Just a Couple of Kids Fishing with Their Grandpa

I beg your indulgence for the truly ridiculous number of photographs that is to follow, but I imagine that you're aware, by now (perhaps based on the truly ridiculous number of photographs that I took last time) that the sight of these two kids, fishing with the man whom all three of us call "Pappa," the man who helped raise me, is my favorite thing about visiting home:

Pappa reviews casting with the kids while Will holds his cane.

Pappa gave the kids these fishing rods for Christmas. They were thrilled!

Will wanted to do all the fish handling herself, so Pappa taught her how.

Every adult is always tangibly relieved when the second kid has also caught a fish. Everything else is bonus!

This kid could happily do this all day, I think.

We have homework before our summer visit back to Arkansas, as Pappa instructed me to take these girls fishing here in Indiana (mental note: must research rules, regulations, and localities for this), but he also reminded me that when we do come back, I need to bring the rods--and the minnow bucket that he's letting me borrow--back with us.

And then we'll all go fishing together again!

Junior Civil War Historians: Ft. Smith National Historic Site

Even though all the Junior Ranger badges are special, there are some that are REALLY special. Will got such a kick out of earning Yellowstone's Junior Ranger badge and Young Scientist badge because they were actually sew-on patches, and so when I learned about the Junior Civil War Historian Program, which is also a patch, and which is only a limited-time program through 2015, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, I knew that the kids would like it, and that Will would love it, so I planned to make it happen for them.

The Junior Civil War Historian Program requires that the kid either earn a Junior Ranger badge from three parks participating in the program (all the parks that are participating are relevant to the Civil War, but not all parks relevant to the Civil War are participating, so you have to check before you go), or earn a Junior Ranger badge from two participating parks and complete this packet on the Underground Railroad (bring it to one of the participating parks to get it checked and signed off on when completed). I was super bummed that we'd done Gettysburg during the sesquicentennial but before we knew about Junior Rangers, but as I was checking out the parks list, trying to see if there were any two that we could hit sometime before the end of 2015, I saw that, why, yes, there ARE two parks right on our route to and from Arkansas to spend Christmas with my family, and why, my goodness, one of those parks is actually IN my hometown!

Also a major player in this story: our national parks pass that doesn't expire until July. Worth every freaking penny. Just between you and me, I don't one hundred percent know if we've actually made our money back on that purchase yet, but the fact that we go to way more national parks now than we did before we bought the pass makes it worth everything that we paid for it, and more.

On this particular trip to the Ft. Smith National Historic Site, our first of the two participating parks, I was having some major flashbacks to my eighth grade field trip to the same spot. News flash: I didn't enjoy it (adolescence=shudder), nor did I really grasp how macabre much of the site is.

Like seriously macabre. Much badness. Much blood. The site started off as a fort at the edge of "Indian" territory, to keep the peace between two Indian nations, one of which had been displaced to the area by colonial government, the other of which did not appreciate having its own land encroached on by the displaced nation. Once the colonial government decided to keep on displacing the Native Americans, including both of these nations, the fort transitioned into a supply depot for the Trail of Tears. This display--

--shows some of the crap that the Native Americans were given here, and tells the story of how they were also given rations of rotten meat while starving, their protests at the food treated with contemptuous shrugs. 

Is it even necessary to mention that I did not learn about this on my eighth grade field trip? I swear that I didn't even know that Ft. Smith was part of the Trail of Tears until I was an adult, and I lived my entire childhood next to the former "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma--

--and family lore even claims that I have Cherokee blood on my Pappa's side (I doubt that I could ever confirm this one way or another, but marriage to a Caucasian guy would surely have let a Cherokee woman avoid her forced removal...). 

Ft. Smith remained a frontier fort, and since it was evacuated by US forces after the firing on Ft. Sumter, it was easy for Confederate troops to move in. They stationed and trained there, and it was a staging area for some of the local battles, including the Battle of Prairie Grove, which my great-great-grandfather fought in, and the Battle of Pea Ridge, where we would visit a few days later. The Union retook the fort a couple of years in, and then used it as a staging and training area for themselves. 

This is the day before I learned that you're actually not supposed to climb on cannons in national parks. Oops!

Don't worry--the museum includes lots of stories of troops on both sides doing cruel things to each other there. Lots of systematic executions, lots of making captured soldiers from the other side stand on their coffins or next to their graves while preparing to be executed, etc. Sigh.

After the Civil War, Ft. Smith returned to its role as a frontier fort, and this is what we learned about in the eighth grade, particularly the history of the Hanging Judge, Judge Isaac Parker. Here's his courtroom:

The history of the US Marshals, who were kind of like a combination of bounty hunters and police officers, is big here, so the kids learned a lot about what it was like to hunt down criminals in the Wild West:

That photo on the left is of a gang of criminal teenagers who were executed for gang rape. Nice, huh?

Here's one of the jail cells:

It could contain up to fifty individuals, some simply there to wait for trial, all sleeping on pallets on the stone floor, stinking so badly that they could be smelled in the courtroom above.

Here's where many of those individuals were headed:

If you visit the site on the anniversary of an execution, there's a noose hanging there. Ft. Smith is nothing but festive!

All that hard work was then rewarded--

--and we went out for a refreshing hike to the river and back to clear our heads of the history of people being mean to other people:

This was the grimmest site that we've been to yet, but it's good, you know? Eventually, the kids have to start learning the history of people being mean to other people, if only to help them memorialize all who have been victimized and to teach them not to victimize, themselves, but I'm a softie for the hearts of my children, and I'm reluctant to teach them as much about the sad stuff as they're probably ready for.

Nevertheless, I appreciated our time at the river as a balm to all the cruelty that had taken place here, practically under our feet:

Better, just then, to let the flowing water wash it all away, and then go back to Pappa's house for peanut butter fudge, Animal Planet, and craft projects.

Aerial Silks Winter Showcase: Momma's Little Sugar Plum

Since Syd spent much of the past few months rehearsing for her role in our university's production of The Nutcracker, it struck me as quite apropos when I learned that one of the songs that Will would be performing to in her own aerial silks show would be "The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies."

Mind you, Syd's role was on the ground (although the angels were meant to look as if they were flying), and Will's role was in the air, but nevertheless, they were both Nutcracker kids this year.

My Will lives so much in her own head that she sometimes finds it hard when she's required to be in her body; she's strong and flexible and smart, but she has to work harder than the other kids to find the body awareness that leads to grace in one's movements, and it's not something that she can yet reliably achieve. That's one of the many, many, many reasons why I was so proud to watch her practicing and rehearsing for this aerial silks show--a lot of kids who are good at some things will only do those things, and never be brave enough to stretch themselves in a new direction in which they risk failure, but not my Will. She wanted to perform in this show, and she worked her butt off to do it.

I thought that this show would be a direct contrast to Syd's Nutcracker run--everyone in town, practically, saw Syd dance onstage this year, but I figured that only the performers' families, and perhaps a few doting friends, would be in the theater to watch Will. And yet when we got there, so early that I'd thought about doing a little window shopping first just so we wouldn't be the only people sitting in the audience, we actually walked in to find the bleacher seats about 95% taken, and we had to squeeze ourselves in at the far end of a row. And people just kept coming, and coming, and coming! The performers brought out folding chairs and put them all around the stage, wherever they thought that people could sit and probably not get kicked in the head. More people sat on the floor:

I don't know what else was going on in Bloomington that night, but there can't have been more people anywhere than there were in this theater, watching this show.

And what a show it was! I don't know if you've ever seen much circus arts performed live before, but it's really something special to watch. There was everything--synchronized numbers, solo numbers, aerial silks, aerial hoop, and trapeze:

And this kid, of course, who was my own personal favorite performer:

 She tells me that she wasn't nervous, but I don't know... look at that face:

Matt took videos of Will's performances (shaky, wonky videos, of course, as one does when one is holding the video camera and filming, but one's focus is rather on the actual show, as it should be), but I'm a rotten perfectionist, and I kind of didn't want to show them to you at first. I didn't want you to see Will's hesitations, her frowns of concentration, how she wants to always watch her partner to keep herself in time, the spots where she forgets her choreography, and think that she didn't do a good job.

But of course, who really cares about small things like that? You might see an imperfect performance, yeah, but you also see a really brave kid. A focused kid. A kid trying so hard that the concentration is clear on her face. A kid who hung out all day with her fellow performers and her teachers the day of the show, got her hair curled and her face glittered, and DIDN'T BRING A BOOK. 

A kid who, in her first rehearsal several weeks before, wept silently but hard as she tried and failed and tried and failed to master a stunt that she was able to successfully pull off during this performance. 

This is that awesome kid in her show:

It was a perfect performance. 

How NOT to Make Melted Plastic Bead Ornaments (and also How to)

We've got a medium-sized stash of random, mixed-up, unsorted beads, and one day I dream that we shall instead have a stash--of any size--of organized, sorted beads, many of which are the color and shape that we find most useful.

Until then, however, the children and I craft from the madness, picking out by hand what we'd like, and to hasten the end of this chaos and forward the time when order will reign, I encourage the types of projects that use up lots of beads quite quickly.

Such is the case with this project, these melted plastic bead ornaments.

We've done sun catchers before, and although it was a while ago I pretty much remembered how we made them, and so I started the kids working on their ornaments the same way, first sorting out the beads and filling their silicon muffin trays with their selections.

You can also use metal muffin tins, or even non-stick baking pans, but these novelty silicon trays make cute ornaments. 

Ideally, you want to use pony beads, because those have a standard melting temperature (around 400 degrees), but with our mixed assortment, the kids used only mostly pony beads, with others included as they struck their fancy. 

Ideally, you also want to arrange the beads into a single layer, but that's pretty fussy, so the kids simply plopped the beads in however they liked, with me reminding the big kid several times to keep it shallow.

I've heard that you can melt your beads over an outdoor grill, but last time I plugged the toaster oven outside and used that, and it worked so well that I did it again. You can set a toaster oven to the correct temperature, and since it's outside, all those toxic fumes of melting plastic will simply dissipate on the wind.

Yep, toxic fumes. I'm 100% positive that this project is crap for the environment.

So the thing about my toaster oven is that it's really old, and even when we DID buy it, we bought it at a garage sale, so it's, like, really, REALLY old. 

And... it probably doesn't work quite right, particularly in the temperature setting, because when I set it to a perfectly reasonable 425 degrees, going out to check on it every five minutes (it should take around 20-25 minutes for the beads to melt nicely), this is what I found when I pulled the tray out for my second check:

Um.... oops?

There goes my favorite silicone mold!

Obviously, the toaster oven was WAY hotter than 400 degrees, so when I tried again (of course I tried again!), I set it down to 300 degrees.

Perfection:

Use a power drill to drill a hole near the top of the ornament (but not too close to the edge, or the drill's torque will cause the brittle plastic to crack), use a pair of wire nippers to cut off about six inches of jewelry wire, and let the kids use the wire to make hanging loops for their ornaments, and then hang them on the tree for all to admire:

The little kid made the stocking, and the big kid made the burned gingerbread cookie. Goofy kid.

I really want to show the kids how to use roughly the same technique to make these ornaments out of melted crayon, as well, but who knows if I'll have the time? 

Good thing that Christmas will happen next year, too!

P.S. Want to follow along with all of our handmade, homeschooling successes and failures? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Visit with St. Nick

There are a lot of places where you can go see Santa this time of year, but I've made it our tradition for the kids to have their chat with him at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. After all, although Santa's helpers often fill in for him at other sites, it's always the genuine Santa, Jolly Old Saint Nick himself, who sits on the couch here for the children's visits.

It's also a convenient excuse to spend the whole day at the museum, the kids love the winter-themed exhibits--

The sliding pond: Some of the kids' friends already find the Children's Museum too baby-ish, I'm told, but my two are the ones who will still be there, in their 30s, happily sliding on the pond and building with blocks and riding the carousel over and over.

--and here, unlike at most other places, you can take your own photos of these magical moments:

Syd still gets a little freaked out anticipating visiting with Santa--she was consumed by the "naughty or nice" question this year.

Will, on the other hand, couldn't give a flip how naughty she was--she wants a robotic dinosaur for Christmas!

I couldn't hear what they were saying, but considering that Will's letter to Santa this year stated that she'd been "somewhat good lately," there's really no telling.

 Try as I might, I am just not one of those "breathe deeply; focus on the moment" sort of people. I know that if you're frantically rushing through the Christmas holiday, stressed and struggling to get everything done, then you're doing it wrong, but dang it, that's just the way that I operate. Right this second, for instance, as I write this, I'm freezing under a blanket and waiting for Matt to text me with the time that the furnace repair person *might* be here, I'm deciding if I should have the kids make popcorn or cut up apples to bring to their math class party that starts in 55 minutes (and I'm about to have to get out from under this blanket and go kick their butts to get ready for it!), I'm hoping that the internet works at the community center where the math class is held so that I can sit in their library and finish another paid writing gig there (and email a couple of customers to explain that my shipping deadline was indeed firm, so they will want to cancel their orders) so that I can then work on some big handmade gifts when I get back home, I'm wondering if I should email Will's aerial silks teacher to nag her that I don't yet know her performance call times for tomorrow, and I've just this second realized that instead of working on my own handmade gifts this afternoon, I'll actually need to guide the kids through making theirs for their dad instead, since this is the last day that we'll have him out of the house until Christmas.

But I do enjoy these special times, as fleetingly as they come and go, as hard as I work to manage them and plan them. I memorize the expression on my true believer's face as she nervously contemplates whether she has, in fact, been naughty or nice this year. I smile at my ten-year-old, as blissfully "ice fishing" for stuffed fish as the couple of toddlers next to her are. And once I have snapped many, many photos of my children talking with Santa, and I'm positive that I've gotten THE shot, then yes, I do put down my camera, breathe deeply, wonder what they're saying to each other to make the kids giggle like that and Santa to have that particular expression on his face...

... and yes, fine. For a few seconds, I focus on the moment.

The Nutcracker 2014: Momma's Little Angel

I told myself that this week I would only work on the tasks that must be completed before Christmas--etsy orders, homemade gifts, the ever-burdensome job of finding a chicken sitter, holiday memory-making--and, indeed, much of my time is taken up by advance work for my paid writing and editing jobs (wouldn't want to be stuck writing on Christmas Day to meet the next day's deadline!), but there are a few topics that I wanted to write about here before Christmas, and so I've decided that this fulfills my promise to myself.

Because writing about The Nutcracker wouldn't be nearly as fun AFTER Christmas!

Although Syd has participated in some pretty intense, large-scale stage productions before, and she's danced in ballet recitals before--on this very stage, in fact--we have never been involved in anything as intense, as exciting, as large-scale as this, the kiddo's first role in our university's yearly staging of The Nutcracker.

We're fortunate, here, to have a stellar ballet program, and a pre-college program that is both as stellar, and is the pool from which the children's roles in their productions are chosen. Auditions for this year's production of The Nutcracker took place way back in September, and Syd was cast as an angel, the usual role for children in their first and second years of ballet (the children in the Creative Movement program, who are all under the age of seven, are not invited to audition).

I had expected much of the time commitment that came with months of weekly rehearsal (and nightly practice at home, with a "practice candle" made out of a paper bowl and a pipe cleaner, and "Scene: The Enchanted Palace and the Kingdom of Sweets," performed by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, on repeat on Spotify, but I didn't quite expect the hours--absolute hours--of daily rehearsals opening week, so much so that I still wonder how the children who had to attend school managed it, because I know that I sure declared it a school holiday! I was worried that Syd would become tired and stressed, so I devoted that week to supporting her, making sure she got plenty of rest and ate plenty of nutritious food, making sure she washed her hands often, making sure she had a lot of play-time and unstructured time when she wasn't needed at rehearsal.

Syd, of course, was not tired and stressed (well, that Saturday evening performance wasn't quite as fun as the matinee performance a few hours prior, but that was the only one). She loved it. She loved being backstage with the other dancers, she loved wearing her costume, she loved getting peeks at the scenery and props used in other parts of the show, and she loved, loved, loved performing. Just loved it.

Frankly, I was the stressed one. The daily rehearsal times were emailed to the parents the night before, and those were simply the times that your child had to be there, in the required uniform, her hair performance-ready as specified, carrying her backpack with street clothes, water bottle, quiet activity, and healthy snack. She mustn't be tardy, even though driving and parking on campus can be very, very tricky. She must be there at exactly those times, even if there's another child in the family who also has to be places right then. Again, I can't imagine how families with inflexible schedules that can't accommodate all this complicated prep and transportation can possibly permit their children to participate.

And about that hair... I had to STUDY for that hair. I had to Youtube "flat performance bun," skim video tutes until I found one that matched the ten-step how-to included in the 30+page parent's guide that we were given, watch it several times (and yes, that video is done by a child. A child had to teach me how to do this hairstyle), and practice it on both children before I felt confident to do it for real on the first tech rehearsal day.

It was very important to me that this bun be perfect every time (Gee, I wonder where Syd gets her Type-A perfectionism?), and every time I made a bun, I'd make a little note to myself for next time--less hairspray at the beginning; brush the hair into the high ponytail gradually, not all at once; note the placement of each bobby pin so that they don't overlap; place the ponytail slightly off center to the left, since the majority of hair will fall to the right, etc.

Wouldn't you just love to be me?

And yes, because I know you're as interested in this as I was, the bun was perfect. Every. Single. Time. Other parents photographed it to help them make their own buns, it was that perfect. Here it is, from every angle, just so you can admire it as I did:

My stage-makeup skills weren't nearly as good. I don't understand blush, and Syd had to tell me how to do the mascara.

 See? Perfect.

Mind you, I'm saying all of this like it was a pain in the butt, and it was, sure, but it was also so, so worth it. The kid loved it. She got loads of free ballet instruction. She got to be onstage, in front of an audience, doing ballet with a first-class cast, which was a big deal to her. She got to look like this--

--and it's adorable. 

She even got to be on TV, if you count the livestreams of every performance, every single one of which I watched. I even, because it's apparently the 1980s again (Aunt Pam, I swear that I remember you doing this!), had Matt take photos OF THE TV while she was on:

Syd's the blurry angel at center left.

Now she's second from the left.

Matt missed her other close-ups, which I, of course, wouldn't have done, but I didn't want to tear my eyes away from the screen to take the photos in the first place, so I probably shouldn't complain.

We attended the final performance, and at that one, I finally understood why I'd been trucking the kid back and forth to hours of rehearsals for months. Apparently, at the rehearsals, they'd always rehearsed to the music, and the children had been trained to not just count, and not just follow their partners, but also to listen to the music, and to follow the musical cues. And so during this particular performance, when the entire orchestra inexplicably--I still don't understand how it could possibly have happened, and I used to play violin in an orchestra--skipped several measures, the children were not thrown. It could have been disaster, with the children carrying on with their correct choreography, no longer in sync with the music, ending their number too late, and what about the Snow Queen and her Cavalier--how would they come in on time, with the angels still on stage? However, even though their choreography meant for them to do several other things, the children immediately heard the music change and without hesitation, they all skipped the same measures that the orchestra did and followed the new musical cue. Having watched the previous four performances online and actually knowing what had happened made it incredible to watch, for me--nobody else in our group noticed anything unusual.

And now The Nutcracker is over, and we can all concentrate on Will's upcoming aerial silks show. It was a wonderful experience for everyone, especially for my kiddo who loves ballet and loves the stage.

Next year, she's hoping to win the role of a baby mouse, or perhaps even a soldier!