Teach Your Children Algebraic Notation!

Our family loves a casual game of chess. Matt and I are evenly matched--he's a more creative player, although I have a better structural knowledge of strategy--and Willow plays a great overall game for her age, although she hasn't yet mastered setting up a checkmate.

If you merely love a casual game of chess, then you likely don't need to learn algebraic notation, the method of recording the sequential chess moves of your entire game. If you find intellectual pleasure in chess, however, then you must learn algebraic notation, because I guarantee that you'll love what the knowledge of algebraic notation can open you up to. And if you have children who enjoy chess, then you must teach them algebraic notation, as well; not only is it a great precocious math skill, but otherwise they, too, are closed off from studying and mastering the game. The study of chess is full of just the sort of things that delight little children--tricky pawn tricks, secret strategies, patterns that carry you straight to checkmate if you only recognize them as they're unfolding, etc.

Here's a little of what you can do:

algebraic notation in action

Will's a reluctant writer, so don't tell her that this is writing practice! Finding a specific point on a grid is a crucial math skill, and translating the board's play to paper builds her three-dimensional visualization skills, which will be powerfully useful throughout her life, everywhere from performing high-level physics to nagivating her way on the highway one day.

I date-stamp her game notations just as I date-stamp all our schoolwork, and I have her write them in one spiral-bound steno notebook. When she's a more mature player, she'll be able to play these games back and alter the outcomes using better decision-making. Also--what a cute memento of a childhood!

replaying a game using notation

Of course, right now Will usually chooses to replay a game, using her notation, immediately upon its conclusion--this is called a Post-Mortem, and it's actually an important strategy in chess study, as you have the unique opportunity to study the board and recognize better/alternate moves while your reasoning for making the original moves is still fresh in your mind. In chess club or at a competition, your teacher or coach will go through the Post-Mortem with you, and it's also an opportunity for them to see where your skills stand--needless to say, this opportunity is lost if you don't know algebraic notation.

Will simply thinks it's fun to play both sides. Sneakily, the Post-Mortem also requires her to read and translate the algebraic notation back to the board, again strengthening her math, logic, and three-dimensional visualization skills.

re-playing famous games

Here, Willow and Matt are re-playing Bobby Fischer's The Immortal Game, with Matt (and later me, because Matt doesn't have the practice at algebraic notation that Will and I do and got overwhelmed, poor dear) calling out the moves using algebraic notation, and each player moving where the notation says to. This sounds dry, I know, but if you like chess it's actually really fun--the game moves fast, since you're not sitting and thinking up the moves yourself, and it's a GOOD game, because it's one that great players have played, with exciting tricks and tricky traps and fabulously bold machinations. Usually the game that you're reading through will be annotated, as well, to point out both the genius moves and the boneheaded ones, and it's fun to see.

When we do these re-plays, I always position Willow on the winning side, to give her practice at developing a checkmate. It's especially fun because, when a great game is playing out in front of you, even a little child can often see and exclaim over these genius or boneheaded moves--there was much outraged shouting during this particular match over Donald Byrne's dead-end strategy of simply moving his king back and forth in the endgame. It's an excellent model, because you can see how the center is developed and how the pawns get sacrificed and how truly excellent it is to fork your opponent's pieces. Several times, after Fischer did something amazing, we rewound the pieces and played it out again to better see how he set it up.

And yes, that's how we spent last Friday night. Do not judge.

studying chess problems

Will's not normally a kid who loves worksheets, but nevertheless these are fun for her, probably because of their novelty. Worksheets set up chess problems, from simple "What are the possible moves for the knight here?" to the more challenging "Find the mate in two moves" types. Since these worksheets abstract chess from the board-and-pieces manipulatives, they distill into some serious intellectual work--consider the difference between solving 19+24 with Base 10 manipulatives, and solving the same problem on paper! Many studious chess players can go one step further, and work these problems, and even entire chess games, entirely in their heads, the same way that you and I mentally solve 19+24.

Will's also a member of our community's scholastic chess club for children, which is nice because she can play with children her own age and has access to coaching that we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. She's also a scholastic member of the USCF, which means that she receives a children's chess magazine quarterly and can earn rankings when she competes--a leg up in case she decides to get serious about competitive chess later in life. Sydney's not yet interested in chess, so it's divide and conquer so far: Matt attends chess club meetings with Will, and I accompany her to competition. I'm looking forward, though, to Sydney's inevitable decision to try chess out for herself--just think about how much more fun we'll have when this game is truly an activity that the entire family enjoys together!

Until then, it's something special that Will has with just her parents, which, of course, is also pretty great.

What I've Been Busy With

Whew! Now just two more orders to make tomorrow, and then I'm going to do something entirely non-productive.

The Third Biggest Milestone--

--lagging only behind toilet training and sleeping all night in their own bed (and, well, breathing on her own, but you can't count Syd milestones that way, lest you first count down a list of at least forty medical-related milestones, from 1. breathing on her own to 41. finally getting our insurance companies to cover her $200,000 hospital bill), is witnessing the children put on all their own snowgear, from snowpants with the elastic ankles and zipper up the front and overall straps, to snow boots that go under the elastic ankles, to sweaters that need to be buttoned or zipped, to the hat that's pulled on just right to keep hair out their eyes, to the coat that needs buttoning AND zipping, to both mittens, even that tricky second one that you have to put on with your other hand in a mitten!

Of course, it's handy to have a sister to assist you.

Chocolate Pumpkin Icebox Pie from the Pantry Stash

I am saving money. Week by week, sometimes day by day, sometimes one challenging minute at a time, I'm setting aside bits of hoarded cash--a $3.99 ipad game that Willow wanted me to buy for her, but that I asked her to pay for herself. Plus tax, that's five dollars in my stash.

A trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, sans the typical visit to the gift shop. That's a good fifty bucks in the stash.

A choice not to order take-out at all last week. That's thirty bucks in the stash.

I'm saving money for a (hopeful) September trip to Disney World, if you must know. Yes, it's silly and expensive, but the girls and I want to go, and Matt is willing to indulge us, and so I'm saving money.

One of my most controversial money-saving experiments, and one that I'll have to evaluate for a couple more months before seeing if it's actually worth it, is attempting to do without one of our weekly trips to the grocery store each month. We spend approximately $150 a week at the grocery store, so that's $150 straight to savings every month if we can pull it off. The theory behind the practice is that we have ample food supplies in the pantries and the freezer--stuff that I bought at good price in bulk ages ago, stuff that I have a lot of and don't regularly use, stuff that got lost and then re-purchased and then found again during the Great Kitchen Remodel. I certainly don't need the excess, and I certainly don't like the clutter that an entire case of canned tomatoes, or three half-used jars of tahini, or a giant bag of powdered milk out of which approximately one quarter-cup has been taken, adds to the minimal storage in this house.

Wouldn't it be nice to save money AND declutter our food storage, and spend a week eating a nice canned  tomato-pesto soup with homemade bread and last year's frozen corn, and chicken and dumplings from that frozen chicken we need to process, and DIY pizza with homemade dough and all those bits and bobbles of leftover cheeses, and barley with our stir fry one night instead of rice, and peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches for lunch one day, because why on earth do I have half a jar of marshmallow fluff in the back of the pantry?

That's the idea, anyway.

So with a can of pumpkin (minus the quarter-cup that I used making pumpkin-spice latte creamer), a cup of chocolate chips, and a pie crust that I found in the back of the freezer (I DO know how to make a pie crust from scratch, but Matt doesn't, and he's the one who made the pumpkin pie last Thanksgiving. Apparently frozen pie crusts come in pairs?), I whipped together one of our favorite desserts, the chocolate pumpkin icebox pie from Chocolate-Covered Katie. I often make desserts from Chocolate-Covered Katie, and I'm always pleased with them--they're healthy-ish, since they're minimally sweetened and made mostly from highly nutritious foods, they're delicious and satisfying, and they feel better in my tummy, probably because they don't have all the usual crap. I have a big sweet tooth, and it's highly UNUSUAL for me to be satisfied with desserts that aren't southern redneck rich, so these are extra happy foods.

The chocolate pumpkin icebox pie calls for lots of nutrient-dense pumpkin, a pie crust that you could make far more healthily than Matt's leftover Pillsbury pie crust, a cup of melted chocolate chips, whose sugar content you can monitor when you select the brand, and some extract (I used vanilla and orange extracts, because that way I could use up the last little bit in the orange extract jar, and I really liked the resulting flavor). It looks like this after it's set:

But less than an hour after all four of us came back from sledding, the entire pie looked pretty much like this:

I usually make hot cocoa from scratch these days, so I had no idea that we still had all these envelopes of powdered hot chocolate! Another no-groceries-week score.

Hands Off My Pinterest!

Snowy Day

Our part of Indiana has not yet been blanketed in snow this winter.

It's odd.

Right now, for instance, there's thunder and lightening outside, and the making of what would be several inches of snow by the afternoon...if the temperature was only twenty degrees colder. Which it usually is in January.

Odd, indeed. A little troubling, frankly.

We did have a light snowfall this past weekend, when the temperature WAS twenty degrees colder (see? Odd), and even though the snow didn't even completely cover the ground, it was very special for two reasons:

1) It was a weekend, and Matt was home with us. It NEVER snows on a weekend when Matt can be home with us, usually.
2) On one of their visits since last winter, the girls' Grandma Janie and Poppa brought them thin little plastic flexible sleds. Unlike our antique wooden sled behemoth, with actual metal runners, these little sleds don't actually require that much snow to work their magic.


Do you hear that laugh? That kid was AIMING for me!

Even the adults got into the act:

Even me, your normally dedicated behind-the-camera woman!

The girls' other favorite snowy day activity, when they're not sledding, is to explore the snowy playground--

--where slippery snow makes even your most run-of-the-mill playground slide vastly exciting--


--and where there's always just one last bit of virgin ground to dedicate to angel-making:


The girls will tell you that their favorite part of the day was the sledding, or the sliding, or how Momma fell on her butt, or the hot chocolate and chocolate pumpkin icebox pie that we came home to afterwards.

My favorite part of the day, however?


This guy. Always.

Dehydrated Orange Garland, Country-Style

I know, I know, it's so countrified that it kind of makes me wonder when I'm going to start cross-stitching ducks in bonnets, but still...

Pretty, right? The view straight out my study window in winter is, shall we say...unlovely--something about the next-door neighbors and my sinking suspicion that it's their bathroom window, uncurtained, that I'm staring directly into through the bare branches of the rose of Sharon that sits between our houses. I've gotten into the habit lately of putting some pretty things up in the study window, then, pretty things that can be taken down when the rose of Sharon flowers in the spring, pretty things that look especially pretty when placed in a window, such as this dehydrated orange garland that the girls and I made, so lovely to look at when back-lit by the morning sun:

Our house is naturally so dark that blocking a window at all seems almost criminal, but until we find our dream house one day, with many bright windows and lots of roses of Sharon but absolutely no neighbors for acres and acres, this will do.

Seriously, though, a little curtain in front of a bathroom window? That's not hard!