Sunday, Unexpected

Sometimes you start out with a typical Sunday, no plans, lots of home-time. Maybe you'll finally get through that entire sink full of dishes. Maybe all the laundry will be folded. Maybe you'll do some baking. Maybe you'll order that chicken coop kit off of the internet.

Holy smokes, the shipping for that chicken coop kit is almost as much as the chicken coop! So you shift into research mode, get the numbers for all the big farm and ag stores within an hour or so from your house, and delegate the telephoning of said farm and ag stores to the husband.

And lo! The Rural King an hour away has exactly one chicken coop kit left, in the receiving department, not even on the floor yet! Huzzah!

The husband offers to go and buy the coop, but you, imagining an afternoon that is now not the family afternoon of your fantasies (Bike ride! Softball in the park! Dishes! Laundry!), insist that an hour's drive to Columbus, Indiana, is the perfect way for the family to spend a Sunday. You can listen to an audiobook in the car! You can stop on the way back for a hike in Brown County State Park and a visit to the nature center! You can check out the chicks in the Rural King!

The husband agrees (resignedly, perhaps, since HE likes to listen to AM sports radio in the car), you force the girls into clothes and shoes, you pack lunches and the microscope and an audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg, the kids pack books and toys and headphones so that they don't have to listen to an audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg, and you're off!

Wow, that audiobook retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg sure is vivid!

Wow, those kids can sure eat a LOT of apricots!

Rural King is, of course, uhMAZing. Poor Matt is left to negotiate the Great Coop Purchase while you and the girls hold baby chicks and check out the horse tack and try to figure out the soonest length of time before the girls will need new cowboy boots (the girls are not best pleased by even your most generous estimate).

Loading the coop kit into the car requires removing one of the back seats and then putting it back, and some swearing, but eventually it's done and you're on your way out of town when--what the heck is THAT?!? Is that seriously an insanely giant glass-fronted indoor playground right downtown? The van basically squeals to a stop so you can all go and check it out.

Holy smokes, it IS an insanely giant glass-fronted indoor playground right downtown!

And thus an hour passes quite amiably. You and your husband get to actually, you know, talk, without having to say anything in Pig Latin, and the children are pretty happily occupied, too:

The children are deliciously tired as you get back into the car, but, being children, they're all revved up to go again by the time you enter Brown County State Park, buy your season pass (Another item checked off of the to-do list! Woot!), visit the nature center, and figure out which hike you want to do.

Mile and a half, to the lake and around the lake and back again, uphill and a shit-ton of stairs all the way back, so yay for healthy exercise (is what you tell yourself). The hike has ravines for the kids to run up and down, and the lake has huge bullfrogs to spy on, and water to "fall" in, and tadpoles to hunt, and a conveniently tossed-aside empty water bottle left by some horrible litterer that is actually perfect to transport the tadpoles home in, and you only have to hike off-trail to pee once. 

You contemplate stopping for dinner on the way home, because the hour grows late-ish, and you DO drive right by that one ice cream shop, but common-sense prevails, for one of the components of Sunday pre-road trip, back when it was just your typical family day at home, was chicken in the crockpot for dinner. So chicken you have, you force children into the shower, you zoom them off to bed, and then you settle yourself down with a lite margarita (yes, you do drink those now, and you don't care what the haters say about diet alcoholic beverages, because you like them just fine, thank you) and the newest episode of Doctor Who.

Which, can we talk about for just a minute? I just need to tell you that in the 50th anniversary episode, I really, really, REALLY want there to somehow be yet another rip in the universe so that we can see a happy Rose and 10.5 and their four children traveling around and solving mysteries in a TARDIS grown from a piece of coral that the Doctor/Donna secretly handed off to them before they left.

And also? I know people love River, but I'm over her. Over. Her. I never liked that plot, where Amy and Rory didn't get to raise their own baby, and Rory didn't even get to hold the real version, just the flesh copy that they thought was real at the time, and instead their infant was raised by Silence creepos and turned into a psychopath who's redeemed as an adult by the love of her parents and her love for the Doctor, and I don't buy the Doctor falling into a relationship with River because even though she's all "Spoilers!", she is continually spilling info about his future with her, and he HATES that sort of shit, and couldn't it have just been a well-crafted plot on her part in the first place to put it into his head and manipulate him into being with her?

That is all.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: A DIY Balance Bike, and a Vintage Embroidered Pillowcase Refashion

a tutorial for converting a pedal bike into a balance bike

and a tutorial for converting a pillowcase into a summer top

with much bonus chick footage, apparently

 

In other news, the fabulous food pantry where we volunteer has big, wonderful changes afoot: it's moving to another, much larger space! With that space, it will be able to be open more hours, so patrons will no longer have to stand in line outside waiting to shop; it will be able to stock more food of a wider variety, giving patrons more options and power to make their own food choices; it will be right on a bus line, making it less stressful for many patrons to get there; it will have a bigger parking lot, so patrons in vehicles won't have to waste gas circling the block or risk getting a ticket; and it will just be BETTER, with a teaching kitchen on-site, loading docks, a pallet jack (my back says hallelujah to that!), walk-in storage coolers and freezers, and a small demonstration garden.

The pantry isn't *quite* as close to us anymore, but it's still not that bad at just about a mile. I'm fixing to go make the girls sandwiches for lunch, and then we're going to head down the road that mile to an orientation in the new space.

And, and, AND...

We're all going to ride our bikes!

A Scene from the "School Room"

Embrace the chaos!

Recreating Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform in Clay

The kids have been excited about this project for a REALLY long while. I told them about it, but then made them burn through a few weeks of Story of the World review questions, map work, and timeline cards.

But finally, FINALLY the review questions were memorized, the maps were filled out and colored, and the timeline cards were glued to our big basement timeline. We'd seen documentaries and read books on cuneiform, and I'd received several nice jpegs of cuneiform artifacts in the British Museum's collection (including some of the actual Code of Hammurabi, so woot!), so when I dragged out the clay bin and printed some word and alphabet charts from Google, the kids were ready to dig right in.

I suggested that they could carve themselves the correct triangle-shaped stylus, but after looking through all our clay tools, the little kid tried out a screwdriver--

-- and then switched to a toothpick, and the big kid started right off with a toothpick. There's a nice awl in the clay tools that also would have worked, but I think the toothpicks fit their hands better and looked less intimidating to use.

On this particular day, I just wanted them to explore writing cuneiform on clay. The big kid tried several figures but got frustrated when they didn't turn out as she wanted, and ended up with just one, but the little kid really took off and ended up with several nice slabs of writing: 

They looked pretty well like the cuneiform characters, too!

I think we'll use these slabs for the experiment found in the Story of the World activity book, but on another day I'd like to set the activity up again, along with a cuneiform alphabet, and have the kids create their names as keepsakes.

We'll do that in a couple of months though, after our road trip, because we're going to see Gettysburg, and until then, we're officially Civil War buffs!

Here are some of the resources that we used to study cuneiform:

• The Lifeboat That Saved the World: a Mesopotamian myth retold by the Mesopotamia curator at the British Museum.
• Hands-on History Mesopotamia: we didn't do any of the hands-on projects this time, but this series always includes a ton.
• DK Eyewitness Mesopotamia: the kids love the graphics and the bite-sized bits of information.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Four Little Chicks

Our babies have been the main focus of our lives ever since we received them:

brand-new babies, still with a layer of paper towels on top of their wood shavings

I do make the girls wash their hands after touching the chicks, but I should probably also make them wash their faces!

Every day, Willow weighs each chick and writes what it's been doing that day in her chick journal.

I don't remember when I bought this postal scale, but we use the HECK out of it!

Our brooder is a clear plastic bin, lid cut out in the middle and chicken wire taped to it.

Inside are food, water (paper towels keep them cleaner from wood shavings), thermometer, a shade tent, and some greens and bugs to peck at.

This is Cluck.

 

Arrow

Fluffball

and Crow (or Peck--Syd can't decide which name she likes better)

   Syd loves the babies very much, obviously (as do I!), but this is the girl whom I really wanted to get chickens for:

My girl who keeps to herself, my girl who would rather read than play, my girl for whom comfort in her own skin and in the world at large is something that she has to work at, she has an affinity for animals. She's comfortable with them--


--she's feels free to be herself with them--

 --and they help her be kind and compassionate, to get out of her own head, and to connect:

Our babies are growing SO fast. I no longer wake up in the middle of the night to check that they're warm enough (Yes, I did that!), and they're just hitting the size that says to our three cats, combined with our body language, that these are not prey animals for them. Hopefully this weekend we'll build them their backyard coop, and let them start taking little day trips out there next week.

Because as much as I love love LOVE these babies, I'll also be pretty excited to have a hallway that does not contain a big chick brooder.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Altering a Softball Uniform and a Dinosaur-Themed Birthday Party

a tutorial for altering a too-big softball uniform

and a tutorial for the fruit and cheese dinosaurs that we served at Syd's seventh birthday party

At the party we also did this mini-watermelon dinosaur egg activity. The girls helped me and Matt paint mini watermelons to look like Easter eggs--

--and on the day of the party, I hid the giant dinosaur Easter eggs around our yard. There was one egg for each child at the party, and to begin the game I showed the children the one extra egg that we'd decorated so that they'd know what to look for, and told them to find one egg and then come back to the deck.

When all the children had returned with their egg I passed around a Sharpie so that they could label it to take home, and then Matt took out our example egg and asked them if they knew what a dinosaur egg looked like on the inside:

It was pretty cute to see the kids' faces, especially before he'd gotten the wedge cut out but after the red juice had started dripping off his hand.

Watermelon? Big hit:

Of course, there was even more food--

--some singing and a wish-- 

--and a walk over to the park to run the sugar off and open presents:

Although Syd was overwhelmed by the attention, she nevertheless claimed that it was the best birthday party ever.

And now she's seven!

Homeschool Biology: Horse Evolution on the Timeline

Our science right now consists of both horse biology and chicken biology--the kids are taking horseback riding lessons, and we have chicks!

It's mostly memory work stuff, these topics, because I still have my eye on starting an in-depth study of human biology later this summer, so the plan is to study classification, evolution, labeling of internal and external parts, life cycle, breeds, and stewardship for both creatures. Because horses and chicks are of special interest to the kids right now, their interest and engagement will aid their learning, while interacting with and caring for the actual creatures add depth and context and increase their capacity for taking in the material. But much of the actual content that they'll be exploring are actually foundational biology concepts that will build their overall knowledge base and enable me to add increasing depth and sophistication to their further studies.

Classification of horses made for a great research project (and how stoked were we when we finally learned what "odd-toed ungulate" means!), labeling is something that the kids work on every day as part of their memory work (their riding instructor also includes this, briefly, into their lessons), horse care is also covered during their lessons and through library books and videos, breed study is mostly still to come, although the kids have written reports about the horse breed that each rides during her lessons, life cycle is still to come (birthing videos on YouTube--yay!), and evolution was studied last week!

Our horse anatomy coloring book has a page on horse evolution, which the kids colored, cut out, and organized chronologically, then we added in a ton more modern horse ancestors using this online, interactive fossil map. I printed each ancestor off, then the kids cut out the images and important information and added each one to its proper place in the chronology:

I read out loud the info about each ancestor, we discussed how each one represented a change, and then it was downstairs to the big basement timeline, with stacks of horse ancestors, a pot of Mod Podge, and two foam paintbrushes.

It tortures me that our basement timeline isn't perfect--there's not enough room for everything (the lack of space in the Modern Age is critical), the layout of the epochs isn't even, and because it's so busy, it's too easy to accidentally place something in the incorrect decade, or even, in the prehistoric era, the incorrect millennium.

I don't know how you would fix that, though, without standardizing the entries beyond what would be fun for the kids. They like giant pictures, and entire coloring pages, and images printed from the internet, and large, messily-handwritten captions.

And so they glued up their links in the evolution of the horse more or less in the correct spots:

You can at least gather some facts from the messy timeline--horses come after the dinosaurs, and begin to overlap, towards this end of their evolution, with the beginnings of our record of human evolution. Much further down towards the present, we also record the horse's extinction in North America, and then its reintroduction.

And THAT leads to some interesting exploration of human history, and geography, and then leads pretty logically to breed study.

But first I think that we're going to watch those horse birthing videos on YouTube.