Front Room Completed

I was a little happier with my front room about an hour ago before we hung up the two final items - the big photo of the Nauvoo Temple and the wreath above the TV. Although the temple is level, it's not centered and the wreath is too high. But at this point I'm not really willing to do anything about it.

Besides that, I LOVE MY FRONT ROOM. It didn't turn out how I first thought it would. The sky really never is the limit on these home improvement projects. There is that little inhibitor called the wallet. But I am very pleased at how things came together and Derek and I were able to pick photos of family members and frames and place them on the walls where we both really liked them. I wont bring up the fact that I did all of the work, except in hanging the temple photo, even though this was my birthday present, nor that I used my own personal spending money to buy all of these things - well, I suppose I just did.

Anyway.

The photos I took (please excuse the messy living room - it is Halloween after all) aren't very good. They kind of distort the colors and don't give you a good sense of, well, much. The frames really do look good together - it's just the colors in the photos on the blog - I promise the browns aren't so red and such. But you can get an idea of what has occupying my adult thoughts (thoughts not revolving around my children) for the last month or so.

Sorry about the glare.

I forgot to mention, on the left is a family photo and the Proclamation on the Family and on the left is "The Living Christ" and a painting of the Savior. I'm thinking of putting a potted plant on that little table with the lace doily thing. It just looks kind of lacking.

Halloween

This morning I dressed all the kids up and we all went to Abigail's preschool Halloween party. The kids had a lot of fun and Lukas asked me as we were leaving if we could "play Halloween party at that kid's house again." To which I replied, sorry no, but better things were yet to come.

We (I) carved our jack-o-lanterns. The got about 45 minutes of light time. Derek didn't want to leave them burning while we were trick-or-treating so we didn't light the candles until we got home, and then, like I said, after about 45 minutes or so Derek decided Halloween was over so he blew them out. That was sad. But oh well.

Also, I almost forgot to mention, we were all excited for our annual sweet and salty roasted pumpkin seeds. Now, I am not a pumpkin seed expert, but I have made these before, and not once have they caramelized on me this these did today. We were all kind of disappointed. Until we tasted them. Caramelized pumpkin seeds! Who knew.

After dinner (which no one ate of course, it's Halloween after all. You have to save room for all that candy!) Grampy and Grammy came by and we all went trick-or-treating. We were out for a little over an hour but at the end Abigail was asking when we were going home and Grampy had to carry Lukas because he just couldn't move his little legs anymore. It may be because their candy buckets were so heavy.

And after we got home Grammy read the children a sweet little Halloween book before she and Grampy had to leave. Then we herded the children into bed. I was so surprised that Kaleb made it the entire time! He was actually singing and laughing and squealing as we were trick-or-treating, even though it was 2 hours past his bed time. Maybe they'll all sleep in tomorrow?

Mycenae and Worms

I originally planned on a day or two about the ancient Hittites last week, but there was so little information I could find that I decided to just skip it. I'm sure my children's education will not suffer too greatly because of this decision. Instead, we moved onto Mycenae, which is the Greek city from which Agamemnon is supposed to have been king during the Trojan wars.  Sometimes narration pages get a little redundant, so we didn't really do any for Mycenae. And in fact, on Friday, we were so busy, that we didn't really do much homeschool, which is why Mycenae has flooded over into this week as well. But even Mycenae isn't that interesting all in itself. What is really interesting is Homer's epic poems, the Odyssey and the Illiad. I've mentioned before Derek has read two different versions of the Odyssey to Joshua (he's reading them Gilgamesh now from ancient Babylon - we went a little backwards) and it is probably Joshua's favorite book ever - although he is really enjoying Gilgamesh the Hero. So instead of doing narration pages on Mycenae I decided Joshua could narrate his own version of The Odyssey. This has actually turned into a huge project because his memory is too good and he starts recounting all these little details. (In fact, sometimes I say too him, "you know, its ok, you can just say Calypso let him go, instead of retelling the entire conversation between the two." That's probably not the best teaching tool, but it helps him not get too bogged down in all the details and make the project too large for him to finish. By the way, we aren't finished yet. He's narrated to the point where Odysseus is back in Ithaca and he's illustrated to the point where Odysseus sails away from Troy. So, yes, we have a long way to go. I would like him to get done by Thursday, but we'll see.  Once Derek is done reading Gilgamesh to the kids, he's going to read a children's version of the Illiad and then also the Anead. I'm sure I've mentioned that as well.

But today, because we had to read something during learning time and Derek has forbidden me to read "his" books to the kids (it is their special time together) I read Joshua a different book. It is about the man who discovered Troy, Mycenae, and some other Bronze Age settlement mentioned by Homer in modern day Turkey. He was a German named Heinrich Schliemann and his story is really interesting. The title is "The Hero Schliemann; The Dreamer Who dug for Troy" but I wouldn't call him a hero. He is kind of more like a nut. But he ended up an extremely rich nut. And a famous rich nut at that. The book was much longer than I realized, but Joshua was so interested in it, that we read the entire thing. It took us about an hour.  It is a very interesting read and I recommend it to anyone learning about archeology, the Trojan Wars, or needs a subject for a biography research paper or something.

My original idea for the latter half of this week was to move onto the Old Testament lands and peoples but that might flood over into next week as well. I don't have many pictures of our history learning, but I promise it was interesting.

In science we learned about worms and leeches. so gross. But we got some of the most awesome narration pages out of it. For some reason, science narration pages don't get boring. The books were very informative, even if they were gross, the leeches especially. For our worm day we went outside and collected worms in old peanut butter containers so we could observe them digging their tunnels. Lukas has never been so excited to participate in learning time. He was right there the entire time and insisted on making his own worm house. (I think our worms are barely struggling onto life so I better let them go). The kids had so much fun digging in the dirt, finding the worms, and picking out the best leaves for them to eat. And just so you know, you can't cut a worm in half and get two living worms, although the head end of the worm might grow a new tail end. And a worm does have 5 hearts, but they are all clumped together around it's head end. I always thought they were all throughout the body and that was why you could cut worms in half and they would still live, because they would still have at least one heart. Anyway, that is false.

And a quick warning about teaching your kids about leeches and bloodletting, besides that it is gross. I did come down one afternoon to see the kids playing doctor and Joshua had drawn and cut out a picture of a leech to use on Lukas, who was forced to lie on the couch and have a paper leech suck on his ear every few minutes to help him get better. If you don't want your kids leeching each other, don't teach them about leeches.

In other news, I had a birthday last week. I turned 32. That seems so young still. But then I realized I was almost 36 and 36 is TWICE as old as 18. That seems really old. So when I turn 36 maybe I'll feel differently about my age. For my birthday I made myself a cake. It was a four layer lemon and strawberry cake with a whipped cream frosting. It was kind of fun to make, and kind of pretty, but of course, we can't eat an entire cake so I gave a little more than half of it away and just threw away the last 2 two pieces forgotten in the fridge. And I've decided, I probably would have been just as happy eating the lemon curd I made for the filling, instead of sticking it into a cake. Maybe I'm more of a lemon pie kind of person instead of a lemon cake kind of person. I also went up to Salt Lake to visit a friend I hadn't seen in a long time and it was very nice to see her. She is an amazing person and I admire her very much.  That night Derek brought home dinner and we had cake. My favorite part of the day, maybe, was watching my kids sing happy birthday and literally squeal with delight as they cheered after I blew out my candles. They were so happy! And so that made me really happy.  Derek got me a water bath/steamer canner, some canning tongs, an apple peeler/corer/slicer, and a citrus zester. So of course Friday I had to test them out.

We made applesauce! It was so fun using my new stuff, and it really wasn't that difficult - especially since the kids ate all the apple peels right as they came off the apple. They really enjoyed that. And I couldn't help but notice their resemblance to our science topic of the week. We also made one more stop to the pumpkin patch with our friends and ran a couple of other errands, like our weekly library trip. It was a busy day.

Also, I worked on Halloween costumes. They turned out pretty good and the boys wear theirs every day! This photos doesn't show them totally complete, but they are pretty close.

My other birthday present still isn't quite finished. My goal was to have our front room finished, meaning having all the pictures selected, printed, framed, and hung on the wall. This has been a major project and an expensive one too (but to me, everything is expensive, even milk and bread). I've hung all but three photos and a wreath up since those items need nails and we've all had colds but Derek has been maybe the most sick so he hasn't hung up the last things for me. I'd much rather have him be responsible for a hole in the wall than myself so I don't dare try to hang them up by myself. When I get those done - which will hopefully be tomorrow - I will post those photos too. I already love the room, although if I look too closely at one arrangement, I start seeing mistakes, but it's ok.

Preschool and Pumpkins and Babylon

This week it was my turn to host Abigail's preschool again. My letter was D, the number was 6, the theme was dinosaurs, and the nursery rhyme was Hey Diddle Diddle. On day 1, after our little show and tell of things that start with D, we counted out six dinosaurs, six ducks, and six dominoes and lined them all up. The dinosaurs were eating the domino playing ducks. (It's kind of hard to come up with things to do with the numbers, I think. That's as creative as I got.) The kids also had a D page to work on and a dinosaur picture to color (I don't remember taking photos of those, but if I did I put them on here. They were just things I got off the internet.) Then we read a couple of books about dinosaurs. They were all fiction books, but they didn't hold the attention of the kids for very long. That's ok, I thought, snack time, I was sure, was going to be awesome. But no. Apparently 4/5 year olds don't like vanilla pudding with bananas. I even carefully counted out six banana slices for each dish. Some of them politely nibbled at their pudding, while others shouted out for all to hear that they thought it was gross. I tried to explain that pudding is a dessert like cake and ice cream, but they weren't going for it.  Well, if pudding didn't win them over, the last activity would. Who doesn't like play dough!!?! That's right. EVERYONE likes play dough. And notice how dough so nicely starts with D. I had the kids at first try to make dinosaurs out of their play dough or anything else they could think of that started with D. This was the winner activity and they worked with their dough right up until it was time to go home. So day one, although it started off slow, ended with a big success. Phew.

Day 2 we focused more on Hey Diddle Diddle. We still had the show and tell time, in which two of the children brought books, so since I am really big on getting kids to listen to and read books, we read them and the kids really enjoyed that. Things were starting off pretty good. Then I had two more books to read following the Hey Diddle Diddle theme. One was actually about Humpty Dumpty - the bad old egg - who sat on top of the wall and shouted to the other nursery characters who passed by, "I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal!" Until one night a near-blind-but-high-jumping cow and a dog were walking passed with a dish and a spoon. The dog and cow were arguing about who could jump higher and the cow decided it could prove itself by jumping over that moon over there lying on the wall (hint: it was actually the egg.) So the cow jumped over, humpty woke up and fell of the wall and broke, the dog thought it was funny, but the dish and spoon were afraid they were going to get in trouble so they ran away. And the story goes on but that was the part that had to do with Hey Diddle Diddle. The kids really enjoyed it. Afterwards, the kids colored a Hey Diddle Diddle picture that I got online and played until it was time for snack. I put absolutely no effort or money into this snack. I was still hurt about the pudding incident. So we had cheese sticks (cut off my cheddar block from Costco) and sliced apples that the bishop gave me off his tree. The kids LOVED it. Oh well. Apples are better for them anyway. After snack we had a small craft to do before play time. I had prepared 6 items for the kids that they needed to collect off the table - a paper plate (dish), a plastic spoon, and a dog, cat with a fiddle, cow, and moon to color. They colored their little pictures and them glued them onto the plate. They drew smileys on the plate and the spoon and then I hot glued the spoon to the plate. They thought this was really cool. Afterwards they got to play until it was time to go home. One child refused to leave - even after his mother came downstairs trying to coax him out. (I think this means I did a good job.) His mother finally got him out by telling him he could watch a movie when they got home.

Preschool is done for another 5 weeks. My next assignment is just one day - the Thanksgiving Party! That should be fun.

Unofficially we made this week "pumpkin week." It just sort of happened. It actually started about 8 days ago when my lovely home grown pumpkins I had placed on my front door step to celebrate the season were all smashed onto the street, probably by teenage punks who don't realize there are real consequences to their actions. In this case, the consequences included a sobbing little 6 year old boy, a very hurt mother, and a confused 4 and 2 year old. "Why would someone want to smash our pumpkins?" That is a very good question indeed. But that happened the day we went to the zoo so we didn't have much time to mourn.  At the zoo we finished off the last of our pumpkin roll out cookies with orange glaze. I know, I post a picture of these cookies every single year, but I love them. We also made the pumpkin chocolate chip muffins again this week, so yes, I will include a photo of one of those as well. I made them with powdered eggs, so they looked a little different, but they tasted just as fabulous. On Monday night, after the kids were in bed, there was a loud knock on the door and when I answered it I saw 6 brand new pumpkins and a little note saying Happy Halloween! How thoughtful. The next morning I told the kids the pumpkin fairy came to visit in the night and they were very excited. Except now, every night before we go to bed we pull our pumpkins inside for safe keeping. Let's see. The kids also made some jack-o-lanterns and ghosts to decorate the classroom window. Some of the pumpkins and ghosts are "bakers" wearing their "bakers" hats. I don't know how they came up with that, but sounds good to me. We also went to our favorite pumpkin patch. I took photos in the big maze (taller rather than bigger), the kids played in the mini maze, they played in the corn, they climbed the hey pyramid, slid down the slid (Lukas, Kaleb, and I went down the slide together too) and we went on the tracker ride. It was lots of fun and we will probably go again right before Halloween. And for dinner last night we had dinner in a pumpkin. I didn't cook the pumpkin enough so it came out a little stringy and I couldn't stand to eat it - it's a texture thing for me, I need my pumpkin mushy, not stringy - but everyone else thought it was delicious. So there. Pumpkins. (the only things we didn't do but will do later were to roast and eat pumpkin seeds, paint our pumpkins, and carve one of them. Joshua actually wants to be a pumpkin fairy and donate two of our pumpkins to some other kids whose pumpkins were also smashed, but I keep forgetting. That would also be a lot of fun.)

 I forgot to mention they had a haunted house - or more like a haunted trailer from a semi truck. It was cute - but Lukas was terrified!! I only got him through by carrying him and then on the other side he said he never wanted to go in again.

Babylon. You never knew how cool Babylon was because if you are like me, you grew up associating Babylon with worldy sins, which I'm still sure it was full of. But there were also a lot of cool things about Babylon too. The first day we read a very interesting and well written book about Babylon for kids and learned a lot. Joshua did a narration page. And another day read up on Hammurabi and made our own codes. The rule was the code had to follow the pattern of Hammurabi's; They were if/then statements. We wrote ours with chalk on black paper to look like carvings on stone and then the kids drew themselves as king of queen on a top paper. Hammurabi's code was carved into a pillar and the top had a carving of him being given power from the gods. We omitted all false gods in our renditions. It was fun to learn about Babylon because it comes up so frequently in the scriptures, and multiple scripture characters the kids know actually lived in Babylon, like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshak, and Abed-nego, Esther, etc. So that was neat. And there were a lot of things we had learned about before that came back when we talked about Babylon. Babylon was in the same area as Sumeria - practically speaking, so the landscape was the same, they used clay tablets and cuneiform - which we already knew all about - and they still had ziggurats. Also interesting to Babylon is the epic of Gilgamesh. The stories of Gilgamesh is the oldest none written story. I checked it out from the library, but our library days are Fridays so we haven't started reading it yet. Derek was reading another shorter version of "The Odyssey" to the kids, which he just finished, so he'll start Gilgamesh, the Hero tomorrow. I didn't know Babylon was so interesting. I'll still try to stay out of it though.

Abigail's code says "1) If you hear Kaleb crying, then you have to help him. 2) If you make a big mess, then you have to clean it up with nobody helping you. 3) If Abigail turns on the light in the middle of the night, mom cannot turn it off. 4) If you don't do the work then you'll be sent to the dungeon."

 Joshua's code says, "1) If you come in my room then you have to sleep in my room. 2) If we fight with our dad he cannot fight back. 3)If you are not nice to your brother then you have to go in the washroom for an hour. 4) If you make a big mess, then mommy has to clean it up. 5)If someone says a bad word, then mommy has to put soap in her mouth. 6) If mom and dad stay up late, then the kids get to stay up late too."