Fun Homemade Crafts

Zhara has decided that she wants to host a Cupcake's Holiday Tea. We have sent out e-mails and gotten some RSVPs -- yay! We're decided to bake cupcakes and let the girl's decorate them themselves. She has also come up with a craft (completely on her own) that she wants to do, involving using paper plate to make Santas, reindeer, snowmen, or whatever holiday creature they would like. She wanted to trial run it the other day, so we got out the fun craft supplies. The results were great.

Zhara's Santa

Angus's Snowman



Wednesday's drum

A Visit to the Grain Elevator

So one of the awesome benefits of having your grandpa own a grain elevator is getting to go and visit during harvest season. We went down today. It was crazy busy. Thanks to the super wet weather this year, harvest is very late and prices are pretty good for grain. We checked out the grain silos and augers.


Papa Gary gave us new Dayhoff Elevator hats that had just come in, and the kids got to help do moisture tests on the grain coming in, then read the results to Papa for the tickets.



We watched the trucks unloading the grain into the ground grates, where it's then augured up and over to the appropriate silo or shed.


Some of us were less interested in the grain, and more interested in the hats, and peanuts and candy Papa gave us, but whatever...

Dinos & More

Anyone who knows Angus, knows that he is a lover of the dinosaurs. He spends a great deal of time trying to decide whether his future career will be a professional drummer or paleontologist. I have tried to convince him that he can easily do both, at least if he goes more amateur on the drumming side, but, you know, he is a boy who likes a concrete plan.

We spent quite a bit of time today reading from the dinosaur non-fiction readers we found at the library last week. He has long ago run through the entire picture book and reference dinosaur sections, but the readers have added a whole new area of dinosaur books to us. Of course, he is not "reading" them, but he is being read to, and there is a lot of interesting information aimed at his age range in there. We read about predators, teeth, and herbivores/carnivores today. It doesn't hurt that we were happly snuggled up together on the couch reading while Winnie was napping.

Tomorrow Zhara is going to the farm to spend a couple of days with grandma and papa before we go down there for Thanksgiving. She'll help grandma drive the tractor, clean the chicken coop, get Thanksgiving stuff together, and generally be spoiled rotten. She will love it.

Adam and I have started working on getting Winnie into her own bed. Mainly because when she's in ours (all the time) she is waking up and waking us up like 5-6 times a night and not sleeping. Ugh, mama's tired and wants her boobies back. I checked out the No Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers from the library. Gonna see if we can gently work it a little to help the girly (and us) get a better night's sleep.

How the Ball Rolls

We made a wonderful find at the thrift store this weekend -- a marble run set. The kids have spent hours putting it together again and again. Lots of fun. We're calling it fun with physics and geometry.

Our Unschooling Journey

We had such an amazing day watching our daughter make new homeschool friends. Everyday we unschool, I realize, is a better day than the one before.  I am so lucky to have the absolute support of my amazing husband on this journey.  I never thought that I would be so gushy about unschooling, but my god, what a difference it truly has made in our lives and our outlook on the world.

A Cupcake Girl

Well, we went to the first homeschool Cupcake meeting this afternoon. OMG, Zhara had a blast. Total blast. They did manicures, and made popcorn balls, and pulled taffy. They laughed, and ran, and played outside in the dark. It was wonderful. She is making friends. Really sweet ones. Ones that understand her, and what her life is like, and some of them are even girly girls just like her. She is excited, and so am I. These are several of the same girls that we see at the American Girls Club and a few other activities through E.D.U.C.A.T.E, so I feel like we are really really forming a good group for her to bond with. We have to miss the December meeting, which is an outing, so we are thinking about perhaps inviting the Cupcakes over for a holiday afternoon tea or something for fun in December. That way Zhara can have a get together with the Cupcake girls before Christmas. I am just so happy for her. She didn't want to leave, was calling them by their names, and really having a delightful time, just like any other 8-year-old girl would. And I talked a bit with some of the other moms, which was nice, as well.

Art Through History

Yesterday we went to our Art Through History class. We had fun learning about ancient Egypt. The kids made heads for body part jars -- go go mummification. And they drew themselves sideways in an Egyptian style.


Everybody loved painting and drawing.


Then on the way home we started to listen to The Story of the World on cd that we had gotten at the library. We learned about Rome, it's fall, and the Celts. The kids are really enjoying it and another HS mom cued me into the fact that there is an activity book that goes with the cds/books that have really fun activities in them. Yay, have to pick that one up!