Jennifer's Junky Life ~

Winter Habitat

These pictures are from a couple of weeks ago but we got a little dusting, a couple of inches of snow, today. (Willow, watching the kids play.)

I found these, a pair of black Sorel boots from a garage sale last summer. My first pair of winter boots in almost 9 years. ($2.00 -- Given the choice, I'd have picked something more colorful, but for the price they can't be beat.) They make me wonder how I've survived this long without them in these cold winter climes. It sure feels nice to have warm feet when I run errands this year!

We had a really nice weekend snuggled in at home as a family this weekend and Mark got a bit more wood chopped for the wood stove. It was perfect and it went by much too quickly. Now we're ready for another week. (I hope your weekend went well, too!)

I don't normally follow the public school schedule as far as days off go because we do a four day school week, but we took today off and it was nice to have a little three day weekend. Although, technically, there was still a bit of school snuck in anyway. There usually is.

With home school, the lines of learning are often blurred. Learning goes on 24/7 and we grab any opportunity for a learning experience. We don't have a distinct line as far as time goes for when school happens. We have our four day schedule but if they want to learn, then we learn when it's outside of our 'normal' school time. If the kids spontaneously want to be quizzed on math problems or writing or whatever then we do it, even if it's the weekend. It's not just a four (or five) day thing. (Although, don't tell that to the kids because they think they only have four days of school each week.)

I was super excited to see the new exhibit at the Science Museum in Sunday's paper! (Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs.) The exhibit is in the cities until September 5 and we're going to make every effort to take a field trip there in the next few months.

Last year, we learned all about Egypt and the Pharaohs as part of the kid's history and geography. I let the kids pick the things they want to learn about for history and that was what Nikayda chose. (It's been a great jumping off point for us to have discussions about God and our own faith, as well.)

This year, we're reading all about Africa and a large portion of our history lessons have been about early Egypt again. The kids are so fascinated with it and this exhibit would really bring it all to life for them. I can't wait to take them!

Sunshine Catcher

We don't have a very formal approach to art in our home school simply because the kids are always doing art. They have free reign of all of the art supplies and at any given time are making things on their own throughout the day. So...when I come across a fun art project (i.e. a structured project), it's always kind of fun to sit down and make something together. (Below, a corner of Nikayda's room. I feel like adding the little heart banner finally helped to pull this random wall collage together.)

I came across this tutorial last week, while surfing through some of my favorite blogs, for some wax paper hearts that I thought looked pretty cool. The kids had a blast grating a bunch of our old/broken crayons for this. I gave them each a vintage grater, last night, and let them go to town! They loved it.

Let me warn you, this project makes a bit of a mess but as I told the kids, "It isn't fun unless it makes a mess!" In hindsight, I would have put the drop cloth over the entire table as opposed to where the kids were because it kept sliding and we still got crayon particles everywhere.

It was fun to see the different colors they each carefully chose for their respective banners. I ended up free-hand cutting out all of their hearts for them (their choice) and threading Abram's and Carter's. Although, Carter helped me thread quite a few of his. Nikayda did her own threading, and they all picked out their own yarn color. (Below, Abram's banner hanging in the living room window. The little lean-to is for the goats.)

Now they're hung on our 'newly' trimmed but unpainted windows, adding a little splash of color around here. And I love that they would work year round even though we made them for a Valentine's project. (Below, Nikayda's.)

I may have a relatively new point and shoot -- but after scoping through Ashley's blog, I have a renewed itch for a digital SLR! Maybe this will be the year...! or next. A girl can dream... (Below, Carter's banner hanging in the sitting room window. You can see the chicken coop (which still needs windows) in the background there.)

It's been such a treat now knowing that we'll get a steady paycheck every two weeks -- as opposed to the random checks of self-employed carpentry that we've been getting for the past 9 years. We just got our second one...here is to catching up on the past few months in the next few months! At least, we're heading in the right direction now... :)

I like things

I'm a collector, pack rat, magpie, hoarder, whatever you want to call me, I'm a junk collector. I like things. I like everything. And, I mention getting organized just about every single time I post -- that's because our house has never been organized and I struggle with it constantly because I'm a neat-freak. (Someone is out there laughing right now...)

You'd never know it to walk in our house. About the only thing that's ever been (and stayed) relatively organized is my silverware drawer and kitchen cupboards (pantry excluded). There is a reason, I never post pictures of our house on here -- just little clips of things hanging on the walls.

So, when I, for the first time in five years, had this feeling last week that it is possible to live organized with all of this clutter junk, well...it was a really good feeling. A very good feeling. I told Mark that I finally feel like it's possible to get on top of all this clutter.

January was a stressful month (waiting for our first paycheck after three months) and I spent the entire month sorting, purging, cleaning and organizing. Now, before you get any notions that our house is in tip top shape, let me assure you it's only about halfway done. I have home school thrown in the mix during the day, so technically, it was just my late afternoons/evenings spent cleaning and organizing. But I'm making progress and that's what counts. It's making me start to feel a little elated.

I love our days, snuggled up on the couch with the kids in the afternoon, reading and writing and learning. So many times, I wonder at how I thought I'd never want to home school when it's one of my favorite parts of the whole day. Sure, it's challenging and time consuming (in a way -- but I never feel like it's that time consuming because I enjoy it). There is nothing better than spending that time with my kids. And, in our present circumstances, they keep me grounded and distracted and I love that. That's not to say that sometimes it isn't hard, we have days where we're all frustrated or things just aren't working smoothly and we have to try different approaches to things, but it's all in the learning process. Literally and figuratively. I feel like making the choice to home school has been such a gift.

The weeks have been flying by (a blessing to me, I think!), I can't believe it's Friday already. Again. Feels like it was just Friday. Have a great weekend! It's beautiful and sunny here.

Happy MLK Day!

I love Sundays, and yesterday was no exception. Sunday afternoons are the best for guilt-free lounging and on-line inspiration hunting. I spent the entire afternoon and evening searching over new blogs and perusing so many wonderful flickr accounts as viewed in my favorites.

Source.

I'm trying to stay on track with the purging and organizing I've got going on around here and I knew that seeing other people's beautiful homes and decor would keep me motivated. Even other people's beautiful miniature homes and decor. I want to be able to decorate and share those images here -- but I can't until I get a whole lot more done around here. (Our house is far messier than you can imagine.)

Today, being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we had the day off school and I spent some time uploading images to my own flickr account (mostly food/recipes). That was after I remembered that the schools are closed today! We'd already done some schooling (discussions about MLK, and others, who have helped to change our world (we have many to be thankful for!), and some of the book work for their other subjects) before I'd remembered.

Source.

I want a dollhouse or three. I've wanted one for some years now, and in fact, found a cute one with a red roof while garage sailing a couple of years ago (not pictured) that has been since stashed in the basement waiting for a cleaning and some repairs. Yesterday, I came across some really cool images on flickr (as seen here) and it renewed my spark for a dollhouse. I think vintage dollhouses look amazing when they're also used as shelving as I've seen in various magazines and blogs but I also love them used traditionally as they are here. Happy Martin Luther King Monday!

Rockin' the juicebox

It's MEA. I don't even remember what it stands for but all of Minnesota public schools are closed Thursday and Friday this week. Not home school though. We stay open.

I've been trying to get the first floor cleaned up, lately. It's a never-ending job since we still don't have much for storage. Although...I was looking in the basement and I have a ton of vintage suitcases down there, a couple of old lockers, and a few dressers. Plenty of storage if I get creative with it. All gathered over the past few years. They need to be cleaned up and I need to work on that. The dressers and lockers need new paint jobs but I'm going to clean up what I can just so we have a place to put things for now.

I'm getting tired of all of our clothes in boxes or stacks on the floor. Same with a lot of other things...

It's amazing what a few little metal baskets can do. I have had a bunch of our school books in stacks on the floor on the side of the couch and they just looked messy. Today, I put them all in a huge old metal refrigerator basket and voila! they look organized. It's motivating to me, even just getting these small little corners organized and presentable.

Mark promised me he'll put trim up this winter and I can't wait. Maybe I can finally get full shots of the rooms around here without feeling like I'm constantly cropping the chaos out when I take a picture.

I'm trying to hit it hard to get what I can done by Halloween. I'll get some pictures on here once I get some more stuff done.

(Photo: I found a bunch of midcentury turquoise glasses at a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. I bought them from a woman who said they were her mom's. I couldn't believe she was parting with them as her mom had passed away several years back but I assured her I'd treasure them. The color was just right. On another note, I finally changed the vignette atop that cupboard this week. It now has a bunch of blue Ball Mason jars up there.)

Caterpillars, Caterpillars... everywhere

The kids have been mesmerized by caterpillars lately. They've brought many into the house this fall. But I limited them to two jars with holes poked into the tin lids in an attempt to keep the bug population down around here.

The first two caterpillars they'd brought into the house, a brown and black one and the one above, they'd placed in one of the jars along with a length of stick and several green leaves. But within a day or two, each caterpillar had turned into a fuzzy light brown chrysalis (most likely to be moths). We were quite surprised! But, I'm hoping they'll survive the winter, as I just read that many caterpillars overwinter in their chrysalises. -- that was news to me as I thought they all usually took about 8 weeks to completely change and come out. (And, the nerd in me had been wondering what happened to them during the winter months.)

In spite of the two jars, I did find a black caterpillar crawling on my couch recently, along with a little pile of green leaves and an upside down jar nearby. That would be Carter's idea of play. Not sure what he was doing at the time, but he wasn't even in the house when I'd spotted the thing!

A clown can juggle, too.

Things will be relatively quiet around here for the next little while. No specific measurement of time as I don't know specifically how long 'the next little while' will be. And, if you know anything about me by now, you also know that I could end up posting every day now...

But, anyway, we're settling into school around here and all of my concentration is focused on juggling that along with the purging I'm trying to get done with in the loft and the rest of the house. (Some of you may remember I have a goal to have our house as purged out and cleaned up and organized as I can get it by the end of 2010 -- and I've still a long way to go due to that little thing we call procrastination.)

Sunday school started this past Sunday and all three of the kids are in Sunday school now. Carter's in the preschool group although he'll be five this month. We both think he best fits in with that group of kids maturity wise even though at home he seems to be ready so we're starting kindergarten.

 

He was super excited to finally be going to Sunday school when they walked out the door Sunday morning! Mark ended up staying with him because of his PA (we've decided that we'll stay near the church until we feel he's capable of looking out for himself). But when he told Carter that he'd be out in the car, he cried and wanted him to stay with him (no big deal) and he wouldn't sit at the table with the other kids but instead wanted to sit at a table nearby (again, not as big a deal). But then when it came time to color his picture, he whipped his crayon over the paper and angrily scribbled across it and then crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. (He's been going through a streak of defiance lately and I haven't figured out yet how to curb it.) So, Mark said he calmly picked it up and started coloring and eventually Carter wanted to color too. By the end of class, he'd decided he wanted to sit with the other kids. So, we'll see how next week goes!

Random pieces:

I finally tried raw goat's milk and it's really good. I think I might even like it better than cow's milk although there isn't a huge difference in taste.

It's been gorgeous around here lately mid-50°'s and 60°'s and sunny. Beautiful fall days! Yesterday, it was about 65° F and I sent the kids out in the afternoon after they were spending too much time in the house fighting. They were out for a short while when they all came back in complaining that it was too hot out.

Yeah. Right.

Needless to say, I sent them right back out again with instructions to change into shorts if they were too hot. And no one even bothered to change.

I've been reading the Junie B. Jones books to the kids after one of my cousins mentioned them last spring. She warned me that they say 'stupid' a lot and she didn't care for that part either but they're so funny. (My kids already say 'stupid' a lot although I don't like it and am constantly asking them not to. I'm pretty sure it's just a rite of childhood, about as easy to stop as your kids growing.)

Carter learned how to write my sister Molly's name last week so he's been writing it on everything. He even wrote it along with his name on his spiral bound yellow notebook for school. I'm hoping this doesn't mean he'll begin to think his name is 'Carter Molly'...

The Thin Line to Insanity While Riding in the Fast Lane

I'm amazed what people are willing to shell out for used homeschool materials on Ebay. They must not be willing to sit in front of their computer for three days straight searching between Amazon, Ebay and each particular company's website to do price checking... all the while having a tension headache around their eyes but being so engrossed in their research they're unable to stop.

Not that I know what that's like.

In the past two days, I've watched auctions for used items go for more than they would brand new, including what you'd pay for shipping if you bought it new. Crazy. Just plain crazy.

Apparently, Ebay is a great way to sell used home school materials. At least, that's the lesson I've learned this week.

I'd wanted to go with a full curriculum (all the subjects by one company) this year but never did any research into them. So, instead, I've opted to go with a separate curriculum for each subject instead. Pretty much what I did last year -- only I'm using year-long subject materials this year as opposed to having to plan everything every week like I did last year.

I hope that helps me breathe a little more.
I rather enjoy breathing.
Especially in the fall. It's so gorgeous in the fall and I'm loving the cooler weather we finally got again.

I'm really excited for the school year to begin and it'll be more exciting once these things I'm ordering start trickling in in the mail. The kids are starting to get excited, too, as I've shown them some of the stuff I'm ordering. I've also been keeping an eye on some fun educational stuff for Christmas as well, that I'm not showing them.

The biggest struggle, and I imagine it's like that for a lot of homeschooling parents, is making learning fun. It's not an easy task. It's so difficult in fact that if you stop to think about it we tend to have just a couple of 'favorite' teachers from our entire educational years. I remember the few teachers that I absolutely adored. Many slowly fade from memory along the way, but those special ones are always remembered. My kindergarten teacher, my fourth grade teacher and one of my high school teachers immediately come to mind for me -- although there are more. They brought learning to life with their love of the subjects they taught and their contagious enthusiasm every day.

I'm starting to round up some fun ideas but I'm also hoping to use our loft for school -- and it's still buried under boxes. I'm hoping the organizational fairy will find her way to my house soon to grant me tranquil organization so we can find ways to do more fun things this year. If you see her, send her my way.

Brain overload. But in a good way.

I wasn't feeling too hot yesterday (well, technically I was feeling plenty of hot seeing as it was just about 90° and humid...) so I spent the day doing home school research on-line. There is so much cool stuff out there for home schooling that it can get very overwhelming very fast. Even after a year, I still don't know where to begin with narrowing things down for us to try out. (So.much.cool stuff.) And, the only real way to see if something will work for you and whether or not you'll like it is to try it for yourself. (I'm starting this little guy in kindergarten to see how he does. He turns 5 in September which is after the cutoff for school in our area and if he were going to public school, I wouldn't be sending him yet. So if it doesn't work out, no big deal, we'll try again next year! A perk of home schooling.)

School is starting soon and I still need to order a couple of subjects. I've narrowed them down, mostly, to what I want to try this year. Math was a big one for me -- I really wanted something that will be a great program but also something my kids will enjoy and maybe, dare I say, even love. (I never liked math very much.)

I've heard rave reviews from many of my fellow home schooling moms about Math U See over the past year, so that's what I've decided to go with. Nikayda's eyes lit up when I showed it to her on-line and she said she used the same manipulative blocks when she went to public school. And she said she loved how they helped her to count without using her fingers. And since she liked the idea, so also did Abram who mirrors every reaction of hers towards school.

Teaching your kids yourself, is a great opportunity to make their education fun and exciting. In many ways, I feel like Nikayda did too many workbooks/worksheets last year and I, too often, failed to make it 'fun'. Too many worksheets a day especially in math and language arts -- which, not that there is anything wrong with that if your child loves to do as many as we did, but she didn't always enjoy it. I know it was probably too much work for a second grader but I was so worried about her not learning what she needed to that I made sure she did more than she had to just to be sure we covered all of our bases. I'm hoping this year will be much more relaxed and fun for all of us!

 

I'm really, really looking forward to this second year of home schooling, not just because we get to spend so much quality family time together (and plenty of time driving each other crazy) but because I feel that you probably learn a little more how to make it fun each year you're teaching your kids. And, also because I loved it so much last year. I highly recommend it if you're considering it. It can feel so daunting at first, but it's really not as daunting as you think it will be.

I want it to be a fun and rewarding experience for our kids and I know it can be. That they will love to learn is the most important thing to me as their mom. To instill a love of learning in a child, is to open the doorway to a lifetime of education. And, when I say 'lifetime of education' I don't necessarily mean college. I don't expect to go at this and be a pro. Heaven knows, I'm not. Most of the time, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. (Thank goodness for all of the school materials out there at our disposal!) But I hope that if I give it my best, then in time everything else will fall into place.

The Emu Ranch

We were 20 minutes late getting to the emu ranch yesterday. I underestimated the amount of time it would take to arrive as I hadn't been to the town it's in in quite a while. And, then I got our directions mixed up a little because the road does a couple of crazy jogs across other roads. But we finally reached our destination, nestled amongst a bunch of cabins at the end of a dirt road on a lake, and joined one of the two tour groups that were going on.

 

They broke us into two groups because we were such a large bunch. (Our home school group consists of hundreds of kids from all of the surrounding areas where we live.) I was glad to be on the tour around the ranch first before the sitting presentation about the products (emu oils/lotions) that they sold but a little disappointed afterward because we had missed a lot of the fun filled facts that were presented to the group about the emus, due to our being late. And, I'm a nerd for fun filled facts. :) (This one, below, kept moving. This was the best close-up I got of her.)

 

The kids were mesmerized by them. As we walked up, we reached a fenced in area with a whole bunch of baby emus (top picture). And then just beyond them were the adults (males, above-- females, below). I thought they were much prettier in real life than they are in pictures. They have big golden brown eyes and pretty blue heads and are about 6-7 feet tall. The females make a drumming sound during (I believe) mating season and we got to hear that. It's kind of a neat sound. (The one below kept drumming while we were there.)

They originate in Australia and although I'd never consider myself an extreme animal rights person, I did feel sorry that they have to live up here in the cold, cold north during the winters! Although, the ranchers claimed they stayed comfortably warm all winter.

There were hundreds of emus on this particular ranch. I was amazed to see so many! They also had a handful of rheas (above, native to South America) including some endangered white ones with blue eyes. They were really cool looking, too, but not as pretty to me as the emus were. Our guide told us they'd attack us and try to tear us apart if given the chance. I was glad they were tightly locked up.

It was an interesting field trip and I'm glad we went! The kids really enjoyed it. Carter was asking me if we can go again today. There was a rusty metal sculpture of an emu near the entrance (above) that I thought was pretty neat so I grabbed a picture on our way out. It was hot and sunny but the breeze off the lake and the lack of humidity kept it comfortable enough. I was dreading the trip prior to going when I knew it would be 80° and sunny! But, it really wasn't bad at all.