Get This Party Started!

Yes. My garden party has started! And for the first time my backyard sort of feels like a real farm. That's probably because of the baby kittens.

Yes. Sunset our cat (who was just a kitten herself when we got her in August) is the mother of four. I still can't decide if the newborn kittens are cute, or if they look like rats. I'm back and forth about it. But I know they'll get cuter. When they are weaned we'll give them away to people who want mousers. Know anyone?

They weather hasn't exactly been warm, but in-between rain showers I've been able to get some work done. I planted 3 concord grape vines along the outside of the chicken fence. I know the chickens will eat any grapes that grow within reach on the inside of the fence. But when they free range the yard they leave my other grape vine alone once it gets higher than their eye level, so I'm hoping they'll do the same with the concords. Grape vines would be a nice screen between the coop and the rest of the yard. It would also give the chickens a little more shade. So I hope it works. It's kind of an experiment at this point.

I tilled the garden bed as well and planted some spring crops: lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, radishes, beets, and at Ollie's request, carrots.

I decided not to plant peas this year, because I've never gotten a decent enough crop of them to make them worth the space they take up. (And I'm pretty sure the reason why is because I plant them too late every year, and they get too hot and burn up. You're supposed to plant peas on St. Patrick's Day, but I never remember until about mid-April. Ha! So I'm just bagging it this year.) I'm planning to convert the pea trellis from last year into a cucumber trellis, since I need to grow quite a few cucs this year to replenish my jars of pickles. I also want to try butternut squash. And since Aaron gave me a pressure canner for Christmas, I should be able to can squash and beans, and soups, and a whole bunch of other things I wasn't able to can before. The possibilities are endless, and I need more garden space. :)

Easter 2017

Aaron, Cal, Ivan, Krystal, Ruby, Adelia, Lincoln, Nolan, Kirk, Lily, Stephanie, Brighton, Graham, Ollie, Tanya, Burke, Jackson, Emree, Tanner

Cal

Tanner, Krystal, Jackson

Ollie

We had soccer games on Easter Saturday, which means we missed the neighborhood Easter egg hunt. And I had to speak on Easter Sunday, which means we absolutely HAD to be on-time for 9:00AM church on Easter morning. Needless to say Easter was super duper low-key this year.

We did invite some of our cousins over for a fun little egg hunt Saturday afternoon. And then Sunday after church we drove up to Hooper for dinner. My mom put on an egg hunt for the grandkids there also.

My kids didn't get new Easter clothes or anything. I swear every time I look at my boys their church pants are 3 inches too short, no matter how recently we've bought them new ones. They all need shoes too. And the girls needed new dressed back in March, so technically those were their "Easter" dresses, they've just been wearing them for awhile already.

But none of that is very important.

What's actually important is that we did take time to teach our kids about Jesus Christ. We talked about how because of Jesus our family has the potential to be eternal. We talked about how everyone will be resurrected from the dead, and how if we keep the commandments and the covenants that the Lord has asked us to make and to keep that we will have eternal life, which gift is the greatest gift.

And for that, I am eternally grateful.

Swingin' Spring

This about sums up every night at my house, haha! Aaron and I aren't getting much sleep. Someone....or three or four someones....or someone three or four times....is always up in the wee hours.

But that's life, right?

Spring sports are upon us. Ivan, Adelia, and Ollie are playing soccer (and I'm coaching Ollie's team), and Lincoln is playing baseball. Baseball games haven't started yet, but since Linc's league starts their first year of kid-pitch this year, they are already practicing twice a week. Our week goes something like this:

Monday: FHE and Relief Society meeting
Tuesday: Linc and Ivan have piano, Linc and Ivan have fishing, Ollie has a soccer game and Linc has baseball practice. Sometimes Adelia also has soccer practice. And I go to yoga.
Wednesday: Ivan has scouts, Adelia has a soccer game, Lincoln has scouts (at a different time and location from Ivan *rolls eyes*).
Thursday: Adelia has piano, Ivan has a soccer game, and Lincoln has baseball practice.
Friday: Homeschool park day and date night (which usually means Aaron and I do something together after the kids go to bed. We rarely actually go out.)
Saturday: Ivan, Adelia, and Ollie all have soccer games.

The mental gymnastics of trying to figure out who is going where and when is a bit of a headache....but other than that, I love being so involved. Watching my kids doing their different activities, trying new things, learning new skills, and seeing their different interests and abilities, and being there to cheer them on is what I live for. Plus, not gonna lie, I love having reasons to get out of the house and DO something, instead of the same-old-same housework. :) Aaron is a good sport to tolerate it all.

Ivan kicking a corner kick. He's scored two goals already this season.

Adelia made an awesome save while playing goalie.

Cub soccer is my favorite. It's hilarious. And Ollie is catching on really well. He's scored two goals so far this season.

Ruby likes to play catch with me while we watch Lincoln's baseball practices. She makes up her own rules about how the game of catch should go. 

A few Saturdays ago, Aaron took the kids out to launch Lincoln's model rocket. Cal and I were able to join them after Cal got up from his nap. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the kids had a marvelous time chasing down the rocket each time it landed. Here is my favorite picture of it. I love that Aaron and Lincoln have the exact same stance and posture. Lincoln might look more like me, but he is Aaron to the core, and I love it.

I guess I've inadvertently been talking about yoga while my kids were listening. Anyways, I few nights ago we were sitting down eating dinner, when out of nowhere the next thing I knew, all the kids were standing on chairs or our bench, trying to balance in a yoga pose they've seen me do. Haha! Even Ruby was trying and it cracked me up.

Poetry Workshop Week

April is poetry month! I spent the first week of the month putting on a mini-poetry workshop for my kids.

Someday my goal is to refine this workshop, make it bigger, and invite other homeschoolers to do it with us. I envision rotating stations, where at each station kids learn about a different kind of poetic form or feature, and then, after every group has rotated through each station, coming together for a poetry slam. At the poetry slam all the kids will have the opportunity to read the poems they've written at each station to the big group. But anyways, that's going to be at some future point. Right now I'm practicing my ideas on my own guinea pigs kids. :)

We spent almost all of last year's poetry time writing acrostic poems. We've recently done magnetic poetry on the refrigerator. And I didn't have any magazines on hand to cut out of to have the kids do collage poems. So I started with Haiku, because it seemed the next easiest after all the things I mentioned above. It's the first time my kids have been exposed to a poetic form that required a certain number of syllables. But we've learned to count syllables from our All About Spelling curriculum, so it wasn't a totally new concept. They grasped it quickly.

All three big kids seemed to really enjoy haikus. They each wrote three. I can't find Ivan's or Adelia's but here are Lincoln's:

Wind
Wonderful, breezy,
Blowing, lovely, soft, nice, wind.
Breezy, wonderful.

Clouds
Floating, breezy, fun
Puffy, raining on my house.
Clouds are wonderful.

Cats
Soft, lovely, cute fur.
Quickly pouncing on grey mice.
I like nice quick cats.

The next day we did shape poems. These were fun, because the kids were able to find tons of examples of them in our collections of children's poetry. They did turn out to be a little trickier to write than we anticipated, getting the poem to have the right number of words to create the shape you're envisioning is a lot easier in theory. :) To try and help with that, we all did a kite poem using the same shape, but filling it in with our own words. Then I turned the kids loose to try whatever shape they wanted to. Again, I can't find Ivan's notebook, but he wrote a cool one about blowing a bubble, and another about families that was in the shape of a heart. Here is Adelia's kite poem:

Out my window is a sunny-windy day.
Gathering glue, paper, ribbon,
A string. I did it! A homemade kite.
Unwinding the string, my kite goes flying!
Left and right. Up and down.
Carried by the wind.
A colorful jewel floating with the birds.

And Lincoln's kite poem (just imagine it in the the same shape, I didn't get a picture.):

A last kite soaring skyward.
Small, smaller. Getting away.
Was so fun.
Was so cool.
And now it's gone.

The trickiest form we tried this week was Limericks. They are hard because not only do they have a rhyme scheme, and a syllable pattern, but they have stressed and unstressed syllables. Think of the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock.

HICKory, DICKory, DOCK
the MOUSE ran UP the CLOCK
the CLOCK struck ONE
the MOUSE ran DOWN
HICKory, DICKory, DOCK.

We also discovered that not all limericks stick strictly to the number of syllables they are 'supposed' to have. This created a good discussion about how poetic forms are not exact things, but more like guidelines to follow as closely or as loosely as the poet chooses. This concept was super frustrating for several of my children who like to stick to the rules. Instead of putting too much stress on them to author their own limerick, we decided to read plenty of funny examples of limericks and get everyone laughing. Lincoln ended up being the only one to compose his own, and this is it:

Fish
There once was a very big fish
Who had just one simple wish:
To ride on a cloud
But he was so loud
That the cloud threw him off with a swish.


And that was our workshop. It was really fun. And I think the bones are good for my big plans, I just need to get a few things refined, and figure out how to make the stations work for a larger group. I'm also thinking I need to add in somewhere and element of peer review and personal revision, because that is a huge important step in the writing process, and it's good to learn how to give and take constructive criticism. But all in all, I am happy with how this week went. I really enjoyed sharing something I love with my kids. And I hope someday down the road to be able to share it with others too.

Spring Break Moab: Day 4: Arches part 2

If I HAD to pick a favorite day of our trip, it wouldn't be an easy choice, because I loved all of it. But, if I really had to choose, I think I would pick today as the best day because my kids had such a good time.

We started the day out fully planning on doing the Delicate Arch hike. We'd heard it was a little difficult and that there were some steep drop offs and ledges, but we were going to give it a go anyway, and just turn back if we thought it was looking too hairy. When we got to the trail head, the parking lot was jam packed. Every stall was full and cars were lining both sides of the road in both directions. Not to mention that the line for the pit toilet had about 50 people standing in it. Haha, So we drove a little further up the road to the Delicate Arch View Points instead, deciding that we would do those, and then see how crowded the hike was at that point.

The lower view point trail was kind of a joke, really. It was so short it wasn't worth even getting out of the car for. But the upper view point was ok. Nothing fancy. The hike was easy, and at the end you can see Delicate Arch from across the canyon. But meh. If you have to miss a hike in Arches, go ahead and skip the Delicate Arch view points, there are lots cooler and interesting hikes out there.

Ruby had been in a SUPER bad mood all morning, and wanted to be carried the whole time we were walking the view point. She was being really uncooperative about everything, and throwing a tantrum every other minute about things like the wind blowing her hair in her face, and not wanting Lincoln to look at her. We reevaluated how much we really wanted to try the actual Delicate Arch hike, because I wasn't sure if we could manage a more difficult trail with Ruby in her currant temperament. When we drove by it again the parking lot was still really packed, so we opted to skip it, and do it next time we come to Moab.

Instead, we parked at the Sand Dune Arch trail head and had lunch. This helped Rue a little. Then we hiked to Sand Dune Arch and it was SO COOL. It's like a slot canyon, except wider, and the bottom of it is covered in soft, deep, red sand, like a beach. Along the side walls are smaller rock structures that aren't too high, so the kids could climb all over them and have a great time, while the younger kids sat down and played in the sand. It was a family of all-aged hikers paradise. Seriously. We could have stayed here all day and been 100% content.

In the same parking lot is another trail head called Broken Arch. We decided to do this hike too. Another super cool, really easy, kid-friendly hike with a big payoff at the end. Most of the trail hikes through the flat desert. Then you get up to the rock face and hike along it for a little ways, you come around a bend and see the arch, and then the hike continues right underneath the arch. You have to scramble up a rock face to get right up under the arch, but I had no problems doing that with Cal on my back. Ruby was the only one who needed help. The views from there were amazing.

We could have followed the trail another mile through a campground and then looped back to the parking lot, but it was getting late in the day and time for us to start heading back towards Springville, so we just retraced our steps and went out that way. We didn't get to see nearly all there was to see in Arches, so I guess that means we'll have to come back sometime. :)

I've put up all my awesome pictures, but I just want to share a more "real life" one that I think captures the spirit of vacationing with kids perfectly:

Every member of our family is in this picture, except me. Can you find them all?

Haha! We all had a really good time though. I really needed the vacation, and Aaron was a good sport to let us vacation T3-style. We were go-go-go for 3 straight days. On the drive home the kids and I counted it up, and including the small pull-out trails, we did 10 hikes in 3 days. And it was glorious! Add this one on to the lengthening list of places I need to revisit and spend more time in.