Hamster Sitting

Meet China:

We are hamster-sitting this cute (and fat!) little dwarf hamster for a few weeks (and adding hamster classification, hamster anatomy, hamster care, the hamster life cycle, and hamster sketching from life to our summer animal biology study--mwa-ha-ha!).

And then--and this is my favorite part--after enjoying her and caring for her and feeding her pea pods and cereal (and listening to her run on her wheel all night and keeping her away from the cats), we get to give her back to her owner and once again live in a hamster-free house!

Pet-sitting is pretty great.

The Party has Encountered a Dragon: A Dragon Party for Will's Ninth Birthday

cardboard shields and balloon swords

a castle to paint and play in

a treasure hunt for the dragon's hoard

This is exactly like an Easter egg hunt, only I used the painted rocks from my DIY Treasure tutorial. 

 Dragon Tag

Rip old fabric into "tails." Have the kids close their eyes, and pass out tails to the majority of kids, who should tuck them into the backs of their pants so that they hang down. Have the tailed kids, who are the dragons, start running first, then let the other kids, who are the knights, open their eyes and chase them. A dragon whose tail is pulled off becomes a knight, and helps chase dragons. The last dragon is a champion, and so is the knight who has the most tails. We played this a second time without closing eyes, and with each kid choosing whether she wanted to be a dragon or a knight.

 watermelon, chess cookies, chocolate ice cream, and a castle cake

Yes, the cake did look about as bad as I was afraid of, but I don't care. I let the girls decorate it--can you tell? I've started making these super-long birthday candles for the girls now; Willow requested blue and yellow.

 friends and sisters to celebrate with

presents that are always so thoughtful

and, of COURSE, a walk to the park to finish

And that's how a great kid has herself a GREAT birthday party. Nine is going to be a good year, I can already tell.

Stained Glass Coloring Pages on the Light Table

another fun use for one of my favorite space-wasting behemoths!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Business Cards and LEGOs

a round-up of surprisingly sustainable LEGO crafts

and a tutorial for stash-busting embellished business cards

I'm pretty excited about this method of de-stashing some of my random little craft supplies, so if you order something from my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, you can probably expect to receive a bonus treat!

Blueberries

We also came home with ticks and tadpoles, you will not be surprised to hear.

 

The girls do not share my strategy of, you know, actually picking all the ripe berries off of one bush before moving on.

I think they picked about four blueberries from every single bush on the property. 3.5 of these blueberries were eaten immediately.

Blueberries only consistently made it into the bucket after their tummies were full.

The third child is such a dear friend of my kiddos. We had the pleasure of watching her taste her first blueberry!

With three big girls to help, I ended up with over thirty pounds (and seventy dollars, yikes!) of summer.

This girl will be nine tomorrow. I'm simultaneously overjoyed and heartbroken.

Chess Classes from Chessology: Will Loved Them!

For the past couple of months Will has been a beta tester for Chessology, guinea pigging the development of a new online chess class. She took the class with the other children also beta testing, giving her teacher a real-world model to work through technical issues and develop strategies, and I provided feedback about her experience, to help him troubleshoot and make improvements.

The final result was a chess class that I just can't say enough about.

Willow LOVED her teacher, Coach Atkins, who was really personable and great with the kids. He teaches all the classes, using a webcam and a large wall-mounted chessboard:

Will's class ran from 9-10 on Saturday mornings--hence the doughnut!

The kids also use their webcams for a portion of every class, so that they can see each other and Coach Atkins can see all of them, but mostly they communicate through chat--one of the first skills that Coach Atkins taught them was algebraic notation, so that they can answer his questions and offer solutions to his puzzles and propose moves in demo games without having to have too much keyboarding ability:

One of my biggest pet peeves is the kids missing an activity that I've paid for, and I always try to route vacations to avoid missing activities as much as possible, so my favorite thing about this summer Saturday class was the fact that since it occurred online, Will could attend class wherever we had an internet connection. She attended class in hotels in Arkansas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and if they hadn't had internet, I was prepared to drive her to Starbucks and just drink a giant coffee while she had her class--the sacrifices that we're willing to make for our kids' education!

Parents are expected to sit next to their kids and supervise during class which, while it means that I'm chained to the table for an hour doing paperwork (and the crossword puzzle!), it does turn out to be really useful. I've never formally studied chess, so I find learning about strategies like cascading pawns and en passant really useful. I can also pick out things like vocabulary terms and specific rules and strategies to add to Will's memory work--as an active scholastic player, she should learn that stuff, and it can only help her game. And since every week when I ask Will after class what her homework was and she says, "We didn't get any homework," and nearly every week they DO, in fact, get homework, it's also pretty useful that I'm sitting right there to hear and write down the homework assignment. 

A lot of the homework assignments have involved practice games set up in specific ways to teach specific strategies--

These cat and mouse games, set up in various ways, have really worked to make Will way more aggressive with her checkmate.

--and an interesting set of puzzles that turned possibilities for checkmating the king into an algebraic equation. It was pretty darn brilliant, and we've been using it ever since: 

You can see how it works in Coach Atkins' video about how he teaches it:

The girls have also been balancing equations in The Life of Fred, as well, so it's nice to have it all meet up.

I had several people ask me about the classes when I bragged about them on my Craft Knife Facebook page, back when registration wasn't open to anyone outside of the beta testing children, but now registration is open to everyone! Through August 1 you can actually get half off the registration price because we were beta testers and you know us (sort of), so you can click on the 50% off button and then name drop "Willow Indiana" as your beta tester buddy.

Okay--funnily enough, Will is actually at our town's scholastic chess club right now, along with Matt and Syd, so I'm off to eat frozen Kashi pizza and some cherries while reading my Dexter novel, figure out a pillowcase pattern to make from some organic flannel that I was given to review in the coming week for Crafting a Green World, weed my messy garden, and start on a frittata for dinner.

And yes, I may never make it past the Dexter novel on this to-do list.

It's a Dragon Party!

Postcard invitations are now our thing. Matt designs one side of the postcard, with an awesome party graphic--

I love how Matt designed this to capture not just the party theme, but also his and Will's shared love of video games.

--and the party details, and space for the address and stamp (we didn't have time to hand-deliver invitations for this party, so I also got Matt to type in all the addresses directly onto the invitations for me--yay!), and the kids do the front sides of the postcard invitations:

Willow likes to use Google Images to research possible illustrations.

Next week is pretty much designated as Party Prep Week--we've got cardboard shields to cut out, a dragon hoard to finish painting, dragon bread to bake, the rules of Dragon Tag to finalize, and a castle cake to put together.

She's going to be nine. I can't believe it.