Things I Love About Summer

I know, technically it's not summer yet, but it's our summer break, and we're enjoying it so far!  So, here are some things we are loving so far about our unstructured time during our summer break.

Ice cream!  We had Neapolitan ice cream to remind us of the Trinity... we topped them with nuts, chocolate chips, and coconut to make Trinity Sundaes for Trinity Sunday!

Short hair!  Cecilia has a new summer haircut to keep her hair off her neck... she's never had it cut this short before, and she loves it!  I cut off more than I meant to, but I think she's glad about that!  Caroline got a hair cut too, but I took her to Mastercuts at the mall since she's working on growing out her bangs, and I didn't trust myself to  even it out and taper the bangs so they looked decent...

Free time in the out of doors!  They can get dirty, messy, wet... Caroline's digging dirt to make a mud pie, I think, in this shot... she's also wearing dress-up clothes over her regular clothes.  I had to send her inside to take it off because she'd gotten mud on the dress, so I had to wash it.  We have a no dress-up clothes for dirty play policy here.  They have plenty of regular clothes that aren't dressy, so they can get dirty in those!

Fresh basil!  The kids like to pick it and eat it off the plant, or tear it up and put it in a jar of water for "herb stew," as they call it.  

Honeysuckles!  I showed Cecilia how to pick the flower apart to get the drop of honey out... we have lots of these growing beside our carport.

Mud pies!  Here's Caroline with her mud pie, topped with a few blueberries.  This is what childhood should be: the freedom to just play without adult guidance or rules when school is out!  One thing I want to try hard to do is not overschedule my children.  I don't think they need to take a bunch of classes and lessons outside of their schoolwork.  School, ballet, and church activities are plenty for elementary school, in my opinion.  Then they have so much more time to do things like this, to play with siblings and friends, to observe and enjoy nature around them, and the best part: they rarely complain "I'm bored!" because they aren't used to be constantly entertained in structured or contrived activities all the time.  Okay, end of rant. ;)  And I'm thinking on where would be best in our yard for a nice mud pit to enable more of this kind of play...

Fresh tomatoes from the garden!  This year, I bought bigger plants which were apparently already well enough established that we were unable to kill them. ;)  They have at least doubled in size and are giving us lots of nice tomatoes currently!  Hoping this lasts... we've had poor success with gardening in recent years.  These plants were purchased from a local person who raises lots of plants on his property about ten minutes from our house.

We have three varieties of tomatoes: Rutgers is one type, and I can't remember the other two now...

Chris moved the garden boxes to a spot where they get more direct sunlight, and I think this has helped them to do better this year!

Fresh blueberries from the backyard!  Our berry bushes are doing very well, so we're picking about a cup or so of blueberries each day right now.  They'll go into the freezer for future baking and for stirring into yogurt.  I think we'll have some of the fresh ones on our cereal in the morning, mmm!

Food cooked with our home-grown food!  Blueberry muffins and an egg-veggie casserole... with our own eggs from our hens, who aren't laying very well right now.  I had to save eggs for a week to have enough for this!  Maybe the hens are starting to show their age...

Baby birds!  We continue our nature study year round, and this is an example of why.  There are always new things to notice all around our yard!  We think this nest belongs to a sparrow... she flies away so quickly that we haven't gotten a close look at her.  The first egg actually hatched yesterday, so we'll be checking each day to notice the changes!  The nest is in a small bush near our garden.

Watermelon!  What, these don't look like watermelons to you? ;)  The hens enjoy the rinds after we eat the best part!  That reminds me that Lucy seems to know the word "hens" - she looks for them when I say the word.  She also seems to be beginning to understand the words "wave" and "baby," and she knows Caroline, Cecilia, Mommy, and Daddy.

Extra cooking time!  With not doing school comes extra time in which we can bake together (if it's not too hot to turn on the oven, that is!)... the girls wanted to make gingerbread because a girl in a book the read had gingerbread and ate it outside in her secret tunnel, so they did the same.  This had crystallized ginger in it too, mmmm!

Extra project time!  We have more time now to follow the whims of our artsy girls... they wanted rag dolls like Laura and Mary Ingalls had, and Caroline found directions in a book for making dills from old socks.

Here they are with the finished dolls... sock bodies filled with stuffing, button eyes, embroidered mouths, yarn hair.

Cecilia's is named Charlotte if she's pretending to be Laura...

...and Caroline's is named Nettie when she's pretending to be Mary.  Otherwise, the names change.

And another project they have enjoyed: finger-knitting.  Caroline and I learned from a youtube video.  Cecilia learned in one day from watching Caroline and me (though she doesn't always cast off so that it gets tied right at the end and it sometimes unravels as a result).  She made me this bracelet.  She finger knits left-handed, interestingly, although she draws right-handed.

School Stuff from February

Well, I have some fun stuff we did for school way back almost two months ago... first, we made a landform cookie cake!!  This is something I made up on my own back when I taught third grade... with my students, they'd make landform cookies after completing a study of landforms.  Each child got a sugar cookie and had to decorate it with at least ten different landforms.  So, with my own kids, I thought even bigger and went for a huge cookie cake to decorate with landforms!

We started out with a chocolate chip walnut cookie cake recipe that I modified slightly (subbing whole wheat flour and Sucanat).  I made it on our largest pizza pan (what, you don't have multiple pizza pans?  We have three - and I didn't buy a one of them!).  Once it had cooled, I cut the "shoreline."  Caroline gave me a diagram of how it should look after I explained to her that the cookie cake was like part of a large continent and the pizza pan was the ocean.  Then I whipped up some basic frosting (cream cheese, I think?) and tinted it with our natural food colors (which don't always work super-well, but they did nicely here... bright fake green for the land would look weird anyway).

Here's Caroline's plan next to the completed landform cookie cake.  I always had my students draw a plan first too, and then I took photos of their cookies to evaluate them later.  Nice thing about homeschooling: I don't have to fill out a rubric to give this project an actual "grade!"

Close-up: ocean, island, bay, mesa, peninsula

You can click on this to see it better... she ended up including lots of landforms.  In addition to the ones mentioned above, there were mountains, a volcano, hills, rivers, tributaries, oxbow lakes, regular lakes, a delta, an isthmus, a glacier, plains... and we talked about where the sources, mouths, and confluences of the rivers were.

And boy, was it yummy!!!

For about a week, his little guy visited our maple tree in the afternoons while we were outside.  He spent a lot of time on our neighbor's maple, too, and he made lots of holes.  We observed how wet the tree was around the holes he'd made and how the fresh sap attracted insects.

Here's a closer shot... we identified the bird as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.

The next week, we participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count.  By then, this guy had moved on, but we still got to identify lots of birds, including house finches, cardinals, crows, chickadees, tufted titmouses/titmice (?  they aren't even rodents, so I don't get their name at all!), mockingbirds, and a brown thrasher.  We now know the scolding call of our mockingbirds quite well, and even Cecilia will say, "There's Mocker!" upon hearing it, without even seeing the bird.  We have been reading The Burgess Bird Book and learning lots of interesting things about birds this year!

Here are the girls at our nature club one day...

one of the few days it was actually cool enough for long sleeves...

And now for cute baby photos... she's much older now than she was in these photos!

between 4.5-5 months, I think closer to 4.5

hmm, a bit over 5 months, I think?

and these were taken the day she turned five months.. now she's over 6.5 months!

Advent 2011

A few things we did this year during Advent... St. Lucy bread on the 13th!  Chris made the recipe for us the night before so it'd be ready for breakfast.  He's so good at keeping the extra stuff (and the regular stuff!) going while I'm mothering the bitty one. :)  This day will be a fun one to celebrate in the future with our own Lucy!

The girls about to blow out candles on the wreath-shaped bread.

Our Christmas baking this year consisted of non-baked goodies that were easy to assemble: M&M pretzel dots, Christmas bark, and caramel popcorn.  No gingerbread men this year; maybe in 2012...

Cecilia and Caroline helped with the "baking." We always enjoy being able to put work into homemade treats to give as gifts.

The girls frosted a gingerbread house kit for the O Antiphon that begins with "ruler of the house of Israel," like last year.  This kit was particularly helpful in that the house came pre-assembled!

Cecilia adds an ornament to the Jesse Tree.  We enjoyed doing the Holy Heroes Advent Adventure and following Jesus's family tree.

And now that it's Chris's birthday, January 14, maybe I'll actually get around to putting away the Jesse Tree, along with the Christmas cards and other random decor that's out and about our house!

St. Nicholas Day 2011

Yes, it happened over a month ago, but I am finally recording it here... new baby laziness syndrome going on here. ;)  I want to try to catch up a bit....

So, St. Nicholas Day was on December 6th.  The girls set their shoes out the night before, and in the morning they were found filled with goodies!  

This year, the shoes contained walnuts, holy cards (St. Andrew is visible - his feast day typically falls right at the beginning of Advent), and St. Nicholas chocolate coins to represent the story of Nicholas tossing gold coins into the home of  poor family.

Cecilia was excited about the chocolate!  St. Nicholas also left two new books for Advent, plus a box of candy cane Joe Joe's, which are apparently a much-coveted product at Trader Joe's as soon as they hit the shelves each year... my mom and I were buying them and another customer said, "Oh, you'd better get another box of those - they're so good and will be eaten quickly, and when you come back in a week, Trader Joe's will be sold out already!"  This man and his son were each carrying a box or two of the cookies.  My mom said that  they must be good since she just saw a lady with four boxes in the next aisle.  The man said, "That's my wife."  

I just bought one box.  Probably a good thing since the 2/5 of pregnancy weight I had lost hasn't budged any further (and in fact got worse over Christmas with all the yummy eating).

We have had a fancier breakfast on this day in the past few tears to set it apart as special.  Well, I wasn't up to preparing the candy cane shaped sweet bread this year, so my incredible husband did it!!  Caroline was really excited, since she remembers this bread from years past and enjoyed having it as our little family tradition.

enjoying her St. Nicholas breakfast!

Oh, and this was the evening before... we had our St. Nicholas pork and apples dinner, again in part thanks to my hubby, who cooked the meat so I wouldn't spatter grease on the little slingling.  

During the day, Caroline did some St. Nicholas copywork, we read St. Nicholas books and sang songs about him, and the girls made this fun set of paper figures that I printed from St. Nicholas Center.  

In the afternoon, we were invited by my sweet friend to come over to make St. Nicholas cookies!  Making cookies has been fun for us in the past years, but all that dough-rolling and icing-piping didn't sound very easy for me to manage with a baby.  So what a treat for them to have all the dough made and everything ready at their house!  The girls and I still got to help without the stress I would have faced trying to do it on my own.  And yes, my husband probably would have taken on the cookies too, but this way he didn't have to, and we got to still take part in the cookie tradition.

Yum!!  I just love this recipe!

and so does Cecilia, apparently!

St. Nicholas, pray for us!