Yes, I DO Pick out My Kid's Clothes

Not the younger one--she has better taste than I do, by far. In fact, I should start getting HER to pick out her sister's clothes.

But yep, the older one. I actually pick out my eight-year-old's clothes for her.

Here's the thing:

1. Will doesn't wear clothing by choice. She hangs out naked (for most of the day) until someone makes her dress, and then she puts on the absolute minimum that she can get away with. 
2. Absolute minimum means ABSOLUTE minimum. Unless you specify socks and underpants, and then double-check that they're there, she won't bother putting them on. Normally, I don't care, but I draw the line at personal injury, and I'm weary of discovering, mid-hike, that the child has put on her jeans commando, or finally finding out near the end of our sledding adventure that she's put on her snow boots without socks. I know that a lot of parents would tell me to let Will teach herself with those blisters and frozen toes, but not ensuring that she takes care of her body feels differently to me than, say, letting her test her physical limits by climbing something that she might fall off of, which I have no problem with.
3. When she is required to dress herself, Willow doesn't care what she wears. She prefers comfy, elastic-waisted pants, and she does not prefer the pinks and purples that are heavy in her hand-me-down stash currently, nor does she like dresses or skirts and tights, but she'll wear whatever is easiest to grab from her clothing storage. She finds it VERY frustrating if she is required to search through unsorted clean laundry for something.

Until a few weeks ago, the girls kept their tops and bottoms on hangers--each kid had her own rod--and their socks and underpants in drawers. Lately, though, I feel like I've been on an organizing kick, or rather I've somehow found some extra energy to start rethinking chronic sticking points and finding solutions to at least a few of them. And my clothing re-organization is making me VERY happy.

I gave all of the clothing rods to Sydney. She carefully thinks out each outfit, so she might as well have the extra space to really look at all of her options. I moved all of Willow's clothing to drawers, and I no longer require the children to sort and put away their own clean laundry. Instead, I do it for them: I hang up Sydney's clothes on her rods, and I package Willow's clothes like this:

Pants get folded in half and laid out. On the middle third of the pants I stack a shirt, a pair of underpants, and a pair of socks. I fold the pants up around the bundle, and put it in Willow's drawer.

Now when someone finally tells her to go get dressed, Willow can simply grab a complete outfit out of her drawer--if the underpants are right there, she puts them on, and if the socks are right there, she puts those on, too. I think that somehow the packaging is encouraging her to dress herself in all the items of clothing, not just the minimum that she always chose when she had to select each item individually. Hallelujah!

 As you can obviously tell from the photo above, I don't spend much time carefully matching items, either, and Willow still feels pretty disdainful about the idea of clothing, in general, but next time I start griping about how tedious and frustrating and full of annoyances my life is, please please PLEASE remind me that my older child will now dress herself completely in all the clothes required by polite society.

As long as I pick them out for her, of course.

Gridlock is a Great Game

Our basic weekly schedule has both kids active and formally learning at set times during the day.

Mind you, that doesn't include playdates, day trips, library visits, mornings at the park, sick days, picnic lunches, field trips, etc., so it's the rare week when the plan goes EXACTLY as planned, but my point with this is to note the particular way that's currently working (yay!) to allow each kiddo to do some different work during the day, while keeping their number of activities even--that last part probably isn't really necessary, but it seems necessary to me.

Currently, Syd does one subject every day that Willow doesn't--reading--and one subject twice a week that Willow doesn't--grammar. I'd have Will doing grammar if I had a method that I liked, but nothing, not pre-packaged texts nor my own invented curricula, have seemed workable for the long-term, so I'm letting it slide for a while. Latin is good for grammar, anyway, as is the approximately four hours of independent reading that Willow does daily.

That leaves, depending on the day, one to two holes in Willow's schedule. If she's following a specific area of interest, I'll plug that into one of the spots while it lasts--we made and flew paper airplanes FOREVER, it feels like!--or if I find a new study that she might like, I'll test it out in one of those spots for a few weeks before I find a sticking place for it, like I did with the weekly comics lab that Will was doing with Matt, until he decided that he could just as easily do it with both girls on the weekends.

When Will's a bit between passions, however, as she is at the moment, I use those empty spots for more advanced work in one of the studies that she does with Sydney, and with extra math. Will is very good at math, but she hasn't found anything about it yet that she likes enough to really settle into, so I try to venture far and wide with the math that we explore on enrichment days.

One day before Christmas, the girls did a day of entirely Christmas-themed work, and Will (and Syd!), really enjoyed this game of graphing coordinates in order to draw a Christmas tree, which reminded me that, other than Battleship (which is also a game that we use for math enrichment), Will hasn't done much exploration with coordinates, and so I printed out Gridlock for us to play together on our next school day.

It's a hit!

To play Gridlock, you roll two dice--the roll gives you your coordinate pair, and you put your marker at the intersection. The goal is to be the first player to have four markers in a row. Strategy comes in through deciding which of the two coordinate pairs given by the dice roll you'll use. The download comes with a recording sheet, but while I totally get the value of using both concrete manipulatives and representational models in the same math activity, having to write would have made the game suck for Willow, so we skipped it...this time. It's a good habit to get into, though, especially since I'd like Will to get into the habit of notating her chess games, too.

So challenging to win! See how we're blocking each other, and how the number of open coordinates is narrowing?

We've played Gridlock a few more times since then, and it makes me realize that, with all of the homemade games we play, we NEED to make ourselves some much more versatile game pieces. The dominoes kept falling over (duh!), and it may take you a few tries to guess who's who in this LEGO version, below:

I can't decide, though...painted rocks? FIMO? Shrinky dinks?

Page protector and dry erase markers?

Sledding Down a Snowy Slide

First there was sliding down a snowy slide:



Then inspiration struck the littles, and the slide instead became a place to sled:




After some serious immersion into sledding for a few days, the girls seem to have gotten it out of their system a bit, in that for the past couple of days they've been able to enjoy the snow in other ways, happy to explore in the yard instead of needing us to walk them over to the park to sled every time. I put together a couple of invitations for different exploratory activities in the snow--a set of colored ice blocks, and a tray containing the liquid watercolors in spritz bottles, colored sand in funnel bottles, and a bowl of birdseed with two spoons--and although the girls were too busy stomping around and exploring with their gross motor skills in the snow today to pay it all a ton of mind, I'm hopeful that they'll spend some time tomorrow making art outdoors.

Because tomorrow night the forecast calls for MORE snow, and then we'll have a fresh canvas to decorate again!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Wrapped and Dipped

a tutorial for dipping pinecones into melted crayon, melted beeswax, and paint

and a look at the presents that I unashamedly wrapped in newspapers and brown paper bags

 

 

The girls had a good Christmas, loot-wise. After they went to bed on Christmas Eve, they heard Santa walking on the roof, along with reindeer stamping their feet and the jingling of sleigh bells--this drove Sydney into such a state of sobbing hysterics that she couldn't get to sleep for at least an hour. She wanted to run see her gifts, and she wanted to go meet Santa, and she wanted to double-check that he saw his special reindeer-shaped cookie, and she wanted to make sure that I hadn't eaten the cookie instead of Santa, and she was pretty sure that Santa was going to come back so every noise made her sit up and say, "What's THAT?!?"

That walking on the roof bit has scared the crap out of every kid in the family, which is honestly half the fun (you might have to be from Arkansas to understand that part), but the other half is in listening to the kid tell the story, for the entire coming year, of how on Christmas Eve, They. Heard. SANTA!!!

My cousin may have also wanted to poop in the yard and blame it on a reindeer, but I wouldn't let him.

Snowy Day, North and South

Believe it or not, we had a White Christmas down in Arkansas!


Yes, the children are playing in a vacant lot, on great piles of fill dirt. America can stop building playgrounds now.

The next day, we drove back to Indiana, where it is also quite white:

Remember our girls only snow day a couple of years ago, when Matt couldn't bring himself to skip a day of work to stay home and play with us? Well, that's moot this week, because his office is CLOSED!!! We can make him play with us all we want!

This is good, because sometimes I flip over my sled and need to lie down for a while:

No, I'm not wearing a coat. I bought some silk long johns, and holy cow are they warm!

  And how can a person FLIP themselves over a sled, you ask?

It's easy when you've made yourselves a ski jump!

Tonight, all warm inside and tired out from sledding, we've got a Monopoly game going, dyed ice blocks freezing outside on the porch, and Weezer playing on the stereo. Syd's giving Wild Pony a bath, and I think I'm going to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special a second time, while eating a doughnut.

Oh, and it's snowing again.

Classifying Living and Non-Living

In the months since we've begun to do school formally, I've been working through various methods of review. For history, for instance, since we're currently using Story of the World as a spine, we review the previous chapters' quiz questions, map work, and timeline cards on the same days in which we work through the current ones.

For Latin, we review previous vocabulary words on the same day that I "test" the current ones.

For math, I occasionally put review concepts into the math journal that Willow does once or twice a week for extra math enrichment, and occasionally have either girl drill a previously learned concept on Worksheet Thursday (the most hated math day of the week!).

I also consider every former area of interest still open for further study, and at the library, whenever I come across a living book that explores an old topic, I add it to our stack.

Science is a little trickier to review, for me, because it's so expansive, but since the girls and I are on the cusp of beginning a comprehensive unit on human biology, it seemed reasonable to spend a little time reviewing the order of classification that we first explored at the beginning of our briefer unit on the biology of mollusks.

Therefore, for science a few weeks ago, all we did was review the concept of living vs. non-living.

Willow and I read the requirements for life in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I wrote them down for her to memorize. Sydney did a simple little living vs. non-living sort that she'd helped me prepare earlier in the day, and as she worked I asked her to verbalize her reasoning, and I put her words in the language of the requirements that Willow was memorizing:
I might have Syd start to memorize them next time.

Successful sort!

Living vs. non-living seems a really simple concept, because you can just look at something and sort it into one of the two, but it actually has a lot of depth, and to understand all of the criteria that makes something living--well, that's some sophisticated scientific reasoning there!

One of the benefits of science review that I'm just starting to discover is this depth that you can get into each time you revisit an old topic. For instance, I'd never want to spend weeks and weeks on the concept of living vs. non-living--I'd go mad!--but each time we briefly revisit the topic we can do another fun explorative activity, perhaps:

• science journal entry, using a checklist to categorize something as living or non-living
• Sesame Street video on classifying living vs. non-living--Will LOVES to make her own video tutorials!
• outdoor square-foot catalogue of living and non-living things
• living vs. non-living DIY book
• living vs. non-living cut-and-paste sort

Next, we're going to head down the order of classification, spending some time at each level until we get to us humans, where I think we're going to stop and stay a while.

Winter at the Indianapolis Zoo

It's been years since I've been able to easily budget both a membership to the Indianapolis Zoo AND the Indianapolis Children's Museum, so I took an acquaintance's advice and started staggering our memberships--last year we had a membership to the Children's Museum, and when that expired, we instead bought a membership to the zoo. By the time our zoo membership expires, the Children's Museum will seem brand-new all over again to the girls, and in the meantime, we've been taking regular advantage of our zoo membership!

In December, the Indianapolis Zoo offers special night-time activities, along with lots of Christmas lights, carolers, and Santa Claus, so the girls and I did some shopping in Indianapolis, then headed to the zoo for the afternoon and evening.

The zoo is an entirely different experience in winter, I was fascinated to discover. The animals that enjoy the cold weather were much livelier and happy-looking:

I really like the expression on Willow's face, reflected on the glass wall of the enclosure

Until the late afternoon, we had the entire zoo pretty much to ourselves, which seemed to make the zoo animals more likely to engage in direct interaction with us. I have never before gone to the zoo and experienced the monkeys just as interested in staring at us as we were at them, and this encounter with a lioness raised my heart rate, quite frankly:

I was all, "Look, Sydney! The lioness wants to eat your face off!"

It's one of my hobbies to plan strategies for emergencies; my strategy in case the lioness managed to jump the fence was to yell for the girls to run while distracting it with my body. Hopefully, the lioness would be happy to settle down and just eat MY face off so that the girls could make it back to the safety of the indoor cafeteria.

The tiger also kind of wanted to eat the kids:

In an action that is the opposite of the responsible, careful parenting evidenced by my willingness to be eaten by a lioness to save my children, I also took advantage of the de-population of the zoo to permit the girls to reach their arms into this flamingo enclosure--

--and collect pink feathers for themselves:

Although the weather wasn't too chilly (at least until the sun set!), the indoor exhibits remained good places to warm up fingers and toes, and we ended up spending a lot of time, in particular, in the Oceans exhibit:

I still remember when this exhibit opened, and visitors were packed in six deep in front of the reef aquarium, so it always gives me an extra sense of peace and happiness to watch my girls able to just chill out and pass the time here.

Ah, I LOVE mid-afternoons on a public school day!

It was especially pleasant to have the shark touch tank to ourselves, since it can be tricky to get a shark to permit you to pet it when the room is full of other visitors talking loudly, splashing the water, and making scary shadows on the surface of the tank. However, with just us in sight, many sharks seemed happy to come over and engage us:

Willow, especially, was the shark whisperer here--several times I witnessed a shark make an obvious beeline to be stroked by her, and sometimes they'd turn around right after they'd been stroked going one way so that she could stroke them swimming the other way! Sydney was PISSED by this because, even though she'd stroked many sharks, and probably as many as Willow had, she nevertheless...

Actually, I have no idea what pissed Sydney off about her sister petting the sharks. Ah, sisters.

We watched the penguins, who were pretty thrilled about being fed--

--and the seahorses, who got fed and didn't care:

The piece of food near the bottom of the photo actually bonked that seahorse on the head as it floated down. The seahorse shook it off and was all, "Get off me, Food! I hate you!"

When we go out for the day, I usually require the girls to pack themselves a lunch, and when we go out for the day and the evening, I usually require them to pack themselves a lunch AND a dinner. My metabolism and hunger cues are so screwed up that I'm pretty much fine not eating until later that night, and in my opinion, if the kids are just as happy eating packed food, and it saves time to have them do so, AND it's a ton cheaper, then it's a no-brainer. 

Besides, that leaves room in the budget for the occasional pressed penny, of which I am highly fond--

--and the zoo's evening special of one $8 mug, in which one could obtain unlimited refills of hot chocolate with a big scoop of marshmallows on top:

NOM. We refilled that mug a lot.

The zoo has lots of pretties set out for the holidays--

--but by far the coolest thing about being there was getting to see the animals at night. The meerkats snoozed in their eensy clear-walled meerkat den, but the bats that are always deeply asleep whenever we stop by to visit them during the day?

Holy cow, THAT'S what nocturnal means!

I feel like we have been out traveling SO much lately--trips to one coast, trips to the other coast, weekend trips down south, day trip after day trip to special Christmas events, and another trip down south FOR Christmas coming up in just a couple of days (although we might go on a day trip to Louisville first, sigh). I want to be weary of it and just stay home, skip the next holiday party, cut short the visit to my family, but I'm trying to instead stay excited, stay eager, stay adventurous.

Because sure, November is wild, and December is wild, but after that comes January. Nothing happens in January. And then we've got February. Not much happens in February. There will be a lot of home time then, a lot of school AT home, a lot of days when there's no way I'm going to dig out the car or risk the weather forecast to take the girls away for the day.

And when those months come--and they're coming soon!--I'm going to rely on this travel-weariness that I'm really feeling right now to keep me content for just a couple more weeks before I succumb to cabin fever.

And then will come March. I think the girls and I might drive up to Connecticut to visit a dear friend in March.