The Magic Tree House on Our Timeline (Updated August 2022)

Last night, they listened to this book while they fell asleep!

Note: I updated this post in August 2022 to include in my timeline list all the Magic Tree House books that had been published after November 2010. 

Dishes are in the dishwasher, laundry is in the washing machine, dinner is on the stove, one kid is playing LEGOs while the other kid reads on the couch, and the house that Matt painstakingly straightened while we were gone is trashed, trashed, TRASHED.

We must be home again!

We left a few projects in the lurch for our trip--our bat house, the thankful tree, the Disaster Dioramas of Pompeii and the Titanic, a whole slew of Spanish flashcards--and every now and then, as the kids decompress and I continue my manic run through the holiday craft fair season, we're picking them all back up again.

For instance, we finally finished a project that we've been working on for a while--putting all the Magic Tree House books in their proper spot on our huge basement timeline. Because the kids listen to the Magic Tree House audiobooks over and over again, they've gained quite a bit of historical and geographical knowledge, but it can be tough putting that into a wider context, and wider contexts is what I am all about.

So I sent Matt thumbnails of every Magic Tree House book cover for him to lay out and print, and I made a list of where each relevant book belongs on our timeline. Want to see my list? It's pretty great:

• #1 Dinosaur Before Dark--Cretaceous period
• #2 The Knight at Dawn--Middle Ages
• #3 Mummies in the Morning--2630 BCE to 2250 BCE
• #4 Pirates Past Noon--1690-1730
• #5 Night of the Ninjas--1336-1600
• #7 Sunset of the Sabertooth--Late Pleistocene period
• #8 Midnight on the Moon--2036
• #10 Ghost Town at Sundown--1850-1900
• #13 Vacation under the Volcano--79 CE
• #14 Day of the Dragon King--first century
• #15 Viking Ships at Sunrise--9th century
• #16 Hour of the Olympics--776 BCE-393 CE
• #17 Tonight on the Titanic--1912
• #18 Buffalo before Breakfast--1850-1900
• #21 Civil War on Sunday--1861-1865
• #22 Revolutionary War on Wednesday--12/25/1776
• #23 Twister on Tuesday--1870s
• #24 Earthquake in the Early Morning--1906
• #25 Stage Fright on a Summer Night--1558-1603
• #27 Thanksgiving on Thursday--1621
• #28 High Tide in Hawaii--11th century-1777
• #29 A Big Day for Baseball--1947
• #30 Hurricane Heroes in Texas--1930
• #31 Warriors in Winter--100s CE
• #32 To the Future, Ben Franklin!--1787
• #33 Narwhal on a Sunny Night--975-990
• #34 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #6) Season of the Sandstorms--prior to the 8th century
• #34 Late Lunch with Llamas--15th century
• #35 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #7) Night of the New Magicians--1889
• #35 Camp Time in California--1903
• #36 (old numbering--now it's Merlin Mission #8) Blizzard of the Blue Moon--1938
• #37 Dragon of the Red Dawn--1185-1603
• #38 Monday with a Mad Genius--around 1500
• #39 Dark Day in the Deep Sea--1870s
• #41 Moonlight of the Magic Flute--1760
• #42 A Good Night for Ghosts--1916
• #43 Leprechaun in Late Winter--1860
• Merlin Mission #17 A Crazy Day with Cobras--1500-1600
• Merlin Mission #18 Dogs in the Dead of Night--1600s
• Merlin Mission #19 Abe Lincoln at Last--1861
• Merlin Mission #20 A Perfect Time for Pandas--2008
• Merlin Mission #21 Stallion by Starlight--340 BCE
• Merlin Mission #22 Hurry Up, Houdini!--1915
• Merlin Mission #23 High Time for Heroes--1849-1850
• Merlin Mission #24 Soccer on Sunday--1970
• Merlin Mission #25--Shadow of the Shark--before 1511
• Merlin Mission #26 Balto of the Blue Dawn--1925

Some books aren't included in the list because they don't take place in any particular time--wait with bated breath for our big geography project later on. We're also still reading the latest Magic Tree House, the one about Charles Dickens, and then we'll put that one on the timeline, too.

The little kid helped me cut out all the book cover thumbnails, then the big kid glued them onto the wall as I showed her where each one went. She coated each in an extra layer of glitter glue, just because, and then I went back and wrote in the timeline info:

I had no idea, until we actually started placing them, how many books Mary Pope Osborne had set in the latter half of the nineteenth century or so. If we ever move and thus need to do our timeline over again, remind me to set aside more room here just for her.

For a while the kids listened to this book over and over and over again--I think they found the part with the ghost thrilling:

 

I was going to encourage them to listen to Thanksgiving on Thursday, but I don't seem to have ripped the audio copy from a library CD yet. Fortunately, we own a paperback copy of the book, so perhaps we'll find time to read it out loud together today.

Interspersed with making Pilgrim paper dolls and the thankful tree and the dinner roll dough to freeze for Thursday, that is...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

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!

Work Plans for the Week of May 30, 2017: Let's Try That Again, Shall We?

Last week was not a successful week, schoolwork-wise. For a variety of reasons, the kids got very little done. They did keep up well with their math, and Will kept up with grammar, but I have to create and enforce a different system for finished work this week, because both kids have begun to simply set their finished work next to their work areas, instead of bringing it to me. If I don't see it, I don't mark it, and they blithely move on the next day, and if they've made errors, those are compiled the further they advance, sigh. Will, in particular, is not going to be pleased that she somehow forgot what a linking verb is between Lessons 11 and 12, and Syd refuses to understand that drawing her angles on a separate page, and then "losing" that page before I had a chance to see it, has the same result as not drawing the angles at all--she's doing it again today!

Regardless, the week as a whole was full and happy. The kids spent loads of time preparing for a Girl Scout meeting that was an outdoor cookout feast--


--Will has been working with Luna several times a day on their homework from obedience school--



--we spent a full day at the Children's Museum, volunteering and playing, the kids spent another full day at their wilderness class, and then we spent the weekend visiting family in Michigan.

Yesterday we took lots of naps.

Because of that, you'll find the annotations for most of this week's assignments in last week's post, where they were first assigned. And honestly, we may not be much more productive this weekend--summer activities, such as this afternoon's trip to the public pool and tomorrow's all-day trip to the zoo, are peppered throughout the coming days, but heck. Why homeschool if it's not so we can go to the pool with friends, and spend the whole day at the zoo just because we want to?

Memory work for the week consists of the first eleven lines of Beowulf recited in Anglo-Saxon, standard conversions, and Greek vocabulary. Books of the Day include some sneaky selections from the kids' MENSA reading lists, a biography of Juliette Gordon Low, a leftover book on the Celts, and the rest of the One Crazy Summer trilogy for Will. Other daily work includes creative writing for Syd and cursive copywork for Will, typing practicing on Typing.com and progress on their MENSA reading lists for both, Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd, a Greek language lesson or review and a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson or practice for both, and SAT prep on Khan Academy for Will.

And here's the rest of our week!

TUESDAY: At least hiding their work from me until I find it while tidying over the weekend lets me give them exact assignments for Math Mammoth and Analytical Grammar this week--usually the kids just correct the latest lesson and complete the next lesson. Notice that for each of these, I've also instructed them to give their work directly to an adult to mark. They put their completed assignments in the face of an adult, or their work plans for the day aren't complete--mwa-ha-ha!

Most of the rest of this day's work is reassigned from last week, although Will has some extra time to work on a Girl Scout badge, and Syd has big plans to run a bake stand in our driveway before the drive-in movies this weekend (it's kind of genius, because almost every car headed to the drive-in will have to drive by her bake stand first, and if it's a nice weekend for an outdoor movie, traffic will be stalled, meaning that every car will have plenty of time to just sit there and look at her mouth-watering treats), so she'll be working on that every school day this week, in preparation for her Friday debut.

WEDNESDAY: Day at the zoo! If there's one thing that you can guarantee about my kids, it's that they're game for any and every trip to any and every zoo and aquarium that you offer them. We're going to have a wonderful time.

THURSDAY: The only new assignment on this day is more work on Girl Scout badges--with so much make-up work to do this week, we're not really able to progress in most of our units, so Girl Scouts is filling the few gaps in the school week. Good thing there's ALWAYS something to do in Girl Scouts!

FRIDAY: Since our only Medieval history assignment last week was our field trip to look at Medieval manuscripts in the Lilly Library--which was AMAZING, by the way!--we actually are free to move on in our Medieval history unit this week. I didn't spend a ton of time looking up enrichment activities or projects for this week's chapter in Story of the World v. 2, but at least the kids can get it read and get the quiz and mapwork done, and I'll have a chance for more research this week.

One of the few flaws in our Story of the World spine is its lack of dates in the text. The author doesn't want the kids focusing on memorizing dates at the expense of understanding the events and their context, but it's just one more thing that I have to add to the curriculum to better suit my older children. I'll be printing one nice copy of this timeline, and for use in a binder or as a pull-out, and the kids can help me order and construct it and then add timeline figures for what we've already studied this semester. It's no basement timeline, but I'm hoping that it will be a suitable replacement.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: No three-day weekend this weekend! Luna has obedience school, but thankfully that's our only scheduled activity, because summer extracurriculars begin next week.

And we'll have a five-day school week for a change!

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Tutorial: Cornhusk Dolls for Pioneer Girls

I can't tell you how many times I have read the Little House books. I can tell you that I read them several times as a child, always from my Mama's boxed set. When I was pregnant with Willow and hyper-emetic, and had no relief from constant nausea for a solid month (until my midwife had a miracle cure mixed up for me at a compounding pharmacy, but that's another story), Matt lay next to me, tried not to jostle me, and read me the entire series over again. Little House in the Big Woods was the first novel that I read to the girls chapter by chapter, one chapter every night at bedtime. And when Willow could first read, REALLY read, she watched me ceremoniously move Mama's boxed set of Little House books down from my adult bookshelf to her child bookshelf, and soon after she was asking me exactly how Almanzo had grown his pumpkin so big, and if we could try that, too.

Just recently we've again been exploring the Little House. The Little House in the Big Woods audiobook was such a hit (even though I highly disliked the narrator's voice--sorry!) that we're now working our way through all the audiobooks. We've got some good Laura Ingalls Wilder timeline tidbits for our big basement timeline. And we've got a Little House cookbook and a Little House craft book, and we're not afraid to use them!

(Well, I am a little afraid of the cookbook, and don't tell Matt, but as the official homeschool errand man, it will soon be his responsibility to track down a particular cut of meat known as "salt pork", and then he's going to have to cook it with the girls, on account of I don't cook meat, and I definitely don't cook meat called "salt pork." Shudder.)

Of course, it wouldn't be a homeschool of mine if there weren't a lot of craft projects involved. There's the model of the covered wagon that we're putting together, there's the nine-patch quilt, there's the godawful salt pork, and there are the girls' newest plaything, the cornhusk dolls.

Cornhusk dolls aren't really seasonally appropriate for February, but I pulled the dried cornhusks out from my magic craft closet, and you can either get your own cornhusks from non-local, out-of-season corn at the grocery store, or you can wait until harvest time. Or just live vicariously through me and my project, cause here goes:

If you're using dried cornhusks, soak them for maybe half an hour first:

 If you're using fresh cornhusks, you can skip this step.

Pick out three or four of the longest, best-looking cornhusks and stack them on top of each other. Fold the stack width-wise until you have a width that is a good one for your doll, and then fold the stack in half. The ends of the stack are your doll's skirt, and the folded part is your doll's head. Tie a piece of twine tightly around the cornhusks at your doll's neck:

 If you're a rock star and your cornhusks are fresh, you can use a cornhusk to tie the knot, but I just used twine. I'm not a rock star, although I am a craft star.

Pick out two short but good-looking cornhusks and roll them tightly. Poke the roll through the folds in the cornhusks just below your doll's neck, and tie another knot under this roll for your doll's waist. Trim the roll at both ends to a good arm-length:

 Syd needs to trim her arms a little more:

At this point you're basically done. You can now play with your doll, or make her some clothes, or, apparently, just draw some clothes on, because apparently it makes you pretty darn happy to do so:

Sure beats a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, doesn't it?

Learning at Home and Everywhere Else

So this weird thing happens when anyone asks me about homeschooling.

I make it sound all lame.

Some mom at the playground innocently asks how homeschooling is going, and I get all excited and talk on and on and on, and I can see the mom's face sort of getting a funny kind of "oh, dear!" look on it as I talk, so I go on even more excitedly about even more great stuff, and then they ask a question about curriculum, and down it goes from there.

And they leave to go home and tell their partners, "Remember Julie? Well, she homeschools now, and I'm pretty sure that her kids just sit around and watch Spongebob all day."

We do not watch Spongebob. Well, the girls watch Spongebob, but only at the dentist, and they think that he's a piece of cheese, not a sponge. If you don't want your kids to watch Spongebob, you have to go to the pediatric dentist in Bedford, which is a half-hour drive from here.

One of the problems, I think, is that what excites me most about homeschooling, and thus what I talk on and on about, is often not what would excite most other parents about their children's education.

It excites me that the girls get to play pretend ponies for as long as they want, and never get interrupted.

It excites me that most days we bicycle to the park, and that park that's a block away is generally a three-hour trip, door to door.

It excites me that Willow doesn't even bother to ask for my help with Zoo Tycoon anymore, because she's way better at it than I am--"No, Momma, the spotted hyena needs a den to sleep in, not the bamboo bungalo!"

It excites me that sometimes the girls don't even get dressed all day, because they're too busy drawing, and playing, and listening to audiobooks, and lying on top of their bed staring out the window. If they don't feel like going anywhere or doing anything in particular, then we don't.

It excites me that I don't have to try to make the girls go to sleep at night if they're not sleepy, and I don't have to wake them up in the morning if they are.

It excites me that we can spend the whole day at the library, including the half-hour bike ride there and back, and we can stop at the park on the way, too, and at lunchtime we can walk over to another park to hear a concert.

Are those things nothing? They seem vitally important to me.

I always forget to bring up the stuff that I probably should be telling everyone about.

Willow can read anything you put in front of her--is there a certain grade level associated with that?

The girls have listened to the Magic Tree House audiobooks so many times that they can tell you all about Pompeii, the Titanic, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, the shoguns of China, and one-room schoolhouses.

They're quite looking forward to the Disaster Dioramas of Pompeii and the Titanic that I told them that we could make next week.

Willow is fascinated by human evolution. We all watched Ape to Man the other day when it was her turn to choose the movie, then we checked out the interactive timeline on the Smithsonian website, and then we had Matt print a bunch of pre-human bios to put on our basement timeline.

We're also building a miniature log cabin with twigs and hot glue, and a chia farm in the pony playset.

Sydney and I made half a dozen pinwheels that spin in the wind, and the next time we get to Lowe's we have a list of supplies that will improve our design immensely.

Every time we're in the car, we listen to The Story of the World, and it's the first time that I've really understood world history.

We took a field trip to an apple orchard. We took a field trip to a famous fossil site. We took a field trip to a different apple orchard.

On the two-hour drive to fossil site, Willow read Shel Silverstein poems out loud to Sydney, and both girls laughed and laughed and laughed.

Today we collected pinecones.

We also made bracelets out of UV-reactive beads, so that we'll know when to put sunscreen on.

Tomorrow we're going to bake a chocolate cake just for the hell of it.

Is that what I should be explaining about homeschooling?

Family Tree

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that the girls have the opportunity to explore whatever they want.

Think about it. Think about having the opportunity to explore anything. Would you learn vegan baking? Car maintenance? Yoga? Embroidery?

Perhaps, like my daughter, you'd get really, really good at Zoo Tycoon. Perhaps, also like her, you'd read every single Nancy Drew novel ever printed. Perhaps you and she could spend some time together studying another of her interests...

human evolution.

I did predict this somewhat--years ago I drew a learning map trying to discover where Willow's passion for dinosaurs would take her, although I didn't know about Zoo Tycoon: Dinosaur Digs then, either--but I'm confident that it, along with Nancy Drew and zoo engineering/animal husbandry, does not appear on many standard first-grade curriculums.

But it's apparently what first-graders do in our homeschool. We've had human evolution books, human evolution documentaries, human evolution web sites, and we spent a morning last week putting human evolution on our big basement timeline:

All the info comes from the Smithsonian web site, printed in color, cut out by me and the Sydmeister, and glued straight onto our wall:
 
 And then, of course, the Very Important Signpost:

If you'd like to add human evolution to your first-grade curriculum, here are some of our favorite resources...so far:

Books



Film

• Ape to Man from the History Channel
• Becoming Human from Nova
• The Human Family Tree from National Geographic
• Walking with Cavemen from the BBC

Web Site

• Interactive Human Evolution Timeline from the Smithsonian

And if I ever found a hundred dollars lying on the street, I'd get Willow's mitochondrial DNA tested to determine the migration paths that our ancestors took.

I Turn Quizlet Flash Cards into Physical Flash Cards because I Am Stubborn and Ridiculous

 

And because the kid already has quite enough screen time without also studying her French vocabulary on one.

I am SUPER old-school to be so weirded out by this, I've learned. Syd doesn't even have a single physical, paper textbook in any of her public high school classes--actually, she only has a textbook at all in two of her classes! The other three classes just have... teacher-created lessons. And YouTube video links. Worksheets of unknown provenance. 

Don't tell her textbook-less algebra teacher, but I checked out a high school algebra textbook (and teacher's manual!) from our local university's library, and I've been referring to it quite a lot as I help Syd with her work.

I also print out most of her biology and French readings from the digital textbooks, which I know is the most appalling misuse of my personal resources, but you know what? The print-outs don't crap out in the middle of a timed open-book test, or refuse to load when an exhausted kid is coming up on a deadline, or lag when three other members of the household are in simultaneous but separate online meetings.

Flash cards, of course, don't have nearly that level of urgency, but I like having them physical. I like having them portable, so I can torment the children with them in the car, and I like having them readily available, so I can pester the kids with a couple whenever they randomly walk by.

So here's what I do to make my kids' lives more annoying. I take a Quizlet (you can often find Quizlets already made for whatever you're studying, even for specific chapters of specific textbooks)--

--tell it that I want to print it--

--and then set it up as 3"x5" index cards that print 16 to a page:

I use a guillotine paper cutter to cut the flash cards into rows, then cut each row in half, leaving each French/English word pair connected. To finish each flash card I fold it in half and glue it with a glue stick. It becomes the perfect, pocket-sized, double-sided flash card!

So yes, super old-school and resource heavy, but to be fair, I've been happily using flash cards with the kids since they were preschoolers. Here are just some of the things that we've done with them from preschool on up:

• Laminate them and trace words with dry-erase markers.
• Print two copies and match them or play Memory with them.
• Print them tiny, add a pin, and use them with pin flag maps. 
• Print them full-page and let the kids color the line art. 
• Print them full-page and use them as display posters.
• Leave them in the car and declare the first ten minutes of the first car ride of every day "memory" time--we did this for several years!

Here are some of my favorite flash cards that we've used:

• addition, subtraction, and multiplication drill. I absolutely used these with the kid when they were memorizing their math facts. Yep, they LOATHED them, but you know what? Review only took a couple of minutes every school day, and it 100% helped seal the facts into their little-kid brains.
• Chinese vocabulary flash cards. For a couple of years, the kids took a Saturday morning Chinese language class. The next week, I'd find flash cards for the vocabulary that they were studying so that we could review for just a couple of minutes daily.
• European countries and capitals. We used these a couple of years ago when Will was studying AP European History and Syd was studying European Geography. Now that Will is studying AP Human Geography, I'll probably bring them back out!
• French alphabet flash cards. These are pretty enough to print full-page and display on a wall--which is what we do!
• sharks of the world. We used these a few years ago when we did a summer shark study, and since then I've brought them out a couple of times for Girl Scout badgework.
• Story of the World timeline cards. Unfortunately, the original source for these no longer exists, but you can still find bootleg copies (ahem). We used the SNOT out of these when the kids were elementary years! We glued them to our big basement timeline, as well as laminating a set to use as memory drill. Once upon a time I even found a bootleg set of all the comprehension questions from the Story of the World books set up as flash cards, and we used the snot out of those, too!
• zoo fact cards. I made these during the couple of years when Will's obsession led us to nearly every zoo in the land. It would be extra useful to make a set for a zoo or aquarium that you went to often. 
• insect flash cards. We used these steadily for several summers in a row when the kids were younger, and I still pull them out at some point most summers, because we always end up swinging around to entomology.
• sight word caterpillar. Syd has fond memories of the caterpillar that took over our walls and taught her the dolch sight words!

Masterpieces of Art in Historical Context

Or rather, color print-outs of artwork cut out, glued in the right(-ish) spot on our big basement timeline, and then painted over again with glitter Mod Podge:

After a brief foray into a library copy of the computer game Masterpiece Mansion, Willow decided that she wanted to learn more art history. All of our print-outs have so far come from The Worldwide Art Gallery, although this will also be a great subject to have in mind the next time that we attend one of those used book clearance sales that happen here pretty frequently--can't you imagine how perfect a five-cent used art history textbook would be for this project?

I still have much to do to figure out other points in an art history unit study, especially since Will has also asked to learn about Ancient Egypt, and we're still doing projects about China, dinosaurs, ballet, Independence Day, cooking, and geometry, but just from our brief study so far, Willow has already achieved the hallmark of cocktail party conversation material, in that she now has a favorite artist.

Hieronymus Bosch. Oh, dear.

Chicken Portraits

Our boys finally started practicing their little baby crows, which means we had to re-home them back to my friend. I could have probably kept them for a few more days, until the first real (loud!) crows came, but Grumpy Neighbor is still actively trying to manipulate us into getting rid of our chickens (Did I tell you that he offered to pay us $500 to get rid of them? Sigh), and so I think he'd probably call 911 or run over with a shotgun if heard so much as a single crow--so off the boys must go.

Before the two boys left, however, we took an afternoon to take portraits with them. These are in the same vein as our foster kitten portraits, only with chickens, they're even more silly:

Fluffball

Cluck and Peck, our two boys

 Cluck

Peck

Arrow

all four 

 watching them forage while out on a "field trip" from their yard

The girls held Cluck and Peck on their laps the whole trip out to my friend's farm to leave them. She'll wait to harvest them until they've grown up a bit more and she can be entirely sure that they're boys, and in the meantime she sometimes sends us photos of the two sitting on her porch rail and looking quite pleased with this free-range life that they've made their way into.

Our girls, meanwhile, don't seem to miss the boys a bit. Their coop and yard is perfectly comfy for the two of them, although they escape just often enough to drive poor Matt to distraction as he cobbles on yet another fence rail or wire bit to try to foil them--the good new is that he's perfectly on board now with my conviction that we must buy a new house that we can afford to double mortgage with this one while we prepare it to sell. A cobbled-together chicken yard just outside the master bedroom window is the last straw, really. A buyer could perhaps overlook the kid-painted front door, perhaps overlook the seashells glued to the bathroom door frame, perhaps overlook the big basement timeline, but no one, and I mean NO ONE, is going to buy a home that has a chicken yard right outside the master bedroom window.

Except for me, of course, I adore it. And when we find a new house, I might do it again!