Science and History Kicks Off

Wynter and I are teaming up again this year to teach our kids Science and History. This arrangement is so awesome, and adds a fun and social aspect to our learning each week.

First semester I am teaching Science and focusing on rocks and minerals, using the book Explore Rocks and Minerals with 20 great projects. To kick off our topic, we learned about the Earth and it's layers. First, I read them the book Under the Ground, to introduce the layers, then we made a paper diagram, similar to the ones my kids and I did for our volcano unit. Only instead of having the kids draw it free-hand, I made up the diagram on the computer and printed it out for them to color and label and glue in their notebooks. Then we did the fun part. We made the earth and it's layers out of Play-Doh. We started with a small red ball for the inner core, then an orange layer around that for the outer core. Next a yellow layer for the mantle. Then blue with green spots on top to represent the oceans and the continents for the crust. Once everyone had finished their Earth balls, we used a butcher knife to slice them in half, to show the layers.

This semester Wynter is teaching History and focusing on Colonial America using the book Explore Colonial America with 25 Great Projects.  Today she taught the kids about why the pilgrims decided to leave England. They colored a map of the 13 Colonies in order of where the pilgrims landed first. They will glue the maps into their notebooks as well. Then they carved boats out of bars of soap, and got to float them in the "ocean" (a bucket of water). How cool and fun! I was impressed.

Lincoln's Soccer Pictures

Red

The bookcases are finished! And I couldn't be happier about the way they turned out. The red is the perfect pop of color for our living room. And look at all the shelf space I have to work with...Guess it's time to buy some more books, eh husband? ;) *He rolled his eyes at me.*

Now all we need is a not-so-shabby-looking desk and some nicer couches and we'll be in business. One thing at a time though, one thing at a time.

Week 27 and Counting (but trying not to)

27 weeks pregnant. Does that put me in the third trimester yet? I'm not keeping track very closely this time around. I've got other things to do. Which is how I prefer it, the busier I am the faster the time goes by.

But I haven't talked much about this pregnancy yet, other than baby names. I'm feeling pretty good. At the beginning I got "evening sick" as opposed to morning sick, but never enough that I was actually sick. Mostly just that I spent every evening feeling like I was going to be. But that's over with now.

I've been craving sweet things like a crazy person. I did this with Del too, so it must be a girl thing. But also hummus, cheese sticks, and corn on the cob.

I've had to really try hard to stop carrying Oliver all over the place, especially up and down the stairs. It does bad things to my lower back, which has started hurting a lot earlier in the pregnancy than it has before. But if I don't carry Ollie as much that seems to really help.

So far I haven't had any of the gallbladder issues that I had with Ollie's pregnancy, so that's a bonus. I hope we keep up that trend. And I'm only barely starting to need to concentrate really hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in at night.

I guess you could say so far, so good. But I do tend to turn into a cave troll for months 8 and 9. So we aren't out of the woods yet. Mostly my strategy is to be busy enough to keep my mind off of it, but to also remember to take breaks here and there throughout the day, so my legs and back don't kill me by end of the day. I succeed almost every day except Sunday. And that's because Sunday is the day from...well, I won't go there, in case I get struck by lightening. But let's just say Sundays+pregnancy are not a good equation for me.

As for Baby, currently, Aaron and I are at a name impasse. I think this might be the first time ever that we go to the hospital with a list of names to see what fits, instead of choosing a name before hand. There are four that we are really considering, but we can't pick one we like any more than another. So I'll pick one, and call her that for a few days, and then my mood will change, and I'll pick a different one and try that for a few days. Aaron is just as bad. :) Our children have started calling the baby "Whatever her name is". Awesome, right? Here are the names:

Ruby Eleanor
Rosalie Ruby
Eleanor Ruby
Rosalie Eleanor

The only thing I'm fairly sure about name wise is that Sadie is probably out. I still like it, but something has to be eliminated, and Sadie wasn't holding her own with Ruby, Eleanor, and Rosalie.

But I'm also still toying with the idea of using Evelyn as a middle name. And I suddenly find myself having a huge crush on the name Ruth. Ruth is Hebrew and means compassionate friend. Which is applicable, because Adelia is so excited to have a sister and 'friend" in our family. And, wouldn't it be adorable to call her Baby Ruth, or even Babe Ruth. There would totally be a softball/baseball connection going on there, that I admit, makes me grin. And I could nickname her Rue, or Ruthie. So, maybe to the four above, we'd better add:

Ruth Eleanor
Ruth Evelyn

You can see what I mean by impasse. :) And then I have days where I just want to bag everything we've talked about before, throw caution to the wind, and just name her something exotic and awesome. Forget practical. Forget family connections, and deep meanings. Haha! Maybe her name will depend on the mood I'm in the day she's born.

More Soccer

Ivan has been rocking soccer these last couple of games. Yesterday he scored two goals, and I think the game before that he scored one. He's quick, and he's good at defense. Atta' boy!

Aaron subbed coaching last week. Adelia enjoyed having him be her coach. She keeps telling me, "Mom, remember that time Daddy was my coach." :)

And here is Ivan and Adelia's team picture. They are the Bumblebees.

Lincoln has been doing well at his games too. His favorite position is goalie, I think because he gets to use his hands, and doesn't have to run as much. :) But he does a good job there.

And of course we couldn't leave Ollie out. Mostly he just wishes really badly that he could play too. During the games he wanders around until he finds someone's ball to steal, and then spends the rest of the time kicking it around, saying, "Ball. Ball." And laughing. At half-time of Ivan and Del's game last night he even took his ball, dribbled it all the way to the goal, then picked it up and chucked it in. It was cute.

Because Sometimes...

Because sometimes you come home from soccer games to find a chicken on top of your shed roof...

When we first pulled into the driveway I thought, "Our weather vane sure looks nice...wait, we don't have a weather vane." 

Don't worry, Aaron stopped the rogue chicken, or rescued her, depending on how you want to look at it. 

Just Peachy

Two thirds of my peaches ripened up this week. I think sliced peaches in canning jars are one of the prettiest things. I almost just want to line the top of my cupboards with them and use them for decoration. I did 15 quarts of sliced peaches. And I still have some quarts left over from last year, so I decided to branch out a little in the peach department.

Last year I canned this Peach BBQ Sauce as an experiment. And we loved it so much, that this year I decided to make twice as much. It's fabulous. I usually use it over a pork roast in the crock pot, to make pulled pork sandwiches. But I think it would be good on any meat.

Zesty Peach BBQ Sauce

6 cups pitted, peeled peaches (about 3 lbs, or 9 medium) 
1 cup seeded red bell pepper (about 1 large)
1 cup purple onion (about 1 large)
3 Tbsp finely chopped garlic (about 14 cloves)
1 1/4 cup honey
3/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp hot pepper flakes
2 tsp dry mustard
2 tsp salt
8 (8 oz) half pint glass preserving jars with lids and bands

Directions

1. Prepare boiling water canner. Heat jars and lids in simmering water until ready for use. Do not boil. Set aside.

2. Put peaches, bell pepper, and onion, in a blender or food processors and blend 'til smooth.

3. Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan. Bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring frequently, until mixture thickens to the consistency of a thin commercial BBQ sauce, about 25 minutes.

4. Ladle hot sauce into hot jars leaving 1/2 headspace. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rim. Center hot lid on jar. Apply band and adjust until fit is finger tight.

5. Process in a boiling water canner for 15 minutes, adjusting for altitude. Remove jars and cool. Check lids for seal after 24 hours. Lid should not flex up and down when the center is pressed. 

And after that, I still had some peaches left (and some more still on the tree). And I was in the mood to experiment with the exotic. :) I found this Sweet Hot Pickled Peach recipe that spoke directly to my little pregnant taste buds. And I'm glad, these are by far the best tasting thing I've ever canned in my life. They will be a future staple at my house from now on.

 Sweet Hot Pickled Peaches

Ingredients

6 pound small fresh peaches or apricots (about 18 peaches)

2 ½ cups water

2 ½ cups cider vinegar

4 cups granulated sugar

3 cups packed brown sugar

4 sticks cinnamon

2 piece fresh gingerroot, peeled and cut in strips

1 ½ teaspoons crushed red pepper

1 teaspoon mustard seed

8 whole cloves

1 small sweet onion, cut in wedges

1 medium red sweet pepper, seeded and cut in strips

Directions

1. To peel peaches (apricots may be used unpeeled), fill Dutch oven with water; bring to boiling. Carefully lower peaches, a few at a time, into boiling water; let stand 30 to 60 seconds. With slotted spoon transfer peaches to large bowl of ice water. When cool enough to handle, gently rub skin off peaches. Halve and pit any large peaches; set aside.
2. Drain water from Dutch oven. For pickling mixture, in same Dutch oven combine the 2-12 cups water, vinegar, sugars ,cinnamon, gingerroot, red pepper, 1 teaspoon salt, mustard seeds, and cloves. Bring to boiling, stirring to dissolve sugars. Reduce heat. Simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes.
3. Add peaches, onion, and sweet pepper to pickling mixture; return to boiling. Reduce heat; simmer, covered, 5 minutes or just until tender, gently stirring once or twice. With slotted spoon divide peaches, onion, sweet pepper, and cinnamon evenly among four clean, hot 1-quart jars. (See Safe Storage, below.) Pour pickling mixture into jars; cool. Cover and refrigerate at least 24 hours or up to 3 weeks. Serve peaches with a slotted spoon and drizzle with a little of the juices.

From the Test Kitchen

Safe Storage:

Before filling the jars, wash them in hot soapy water and rinse thoroughly. Pour boiling water in and over the jars and let them stand in the hot water until ready to fill. The pickled peaches are stored in canning jars, but are not processed as canned. Therefore, keep refrigerated and eat within 3 weeks. If giving as a gift, include storage instructions. Makes 18 servings.

Hot:

Hot: 2-inch piece fresh gingerroot

Hotter: 3-inch piece fresh gingerroot

Hottest: 4-inch piece fresh gingerroot

This recipe says to store them in the fridge, but I wanted to can them, so I searched online until I found a similar recipe with most all of the same ingredients, and it said to process for 25 minutes. So that's what I did.

This used up all my ripe peaches. I'm still waiting for the ones left on the tree to be ready...but don't worry, I have big plans for them too!

Back to School

Adelia had her very first day of preschool last week. She has the cutest teacher (a lady in our ward whom I really admire), and a class full of 5 girls and 1 boy. I opted to put her in a neighborhood preschool this year, instead of helping to teach a co-op, because I didn't think I'd be able to give the co-op my best efforts with a new baby coming around Thanksgiving. Plus, a newborn during the winter and RSV season didn't seem like the ideal time to have a ton of little kids coming over to the house. At first I was really sad not to be doing co-op with Del. I kind of felt like I was letting her down in some way. But to listen to her excited chatter every time she comes home from preschool is enough to let me know that I did the right thing. Her teacher teaches the same way I would...lots of projects, lots of stories, lots of hands on, lots of doing. And Adelia is my social child. She is thriving with this new opportunity. And so I'm finding my peace with it too.

Lincoln started up again at Harmony. This year he is in the MAP (multi-age program) and goes on Mondays and Wednesdays. It was pouring rain on his first day, so I didn't get a good picture of him. He's happy to be back. And he also has a really great teacher. She encouraged him to bring a couple of his robots and his poster that he made and share them with his class. It must have gone well, because now he wants to take something new he's working on every time he goes. One time he even took a book he was reading, and shared with the class what it was about and why he liked it. :) It's hard for me to have him gone two days a week, but he enjoys it. And it gives me an opportunity to have some really good one on one time with Ivan.

My goal this year is to get Ivan reading independently. We're using a program called All About Reading (which is made by the same company who does All About Spelling), and I really, really like it. It takes a little longer than the Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, that I used with Lincoln, but I also feel like it develops decoding and phonics skills much better. It also switches up activities more often to keep the kids interested. Some of the time you work with magnetic letter tiles, some of the time you do flash cards, some of the time you play games, and some of the time you are reading from the readers. It's working really well for Ivan. He's funny, because he always wants to choose a really strange position to sit in to do his review flashcards. Here he is sitting in a box:

 For Math, I have both Lincoln and Ivan working out of the Singapore curriculum at their appropriate level. Right now my boys are moving quickly through math, and Singapore also moves quickly, so they are staying challenged without getting bored. We'll adjust as needed when concepts get more difficult.

Lincoln also got a free subscription to Dreambox Math, which is an online program where the kids get on and play math games. I've been using "Dreambox Time" as a motivator to get the kids to finish their school work. Once they've done everything on their list for the day, the earn Dreambox time. So far it's working pretty well, and since they are still doing math it's not a complete waste of time.

I'm trying something new this year for writing, it's the Institute for Excellence in Writing's Primary Arts of Language: Writing. I like it so far because I can teach all three of my older kids, at their own level, at the same time. This program recommends using All About Spelling in conjunction with it, which I am doing with Lincoln. It also has a basic handwriting instruction, which I'm doing with Ivan for a review, and with Adelia to introduce her to writing letters. I'm also still using Handwriting Without Tears with all three kids, as an intro for Del, a review for Ivan, and cursive for Lincoln because he begged and begged for me to teach him cursive this year. (I think he sees a lot of cursive in books, and wants to be able to read it, I think that's his motivation.) Along with HWOT, Ivan and Lincoln are also doing Keyboarding Without Tears, which is a 1-year subscription to an online typing program. So far the typing is going really well, it's something the kids look forward to each day, and it's something they can do independently while I help the other practice the piano. :)

I don't currently have a specific reading program for Lincoln right now. But I do have him read a chapter or two, from a book of my choice, out loud to me each day. And he is assigned to read two non-fiction books every day and write down one thing he learned from each in his journal, and to read silently for 35 minutes from a book of his choice every day. When he finishes a book, he does a book report. I'm really trying to focus on summarizing with him right now. He really struggles with it, actually. He has such a good brain for memorization, that when you ask him to repeat what happened in a story, he usually chooses to tell the story back to you word for word. Now that he's reading a lot longer of books, this is getting harder for him to do. And I've been noticing that if he can't repeat the entire book back verbatim, then he gets frustrated, and can't tell you very much about the story in a concise way. So that's what I'm really focusing on with him these days. the IEW program is helping a lot with that. It has a story summary chart that gives you questions to ask that break the story down into it's parts, and once you do that, then it encourages you to come up with a main theme or lesson learned from the story, and state it in a single sentence. I'm surprised how hard this is for Lincoln, and how easy, and second nature it is to Ivan. Linc is making good progress though, and I think it's really good for him to see that he isn't better than Ivan at everything. :)

Even though Lincoln is my stronger reader, Ivan is showing the signs of being the better writer. He seems to just naturally understand the way a story works. And I'm excited to see this talent of his developing more and more. He's always liked rhyming words, and he caught on to those long before Lincoln did too. And now he's really interested in descriptive words, he's always trying out a new adjective just for the fun of it. And when we listen to stories or even songs or movies that have a lot of word play, he just laughs and laughs.

We had a pretty cool "homeschool moment" the other day. We were writing stories to go along with a painting the kids did for an art project. Anyways, Lincoln got really frustrated and said to me, "I am a robot builder and an inventor. I'm not a writer or an author. I like science, not writing. I don't even know how a story is supposed to start!" And all the sudden, I had an ah-ha moment. And I said, "That's a really good question, how so stories start?" I got out a white board marker, and asked them again, How do your favorite stories start? Ivan immediately gave me several options, "Once upon a time..." "It was a dark and stormy night..." "My name is..." I wrote them down, then I told the boys to go and find some of their favorite books, and that we would write down how each one of them started to get ideas for how to start our own stories. So we made a list, and by the time we were done with that, Lincoln was really excited to start his story, and no longer frustrated. Homeschool win of the day!

Speaking of art, I am having the kids to At Home Art Studio again this year, because it was so awesome last year. Our first project was a Party Pig. And after we painted it, I thought it would be a good idea to have the kids write stories about their pigs. Here is Lincoln's painting and the story he wrote to go with it. I still need to take pictures of Ivan's.

So there's a peek or two into what our back to school has been like for the last two weeks. I'm excited about our year, and the things we have planned.

Labor Day

We had the perfect Labor Day.

I feel like lately I've been fighting really hard for family time. There is SO MUCH constantly going on, most of them good things, but I feel like I haven't had a relaxed, unscheduled day to spend with just my husband and children in forever. And I've been craving it.

Well, today I got my wish. And it was wonderful. It was the best holiday we've had in a long time. We had no expectations, no time limits, no schedule. We just sort of got to make the day as we went. It was so nice.

First we went out for breakfast to Daylight Doughnuts. Would you believe that my children have never eaten a doughnut for breakfast in their lives? Now they have. They were excellent doughnuts too. I highly recommend them. Much better than Krispy Kreme. Much better than your average grocery store variety. Check 'em out...the one in Springville even has a drive-through. You better believe I'll be using that to my advantage from now on. :)

We spent some time out in the backyard, and noticed that some of our peaches were ripe, and decided to pick them. Everyone helped...Aaron and I picked, the kids ran back and forth from the house grabbing buckets, and then they'd take the peaches form Aaron and I and carry them in their shirts and put them in the buckets. They also took the bruised or bugged peaches and fed them to the chickens. Ivan said to me at one point, "Mom, you're the queen of the peaches." It made me smile. We picked just about half the peaches off of our tree. Look at them all! And in a few days I'll have that many again, when they get ripe. We're in peach heaven. I know what I'll be doing for the next few days. :)

My brother Kyle gave us three very nice, solid wood book cases a week or so ago. I'm so excited to have them, but the wood isn't the color of other wooden things in our house. And I'm trying my best to get rid of mis-matched wood trend I've got going through my entire house. So, I convinced Aaron to let me paint the bookcases. They're going to be red. Stayed tuned for "after" pictures. I'm pretty pumped about how they are going to look.

We ended the evening doing one of my favorite things...sitting around the fire pit, roasting hotdogs and marshmallows, and watching the kids and the chickens running around and playing in the grass.

Perfect end to a perfect day.