Box Elder Bug Coinkidink

I just walked into the bathroom, saw a cool looking bug hanging out on our shower and wondered what it was. We just happened to be looking at science blogs at the time. I was about to open a new window to look up "my" bug, but decided to click on one more science blog entry first and, lo and behold, there was "my" bug on the computer screen! LOL What a coincidence! So, the boxelder bug gets our nature find of the week award thanks to a well timed entry on a blog around the clock.

Cameron's Recommended Books

The Mistmantle Chronicles by M. I. McAllister
Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan
The Redwall Series by Brian Jaques.
Anything by Neil Gaiman!
The Oliver Nocturne series by Kevin Emerson

The Skullduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy

The Kids' Garden

Catherine's mini bell peppers. She harvests a pepper or two from this every couple of days.


Catherine and our Japanese bantam, Sakura.


These Jack-be-little pumpkins are growing like wildfire all over the kid's garden. We've already harvested about a dozen and there are still lots of little green ones on the vines.


Cameron and Peony, the most pampered chicken in our flock.


The kids' bean/gourd teepee is taking over and we have gourds galore!

Sewing & Cooking

The kids have been on a cooking and sewing kick for the last few months. Cameron has been sewing on the machine and by hand. A few weeks ago he made a bunch of bags made out of some funky brown batik fabric that he thought looked like tree bark. They were all different sizes from dice bag size to small shoulder bag size. They were primarily for his Richard Cypher costume that he's been putting together. Last week, he created a custom belt bag for his heelies wheels out of denim.




And here are some of Catherine's creations. She's 5 and has never done hand sewing before, yet she made these by herself over a couple of days. She only asked for help getting the needle through the fabric on the bottom seam of the blue doll and sewing up a couple of small holes where her stitches were loose. She copied the pattern from a book, traced it onto the fabric (different fabrics on front & back), sewed them, stuffed them, & sewed on the buttons. She has carried these everywhere and even sleeps with them.



Cooking is an ongoing interest for my kids, but once in a while they get in the mood to find new recipes. We took a trip to the library and these are some of the ones they checked out and made things from:


Well, except for that Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook in the upper left. That was my favorite cookbook when I was a kid and I went on a search for it a few months ago. Found a used copy in really good shape on amazon and snatched it up. The kids love it as much as I did! They've made almost every recipe in it several times. Here are the "Batnana Split" and "Batnana Sundae" that they came up with because of a recipe in that book:

They were made with homemade cottage cheese instead of ice cream, homemade yogurt, bananas, strawberries, and raw nuts.

Snakes & Rats & Chicks...Oh My!

First of all, Uno the snake has found a new home. We took him (her?) to the local nature center last week and they thought he was just as cute as we did! They also thought that since they didn't have a snake like Uno that he'd be a good addition to the animals that they use for kids' programs. The fact that he has is so tiny and also has that "awwww" factor because of his missing eye, they thought he would make a perfect snake for kids who think they don't like snakes. So, now he's living at the nature center and (providing they can get him to eat) we will be able to visit him when we're there. And thanks to the naturalists we found out that he is a brown snake. No wonder he had us so stumped! He wasn't either of the snakes that we usually find on our property. Brown snakes are apparently very common around here, they just aren't seen much because they're so small and tend to stay well hidden. Now if we ever see another one we'll know what it is. Of course he was the first one I've ever seen in all these years, so who knows if we'll ever see one again!

The second happening in the pet department was "the rat accident". Catherine fell a few days ago while holding her pet rat, Cornflower, and the poor rattie was injured. The skin was scraped right off the toes on her back foot and her toes were swollen and red for a couple of days. She's recovering well and her toes don't seem to be broken as we feared, but she sure gave us all a good scare! Cornflower was going stir crazy by the time we took her out this morning because she was confined to her cage until her foot healed enough for her to put her weight on it again. That's apparently torture to a hyper, free roaming rat like her, but she survived and is extra happy to be held and cuddled now.

And just today the chicks we've been waiting so long for finally arrived. We were just getting ready to head out the door for a day at the park when someone knocked at the door. I was expecting the chicks this week, just not TODAY. They were supposed to call the morning they came in so that I would know to expect them and not leave for the day like we were about to do. Anyway...here's the sight that awaited us as we pried open our cheeping box:

Aren't they sweet? It's been difficult to keep the kids from holding them ALL the time, but then the little fluff balls are rather irresistable. The two bantams get held the most of course. Cameron's Japanese bantam is particularly fond of him. She falls asleep in his hand almost as soon as he picks her up and starts rubbing her tiny little head, and she eats right out of his hand. He named her Sakura because she's sweet as a cherry blossom. We named all eight of them flower names - Lily, Daisy, Orchid, Poppy, Rose, Sunflower, and Peony -so I sure hope there are no surprise roosters in the bunch! We've spent a lot of time today just watching them go about their chicky business. I'm sure that in a few weeks we'll be ready for them to go to the barn, but for the time being we're enjoying watching them and trying to figure out their personalities. Poppy the Polish crested is definitely the quirky one of the bunch, but then that's why we picked a Polish crested. We like quirky. Lily the Easter Egger is already showing top hen potential. She tends to walk all over the other chicks (literally). Catherine's silky bantam is Rose and she's a sweetie. I think my favorite is probably Daisy the Golden Laced Wyandotte, but I'm not sure because they're all so cute. The others all have very similar markings and personalities so they're difficult to tell apart unless they're all right together. I've just been calling them the triplets and probably will continue to do so until their feathers come in and I can tell them apart more easily.

Uno

We'd like you all to meet our latest critter, Uno! We found Uno while weeding in our garden today. He looked just like a piece of dried grass and only Catherine's keen eyesight alerted us to the fact that he was there. We caught him in order to take a closer look at him and instantly decided that, even though it's only Tuesday, "he" is definitely our nature find of the week. We actually aren't sure whether Uno is male or female, or even what kind of snake it is. We're pretty sure it's either a common garter snake or a ribbon snake, but because he's so tiny (only about as long as my finger and about as big around as a piece of string) and his markings are so difficult to make out, it's not easy for us budding naturalists to figure it out which one it is for certain. He definitely has the stripes of either a garter or ribbon snakes, but it looks like he has a white stripe in front of his eye, which I believe is more indicative of a ribbon snake than a garter, but it also looks like he may have some markings around his mouth as well, which ribbon snakes don't have. Right now the markings are no bigger than a pencil dot so it's really difficult to be sure. We'll be taking him to the local nature center later this week to see if anyone there can tell us more about him and help us figure out how to best take care of him. For now we have him in a tank with some moist sod and a few worms...and a fake log with some fake leaves that the kids thought he might like. You can see him resting in the leaves in the pic, so obviously they were right. He's really quite cute, don't you think?

The reason why we call him Uno, and the reason why I agreed to let the kids keep him rather than insisting that we let him go like I normally would, is because he only has one eye. Obviously, you're looking at his "good" side in this pic! The other side of his face is completely featureless and his mouth is somewhat deformed on that side as well, which suggests that he was born this way as opposed to being injured. It's doubtful that he would live very long in the wild, so I agreed to keeping him...at least for a while.

Because of Uno, we spent a good portion of our evening looking up snakes on the internet. We are most familiar with some of the more common snakes in our area because we see them frequently. We see garter snakes and ribbon snakes in our yard and the fields around us all the time, and banded water snakes on the lake and in the creeks around here a lot. I've seen a few black rat snakes and blue racers over the years as well, and we've seen a milk snake at the nature center, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of snakes in this area. We found out that there are some really interesting and beautiful snakes around here. Unfortunately, many of them are uncommon or endangered. We live in a place where there are no common venomous snakes, but I still warn my kids to be very careful about observing and handling snakes. Even if a snake isn't venomous, if it has a mouth it can bite!

It's almost spring!!!

We've all got spring fever around here, and it's really showing this week by how much money we've been spending! We decided that we didn't want to order the minimum of 25 from the hatchery we had planned to order from and chose to order 8 chicks from mypetchicken.com instead. We spent as much on shipping as we did on chicks, but we're getting the smaller flock that we wanted. We didn't have any references from anyone for mypetchicken, so we're taking a bit of a risk. Hopefully it works out in our favor. If not, then we may end up ordering 25 chicks later on and having a larger flock afterall. Either way, we're soon to be "egg farmers" as my son used to say.

These are some of the "working girls" we chose: Black Australorp, Golden Laced Wyandotte, and "Easter egger"

And these are the "pet" chickens that the kids chose: a Japanese true bantam and a Silkie bantam

They won't be arriving for several weeks, but we're already preparing by running around to various farm stores looking for feeders and waterers, checking prices on litter, and reading lots of chicken books and websites. Our biggest hurdle has been finding organic chicken feed. No one in our area seems to carry it, so we're looking into ordering pre-made organic feed online vs. making our own with grains that are available from our food co-op. So far, making our own is in the lead, especially since I'm already a big believer in raw, organic food for both people and pets.

We've also been ordering gardening seeds, plants and gadgets this week. I ordered a small seed dispenser for planting lettuce, carrots and other small seeds. I've put that inexpensive purchase off for years, yet I continue to grumble about "wasting" seeds every single year. How silly! So, I finally added one to my cart this year. On a whim, I also added a pot maker. It's a cool little gadget that makes pots for starting your own seedlings from paper.

We spend a small fortune in seeds and plants each year, so I want to start saving more seeds from year to year and growing more of my own seedlings. We start a few things from seed that are difficult to find, but I'm still buying most of my tomatoes and peppers and a few other things as plants. That gets kind of expensive with the large garden plot we have. Besides, there's something extremely satisfying about saving seeds from plants that you grew yourself and watching them turn into healthy, thriving plants again the next year.

We have several varieties of many of these fruits and veggies, but this is a general list of the things we are growing this year: bush beans, pole beans (for the bean teepee), beets, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, chard, sweet corn, pop corn, cucumbers, eggplant, endive, ornamental gourds, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce (leaf and romaine), watermelon, okra, onions, peas (shell and snap), sweet bell peppers, hot peppers, pumpkins, shallots, spinach, yellow summer squash, zucchini, and tomatoes. Oh, and lots of flowers for Catherine, of course. She fills many, many vases of flowers during the summer, so we have to make sure we have plenty to pick. We don't have any potatoes, sweet potatoes, herbs, or garlic yet, but there's still plenty of time for more shopping!

The kids are also in the process of planning their own garden alongside the family garden. We haven't had a separate kid's garden for a few years. They've just been helping out with planning and taking care of the family garden, but when they saw the kid's pack from Seeds of Change last week, they decided they wanted to plant that this year. Together we came up with a 12x12 "garden in the round" plan with a statue surrounded by flowers in the middle. They are mostly planting miniature versions of things such as Tom Thumb lettuces, little round carrots, mini corn, mini bell peppers, and cherry tomatoes. In the big garden they also wanted to try different colors of some of their favorite foods, so we will be planting multi-colored carrots, various colors of tomatoes, red okra, green, orange and purple cauliflower, multi-colored sweet corn, red lettuce, and a few other rather psychadelic looking veggies. Boy, are we going to have one colorful garden this year!

Can it get any better?

The short answer... ABSOLUTELY!!



What the heck am I talking about?...The Unschoolers Winter Waterpark Gathering, of course!



I thought last year was fantastic, but this year blew last year's UWWG out of the water! (No pun intended.) The worst thing I can say about this year's UWWG was that it was impossible to be in two places at once. I just couldn't get to all of the things I wanted to do and see! I didn't get the mehendi area at all. I only got to glance at the kids marketplace while going from one presentation to another, but I wish I could have shopped! There were some really cool things there! The kids missed the DS funshop and the Webkinz gathering, and we all missed out on the ATC funshop. I wish I had a timeturner so we could go back and do all the things we didn't get to do! The kids got to do the one thing they were looking forward to most, which was spend lots of time in the waterpark. And I did get to most of the things on my "high priority" list too.

I made it to both of Kelly Lovejoy's presentations. I've enjoyed her posts on unschooling lists for quite some time and was surprised to find that she is exactly as I always imagined her! She's a lovely, lively, engaging speaker and I enjoyed her presentations immensely. Although, in retrospect I think that perhaps "presentation" isn't the right word for what transpired at all. It sounds a little too stuffy for the interactive, spontaneous exchanges that occurred.

I went to the unschooled teens and young adults panel discussion too. Very interesting stuff there, although I will admit to being ever so slightly disappointed that there wasn't a totally unschooled teen on the panel. I sometimes feel sort of like the odd woman out, even around other unschoolers, because it seems that so very few of them have been doing it from the beginning like we have. We've never done highly structured "school at home" either, so we seem to be in the minority even among other unschoolers. It was still interesting though. I'm on lots of unschooling lists and read lots of unschooling blogs, but they are most often from the parents (usually the mother's) perspective. It was refreshing to hear from the kids themselves.

I also made it to Bethany Hagensen's raw foods demo (www.bethanysstory.com). What an inspiring story she had! It was just the kick in the pants that I needed too. I was eating a high raw diet most of the last year but had dropped to about 50% (some days even less!) since the holidays. My health issues were starting to flare up again but I still was having a difficult time getting back on track. Eating a non-standard diet is difficult enough, but I was having the most trouble with the lack of support. I don't know any other raw foodies IRL and my online support just wasn't working for me during the really difficult patches around the holidays and the start of my usual season of depression. I was so excited to see that a raw foods demo was scheduled and made it a top priority. I wasn't sure what to expect since I've never even met another raw foodist, but it was WONDERFUL!! The food was fabulous and the people who have been at this longer than me were so inspirational. Best of all, I wasn't *alone*. I had a room full of people who were high raw, totally raw, transitioning to raw, or interested in eating more raw. I can't begin to express what a boost just being in the same room with all those people eating delicious raw foods was to my resolve. And the healing stories I heard there were just amazing. I had already been eating more raw foods and was motivated even more after going to the program. I've been high raw all week and am feeling great...and I actually *lost* weight while on vacation! How often does that happen? LOL

Cameron was inspired by someone at the UWWG as well. He was interested in stage magic for quite a while, but lost interest about a year ago. Just a couple of weeks ago he pulled out all of his magic stuff again and had been talking about the possibility of learning some tricks for Catherine's birthday party this summer, but he hadn't really done a lot with it. It was like he was waiting for something. Then off we go the the UWWG where we see a young magician perform several times during the week. Cameron was totally engrossed in each and every performance and he talked about them all week long. Then this morning I went downstairs to find him curled up on the sofa looking at magic kits in a catalog. The spark is back in his eyes when he talks about magic and he's planning on spending a nice chunk of change on some new magic supplies in the next couple of weeks. Yay for happy coincidences!

I also led a bellydance funshop this year and I had such a blast! I'm now convinced that there is no better place to share something you love than at an unschoolers convention! It was a totally freeform hour long whirlwind tour of bellydance without any real structure. I decided not to focus on any one style of bellydance but encouraged everyone to do their own thing. We just kind of went with the flow and the interests of the attendees, and it turned out so cool. I have never had so much fun teaching bellydance!

And then there was the carnival with all the cool games and prizes. The kids came away from that with lots of ideas for projects and contraptions to build at home! And there was the dance on the final evening. I think Dave and I enjoyed that more than the kids since we so rarely get to dance with each other anymore. And I can't forget getting to meet so many interesting people either. Some of them I've only known online until now, but now I've got faces and voices to put with those names. I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting at the moment, but oh, what a wonderful time we had each and every day!

Let's not forget the Kalahari itself! It was as awesome as it was last year and then some. Cameron struck out with a friend and rode many of the rides that he wasn't ready to ride last year. Catherine isn't quite big enough for most of the rides, but she was perfectly content to spread her time in the waterpark between the Lazy River ride, the wave pool and the spray grounds. The weather was kinder to us this year too. Last year it was so cold outside that they had trouble keeping the waterpark warm enough. No problems with that this year though. It was like a warm summer day inside the waterpark, and if you were there at just the right time of day you could even bask in the sun through the overhead windows. Ahhhh!

We were all sad when it was over. It goes by far too fast! But true to form, by the time we were on the road home the kids had already started the countdown to next year. UWWG 2010, here we come!

Light Bulb Moment

Catherine made a neat discovery this evening while we were reading bedtime stories. She discovered a very powerful word - the word "I". Not only is it a letter, but it's a word all on it's own too. How cool is that!

We are spending the week at the Unschoolers Winter Waterpark Gathering in Ohio (which is *AWESOME* by the way!). We brought a few new books to read while we're here, because we don't go anywhere without books. Cameron brought Fablehaven to read on his own, Catherine chose Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which is her current favorite book. We also brought the Faraway Tree series from home. And both of the kids wanted to get the Skippyjon Jones books to bring. We all love Skippyjon Jones, so I surprised them with several Skippyjon Jones books and a Skippyjon Jones stuffed animal. Skippyjon was the favorite the last couple of nights, but not tonight.

Cameron was down in the arcade with a friend. Dave went down the street to the store because we already used up the 5 gallons of drinking water we brought from home. Catherine and I found ourselves with a little "girl time" on our hands. We danced around the hotel room in our pj's for a while, had a snack, then settled into bed to read some books. She picked Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. We read it through just like we've done dozens of times, but tonight she noticed the alphabet in the front and the back of the book. She started looking at them and pointing out the letters that are in her name, then other letters that she knew. She talked about which ones were big and which ones were little. Then she noticed that the big "I" didn't have the serifs on it. We talked about how sometimes the big I has those little lines on the top and bottom and sometimes it doesn't and talked about how without the serifs the big "I" looks just like the little "L". We talked about those letters for a while longer and then I noticed something different about the way she was looking at them. She was really studying them, and then there was this sudden *explosion* of understanding. I don't know what the exact trigger was, but I could tell she just *got it*. She understood what I was doing when I read to her. WOW! That realization was so POWERFUL for her, and the amazement in her eyes was absolutely priceless.

She closed her book and studied the front. Suddenly those letters "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" had *MEANING* to her. They were *WORDS*. She ran her finger across them over and over, saying the words again and again, imprinting them in her mind. I just watched her for a while, then she started playing with the words and I joined in. We covered up the "m" in "Boom" and that made a totally new word! What a discovery! She covered up every single letter in each word and wanted to know what it said *NOW*.

I told her that that "I" that she was looking at earlier was a word too. I told her it said "I" as in "I went to the store". She repeated that phrase over and over, letting it roll around in her mouth, then *CLICK*...another light bulb went on. I could *SEE* it and it was amazing! I happened to have the book I was reading lying on the table next to the bed, so I picked it up and showed her how in my book the big "I" had the lines. She gasped and said "Mommy! They're EVERYWHERE!!" She sat there for a good 15 minutes flipping through my book and pointing out every single "I" she could find. ("There's another one! And another one! Look, Mommy! There's one on this page too!") She couldn't get enough! Then she noticed a lower case "i"...and another...and another. She noticed there was an "i" in the middle of the word "Chicago" and wanted to know what it said. Then she wanted to know what words followed that word "I", so I read those sentences to her and she repeated them, running her finger over the words as she did.

Right about that time, Dad returned from the store. She yelled "Daddy, Daddy! I want to show you something!" and proceeded to show him how she could read the words "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" on the front of her book, and the word "I" in my book as well. Within a few minutes she had moved on and started working on the jigsaw puzzle we brought with us. It was such a *BIG* moment, yet she took it in stride. I, however, am still reeling from the "bigness" of it.

Sheltered?

I've been hearing this one a lot lately. I thought perhaps it was dying off, but no...it's back lately and seemingly as strong as ever. IT is the idea that homeschooled children are "sheltered". It seems that people who know very few homeschoolers have this idea that we all sit around our kitchen tables forcing our kids to do school work for 6-8 hours a day just like kids in school sit around doing school work in desks all day. I've been in the homeschooling community since my oldest was born 12 years ago and I honestly don't think I've ever met a homeschooling family quite like that. Granted, that may be because they are at home sitting around the kitchen table and we never see them (lol), but in all seriousness I just don't think that type of homeschooling family is very common. People are by nature social creatures. Even the most reserved of us crave human contact and a change in scenery on occasion. And even the most reserved homeschoolers I know get out more often than your average school child for field trips and learning opportunities outside their homes.

Forgive me. I'm getting side tracked by trying (once again) to explain that homeschoolers aren't as "sheltered" as people might think. Flogging that horse was not what I inteded to do however. Where I was really going with this diatribe was slightly different this time. I was thinking about this whole "sheltered" business again the other day while explaining to a mom on a forum about all the interesting things we do in an average day, when it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I should turn this question around. Maybe the question isn't "Are homeschooled children sheltered?", because in reality all children are, and should be, sheltered (i.e. protected) to a certain extent. Maybe the question should instead be which group, on average, is REALLY more sheltered in our society? Is it the children who are at home or those who are in school? Many people whose experience is solely school based seem to think that homeschooled children come up short, but having been a public schooled child myself and now seeing the other side of the coin, I beg to differ.

In an average week, my supposedly "sheltered" children go many different places and communicate with many different people. They might take swimming lessons from a beloved swimming coach with children of various ages, learn Japanese phrases and culture from their sensei who is from Japan, or call the naturalist on staff at the local nature center to talk about the cool snake they found. They might get into a dinosaur discussion with a childrens museum staff member while on a field trip (which is very different from a lecture by the same staff member!). They might go stargazing at midnight, watch and discuss world news because it's INTERESTING to them, chat on line with friends from all over the globe, ask the vet questions about instruments and tests and animal health while taking the dog to the vet. They might scour our cookbook collection looking for something new to fix for dinner, spend time catching snowflakes and looking at their shapes, or spend days on end watching birds at the birdfeeder and learning to identify them by their cries ("here comes a nuthatch!"). They might decide they want to try their hand at cartooning, rocket building, gourmet cooking, piano, or ballet. They might grow their own food in the backyard, take "behind the scenes" tours of the local museum (because they are the only kids who come in there during the day), or ask the waitress at our favorite Indian restaurant about her trip to India, or do any number of other things.

These are just a sample of the average, every day types of activities and interactions my kids have. They aren't special, once in a lifetime experiences. They aren't things that we go out of our way to do specifically for their "educational benefits". We don't live in a big city. As a matter of fact, we live in the country outside a small rural town. We don't drive long distances very often or spend a lot of money going exotic places. These are all things we do within a short drive from our home on a single income, yet, we communicate with people of varying ethnicities, economic levels, and backgrounds regularly by simply going about our lives and doing the things that interest us.

Compare this with the average experience of public schooled children. Unless they move several times a year, the vast majority of public schooled students are limited to a small number of teachers and a small number of classrooms. They go to ONE school with ONE cafeteria serving limited food selections. They are exposed to ONE pre-determined set of children, all of whom are the same age, and most of whom are from the same geographic area and most likely from a similar economic background. They are expected to learn ONE lesson at a time from ONE pre-chosen curriculum and ONLY when told to do so. They are never allowed to leave the watchful eye of their teacher, nor are they allowed to leave the "safety" of the school walls and fenced in playgrounds, except on rare field trips, during which they are kept under even stricter supervision than at school. Their daily experiences are, on average, extremely limited in number and restricted by highly controlled circumstances. Even after these children leave the school to go home, what they do with their time is STILL determined by the school via homework and at home assignments. It seems to me that it is school children, not homeschooled children, who are more "sheltered" - from themselves, from others, and from learning.