Spider Friends

My son Joe has been working really hard cleaning up the wood piles in our yard betting ready for my mom's new house.
I have been very worried about what "friends" he might find. There are so many snakes this year and I didn't want him to find any copper heads.

Well this is the friend Joe found.

That is the bottom of a wide mouth pint canning jar. The spider still gives me shivers.

Joe took the camera and took the pictures himself. He took the spider outside to take the pictures and brought back an empty jar. I asked him if he squished it and he looked shocked. Of course not. He took it to the woods and let it go.

Caroline-a in the Lolita

Miss Caroline turns 9 tomorrow. In honor of her birthday I gave her a Lolita apron that I was honored to get to test the pattern. I just love how festive this apron looks. The pattern should be showing up very soon for public sale at Sew Liberated.

Happy Pinkness

I realized that I have allowed the difficulties of life interfere with my blogging. This is my corner of happiness and fun. I need to post more.

My little Hannah turned 5 this month. I can't believe how time is flying. She starts kindergarten in a month. I don't know if I can bare to let her go. She is such a bundle of happiness.
My niece Angelic came here this summer and brought her (and her sisters) a tutu. Hannah wore it non-stop for 3 days. Bryan caught her wearing two of them the other day while I was at work. I was so happy he thought to take a picture.


We also held our family reunion on her birthday. It was so great to visit with my brothers and sisters and their children again. I will post some pictures of that funness when I get my hands on some.
My niece Josie was able to come from Nigeria (too fun to see her!). She brought me a wonderful treat from the markets there.

Not only is it a fabulous apron, but it is also blue, batik , and has a tree on it. All of my favorite things! (I don't know if that was Josie's intent but it was a happy coincidence.)

Welcome to Hogwarts

April 5th was my oldest son's 11th birthday. In honor of this special occasion we help a one night Hogwarts Trial for him and his friends.
We started off with official invitations written in green ink on preachment paper. Here is what they said:

Dear ,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to a one-night trial with the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry staff in honor of Josephs 11th birthday. Hogwarts is temporarily unavailable do to repairs made necessary by the mischievous acts of certain red headed twins. As a result the Ministry of Magic has set up a safe location disguised as a muggle home at (our address). Please use ministry approve port keys or, to not attract attention, please employ a muggle to bring you by car. The trial will take place from 4 to 7 p.m. on Monday, April 9th, 2007. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary equipment for your trial.
Professor Albus Dumbledore

Please Bring
Muggle attire
A broomstick
A cauldron
One sock for Dobby the House Elf

When the kids arrived at our house we sorted them into houses. Because we were in such a muggle infested location we had to transform the sorting hat to disguise it. I think it really worked.

Here is Hannah being sorted. She ended up in Hufflepuff. I had printed off house badge stickers to put on their shirts.

Next the children had to go Olillvander's to get their wands. My nephew Angus was our Ollivander. The children had to try out their wands by swishing them and calling out an animal name. If the wand was the right one, then Ollivander would transform into that animal.

Here poor Owen is laying on the ground recovering from the attack he suffered when he transformed Ollivander into a Lion.

Now the kids were ready to go to their classes and see if they really were worthy to attend Hogwarts. First up was Potions class with professor Snape. Apparently the Slytherins thought it would be really funny to transform the drinks for the feast into water so the children had to try their hands at potion making to turn it back into pumpkin juice. This is very tricky to do.

The potion went as follows. First Snape poured rainbow water into the cups (vinegar) and the water turned a different color in each cup. (the spoons had dried food coloring on them) Then they added powdered unicorn hair (baking soda) and had to stir it properly. If not it would boil over. (well of course it bubbled over and Snape berated them all).

Next they added dried Hinkypunk hearts (pop rocks) and had to stir till it quit crackling.

Next they added Dragon milk mixed with Oil of Sunshine (2 cups white school glue mixed with 1 1/2 cup water and yellow food coloring). To this they added Essence of Boom slang (2/3 cup water with 2 tsp borax mixed in and food color for effect). Then followed a very complicated series of stirrings.

If they messed this step up they did not end up with delicious and refreshing pumpkin juice. Instead they got ....

Troll Boggies. We all gaged and choked.

Snape felt it necessary to show us how it was really done and whipped up some Sour Snape Grape Spirits for us.

(this was 2 bottles of lemon lime pop and 2 packages of grape Kool-aid mix and the left over pop rocks) It was pretty good.

The next class was Divination with Professor Trelawney.

My Niece Rebecca filled in for us. She had them put Dragon's blood (red food coloring) in a bowl of Troll milk (milk with dish soap added) and them read the fortunes they saw. We saw many basilisks. She then used her Crystal ball (round fish bowl) to read their fortunes.

There were many prophecies given such as , "you will eat cake tonight", and "I see treats in your near future" and such. They kids thought it was really fun and thought she sounded like Gollum.

The kids then went to Care of Magical Creatures with Professor Grubbly-Plank. (my Sister in Law, Miyuki)

She taught them the anatomy of woodland creatures and the showed what they learned by making Origami replicas of owls and bats. They had to touch them with their wand to make them fly (they looked a lot like paper air planes).

The last class was Defense Against the Dark Arts with Professor Loopy (Lupin's sister).

I had the kids make Anti Dark Wizard Missiles. We took plastic eggs and added powdered asphodel (baking soda) and powdered boom slang skin (citric acid) to this we added essence of gillyweed (green water). We had to quickly shut the eggs and throw them.

If you were fast enough they would blow up.

Sammy worked really fast. His blew up as he threw it.

The children also leaned to do the Patronus Charm. They practiced on a Boggart we found. (Angus)

Our poor Boggart really got hit hard.

The kids then went out in the field and played quidditch. They were all looking for the snitch (a golden Easter egg).

We finally had a feast. We had Wesely Cheesy Weezy Pizza, Pumpkin pasties, our Snape Juice and a Madd Eye Moody Eye cake.

Everyone was really grossed out by the cake. It was great!! (it was baked in a Pampered Chef mixing bowl and we put a blue jell-o eye on top.

We sent everyone home with a bag of treats from Honeyduke's candy Shop.

We gave them Chocolate frogs, Fizzing whizbees, Bertie Bott's every flavor beans, Drooble's best blowing gum, Owl Droppings, lemon drops, Acid worms and a squirting frog. Joe also made each of his guests a wand for them to take home. He will be selling these in his own Etsy store soon. They looked really great!

This party was so much fun. We love to have fun at birthdays and celebrate our family this way. I couldn't have pulled this off without a lot of help from my friends and family. Thanks to Vea for giving up our craft play day and helping me pull this off. Thanks to Sam, Miyuki, Angus and Rebecca for filling in as faculty and Characters.

I hope you enjoyed sharing in our day.

My Funny Valentine

This is one of Hannah's Valentines. I just love them. We cut out doggy bone shaped pieces of tissue paper and stuck a sucker through the center, twisted them and secured it with tape. She wrote her name on them and took them to Pre-school. She was so thrilled to get to do what the big kids do and have a "class party".
By the way, her preschool teach had her first baby this weekend. She had a little girl named Elli. Hannah is so excited. We made her a custom Piggy Bag. I hope she gets a lot of good use out of it.

Homeschooling Jump

My husband and I took the homeschooling jump this week and took our oldest son out of the public school system. Our two oldest daughters are still in public school. Our son just needed some time at home were there are less distractions. He is very bright and rather ADD and works very well one on one.
We had fun today working out our schedule and starting in on our "class work".
I have searched the Internet for months, trying to find information on homeschooling and curriculum and have been very frustrated. I have a degree in early childhood and elementary education (don't ever look at my spelling though) so I have never doubted my teaching ability. I just don't trust my self discipline to keep up with a program.
In searching the web I found it frustrating that I couldn't find what I wanted. The curriculum's were either incredibly expensive or so far off the deep end that there wasn't much usable info in them. I know there must be good programs out there but they really are hard to find and you have to take their word for it. I also found that the religious based curriculum, while doing a pretty good job of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the children, they were very soft on other subject matter. I already work on teaching my children the Gospel, I want help in teaching math, reading, social studies, and science.
I got some good advice from my mom. She told me to go talk to the principal so I did. I am so glad that I did. I called her in advance and let her know what my plan was and that I wanted to come in and talk to her. That gave her time to collect her ideas and be prepared to give me ideas. When I got there, she had gathered all of my son's text books together and and gone into her own resources and found some others that are really fantastic. She let me check these out for the remainder of the year. She also let me know that he is welcome to come back to the school for special classes if we want to, such as art, PE, music, library and computers. He can also attend the after school program which is a lot of fun.
I felt so much better about things after talking to her. I am a little ADD myself and get overwhelmed when faced with too many things to think about and decide all at once. Now I have a plan that we can follow and can deviate from without upsetting the apple cart. He can work on special projects as the mood strikes which is something you need to be able to do with and ADD child. They have an incredible ability to hyper-focus on things that interest them which is to your advantage if you can direct it and help them harness that drive.
We are so excited. He has already found a pet project. I will have to post more about that as it develops. I might have to let him create his own Homeschooling Blog about his adventures and his conservationist projects.
I hope I am not just typing this to fill space out there in cyberspace and that someone can actually get some ideas from this. I started the week feeling good about this decision but very stressed. Now I feel good about the decision and very excited about the plan that we have to accomplish it. I think the whole having a plan thing is what is going to help me.
This homeschooling thing is forcing me to organize a few pockets of my chaos that I call a life and home.
One of my son's great comments today was that now he gets an afternoon recess EVERY day. The poor kid has been missing them for several years because he had detention for behavior (talks way too much) or because he hadn't finished is work (couldn't stand another worksheet).
Well that was long but it has been an eternity of a week here at our house.
I am excited to be looking at the start of a new week soon with so many new projects to get into.

Uh-Oh

Jeddie said his first recognizable word this week Uh-Oh. He pulled the lid off a babyfood container and looked up at me and said Uh-Oh with a very surprised look on his face. He talks a lot and is the Jabber King. It was fun to recognize something he was saying. He is such a cute little bug.

Hannah in Frosting

Today is my niece Rebecca's Birthday. To celebrate, I helped her children make a birthday cake for her. Of course my daughter Hannah helped. After they left with their cake, Hannah was very dissapointed that the whole cake left with them. She took herself to the kitchen where she found the leftover yellow frosting and as she didn't have a cake of her own to frost, she frosted herslef on a plate.
Here is her "sweet" self portrait and her first atempt at cake frosting.

I think I will have her frost all the cakes from now on. Her humble creations are always better than my grand attempts.

Halloween Early

We live out in the country so trick-or-treating isn't really very do-able. As a result, I am afraid that we tend to over do it for the kids for Halloween. The school has a party day, the PTO has a festival, the High School provides a safe spot, the church group get together and have a dinner and a trunk-or-treat, and the communities near by have several Halloween parties going on. I used to feel bad that the kids didn't get to do the whole trick-or-treating thing like I did as a kid but have found that they make off with a bigger haul than my husband or I ever did. LOL! I do try to limit what they get and usually end of thowing away a lot of it. I also funnel a lot of it into the treat box for good behavior and special jobs.
I do try to make the kids fun costumes each year. This year, with the help of my friend Michelle, I made some really beautiful costumes for my girls. They are all Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fans. My oldest wanted to be Aowen from Rohan and the other two wanted to be Hobbits. The costumes were really fun to make and I saved us big bucks. Each costume would have cost me $125 if I hadn't made them myself. They were really fun to do. They are very excited about wearing them to their class parties.


I am glad I won't have to be sewing anyone into their costumes right before the party.