A Week Briefly (October 17, 2022)

 Notes on the teens:

Nature Angel finished her luna moth journal page and has begun one on the female cardinal.

Nature Angel has continued to study Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading and annotating several poems as well as finishing the first essay about education and starting a new one . . . that I can't remember.  She's also reading Pride and Prejudice, keeping character notes along the way.  She found a dystopian novel she's liking a lot, and I asked her to start keeping a list of these "free reads" because they count!

Here's a sketch she worked on a couple of weeks ago:

Little Princess completed an almost 5-page paper about the educational and career journeys of 5 ISS astronauts. It's her dream to get there, and I figured learning how others got there could inspire her and give her direction.  I only asked for a paragraph about each one, but as she studied, she asked, "Does it have to be only one paragraph, or can I write more?"

(lol)

Monday

I had to go to the dentist at 10:30 am to get a broken crown replaced, but before I left we managed to take a walk and make wooden pirate swords out of paint stirrers (5-gallon and quart-sized) and duct tape.  I passed out sandpaper to everyone so we could smooth sharp corners and edges first, then I tore tape and helped kids hold the crosspieces firm.

I was gone far longer than I anticipated, but I came home to happy kids playing in a huge pirate ship in the living room!

I did what I could to catch up on everyone's needs, get kids fed, get babies down for naps, and settle into reading aloud followed by independent study time.

One story I failed to record last week is about acorns.  The kids collected them by the pocketful at the park.  They asked if humans can eat them, and I looked it up.  Turns out, they need to be soaked and rinsed for a few days to leach out the tannins, then they can be dried and eaten.  Ladybug opened a bunch of acorns but forgot to bring them in, so they rotted in the bag.  Beowulf and Lola, however, brought their acorns in, faithfully changed their water every 24 hours, and finally, I put them in the oven at 175 degrees to dry them.

They turned dark brown. (Should I not have heated them?  More research to be done!)

And they were still bitter.  :(

Everyone but Lola gave up after a single bite.

Lola ate them steadily for several days.  

It would be fun to collect a large enough batch to bother grinding them into flour and baking with them.  We might soak them a day or two longer and dry them in my dehydrator instead of the oven.

Maybe in baked goods, the bitterness would be less pronounced.

There's so much to learn!

Tuesday

I continued trying to manage my post-dental-work pain. :(

Temperatures dropped dramatically below freezing, so we opted to do yoga videos indoors instead of go on a walk.  I wish I could have both done the yoga and taken pictures of the kids as they did it.  The tiny ones were so, so, so cute trying to do the poses!

We decided to devote the day to completing a q-tip painting of a field of tulips.  It was a multi-step art project that, I explained, was more about following directions and learning a technique than expressing oneself individually.  

The first step was to paint the background green and blue and leave the paper to dry.

The babies were not required to follow directions.

Later in the day, we came back to paint mountains along the horizon and add dots for tulips, as if we were very far away.  I explained that the dots at the bottom of the page would be larger than the ones at the top because the bottom tulips would be "closer" to us.  

I haven't been taking pictures of finished products lately, but in person, their paintings came out to be quite individual.  Ladybug and Brother took the time to make the "closer" tulips look like tulips and the "farther" ones look like dots because that's how they would look in real life.  And Brother mixed his mountains in with his clouds because the mountains were so high.  (More physical geography to come in the future. :) )

Wednesday

Anything we planned to do was tossed out the window when Sweet Peach went limp with her eyes rolling back in her head and was clearly in respiratory distress.  I called her daddy and told him to meet me at the hospital only to realize just how badly she was doing and call 911 instead.  

I ended up doing some rescue breathing for her just before the paramedics came in and administered oxygen.  Because she moved and made an effort to cry, they asked me if I wanted to drive her to the hospital myself, but I knew she was still not okay and told them they had to take her and I would follow.  

Long story short, I met Dad and Mom at the hospital, explained what had happened, and advised them to stand strong that there was something wrong with their girl and insist on careful tests and monitoring.  They'd been blown off over concerns for The Dude when he was little, and he's had several respiratory issues since then.

Before I left, I sat in the van and cried for a few minutes.

I came home to the rest of the crew happily eating popcorn and watching Signing Time.  I downed several ibuprofen tablets (my mouth, still) and set to work getting us back on track--at least as much as possible.

Given that I stayed shaky and that we'd finished Don Quixote the night before, I tried to let the kids watch the 1972 musical Man of La Mancha.   It didn't work out, so we switched to The Princess Bride--I called it school because of the pirate theme.

  

I had barely finished mixing a large batch of finger paint when the emergency began, so Nature Angel and Little Princess oversaw as much finger painting as the kids would do before turning to snacks and Signing Time. 

 

We finished reading about Kat and Kit--the Dutch twins.  I asked the kids to write/draw something from the book they liked/remembered.  This was met with astonishing resistance, but everyone did it with varying levels of dedication.

We heard that Sweet Peach was diagnosed with covid and RSV, so she was admitted to the hospital for overnight observation, and we kept The Duke with us overnight.

Thursday

Though temperatures started rising, we voted to do yoga one more day, and then we did a little bit of science before diving into our library-dance-church activities routine.

We started by setting up cups with red, yellow, and blue dye, linking them to empty cups with pieces of paper towels and watching what happened.

When waiting got to be too much, we decorated balloons to look like sharks, and each kid filled one balloon with water and one with vegetable oil.  And we tossed them in a tub of water.

Oops!  Both types of balloons floated because they had air in them, too.  I had to fill a couple of balloons myself and make sure there wasn't any air in them in order to demonstrate how a sharks' huge, oily liver helps it float.

Then we came back to our cups to see how the dyed water had traveled along the paper towels to mix the primary colors and make a rainbow.

I quickly taught about adhesion and cohesion and assigned the kids to write/draw about either or both activities.

Then we ran around the whole rest of the day.

Friday

We took a walk again!  It was so, so lovely!

On our walk the kids played that they could only step where there were leaves in the road--plain asphalt was death.

There was a lot of leaping and contorting and problem-solving on this walk.

Then the kids figured out they could collect leaves from the roadside and drop them as they needed along the way!

One of our neighbors was having a garage sale.  I let the kids run home to collect their wallets and return for treasures--with the strict injunction, "You may each choose one--and only one--item!"

They came home thrilled with their independent purchases.

Lola: stuffed penguin
Ladybug: purse
Baymax: roller backpack
Brother: toolbox with tools and other odds and ends
Beowulf: penguin beanie baby
Mister Man: boxing gloves

We got in the van for a quick trip to Cave Spring park so that we could use our jeweler's loupes to study pond water.  I was worried that the recent freeze (we were supposed to do this outing a week earlier) would have killed a lot of the squiggly-wiggly things in the ponds, and I might have been right, or we might not be good at looking because we didn't see any living organisms in the samples we took.

But Nature Angel found a little jelly-ish blob of something that was either frog or fish eggs, and we really enjoyed taking a close look at that!

We stopped to examing moss and ants as we walked from the small pond to the big one.

By this time, most of the fun of looking at small things had worn off for most of the kids.  But there was plenty to climb, observe, and touch.

Little Princess got totally absorbed in taking pictures through the loupe.

Duckweed and an insect x10

Ladybug was by far the most interested in looking closely at things.

But here and there, kids would come running back from their own explorations to admire something someone else found.

Little Princess spent lots of time experimenting with her phone camera.

And in the photo above, she was capturing the photo below--unfiltered and unedited.  I'm amazed at the colors she caught simply by her physical position in comparison to the light around her.

Naptime came too quickly for us all, so we headed home.

In the afternoon, I started sewing Ladybug's Halloween costume (a Star Wars Jedi), but first I gave her the chance to sew the long, straight seams herself.

She did a good job!

Saturday

Soccer in the morning.  It was the last day, but the leader announced that we'd get to join him for 2 weeks of family kickball, if we wished, the first two Saturdays in November. 

My kids unanimously voted, "Yes!"

I did what felt like unending sewing in the afternoon while the kids alternated between playing and complaining there was nothing to do. 

We'll be celebrating Halloween next week at our church Trunk or Treat/Chili Cookoff.   I'm currently searching for ways to make the actual day of Halloween special without having to go trick-or-treating a second time.  I stand firmly that one actual holiday is enough.

I hope Sweet Peach and The Duke will be well!

But I'm worried that our week will go wonky again as I'm in even worse pain than ever, and I'm living on ibuprofen.  Something went wrong, and I'm going to have to go back to the dentist ASAP.