquid watercolor and wood project to complain.

Ancient Egypt at the Indianapolis Children's Museum

As if a day of play there isn't educational enough (it IS!), the girls and I occasionally sign up for the homeschool classes offered monthly at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I've found that these classes work best for us when they're covering a subject that's already in the girls' areas of interest, so that they have some context in which  they can place all of the information that they're cramming in, and all of the projects that they're working on in that short hour and a half.

Fortunately, this recent class that we attended on Ancient Egypt is right in my girls' backyard, academically speaking. They LOVE Ancient Egypt:

There are three really nice things that generally occur in homeschool classes:

1) The kids are of all different ages, and their parents are with them, and it always seems to be a really good mix, so that everyone has a lot of fun with each other.
2) The kids pretty much all want to be there, and all participate eagerly.
3) No matter the subject of the class, at least some of the kids there have obsessively, passionately studied that subject, and so there's always someone able to answer a question.

In this Ancient Egypt class, I happen to have one of the kids who's obsessively studied the subject, bringing to life a fourth pleasure in homeschool classes:

4) You get to watch your kid raise her hand and speak up with answers. Seriously, how cool is that? I imagine that kids are doing that all day long in institutional schools, but on the occasions when my kids are in that particular situation, I'm generally nearby, watching and beaming with pride and reporting their triumphs back to Matt in the evenings.

In the laboratory, the kids got to help the scientist with the dummy mummy. When the scientist was discussing the removal of the organs, Willow shouted out, "But not the heart!" and cackled at her joke, along with a bunch of other little Ancient Egypt obsessives. She was fine with helping to remove the liver, though:

Sydney helped take out the intestines:

While they were in the lab, the kids all started their own experiment:

1) You take four pieces of apple, and put each piece into a little lidded cup.
2) Leave one apple as the control, so all you do is put the lid on that one.
3) In each of the other containers, cover the apple completely with one of three substances available to the Ancient Egyptians--salt, sand, and natron (our natron did not come from the banks of the Nile, but was made in the museum's laboratory):

Check the apples daily, and unlid them in a week to see which substance (if any) preserves the apple the best. Remember that we're not concerned with DRYING the apple, necessarily, but with PRESERVING it, since preservation was the true goal of the Ancient Egyptians.

We also learned about the amulets that the Ancient Egyptians made, particularly the process that they used. Basically, if an Ancient Egyptian carved a really super amulet, they'd press that amulet into clay to make a mold of it, which we did. Then whenever they wanted a copy of that amulet, they'd press more clay into the hardened mold, which we also did:

We got to take our amulets AND our amulet molds home so that when the clay hardens, we can use them to make even more copies of authentic Ancient Egyptian amulets.

We discussed hieroglyphics, specifically cartouches. We took a tour of the museum's exhibit on King Seti I, and found and translated his cartouches (two, of course, since a pharaoh has a given name and a throne name).  The girls used a hierogplyphics alphabet to create cartouches of their names--

--and then they carved their cartouches into clay:

Recently, one of our relatives (after listening patiently to the girls describe their class, and inspecting their salt dough maps of Ancient Egypt and their other work that only those obsessive and passionate about a subject of study can produce), told me that at the school where she works, children study Ancient Egypt in the sixth grade. This brings me to another pleasure, not in homeschooling classes, per se, but more in regards to homeschooling as a whole, for us:

We can learn as and when we choose. Willow and Sydney don't have to wait until the sixth grade to study Ancient Egypt for their school. They don't have to wait until after school and the weekends to study Ancient Egypt in their "free time," while doing a serious of interesting and uninteresting things at school for the greater part of each weekday. When they study Ancient Egypt, they can study as they wish, reading about gods and figuring out whose canopic jar is whose and building pyramids and relief maps and exploring the saga of Moses--they don't have to only do the projects that a teacher asks, in the time that is allowed for the project, producing something that's not as special on account of everyone else is doing the exact same project at the exact same time.

And yes, they can NOT learn something when and as they choose. I don't give a flip that Willow can't tie her shoelaces or tell time. She CAN tell you exactly how the Nile's flood process works, and why the Nile delta is named as such, and which is Lower and which Upper Egypt.

And after she does that, she can take you to ride the vintage carousel three times in a row, because her class just took place at the Children's Museum!

How We Learn: Playing Games

Over the time that we've been homeschooling now, I've occasionally deviated from the unschooling method that obviously works so well for us to try out other systems, only to be struck by the also obvious failure of those systems.

Nope, my girls do NOT want to sit down and do formal academic activities every day. Requiring them to do so only resulted in power struggles, them figuring out how to do a half-assed job on an assignment to get it over with, and almost ruining their pleasure in activities like worksheets and the other school-ish projects that they do enjoy when they're presented casually, as one interesting part of an entire interesting day.

These days, I tend to let my little free-range girls run wild, and they tend to spend their days in elaborate pretend games that run from inside to outside and inside again, in listening to audiobooks, in playing the ridiculous number of computer games that we check out from the public library, in hanging out in parks and playgrounds, in solving mazes, in immersing themselves in elaborate and really messy art projects, in reorganizing their toy Egyptian pyramid, in jumping rope, in collecting leaves, in baking cookies, in checking out too many books from the library, in coming with me to puppet shows and museums and children's parties and playgroups, in reading for hours in various little hidey-holes around the house, in pestering the cats, in sewing stuff, in having lots of playdates with their friends, in fooling around with magnets, in playing with their collection of little toy animals that I keep buying them despite the clear indication that they have plenty...

It's actually easy for all of us to get lost in our days these days. The girls can happily spend an entire day, after their chores are done, making their own meals and snacks, getting out and putting away their own activities, moving from quiet, individual time to wild and loud play with each other, running inside and outside, hopping in the shower if they feel like it, turning on the Netflix streaming for their choice of the day and then turning it off when their show is through, all without assistance from me. When the kids are happy and don't need me, I go about my own business--blogging, photographing, making, writing, cooking, cleaning, planning, etc.

For my own benefit--just to spend a little time with my babies, some days!--I ask them, for their "school," to simply spend time each day doing a one-on-one activity with me. With Sydney, I may find myself reading an entire children's chapter book (that's almost a two-hour commitment, by the way, after which I often need to be committed, myself!), or baking something, or doing art, or putting together a puzzle.

With Willow, it's one choice only:

GAMES!!!

Blokus, Othello, Quirkle, chess, Battleship, Monopoly Junior, Sorry, quiz decks, Chutes and Ladders, cards, checkers, Connect Four, Scrabble--my Willow loves them all.

Shh...don't tell her that these games are also highly educational, and give her killer math skills and hone her logical reasoning, which will help her learn even more. I wouldn't dream of telling her that Blokus increases her intuitive knowledge of geometry, which is going to make future formal study of it easier, or that Quirkle is all about honing her pattern recognition, which is the key to a high IQ, or that Othello and chess are making her a masterful tactician, or that Monopoly Junior is all about computation, or that Scrabble is not just about spelling and vocabulary but also about anagrams, or that if there's ever a math skill that I want her to learn, I just teach her a card game that reinforces it.

Just tell her that our time together every day, just she and I, is special, and that her Momma loves it:

Which I do.

Homeschool Science: Ice Skull versus Salt

Too many holidays, too little time!

ESPECIALLY after the advent of Pinterest, my planner is absolutely chock-full of dozens and dozens of fun, beautiful, and educational project that the girls and I would absolutely love to do for every single holiday that you can think of. Now the problem is that there just isn't enough time to do them all!

In October, we did autumn projects and Halloween projects. We colored and cut out paper garlands with jack-o-lanterns and skulls on them, carved pumpkins, made garlands of autumn leaves using paint chips and crayon boxes, baked pumpkin bread and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, sewed Halloween costumes, did leaf rubbings and pressed leaves and coated them in beeswax, baked mummy dogs, and assembled giant laminated paper skeletons and hung them on the porch. We did NOT make haunted candy houses, or carve turnips, or assemble a bone garland or a gourd garland or a candy corn garland, or play with dry ice, or bake jack-o-lantern pizza, or paint pumpkins, or make eggshell ghosts, or even half of the other billion wonderful projects in my Halloween Craftacular pinboard.

And even though Dia de los Muertos was practically my favorite holiday back when I was living in Texas--dancing skeletons, sugar skulls, tissue paper flowers, Mexican beer!--it's going to have to be celebrated next year, because this year it just passed us by in our post-Halloween candy coma.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't do any of the awesome projects that I'd had planned--they're just regular old projects now, not festive thematically-appropriate seasonal projects.

And that's how this big old ice skull, made from a mold that I bought a few weeks ago from Joann's at 65% off, is in our regular rotation these days not as a Dia de los Muertos or Halloween science project, but just as a regular old fun science project:

Any big ice cube will work for this project, although you have to admit that the skull is pretty gruesome! I've also made the girls icebergs by freezing water in a mixing bowl, however, and that kind of simple ice mold will work just as nicely here.

You also need liquid coloring--we use liquid watercolors, because I'm a sucker for those bright, saturated colors!--and plenty of cheap salt.

Liquid watercolors alone, simply because they, themselves, are above the freezing point, will assist in melting the ice mold in interesting ways as you dribble, drop, and spoon them on, but the best fun comes from adding salt into the play. Salt lowers the freezing point of water--for instance, a particular salt solution might lower the freezing point of the water that it's mixed in from 32 degrees to, say, 20 degrees. When you add it straight to ice, then it hastens the ice's melting, because room temperature is now even farther above the ice's freezing point than it used to be.

This is all fun because the ice melts the fastest right where you add these things:

See? Gruesome!

Of course, it's also fun just to scoop and pour and mix and generally make a big mess:

Besides, who wouldn't appreciate some crayon skulls and x-ray viewing and plaster of Paris skeleton making mixed in with the handprint turkeys and pumpkin pie baking and walnut shell Mayflowers this season?

It's turning out to be such an interesting autumn!

Winter Sport

Southerners who move north tend to go one of two ways: either they embrace all things snow and cold because they've never had it before, or they loathe all things snow and cold because they've never had to deal with it before.

I follow the latter path.

That's not to say that I haven't gotten used to the winter weather here. When my Papa calls from Arkansas and gripes about how cold it is there when it's only in the 40s, I roll my eyes across the phone lines. When my in-laws visit from California in January and pull on their coats and scarves and mittens and hats just to go out to the car, where it's going to get warm in, like, ten minutes, I just sigh and grab a hoodie and off we go.

But that doesn't mean that I LOVE the weather. I just have a high pain threshold. When some local mom friend invited me and the girls to go over to her house and play some family version of football outside in the snow after dark, I was all, "Ummmm.... no." I have no patience for snowman-building, so if the girls want something taller than they can do, they have to make Matt do it. I'll take them to the park and spend all day there with the sledding and the nature walks and the futzing about with the damn snow, but it's more like torture as my thighs go numb and I realize that I didn't wear the right warm boots, etc.

Therefore, the upcoming winter must be handled more like problem-solving.

• I will splurge on fancy wool long-johns.
• I will sew pocket handwarmers.
• I will knit scarves.
• I will always know where my hat and mittens are.
• I will focus on the (few) things that I love about winter, such as my babies on ice:

• I will even suck it up a few times and get on the ice myself. 

I swear, though, that if I fall and break my tailbone (AGAIN!), that you and I are through, Winter!