Independence Day 2014

You've got to be at the parade bright and early to score the best spot!

But no matter where you sit, every kid gets a free flag to wave:

I've been told that our parade here is a little strange (I just think it's weird that it doesn't have many horses, and it doesn't begin with a mock gunfight as the parades in my Southern hometown do), but we love it!

I'm pretty sure I take a photo of this guy every year.

This kid LOVES herself a parade.

The biggest difference with the parade this year is that it's no longer in walking distance, but all that means is that we got to park next to a near-ish playground and then walk over. And if we've parked next to a playground, then we might as well spend an extra hour after the parade playing!

I LOVE when the Fourth of July falls on a Friday or Monday; I cherish that long weekend spent at home, particularly this year, when I refinished my lockers with the kids' help (more on that later); refinished my former overhead projector cart and now brand-new school supply cart (more on that later, too!); packed the kids for camp (required much shopping for mess kits, white T-shirts, socks that go OVER the ankle, non-aerosol bug repellant, etc.); hung out with the kids elsewhere while Matt ran a garage sale at our old house, mowed the lawn there, packed up the rest of our stuff, cleaned up, and signed the paperwork for our first official offer(!!!); mostly refinished a dresser; sanded down a bookshelf to varnish; and did many, many, MANY other we-will-never-finish-moving-in-to-this-dang-house projects and endless chores. 

And of COURSE we also went to the drive-in--Transformers is really good, y'all, especially when seen under the stars from deck chairs right in front of the projector, ice cream from our favorite local ice cream shop in our hands, amateur fireworks sounding every now and then from off in the distance.

It's kind of the perfect life, you know?

My Latest: Vacant Lots and Kids Working with Tools

an article about Chicago Selling Vacant Lots for $1 to Urban Gardeners

a round-up of some of my favorite DIYs suitable for kids

a tutorial for a kid to make a scrap wood stomp catapult

and another tutorial for a kid to make a PVC pipe sword

As the kids have rediscovered the books and kits and toys they'd forgotten about until everything got boxed up and moved and unboxed (like Christmas! Every day!), they've also remembered how much they like these big projects that involve lots of tools and noise and paint and mess. Now that we have a driveway big enough to support multiple simultaneous projects (at one point on Saturday, there were sidewalk chalk, three different furniture painting projects, scooter play, and two chickens all on the driveway at once, with room to spare!), and a garage big enough to easily put away and store tools and half-finished projects (my days of lugging that work bench across the house and up a flight of stairs every time I want to use it are OVER!!!), woodwork becomes a lot more fun. The kids discovered that their fingers are now strong enough to press down the nozzle on a can of spray paint, Will has been happy to help me sand endlessly, Syd is nimble with the removal of furniture hardware, and both can be pointed at the primer and a piece of furniture and simply left to it.

And when they're home with me tomorrow, I plan to introduce them to varnish!

Magnetism and Electricity Self-Directed School

There are some shelves, formerly of the general store, that I'm in the process of varnishing (right now I think I'm wearing as much varnish as the shelves are!) for the children's rooms. I intend these shelves to neatly store (how I'm going to go about that "neatly" part, I don't yet know...) all of the children's kits and projects and playthings; one of the things that I've noticed about my kids is that only when their things are neatly stored and regularly rearranged do they interest themselves in them.

Syd, for instance, has played with her wooden dollhouse (given to her at the age of two) more since we moved it to our new house and set it up in the living room than she has in her entire ownership of it prior to this. Will set up and completed a world map with stickers of the prehistoric animals that lived there. They've both asked me to play board games that they've rarely touched before. Syd got out this magnetism and electricity set that once fascinated Will, and was herself fascinated by it:

Gracie really likes where I put the table in this room.

Be warned: this kit is LOUD!


Here's the outfit that she's wearing here, by the way:

Momma-dyed playsilk tied into a tunic, with leggings as a belt

I'm glad to know that even this unexpected, lengthy holiday from my formal schooling is rather schooly when done by these intellectually curious, active, engaged kiddos. We may not have completed the paleontology or Laura Ingalls Wilder unit studies that I'd hoped we would, nor has Will made her comparative study of American and British government, but still there has been science, and engineering, and woodworking, and hiking, and lots and lots of reading, of course. 

Definitely not enough math, but I suppose the kids need me to be in charge of SOMETHING to earn my keep...

My Latest: Poop and Libraries (and the Antique Furniture Hiding in My Outbuildings)

for Insteading, a discussion of humanure composting and wastewater gardening

and for Crafting a Green World, an article about a little kid forced to shut down his Little Free Library

Here on the home front, there's not as much unpacking going on as you'd think--can't really put things away when there's nothing to put stuff ON, or IN, you know--but I've got a dresser half-painted in the garage and my lockers half-painted on the driveway, and the card catalogue also out there waiting its turn, and tomorrow evening, perhaps, before we walk across our yard to go watch the new Transformers movie at the drive-in (I'm torn about letting the kids watch this one--on the one hand, I think it'll will be too scary and too long for them, but on the other hand, I didn't let them watch X-Men with us last weekend, and you can't let kids live next door to a drive-in and not let them go to ANY of the movies!!!), I'm going to take Matt on a tour of the old garage and the even older general store, and point out to him all of the antique, unfinished wooden storage units that I want him to move inside for me. 

Namely these--

behind the egregious photo of my stove--toy shelves for the living room and children's bedroom?

MASSIVE dresser with tons of these little drawers that just sit on the shelves--wants to live in my bedroom and hold my pretty things?

feed bin? Super gross right now, but could hold a hell of a lot of fabric all nicely folded and out of sight

display shelves from the general store--maybe these would be better toy/treasure shelves, given the kids' insistence on displaying ALL THE THINGS

And I haven't even been into the attic yet! It requires bringing a ladder in from the garage, which I'm not up for, but the kids and Matt did it once. The kids tell me that there's a fire truck up there, and Matt says that there are Christmas decorations from who knows when. 

I'll check it out when I've got the downstairs sorted...

Indiana Unit Study: Homeschool Field Trip to the Eiteljorg Museum

The Eiteljorg is not one of my favorite museums. Its artifacts are beautiful, but I don't think that it includes nearly enough breadth and depth in its exhibits; what should occupy the entire museum fills merely three galleries, and most of the downstairs children's gallery is contextually unrelated to the rest of the museum. The Western art theme appears tacked onto the American Indians focus, as if the curators couldn't quite figure out how to usefully juxtapose the two major collections that they were given.

To add to that, I've never come even close to getting over my pique from the time that I visited with the kids perhaps three years ago and found the staff as a whole to be shockingly aggressive about the children's behavior. Perhaps they had all just taken a workshop on managing children or something, but in the course of one morning (I was fed up and took the kids to the zoo for the afternoon) we were chastised three entire times for things that we did not do (we were never chastised for anything that we did do, of course--this is pretty braggy, but my kids are excellent museum-goers). As Will drank from a drinking fountain just outside the restroom in the lobby, while I stood just inside the open restroom door to supervise both her and Syd, still in the bathroom, an employee came over and informed me that my children had to stay with me. As soon as Syd placed her hand on a red velvet rope in front of a large painting, an employee came over and told her to stop leaning on the rope. As we were leaving the children's gallery after peeking in and deciding it was too untidily chaotic to enjoy, an employee came over and told the children that they were supposed to put things back after they played with them, and they could not leave until they helped her clean up.

Nevertheless, our Indiana study included a large Native American component, so I considered revisiting the Eiteljorg to be a must-do. Fortunately for the current crop of docents, as I came loaded for bear, this trip was uneventful, and lots of learning was done:

I was fascinated by the many origin stories and pre-contact artifacts, although surprised that I didn't see more on the Mound Builders, our particular area of emphasis in this unit.

We also spent a lot of time with the Plains Indians, since we'll be in their area this month!

The kids enjoyed the hands-on stations--I would have liked to have seen one in every section of the many galleries.

Check out this decorative horse tack!

We now know the difference between a wigwam and a teepee.

We loved the art and artifacts.

Even those she's completed that particular activity for her Girl Scouts Brownie Pottery badge many times over, Syd still enjoys sketching pottery.

Although I think we've exhaustively covered fourth- and second-grade American history this year, I still need to firm up some Native American sites to visit on our upcoming road trip--Syd, in particular, is very interested in the Plains Indians--and I'd still love to find a truly stellar Native American museum to visit one day. 

Perhaps fifth and third grade American history will require another road trip to D.C?

House Report: Being at Home

Chaos!

Good chaos, at least. Happy chaos.

We've been about a week living in our new house--well, on Sunday night we slept on bare mattresses back at our old house after the toilets in our new house backed up into the bathtubs (turns out that houses that are vacant for two years get things like roots growing into their main sewer lines), but plumbers fixed that for us on Monday and we've been here ever since.

Most of our belongings are still in boxes lining the walls, because our new house doesn't have any SHELVES!!!!!, and poor Matt is still spending most of his time at the old house getting it ready to be sold, but the kids and I, at least, are happily puttering about and finding new corners to read in and watching the chickens learning how to free-range and exploring our new property, which is wonderful and beautiful and poorly-maintained and bounteous. Already, as we drove the other day through town to redeem Will's reading program prize of an ice cream voucher from a local ice cream stand, I looked at the houses that we passed in town and thought, "GAH! Their yards are all so SMALL!"

I have a to-do list so long that I've actually imported it into Microsoft Word so that I can organize it according to priority (lots of painting ratty found-on-the-side-of-the-road furniture to make it look less ratty, lots of shelf building, lots of transplanting perennials from old house to new, etc.), and Matt has a totally different to-do list that's even longer, but we are SO happy. And loving our house. And walking across our yard to the drive-in to watch movies. And last night, coming home after 10:00 pm from a swimming date with friends, we stopped at the yard in astonishment, then sat together on the roof of our root cellar and watched hundreds of fireflies sparkling like twinkle lights in the woods behind the field behind our house--all over the woods, from the tops of the trees to the bottoms, incomparable to anything we'd ever seen before.

To conclude, two photos, the only two, other than cell phone shots of chickens cutely wandering where they shouldn't, that I've found time to take this week:

Yes, I've been permitting the kids to ride their scooter indoors.

And yes, Will's found a spot to read. That's all she needs in a home.

Really, though. We definitely need some shelves.