I’m investigating things that begin with the letter M.

Saw Alice. Was amazed at every turn of every page of the story. Amazed by Johnny Depp’s talent, the way he makes you love him, makes every character he plays redeemable and makes you feel compassion no matter what. I’m in love with the Hatter/Alice relationship and I felt so sad for him when she left. Won’t anyone think of the Hatter?

Dylan has started using quotey fingers randomly. I don’t know where she would have picked that us – though the likely source, as usual, is me. For example, tonight after dinner she said, “Dad, do you like “pineapples“?” We laughed until we cried and then we laughed some more. And of course, she’s a tiny mutant teenager, so she made angsty face and crossed her arms and refused to laugh…until she couldn’t hold it in any longer, and of course, did so.

Alex is becoming a small person, and I’m finding myself holding conversations with her the way I used to with Dylan. Dylan somehow took a leap from four years old to seventeen years old and now wants nothing to do with me. She spends her free time playing Spore on the computer and just generally being in a different vicinity than the rest of us. Its unsettling and I’m hoping its just a phase. So now Alex is filling that spot and we have silly conversations and long conversations and we talk about the weather and what our brains do, and when she is loud and I tell her “Shh, you’ll wake the whole neighborhood,” she asks confusedly, “Why is the whole neighborhood asleep?” Last night we were watching the most recent episode of Lost and she is just baffled at non-Locke. “Is he the man in the wheelchair that doesn’t need a wheelchair on the beach but needs a wheelchair in his house? Is he dead? Then is that him? Is that his twin?” Oh Alex, I don’t know.

We are in the “end-game” for health care reform. Votes will be made soon. Do you hear the drums? The ominous, sensationlized, fear-mongering drums symbolizing good versus evil, red versus blue? BOTH WILL ENTER, ONLY ONE WILL LEAVE. Eh, neither do I. It will pass or it won’t, but there will be reform. If not this time, the next. I’ve got to have faith that the people against the bill aren’t really as stubbon, misinformed, and heartless as they have literally and wholly acted this past year. If I must have faith in something, it is that people will hopefully, eventually, do what’s best for our country.

Spring is so close I just want to sneeze in anticipation. This has been the longest, coldest, greyest winter I can remember. Though I feel like I handled it better than the last few. I wonder why that is. I’m excited for the abundance of sunshine though, no matter that after two-ish weeks of gorgeous weather I will feel like my flesh is baking just from walking out to my mailbox and be praying for rain, for a meteor shower, for anything just to block out the damn thing. I’m also excited for earth day, just because its always been my favorite holiday.

I wanted to volunteer at the school I went to as a child. See, when I went to school there we had the most amazing Earth Day activities. The high school students got out of class the entire day and cleaned the school. In the morning we made our cleaners from vinegar and baking soda and oils for cleaning wood, using rags instead of disposable paper towels. And we loved it. At the end of the day, the place just smelled clean, which in a public school is pretty rare and amazing all in itself. That wasn’t all though. We had what I can only describe as an Earth Day Pep Rally. It was a very small, K-12 school, so the whole school would pile in the gym and we did these activities. I think we watched a movie, listened to someone speak, and what sticks out the most to me is the frog races. Who knows where our science teacher came up with this idea, but she had these frogs, right? And little lanes that we would plop the frogs down on. And the students had straws…anyone see where I’m going with this? Probably not. The students had to blow on the frogs’ bums to get them to hop. Whoever’s frog got to the finish line first won. My sister who was in kindergarten or pre-k at the time, well her frog hopped over the line first and won a goodie bag and a baby Dogwood Tree, which we planted in our yard and you can look out of my parents kitchen window and see it today.

That’s a celebration of the earth, folks. That is teaching children, teenagers, people, that its important what we do, how we act. I wanted to volunteer, to help organize this again because I remember it being such a wonderful thing and as my brother still goes to that school, I know that they haven’t been holding them at all since I graduated. But I’m afraid I know exactly why they ceased their celebrations. No one cares. My brother, a junior, informed me that every kid in his class would hate me if they were made to participate in something like that. I believe him. I also believe teachers are too busy/too stressed/too apathetic to take interest in my offer to volunteer and unfortunately, I have two children and cannot do everything alone. I’ll do something though. I feel it, like hunger or unspent energy, gnawing at me. I’ve got to do something.

Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

“Baking Soda…can I drink it?”

quoteth my 4 year old, lol.

Eep I haven’t blogged in ages! We’ve just been chugging along, doing our thing. Been raining alllll week – well, showering at least once a day, then it gets bright and sunny out! Makes for a miserably humid evening, but at least its pretty. :p

Friday is pretty much our review day/free day. Last night we made the most awesome homemade play-doh I’ve ever made, very soft and smooth and with the pastel food coloring I bought at the story, they came out beautiful too!

And today we made a homemade watercolor paint recipe from Chasing Cheerios’ blog here. I have NEVER been good at creating homemade concoctions like this, so I am very excited at how well they both came out LOL.

BUT NEVER MIND ALL THAT — MY BABY HAS A LOOSE TOOTH. O_O I haven’t had this feeling in so long. I guess its been a while since we’ve had a major milestone, when I felt that little tooth all wiggly, I honest to God teared up! LOL. Being a mom is so silly.

From SEPT09

From SEPT09

raindrops on roses

It is one rainy, rainy day here in Florida land. Appropriate though, that this just happens to be our weather week. Today we learned about – yup, rain. We talked about how rain was made, the water cycle, the different kind of clouds – her favorite was cumulonimbus, drew a weather observation in our special weather journal for this week, watched a video on youtube of a Cherokee Rain Dance ceremony, talked about how they would wear feathers to symbolize wind and turqoise to symbolize water, and then we made our own rainsticks. Whew! Dill really liked the music they played in the video and kept going over to the computer and replaying it while we did our crafts. They were VERY excited for it to stop raining so they could go outside and look at the clouds, and it did – for about half an hour, then it started raining again.

Dill really seemed to get the water cycle. She kept talking about how after it rained she was going to have a great big river to play in, lol. So when Pickle opened the door during a rather heavy downpour and saw our yard, they thought we really WERE going to have a river in our front yard, haha. Imagine their disappointment when I told them it wouldn’t last.

Words on the Imaginary Vocab List for This Week:

Meteorologist
Cirrus
Cumulus
Stratus
Cumulonimbus
Precipitation

After that we had lunch (leftover spaghetti and carrots). I’ve got dinner in the crockpot so I don’t have to worry about cooking, woot! Then we copped a squat on the couch and had reading time. Dill did two more sections in her reading unit, got to put another star on the chart for reading a new Hop Book, and Pickle listened and played with play dough. She’s making so much progress with reading I can hardly believe it. I’m just stunned and crazy happy about it. For read-aloud time, I’m reading All the Money in the World, by Bill Brittain. I picked up a dozen of small-ish chapter books at our local Goodwill store the other day and this was one of them. I actually remember getting to go to a “Young Author’s Conference” when I was in elementary school and Bill Brittain just happened to be there that year, signing his book. I don’t still have the book, unfortunately, but when I saw this in the Goodwill store, I immediately picked it up. Among the others were Pippi Longstocking, Chocolate Touch, Wizard of Oz, and the Family Under the Bridge. When I asked Dill what she wanted to read, she picked

All The Money In the World.

For Math, we continued working in our Singapore math workbook, skipping around to pages I feel she’s ready to do. She did four addition pages all by herself this evening; I’m very proud.

Come aboard the dinosaur train

Its no news that my homeschooling style tends to lean on the eclectic side of the fence. I’ve been pretty eclectic my whole life. I’m a night owl, I have difficulty following a schedule or ritual of any kind, and I’m a fan of conventional and unconventional methods, depending on the subject. When it comes to homeschooling, DD is so curious about life, that I tend to want to follow her lead, let her learning be child-led. However, I still enjoying encorporating curriculum into what she’s currently interested in. I love the concept of unschooling, I just feel like this is what’s best for us at this time in our life. I let her her lead for the most part and I just try and supplement with anything that happens to be part of our day. This is what I love about homeschooling, something a lot of parents either take for granted or just don’t realize – everything can be learning. From going to the library, to watching a tv show, to grabbing a kids meal at a fast food restaurant.

I went through a period where I felt tv was evil, and I still believe part of it is (commercialism, marketing to children, sexism), but there is also still plenty on tv that we can learn from, learn about. Not to mention the awesome ideas for crafts we can do, places we can go, etc. Utilizing all media types really is beneficial, if you ask me.

That said, there is a new cartoon that comes on PBS in the morning called The Dinosaur Train and I just adore it! They teach the names of dinosaurs, what they eat, where they live, even what period they lived in. It’s totally educationally and leads to many discussions about dinosaurs and whey they aren’t around anymore, which leads to even bigger discussions. Darn, I think my dino-preference is showing, lol. Dinosaurs were totally my favorite thing in elementary school and I just think they really open the doors in a child’s mind to science. Did I mention dd told me the other day she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up?

And this, dd just happened to get in a happy meal, I think from Burger King with her grandma. She picked up two, one for little DD too. It’s from the Dangerous Book for Boys and has tiny molds to make fossils with!

I think I’m going to have to go this book, even though I loathe the “for girls” and “for boys” title. I think it gives my daughters the impression that only boys should like dinosaurs and fossils and technical things whereas girls should like glitter and sparkles and crafts. Am I the only one that feels this way? Either way, we had a blast making fossils and even found some of our dinosaur figures and made fossils out of their plates, tails, and faces. They looked really cool!

Oh, I almost forgot! If you’re into dinosaurs, definitely check Dinosaur Pop out. I’ve already downloaded Stegosaurus, Party, Pterondon, and one other about a velociraptor that I can’t remember the name of right now, lol. I love this review of the music:

Paul Legrady has, under the moniker Dinosaur Pop, crafted a terrific concept album centered entirely about those extinct creatures so many kiddos love to wear on their pajamas and play with in the bathtub.

Imagine if The Decemberists took a break from writing about stillborn children and prostitute mothers and focused their efforts on a Jurassic rock opera. You might end up with something as lovely as the dino-ballad “Pterodactyl Baby”.

It’s on Itunes, definitely check it out!

come away, o human child

Sometimes I can’t stand it here, living so close to my parents, living in such a small town where no one seems to have an open mind and everyone thinks I’m crazy. But sometimes I’m reminded of how lucky I am by how beautiful it really is, that some people don’t have the luxury of slipping their flip-flops off and walking barefoot in the grass to try and catch a grasshopper, just to let it go again. Today my disdain was pushed down once again by the simplicities that surround me everyday. To say I take nature for granted would be an understatement.

Living in Florida my entire life, dusk has always been my favorite time of day. Its just so much cooler, when you can finally get out without feeling a heat stroke coming on. As a child I would play inside or watch tv during the day, but around five o’clock, that’s when things really started to wake up. My cousins would ride their bikes over and that’s when my day seemed to really start. We’d play in the woods, play in my tree house, go bug hunting, you name it. Of course, in the evening is when you’ll see the most wildlife too, so rabbits and deer, raccoons and bats were a regular sighting for us, so normal that we paid them little to no attention. It makes me happy that this is when my own children choose to spend most of their time in the summer as well. When the sun is going down, it casts this gorgeous, golden light all over my backyard. The light is filtered through the pine trees that surround us and it almost looks like the girls are dancing with the myriad of shadows as they jump and skip in the too-high grass. The crickets chirp so loudly in the evenings here its almost hard to hear yourself think and the mosquitos are out for blood quite literally, but while I’m busy with something mundane and domestic, like browning ground turkey on the stove or unloading the dishwasher, I look out of my kitchen window and I find I can’t describe the feelings that wash over me as I see my two girls bathed in that golden light, hair curled up around their ears from the humid evening air, laughing as they swing their legs back – forth – back – forth, talking in secrets that I will never be privy too, unless I’m lucky. And, I think, I certainly am.

From apri09

That’s Ms. Stewart, to you.

I actually meant to post at lunch time, hence the picture, but got distracted. It happens easily. Its not something I’m proud of. :p Anyway, the girls had tiny heart-shaped half-white, half-whole wheat peanut butter and nutella sandwiches with a fruit leather thingy. Little A was like, “Chocolate?! On a sandwich?!” She was in complete awe and gobbled it down. Then asked for another. She also ate her weight (and mine, I think) in boiled peanuts today.

As for me, I’m still in de-clutterfication mode – not a word, technically, but its my blog! I’ll make words up if I want to! xD Things are going well and I’m definitely not having trouble sleeping at night, lol. The girl’s room has so much more room in it (its a very tiny room to begin with), and my closet is cleaned out like whoa. Bags and bags and bags are going to goodwill tomorrow, thank God. I’m starting to realize just doing daily things like cooking and doing laundry and throwing stuff out, just how much thought has to go in to being green. Its overwhelming and I love it. I love actually having to think about the stuff that I do day-to-day that effects everyone.

Today I didn’t throw away:

A toilet paper roll
A produce bag – Idk what I’m going to use it for yet, but i’m sure it will be used to store something.
My mountain dew cans – Its awful, I know. But at least I’m going to re-cycle them?

And one thing I’m super proud of myself for doing:

Last night we had crockpot chicken and rice. Tonight we finished up all the leftovers! LOL, I know it’s lame, but I have always been terrible at using up leftovers. Just doing that makes me proud of myself.

In school news, helper words are a pain in my tush, for some reason “13, 14, and 15,” are the bane of my 6 year old’s existance, and I need a microscope in order to search for rolie polies!

Kid Quote of the Day: “Mom, when I grow up can I have a baby?” Awww and also, EEP.

O/t: Is anyone else watching Glee? I love that show. ;D

So. Tired.

In an attempt to de-clutter my house and pretty much my life, I have been working my arse off, like all day. I’m sitting down for what’s possibly the first time today and GOD, it does feel amazing. I’ve bagged up 10+ bags of clothing to send to Goodwill, 4 bags of toys to send to Goodwill, and 3 bags of trash from my room and my children’s room. I found a way to use the old pizza boxes that had been stacking up because I didn’t feel like throwing them away, but never knew what to do with them. I broke down many old boxes that weren’t going to get used – the kids made a “hoppity-hop-scotch” mat out of one of them, lol.

I’d call my newfound motivation half-selfish, half-un-selfish. Part of me wants to de-clutter and live a little more “green” because a.) My family just creates too much trash – we have trash pickup two times a week and we have at least four bags that acculumate between Monday and Thursday, sometimes more than that over the weekend. Especially if its a payday weekend. And I just really don’t have room for all those garbage bags! Second, my electricity bill is SKY high. I’d say that’s 90% selfish on my part to start conserving energy, because I’m too poor to pay $300 for electricity! xD

But that’s not it. There’s something else. My husband was a manager working for an auto parts chain. The bs and bureacracy and favoritism and commuting and long hours and crappy pay was getting to him, thus it was getting to us. So he decided to step down to a less paying position, with my support. The pay is drastically lower, but one day I was thinking. I actually don’t mind being broke so much. When he was making more money, he’d get paid and we’d go out, spend a truckload of money, and still have nothing. When we don’t have that much, we have to pay attention to what we spend. It means more this way. Because we can’t afford to go out all the time, we spend more time together as a family. I just got this great epiphany one day about how I’d been living and how I feel this way is really better for me and my family. And oh yeah, the planet.

I’m in the middle of turning my family’s life completely upside-down, but in the best way. We are going to stop creating so much waste – this is not an option. This is something that has to be done. But how? Here’s my small list.

- No more paper towels. Dish towels only.
- No more paper plates. Or at least something like earth shell.
- Use leftovers more. Heck, use leftovers, period.
- Compare the amount of packaging when buying products. Try and buy the one with less to throw away.
- Recycle as much as possible. We don’t have recycle pickup so this will be a chore, but my 6 year old is fascinated with recycling, so should be able to keep me on my toes.

As far as conserving energy, I’ve already begun unplugging all of the vampiric appliances in the house, looking in to getting surge protectors for a few of them. Replacing all bulbs with more efficient ones, making sure only necessary lights are on – I’ve been very lax about this in the past. It’s Florida, so the air conditioner is a major problem for us. I’m going to figure out how to set the thermostat and keep it at about 76, I think. Hopefully soon the weather will turn fall-ish and I’ll be able to turn it up higher, possibly even off, and just have a nice breeze blow through the house with the windows open. Right now though…:\ I’ve already heard the dryer is a big energy suck and am looking in to ways to cut the drying time, such as dryer balls. If I get really brave (and ever catch up on my laundry so that I don’t have mountains of it) I might cut out out the dryer completely and install this on the back of a door. What? I’m staying positive.

Well, the chicken in the crockpot smells delish and I’ve got even more de-cluttering to do, if you can believe it. I’ll leave with a picture of some girls I know playing in a summer rain shower.

TGIF.

Woo, Friday. Not that it means anything to us really lol, there’s just something symbolic about Friday that makes one go, “AHH,” and let their hair down or something like that.

To play a little catch-up, Wednesday was “Animal Communication Day. Dyl drew me a picture of the doggies at her grandma’s house communication with her, with little squiggly lines to illustrate that they were wagging their tails, hee. We have a new kitten, so they then spent the rest of the day letting me know what the kitten was telling us. Anything from, “She needs to go pee-pee mom!” to “I think she’s saying she wants some marshmallows.” :p Miss Suzie on Sid sang a song about animal communication and there was a short skit about beees and Dyl totally went off on this bee tangent, how do bees communicate and why do they have wings and do they sting you and do bees make honey and HOW HOW HOW? lol, sooo we did a little bit of internet research, found a cute game on boowakwala.com (that i cannot find again for the life of me) in which you controlled the little bee, flew him over to a flower and it showed him sucking up the nectar, in which he became a big fat bee (hee) and then you flew him back to the hive and let him fill up the honey comb. The kids GREATLY enjoyed it and laughed loudly and obnoxiously every time the bee got all fat lol. We had to go grocery shopping later, so I showed them all the different kinds of honey and the different flowers they came from and we bought a small jar so they could taste it at home. One didn’t like it, the other did. As per usual.

Yesterday was “The Big Bird’s Nest.” This week was totally fun because of all the outisde-ness we got to have, and the weather was pretty awesome, so that helped a lot. Warm, but not omgsohot. They went outside and found leaves and twigs and we made little nests on paper with lots and lots and lots and lots..and lots of glue.

From SEPT09

Daddy was off work yesterday so we didn’t get much done, but we did get a little prize in the afternoon from a co-worker.

From SEPT09

So there was a lot of that too. :p

Today’s review day and clean up your room day. And a make-up for not reading enough yesterday day. And when we went grocery shopping yesterday I let them pick out a cake and frosting and a couple of things they want to put on top of the cake, so if they clean their room up, later we’re going to make confetti cake with pink icing, sprinkles and marshmallows. Oye.

just keep rolling.

Its Earth Day!

Okay, so its not Earth Day technically, but Earth Day can be everyday – especially when Sid the Science kid is running re-runs and saying its Earth Day. SO. After explainng what a re-run was to the girls, and telling them that it doesn’t have to be earth day to help take care of the earth, I sent them out on a mission to see what they could find in the dirt.  This week’s science theme is Backyard Science and today’s theme was Diggin in the Dirt.

After they came back inside, we talked about the things they found (leaves, rocks, broken pieces of plastic, an empty pepsi bottle – thank you little brother), and they drew the things they found in their journal. Dyl plans on giving her uncle a stern lecture when he gets home from school lol. Right now they’re both back outside, picking the scuppernogs/muscadines from the vine in our front yard. Dyl loves them, Alex doesn’t quite understand them.

Later we’re going to sort things for recycling. We don’t have recycling pick-up, so we’re going to have to set one day a week aside for a recycling day and make a trip to town to dump our cans, plastics, electronics, and paper.

Oh! Milestone! Dyl totally finished the first HoP cd up yesterday. Today we move on to the second cd and I believe plurals of words, like cats and hats. We’re still working on sight words like is, the, to, etc. “The” truly boggles her. She tries sounding it out every time. Its pretty funny. :p

Lunch time!