Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Friday, We Explore the Aquarium and Attend the Ballet

Our last full day in Boston was another sausage day in the hotel breakfast room. Moral of the story: eat ALL the bacon when it's there, for you never know when it will be your last bacon.

We had a bit of a lighter itinerary on this day, because I wasn't sure how long each of our planned activities would take. First up: the bus to Airport Station, the subway to Aquarium Station, and then a short walk to the New England Aquarium!

My college kid and I have been low-key obsessed with eels after listening to this Gastropod episode together--

--so we were both delighted to see a real, live eel minding its own eely business:

Here is more interesting information about eels, because I know that now you, too, care a LOT about them.

Also, a scuba diver:

And seahorses! 

Did you know that seahorses are extremely challenging to keep happy and healthy in captivity? Their food pretty much has to boop them on the nose before they'll bite it, and if anything upsets them in the slightest they'll simply die about it. But, of course, it's not like the oceans themselves are generally humane places for sea creatures to live anymore, either. They like having stuff to hang onto, though, so this little dude seems pretty okay with life:

This piranha and I became best friends:

And here's a super rare blue lobster:

I'm also low-key obsessed with lobsters ever since that time I drove through the Maine woods for several hours while listening to an hours-long radio program on their local NPR station about the dwindling local lobster industry. Thanks to global warming, the range of the lobster is steadily moving northward, so much so that eventually New England lobsters will no longer be an American product!

Along with seahorses, jellyfish are my other favorite ocean creature to watch:

After a long morning at New England Aquarium, the troop walked over to Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a late lunch--

My cheesesteak was so bland that I wondered if I'd missed a sauce station somewhere, but I was starving so I hoovered it down anyway.

--and to finish everyone's Junior Ranger badges!

Because Junior Ranger badges aren't the comfiest thing to wear on the back of one's Girl Scout vest, I bought Boston National Historic Park patches for the kids to wear, instead. And I bought myself the 1993 National Park Passport Stamp Set because it features Boston National Park. That was one of the two souvenirs I purchased on this trip!

Does it count as a souvenir if a kid buys a bunch of candy, but then eats all of that candy before she gets home? Because that happened, too...

At one point I was supposed to be meeting up with my own two kids in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, but I lost them. I texted them to ask where they were, they texted back to ask where *I* was, and in response I sent them this photo:

The teenager arrived within a minute.

I hadn't been sure about how long visiting the aquarium and finishing up the Junior Ranger badges would take, so when everyone had their Junior Ranger badges in hand by 2pm, we had tons of free time left until our 7:30 Boston Ballet performance of Cinderella. The kids had a mini meeting and decided that people could head off to do their own thing until then, and we divvied up the chaperones to support them. I ended up with my own two kids and an afternoon agenda of bookstores and the Boston Massacre Site.

The kids were navigating, though, so first we walked a complete circle and saw Faneuil Hall again!

And then we figured out how to simply put away our phones and stay on the Freedom Trail path, and that led us handily right to the Old State House--

--and the Boston Massacre Site:

We'd only missed its anniversary by exactly ten days!

We were actually walking towards Old South Meeting House when we saw Commonwealth Books in a little alley to our left, and we ended up staying there for a looooooong time:

Here's the teenager examining a book that I excitedly brought to her and which I would actually end up buying. It's an 1899 first-edition book about our collective Special Interest, Gilles de Rais! The author definitely thinks he's a serial killer, which I do NOT, buuut the book has handmade pages, many of which remain uncut, and is in overall beautiful condition and a total steal at $35. I'm not really the book collector that the teenager is, but I couldn't pass up such a lovely copy on one of my favorite topics:

We had quite the trek over to the next bookstore I really wanted to see, but it was worth it because Porter Square Books was the BEST bookstore I think I've ever been in! It was super comfy with nice bathrooms (yay!), and check out the awesome displays:

This one was a display of each of the Boston Bruins as a book:

Lol at these poor guys!

I learned here that there's a new sequel to The One and Only Ivan! The One and Only Ruby is on hold for me at the library as we speak.

Fun fact: my college kid STILL won't read The One and Only Ivan! She says it's because it's "overhyped," but you and I both know it's because it has animals that are sad inside it. 

Even after all the wandering and candy eating and bookshopping, we still had time for one last stroll along the waterfront--

--and then just one more quick visit back to Granary Burial Ground because the college kid hadn't seen it on this trip yet and *I* hadn't seen Paul Revere's grave!!!

The burial ground was closed by the time we got there, so I Google Imaged what Paul Revere's grave looked like, then we peered at the burial ground through the bars of the fence until we spotted it. Success!!!

Time to go to the ballet, then!

Citizens Opera House is in walking distance of Granary Burial Ground, and it is the prettiest building I have ever been in. The auditorium is absolutely stunning, and I didn't even think to get a photo of the ceiling, which is even prettier!

The ballet was also the prettiest thing I've ever seen! I really thought that I'd seen myself some ballet, with all the university productions I've been to, but whoah. I. Have seen. NOTHING compared to this. I barely even followed the fairly simple plot of "Cinderella," I was so enchanted by just the sights and sounds and pretty dancing. My only regret is that they only showed Cinderella's carriage for, like, five seconds, and it was the prettiest part of the entire ballet!

Interestingly, the ballet had the traditional casting of male dancers in the roles of Cinderella's step-sisters, but they didn't do any gender-related jokes with it, and the program had a blurb about their choice and the ballet's partnership with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. I've been much more aware of the possibilities of men dancing en pointe this year, as our local university has a male-bodied dancer who dances en pointe with the corps in university productions, and my partner, the teenager, and I went to a performance of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo recently, also hosted by the university. Considering that this school year the teenager danced in a new Nutcracker reworked to remove its yellowface and heteronormative gender stereotyping, AND a new La Bayadere reworked to remove all its racist components, it feels like there is suddenly a revolution going on to wake up the world of ballet to all the possibilities of diversity in representation... just in time for my kid to graduate and miss out on most of it, dang it!

Ah, well. We can still enjoy the ballet world's growing diversity in representation from the audience, if not from the stage and the wings.

I think the kids were well-paid for their sophisticated choice of the ballet, in that they all seemed to have loved it, too. We left the opera house along with all the other fancy people--

--and went back by subway and bus to our comfy hotel rooms for one last night. 

The next day, it was one last hotel breakfast (still no bacon, sob!), one last airport shuttle, one last adventure through security, and two more flights home. The kids had each earned a Girl Scout badge, a Junior Ranger badge, and a fun patch. They'd navigated airports and TSA, mapped their way around Boston, figured out public transportation, and learned the social scripts for Italian bakeries, Chinese restaurants, and throwing tea into Boston Harbor. They ate new foods, tried new activities, talked to strangers, and visited a college campus. 

In other words, it was a perfect trip!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

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Homeschool High School Honors World History: DIY Art History Artwork Cards

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times course uses an AP World History textbook, a college-level art history textbook, and all the other additional resources you'd want in order to flesh the study of ancient history out into a full-year high school honors course.

Among the other many resources I've compiled and DIYed for this study, one of my favorites is the new set of DIY artwork cards that I prepare for every new chapter of Gardner's Art through the Ages, which in turn I've keyed to the relevant chapter(s) in Duiker's World History. 

Artwork cards are a major component of a couple of different pedagogical approaches to homeschooling, and you CAN buy sets of them--Memoria Press is generally considered to have the nicest, if you're in the market. But if you buy sets of them you're not going to get exactly the artworks that you want in the sizes that you want, and depending on where you buy them, copyright can be an issue. 

Another option, one that I also use, is buying museum gift shop postcards. I LOVE my sets of artwork postcards, and it's nice because they're always high-quality, I know they're not pirated, and I didn't have to do any of the work of sourcing, printing, and cutting out the images. But they're hard to buy online, and they're pricey! I would NOT have the collection of artwork cards that I do if I was paying a buck-plus for each of them. I mean, geez, my kid is going through twenty or so of these cards per chapter in just her current study! And that's not even counting the separate political art or history of photography studies that we've completed fairly recently, yikes.

So you've got options, but if you want the highest-quality, cheapest, most bespoke sets of artwork cards, you probably want to DIY them like I do. 

Step 1: Go through the study materials and select the images you require. 

I always pre-read the kid's textbook chapters so that I can collect additional resources and set up extension activities anyway, so while I'm reading her art history textbook I also note the artworks that are referred to in that chapter. Occasionally, there are also a couple that her history textbook refers to that the art history textbook doesn't, or I might want to collect different types of images referenced there, like the cuneiform tablets from the Mesopotamia chapter, or the Neolithic stoneworks from the Ancient Great Britain section. 

Step 2: Find the images online and save them.

There are three ways to find good images online. First is just to do a Google Image search and filter the results for Large images:

This is a screenshot from when I was collecting images for our History of Photography study, but the process is identical.

You'll often come across pirated images this way, but you're not using your images commercially, so I'll allow it, ahem. 

Another good way is a Wikipedia search, especially for more iconic artworks. You won't get any pirated images here, but you WILL get some lower-quality images, as many will be photos that contributors took themselves of the artworks in their museum settings. 

And then ANOTHER good way is to go directly to the website of the museum that hosts a particular artwork. A lot of museums do offer free downloads of digital images of many of their artworks. My special favorite is the British Museum, which will often let me download an image so high-quality that I can print it life-sized--I've done that for both the Rosetta stone and for several cuneiform and hieroglyphic pieces, and it's so cool and useful for detailed study! 

Here's one list of museums that offer open-source images, but it's definitely not comprehensive because the British Museum isn't even on it. 

Here's the British Museum's image site; I usually download or request the super-high-quality images, because why not! Wouldn't some large-scale Greek vase images look so awesome framed and displayed in my future Life of Theseus-themed bathroom?

Here's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's image site. I like that if you're not looking for a specific artwork, but rather a time period or style, you can filter your results by open-access so that everything you see is obtainable.

The National Gallery's image site provides open-access images and also provides many of the Wikimedia images. 

Here's the National Trust images site. Only some of these images are free, but there are images that work very well with British history and geography studies. 

The Smithsonian's image site pulls from all its museums and holdings across genres, so it's a great resource not just for art, but also historical artifacts and even primary sources. 

Step 3: Print and cut.

I prefer to print my images with a laser printer onto cardstock, because I want them to look and feel nice. To make the artwork cards a standard size, I print them four to a page--

--then cut them on a guillotine paper cutter:

I label the back with title, artist, date, and, for these art history cards, geographic location, and currently I have them filed by textbook chapter.

My teenager is also keeping a comprehensive ancient history timeline, so I print another set of these images as thumbnails onto regular copy paper, and then she glues them into her timeline and labels them. 

Okay, so how do you actually USE these artwork cards? There are so many ways!

• Flash cards. Memorize the artwork, title, artist, date, and geographic location to add to one's working knowledge of art history. Having a ton of artworks memorized will make it easier for you to slot future pieces into your memory, and allow you to build context and make better comparisons/contrasts, add to your understanding of social history, and write some kick-ass essays, etc.
• Sort and organize. Having these visuals at hand allows you to easily make comparisons about style and other features of artworks that may be less noticeable when each image is trapped in the pages of a specific chapter of your textbook. How do the early Native American earthworks compare to Neolithic European ones? How does portraiture vary, and how would you sort portraits stylistically when the images are separated from geohistorical context? 
• Order chronologically. We play a lot of history card games in which we have to try to put something in chronological order. We have almost all of these Timeline games, but you can play the same game with art, and not only is it interesting, but it builds a chronological understanding of art on a sensory level.
• Display. Once upon a time, a worker who was doing emergency repairs on our old, poorly-maintained, homeowner's special home came out of the kids' bathroom after installing a new toilet and asked me if I homeschooled. I was all, "Yes?" I thought it was the weirdest, most random thing for someone to figure out about me with zero evidence! But when I told this story to the kids later, they were immediately all like, "Um, it's because you tape educational posters to the wall facing the toilet?" Because riiiiight... when I want the kids to memorize something but I don't want to go through the emotional torment of MAKING them memorize something, I just print that thing out onto 8.5"x11" paper and tape it to the wall facing their toilet. I also once put tape onto ALL our things and made the kids label them in French and that's all still around, and every once in a while I printed out and assembled a giant line map of someplace we were studying, made them label that, too, and then hung it in the hallway until I was ready to make them study some other place. I also use pushpins to make little clotheslines across our bookshelves and I have the kids clothespin these art cards to them, and sometimes I'll display them on our magnet boards. I thought I was being sneaky like this, but apparently I wasn't, lol!

I should probably act like, since these images cost only the amount of the paper and the ink, and they're just cardstock, I'll recycle them when my last homeschooling kid graduates in a couple of months, but you know I won't. I won't have the kids to label me new giant maps for the hallway, so perhaps I'll retire them all permanently on display there!

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Homeschool History/Culinary Arts: Homemade Chocolate

The teenager's Honors World History: Ancient Times study (2 semesters; 2 high school credits) is a LOT of work, because we're using two college textbooks as the spine for this DIY course:

• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages

This homemade chocolate project is relevant to Duiker Chapter 6, "The New World," and Gardner Chapter 14, "From Alaska to the Andes: The Arts of Ancient America." It also builds context with our study of Mesoamerica, and trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, from two years ago. We discussed the Ancient Maya's relationship to chocolate then--our local university's art museum actually has a Maya vessel that still has the dregs of ancient hot chocolate inside!--but we didn't do any hands-on chocolate-making projects during that particular study.

Yay, because it gives us something new to do this year!

This TED-Ed video about the history of chocolate is surprisingly thorough for being less than five minutes long, and since our study of chocolate is mostly contained to the Ancient Maya, it builds context by centering chocolate within world history:

If you'd rather your student read than watch, here's about the same level of content as informational text from the Exploratorium.

For our hands-on project, I bought this Make Your Own Chocolate kit from Glee Gum--the kids and I have actually done this exact same kit before, but since it was a whopping ELEVEN YEARS AGO(?!?!), I figured we might as well give it another go!

The kit is marketed to and suitable for young kids like my own long-ago wee ones, but it's actually quite suitable for this nearly-grown teenager and fully-grown me, as well--as long as you're a beginner chocolatier, I suppose. If you can temper chocolate in your sleep this kit probably wouldn't cover much new ground for you, but the teenager and I didn't find the instructions or the activity babyish or overly simplified. 

And look! We got to taste real cacao beans!

The kit is sort of like a Hello Fresh for chocolate-making, in that it provides the ingredients in the amounts needed, and then you heat and combine them as directed. I especially liked the sticker thermometer for easily taking the temperature of the chocolate. My teenager was more than capable of completing the entire project independently, so all I had to do was hang out, take photos, add weird mix-ins to the candy wrappers, and then enjoy all of the chocolate!

For mix-ins, we tried various combinations of candied ginger, dried unsweetened cherries, and peanut butter. The latter two in the same truffle was my favorite combo.

If you wanted to extend this activity even further, there are a ton of ways you could go:

If you live within driving distance, Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania, would be a fun, educational-ish trip. They mostly want to sell you things, but if you're thoughtful, you can make the things that they sell you work as enrichment. We didn't visit The Hershey Story on our own trip, but it looks much more legitimately educational, ahem.

If your kid gets really into the foodcrafting part of the experience, you can buy more of the same ingredients from the kit and make more chocolate from scratch. Kid-made homemade truffles or chocolate bars would be such a lovely Valentine's Day project or handmade gift!

Another super fun but low-effort chocolate crafting project is coating random foods in chocolate. Chocolate-covered gummy bears ARE surprisingly delicious, as are sour gummy worms, mint leaves, and, um... Ramen noodles.

If you're working with a young kid, and don't want to mess around too much with molten chocolate, you could make them a batch of edible chocolate slime for a fun sensory extension activity. Or make modeling chocolate, which sculpts well and is also delicious!

Here are some books that pair well with making your own chocolate:

• The Bitter Side of Sweet. Pair this with any chocolate study to bring insight and empathy to the serious problem of child enslavement that plagues modern chocolate production. 
• The Book of Chocolate. This is a very readable history for apt middle grades and up. 
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It's not for the history buff, ahem, but it's perfect if you're doing the kit just to have fun with candy. If you've never read this book aloud to your kids, are you even a homeschooler?
• Chocolate Fever. Yes, it's a children's book, but it's really, really good! Find an audiobook version that you can listen to while you do some of this food crafting, and you can probably get through the entire book in one session.
• Making Chocolate: From Beans to Bar to S'more. This book is a completely excessive tome about making chocolate from scratch, but if you've got an older kid who's interested... well, you're homeschoolers for a reason!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

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