Thanksgiving in California: Attack Seagulls and Sea Doggos

What to do when your brother-in-law is getting married completely across the country from one kid's Very Important Nutcracker Rehearsals?

You send your husband and the other kid to go party without you, sigh... No fancy clothes for me and Syd. No fancy dinners. No dancing. No wine (well, there may have been a little wine for me after she went to bed, but still. Wedding wine is better). While Matt and Will flew out to California together to hit the beach and do fancy stuff, I drove Syd back and forth to hours of daily rehearsals, and in between we did stuff like hike through the frozen, really freaking cold landscape that we were stuck in:

Seriously, that's an actual ice storm. Meanwhile, Matt and Will were flitting around California's wine country in short sleeves.

Jealousy is a legitimate emotion, Friends. It's okay to feel jealous as hell when your husband hangs out in paradise while you stay back in the frozen wasteland to chauffeur your kid and walk the dog.

But even The Nutcracker has to give its ballerinas a Thanksgiving vacation, so at 2:00 am on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, approximately 8 hours after Syd's final rehearsal before the break, up she and I got ourselves to drive to the airport and get on the first flight of the day to San Diego:

Here's what the Long-Term Parking shuttle shelter looks like at 4:00 am. It had a button to press for a space heater that would function for exactly 10 seconds before shutting off again. I got VERY good at pressing that space heater button exactly on time.

We found the sunrise on the way to our Phoenix layover. 

 We were able to get to California in time to tag along on the last 24 hours of post-wedding festivities, and then it was time to start our own, personal Thanksgiving vacation! First on the to-do list was to head down the West Coast back to San Diego, checking out every beach and tide pool on the way.

We did a pretty good job of it:

We started at Scripps Beach, then hiked north all the way to Black's Beach, far enough that we could see the Mushroom House funicular before turning around. We did NOT hike all the way to the north end of Black's Beach, where I'm told that clothing is optional...

Syd's first time in the water on this trip--doesn't that make a nice change from those ice storm photos from two days prior?!?

You can take the ballerina out of the ballet studio, but...

I'd say we were happy to be warm!

This girl was well used to the beautiful weather by then, but she still loves the novelty of digging in the sand.

Matt's always taking photos of me doing something dorky. Here, I'm investigating a tide pool.

Yep, another tide pool. You can't see something right unless you get your face in it!

And here, the children and I have found a total stranger to tell us all about the California sea hare. You can take the homeschooler out of her homeschool, but...

This is the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier. It's very photogenic!

 Next on the list was sea lions (thanks to YouTube, we can't stop calling them "sea doggos." Seriously. Pause here, go to YouTube, and search for "sea doggos." You can thank me in the comments). We drove a little further south, stopped for sandwiches (and saladitos, which I had never even seen before and I can't decide if I liked them or not, but still I couldn't stop eating them), and thanked our lucky stars that we were able to find a parking spot within a mile of the Children's Pool--Sundays in La Jolla are CROWDED!

We lucked out even more to score a bench on top of the cliff, overlooking the ocean (when I say "score," I mean that I saw people getting off a bench off in the distance and instructed my children to sprint for it to claim it for us. I'm very good at delegating), so before hiking and exploring, we sat down to eat our sandwiches in peace. It was a pretty crowded area, like I said, with lots of the whole variety of humanity there, so in the middle of my first bite of sandwich, when I suddenly felt a "Whoosh!" an inch from my face and I got knocked forward on my seat, I thought that somebody had come up behind me and had tried to punch me in the back of the head. Instead, what had really happened was that a seagull had swooped down and neatly plucked the entire top half of my sandwich out of my hands AND MY MOUTH. Like, I was BITING INTO MY SANDWICH, and a seagull came and stole half of it!

Matt and the kids saw the whole thing, and we basically just blinked at each other until someone noticed the seagull sitting just a few feet away, gulping down my delicious sandwich and then eyeing me for more. We spent the rest of our lunch with Matt standing in front of us to guard us from further attacks.

I mean, WHAT THE HELL?!?

After our lunch, we hiked and explored more of the coast--

--making our way to Children's Pool and the seal rocks just south of the seawall that encloses it:

We found the sea doggos!!!

Here, Matt and Will are at the far end of the sea wall, overlooking Children's Pool.

And then it was off to meet the grandparents, who were hosting us in San Diego, for dinner. Next time, we do all things San Diego, including the Navy Base!

CK-12 Biology Chapter 2: The Chemistry of Life

The kids and I are using CK-12's 9th/10th grade Biology textbook as the spine for this year's biology curriculum--for Will, this will be recorded as Honors Biology on her transcript.

In addition to that textbook, we're using The Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments as our lab manual, and of course we've got a plethora of other reading/viewing/listening resources and hands-on activities to enrich our study.

• Lesson Plans for Chapter 1
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 4
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 5
• Lesson Plans for Chapter 7

The kids read chapter 2 in sections, completing the questions at the end of each section. At the end of the chapter, they took the test (from the CK-12 Biology Quizzes and Tests book) with an open book. 

We had the most fun with Section 2.1: Matter and Organic Compounds--there's a lot of good, meaty, hands-on stuff in this section!

Along with the textbook, we used the following resources:

• (for Syd) BrainPop's movie and game for the Periodic Table of Elements
• Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham
• (for Syd) BrainPop's movie for Compounds and Mixtures
• Your Guide to the Periodic Table of Elements
• (for Will) The Disappearing Spoon
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe
• Molecules: The Elements and Architecture of Everything

We have a few hands-on activities already kicking around the house that we used: a PTOE puzzle that was a Christmas gift several years ago, and that we assembled as part of our family time for a few evenings in a row, and this DIY PTOE game, "Quick Six," that the kids and I constructed some other time when we were studying chemistry. Whenever it was, the kids did really fine work on it, with all the illustrations neatly colored in, and I'm glad that we kept it on our games shelf all this time.

For memory work and reference, I printed a one-page Periodic Table for the kids to color and put in their science notebooks, and I printed a giant, multi-page, full-color Periodic Table that I taped together and put on the wall of the playroom.

We covered the section's study of organic compounds by building molecules using our Zometools set, and testing for organic compounds in food:

This was a crazy, elaborate, challenging experiment that they're probably not doing in a lot of other sixth grade classrooms, but the kids loved it, and I think we'll repeat it again when we get to our biology's chapters on human biology.

For Section 2.2, Biochemical Reactions, I set up this process-oriented experimentation with exothermic reactions, loosely based on this experiment, for the kids:

We've done lots of exothermic reactions before, including with lye, potassium nitrate and sugar, and the ubiquitous hydrogen peroxide with potassium iodide as a catalyst, so the kids were familiar enough with this activity that I really could set it up as a process-oriented exploration. If your kids, unlike mine, haven't gone through several stages of obsession with homemade exothermic reactions, you could mediate this as a more guided experience.

Section 2.3: Water, Acids, and Bases, was also a review--we've done pH chemistry over and over and over again since the kids were preschoolers. I gave the kids some of our collection of pH test strips (you can also use this red cabbage pH indicator), and set them to work testing and recording the pH of a dozen or so substances each:

Good times.

This felt like a big chapter, with what felt like four big concepts to cover. As always, I do a lot more research than I do assigning, so here are suitable activities that we could have--but didn't--complete for this chapter:

• Periodic Table of the Elements cupcakes. I don't know why I want to make these. That's too many cupcakes for us to eat. The decoration would take FOREVER. And yet... I want to make these sooooo badly!
• Periodic Table of the Elements Battleship.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements
• Find the mistakes on the Periodic Table of Elements.
• Paint the Periodic Table of Elements. I really want to make plaster of Paris cubes in a silicone muffin tray and use that for this PTOE.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Chart. For Perler beads or cross-stitch!
• Violet Jelly. Did you know that violets are also a natural pH indicator!

And now, on to cells!

Turn an Old Greeting Card into a Notebook

I freelance over at Crafting a Green World, an eco-friendly crafting blog. Every now and then, on a non-regular basis, I'll share one of my favorite tutorials with you..

...such as this one! I originally published this upcycled greeting card notebook tutorial right here at Crafting a Green World.

Greeting cards are more than just a waste of paper...

Well, they are if you upcycle them!

Here's a useful and cute way to upcycle a greeting card into a blank book. Use it as a travel or nature or art journal, or just use it for your shopping lists. No matter how you use it, you'll have given new life to one old greeting card, upcycling it into something brand-new.

You will need:

Greeting card. My favorite cards to use are the ones with personal notes inside--it's an easy way to keep your loved one with you in the day-to-day.

Blank paper. You can use any paper that you want. Look for paper that has at least the same dimensions as the greeting card when it's unfolded.

Embroidery needle and embroidery floss. You're actually going to bind this book. No staplers for you!

  

1. Measure and cut the inside pages. Measure the length and height of your greeting card; your paper should be about 1/4" shorter in each of these dimensions.

  

Your book will need to have fairly few pages, although there's some wiggle room here, depending on the thickness of the paper that you choose. I took this paper from the inside of a vintage scrapbook, so it's pretty heavy, and I found that eight pages were just about the perfect number for my little greeting card books.

2. Align the paper with the greeting card cover. You can do this really precisely, but for these little books, I just eyeball the alignment. Center the paper over the greeting card, with the inside of the card facing the paper, and then use paper clips to hold it there.

3. Poke holes for the binding. Use the template from my bookbinding tutorial here to poke five holes down the center of the book, along the fold in the greeting card:

  

4. Stitch the binding. Use that same template to stitch the binding with embroidery floss. Your floss will start and end in the same spot, so it's easy to tie the two ends into a square knot and then trim them:

  

 These books can be made quite quickly, and they make cute easy gifts. Keep a couple in your bag at all times, and you'll never be without paper when inspiration strikes!

Halloween 2018: The Ghoul Scout and the Greencloak

As the kids get older and older, the days go by faster and faster. When they were babies, I often felt like the days dragged on interminably. I'd invent adventures to get us out of the house, or we'd just hang out, for days on end, with finger painting and the sandbox and cheese cubes and picture books. I was often lonely, often bored, but not always. Often, I was perfectly content to sit in the grass and watch my baby eating from a strawberry in each fist.

Now I feel like the days pass before I have time to take a breath. One kid wants to go to the library. The other kid has ballet. One kid has a highly rigorous outside class that has to be studied for every single day. The other kid has a sleepover, and then a birthday party, and then a playdate. There's an online class to set up for. There's French to study. A volunteer application to help with. An all-day workshop in another city that one of them has to be driven to, while the other is picked up from yet another sleepover and driven to yet more ballet and then taken to another birthday party.

September just flew by. So did October, and by next week November will be half gone. And once again, I didn't celebrate Halloween half as much as I wanted to. I didn't do every single family activity on my mental to-do list, didn't make every moment magical, didn't even get a photo of the little kid trick-or-treating, and next year the kids will be even older.

Ah, well. It was magical enough, I suppose:

We did have one good lesson on El Dia de los Muertos, and the kids made truly horrifying sugar skulls.

The kids and I did have a Halloween-themed breakfast of mummy dogs, although I forgot to make the black ketchup to go with it. Red ketchup is just as spooky, fortunately!

We could simply not find the time for our family tradition of a full Halloween feast, but my partner still managed to make us mummy meatloaf, and we ate it past 9 pm, because that's when everyone is finally back in the house after their evening extracurriculars.

He also made the BEST Halloween cocktail, a vampire margarita. It's a regular margarita with red wine carefully poured on top. Isn't it gorgeous? And it tasted just as good!

The little kid made her own costume from scratch this year--I'll take the extra expense of buying her fabric and a pattern for the pride that I feel watching her be so hard-working and creative.

She's a very detail-oriented kid, and even cut a fallen tree branch into a big, wooden button, drilled holes into it, and sewed it to her cloak by hand, because that's just how she wanted it to look.

She is a Greencloak from the Spirit Animals series, for those of you playing the home game.

The big kid worked really hard on her costume, too, this year. She got out her old Cadette vest, the whole family spent an evening watching Jurassic Park while drawing and coloring badges onto freezer paper, and we turned her into a Ghoul Scout, complete with plenty of Ghoul Scout badges:

I love these badges that the girls made to try to play on actual Girl Scout badges. The Archery badge is the best!

My partner did these.

These are my contributions!

I LOVE the little kid's badges, especially the Day Camp badge that shows a Ghoul Scout eating a bear. Lol!

Good skills for any Ghoul Scout to know!

LOVE the dragon.

We watched a bunch of ghoul makeup videos on YouTube, but I'm not sure how much attention Syd was paying, because she kinda went off the rails here.

Oh, well. She IS very ghoulish-looking!

Confession time: the kids didn't carve their Jack-o-lanterns until THIS weekend.

The one thing we DID do, I suppose, is a flat-ton of trick-or-treating. It just kind of escalates every year. Every year the Greek organizations on campus do trick-or-treating the year before Halloween; we did that one year, and it was so fun we keep going back. So that's a bunch of candy. Up until the last minute we thought that the little kid was going to miss Halloween trick-or-treating completely because of ballet class, so we joined our friends for trick-or-treating at a state park the weekend before Halloween. Another bunch of candy. And then the kid's ballet instructor convinced the department to cancel pre-pointe class on Halloween night so that the ballerinas could trick-or-treat after all. Even more candy!

SO much candy:

We're still eating that candy, and the big kid already put back several pounds of it for making gingerbread houses next month. It's ridiculous, and yet that's what the kids were super into this year, so that's the source of their happy memories someday, so that's what we did.

MY happiest memory might be sitting on our bed, eating plates of mummy meatloaf off our laps, me with a bloody margarita, watching Doctor Who because they took Nightmare Before Christmas off of Netflix (grr!).

Here are my reminiscences of Halloweens gone by:

• Halloween 2017, when the big kid had the most amazing costume EVER even though I almost died helping her with it
• Halloween 2016, when I lived my dream and made us all Hogwarts uniforms
• Halloween 2015, when we made those ridiculous trick-or-treat cookies
• Halloween 2014, when the kids weren't even home with us!
• Halloween 2013, that blissful year when the kids made their own costumes
• Halloween 2012, when the hipster development in our neighborhood was finally finished and trick-or-treating got crazy awesome
• Halloween 2011, when the little kid dressed herself as a skimpy-on-top "leaf mermaid" and people kept asking her if she was cold
• Halloween 2010, the year that we threw a party!
• Halloween 2009, with a clown and a "baby deer"
• Halloween 2008, with the bunny and the zebra

The Halloween posts alone make mommy blogging worthwhile. Without this blog, I'd never remember so many sweet details from our families Halloweens throughout the past decade.

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

Homeschool Book Review: The Art of Doodle Words

I'm happy to admit that art is the hardest subject for me to incorporate into our homeschool. Syd is a gifted artist and needs lots of art enrichment, but resents any art instruction that doesn't come from her father, who fortunately is also a gifted artist, but is not at her beck and call, and certainly not during the average school day.

Will's gifts lie elsewhere, which means that she needs art just as much but is often clueless about how to go about it, and reluctant to pursue it.

I try to incorporate a weekly hands-on art project that both kids can engage in despite their varying skill levels. I've tried and so far failed but have high hopes to try again in the winter semester to include a comprehensive art history study. What has worked most consistently, however, for several months now, is to include daily art time in Syd's weekly homeschool work plans. She is generally left to do what she pleases during this time--mostly mermaid drawings or more panels for her comic strip about office workers who are also cats--but is expected to be accountable for what she's been working on, and to keep a portfolio of her work.

Every now and then, however, I come across an art book that I think Syd will really love, and I'll assign it to her for her week's work. Such it was with The Art of Doodle Words, which I received for free from a publicist. I handed it off to Syd, said, "Here you go. Show me what you make!" and left her to it.

And she made lots!

The book is super clever, in that it shows you how to incorporate themed doodles into words, kind of like your own Google Doodles. It's the perfect book for a tween who loves to draw, loves things to be cute, and is extremely clever.

I love her whale:

Her cat is a little more abstract, but I can read it, especially the yarn ball "C":

Here, I think, is where she really started to get the hang of it. All of "BACON" is made of bacon--except for the "O", which is an egg, and her cotton candy looks just the way that I feel after eating cotton candy:

I actually didn't even see, at first, that the dots on the "I"s are the eyes of the smiley face. How clever is that?!?

I like the way that Syd started to play around with the concept more after a while. She didn't doodle the actual letters in "DREAM," but played more upon the overall idea of dreaming to make a more complex sketch:

And now she's moved into slogans!

The pizza would look cute in color, I think, but I really like the bites taken out:

 And the fox is very adorable and autumn-themed:

This was such an easy book for Syd to follow, and the concept was clear-cut and easy to recreate, but it was a very valuable way to spend a week of art, because the extensions to this idea are unlimited. We've got this book in our home library now, shelved with our other art books (because you know that I have our home library shelved according to Library of Congress call numbers, right?), so that Syd can continue to refer to it as her interests change and experience grows. Syd's also really into black and white right now, but I think these would look well with color, Prismacolor markers or perhaps even watercolors.

That was by far the easiest hands-on art unit that I've ever planned!

P.S. Want to learn more about our hands-on homeschool and all the fun projects that work (and, more importantly, don't work!!!)? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!