Parentheticals

Elsa volunteered to help me write this blog post. This is what she said: "We were going to the beach house, and Victoria was there, and we went on the beach and we found so many pretty shells. That's all I remember." Just to be clear, we did not go to the beach house last week. :P I'm not sure if she's making up a story, telling me what she remembers from the last year, or what. She did get to play with Victoria this week, though; Grandma Julie and Grandpa Craig were in town this weekend and invited all the cousins for a sleepover. Alison and Mike and Becky and Chauncey had Arby's for dinner and played Here to Slay at Becky's house while the kids were all at Grandma's. It was very fun! And when we went to pick up the kids, we sat and created characters for a The One Ring roleplaying game that Chauncey's going to GM for us. Earlier this week, Rea got to go to Grandma's house an extra time for an adventure. She was signed up to take her official ...

This has been a busy week! Monday we had CC. We lost another tutor, so now we have all 15 kids in one classroom. The tutor who's still here is a former public school teacher and is AMAZING, so it works, and the kids have made some new friends in the group. But it's also harder to keep everyone focused. We're working on other ideas to help the kids sit still and quiet. Tuesday and Wednesday Alison felt like she was coming down with a cold, so she rested a lot. Everyone else did fun things, probably. Thursday was Rea's Carnival party. We came home from Grandma and Grandpa's house early to meet the Dalyais. Rea picked Vietnam as her theme, and she and Aunt Amy made Vietnamese ginger cookies (yum!), and she helped everyone make paper lanterns and taught them a Vietnamese game. Then they had so much fun playing for four hours that we forgot to have dinner and got to bed pretty late. On Friday the 3rd we had a game day with the Wilsons at our house. We finished up playing...

 Monday started off with Alison waking up at 3am to throw up. Mike had to take two days off work because she was too sick to get out of bed. Monday he did school with the kids, and Tuesday Rea threw up when she woke up, so Mike cancelled school and just took care of sick people (who mostly listened to audiobooks). Wednesday the kids were fine and Mom was better enough to do school in the morning and sleep all afternoon; Thursday she stayed awake most of the day, and by Friday and Saturday everyone was better. Sara's math program right now has her mastering a concept and then using it to decipher a recipe that Alison has made into math problems. She learned rounding last week and then figured out the recipe for peanut butter fudge. She made it Monday morning with Aunt Amy's help, and she did a wonderful job! It was the most creamy fudge anyone in the extended family made this year. Everyone loved it. While people were sick and stuff, Boo went in the bathroom and painted her hair...

Alison assigned the kids a new project for school this week. They've been listening to the Wings of Fire novels as audiobooks and playing dragons, so for biology, they are each supposed to design a real-life dragon. They have to explain their dragon's skeletal, muscular, nervous, and digestive system, and how it would be classified scientifically. Rea also has to talk about how her dragon develops from an egg and how the cells differentiate to make those different systems. It has been fairly popular; the kids are enjoying looking at books of how bodies are put together and thinking about what their dragons are like. Rea wants to make a swimming octopus dragon, Timmy an ice dragon that's eaten by polar bears and is adapted to protect itself, and Sara a crocodile dragon. Alison is working hard on getting better at helping the kids learn to design their own projects for learning; the dragon one is a fun start, and she hopes it will help them learn how to create their own proje...

The Fourth of July went well. The Plastows came to our house for a barbecue, and Amy brought an awesome collection of fireworks from Costco (Rea really hopes we can find the ones called "goddess fountains" next year). It didn't have Pop-Its or sparklers or tanks, so we bought those. We didn't find any Bestest Crackering Ballz this year, though. It rained a tiny bit and then was very windy, which is not great for fireworks in a drought, but we survived and didn't even light anything on fire. We had a lot of fun. No-one got hurt, and we got to bed at a reasonable hour. Timmy and Gideon both ordered more Bakugan on the internet. Both packages arrived on Saturday, and they have been enjoying them a lot. For those that don't know, Bakugan are ball shaped toys that transform using magnets and springs to become monsters and robots. They are pretty cool. Mike is getting closer and closer to the end of this semester of grad school. He only has one assignment left from ...

We had a family reunion this week! Monday we drove up to Flaming Gorge to meet Grandma Sheila and Papa Mike, the Plastows, the Strombergs, and the Andersons and spend a few days on the river. On the way, we stopped at the Dinosaur Quarry in Vernal and saw the dinosaur bones still embedded in the wall. It was very exciting for all the kids, especially Boo. It was hard for the kids to believe that this was exactly what it looks like when paleontologists dig up fossils, and that these were REAL FOSSILS. It was fun! We got to the motel fairly late Monday, so Tuesday morning we headed out to raft the river. The water was really low, so the rapids were very mild. Mike and I were in the "calm boat" with the Andersons, and we brought in any other kids who needed a break from the excitement (mostly Boo and Gideon). Everyone had a great time on the river! Wednesday we took the rafts and inner tubes to the lake and swam and floated and wandered the shore. Papa Mike and several of the ol...

This week was not as exciting as last week (phew!), but we had fun. We switched over to our summer schedule this week, since our scheduled school-ish things (nature group and weekly learning logs) ended last week.  This year, summer schedule involves listening to a early-elementary-school-level audiobook over breakfast (nature stories, stories from history, things like that), then getting ready for the day, then half an hour of review (math, reading, handwriting) before they head out to play. They also need to take a siesta in the hot part of the afternoon if they want to stay up in the evening when it's nice - not that it's hot yet, but we're starting the transition now, because it's always a grumpy week or two until we all adjust. We're listening to less-exciting upper elementary/middle school level audiobook over naps, in hopes that it won't keep people awake. The kids have gotten to play with their cousins a lot, and they will get to do more now that public ...

Oops, we forgot to write last week, so here's two weeks' worth of notes: Last week we played the board game Near and Far with the kids for the first time. It's a board game with a bit of an RPG flavor, so we picked it when Timmy wanted an RPG and the girls wanted a board game. It was fairly fun, although Timmy wanted a real  RPG and wasn't totally satisfied. Timmy got masking tape tangled in his hair and decided to cut it out instead of asking for help. He ended up getting a haircut, so it's now chin length. Mike did a good job; it looks nice and he still feels like it's long. Every kid has to cut their own hair at least once; at least Timmy's was more fixable than Sara's. There was a snowstorm last week; Alison offered the kids the day off school if they spent it outside in the snow. They had a good time. Gideon helped shovel Grandma and Grandpa's driveway after the storm (Mike invited the kids to go along, and he was the only one who accepted). The...

It still feels like we're just getting back into the swing of things, even though we have been home for weeks now. We're restarting all the kids' social activities: nature groups (three a week!), ballet class from a friend's older sister, library trips, etc. And of course getting the basics of school happening. January is always an exciting time in our homeschool. Every year, we retell the Montessori Five Great Lessons: The Story of the Coming of the Universe, The Story of the Coming of Life, The Story of the Coming of Humans, The Story of Communication in Signs, and The Story of Numbers. The goal is to put all learning into context and make it exciting! We did the first Great Lesson this week, which covers the Big Bang up to the Earth being covered with water. The big hit of this one is always the volcano, which did not explode in a very satisfactory way this year. Alison wants to remember to use a disposable water bottle for the reaction chamber next year. Rea mad...

Since having come back from California, baby Elizabeth has learned to sit and she is still only nearly crawling. She has made progress - she can take little "steps" with her feet and occasionally her hands - but she hasn't put it all together yet. She took a break to get good at sitting once she learned that. She really likes sitting and using her hands. She gets frustrated when she can't get to something out of reach, so she'll be very happy when she learns to crawl. (Although she's a very happy baby in general.) Monday night after getting back, for our family activity we went to the library to see a teenager acting group from Provo perform a short version of Cinderella. It was a lot of fun. The mice were the kids' favorite characters. The king really hammed up his part, and there was a very funny third trumpeter. We really enjoyed it. On Last Friday and Saturday we had the Plastows over for a sleep over. The kids were good, and they had a fun time pl...

Apparently we have not written blog posts in a long time. From the 22nd to the 26th of July we went to a family Reunion in Oregon. Much of the Brown family was able to make it there, and we had a fun time. We loved playing with our cousins and going to the beach. The kids also "found" arrow-heads that seemed to magically be seeded in the yard of our camp site. Rea remembers the really windy day at the beach where it was so windy that it kicked the sand around all over the place. The first time that we tried to fly kites at the beach, we were hardly able to get them up, however the second time, it was so windy that we had a hard time controlling all but the largest kites. Sara liked the fact that we stayed in Yurts, and she also liked "crab paradise", which was when grandpa Mike caught them a lot of crabs and they played with them in a man-made tide pool. Gideon liked playing on the sand, and drawing pictures to Mommy, and grandma Sheila sharing out foo...