An old writing assignment

As I was going through an old workbook to see if I could resell it, I came across a writing assignment, neatly tucked between the pages.  The prewrite exercise was in minimalist form, true to Ian's style.  The instructions say, "Use this sheet to help you prepare to write your first draft.  Record details about your myth below and remember the characteristics of the myths you have read."  Under Natural Phenomenon, he wrote dark.  Characters: Barn Owl.  Setting: Space. Problem in the Story: No day or night. How the problem is solved: owl comes... (yes, the ellipses were his).  Sigh. No details. And then his writing assignment:

If the text is too small, it reads:

It was not day it was not night.  The world was mixed up. Owl looked down from his nest in the sky, "I will shine my big black eyes and make them one."  Then they had night.  He called upon his mate, "Dear wife shine the light from your big white face so they can have day." So they took turns.  You can still see owl's face as the moon and his owlets as the stars.

That kid. Man. He has an amazing gift for storytelling and entertaining people.  I'm hoping this skill survives his adolescence and he is able to find a way to incorporate his gifts in a career path... (those ellipses are mine) 

Food, It Starts With It.

So..... I'm x number of days into a Whole30.  I can't remember and I'm not going to count.  I sat down last weekend and made a meal plan for the week.  It took me two hours, no joke.  Then I went shopping with my Little3 and spent $400 and didn't even get everything I wanted.  One would think a recipe called Sunday Gravy that had ten servings would be on the affordable side.  Uhhh...$50 for just the meat? NO THANKS! I'll buy steak instead.

Also, Mark got me a new phone: an iPhone 6s Plus.  We were testing the image quality

In my never-ending quest to streamline everything in my house and tame my wild children, I came up with a brilliant idea.  As I was driving home from my Costco run, I pondered why the schools spend 13 years, not counting college, teaching kids math and only a half of a semester teaching them cooking and other homemaking skills.  This should be inverted.  People actually need to eat and tidy every single day.  Complicated math is rarely used.  Yet the the determining factor on whether or not they have a successful future depends on their ability to do higher order math.  You can't get into college unless you spend four years in high school taking Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. And you aren't going to be successful if you don't go to college.

Lula prepares to sleep at the counter because she won't finish her dinner.

Now I use math all the time.  I don't think people shouldn't take math; that's stupid.  But there sure are a lot of dumb people online that have no idea how to think for themselves in the kitchen.  So kitchen skills are becoming a bigger part of our day.  My kids are going to know how to feed themselves and not live off Pop Tarts and cereal.

Super Soup! Ten minutes in the InstaPot!

Fiona and Daniel, being the middles kids, often fall through the homeschool cracks.  Daniel is wicked fast and is often done with his schoolwork before anyone else is up.  He then spends the rest of the day getting in trouble.  Fiona is slow, but is neat and has a great talent for pleasing the eye.  The two of them work pretty well together if they have a task in front of them.  And they both love to play restaurant.

This week I'm experimenting with letting them be in charge of preparing snacks according to my meal plan and helping with dinner prep.  It frees me up to do other things and it keeps them busy.  They are building amazing kitchen skills (I can't believe I let Daniel use a sharp knife to slice cucumbers) and the kitchen is staying cleaner because I don't have a bunch of free range kids helping themselves to toast all morning while I'm busy doing something else.  And everyone is eating healthier too.  We had veggies instead of endless toast this morning.  Fiona's sense of "The eyes eat first" makes sorting the food into serving size containers a great way to work on her multiplication and division.  Daniel just benefits all the way around. I can't wait to see if this is something we can keep doing!

Homeschooling With Littles

My most peaceful homeschool days are those when everyone who can read works on their own and those who can't, do what they want at the table while I drink coffee and pass markers out.

Shane and Genevieve do quite well on their own all day.  Fiona needs constant reminding and has the focus of a gnat (which is why she is at the table). And everyone else is just coloring.  Daniel got through his three R's before breakfast.

As long as I stay completely still and I don't try to teach anything, everyone is perfectly happy.  If I try to teach or single out a kid or two or three, those who aren't singled out for learning start hollering and wanting some too.  So, back to coloring.  And counting the markers when they are done!

Happy New Year!

The Downen Clan celebrated New Years the way we always do...traditions, right?  We ate, we stayed up late watching a movie, and took a family picture by the clock at midnight.  But we did more than that!

While Mark took a subset of older/middle kids for a bike ride, I made glittery slime with the Little3:

Lula is a natural scientists and started exploring the physics of slime right away!  Shane couldn't stay away and joined in, asking further questions about how strong the slime is and how much it can hold before it collapses.

When the older/middle3 came home, they couldn't wait to make their own slime (good thing I bought the gallon jug of glue and have plenty of glitter left over from THIS project)

Ian couldn't stay away either.  He spent the entire day "working on his biology homework" AKA playing on his phone in his room.  But it was nice when he took a break and interacted with his family. I was sad when I realized he doesn't remember much about the physics of slime (hashtag homeschoolmomproblems).  I felt like the mom in Mean Girls (here's a link to the scene I'm talking about).  You don't know about the elastic properties of slime? We covered that in homeschool science! Who are you?!?

We chose our favorite New Year's movie, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  Only we knew we couldn't get through all three movies in one day, and we watched the other two last year, so we started with Return of the King.  Within one minute of starting the movie, we turned it off.  If Lula and Heidi get so scared they fall off the couch during The Land Before Time, there was no way they could handle LOTR.  We went with Jurassic Park instead. 

They have to learn sometime.  

New Years Eve was more fun with LED balloons and glow sticks!

I thought about setting the clock back three hours so everyone would go to bed at a normal hour, but Ian accused me of stealing that idea from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  Actually, I got it off Pinterest, but thanks Ian!  I knew I loved the satire of the series for a reason!  Nothing humbles a mom faster than seeing herself from the point of view of her grumpy kids.

After Lula and Heidi went to bed and Jason fell asleep on my lap, we started our real movie.  We took a break for midnight:

2 (Mark)   0 (Daniel)   1  (Fiona)  4+4=8 (Shane and Ian)

And just for the record, the clock is broken.  We set it to midnight and keep it on the wall.  Our psyche is settled when we automatically look at the wall and see a broken clock instead of a blank space.

This is how I really keep time.  And if you look closely, you see the 0 fading until the 1 as the time turns.

 Then we made our traditional root beer floats.  I have no idea how this tradition started or how long we've done it, but here you go...

Yes, Jason woke up because I was not in bed with him.  And boy did he laugh when he saw that people were putting ice cream in CUPS instead of BOWLS.  Just that morning he joked about putting his foot in his shirt, so things in their proper places is big in his mind.  But ice cream in cups? We all looked ridiculous to him.

Yeah, I don't know why ice cream is a good idea in the middle of the night in winter. (Fiona did her own face paint by the way)

My goals for this year:

• Make Homeschool Great Again!
• Finish four knitting projects I planned last year: spring alpaca scarf, multicolored summer shawl (finished!), autumn themed wrap, and candy cane striped scarves for next Christmas.
• Read a whole list of books including: Les Miserables, The Radium Girls, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Uncle Tom's Cabin, A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, Sense and Sensibility, The Iliad and the Odyssey (with Shane for school), aaaand that should be good.  I'll probably add some Louis L'Amour and Harry Potter in for fun.
• Inspire my kids to read more (see my new banner photo on Facebook)
• Make a better effort to cook (Whole 30 and Nom Nom Paleo, here we come!)
• Stay focused on what I'm supposed to do (oh, crap...getting offline now)...

Yay for 2018!

Christmas Day

I've learned a few things having a large family.

Anything that is chaotic for a normal-sized family is exponentially so for a large one.  I like to have a labeled gift bag with each stocking so they can immediately put their gifts in a bag.  This prevents their little breakable gifts from being stepped on.  I can't tell you how many candy canes got broken.

Christmas is all about eating cookies and candy, so I can only expect rotten behavior from anyone under the age of...oh, let's say nine years old. 

This was the best picture we got of Ian. 

Some kids weren't happy with what they got, but sorry Ian. I'm not buying you a new phone.  And Daniel? You asked Santa for a drone.  He brought you a drone.  Crying about not getting $30 and a video game just isn't fair.

This is the hat that I made for Daniel for Christmas

This is Daniel not wearing his hat!

 I crocheted or knitting little presents for all my kids that I knew would wear them.  Genna got my Afterthought Socks.  Fiona got socks and a hat to match.  Daniel and younger got hats.  It was fun making things. 

Genevieve and Fiona got to make things too! We were gifted a special dollhouse from a friend who is moving.  This house was built for her by her grandparent's friends when she was a little girl.  She wrote her name in puffy paint on the roof and when her little girls started playing with it, their names were added.  She would like us to add our names to hers and keep the story going.  Of course! The girls painted the bedrooms, added rugs made of scrapbook paper, and built furniture out of cardboard and clothespins. 

Our favorite gifts-well, mine and Mark's-were puzzles from the dollar store.  I bought six.  The 500 piece puzzle didn't match the cover picture, so it was really fun putting it together. Together.   The kids' favorite gifts were Forza 5 for the Xbox, the Kindle, and the drone.  Mark also replaced a broken RC car that Daniel got from the local Santa event.  All the boys loved playing with it, but Shane blew out the wiring when he tried to modify it to run off a 9V battery and go really fast!  Ha-science!

Christmas Part 2: Cookies! And Snow!

Jason made his own cookies this year

Genevieve's are on the left, Jason's on the right.

She didn't like Jason's mess, but she's a good sport and filled with Grace

The SSS Odyssey Cookie

As long as they are quiet and not asking to watch a movie or play video games...

Special cookie, just for me!

Red frosting, red sprinkles, RED 40 ?!?!?!?!

He was so careful and deliberate on where he dumped the rolling out flour.

Gingerbread Boy

Cookies were messy and tasty, but I think next year we'll do a different kind.  Some of us have been cutting and frosting cookies for almost two decades.

The first year I've been able to make a full four loaf batch of Yule Kaga!

Mark's sister sent a cheese and sausage box, but someone else did too...and didn't leave a name!  I sure loved watching all my big kids crowding around the box for meat and cheese.  Grandad would have been so proud.

Meat and Cheese! Ian is meat, Genna is cheese!

 And then.........IT SNOWED!  A WHITE CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!

These little gloves were supposed to be in stockings.  I kept them out just in case!

Ian successfully landed several back flips on the icy trampoline.  I'm glad I waited until just NOW to realize he could have easily broken his neck slipping.  If I live through his shenanigans.... I'll still have seven more teenagers to kill me off I suppose.....

 We were supposed to have goose for Christmas dinner.  Sadly, several geese that were slated for eating disappeared and/or died and all that is left is the breeding stock.  I joked it was the snowy camouflage that kept them safe and alive.  We ended up eating.... meat and cheese.

 This snowball was the first shot fired between the older kids...

Revenge is a dish best served....cold.  And frozen.

Will she hit him? Will he dodge?

A direct hit!

Better run!

Shane was stuffing a snowball in her hood and smashed it in to her hair when he looked over and saw...

Slam dunk snowball!

 Ian planned his slam dunk attack pretty well, but didn't take into account that people might move to get out of the way, so he landed on Genevieve and made her mad.

 Shane and Ian volleyed snowballs back and forth for awhile...

 ...some finding their mark, some not.  And Genevieve, who is a very patient person....

"Hey Ian, wanna build a snowman?"

Face smash!

Ian can pass it out, but can he take it?

 And then while I was taking a few pictures of the little kids and their penguin sledding (because no one could find the sled)...

the battle between Ian and Shane got a little more tense.  Shane picked up the old wading pool and used it as a shield...

 ...and just kept going and knocked Ian down.  Look closely at Mark's face.  We all were pretty darn surprised.  And then Ian went after Shane.

 They are both smiling, but I was pretty sure I would never see Shane alive again after they ran into the house. I'm pretty sure the fact that they tandem nursed as babies keeps them from actually hurting each other as teens.  Most days see them arguing about everything, with Ian being the more dominant one (in his mind) through strength and force, but Shane being the dominant one through peace and quiet strength-the kind that realizes that not owning other people's problems is strength.

And that was the fun of Christmas Eve.