Pets

The kids want to get another cat. MrV feels we should wait until one of the current cats dies (not that outlandish, since Geriatric Cat has had some close calls in the past few months).

So I suggested that they have Pet Deer.




They hang out in our yard for hours at a time. They eat the acorns and the saplings and the cotoneasters there.

In the evening they hunker down on the lawn, folding those graceful slender legs under them.

And when it's quite dark out, they invite the buck over to, ahem, "make Bambis".

They also potty all over the yard.

And move out of the sunlight as soon as I try to take a picture of them, and generally glare at me like I'm invading their space (which, as a cat owner, I'm pretty used to).

I'm sharing this mostly because I like the picture

You Are 74% Creative

You are beyond creative. You are a true artist - even if it's not in the conventional sense of the word. You love creating for its own sake, and you find yourself quite inspired at times.

How Creative Are You?

Except I don't much like the white pencils in the center -- too much white.

(There's a question on the quiz about appreciating input from others. My answer was definitely "no" on that. And I was apparently right, since other people do things like put the white pencils in the wrong place.)

I found the quiz at Good Yarns.

By the way, I'm also sharing this because I've been up since about 5am and have a vague sense that I should be doing something more productive than looking at sewing patterns online. Actually sewing the fabric that's over there on the table, for example, would be more productive. But I'm not quite ready to commit to being that awake yet. So I'm writing. It's easier to erase/delete bad writing than it is to rip bad seams.

Absurd Math

SInce we are currently operating without a 6th/7th grade math program, Kid1 is spending her time playing Absurd Math.

Except she wants to do it All. The. Time. And she does it on the computer I use to read blogs and check email and load pictures.

If you don't hear from me, it's due to massive math practice sessions.

Ordinary Time

I love that we're in "Ordinary Time" now. It has such a cool sound to it, don't you think? Like maybe we've been wandering around in a temporal rift for the past few months, but now we've found our way out to Ordinary Time.

And, yes, I know that it's about ordinal numbers (link is to wikipedia article on what "ordinary time" means). But I still like the play on words.

So, since we're back to the ordinary, it's time to get back to homeschooling, right? Actually we started back last week, although on a light schedule. Since there were only three days we schooled, our subjects that fit neatly into 4-day-weeks didn't happen. Here's our homeschool check-in:

Kid1 had taken a long break from Rosetta Stone Spanish, mostly because the computer decided it no longer cared to mess with the CD. I called Rosetta Stone for help. "My disk is dead! Wah!" The service person spent 2 hours on the phone trying to get it to run. He was quite willing to go the distance and spend however many hours it took, but I was getting antsy and suggested that perhaps the problem was with the computer rather than the disk, and I would call back if I felt the need. Believe me, Rosetta Stone may cost a lot, but they really supported the product that day.

Now we have a shiny new computer, and the disk is working quite well, thank you. Except she likes to spend 4 days on each Rosetta Stone unit, so she couldn't start back with it until this week.

And her approach to Latin for Children generally takes 4 days per chapter, so she also took a break from that. Instead, she played around with my Lingua Latina book and disk. I had ordered it way back when, but was afraid to put the disk in the old computer, what with it getting all touchy about disks. We had fun messing around with it last week on the new computer. She's almost done with the first level of Latin for Children -- I think we'll discuss alternating Latin for Children with Lingua Latina.

And for math.... Um. Well. Kid1 has completed all of RightStart, and I had this vague idea that Teaching Textbooks would be a good next step. Except Teaching Textbooks is a computer-based program, and we were having computer issues. Last week, once we had a viable computer up and running I had her take the placement test for pre-Algebra. Alas, she decided she didn't feel confident about multiplying and dividing fractions -- she can do it once I remind her how, but she doesn't come up with the "how" on her own. So she doesn't feel ready to plunge into pre-Algebra, and I'm okay with that considering she's in 6th grade. But Teaching Textbooks middle school math programs don't run on a Mac. And the shiny new computer is a Mac. Sigh. So we're sort of operating without a math program at the moment, which is sort of tough when you're trying to center your curriculum on Latin and math.

Science will probably continue to be rather ad hoc. We go to the Science Center for classes. We go to the zoo for classes. We go on nature walks. We work on science-related Scout badges.

History has been rather disjoint. We have Sonlight Core 6, and have been reading the books on an erratic basis. It has some fun books, we've just been too busy with other stuff to read many of them.

Kid1 continues to enjoy the Bravewriter Boomerang forums. I like having all of the dictation laid out for me, as well as notes on the current book (right now they're reading Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank). I also like that she's getting a chance to discuss books with other kids her age -- we haven't hooked up with a local book club, and this seems to fill that gap. Plus Julie (Mrs. Bravewriter) does a great job of leading the discussion (I peek at the forum sometimes, but don't tell Kid1, okay? because she wants this to be her thing, not mine).

Edited to add: Julie has a blog post about her online classes here that offers some insight into some of the advantages of an online book discussion. I always feel so apologetic about having Kid1 do this stuff online instead of in a class. I think I need to get over that.

And we are poised to start Classical Writing Homer now that life has returned to ordinary, and we no longer are running around like crazed maniacs with too much to do in too little time.

Kid2 has been chugging along in RightStart C. So far it's been easy and enjoyable for her.

We also work on First Language Lessons, and are somewhere in the second year. I think we've just about gotten to the part where it gets dreadfully dull and becomes a matter of surviving until the end of the book.

Kid2 works on Prima Latina, which I also feel is dreadfully dull. But she wants to do Latin. I'm so glazed over by this program I'm unable to see how to liven it up.

She follows along with science and history with her older sister.

We have no grand plans to overhaul our system, nor thoughts of adding exciting new subjects (other than coming up with an actual math program for Kid1 so we don't have to wing it each day). We have about 2 months of calm before the craziness of life explodes again all over our calm little homeschool days. March is going to be a doozy; I'm already dreading it.

Calendar

Time to put up a new calendar!

This year we purchased the Fairy Tale Moons calendar from the Biodynamic Farming Assoc., and, oh, it is gorgeous. We're all quite smitten with it.

It has lovely pictures. It has snippets of fairy tales -- just enough to whet your interest so you want to run to the library and check out the full version. It has all sorts of interesting information written on the dates -- today is the 10th Holy Night, and the Earth is at perihelion, meaning it is closest to the Sun on its path. Yesterday's snippet told about Thoth and Osiris, and Egyptian mythology about the first 5 days of the year; other days have quotes or historical events.

In the back we have information about, let's see, pole stars, and Gregorian vs. Julian calendar, and Copernican system vs, Tychonic system, and other items of this ilk ... a star map of constellations mentioned in the calendar ... suggestions of how to use the calendar (I aspire to be a Milky Way Master, but admit that we'll probably end up as Big Dipper Basics).

There's no room on this calendar to write appointments and such. That business belongs on the planner, not this beauty. This calendar hangs on the wall, and we stop and look at it every day, gaze at the picture, discuss what we read.

The calendar is also available from Bob and Nancy's Waldorf Bookshop, but if I go there I will end up clicking to go to Colorsong Yarn and then end up wasting an hour scrolling my mouse over hanks of yarn so I can see the pretty colors show up on my screen, all the while debating whether I should get a Goldilocks shawl kit. So, it's best for me to avoid putting items in a cart at that particular website, since I get a little too enthusiastic.

The Joyce Country Ceili Sweater

We loaded up in the car to go visit Mom and Dad. We took plenty of CDs to listen to, and I took Twist to work on.

And, for some obscure reason, all the way there we listened to The Saw Doctors, and I knit away on my cabled Twist. I felt very Celtic.

Well, I say we listened to The Saw Doctors. Mostly we listened to The Joyce Country Ceili Band:



Although we also liked "Will It Ever Stop Raining" plenty. It's nearly as much fun. I can't find a clip for it, which is a shame. You should really go buy the CD so you can hear it.

After about 4-5 hours of this, we emerged from the car with Irish accents and a tendency to interject "Boomshakalakalaka" into conversations. And Twist had become a Ceili sweater.

I continued to knit on Twist all weekend (while humming to myself a random assortment of Saw Doctor tunes). I finished the back, we got in the car to head home, we turned on the CD, I reached in my knitting bag to start the left front....

OH NO! I didn't bring the needles I needed to cast on the front ribbing! Five hours in the car, and no knitting!

So I amused myself by loading various CDs in the player. No more of The Saw Doctors (well, not as much as in the original trip).

We got home, unloaded the car, put everything away, and sat down to take a breather. And the knitting gods smiled upon me, because Star Trek TNG "First Contact" was on, so we all HAD to sit and watch it. That left front is just flying along:




Okay, confession: it was also knit during Monty Python and the Holy Grail on New Year's Eve. And I think there's some Marx Brothers in there, too. Is it any wonder I'm thinking this is a fun knit? Fun things happen when I knit it!

The Fog Is Lifting

If I've had something nourishing to eat and a nap I can go maybe three hours in a fairly coherent state. It helps if I spend that time fairly quietly.

I've been knitting on Twist



in Cascade 220 superwash. I got about this far in the cables and realized that I had neglected to change needles to the larger size once I'd finished the rib. I calmly ripped back to the rib, inserted a needle in all the loose stitches, and knitted back up to this point. I was too tired to be anything but calm.

I have been taking online quizzes

You Are a Cranberry and Popcorn Strung Tree

Christmas is all about showcasing your creative talents. From cookies to nicely wrapped presents, your unique creations impress everyone.

What Christmas Tree Are You?

Hat tip to Drew. This picture is pretty funny when you consider that we just had the "garland discussion" while setting up the tree last week. MrV favors the tinsel sort of garland (MrV would probably come out of the quiz as a fiber optic tree, if that's an option). I kept saying, "We could string popcorn, or make paper chains out of construction paper!". Yep, that's me, stringing popcorn for the tree, sending out the handmade Christmas cards, knitting up presents. (In the end we put some gold beaded garland we already had on the tree. We have so many handmade ornaments that garland is superfluous.)

I also discovered here that I am most like The Librarian (no surprise there) or maybe Death (probably due to my tendency to talk in capital letters; also, I'm on the skinny side), followed distantly by Carrot. None of which makes sense if you don't read Terry Pratchett's books. I discovered this quiz via Ravelry when I joined the Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild, by the way. Amazing what you can discover on Ravelry, especially when you're too groggy to do anything but click on links.

In the meantime, while I've been sitting quietly to one side, the kids have been busy cleaning the house. We are hosting a sleepover tonight (this may be really dumb given that I'm sick; or maybe it's really brilliant). They have handed me a list of planned activities, which includes building a roaring fire so they can cook dinner over open flames, then watching about 20 full length movies. Sounds fine to me. I'll be curled up with my box of tissues and my knitting.

Zooming Down the Road to Bethlehem

Years ago someone gave us a book that had cardstock nativity figures you could punch out and set up. The book also had a little story you could read each day as you set the figures up little by little.

Which is fine, except we have tons of stories to be read every day in Advent, and the story in this book was rather dorky. But the kids wanted to punch out the little cardstock figures and set them up because they like that sort of thing -- it has a sort of paper doll vibe to it. And I didn't want to have random nativity figures strewn all over the house (well, more than we already do), getting all tatty and ripped.

So I came up with a sort of compromise -- we would use the cardstock nativity, but we would read a different story. We would use The Light in the Lantern. Of course, this involved getting other stuff into the scene we were setting up, as our cardstock set didn't come with, say, squirrels or spiders or rabbits. But we sort of had fun finding stuff all over the house to use to illustrate the story as we set it up little by little.

And, of course, the next year we did it again. And again. It had become a tradition. Except I don't think cardstock figures are exactly made to be used year after year.

And this year when we were getting out the Christmas stuff I just sort of left the bag of them laying there. No one seemed to notice that they were missing. "Ah," I though, "the kids have outgrown this. Which is fine, since I'm sick of this particular nativity set."

On Monday of this week Kid2 suddenly announced, "WE FORGOT TO DO THE LIGHT IN THE LANTERN!"

Egads. My bad -- I should've known that household traditions are household traditions, and must be laid to rest carefully, not casually overlooked and forgotten.

The book has 28 stories in it, enough to read one per day for four weeks. And it's about a week until Christmas.

So we did the entire first week (mineral kingdom) on Monday. The entire second week (plants) on Tuesday. And the third week (animals) yesterday. Mother Mary and Joesph are setting speed records on the road to Bethlehem.



Fortunately, we are pretty speedy about about getting our props. We no longer break open a new geode for the story about the boulder in their path -- I just save the same one to use from year to year. Run and get some jagged rocks from around the air coniditioner compressor, plunk down a shot glass with water and glitter in it for the well, the squirrel is in the Playmobil, the spider is in the box of Halloween decorations ... on and on.

Mother Mary keeps falling on her face, possibly due to the blistering pace, or possibly due to the fragile nature of cardstock figures. We have lost the sheep's horns. I have been campaigning to pitch the cardstock figures and get something else. Kid2 is tending to agree (although given how sick I am this week, the kids are being pretty agreeable to everything -- my complaints about the cardstock figures are a welcome break from my complaints that my head is going to explode or my eyeballs are going to fall out next time I sneeze, and today we have the entire new issue of how much my chest hurts when I cough or clear my throat and I might be dying here, do I really have to spend my final moments on Earth setting up these cardstock figures that keep knocking over?).

If we do keep the storybook but ditch the cardstock, I'd like to make some new figures. Out of wool. Using the concept of the angel off the front cover of Living Crafts, which is a magazine that I just discovered this week at Michaels and like so much that I want to sleep with it under my pillow. Many of my thoughts this week seem to center on "sleep" and "pillow", though, so this might not be a good measure.

Today we should catch up with the story, and be able to enter Bethlehem with grace and dignity. Assuming I live that long. Have I mentioned how much my chest hurts every time I cough?

Tuesday Teatime

Teatime took place in the living room next to the Christmas tree.

Our menu was hot chocolate (in Christmas mugs) and Reindeer Nose Cookies (on Christmas plates). We had purchased the cookies Monday at the zoo; Kid2 had seen them in the gift shop and commented that we should get them for Tuesday teatime.

(An aside: Parking in the parking lots was free at the zoo on Monday. I don't know if that was due to the crummy weather. Maybe they figured that whoever showed up could just park wherever they want?)

And our reading? Need I even tell you what it was? Twas the Night Before Christmas, of course. This was followed by several pages of The Story of Santa Claus.

Teatime is a great way to take a break during the holiday!

Cheap Filler Because I Am Tired*

This is the sweater I was wearing yesterday:



I'm not sure when I knit it. I know I had it in the early 80s, when I was going through a phase in which I made most of my own clothes (note that this was before I had kids). The yarn is acrylic, and is sportweight; this was back before we had a lot of that newfangled DK stuff.

It may be one of my first attempts at intarsia. The design is all knitted in -- I suck at duplicate stitch. That bit of blue along the shoulders is a horseshoe pattern. And, yes, I really would decide to do an entire intarsia sweater without really knowing how to do the required technique because, well, it's only knitting. What's the worst that could happen if you flub it up?

I have no idea why I still have this sweater. Many sweaters have been knit, loved, worn over and over, and eventually discarded. In some cases I've saved the patterns of those discarded sweaters because I have it in the back of my mind that I want to knit them again someday.

I'm glad I saved this one, though. It's nice to have momentos from the past, especially momentos that are actually useful.


* I expected a busy weekend involving a piano recital, having to be at church at 7:30am. dance class, having 1 (quiet) friend over for a playdate. I did not expect 6 inches of snow, along with the accompanying need to shovel everything and have large herds of children tromping through the house in wet boots and snow pants looking for hot chocolate during sledding breaks. Also, we now have an extra adult winter coat in our kitchen -- where did that come from? Yeesh. I'm too tired to call around and figure out who it belongs to.

Halfway There!

(Okay, we're a little more than halfway there, but we lost our Internet connection yesterday.)

We have celebrated St. Nicholas Day on the 5th. He left wee little painting sets in the kids' shoes. They were immediately used to paint tiny little landscapes. Perfect for dollhouses.



If you need a painting set like this but were passed by on St. Nicholas day, Michael's carries them in the $5 bin with all the cheapy stocking stuffers. They come with that doll-sized duffle bag you see in the background.


We have worked on our Christmas cards. They are based on a design in Family Fun magazine -- you can see a proto-type there in the foreground. We aren't done with this project yet, but are moving along briskly.



We listen to Christmas music while working on cards. When "I Saw Three Ships" comes on we must halt production and dance a jig because we CAN.

We have celebrated St. Lucia Day on the 13th. This is a popular holiday at our house -- it's Swedish and involves lots of candles and a chance to dress up (white dress and red sash). What's not to like?



I thought the crayons in lieu of candles were quite creative. She is carrying a tiny brownie (actually a piece of sponge painted brown) and a tiny glass of milk (a plastic communion cup with a cotton ball in it). These are both items from the Brownie Swap meet last week -- Kid2 took off the safety pins for Kit's entrance as St. Lucia.

And we've been to see The Man.



I think in this shot he's asking Kid2 if her room is clean. He spent quite a long time talking to them. He remembered them from last year, which was ... magic.

Swaps and Exchanges

The Brownie troop exchanged Swaps as a Christmas party activity. The kids made the swaps ahead of time, then handed them out at the party.

Kid2 decided that she wanted to make tiny little marshmallows-on-sticks. She loooooves to toast marshmallows in a fire, so it seemed appropriate.

She made the marshmallows out of white Crayola Model Magic. A tiny package made lots and lots of faux marshmallows. As she made the marshmallows she stuck a tiny twig through each one.



After they were dry she hot glued pins to the back. (Her sister nabbed a pinless one to use for dolls to play campout.)



Very cute. Many people were thought that she used actually mini-marshmallows that she had allowed to dry.

The Junior troop had a cookie exchange -- a half dozen cookies for each girl, homemade or purchased.

Kid1 decided to make meringues, which are basically whipped egg white and sugar baked at low temperature (250F). She added a little vanilla, peppermint extract, and also some mini chocolate chips.



It was her first time whipping egg whites into meringues. We don't have the equipment to pipe them out nicely on the cookie sheets, so they're sort of blobby.

But I think the final presentation looked appealing:



In other Christmas news, the tree is in the house and set up. I need to go get more lights, as one of our strands gave out. In the course of all of this putting-up-of-tree I've come to the conclusion that I'm mildly allergic to Frasier Fir -- my arms were splotchy and itchy from handling it, and my nose was stuffing up while I was around it. MrV offered to pitch the whole thing and come up with something else, but I think I can survive the next couple of weeks. But I'm thinking that we might look for a new artificial tree in the post-holiday sales.

If I Had Two More Yards of Yarn

This is how much black Cascade 220 I have:



I'd like to knit 2-3 more rows in black. That's all. If I could knit 2-3 more rows, I could finish this scarf without having to do much thinking.

But, the yarn is totally gone. As it stands now, the ends don't match -- the beginning has a nice, substantial black border, the end has just a couple of rows of black.

I like that the scarf has 5 complete octaves. It would look wonky to rip out, say, a single black key. Especially since this is a gift for a piano teacher (I think she'd notice, know what I mean?). I like the current length of the scarf. Mrs. Piano Teacher is tall. So I don't want to rip out an entire half-octave.

And since Mrs. Piano Teacher is a knitter, she'll look at how things are cast on and bound off. Really. We actually chat about various cast-ons (casts on?).

So, here I sit, having to actually think about what I'm doing. Which is a shame, because this was a wonderfully mindless knit while we were travelling this past weekend. The illusion knitting takes just enough attention to keep you from dozing off.

The last time I'll see her before Christmas is at a recital next Saturday. I have until then to contemplate what to do. And a little voice in my head is saying, "take it to this week's piano lesson, show it to her and ask her how she would handle it -- she won't know it's for her." Hee.

(The travelling this past weekend was the first family Christmas get together. Gifts were wrapped, delivered, opened, oohed and aahed over. One down! More to come!)

Traditions

Every year I trade out the (quite heavy and large) every day dishes for the (quite heavy and large) Christmas dishes. Then, at the end of Chritsmastide, I trade them back.



It's a lot of work to unpack and repack those dishes twice a year. And when I pack them I do it well enough that we can load up the boxes onto a moving van. Our lifestyle dictates that sort of forethought.

We also unpack and repack the Fontanini manger scene every year. Early in Advent, the gang just sort of hangs out. Here are some of the crew, sailing the good ship Faber and Faber across the sea:



Later on they sailed on into the family room to watch a movie with us.

In the meantime, the Wise Men were hanging out on the coffee table (currently covered in green fleece for the occasion):



Did you know that they didn't get along? It's true. The guy with the gold started calling the guy carrying frankincense "Frankie", so Frankincense Man started getting all sneery and calling Gold Guy "Goldielocks". I have no idea what role Mr. Myrrh plays in all of this, but the whole thing started getting really ugly. It's no wonder the rest of the gang left the Wise Men stranded there on Coffee Table Island.

Of course, by Christmas Eve this will all settle down, MrV will read the Bible story of Christmas, and the kids will act it out using the Fontanini set. It's a cool tradition.

And, let's see, we have numerous Advent calendars going. We celebrate St. Nicholas Day and St. Lucia Day. Lots and lots of traditions. Beautiful, meaningful traditions.

So why, when Kid1's Sunday School discussed family Christmas traditions, did she choose to tell everyone about the freezer-burnt chicken nuggets for Christmas Eve supper? It started in a year that was such a low spot in our Christmas celebrations, having to do with incredibly icky weather, excited little kids whose priority was making butter cookies for Santa instead of making sure we had edible food in the house for supper, and all those stupid luminarias the neighborhood insisted we should all do (it's really hard to light the candles in luminarias when you have strong winds at about -5F -- your lighter stops working, and you can pretty much stick your fingers right into a lit match and barely feel warmth -- just a little tip from me to you). Believe it or not, the chicken-nugget tradition has gone downhill from there. But I always considered it our family's little secret, not to be shared with the general public.

It's moments like this that I realize I've lost control of the magic of Christmas. My children's Christmas memories are apparently full of bizarro, whacky events that we keep stumbling through. Which is probably more fun, come to think of it.

Deer-Approved Christmas Tree

In the past we've been artificial-tree people. MrV thinks it's stupid to kill a tree just to stick it in our living room for a couple of weeks, plus cats don't climb artificial trees as much. Plus they're cheaper over the course of several years, especially if you keep using the same artificial tree year after year after year, to the point that your kids associate the plastic smell of the tree with Christmas.

But we knew some people with a tree lot. So we decided to get a real tree.

We got in our car here in Major Metropolitan Area, drove down Fairly Busy St. and stopped to turn left onto Cut-Through St. (which goes over to Really Busy St., which leads to Extremely Busy Avoid-It-If-You-Can St.). Out of nowhere, 4 deer appeared, and went trotting down the sidewalk into the night. They looked like trick-or-treaters, except they weren't carrying treat bags.

We got our tree and brought it home to put in the garage in a bucket of water



and happened to glance out the garage door because of a loud noise. We were being studied by a buck and doe. It was eery. They would not leave, even when we went out to have a better look. MrV tried to take their picture, but we just ended up with pictures of lots of darkness with bright little eyes in the middle.

The tree is a Frasier Fir. We'll keep it in water in our garage, protected from sun and wind, for another week or so.

No deer have been sighted in the garage today, although a cardinal flew out earlier. I'm wondering if the forest creatures want to reclaim our garage now that we have a tree in it.

Our Story So Far...

Advent is such a special time of year.

It's a time to, well, to eat a breakfast of crinkle cut potato chips dipped in Ranch dip while updating your blog because really you don't have time to sit and be reflective, or even fix something decent to eat.

We started Advent-craziness in earnest last Friday, when I made a skirt for Kid1 to wear to the various Christmas functions:



Ottobre Woman 5/2007 #18. The original in the magazine was made in gold dupioni silk. Kid1 wanted a black skirt; we looked over the black dupioni at JoAnn's, but she felt it "looked like it has dust on it" (there was a sort of white sheen to the black silk). So we ended up with a polyester from the bridal section. She wears it with a pair of my high heels, and looks impossibly grown up.

I was a tad nervous as I got to the invisible zipper insertion, since zippers are often my downfall. The zipper was going in fairly smoothly (I have apparently made every mistake possible with zippers, and am starting to get the hang of it), but I kept noting how amazingly brown the black zipper looked compared to the black fabric. I finally got up to check the zipper package, and discovered that I had purchased a brown zipper. Doh. So, a quick trip back to the fabric store, and I was set. No further problems, although I'll admit that I hand sewed the lining to the zipper since I didn't trust my skills at machine sewing that little bit together.

Saturday morning we went downtown to Shades of Green, a scouting event involving thousands of Girl Scouts wearing identical green t-shirts tromping around a cavernous convention center looking at scouty-type stuff. I felt I should've earned a special badge for driving us to a downtown location I'd never been to before, finding a parking spot, and remaining calm on the way home when the highway entrance ramp I expected to use was closed for construction.

The rest of the day was spent cleaning the house and putting up some Christmas decorations. Then Kid1 and I went to church for an evening Advent service in which she sang (looking all impossibly grownup there in her black skirt and my high heels, sob). Kid2 was sick, and stayed home with MrV.

Sunday morning we all went to church. It was wonderfully balmy when we left home around 9:30 am. By the time we left the church at noon rain was coming down in sheets. The temperature dropped steadily all afternoon. But we were snug inside having a Suzuki piano recital -- Kid1 played and Kid2 read the little story that tied all the piano music together. Various relatives and neighbors were in attendance, as well as Mrs. Piano Teacher. We served snacks on our Christmas dishes. Yay us for getting out some of the Christmas dishes!

The kids decided they both were too sick to go back to church for the evening, so we watched Elf and put up more Christmas decorations.

Two days of December craziness down, 29 to go.

November's Unfinished Object

The other day Kid1 was getting something out of my closet when this fell on her head:



(Note: the plan was to get one of those Closet Maid closet organization systems AFTER we painted the room, since the closets were as dismal as the wallpapered version of the room)

"Hey, look, it's a sock!"

"No, it's not. It's a cuff."

"Well, it's almost a sock!"

Sigh, no, when you're knitting cuff-down, you still have miles of knitting to go when you're poised to turn the heel and start slogging through the foot. Especially if it's a sock for a man's foot.

And indeed, this is the Father and Son sock from Fall 2006 Interweave knits. I got to the line that said "In preparation for heel flap..." and decided a) I wasn't sure exactly what the pattern was saying, and b) I was sick of working on it. The problem with being sick of it was the subtle chevron -- I kept losing track of where I was in the pattern.



See the chevrons? Barely? Yeah, me too. Except, you know, when viewing them from above, sort of like you would when someone is wearing the sock. From that angle it's glaringly obvious if there's a mistake. So, mistakes must be corrected. (And, yeah, you might say, "well, I can't see them because the picture's fuzzy, " but that makes us equal, since they look that fuzzy to me since I need to go get glasses. Just sayin'.)

However, I took the sock along to piano lessons -- Mrs. Piano Teacher has a big, comfy chair that gets the autumn sun on it, and the autumn sun shines at such a low angle that it's easy to see the little purl ridges of the sock. And the several-month-hiatus helped me decipher the pattern. Or maybe I've knit enough socks in the meantime that I have a better feel for what needs to happen next.

Of course, I haven't picked it up since piano lessons. So progress hasn't been exactly swift. I need to find a comfy chair in the sunlight in my house, I guess.

Finished

Bee stripe socks:



Bee stripe yarn from Lorna's Laces. I made up the pattern as I went along. These are a Christmas gift.

A more impressive finished object:



Our bedroom.

This is just a little slice of wall between a bookcase and the door. Note that it is painted. Jut plain ol' paint on drywall. NO WALLPAPER.

When we moved into the house 2 years ago, the bedroom was painted a weird tan-brown on top of textured wallpaper, with burgundy border. I set to work right away removing the wallpaper. Our bedroom is stupidly large, so this involved peeling many square yards of wallpaper off the walls. But I finally did it! And then started to scrub the painted walls...and realized that there was another layer of wallpaper under that paint.

Yes, I could see faint images of flowers under the white of the wall. More distressingly, as I scrubbed the wallpaper paste off of the paint, flecks of the paint came off here and there, letting me know that if we tried painting on top of the painted-plus-wallpapered wall we could expect disaster.

So, we started scraping off the next layer of wallpaper. This involved peeling off the upper layer of paint-plus-wallpaper first, then peeling off the paper-plus-adhesive (it had to be a two step procedure, since we quickly discovered that if we tried to take it all off in one piece, the drywall was going to come off with the paper).

Did I mention how much wall surface area we have in our room? Acres. It seemed to take F.O.R.E.V.E.R. I tried to take some of the tedium away by only working on it during Star Trek Voyager reruns (which I now associate with crappy wallpaper, by the way).

But the wallpaper is all gone. The drywall is patched. The walls are painted. The switch plates are back on the light switches after 2 years of no-switch-plates. I wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and see a painted wall in a pleasant periwinkle color.

And if you ever even think about being lazy and not taking down old wallpaper before you paint or paper, you are a very bad person and probably have cooties. Please get away from me.

Also finished this weekend but not pictured: a long sleeve t-shirt for Kid1 in a periwinkle knit that goes nicely with the walls (I'm a big fan of periwinkle); and, this year's version of fleece Hello Kitty jammies for Kid2.

School Work

Yes, we do get some school work done around here.

Kid1 continues the Bonus Round of RightStart Geometry -- the pages that are downloaded from the website, and not yet published. She has a handful of lessons to go with this. These lessons seem fairly easy compared to what went before. Or maybe they just cover topics that are easier for her. Or maybe she's not actually doing them -- I've pretty much lost touch with the entire operation, and am vaguely aware that she is figuring out stuff about spheres that circumscribe platonic solids. Whatever that means. Okay, actually I know what a platonic solid is. I'm not sure why I care about the spheres that they can be stuck into, unless I'm planning to knit one.

She also merrily plugs away at Latin for Children. She was alternating this with Ecce Romani, but now concentrates exclusively on the Latin for Children. She is charmed by the quirky DVD. We have the early version, the one produced before they decided to get all professional and consistent. We all watch it every week to see what will happen next -- will their cat wander through? Will the girls say something outlandish? Or maybe pop a jaw while yawning, then start giggling?

Odds and ends of Classical Writing Aesop are being done. She felt a need to work with a couple more of the Aesop level stories before moving on to Homer. I was looking over the grammar sheet the other day. "Why do you have OP written over all these words? The instructions don't say anything about OP."

"It stands for Object of the Preposition. We were doing object of the preposition in Latin, and I thought it would be fun to do them on this." Oh. Did I even have a clue about objects of the proposition when I was this age? Probably not.

We've started Bravewriter Boomerang. I have no background in literary criticism. None. I'm pretty sure I never even took a class that explored metaphor or anything else of that ilk. So Boomerang is her opportunity to discuss what goes on in a writer's mind. Yes, she's signed up for Boomerang Complete, which means she can participate in the online forums (I stay out of that -- she has her own password, and tends to her own discussions. We've had some conversations about online safety, and I trust Julie, the forum owner, to keep the kids pretty much in line.). I print out the information regarding the dictation exercises; we would not do dictation on a regular basis if someone else hadn't packaged it for our use.

And then there's piano. And dance. And science (mostly, at this point, Scout badge work, plus Science Center and Zoo classes, and also randomly listening in on conversations ... like at the vet's yesterday, when I was discussing the life cycle of fleas with the vet, which conversation was made easier by the fact that I'd taken entymology in college rather than literary criticism, which may mean I have a duller inner life and write more run on sentences than those of you who were lit majors, but on the other hand I do feel quite at ease discussing the comparative effects of Insect Growth Regulators, and, given the state of my ankles, that is a good trade off for now).

She reads voraciously. Sometimes I steer her to historical fiction. Sometimes I don't.

In the meantime, Kid2 is working through RightStart C. So far it's sort of fun. She is quite fascinated with the card games. I'm not a big fan of the card games, as I'd rather be doing something else, but, aha, she's able to get Kid1 to play the games with her (I also disliked the games back when Kid1 was playing them for RightStart, so Kid1 apparently still has unsatisfied game-playing desires).

We also continue to work through the second year of First Language Lessons. She has completed the booklet of the poem about the months of the year. She had really looked forward to that, having remembered if from when her big sister did it four years ago. Now we're into the part of the book where we whip out School House Rock to supplement the explanations of the various parts of speech. Then after this, as I recall from four years ago, it all gets very dull and we simply try to survive the remainder of the book.

She works on Prima Latina in fits and starts. It is also dull, which we had never noticed until we tried other Latin courses. Mostly she wants to work on it because her sister works on Latin and she needs to keep up.

And she does piano. And dance. And science.

And my own school work? I just got Lingua Latina in the hopes that I will finally wade through more than a couple of chapters of some Latin program on my own. Henle didn't do it for me, nor Latin Book One. And Latina Christiana, Minimus, Ecce Romani and Latin for Children have also failed to make an impression. I will say that I've become very good at reading through and comprehending the first couple of chapters of beginning Latin books, having practiced that skill so many times. After the first couple of chapters, though, it gets ... hard. Eeeew -- chapter 2 of Lingua Latina forced me to remember some of those pesky declensions and actually use them in sentences. Who knew that's what they were for? I liked the declensions better when they stayed in their orderly little charts in the textbooks -- when they start running around the text like they own the storyline I find it very disturbing.

Also, the other day I picked up a copy of John Thompson piano book 3. I had used this book years and years ago, but somehow didn't have my copy anymore. I still had some of the pieces memorized. What a fun book -- not very hard, but a bit more interesting than Mary Had a Little Lamb. Plus it's not Suzuki (having 2 kids go through Suzuki can put you off certain specific pieces of music, let me tell you).

Of course, next week is Thanksgiving, after which we will undoubtably fall to pieces again insofar as school work is concerned. But I will have this lovely snapshot of these few weeks when we had our act together (sort of) to look back upon.

Badge Work

A few weeks back Kid2's Brownie troop worked on their Colors and Shapes Try-It. The girls did 2 projects that day -- mixing colors, and yarn painting. All the moms were to bring in some yarn for the yarn painting.

(The way that ended up working: I brought in a huge bag that barely put a dent in my stash. I'm not sure that anyone else brought anything at all. I announced that I really really didn't want the leftover yarn back, so the troop now has its own yarn stash.)

"Yarn painting" means that you draw a picture on cardboard or card stock, then glue yarn on the picture to color it in. Family Fun magazine featured some leaves done with yarn on cardboard in a recent issue. They looked really nice, and like an adult had done them with nice yarn bought specifically for the picture they had in mind. Sort of a Martha Stewart rendition of a kids craft project.

Kid2 didn't attend that particular meeting (I was in charge of badge work at the Junior meeting down the hall, and she opted to tag along with me instead), but we peeked at the finished artwork. Unlike the Family Fun magazine leaves, it looked more like 18 young girls had done it with random yarn someone had dumped off from their stash. Which isn't to say it looked bad -- it just didn't look like something magazine editors would photograph. It also looked very wet and gluey.

So, in order to "catch up" with her troop, we wanted to do the project at home. But, well. Wet gluey-ness. Available yarn colors that didn't suit the inner vision of the young artist (because I'm not buying new yarn for this project -- sorry, folks). How to make it more appealing for the young artist and her clean up crew?



We tweaked the project. It became painting with roving on wool felt, using a felting needle. I think it turned out pretty good. I had her look through the available roving, then draw a picture based on the colors available. The background felt is actually a wool blend from JoAnn's -- we had several colors, and she decided white would work best for this project. Then we set up foam to work on, got out the felting needles, and she went to it.

After determining that she wasn't going to felt her hand to the picture (she's needle felted before) I wandered out of the room (this either makes me a very bad mommy for leaving a small child with possibly dangerous equipment, or a very good mommy for trusting her creative genius). In the meantime, Kid1 decided to get in on the action, and did her own little roving/felt picture.

I wouldn't have done this project with her troop -- no way would I have 18 kids ages 6-9 brandishing felting needles -- but I really like it for home badge work.

(The other part of the Try-It she missed -- mixing primary colors of paints to make secondary colors as well as tints, tones and shades -- we earn effortlessly since we only own a few colors of Stockmar paints and so mix up whatever else we need as we go along.)

In the meantime, I've made a list of Junior badgework that can be done outside in pleasant temperatures, and we are scurrying to work on those things in this small window where the weather is neither insanely hot (I think it was 90F out about 3 weeks ago, wasn't it?) or uncomfortably cold (and right now it's 21F, which is getting rather brisk).

Kid1 has decided she wants her hiking badge. This involves either 2 all day hikes, or an overnight hike. I anounced that I thought it might be wise to work our way up to that. Once upon a time I could've just spontaneously gone on an all day hike with no muscular repercussions, but those days are gone. We are working on the walking badge, which involves a 3 week program of walking for fitness, and will, cleverly enough, build up our walking muscles. We're also taking shorter hikes in various wooded areas, during which we're working on tree identification (part of the Earth Connections badge -- as soon as she saw it involved learning 10 trees and 5 other plants with their traditional uses she knew I was going to drag her into it, so she had put it on the to-do list), various nature hikes that fulfill Junior and Brownie requirements, taking snacks (also fulfilling various Junior and Brownie requirements), and learning the ins and outs of Finding Your Way. Wisconsin council has a cool bird-watching badge, a forestry badge, and a prairie badge that I'm hoping we can work into our hikes. It all seems like a great way to spend these sunny, crisp fall days.

Scouting is getting to be more and more fun as I get the hang of how to enjoy it.