When in Michigan, You Must Climb a Lighthouse!

I got one last roadschooling field trip with my babies. 

One last adventure incorporated into two kids' homeschool plans. 

One last time earning two Girl Scout badges (Lighthouses of Michigan) and two Girl Scout fun patches (Discover Michigan) by studying for what we'd be sightseeing.

Essentially, one last trotting out of the key word "homeschool" to justify whisking my girls away with me to make magical memories while we let my partner pretend like he has to work, thereby justifying staying home and not doing annoying things like climbing the tallest lighthouse on the Great Lakes that can be climbed by the public.

Here is the New Presque Isle Lighthouse:

It is so tall, and yet so climbable!

Alas for its storied climbability, for the younger kid, the tallest of us, was looking down to watch her feet on those terrifyingly narrow and see-through stairs, and did not notice that the ceiling essentially came down towards those stairs at the top, meaning you had to duck quite low to make it out onto the landing.

She did not duck, and absolutely slammed the top of her head into the ceiling. I'm feeling VERY lucky that she didn't lose consciousness and tumble backwards down those stairs, but man, she hit her head hard. She was hurting even more the next day, the poor kid, like she'd been in a car crash or something. It seriously sucked.

For those of us short enough to not knock ourselves into a concussion at the top of the steps, the view was marvelous and well worth the 113-foot climb:

Here's the lantern room. You can see the original Fresnel lens that used to be visible for over 25 miles away on display inside the light keeper's house:

The light keeper's house also holds some historic ship artifacts:

There's supposed to be a nearby shipwreck that's often visible from shore, so we drove down that little dirt road that you can see in my vista shot, above, and headed out for a hike on what the children soon deemed Spider Beach, Part One:

The shore was so rocky and amazing, paved in a billion interesting rocks and fossils. And underneath every single rock was a spider. Spiders sensed us coming and would skitter between rocks in our path. When we paused to look around, spiders scuttled along on their merry ways around us, emerging from under one rock and scooting under another. 

Pick up a rock, find a spider. Look around, see spiders. Dare to take a beach nap, and you'd surely wake up with your ears full of spiders.

But those spiders must do great maintenance work--look how shallow and clear the water is!

We did not spy the shipwreck, which I was super bummed about and the kids pretty much had to lock arms with me and march me back to the car to keep me from walking just five more spider-lengths to see if maybe the shipwreck was around just one last spider-boulder, but I guess that's what future trips to Michigan will be for. 

Instead, we tiptoed between the spiders back to the car, then drove to the OLD Presque Isle Lighthouse!

This one is only 30 feet tall, and yet the view is even more marvelous:

The Old Presque Lighthouse even has its Fresnel lens in place!

Someone in particular, however, could not be convinced of the marvels of the top walkway, not even after a good pilfering through my first aid kit for Ibuprofen. She preferred the view from the other end of the lighthouse:

Probably just as well for my darling who does not love heights, because this staircase was somehow even steeper than the last:

The beach here was even lovelier, even shallower and more interestingly rocky, though still quite chock-full of spiders:

The kids both refused to put their noses up against a spider's, the better to identify it in our nature guidebook, and therefore they both failed the Practical Arachnology component of their Discover Michigan fun patches, but they did find other lovely natural wonders to look at:

Gneiss rock!

I even got the younger kid's picture with the definitely haunted statue of Patrick Garrity, Sr., a former light keeper who's now lighthouse famous, so we'll have a lot of fun when he comes crawling out of the photo one night and, I don't know, shines bright lights into our sleeping faces?

Anyway, that's a problem for another time. Now, on to Mackinac Island!

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!

Cooking with Teenagers: Mochi Ice Cream

 

These mochi ice cream balls did not turn out to be delicious, but since the whole point of Cooking with Teenagers--for me, at least!--is spending time with my kids, none of us bickering, it was a successful endeavor, nevertheless.

Not delicious, though!

Mochi is one of the recipes from Cook Anime that I'd been wanting to try, along with the Royal Milk Tea (haven't made it yet) and the Matcha Ice Cream (SOOOOO gross, but Will admitted that she *might* have forgotten the sugar, so we need to try that one again). The recipe for mochi is super simple, although it does call for one perhaps difficult to obtain ingredient:

With that on hand, however, all you have to do is mix and microwave and mix some more!

It took a couple of tries to get the consistency correct, and we made another mistake of sprinkling more flour onto the mochi dough to roll it out, because it was SOOOO sticky. What we were supposed to do was wet our hands and rolling pin, and if we'd done that we might have avoided the raw flour taste of the mochi, which I bet comes from adding in so much... raw flour, d'oh.

Regardless, we refrigerated our sticky dough, then cut it into circles, added scoops of ice cream--

--and pinched the dough around the ice cream:

Let it freeze some more and you're done!

Our mochi ice cream ended up looking not unlike store-bought mochi ice cream--

--but its overall taste is not delicious.

Ah, well... the adventure may not have been successful, but the real treasure was the friendships that we made along the way!

Homeschool Field Trip: We Immersed Ourselves in Van Gogh

 True fact time: the kids just don't love art museums. The older teenager, at least, has gradually transitioned from pitching a fit the moment we enter to keeping herself entertained by reading every sign, but both kids take a trip to an art museum like medicine... or, more accurately, like a homeschool assignment that they didn't choose but they know I'm going to make them do, regardless, so they might as well suck it up and get it over with.

We probably didn't *really* need to hit up the art museum on this day, because the trip wasn't related to anything the kids are currently studying, and they're a little too old for the "let's go to this random place and do this random thing" adventures that took up a lot of our homeschool days when they were small and every single thing was brand-new and potentially the beginning of a new passion.

However, I could not pass up this fleeting chance--

--to immerse ourselves in Van Gogh!

It was really pretty, and I loved it (although I had the thought, numerous times, that it would be even better if I was high...). The kids were a bit baffled, I think (the older teenager mentioned more than once that she'd liked Otherworld better, lol), but again, no getting out of the educational activity when Mom is this insistent! The younger teenager even asked for my phone so she could take some photos of ME, for a change:

She may have discovered the activity that I discovered when the kids were baby-sized and I was bored out of my skull ferrying them around the same playground for the fortieth day in a row or sitting on my ass watching them play with the garden hose for eight hours, which is Taking Photos Solely To Keep Oneself Entertained. Honestly, it IS a great way to entertain yourself, and it resulted in so many awesome photos of my little kids doing awesome things... and then one day Matt "borrowed" my hard drive and accidentally deleted, like, a decade's worth of those photos. And that's how I now have maybe two photos of my kids between the years of 2005 and 2015 that aren't on my blog, and I get to throw it in Matt's face and win every fight we ever have until the end of time.

But look how far we've come--now our photos are in a real art museum!

Before we left, we got our pictures taken with Van Gogh--

I definitely left feeling like I'd fully immersed myself, and the teenager's photographic evidence agrees!

On to the rest of the museum!

I particularly liked the new exhibit that put art from different parts of the museum's collections into conversation with each other:

The kids and I played the game entitled Has This Artist Ever Seen a Baby?

Kind of, but not up close and probably only for a minute.

Definitively YES! This artist probably talks to babies like they're adults and graciously accepts toddler offerings of interesting sticks.

The award for People Tried To Talk To Us and We Didn't Like Them goes to the two security guards at the outdoor entrance to the museum's gardens, who made me pull my museum tickets back up on my phone to show them, then security wand scanned all of us again and peered into our bag of crumpled lunch remains and my bag containing nothing but, like, fifty tampons (perimenopause is no joke!) and were kind of snotty about my confusion. 

Because, you know, the other entrance to the garden is just over that way? And there aren't any guards over there? So we could have just strolled in without handing over our wallets and phones and car keys? No, seriously, I'm ASKING!

Whatever. The azaleas are gorgeous:

And so are the peonies!

In the Native American Art gallery, I was surprised to see these:

They and I come from practically the same hometown!

I have a lot of feelings about the mounds built by early indigenous peoples, and a deep interest that I developed when I first studied their history with my kids. Mostly, these sites haven't been respected, and I think that's part of the overall genocide attempted on these nations. Spiro Mounds were completely leveled at one point--like, COMPLETELY LEVELED--and Midwestern white dudes nabbed whatever shit they could find that hadn't already been destroyed, popped them into their personal collections so they could be known as Collectors of Prehistoric Indian Artifacts, and we're lucky if this stuff even made it into museums when they died and wasn't stuffed in someone's attic or tossed onto a table in their yard sale, provenance completely erased. Imagine what we could know about these peoples if their artifacts hadn't been scattered and destroyed and hoarded in private collections? That is a SEASHELL up there that they found in Spiro Mounds! In OKLAHOMA! There is a cup literally decorated with pictures of the severed heads of someone's enemies! Imagine what we could know if the mounds that they built hadn't been plowed over, looted, bulldozed over, forgotten in someone's weedy back forty? One of the big reasons why the mounds have gotten wrapped up in ideas of Nephilim burial sites and similar crackpot theories is that historically, the crackpot theorists were the ones actually interested in doing research on the mounds, investigating local histories to find them and sneaking onto people's private property to take grainy black-and-white photos of them and doing their independent research on them as best they could without the benefits of an academic community to help out and provide standards and best practices. All of these sites should be lovingly preserved as cultural treasures, and the fact that they're not is just plain racist.

*clears throat uncomfortably, then steps down off of soapbox and scuttles away*

OMG sorry. Look at this Georgia O'Keeffe!

The kids more or less gamely wended their way with me through art--

See that tripwire at the bottom of the photo? The kids and I entertained ourselves endlessly in a discussion of how likely the older teenager was to have stepped back, tripped over it, fallen backwards into the Georgia O'Keeffe painting, ripped a head-sized hole in it, gashed her scalp open on the frame, then fallen to the floor in front of it, screaming, blood everywhere. In that case, the younger teenager and I reckoned we'd probably just scoot and meet up with her at home later.

--activities--

--and oddities:

On the long drive home through Friday afternoon rush hour traffic, they dove back into their books and screens, shaking off the adventure as yet another Homeschool Day Trip To Please Mom. I filed it away as one more fleetingly magical experience of my last few days ever homeschooling both my daughters together.

Puzzle Games That Teenagers Like: Izzi

I didn't actually mean for this to turn into a series, but the kids and I messed around with SO many logic games and puzzles and fidgets recently as we absolutely burned through The Great Gatsby audiobook (if you can listen to a book read by Sean Astin, LISTEN TO A BOOK READ BY SEAN ASTIN!) that it really got me thinking about them and the place that they've held in our homeschool high school. 

That place has been central. Absolutely essential. I know I've said this before, but so much of homeschooling high school is having conversations together, or absorbing content together that you're then going to have conversations about. Just last week, which was a short school week interrupted by some service learning and a day trip, we finished The Great Gatsby audiobook, then talked about it endlessly since, and watched a two-hour documentary on Frida Kahlo, then talked about it endlessly since. This week we'll be reading some history together, so we can talk about it endlessly, and some short fiction, which, yes, we'll then talk about endlessly. Over the past 10+ years of interacting with these two kids in meaningful conversation and the consumption of educational content, I've noticed that they pay more attention when they have something to do with their hands, and that they demonstrate more intellectual engagement when their hands are also engaged.

If they're the only people in their college lecture halls with drawing pads and crochet projects and fidgets, then so be it.

This puzzle, Izzi, is currently out of print (although ThinkFun has a different puzzle by the same name. Did they buy Izzi and rework it? Dunno!), but I have learned that it is a pattern puzzle--more specifically, an edge-matching pattern puzzle--and it's quite good on several levels. The colors and patterns are appealing, and like Shashibo, you can make interesting patterns and shapes with pleasing symmetry:

But like those pesky pentominoes that the kids and I also love, this beautiful pattern puzzle is also a legitimately challenging puzzle, with endless ways to just almost solve it... except for that one last piece!

I know that these puzzles have academic value, but I'd love to isolate the specific values that intersect with their appeal, and use those to tempt my teenagers into adjacent areas of study. I can clearly see the possibilities in computer programming and mathematics, but I haven't yet found a specific connection that would serve as a direct step from puzzle to further exploration.

And that's why I have so many books on puzzles, logic, and recreational mathematics on hold for me at my local university's library!

Logic Games Teenagers Like: Rush Hour

This game has just about endless replay value, which is great because it's made entirely of plastic and so will exist until the death of the Sun.

Syd discovered Rush Hour at a hands-on museum a few years ago. It was possibly our gateway into ThinkFun games, all of which we're obsessed with...

...and Rush Hour is no different!

Syd, especially, has always been SUPER into logic games, and she's solved every puzzle in the basic deck a couple of times. I actually check this game out from the local university's library and keep it for a couple of months until everyone is done playing with it, then I return it. Inevitably, I remember it again in a couple of years and check it out again and we play it all over again! I feel like this is a good way to get around the gross fact that this game is all plastic, and now I'm realizing that perhaps my great goal in life is to organize a local homeschool library of manipulatives and games so more families can share out their plastic crap instead of everyone buying their own plastic crap.

In our family homeschool, we've always played logic games or done handwork while listening to audiobooks. Syd, especially, absolutely has to multitask if she's going to be able to pay attention, and I think this is a nice way to incorporate some logic and reasoning study into our schoolwork. Logic and reasoning skills are terrific for math and writing!

If your kid, too, gets super obsessed with Rush Hour, reading about the history of its development is interesting and would be a good intro into encouraging them to design their own original game, or a different version of Rush Hour. The game varieties, like Rush Hour Safari or the two-player game, would also probably be high-interest and expand their skill set. 

Even if this game stood entirely alone, I still think it would have decent replay value because the basic card deck is large enough that you probably can't memorize the solutions between games. However, I'm also VERY interested in the expansion decks, and if we actually owned it, I'd be tempted to invest in this hard case that apparently holds a couple of the expansion decks as well as the full game, lets you travel with it (something that Syd would have been VERY up for when she was younger), and can replace entirely the crappy cardboard box that definitely actively tries to fall apart.