Stories from a Budding Writer: The Bear and the Bee

A note from the author: The yellow highlight is because it's the bee speaking and since bees make honey, their speech should be yellow. 

Enjoy!

Schoolhouse Review Crew: Clued In Kids

What parent would turn down the chance to keep a whole group of kids happily and easily engaged and occupied for a half hour? You know you wouldn't - and neither did I! I was glad to have the chance to review Clued in Kids for the Schoolhouse Review Crew.

I was given two hunts to try out - Playdate Treasure Hunt Pad was the first one we did. To be honest, life has been pretty hectic here lately so I held it for a while and didn't do anything with it because I didn't feel like I would have time to set it up and give it a fair shake. How wrong I was!!

A Christmas School Story - by Chef

I was cleaning off my dresser this morning, and am not sure how this gem stayed folded there for so long. But I enjoyed it so am sharing with you (along with some other summer-homeschool moments!)

Younger Brother Comics

A bit of levity for your Wednesday this week... These are comics drawn by Chef. He has a (shall we say) unique sense of humor. I hope you enjoy the laugh at sibling rivalry and boyhood foibles as much as I did!

Lego Challenge: Day 5 (Pirate Ships) and 6 (Snow Theme)

Still playing catch up - but enjoying the days nonetheless!

Day 5 - Pirate Ships

We have watched a few of the newer Star Trek movies lately so Chef's ship took on a slightly different appearance:

An inverted theme on this one 

Just Do What You Do

I'm working on a song about staying at home with the kids - I call it We Didn't Mess the House Up and is sung to the tune of (what else?) We Didn't Start the Fire. It is a work in progress and not at all finished, but I'm willing to share a small part of it here:

Moms Vs. Dads (In the Mind of a Teen)

Yesterday, Maestro came to tell me about a sort of "Sci-fi Documentary" he had watched. It involved, he said, the idea of Neutron Stars and what would happen if one were speeding towards Earth, and how would we earth-dwellers deal with it.

There is nothing like

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The conversation started out like this: 

Maestro to Mom: "I watched a sci-fi documentary this morning and it was about Neutron Stars. You're probably familiar with those, but in case you're not it's... " and he went on to explain them in pretty decent detail. 

Schoolhouse Review Crew: Diary of a Real Payne

All of my older children have enjoyed books like Wayside School is Falling Down and other such somewhat silly, zany stories that use a lot of imagination in the writing. Eleven-year-old Chef even keeps a running list of his "favorite" authors (Roald Dahl tops the list currently) and is making plans to visit their museums and where they lived some day. This is to say that reading in our house is pretty serious stuff - most especially when it's reading about the Crazy we find in life. And really: What kid doesn't like the silly, make-you-laugh stories? Well, Schoolhouse Review Crew came through again by offering the chance to read and review a book called Diary of a Real Payne Book 1: True Story by Annie Tipton. 

The first book in a still-being-written series, Real Payne is a 192-page story aimed at the 9-12 year old group. The story is built around the imagination of a young girl named EJ Payne, who lives in a small town but yearns for more. How many of us are not affected by a desire to experience life in the patch of grass on the other side of the fence? I find this is especially true with children because they really don't have as much control over their day-to-day lives as they might like.

Schoolhouse Review Crew: A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks

I was given the chance to review the Lapbooks available at A Journey Through Learning  to review recently. Maestro and Chef did a lapbook with me about two years ago that we really enjoyed, so I was happy to see such a great opportunity open up for me to look at!

I had access to four of the books that Journey Through Learning offers:

• Letters, Number and Shapes (good for ages 3 - 5)
• The Earth (for grades 1 - 4)
• Knights and Castles (grades 2 - 7)
• Astronomy and Space (grades 2 - 7)

Maestro helped Buttercup work on Letters, Numbers and Shapes while Chef and Bruiser worked on Knights and Castles. I stayed on hand to provide direction, but for the most part, with the older kids involved, the need for me to be there was pretty minimal.

2010 Hallowe'en Follow Up -

Well, at the expense of my originally-planned "election day" post (which I've just deleted - the overall message: make sure you vote but whomever you choose, make sure you've educated yourself as to who is the "right" candidate for your area and why they deserve your support!) here is my post-Hallowe'en post (hee hee) with the promised pictures included! Hello to the grandparents...

First up is "Herman Munster" - okay, he got many compliments on his "Frankenstein" costume, but Maestro even had old Herman's walk down! And his new clunky Heelies helped complete the look!

Next in line is our "Wii Console" - Smeagol has always thought a little (if you'll pardon the expression!) outside the box - and now it's put him in the box! Well, we went to great lengths to make sure every detail was included - you can't see it in this photo, but the "back" of the console has the ventilation slots and next to the "DVD" in the front (shiny half-moon thing that you can see in this pic) is a blue glow stick, just like when the console lights up when ejecting a disk!

Bruiser really wanted to be a "Ghost with a Sword" and not just any sword, but the one he saw two months ago at the Dollar Store near post. And the face on the ghost had to be done just that way, I suspect to imitate the Charlie Brown Great Pumpkin costumes. I messed it up though - poor guy had such a hard time seeing out of the left eye :-\ He had a great time.

Ahhh... Here is Buttercup - sporting her lovely butterfly look. Can't have a scary basket to go out as a beautiful butterfly, so her colorful Easter basket was brought out to take care of the conflict. Two things to notice here: I managed to get her hair to stand up for the "antennae" (Awesome!) and she is squeezing her eyes shut in anticipation of the flash! These kids crack me up!

And one final costume - this one from a bit farther off, hailing from Tacoma, Washington, we have my mother - the Great Pumpkin. Notice the green topknot and the striped orange shirt. She had a gal doing face painting at the shop and had her put the make up on.

Perhaps it's a little scarier than Mom wanted, and a tad less Great Pumpkin-ish, but then again, if you were a Great Pumpkin and only giving one shot a year to the believing boys and girls of the United States... wouldn't you look a little scary too? (Either way, I think it's an awesome Nana-ish thing to do and hope all the local Tacoma Grandkids had a blast with her!)

In the Charlie Brown movie, Linus gets worried over a slip of saying, "If the Great Pumpkin comes..." So the big question is: did she find a pumpkin patch that was sincere enough to leave toys and presents? Well, our ghost, featured above, might have something to say about that... but he is out cold from a sugar-induced high, and the resulting crash that comes after! He'll have to tell us all about it tomorrow!

Fall, Pumpkins, and Life's Lessons!

I love this time of year! Getting to walk down the street, dry leaves crunching under my feet on the sidewalk, always reminds me of when I was younger- mostly around junior high age, I suppose, when I walked everywhere. Ahhh... those were the days. I remember being 12 or 13, somewhere in there, and using tin foil to put braces on my Hallowe'en pumpkin with a friend.

And those were times of high anxiety too - but for reasons I now look on as being ... well, stupid. I don't say that to belittle what we - and now our children - go through at that sensitive age range, but what my peers think of me and my decisions matters far less than what my true friends think of me. Those friends who love me and have proven their love and respect for me by being honest even when it hurt my feelings and being available even when they didn't particularly want to be helping (babysitting, anyone?) and just being there in general to celebrate our lives together. I now know that for every hobby we enjoy, someone else does too. I recognize that we all feel "alone" sometimes, but rarely are in reality. And am trying to guide my almost-11 year old Maestro through the rough waters he's already entering, before he is fully immersed in (and swallowed up by?) the stormy sea of adolescence.

In the meantime, I'm building as many good memories as I can, hoping to give him an anchor to family and an example of what true friendship is. So we went this past Saturday to a new pumpkin farm with some friends - North Run Farm. We went with two other homeschooling families, of whom I think very highly. One family has four children and the other three, many around the same age as my own older boys. They are all very well behaved and pleasant to talk to, in spite of being "unsocialized" by the local school systems, but socialized within our groups and our family environments (that's my nod to homeschooling here... perhaps I'm a bit biased though.) One other person came along - a friend who is single and whom Jeff and I have known, worked with, disagreed with (on occasion), shared fellowship with... in short, a true friend, Beth. You've seen her blog mentioned on here before, but she's such a great friend, I'll link to it again - you can see her knitting accomplishments here.

Beth is not a big crowd fan. She likes quiet, animals, knitting, long walks, etc. But she is a great friend and so she gamely comes over on Saturday nights to have dinner and be with our family and a few other friends. This weekend, she joined us for our pumpkin patch and excursion through the corn maze. She took pictures of Buttercup as she ran ahead for a bit before getting screechy-tired (and driving us all crazy!) and the boys while they ran and played. Beth is awesome. Everyone should have a Beth like ours (but you can't have ours... :) The picture at left is our Beth - not from the farm, but from her birthday, but it is a picture of which I am enormously fond!

The corn maze was fun but gave us all fits! We started out at the 0.4 mile maze. Throughout the

maze were stops where "clues" were located to try to solve a mystery. There was no gain to solving it, simply fun in making the effort. We found clues 1 - 4 on the smaller maze and then proceeded to the larger. Maestro and Smeagol went with the older boys while Bruiser went with the other two mothers and the younger boys - we got Buttercup, trust me when I say that she was plenty by herself and I am totally grateful to my friends who were willing to let the boys go through with them.

Beth, Jeff and I made it through about ten minutes or so of the 2 mile maze before deciding just to focus on finding the way out! The funny thing about a corn maze is that even when the temperature is very pleasantly in the low 70s, inside a corn maze is a bit of a hotbox because the corn prevents most breezes from going through and so you bake, where you would otherwise be quite comfortable. Buttercup began to complain no matter what we tried to do, "Do you want down?" "NO!"

"Do you want your shoes off?" "NO!"

"Do you want a drink?" "NO!"

(Then Beth asked, "Do you want to be good?" ... no answer!)

We found our way out - and then called Maestro on the cell phone I had given him (my own, he doesn't have one for himself as yet) to see where they were at. I get a grumpy answer, "Hello."

Such a down-in-the-mouth tone was hardly what I expected from him while he is with his friends, having freedom without the parents and supposedly enjoying being a big kid. His group had just exited the maze, but hadn't found all the clues. They had two left and he wanted to find them all. The group he was with outvoted him and decided to throw in the towel. For Maestro, this was a sign of "immaturity." One more stumbling block in getting older: realizing that sometimes you get outvoted and have to find the joy in being with friends - or take the difficult steps of going without the group - anyway.

So, not without some small protest, we moved on, and went to find pumpkins and the hayride. In the end, we all had a great time with true friends. I am grateful that Maestro got to see that regardless of our sometime-disagreements, they are not the end of the world, nor do they have to mean the end of the friendship. I hope the lesson stays with him, even as we continue our foray into the (homeschool) junior high years and in the meantime, I am still enjoying the times when he decides just to play!

Tomorrow - a review of the various pumpkin patches we've visited in the area over the last several years and what we like about them!