Sweetness

It's been a week of sugar. Yeah, yeah, there has been Halloween. We know about that. Walter was a "rich man," perhaps Bill Gates--at least that's what is on his nametag at this party. Rutledge went from having a pirate costume to being afraid of it to getting back his devil costume from last year to finally declaring that he was going to be "A Star War." In the end, this meant that he would reuse Ollie's Jango Fett jumpsuit from last year and would wear the mask for a grand total of less than one minute. Frances made it easy on us by wearing an old tablecloth with two eye holes cut in it and going as a ghost. And Ollie was Freddy Kruger. We ran around like crazy people looking for a mask on Halloween morning, but since I wasn't willing to pay $20 for an ugly piece of rubber, he settled for using makeup. I think he looked fabulous!


But that doesn't really address the many roles sugar has played in our life this week. There was last week, when we made pyramids and then igloos out of sugar cubes. I determined that this whole Classical Education thing was not entirely working when I was benignly neglecting Frances. When the twins were her age, we were knee deep in listening to the Story of the World CDs and making models of the Nile and mummifying things and doing science experiments with bouncing eggs. But now we were forging forward with our own plans, and Frances wasn't getting to do the projects and the endless listening to the story of Tarak, eating his lizards that served as their foundation for the study of history. Let's just say that the pyramid went a lot better than the igloo. Someone was telling me this week that it is very expensive to build round rooms and round houses, and I can fully understand why. Plus glue plus sugar cubes often equals a puddle.

Then there was the "edible" cell models. We've been attempting to cover Biology in a rather schizophrenic way this year. I almost always refer to books and education materials as "resources" rather than curricula, and this is because my real problem is that I can't make decisions. I'm a low commitment kind of gal these days. I use a little of this, a little of that, and I'm constantly looking for something that will fill things out just a little bit further or offer just a tweak on the perspective. And that is my justification for using, ahem, three separate curricula so far for science this year, and it doesn't even touch on the other books I've pulled in on the side. We started with LifePac Science, which has a bit too fundamentalist bent for my comfort, but it does systematically cover the major topics that one might see on a 4th or 5th grade standardized test and has the kids writing down the vocabulary words that marginally literate people should know when it comes to basic sciences. Walter and Ollie find it deadly dull. I find it often lacking in depth, including even the basics of the type that you'd find in the generalist Seymour Simon or Gail Gibbons picture books. Not that we're not reading those as well, but it makes me realize how much we need to supplement in order for me to feel like we've done justice to the topics. Much of last month was spent on weather--causes of differing weather, fronts, heat and cold and their ups and downs, pressure of various kinds, instruments for measuring various things that affect weather. It was really boring! Now weather could be a very exciting topic, but not in a LifePac. I was eager to move on--draw some diagrams in their notebooks, take some quick tests that say they know enough not to be meteorologically ignorant, and then upward and onward. Back to Biology.

So the topic now is cells. Animal cells and plant cells. Another of our so-called curricula this year is the E=McQ free Life Sciences curricula that I downloaded and printed over the summer. This is much better suited to doing while including Frances, which is appealing, and it introduces just a few more terms than what we've seen elsewhere. So far we're not on cells there, but the focus on biotic vs. abiotic was a start. Then I popped over to my newest acquisition, Real Science 4 Kids Biology. We used this series for Chemistry a few years ago (two years too soon, but I digress...), and the Biology lives up so far to my expectations based on my past experience with this author. Since we've already chugged through quite a bit of the LifePac on cells and have rounded that out a bit with Time4Learning's segments on cells, organelles, and the "building blocks of life," the extra material and its lively presentation in the RS4K book went down well. Plus there was a pleasant diversion with an initial chapter on taxonomy. Ever the comedian, Walter had a great deal to say about old King Philip Came Over From Great Spain. The Kingdom was King Arthur's. What do we do to our nails? Phylum. The Order is a McRib. The Family is the Clendenons. The Genus has an IQ of 150. Ha ha.

But I digress again. The big adventure wasn't what we studied. It was what happened next. Last Thursday evening we made these jello cells. They involved a transparent shade of flavored jello, some Knox gelatine, and a variety of bad pre-Halloween candy.

First, Frances' animal cell cracked in half. So she ate it. Then Ollie's nucleus blew his animal cell apart. Walter had better luck, but overall, the plant cells went a bit more smoothly. For one, we had figured out a better system for implanting organelles at that point. And we also benefitted from the more rigid cell walls that distinguish the plant from the animal cell.

But the true excitement came in the morning, when Frances popped excitedly into my room and announced, while my eyes barely had the sleep rubbed out of them, that she had puked four times during the night. In her room. On the bed and the floor. And she had moved the sleeping Rutledge to the floor to get him out of the way. This followed right on the heels of vomit and dog poop all over Bilbo's crate and the living room floor from Hokie. Anyone who knows me know that this is way too much provoking to me! I responded by cancelling our plans to go to Inflation Nation, the indoor inflatable bouncy monstrosity place I had set up a trip to for our homeschool group. And then I began cleaning. Ten hours later, I was still disinfecting. And ten days later, we've managed to go unscathed by her illness. I'm almost certain that that gelatinous cytoplasm was at the root of the ordeal!

This weekend's sugary moment involved...drumroll please...twenty pounds of sugar. Nearly a cup of meringue powder. For the past two years, we have had a tradition of making sugar skulls to celebrate Day of the Dead. I couldn't let it go by this year without some royal icing, so this afternoon I bought my own sugar skull mold--an XL one--at World of Mirth. In the past, we've used Adena's, so I'm thrilled to have one of my own, but I think I preferred making the Large size instead of this gargantuan one, which takes a lot more raw material than I had bargained for!



This is my base of operations. A teaspoon of meringue powder and of water for every cup of sugar. I didn't have a bowl big enough to prepare the whole bag of sugar at once, so I kept it going six cups at a time.



The sandlike mixture is packed tightly into the skull mold--once for the front and once for the back. After I let them dry overnight on little squares of cardboard on the counter, I will scoop out some of the sugar mixture from the back of the pieces and then allow them to dry for another 12 hours. When that time is up, I'll use cement-like royal icing (powdered sugar, more meringue powder, and water) to glue the two parts together to make a 3-D sugar skull that we will then be able to decorate with more icing, pieces of colored foil, bottle caps, sequins, shells, or whatever we decide to use. When they are dry, they can last for years. If Rutledge hadn't made a snack of our previous ones, we would still have the ones we made at previous co-ops. Unfortunately, all I have left is a smeared half of one on my schoolroom bookshelf.



Here are the blanks, reposing on pizza boxes, stuffing boxes, cereal boxes, and whatever else I could scavenge. Our recycling was picked up on Wednesday, and any boxes that didn't go out with that are being saved to wrap Christmas presents in. I had to get creative!

While we weren't being artistic with sugar, we were on field trips this week. Tuesday we saw the play "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" at Theatre IV, which is the local theatre for children. It was pretty bad. Frances liked it--it was silly. But it completely lacked the spirit--and yea, the pun is intended--of Irving's original story. We've seen a few other live drama productions of Sleepy Hollow over the years, including an awesome one at Explore Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway that was done outdoors and included a great deal of memorable music. But this particular prodution belabored the less-important details of the story, took some liberties not exactly implied by the author, and most of all, wasn't creepy. Hmmm.

Thursday we traveled to Mount Vernon. Can you believe that I've lived in Virginia for 36 years and I've never been to Washington's home? It is a full-day affair. There was an engaging introductory movie, an anticipatory line to buy tickets to the whole shebang in the first place, and a pretty amazing model of Washington's actual house that had walls that moved up and down so that you could see the perfectly scaled and detailed interior. I think the kids enjoyed the food court most, with its historically accurate Pizza Hut and 32 ounce soft drinks. We added on a "National Treasure Tour" to our regular ticket, and this got us into the basement of Mount Vernon as well as took us on a walking tour of the grounds to all of the places where the movie was filmed, with commentary on the historical accuracy of what was portrayed, how the Mount Vernon Ladies Association or whatever it is called that owns the property communicated with the Walt Disney company about how they could use the property, and gave us stunning views of the Potomac.


It was a chilly and windy day, but the turning leaves were inspiring.


But not quite as inspiring to 10 year old boys as this: a 3 person privy with wooden drawers underneath that could be taken out and emptied. This was a pretty state of the art privy for its day because it represented centralized sanitation set apart from the house. Their friend was especially repelled by the group aspect of the layout.


Everyone needs a photo prove that they were really there. In this one, the house looks more proportional than it does to me in real life. Up close, it looked a little, well...short. Like a model of a house instead of a whole one. It must have something to do with those second story windows that go right up to the roof. Some of the interior highlights include the very fashionable green room (I'm so glad that this is not the vogue these days--I can't stand when molding is painted as well as the walls!) and the bed where Washington died. We had just seen Jefferson Davis' house the week before, so the continual question the boys had, as they did there, was, "Is this the original ____." Imagine that repeated over and over and over again. What's neat is that Mount Vernon has been working tirelessly to acquire as many of the original items in the inventory in the house as possible--many were sold at estate sales when George and Martha died or were pilfered over the years.


The formal gardens and fruit orchard were not of interest to my world-weary historical house tourists. But they were heartily impressed by the very large trees, including some stunning tulip poplars on the property. When we were at a wedding reception at Washington's River Farm, which is down the street from Mount Vernon, there were only two trees there that were original to Washington's time, and both were the dreaded Black Walnut. I say dreaded because for several years I did battle with a large and violent black walnut in our yard on Sherwood Avenue. I hated that thing! Darn rock-hard nuts with sharp points that embed in your yard and stab your feet when you think you've picked every last one of them up!


And finally, we had a good time Saturday night at the fall festival held by our church. The site where it was held was perfect--many acres for hayrides behind the tractor (all you need is a 3 year old boy to access the deep appeal of this again!), a gladiator moon bounce that could hold about 30 kids at once (this is a church with about 25 kids ages 3-5, not to mention the many on either side of that), a chili cookoff, a bonfire and marshmallows, and plenty of friends. So even though we didn't make it to a pumpkin patch this year, I do feel like we lived fall to its fullest so far. Now if only the leaves would come off the trees!