A Late Tuesday Ten: What's Up?

Ten Things Keeping Me Busy, or An Update of Sorts

1. Planning a choir trip.
I'm planning a three-day trip for lovely lady's choir. Phone calls, emails, faxes, meetings. Details. Shopping. Fielding phone calls from parents worried about everything from their trip account balance to the swine flu. I can't wait to go on the trip, and I can't wait until it's over.

2. Choir.
Spring choir started, upping the number of choristers in my family (and thus the number of separate rehearsals for the Mom Taxi) to four. The Spring Concert took up an entire day with rehearsals and performances. Now the concert is over, the spring choir is over, and the season is winding down.

3. Karate.
We signed up for a family karate class. The boys and loving husband and I attend together. it's a blast, and well worth the time spent, but it takes up two mornings a week, time we really don't have to spare.

4. Swim lessons.
Fine Young Gent the Eldest has been taking swim lessons all year, with the goal of joining the swim team. Fortunately for our schedule, he loves swimming but is re-thinking the swim team idea because he also loves karate. But I bit the bullet and signed up his younger brothers for swim lessons this session. My thinking: I've got to be at the pool anyway, and if I take them now, no summer swim lessons. So I sit on my rear end on those ridged metal bleachers for 30 minutes, twice a week, reading a book. They learn to swim, I get to read. Win-win.

5. Reading.
I manage to fit it into the cracks of my life, and I still read during the boys' Quiet Time. Right now I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver), still working on Green Housekeeping (Ellen Steinbeck) and The Art of the Commonplace (Wendell Berry), just finished Free Range Kids (Lenore Skenazy) and The Backyard Homestead (Carleen Madigan, ed.)

6. Laundry.

7. School.
Math, language, science, the works. We're studying astronomy this term. For a while we had a balloon solar system on the boys' ceiling. Second-grade gent is working on writing a novel using the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program. Sounds a little ambitious, but he's having a blast. It sounds so...pretentious. "Yeah, my second grader is trying to write his first novel. What's yours up to?" Really, he's just having fun filling out the pages and using his creative brain to write a story just like every other normal second-grade kid. Kindergarten gent has been grousing about doing school work even though it takes him only 20-30 minutes, plus our science readings and fun activities. I told him "Suck it up buttercup."

8. Play.
Still making sure that despite my busy schedule the boys get plenty of time for the "work" of childhood: Play. Especially as spring rolls out the sunshine and flowers.

8 1/2. Thinking about the garden and getting outside while the boys play.
It's been pouring rain. They go play in it. I look out and think, "Gee, I wish I enjoyed gardening in the rain."

9. Watching American Idol.

10. Not writing on my blog.
Too busy. When things settle down there'll be more pictures, more projects, more out-of-doors.

I'm still here....

I haven't abandoned my blog. And....

I am planning a choir trip. Chaperoning another. Spring choir has started for kinders, so I have four kids in choir.

Lovely lady was in a Bridgeway House play last weekend.

The choir finale concert is this weekend.

Loving husband, the fine young gents and I have taken up karate. (Yes, me! Karate. Who'da thunk it??) The Eugene School of Karate offers a family class for homeschoolers. It's fab-u-lous.

We have new chicks.

Eldest lovely lady has prom in two weeks.

It's garden season.

I've made two trips to emergency/urgent care in the last week. (One for lovely lady's friend, one for our peanut boy.)

And the laundry mountain is never quite tamed.

I'm so busy living my life that I don't have time to write about it. See you when things calm down.

Wordless Wednesday: I Spy an Egg

Nearly Wordless Wednesday: In the garden

Prepared beds

Snap peas

Spinach

Rhubarb

Shelling Peas

Onions

Raspberries

Cauliflower, strawberries, more onions, lettuce and bok choi, potatoes. Sweet peas and nasturtiums.

Life is good.

Life in a small town

My grandfather told me this story:

It snowed a couple weeks ago in Baker City. The snow plows had cleared the roads, but his truck was still blocked in the driveway, and he was out shoveling snow out of the driveway so that he could get his truck out. A woman was walking down the street, walked a little way past Grandpa's driveway then turned around and walked back the other direction.

A few minutes later, here came a man on a tractor. He plowed the snow from around my grandpa's truck, waved and drove off.

The next time it snowed, he came down and plowed again. Just a wave and off he went.

Grandpa said he'd like to thank him, maybe take him something, but he doesn't know where the guy lives. A few days ago, he saw the man walking down the road leading a couple mules. So now he knows he can find the man's house. He'll just drive that direction until he finds the house with the mules.

Color Study

We're winding up our color studies. It's been a fascinating and motivating subject for the fine young gents. Which isn't surprising when you think about it. Color is immediate and relevant. It's something we experience every moment. A color study combines, overlaps and intersects art and science, and the experiments are simple, fun and accessible. And memorable. The fine young gents often talk about color in terms of science and art, remarking at the red light waves that must be bouncing off a shirt, for example. On the way home from a visit to Grandpa's, kindergarten gent stared out at the brown hills and remarked, "Mom, I can't see any tertiary colors out there."

At the beginning of spring break, we spent some school time doing color experiments. We're moving on to an astronomy study this spring, but we didn't want to miss some of the fun activities we'd seen online and in our experiment books, so we spent a fair amount of time playing with color.

Catch a Rainbow from Kidzone Science:

You need:
A shallow bowl
Milk
Food color--red, blue and yellow
Dish soap
Printable recording sheet (optional)

Drop food color at the edges of the bowl as shown above. Add 2-3 drops of dish soap to the middle of the bowl. Sit back and watch the colors swirl and combine.
Then complete the record sheet:


Is Black Black?
(Pictured in notebook above.)

You need:
Black markers, 2-3 different brands
A coffee filter
Water and an eyedropper
A tray or dish

Cut the coffee filter into strips. Choose one brand of black marker, and color a big black dot at the edge of a coffee filter strip. Do the same with the other black markers until you have a dotted strip for each brand of marker. Set the strips in your tray or dish and drip water on the black dots until they are saturated. Make sure your strips are not touching so that the colors don't bleed onto one another. Wait for the colors to wick up the filter. What colors do you see? Are the colors used by each brand different? The same?

Color Filters

You need:
Colored cellophane, different colors
Paper
Markers
Flashlight (optional)

Using your markers, draw a rainbow (or other colorful picture) on your paper. Place different colors of cellophane over your picture. What happens to the colors? Now take your cellophane and place it over different colored objects in the room. What happens to those colors?

For more cellophane fun, take the colored cellophane and a flashlight into the closet or other dark place. Shine the flashlight through the cellophane. (Moms: This kept my fine young gents entertained for an hour.)

Make a Rainbow

You need: A prism and bright light

Find a prism and experiment with making rainbows in the sunlight.



Color Mixing

You need:
4-6 glasses or bowls
Water
Food color--red, yellow, blue
Eyedroppers, spoons, measuring cups
Tray and towels or rags

Place the glasses and bowls on a tray. Fill three glasses or bowls with water. Add several drops of red, yellow or blue food color to the glasses so that you've got one glass of each color. Set out the the colored water and extra glasses or bowls for mixing. Use the spoons, measuring cups and eyedroppers to mix colors! Make sure to have a rag handy to clean up spills!

Victory Gardens

Victory Gardens: http://www.revivevictorygarden.org/

Eugene/Springfield--Victory Gardens for All, food does grow on trees: http://www.victorygardensforall.org/

A Day in the Life: Field Trip Friday

"Arigato, Makiko-sensei!"

The fine young gents are learning Japanese from their lovely older sister. I've been paying her to teach the boys an art and Japanese class every Wednesday.

She's taking Japanese in high school. She wants to go to Japan this summer. The boys want to learn Japanese. I don't speak Japanese.

She's earning money for her trip, and teaching helps her to use the Japanese she's learning in school. The boys get to learn to speak, read and write a little Japanese, and they get to spend some time with their beloved sister. I get some time to myself to read or make dinner or plan the next day's lessons, or to just sit and stare out the window.

Win-Win-Win.

Life is good.

Wordless Wednesday: In the Hammock