Our Favorite Kids' Gifts of 2016

We're still playing with all of the things from my 2015 favorite kid gifts list (heck, we're still playing with a lot of the stuff that I could have put on a 2010 favorite gifts list, if I'd thought to make one back then!), but there have been a few new things that have come into our lives and stayed. Here are our 2016 favorites:



Solitary games have loomed large in Syd's life this year. After she pretty much took over Rush Hour at the local hands-on museum on every occasion that we've gone, I've kept my eye out for other Think Fun games, and we like them all. The best solitary games come with an entire deck full of different puzzles to solve, and for bonus points, you should be able to buy expansion decks.



Syd has long loved to bake and decorate treats, so this year I made a conscious decision to give her more tools to do it with. I started with her own hand mixer, measuring cups, and spatulas (all turquoise, because of course), and let her know that she has a budget, all for her, just to be used to buy the ingredients and decorations that she wants. She's abused this a couple of times, telling me that she needs to buy a certain candy for a project but actually just eating it, but for the most part she's on the up-and-up, and she has created some really cool treats this year. Candy sushi, anyone?

I recommend not just the basic baking and decorating supplies, but also a small number of well-curated "novelty" items. For instance, you'd think that the miniature cupcake maker would be a waste of counter space, but Syd uses that thing all. The. TIME. She also uses the waffle maker a lot, and I am continually contemplating buying her a special toaster that also cooks an egg and warms a piece of lunch meat, all to make you a lovely breakfast sandwich. So the novelty stuff can be well worth it, if it's something that the kid would be really into.



It's just about impossible to pry Will away from her books, but she and Syd both love both Perler beads and Sculpey. The fine-motor skills required to use these craft supplies make them very un-baby-ish, something highly prized with the tween set, and yet you can still make some simple things with them, as well as some really cool, really complicated stuff. Both kids will spend hours crafting with Perler beads or Sculpey, and Syd will sometimes spend days at it. They both enjoy Googling for Perler bead patterns, most of which are created by other random people, and they search YouTube for Sculpey video tutorials. We have all made some unbelievably nice stuff thanks to those videos! I have a super awesome tentacle pendant that I made myself, and I did have the best ever white Sculpey unicorn with a braided grey mane and tail, until Spots knocked her off of my card catalog. Sigh...



Syd first discovered this stuff on her California vacation, and she came home with a can that didn't leave her hands for weeks, I feel like. I'm not sure how additional colors have migrated to her domain, but she now also has the glow-in-the-dark putty and one of the hyper color ones. We're at the point now where I need to take an actual Thinking Putty inventory if I want to add to her collection for Christmas. She does leave them lying around sometimes, but the putties thankfully don't seem to dry out or stain our stuff, so yay.



So many great things happen as the kids grow. They can put on their own snowsuits, make themselves breakfast, and we can play games together that don't bore me to death! We've got plenty of four-player games, but I also really like two-player games that let me spend time with just one kid. It works especially well, because each kid has her own preferences: Will prefers Othello, Syd really loves SET. They both really love Laser Khet, although the first time they played it, they told me they didn't like it and there it sat on a shelf for a couple of months. But once I got it out, read the rules, and taught them how to play? They LOVE it. It is surprisingly like chess in the strategies that it requires, and predicting where that laser is going to bounce is a good way to internalize geometry. I'm secretly very competitive, though, so when Matt beats me, I get kind of pissed. He is too good at strategy games! It's not fair!



I can't believe that I haven't put Geomags on one of my gift lists before, because we are OBSESSED with them. They're quite pricey, but they're a toy that adults can play with just as happily as kids do, and you can create some really complicated structures with them, including entire perpetual motion machines that rely on the toys' magnetism. Seriously. Search YouTube. I don't add to the kids' collection every single holiday, but if I come across a ragingly good deal on a special set, I'll snap it up and save it for the next gift-giving occasion. Syd was super stoked to get the glittery pink set one birthday, and don't tell the kids, but they *may* find the pretty new Mechanics set under the tree this year...



So the adult coloring book craze is apparently for adults AND tweens! My two have always liked coloring books, but they're very much into the more detailed and sophisticated images in adult coloring books. We've become especially fond of the coloring books with literary tie-ins, perfect for coloring while listening to an audiobook. We now own coloring books for Tolkien, Harry Potter, and Sherlock, and since The Lord of the Rings is (still) our current family night-time read-aloud, that Tolkien coloring book especially gets a lot of play.

I've mostly nailed down what I'm buying the kids for Christmas this year (although I'm not posting that information, because my kids are snoopy!), but I still have a little more room in my budget to buy a couple more things for Will and Matt, my two hard-to-shop for family members. So if you have any suggestions about gifts for either a tween who only loves reading but never re-reads something so don't bother giving her a book, or a man whose only hobby is video games that I know nothing about, let me know!

Crafty Review: Disney Art Studio (and Our Not-So-New Anymore Giant Magnetic Memo Board!)

One perennial thing about my kids (and probably any kid, as I've never known a kid who feels otherwise) is that they LOVE how-to-draw books. My kid who isn't really into art likes them, I'm guessing because the procedure-following helps her feel in control and the finished result lets her feel successful.

My kids who is really into art likes them, too, I'm guessing because they help her create more sophisticated drawings than she'd be doing on her own.

I used to be wary of how-to-draw books, thinking that they were suppressing my children's creativity, but Drawing for Children broke me of that with the author's wonderful explanations of how empowering it is for kids to be given the tools and the structure to create, with the encouragement to make their creations their own.

So now we're big fans of how-to-draw books, usually checking them out a stack at a time from the library, but a while back a publicist sent us a couple of Disney Art Studio kits, the original kit and the Palace Pets kit.

We have been drawing with these a LOT:

I don't know how she can draw with the cat in the way like that.

I was kind of surprised at how easy it is to make the perfect Mickey Mouse, if you follow the directions.

You can apparently even do it with a cat on your lap!

 Syd really likes to take the guided drawing and turn it into an entire scene. Sometimes they're enchanting--

Aurora by the Riverbank

--and sometimes they're a little more... gruesome. Poor Minnie Mouse is being beset by an entire legion of dangers!

You may remember that a long while back I was bemoaning our house's lack of suitable display space for children's artwork and fun magnets. Over the summer, I bought a GIANT sheet of metal (it was actually a big production that involved a post-Children's Museum trip to an Indianapolis metal store and consultation with the salesman and the perusal of several different kinds of sheet metal in several different sizes) and Matt and I roughly followed this tutorial to create this!

We had a harder time putting ours together than the author of the tute did, primarily because we probably shouldn't have tried the glue method--it just didn't hold well for us (humidity, perhaps?), so parts of the frame drifted, and then Matt tried to hold them on with duct tape until the glue cured, but the duct tape left residue that wouldn't take the paint, so I had to re-sand the pieces and paint them again...

Anyway, it looks awesome now, so yay!

It's a little hard to figure out the scale of it without any furniture or cats in the way, until you realize that most of the artwork displayed is done on 8.5"x11" sheets of paper. Look at all the artwork that it holds! This is now our main artwork display area; when a kid creates a new work but the memo board is completely full (as it now always is), I take something off, photograph it, recycle it or save it for crafting, and put the new piece on in its place.

I made a set of Scrabble tile magnets and a set of dyed wooden mosaic magnets to be the main types of magnets that we use on the memo board, although very special handmade magnets will also receive consideration (hence the two kid-made fused glass magnets also on display there). I already need to make more of those magnets, actually, and one of my dreams is to also make a life-sized paper Scrabble board to put up, so we can really play Scrabble with our Scrabble tile magnets!

Maybe I should hang that separately, though, as clearly all the space on that giant memo board is already being used...

I received Disney Art Studio and Disney Art Studio: Palace Pets free from a publicist, because I can't write about something unless my kids have used it to figure out how to draw Mickey Mouse with his tongue sticking out, and then draw that on every single math page so that I know they disapprove of math.

Work Plans for the Week of November 28: The Nutcracker!!!

We had a short school week last week (although not as short as the children would have liked, considering their outrage when they learned that they still had to do math even with their father home from work on a Tuesday), and it was wonderful.

The past couple of years, we've preferred to go out to eat at our favorite Indian buffet on Thanksgiving, but this year, we decided to cook on Thanksgiving and eat out on Christmas. Everybody in the family helped make our feast!

Syd made the mashed potatoes and the flower arrangements:

Will made the cranberry sauce and was my general go-to girl:

Both kids sculpted the turkey bread--

--and unpacked, sorted, and washed my Mamma's china:

This was the first time in my life that I have ever eaten off of that china, by the way. For my entire living memory with Mamma and Pappa, that china was displayed in a gorgeous wooden cabinet in our dining room. Pappa worked for Dixie Cup, so we always ate off of the free paper plates that he was given, even on holidays--my mother claims that there was one holiday in which we did eat off of the china, but when questioned further, she admitted that I was a very young child at the time and was seated at the children's table, where we most certainly did NOT eat off of the fine china.

I made the roasted brussels sprouts, the dried cherry and sausage stuffing (Matt and I LOVED this stuffing, but the kids picked out every. Single. Dang. Cherry), the creamed cheese corn, and the peanut butter icebox pie. Matt grilled the steaks (we don't care for turkey) and made a lemon chess pie and two pumpkin pies.

We ate off of that fine china until we were very, very full.

And then--and I totally don't care what you say!--we went Black Friday shopping on Thanksgiving. Will and Matt needed snow pants, which were 50% off at MC Sports, which opened at 5pm on Thanksgiving. Michael's opened at 6, and although we didn't need anything there, I wanted a giant canvas--70% off--for various school projects, and Syd wanted Christmas decorations for her dollhouse AND a 2017 planner (both 50% off, with a 30% off your total purchase coupon on top of that). Kohl's also opened at 6, and Matt needed a new winter coat (60% off) and we secretly bought the kids a drone at the doorbuster price. We're also secretly going to test it out sometime this week after the kids are asleep to see if it's any good.

The kids and I LOVE the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, but we don't actually have TV reception, so we cheated and watched it on YouTube the next day. The Girl Scouts had a float in the parade this year, and there was a Girl Scout badge that the kids earned by completing a scavenger hunt while watching the parade, designing their own Girl Scout parade float--

This is Syd's!

--and writing an essay about their favorite float. Don't tell the kids that this was also secretly schoolwork!

In unrelated news, I think that Will is about to have yet another growth spurt, as our night owl has routinely been falling asleep at 8 or 9 pm this past week, often in the middle of a family activity. She fell asleep on my shoulder during a break in decorating the Christmas tree last night (and how I did treasure that!), and here she is loudly snoring during a VERY exciting moment in Lord of the Rings:

Our fencing club for the next two nights doesn't end until after Will's been falling asleep all last week, so we'll see how she does...

The day after Thanksgiving is the first day that it's okay to start decorating for Christmas, if you ask me. Time, then, for the tree farm!

I thought that this tree looked really cute, but now that it's up and decorated, it's actually really wonky and lopsided and way too fat for our space. Oh, well!

And yes, we cut it down ourselves.

This kid actually cut most of it down.

This kid worked for two seconds and then wandered off with the dog. She is REALLY skilled at getting out of work.

 We have another short week this week, since this is performance week for our university's production of The Nutcracker, starring the deeply talented Fourth Soldier from the Right. Not only does Syd have four hours of daily rehearsals beginning today, but extended family begins arriving tomorrow evening, starting Wednesday I'll be volunteering backstage at all of Syd's rehearsals and performances that I won't be attending, and we'll have guests straight through until next Tuesday.

In previous years, we've taken this entire week as a vacation from school, but this year, my plan is to have full school days today and tomorrow, and then very short school days that can be ditched, if needed, the rest of the week. I have learned the value of keeping up the children's routine, even their less preferred routine of schoolwork, during weeks when it would otherwise be tempting to simply toss routine out the window.

Books of the Day for our short week, then, include titles on Greek mythology and Ancient Greece. In Memory Work, we're continuing with Sonnet 116 and geometry formulas amongst our other random tidbits.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: So far this morning, Will has zipped through her Math Mammoth (integers are a piece of cake!) and her grammar (she's still making a lot of labeling errors, but is getting consistently better), and is now requesting ebooks from the library for her MENSA reading list. Syd... is drawing and listening to Auggie and Me for the sixth time. Yeah, she may not get her schoolwork done this week.

In Math Mammoth, Syd is finishing up decimals and moving into graphing, which I think that she'll like much better than decimals. I still have to keep a close eye on her to make sure that she keeps up with her math, Junior Analytical Grammar, and Wordly Wise--it must be the age, because two years ago, I remember being in just the depths of despair about Will's flat-out refusal to do her schoolwork. Syd is less antagonistic than Will, so instead of fighting me about it every day like Will did, she will happily spend the entire morning sitting at our work table and piddling, and then as soon as I get distracted by the rest of my own day, she'll wander off and spend the afternoon playing. It's a shockingly effective strategy for her.

Will loves her Wordly Wise, and doesn't mind Analytical Grammar, although she doesn't love that there's so much work to do for each day's activity--label the words, and diagram them, AND sometimes summarize the passage, as well! It's shaping up to be an excellent mastery program, however, and I'm thrilled that I finally have a grammar curriculum that I like.

Both kids enjoy working through their MENSA reading lists. There's no hurry to completing them, but I do like that the list encourages them to read some classics that they probably wouldn't otherwise choose, and they've both so far enjoyed everything that they've tried. I'll likely mention to Will, though, that as soon as she finishes the 4th-6th grade list, she can start on the middle school list, which has even more books on it that she hasn't yet read!

Will struggled a bit with her Math Mammoth geometry unit, in a way that made me think that she doesn't have good internal concepts to work with. The kids have done geometry before, of course, played with polygons and Platonic solids, built with blocks and LEGOs, poured and dumped water and played with volume, etc., but Will lives in her head and plays a LOT less than Syd, and this affects her math skills, I think. To that end, I checked out several geometry textbooks and teacher's guides from our local university library (I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I do this a LOT, and it's invaluable to my lesson planning), and have flagged some hands-on geometry activities that we'll be trying in the next few weeks. Among these is Zome Geometry, a geometry textbook for upper middle school and above that uses Zometools, which you know we already have and love. On this day, we'll be using the Zometools to build and calculate the interior angles of regular polygons.

The kids can do their Story of Science work mostly independently, although I do have to read the chapters out loud with Syd if I want her to actually read them. This week's chapter is about ancient methods of timekeeping and calendar making, and the quest book activity for this day asks the kids, in a fairly engaging format, to provide an in-depth summary of one ancient civilization's calendar. This is one chapter in which I feel like the hands-on activities are too light, as ancient calendars and clocks are fascinating and easy to recreate, so we'll likely spend next week on this chapter, as well. I mean, we HAVE to make a sundial!!!

Greek mythology is another unit that the kids can do independently. They love the readings, and the trading cards that they're making will be good tools for review later. I have a couple of additional hands-on enrichment activities in my plans for this unit, but not many.

Syd LOVES our daily creative writing, but nevertheless, once a week or so I usually substitute letter writing instead; the kids have a couple of pen pals, and, of course, things like sympathy cards and get-well-soon cards and thank-you cards must be handmade and written with one's own real words--no platitudes allowed!

Typing (through Typing.com) and keyboard (through Hoffman Academy) are also daily activities, and also done blessedly independently, although I do have to supervise Will or she'll half-ass her way through the whole thing. Will is also going to begin the Khan Academy SAT Prep unit on this day. She did--and yes, this is a mom brag, so indulge me--amazingly well on her SAT verbal diagnostic tests, so well that even with grade-level math skills, it's definitely worth it to have her take the SAT in the spring to make her academic status as a "gifted" learner official. My plan, then, is to have Will go through Khan Academy's SAT Prep in verbal and math, which is content-based, and after that to go through a prep program that's more strategy-based. Stamina and output (that essay has to be handwritten, and you know how I feel about Will's handwriting!) may still be concerns, but as-is, she's already well ahead of the baseline for gifted programs for her age group.

Mom brag over!

And whether we get all of that done or not, it'll be too late by 4:00--Syd has Nutcracker rehearsal and Will and I have fencing!

TUESDAY: The kids don't love this Animal Behavior MOOC as much as they loved the Sharks one, but Will, at least, is still getting a lot out of it. Syd might not be, but she's got plenty of other science in our work plans this semester. I'm finding that having a new dog is helpful in this class, as I can apply a lot of the class readings to her; on this day, the kids (or at least Will) will use the day's lessons on how animals learn to make a plan to teach Luna one new trick... her first trick, sigh. I'm researching obedience schools, but it's pretty likely that we'll have a leash-pulling, non-sitting, running-away-from-us-for-fun scamp through Christmas.

The quest book activity for this day asks the kids to graph a month's worth of high tides, then use that information to predict the next five high tides. Instead of taking the printed tide chart from the book, however, I plan to have the children pick whatever location they want from this US tidal chart, graph the month of November using that chart, then predict the first high tides of December and check their work. I'll sneak some other hands-on activities and videos about the moon and tides into the rest of their week to flesh out the lesson.

Both kids are almost finished with their Girl Scout first aid badges; Syd just has to create a survey asking people what comforts them when they're sick (I'm going to teach her how to use SurveyMonkey for this), and Will is working through an online Red Cross First Aid class that will cover all the rest of the information that she needs for her Cadette badge.

We're back to a story starter on this day! Syd and I use the story starters that I wrote, and we share our writing afterwards, but it's all I can do to get Will to simply put pencil to paper for ten minutes. She refused to use the story starter, and will consent only to describe in writing the dragon that she will draw when our writing time is over. Sigh...

WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY: I don't know if we will, in reality, even attempt this school with guests in town, but Will, at least, might appreciate some down-time from socializing. I've pared the schedule down to just math and the simplest of our daily assignments, with the addition of the current events journal that the kids started last week. On the days that it's assigned, they need to look for an interesting article in that day's newspaper, answer the Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions about it, and then write a good sentence telling me why this article is important or relevant to them (this is sneaky practice in how to write a good conclusion, mwa-ha-ha!).

SATURDAY-SUNDAY: Will has Chinese. Syd has three performances of The Nutcracker, followed by the cast party--don't let me forget to bring a Sharpie for poster autographing! We'll do fun stuff with family through Tuesday, and then it's back to school.

What are YOU up to this week?

Homeschool Math: Graphing Candy

There's a lot to cover with fractions, decimals, and percents, but fortunately, since they're all ways of representing the parts of a whole, your kiddos can review all of them together.

For our hands-on math enrichment lesson one day, my goal was to show the kids concrete representations of fractions, decimals, and percents, to have them practice the conversions, and to let them explore how they can model these relationships.

If that sounds dry (and it does), then let me explain to you that it was actually super fun, on account of...

CANDY!!!

We went to the grocery store and picked out several small bags of assorted candies, the kind that naturally come in various colors or flavors. I was surprised that it was impossible to find the small bags of M&Ms that I remember from the checkout aisle as a kid, but we ended up happy enough with Mike & Ikes, Reese's Pieces, Sour Patch Kids, and Sweet Tarts.

I bought a package of each for each kid, because I also thought that it would be interesting to compare each kid's results.

After I had made each kid promise not to eat any candy until they'd finished counting, I gave the kids their various little boxes and bags of candy and lots of little dishes. For each candy, each kid had to do the following:

1. Count the total number of pieces of candy in the package.
2. Count the total number of each kind of candy.
3. Calculate, for each kind, the fraction, decimal, and percentage of that kind to the total number of pieces.
4. Create a pie chart to represent the relationships between the candies.

Here is the page of Will's calculations. She doesn't have the neatest handwriting, but at least, after years of nagging, it is at last legible... to her:

And here are their pie charts!

I was interested to see that the ratios between each type of candy didn't remain consistent between the two packages that the kids studied, in any candy that they studied.

If we did this again, I'd make a chart ahead of time for the kids to record their results before graphing, and make it clear that I expected organized results that everyone, not just the kid recording the results, could read.

Extension activities that I'd also consider the next time:

• Use the leftover candy for candy science experiments. There are a ton online, invented in large part by parents desperate to use up Halloween candy, but they're all pretty cool.
• Or use the leftover candy for baking or decorating. Most of the candy that we used would taste good in cookies or brownies.
• Buy several packages of one candy, graph them all, then use the results to calculate an average of each type of candy in the mix. This would make a good STEM Fair project.
• Have the kids write up their results in an essay.

The kids LOVED this activity, and were super invested in the process. Sure, it made for a sugar-filled day and evening, but it was a small price to pay for such intense math practice, conducted fuss-free!

Here are some other fun ways to play with fractions, decimals, and percents:

• Make Rice Krispy Treat fractions. 
• Play edible chess. 
• Make fraction flags. 
• Play Spiraling Decimals. 
• Make pizza box fractions. We got a couple of small pizza boxes from our favorite pizza place to do this project. 
• Play Roll a Whole.
• Make fraction art on a hundred grid. 
• Write your name on a hundred grid. 
• Do color-by-fraction pictures.
• Play First to 50.
• Use dominoes as fraction manipulatives.
• Make play dough fractions.

And here are just a few resources that we've also enjoyed:

American Revolution Road Trip: Philadelphia

About halfway through our American Revolution road trip, I checked my email in our hotel room one night and discovered an email from the ballet department stating that the younger kid's Nutcracker rehearsals would begin that Saturday.

Plan A wasn't to drive home from our road trip until that Sunday, but I'd been worried enough about this specific possibility (and for those of you who wonder why I didn't just ask the ballet department when the Nutcracker rehearsals would begin, I give you the following: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!! As if the department is that organized! Oh, my gosh, I'm crying!!! That's too funny!) to craft a Plan B.

Plan B stated that instead of spending two days in Philadelphia, we would stay just half a day, and focus solely on Independence Hall. No City Tavern. No Franklin Institute. No Thaddeus Kosciusko National Memorial (and after I'd learned to spell it and everything!). No Ben Franklin Museum. No B. Free Franklin Post Office. BUT we'd still hit the highlight and climax of our American Revolution road trip, get the kid back in time for Nutcracker rehearsal, and Philadelphia will still be there another time.

And that's how we got up at the crack of dawn, drove into the city, and headed straight to the Independence National Historical Park!

Matt wasn't super enthusiastic about revisiting the Liberty Bell, but it was part of the kids' Junior Ranger books, AND I insisted!

I really like this view of the Liberty Bell, because you can see Independence Hall in the background.

Some Junior Ranger badge disappointments in Philadelphia:

1. The Thaddeus Kosciusko National Memorial is only open on weekends, alas, so I had the kids finish up their partly-completed Junior Ranger books via web research and I mailed them to the site when we were home.
2. The Germantown White House was closed altogether. An outrage! Sadly, the site also says that they do NOT honor Junior Ranger books submitted by mail, but I sent ours in, anyway. You never know when an especially kind ranger will take pity on you!
3. You may know that there's a special Junior Ranger badge this year for the Centennial. If you haven't had your kids earn theirs yet, go do it now! My kids received theirs at Minute Man, and were super proud to have them; in the car afterwards, I heard the story at least four times of how the park ranger told them to hold onto their badges and then when they were old, they could ebay them for a lot of money. So, knowing as you do how I feel about Junior Ranger badges, you will not be surprised that I was absolutely appalled to enter the Independence visitor center and see a ranger standing in the hallway with a box of Centennial Junior Ranger badges, passing them out to everyone who passed. Excuse me, but those badges have to be EARNED! Some children have worked VERY HARD to earn those badges, and the mother of those children does not appreciate seeing a ranger simply passing them out as if they were Halloween candy! I had prepared a firm refusal and a tart comment when we were to pass this ranger, but the kids were all, "Mom, ebay!!!" So now we have two extra, but the kids are going to be disappointed when the badges are worthless in forty years because the rangers handed them out like stickers.

 Nevertheless, we simply didn't have time in Philadelphia to fuss about all of these little things. Must keep our eyes on the prize!

One of the prizes? It turned out that we had just enough time after the Liberty Bell but before our guided tour of Independence Hall to hike over and check out Ben Franklin's grave!

And then: onto Independence Hall!

There was a line to get through security and onto the grounds of the site, and a middle-aged woman behind us who was clearly trying to edge her way in front of us in this line. Fortunately, when you have four people in your family, you can take up a good amount of lateral area when you're so motivated, and so cutters rarely prevail against us.

Once we were on the grounds, however, this woman continued to act super sketchy. As I was trying to take photos of Independence Hall from the other side--

--I noticed that as soon as the woman got through security, she immediately pushed herself to the front of the line waiting for the next tour. "She must have been running late for her tour time," I thought. But after a few minutes standing in that line, she left it, and then Matt and I totally saw her sneak in the back entrance of Independence Hall!

"She's a terrorist!" I hissed to Matt. "We should tell a guard!"

"Nah," Matt said. "I bet she just doesn't have a ticket." Tickets ARE pretty hard to come by. I bought ours a month in advance.

The woman only spent a couple of minutes in Independence Hall before she came back out--security was pretty tight in there, so I bet she was caught and asked to leave--and speed-walked into another building that didn't require a special ticket. Nothing blew up afterwards, so I guess that Matt's theory was the correct one. Still, clocking her movements kept us pretty entertained while we waited for our turn for the tour.

Here's my second-favorite detective:

Our tour group was a LOT bigger than I would have liked, but our tour guide had a nice, big voice to match, and the kids and I are short, at least, so people usually give us good viewing spots. We also did credit to ourselves, with me being the only one who could immediately answer the ranger's question of which event a certain painting depicted, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

I immediately piped up, "The Constitution!", and it turned out that I was meant to have determined that based on the presence of George Washington, but just between you and me, I actually recognized Alexander Hamilton and didn't even notice Washington.

Here's the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chamber.

And here's the Assembly Room!!! We'd been waiting the whole trip to see this!

After our tour, we turned in Junior Ranger books and received Junior Ranger badges that were EARNED, went to the bathroom, bought Philly cheesesteaks from a food truck, hoofed it back to the car, and ate them on our way out of the city and on the long, long, long drive home.

We got home around 1:30 in the morning, the kid showed up on time to her 10:00 am ballet class, Matt discovered at this 10:00 am ballet class that they'd changed the time of that day's Nutcracker rehearsal to an hour earlier (because of COURSE they did), the kid showed up on time to Nutcracker rehearsal, and over dinner that night she told me that the first thing they did when rehearsal began is start lining up the kids into rows. The kids who arrived a few minutes late?

BACK ROW.

And THAT'S how I have a front row soldier in this year's Nutcracker!