Almost Camping

 If you know me, then you know, I am not a good camper.  The outdoors -- I love it.  Hiking -- awesome.  Nature and wildlife -- I never feel happier than when I'm among them.  But sleeping outside -- nope, I don't do it.  Have I?  Sure.  Do I like to?  Not one bit.  I have a terrible combination -- a bad back (had a surgery several years ago bad) and being a terrible sleeper.  This tends to mean a long, cold, uncomfortable, sleepless night, and a very cranky mommy the next day. 

So, we prefer what I like to call, modified camping. We take the kids, and often the dogs, and we head out for the woods.  We go for a long hike.  Often we go way back, off trails, or on rarely used trails.  We explore, let the dogs off their leashes, enjoy the beauty of nature to it's fullest.  Then, when we're done, we find a campsite, start a fire with wood we've brought, cook out hotdogs, smores, play around the campfire -- you know, the best parts of camping.  Then we put the fire out.  Pack everyone into the car, dirty, tired, and smelling of yummy camp smoke, and head home, where we snuggle into our warm beds, use a real toilet, and wake the next day refreshed, happy, and able to shower.  Perfection! We had such an outing two weekends ago in American Fork Canyon.  It was lovely.

 Wednesday was booking it along the trail that day. We could hardly keep up.  She kept shouting back, "look out for that branch," and "there's a turn up ahead".

 

Angus carried this stick the whole way, then when we got to the turn around, he planted the stick, claiming the mountain for us. :)

 Every now and again, we would break through the trees and into a lovely clearing or meadow.  We brought a ball for Olly in our bag and he would run and play.  Bailey, the bassett hound, would sniff thoroughly.

Those are some happy kids!

 Dad brought up the rear, making sure the hound dog made it all four miles.  Wednesday tired at the turn around, and I was very thankful that she's super skinny, as I carried her the last two miles on my back in the ergo, which I had shoved into our hiking pack.

 When we were done on the hike, we headed to a campsite.  Dad started a fire for us.

While they waited for the fire to build enough to cook, the kids climbed...

...and pretended to roast marshmallows on the unused grill.

Once the fire was nice and roaring, we roasted hot dogs and made smores, and ate!

Gone Fishing

 

My mother has been a public school teacher for more than 40 years.  She is a speech therapist and special education teacher.  She has had some incarnation of this fishing game in use in her classroom for as long as I can remember. A few weeks ago, Angus met with a therapist from the Children's Center here in Salt Lake, where he is going to be taking Social Skills classes this fall.  Lo and behold, if they didn't play this fishing game!  He loved it, so I created one for us.

The poles are two pieces of PVC pipe.  The line, some cotton yarn.  I bought these awesome horse shoe magnets at Lowe's for $1.70, which I will definitely be using again for science experiment magnets.  They are crazy strong!

  

 The colorful fish are paint chips from the store, cut into basic fish shapes.  I then wrote the letters of the alphabet and some basic arithmetic problems on them for when the kids were interested in doing something other than fishing.  They've spelled things with them, fished for specific letters or problems, and used them in a variety of ways.  Then I duct taped a large paperclip to each fish. Wallah -- fishing at home!

Angus, demonstrating his mad fishing skills!

A Fallish Bridal Veil Falls

We love exploring the wilderness of Utah.  We do it a lot, in fact.  Today we ended up heading to a very chilly Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon.  It was no more than 50 degrees, and the kids proclaimed they were freezing throughout, though you will note from the photos that they still stripped to their swimsuits and explored the even colder water.  Brrrrr!  I did not join them.  :)

We took our friends the McKinneys with us.  It was their first visit to the Falls, and they enjoyed it thoroughly.  Zhara took Josh and Emma (their two oldest) exploring up the side of the falls to the top of the first tier, which is her absolute favorite thing to do there.  The younger kiddos and Stephanie and I stayed at the bottom, threw rocks in the river, and played in the water.

Thankfully, we brought lots of blankets, as they were put to good use!

 

 

Eli's favorite part was definitely throwing rocks in the river.

Sometimes you have to bundle up with friends.

 Despite the cold, the kids still climbed on the rocks and logs in the water.   I'm not sure how they stood it, as even on very hot days, my feet freeze from the cold mountain run off.

Winnie and Angus occasionally consented to merely peering into the water from the bridge.

Then there were the ever present invented games -- Winnie and Eli pretended to be flying with the orange blanket.  And the entire kid crew got in on a game of doctor, whereby, one or two members of the party had "fallen down the mountain" and the rest used rocks, water, the laying on of hands, and shamanic chanting to revive them.

All and all, a pretty fun and beautiful day of "school".

Control by Crown

When we first started homeschooling many years ago, I came upon an audio copy of The Story of the World, Ancient Times. We hadn't really listened much to it, and then Zhara became absolutely obsessed with mythology. Ah ha, I thought the other day, I wonder if that is still on the computer, and if it has anything about gods and goddesses on it. So the other day I went looking, and found it. I loaded it on to my ipod, and recently when we were in the car, I asked if anyone would be interested in listening to a bit of it. We listened to the part about nomads in the Egyptian desert, and then today we listened a little bit more. We learned about the upper and lower kingdoms of Egypt, and how about 5000 years ago a war was fought between the two kingdoms for control of Egypt. The kids liked the information about the one king having a white crown, and other a red crown, and that when the Egyptian king with the white crown was victorious, he took the other king's crown. He then placed it on top of his own, and from then on the Egyptian crown had both red and white portions to show that the pharaoh controlled both parts of Egypt. We decided to decorate our own colorful crowns to represent their "kingdoms".

I cut crowns out of poster board, and then the kids painted them with tempura paint.

Angus went with an all yellow theme.

Zhara with six large blocks of color.

Wednesday with a rainbow motif.

Dad was home sick today, so he even got to help out a little with the project.

The kids have been really excited to paint ever since I bought a big pack of new paintbrushes at JoAnn's the other night.

As always, one of their favorite parts of painting, is mixing colors, and seeing just what new unique combination they end up with.


We talked about pictures as representation, and I told them about hieroglyphics. Then we printed out this hieroglyphics translator, and decided that later in the week we would try and write our names in hieroglyphics.

Zhara stapled everyone's crowns together. The crowns were a big hit. The kids even used some of the scraps from the poster board to create other items for their kingdoms. Angus made a flag, and Wednesday and Zhara made arm bands. Angus has, of course, already stolen Wednesday's crown, and placed it on top of his own in a hostile takeover of Wednesday's country. That is, of course, to be expected, and likely to happen many more times before it gets old. :)

Zhara is really rocking the regal look.

Wednesday is one happy, if albeit partially nude, ruler.

Tear Apart Day

My husband is a civil engineer, and according to relatives, spent much of his childhood tearing apart any form of electronic that came near him to see what was inside. Truth be told, he still really likes to tinker with things, not all of which make it back together again. :) So it was natural, I suppose, that we would decide to do a Tear Apart Day, as my kids share his base love of destruction for learning's sake.


The other night, while the kids were at karate, I headed to the local thrift store to pick up some cast off electronics. I got a computer keyboard, an old corded phone, a small cassette tape player, a remote, and a VCR tape. I spent a total of $12. It was worth it, I promise.

We discovered a lot of things. We found circuit boards. At dinner, Adam explained to Zhara how the circuit boards work, and what all the parts are.


We found lots of different sizes of circuit boards in the various items.


We learned that Wednesday is really good with a screw driver, except for when it's aimed at Zhara. Thankfully, everyone survived mostly unharmed.


We learned that the keys on a keyboard can really get some flight time when popped properly.




We learned that sometimes, no matter how hard you hit it, you just have to take the screws off to get inside.
We learned that electronic buttons are super awesome inside. Zhara said they remind her of bubble wrap that never pops.


We learned that there is a massive amount of tape inside a VCR tape. So much so that you can make multiple trips throughout the entire house. Or make your own Rastafarian wigs.


Or mummify yourself.


And finally, we learned that there's not a lot to be done with electronics after you've demolished them. We tried making things, but glue just doesn't really stick to them. It was an awfully fun project, though.