Whenever I look back at photos of all of our former litters of foster kittens, I ask myself why on earth I didn't take MORE photos of them? They're so cute and little! Did I not appreciate what I had while I had it?!?
I appreciated it all right. I just keep forgetting that it is nearly impossible to take a decent photo of a small kitten, much less five of them. Someone is always in motion, always blurry, always running out of frame.
That's not my vibe so much. Everyone else can play with them, wrestle and dangle ribbons and toss curly strips of paper towel tube for them to chase. All I want is a kitten to sleep on my lap and purr while I pet it.
And when that happens, I take a photo!
Socks and Anchovy
Athena
Pickle
We've been moving them between their nighttime accommodations, the children's bathroom, and their daytime accommodations, my bathroom, since for several days they seemed happy enough to use the litter box, but also happy enough to simply squat wherever they were and pee on my floor.
This means we got a lot of fun bathroom floor photos in between doing a sanitary load of laundry and deep cleaning two bathrooms every single day!
Anchovy and Taboo
Taboo
Athena
They're more reliable in the past couple of days (although that back corner under my desk remains an unholy temptation...), so they've gotten to also hang out in my bedroom and nap on the bed, and every now and then a lucky kitten gets to come out and sit on the couch with us.
Anchovy
Anchovy
And sometimes a couple of them get to ride around the rest of the house in a shirt pocket...
Taboo and Athena
They are not very helpful when I'm trying to get some work done:
Pickle
So then you've got to distract them like you do any other ipad baby:
Socks
I still prefer when they lie on me and sleep and purr, though. Obviously, when you're catlocked, you have to stop doing all your productive things and instead play on your phone or nap while the baby's napping.
Socks
They've all been very good kittens this week and hit the one-pound mark, even little Pickle, who had insisted on remaining 15 ounces after all the other babies blew past her. For some reason, a few days ago all the kittens decided that they hated their canned kitten food, so Syd fixed up her go-to Plan B of baked chicken pureed in a blender with a little water, famous as the food that finally got Buttons, the runt from her last foster litter, to decide that eating solid food was a route she wanted to pursue. The kittens are ALL ABOUT the pureed chicken now, but now that they're all over a pound, Syd's next big challenge is to wean them off it and back onto regular kitten food.
Chicken is too expensive to be feeding it to kittens that could eat their nice kibble perfectly well if they weren't so picky!
One of the family traditions that I cherish the most is our yearly day trip to Holiday World, a semi-local indie theme park. It started many years ago, solely because two tickets to Holiday World has always been a prize choice for selling 600 boxes of Girl Scout cookies (this year that prize moved up to 650 boxes, because inflation). The first year that the kids sold over 600 boxes of cookies, they excitedly picked out those tickets as prizes, and we had SO much fun there that they've made it a point to choose that prize every year since.
When I was a kid, some of my favorite vacations were trips to semi-local indie theme parks. Dogpatch USA had better theming, but Silver Dollar City had better rides. I was a nervous kid who had trouble learning social scripts, so I particularly adored the feeling of visiting one of these parks a second or third time in my childhood, already knowing the best rides and what I wanted to see the most and what the day, in general, would look like. I no longer have any of those connections with where I grew up, but I really love seeing my kids have a similar relationship to this theme park. It's a cozy, familiar feeling, and it makes me happy to feel like their childhoods have this connection with mine.
The Theming
The theming is pretty brilliant, because holidays aren't copyrighted! It also makes for a fun game of trying to think of new holiday-based lands and rides that should be added. While waiting in line for Wildebeest this year, Matt, Will and I fully fleshed out the New Year's Eve land that the park should totally do--there could be a Tower of Terror-esque drop ride, and an all-ages dance club, and it could be the one area in the park that serves alcohol. We also need a Land of Lesser Holidays, with a St. Patrick's Day dark ride with a leprechaun playing tricks, and an Easter Space Ranger Spin-based dark ride where you can hunt Easter eggs.
The actual Holiday World decorations are kind of cheezy, because I don't know when they were last updated but it was certainly before we started going--also, I think this cat used to move?
But I swear that it's part of the charm!
The Rides
I'm not a particular coaster enthusiast, but I know that many of the roller coasters at Holiday World are considered quite special. Three of the four big coaster are wooden, which is apparently a big deal, although to me, a wooden roller coaster mostly means that you're going to get the crap beat out of you while you ride it. I literally have bruises today from riding The Legend this weekend!
I LOVE the chalkboard drawing of the Headless Horseman, and the way that one of the ride operators rings a giant school bell every time the coaster launches, and all the covered bridges that you go through.
With The Raven, I like checking on my car in the parking lot from the top of the lift hill, and I like flying over the pond.
I also like to ride it again on our way out, because the path from the back to the front of the park is entirely uphill OMG, but The Raven's exit is a little closer to the park entrance than where you get on, so you've 1) saved some steps, 2) had a little rest, and 3) got your adrenalin up for the last bit of the walk.
The Voyage is Will's favorite coaster, and she said this weekend that her personal goal is to ride it four times every visit.
This one in particular about scared the ever-loving snot out of me the first time I rode it, because I had no idea it was going to go THROUGH the ground, then off into the woods, and then I just kept riding it and riding it and thinking, "Surely the ride should have been over by now? Did I die and now I'm riding a roller coaster forever?"
The Thunderbird is Matt's favorite roller coaster. He likes it because it's smooth and it's over quickly, because he doesn't actually like roller coasters:
I think The Thunderbird is super disorienting, because I have to take my glasses off and then it's just flipping me all over the place.
The Holiday World gift shop was offering very nifty little metal models of all of their roller coaster tracks this year, and I LOVED them and thought they would be awesome souvenirs, but just between us, I ain't paying 35 dollars for a spontaneous souvenir. We already spent 35 dollars on a drive-through McDonald's breakfast that morning, something that's so infrequent that when the kids were looking through the McDonald's breakfast menu on my phone, Will literally read the description of the McGriddle out loud to us, her mind blown at the miracle of modern fast food technology. I will cherish in my heart forever the memory of her exclaiming from the backseat, "It's got pancake buns!!! With MAPLE SYRUP FLAVORING!!!" Like, what magic will the world offer her next?
Anyway, I wanted a tiny metal roller coaster model and I didn't buy one. I did find the company that makes them, though, and see? They're super cute!
The Shows
I was VERY SAD to learn that this year, Holiday World didn't have a full-on original musical production going on, but instead had a comedy juggler and a comedy magician. We went to see the comedy magician, and it was miserable. I was so bummed! He kept bringing small children onto the stage and then coaching them through some small-scale trick and then coaching the audience to loudly applaud them so that they could feel like real magicians. I complied, but, I mean, I have spent the past 18 years of my life loudly applauding children performing middling feats of adequacy--I really don't need to also have to do it for strange children in my free time. Especially not when I knew that I was supposed to be watching a full-on original musical production, and it was supposed to be one of my favorite things about the day! Seriously, I kid you not when I tell you that I bring up one or other of the past Holiday World shows in some capacity several times a year; they are EPIC AND I LOVE THEM.
Like an inside joke, these are probably nearly unwatchable if you weren't there at the time, but I have to share them anyway. I will be the first to admit that the actors are not always perfectly on pitch, but that just means that they're singing live, and on whatever random day we happened to visit, at whatever random showtime of the many they had that day, they were absolutely singing and dancing their hearts out. They were all extremely well-rehearsed, and their sincerity and enthusiasm shown through.
Here's the 2019 show, an original jukebox musical with a fun plot and tons of magic tricks:
The 2021 show was less well-crafted, and an unbiased eye would objectively call it bad, but in my VERY biased opinion, it cycled right back around from awful to AMAZING. Some of the song choices were hilariously off-topic (Midwestern boy singing Bruno Mars with 1000% camp enthusiasm? That's me sitting fourth row center, beaming at him and clapping enthusiastically!), and the circus components kept getting more and more ridiculously over-the-top (they don't do it in this video, but when we watched it live, at the end of the opening number some actors came rolling out on top of giant balls like circus bears of yore, and I burst into silent but hysterical laughter and did not stop until twenty minutes after the curtain dropped), but I kid you not when I tell you that I had not enjoyed myself so much since before March 2020.
I think I've mentioned before how much I love outsider art--art, that is, that isn't "professional," isn't studied, isn't, perhaps, polished, but IS nevertheless skilled, sincere, and fresh. I love fanfiction, fan art, folk art, all the lovingly handcrafted bits and bobs on etsy, and, apparently, large-cast productions at local amusement parks.
Also, super randomly, there's a diving pool and they do a diving stunt show several times a day? YOU CANNOT NOT GO TO THE DIVING STUNT SHOW IT IS AWESOME.
The Associated Media
Obviously something isn't fun unless you study for it, so on the drive to Holiday World we listen to episodes from their official podcast:
"The One with the Cat's Meow" was surprising, because they randomly got one of the founders of Meow Wolf as a guest? I LOVE Meow Wolf, so I was stoked. Will and I went to a similar immersive art experience in Columbus, Ohio, so now all I need to do now is plan a trip to Denver, Las Vegas, or Santa Fe!
On the way home that night, I remembered that one of my favorite This American Life episodes revolves around a theme park, so I streamed it for us. My favorite segment from the episode isn't so much about theme parks, but about what is clearly the kindest, most inspiring, and most skilled boss probably anyone has had the privilege to work for.
Okay, I just looked him up, and he has his own website! Looks like he's got a public speaking side hustle, and I say more power to him--if he ever motivationally spoke at an event I attended, I bet anything he would be the first motivational speaker I ever found motivational. Way better than the guy at a Girl Scout all-day thing a few years ago who advised us to let cars cut in front of us because life is too short. Like, Sir. I am a woman. If I let everyone who wanted to cut in front of me cut in front of me, I would never get there.
When the kids were a little younger, I'd sometimes do a theme park physics unit with them around the time of our yearly visit to Holiday World. I'd introduce them to the always amazing Rollercoaster Tycoon, or I'd have them build paper coasters, or sometimes we'd just watch some of these Disney Science of Imagineering videos. It was a little weird not to turn this year's trip into a homeschool lesson!
You know how the mommy bloggers' favorite summertime guilt trip is saying that you only get eighteen summers with your children before they're grown, so MAKE EVERY SECOND COUNT DO NOT REST UNTIL MAGIC PERMEATES EVERY MEMORY? Well, that yearly trip to Holiday World was the final hurrah of Will's eighteenth summer. I'm lucky enough to get one more fall and half a winter with her, still, as she's not heading off to college until January, but the bittersweetness is already there. She won't be selling Girl Scout cookies this winter. We don't even know what adventures she'll be having next summer, or whether they'll include a trip to her favorite little Southern Indiana theme park with her old mum.
I hope they will. I mean, she only managed to ride The Voyage twice this time, so she's got some catching up to do!
They can't replace the real-life observation that we'll be doing later, when we look at lake water through the microscope (OMG don't ever drink lake water, because it is chock-full of protists!!!), but looking at prepared slides is a good way for a student to study anatomy, and specifically to get used to--and see the differences between!--an illustrated diagram of an organism and an actual example of that organism. Real-life critters never look exactly like their diagrams!
In 2017, when the kids were still older elementary/middle school but it was becoming clear that Will, at least would likely want to homeschool through high school, I did OMG TONS of research before buying this microscope, the Levenhuk 320, and I have been so happy with it! This specific model is actually discontinued now, I bought it so long ago, but honestly I'd trust anything from the Levenhuk site. A year later, I even bought the digital camera attachment, and it is also so great. The user interface is very dated, a little clunky, and extremely non-intuitive--
--but once you click around enough to figure out what you're supposed to do, it's fairly seamless to switch between the optical eyepiece and the camera, and to take both photos and videos of the cool stuff you're looking at.
At each magnification, I like to use the optical eyepiece to observe first, then pull that eyepiece out and switch in the camera eyepiece, already plugged into my laptop and set up in the software. Then I can adjust the focus if I need to, and then I can start taking photos and videos.
If you scroll to the bottom of this Wikipedia article, you can see a video of a Euglena that looks very similar to this slide. It would be better if the slide had additional examples of Euglena when it's not a sphere, though.
The large encasement isn't a single cell, like a prokaryote, but instead a gelatinous structure that the cells hang out in. The staining on this slide is a little weird, because Volvox would usually be green.
The best prepared slide in this group is the Spirogyra. Here it is at 40x:
I sourced an illustrated diagram of Euglena, Volvox, and Spirogyra, and Syd's assignment will be to sketch the microscope views at 40x and 100x of each slide, then label the sketches with the features she can identify, using the diagrams as references. I think this will be a good refresher on how to use the microscope and how to sketch microscope observations.
Syd and I are going to be playing around with idioms next week in her Creative Writing study, so it's relevant that I tell you that I needed five four-week-old kittens like I needed a hole in the head.
But to be fair, I did tell her that she needed to choose a regular volunteer commitment this year, and I did tell her that it should be something that she's passionate about. After all, those college application essays aren't going to be writing themselves!
She'd been making some noise about going back to volunteer at the little local food pantry we used to volunteer at weekly when she was a tot, so I thought that's what she'd be doing. Now that she's fully licensed she can even drive herself, so I could just sit my butt down in a quiet home for two hours a week while she built her leadership skills and logged service learning hours and created the foundation of a kick-ass college application essay about food insecurity.
But instead, somehow I found myself putting my name on a quite different volunteer application that she filled out, and then somehow I found myself going with her to pick up a litter of foster kittens. Another volunteer had already claimed the litter of four six-week-old kittens we'd originally planned to pick up, but the staffer said that another litter of five six-week-old kittens had just been dropped off that morning; would we perhaps like to take them, instead?
Five isn't that different from four, so fine.
As the staffer was examining them, though, she was all, "Hmmm... these don't look like they're six weeks old. I think they're more like five weeks."
Five weeks instead of six weeks means they'd spend just one more extra week in our care, so... okay, fine.
A few more minutes, and that became, "Actually, five weeks might be a stretch. I'm going to write them down as four weeks old."
And of course, by then I'd already been petting them, and seen that one is a tortoiseshell and one is a TORBIE!!!!!, so the news that we'd be coming home with one more kitten than planned and keeping them all at least two more weeks than planned sailed right over my head. An hour later, I was sitting on my playroom floor, holding both that tortoiseshell AND that torbie in my hands and giving them kisses on their little fuzzy foreheads!
Here are Socks, a tuxedo, and Athena, the torbie, the bravest of the litter and the first ones out of their travel crate:
The shelter gave them their first set of vaccinations before we took them home, so here are the other three tired babies sleeping off their shots in their travel crate:
And then Socks laid down for a nap, too:
Eventually, everyone was awake at the same time and whoa. It's been wild ever since!
Foster kittens are a LOT more work than it would be to spend two hours a week unloading produce at the food pantry. We've got to keep them isolated from the other household pets, and just sanitizing their area and keeping them cleaned up takes tons of time. They'll happily use the litterbox, but they'll also just as happily use the floor or their bedding--you will not BELIEVE what the kids' bathroom looked like this morning! I gagged, Syd literally almost fainted, and then five bad kitties had to get stuffed back into their travel crate while we spray cleaned and steam mopped and Lysoled the floor and walls.
Seriously, the WALLS!!!! And then we had to come at each of the kittens with a warm washcloth, too. They were furious.
Thankfully, these guys are acting wolfishly healthy so far, wrestling and scampering and growling at each other over the bowl of wet cat food:
And they flock to Syd. Check them out sleeping and sprawling and fighting all over her lap:
A few years ago, a young friend's cat died, and in the condolence letter that I wrote to her, I told her that I believed that cats could sense when you were a person who had been loved by a cat, and she shouldn't be surprised if she found that cats were drawn to her even more now. Of course I didn't actually believe that; it was mostly just a pretty way to express to her that love is never wasted, and I wanted her to still feel like her Lavender's love was with her.
But looking at these five little foster kittens, happy and snug in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms--
--I swear I can almost feel the invisible spirit of Gracie standing there, telling five scared kittens, "Go over and climb on that kid right there. You're going to be so safe and happy with her."
And so they did. And I know that Syd actually has smiled since Gracie died--we've told jokes and had fun and things have, mostly, gone back to normal. She's definitely smiled and laughed, and she's definitely had her happy moments. But she hasn't yet been as happy as she'd been with Gracie, I don't think. I think she always misses her, and I think that remembering Gracie hurts her. I know it hurts me, and it hurts me to see my kid's grief, always just right there below the surface.
So I'd like to imagine that the invisible spirit of Gracie really was there, that first time that those five foster kittens curled up in a cuddle pile in Syd's arms. I'd like to think that in some way Gracie, too, got to be there to see her beloved kid really, truly, genuinely happy again.
During my kid's brief foray into the public school system a couple of years ago, I discovered, to my dismay, that the entire full-year high school Honors Biology class didn't get past ecology! They studied ecosystems, cells, the cell cycle, ecology, and evolution... and then they were done. The kids then had to take a state-mandated standardized test on those topics, and I imagine that for many of them, that was the end of their biology studies.
No plants. No animals. One lab. No MICROSCOPE!!! Like, don't get me wrong, cells and ecosystems and ecology are all super important, and hallelujah my state is at least teaching evolution, but... aren't plants and animals the fun parts of biology? Aren't labs and microscopes the high-interest activities that inspire kids to love science?
Anyway, that's why I feel perfectly justified in turning our homeschool biology study into a two-year course, rounded out with lots of plants, lots of animals, lots of labs, and LOTS of microscope time.
Honors Biology: Year 2 begins with a study of prokaryotes. Please read all of the sections about bacteria in your biology textbook, and master the practice problems, but then, for the love of all that's good and holy and engaging and enriching, let's go do a lab or look through the microscope. Or SOMETHING!!!
My set of AmScope prepared slides does have a few bacteria slides, but I don't love them. The AmScope prepared slides can be really hit or miss--some are absolutely fabulous, including the protist slides we'll look at next, but the bacteria ones weren't worth trying to incorporate into a lesson. Instead, we looked at illustrated diagrams of bacteria, and played around with growing our own.
Which means... sauerkraut!!!!!
Here's the biology lab that I wrote to lead Syd through the scientific process of making sauerkraut. My favorite parts are calculating the correct grams of table salt and testing the sauerkraut's pH. Most sauerkraut recipes call for a cabbage by the head and a specific measurement of salt, usually in tablespoons. There is some wiggle room in the amount of salt in a sauerkraut recipe, but it's much more accurate to weigh the cabbage, then add 2.5% of that weight in as salt.
Because it can sometimes be kind of lonesome to do a lab alone, I recruited a second biology student for this activity:
Which means that we'll get a yummy two quarts and one pint of sauerkraut out of this lab!
If you've never made sauerkraut before, I really like this walkthrough.
I've never had a problem with my sauerkraut spoiling, but if the thought worries you, an airlock system pretty much guarantees success.
To see an example of a scientific paper written on the subject of sauerkraut, check this out. There is a lot of sophisticated study that an interested student could make from sauerkraut!
If you're interested in other ways of incorporating food preservation into a kid's homeschool studies, check out my totally made-up Girl Scout Homesteading badge. So many practical life skills in evidence!
And to follow along with all my homeschool and crafty adventures and mishaps--and to see how yummy our sauerkraut looks when it's done!!!--check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Quilts intended to be given for a specific holiday are the BEST, because you have to finish them!
And that's how the giant denim log cabin quilt that I've been dreaming of for my own bed is still a WIP several years old, with the extra-wide red flannel that I bought to back it narrowly escaping from being accidentally used in every new project I think up, but this quilt, intended as a car play mat for my baby niece's birthday, went from idea to reality in the space of a single summer.
It also happened to get WAY overengineered in the process, but whatever.
After it was pieced, I needed to think up a few applique embellishments. I wanted the embellishments to hint at the purpose for each area--the park, the neighborhoods, the construction zones, the parking lots, the rivers, the roads, the oceans, the dino dig sites--without being too prescriptive. I wanted features that were naturally stationary, so no animals or vehicles. I had trouble figuring out all the pieces that I wanted, and I had trouble clearly explaining my vision, which led to the fun game of people trying to help me by suggesting ideas, and me going, "No. No. No. Nuh-uh. Not that. Um, no. Nope. Not that, either."
Fun fact: that's actually my pet peeve when people do that to ME, so sorry!
I never did end up happy with my choices for the river (I don't think the piers look like piers) or the construction zones (I think these cones are oversized compared to the other elements)--
--but I love how everything else turned out. I used all stash for the applique pieces, and almost all materials upcycled from other garments, so I think there's a lot of fun texture variety that will appeal to a toddler.
There's toweling for the beach!
And work pants, quilting cotton, and bias tape for the houses!
I like the idea that this will be both a play mat and a snuggly quilt. The cotton batting will be comfy on little knees, and cozy on little sleepyheads!
I don't know why I can never have any peace when I'm working on the floor. These photos are just a glimpse of ALL THE DRAMA that took place on this spot.
Jones was in the way and screaming his head off, so Syd thought she'd distract him by giving him some catnip off the hanging planter in the window.
It distracted him, alright, but only to the extent that he rolled and ran around screaming all over my quilt that I was trying to trim, hollering for more catnip.
And then Spots heard him and she came hunting for catnip, too, and then they both started hallucinating mice under the quilt and attacking it.
During this time, I also learned that Will does NOT think that traveling on foot through Antarctica is a legitimate path of exploration, and especially not if you fly to the continent. And if you do go there and get stuck and nearly die, you nevertheless have no business asking a whaling vessel or a tug boat to pause its legitimate business to come save you and your crew, because you knew full well what you were getting everyone into.
So that's that, everyone! Please consult with Will before planning your next trek.
I barely had enough of that stash cotton batting for this quilt, and I'm going to be very sad the next time I start a new quilt and find myself having to buy new batting. But that's a problem for Future Julie! Present Julie also found a grey flat sheet in the stash that matches the grey flannel roads perfectly. I'd been holding onto that sheet because I thought it was the one that I was going to use to make the final blackout curtain in my bedroom, but I compared it to the other two curtains and it doesn't quite match, so
Where is the sheet that matches, so I can make that curtain?
Where did this sheet come from, and what did I intend to use it for?
Well, whatever it was meant to be, it's a quilt back now!
When it comes to quilting the lines on grey flannel roads, it's Frixion pens for the win!
I didn't even iron the marks away, just washed and dried the quilt and those marks and the chalk marks on the black flannel roads disappeared like magic!
A back-to-front blanket binding...
... and my road map quilt is finished!
But, of course, the most important question: is it fun?
Better get out the Hot Wheels and see:
It's fun!!!
Here are some cars parked in the bias tape parking lot:
And here are some in the park, parked by the waffle shirt and inside-out sweatshirt tree:
Because our baby niece lives in California, Matt designed her a palm tree, and I made it from some T-shirt and dress pants fabric and put it in the park:
The construction cones are blocking off the construction zone so that non-work vehicles stay out:
There are a couple of houses already in the neighborhoods, just waiting for some building block and LEGO neighbors:
And if you ever want to do some paleontology, this is the place to do it!
After work, you can drive to the beach to relax:
You might remember that for a while I was super worried that the quilt would be, just, ridiculously big--like, her parents have to have enough floor space to lay it down, for goodness' sake!--but now that it's finished, I don't think it's too large:
I mean, it IS pretty big--that's Matt's head just barely visible over the top of it, so it's a good six feet!
But the child simply HAS to have enough room to spread out. It's no fun if you can't spread out!
Syd suggested that for upcoming holidays, I should create quilts with different small world themes to connect to this one. Like, you could drive to the outer space quilt to the north, or the deep ocean quilt to the south. Perhaps a mountain range to the east, complete with castle and dragon?
Thinking up new ideas might be the best part of handmade presents!
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