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Holes by Louis Sachar

Maddie has been reading Holes by Louis Sachar to me in school and we have been loving it so much, that many days we end up eating lunch quite late because she asks to read "just one more" chapter 3 or 4 times. Then last night, she and I snuggled into bed and read for quite a while because we didn't want to wait until Monday to read more.

I guess what I'm saying is -- if you have an kid around 8 or 9 (maybe up to 11 -- Amazon says 9-12 yrs), get this book! I think you'll both enjoy reading it together.

Dry Ice & Bubbles

Maddie and I were lucky to receive a box that included some dry ice yesterday (oh yeah, and a chocolate cake -- more on that later today on the Chocolate Blog), so we decided to play around with it a bit. This is an easy and fun experiment -- just add warm water and a squirt of dish soap to a tall glass, then add some dry ice. The usual "smoke" that is generated in this reaction will be encased in the bubbles. Pop them and the "smoke" (just carbon dioxide and water vapor) escapes. Super fun to do with kids and it is relatively safe -- just don't let them touch the dry ice since it is super cold.

Maddie is making her first quilt!

As Maddie turned 4, 5 and 6, I started to introduce crafts to her. While I saw a spark of interest now and again, nothing really seemed to stick. At 7 I took a step back and waited. Now she's 8 and suddenly she's turned crafty!! First there was the potholder business ( which is still going strong! She's sold 4 potholders through etsy and now she's making some for Grandma.) and this past week she started sewing. Be still my heart.

We stopped by the local fabric shop -- Robert's Sewing Center -- after a failed trip to an estate sale that was a total dud. We were looking at all the pre-cut Moda packs and she fell in love with the Fresh Picked fabric pack and I told her she could get it and try sewing on the machine. She was nervous at first, but soon she was off and running! She's sewed 3 strips of her 6 strip quilt already and has plans to make a pillow after finishing her quilt.  I'm so proud of her!

Maddie has an etsy shop!

Maddie decided that she wanted to start her own business, so I helped her set up an etsy shop -- Maddie's Weaving Workshop.

She is *so* excited about this and she is keeping a journal documenting all the details. This is one fun part of homeschooling -- we are turning this into a school project and I think it will teach her a lot about working and finance as well as how to use Photoshop and other computer tools. And she is having so much fun. I remember when I was a kid and I had a big plan of some sort -- it's fun to see her grow up and get involved in a project.

So, if you are in need of a potholder, please visit her etsy shop! I'm sure she will be ridiculously ecstatic when she makes her first sale.

New post at Homeschooling Maddie

Pokemon and Legos -- a lesson in encouraging our children.  Check it out at Homeschooling Maddie.

Learning Spanish

I've always had a fascination with languages -- maybe because I was stuck in Latin in high school and never got to learn a real, living language. In college I squeezed in one semester of German and I've dabble in French and Japanese, but I'm finally getting serious.

A few weeks ago, I purchased Rosetta Stone Software so that Maddie and I could learn Spanish together. This is the leading foreign language software amongst homeschooling families and I can see why. We are on our second week and it is going wonderfully! The immersion technique they use makes learning intuitive and fun. I would highly recommend this software for anyone wanting to learn a second (or third) language.

Fall Leaf Identification

Fall leaf identification post up at Homeschooling Maddie.

Bird Watching

We love birds here at our house.  Recently we upgraded from our sad, bent (due to the great tree falling of '04) pole system to two fancy new poles with two feeders on each.  We now have one each of the following: peanut feeder, thistle feeder, no-mess seed feeder (this is the best seed ever -- you don't get weeds from it!), and a safflower feeder.

Why so many?  Well, you get different birds with different seeds and perch types.  Since Pete installed the new set up, we have been noticing a wide range of birds.  Just today Maddie spotted a bird that we hadn't seen before -- the Red Breasted Nuthatch.  We live in northern IL which is where they winter.  They are pretty little birds with a bright orange-red belly and beautiful dove grey backs.  Their heads are black and white with a striking black line running out from the eye. 

When I'm in my kitchen, or up in my office, I love looking out at the birds.  There is something very enjoyable and relaxing about it.  And Maddie has great eyes -- she always spots the unique birds and brings them to my attention.

So what do you need to get started bird watching?

• Feeder(s) -- You don't need a tree -- now you can even get feeders that you place on the outside of your window with suction cups.  But if you have the room, there are beautiful, functional feeder systems out there.  We buy all of ours from our local Wild Birds Unlimited.  The people who work there are very knowledgeable and can answer pretty much any question you have.
• Seed -- Now, it is possible to go to the grocery and buy big bags of cheap seed, but I'm telling you that you will regret it.  Why?  Weeds!  The cheap seed is full of nasty weed producing seed as well as a lot of filler that the birds won't even eat.  So, while it looks like a good deal when you do the math -- don't be fooled.  We also buy or seed at Wild Birds Unlimited. 
• A Field Guide -- We have an older version of the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America.  It has lots of pictures which make bird identification easy.  It also includes maps which show you the migration patterns of each species.
• Binoculars -- We have a really nice set of binoculars that were passed down to us from Pete's dad, but I have another little set that we bought before or honeymoon in Alaska that was quite inexpensive.  You aren't going to be viewing these backyard visitors from too far away, so an inexpensive pair should suffice.  Really though, I can't identify a bird with out getting a close-up look at it, so I would say that these are a must if you are at all serious about birdwatching.

That's about all you need, but of course there are all kinds of fancy accessories associated with bird watching as with any other hobby. 

I also found some good stuff on the web when I was writing this post today:

• Cornell Lab of Ornithology's online bird quide
• Wikipedia has lots of bird info.  This is where I got the freely licensed photo of the nuthatch. 
• For those of you also in Illinois -- Birds of Illinois
• For those of you homeschooling, at 50birds.com they have lots of good stuff including realistic bird coloring pages.

Have fun watching the birds in your backyard!

Scribbles

Need a great gift idea for a kid? Scribbles: A Really Giant Drawing and Coloring Book by Taro Gomi is a coloring book that really gets the creative juices flowing. Maddie already had Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book, which we bought her before we went on vacation last year, so I knew this was going to be a winner. We actually use Scribbles during school time. She picks out one set of pages and she works on the right hand side while I do the left. It's a great way to play creatively with your child/grandchild/niece/nephew.

Perhaps I should explain a bit more about what kind of coloring book this is. On many pages there is an incomplete picture (for instance, an empty vase on the pages I show above) and there is a suggestion of what to draw to complete it. Usually it's very open ended -- fill the vase, draw an outfit, what is on this hill, draw a super scary monster, or some such thing. Very fun for kids and adults! Maddie and I both highly recommend these books.

Lesson in baking bread

I love making bread from scratch but it takes a lot of time and I hadn't done it in a while.  For a couple years (yes, years) I've had it in my mind that I wanted to come up with a recipe for monkey bread -- you know, the cinnamon bread that you usually make by cutting up refridgerated biscuit dough and rolling it in cinnamon sugar and throwing it in a pan to bake as a loaf.  Well, I wanted *real* bread -- not some nasty refridgerated biscuits.  So Maddie and I pulled out 5 or 6 of my baking cookbooks and scoured them for suitable recipes.

I finally settled on using the basic dinner roll dough from Essentials of Baking.  This is a Williams-Sonoma cookbook and I've had great luck in the past with the recipes I've made from many of their cookbooks, so I was hopeful. 

Maddie read the instructions and I mixed things up.  We left the dough to rise and Maddie checked on it after about 1 1/2 hours -- she was amazed!  I think she is at a good age for an introduction to the magic of yeast! 

Then came the improvisation.  I cut up the dough into about 30ish chunks and I dipped them in melted butter.  Then Maddie rolled them in cinnamon sugar -- maybe 1 tsp cinnamon to 2-3 Tbsp of sugar?  We had to refill the cinnamon sugar bowl a couple times during the process and thing got a little unscientific.  The whole loaf took 1/4 cup of melted butter though -- we didn't run out of that.

As Maddie coated them, she threw them into a bundt pan -- gotta love the classic bundt pan!  And then we left it to rise while the oven pre-heated (about 20 minutes).  Bake at 375 for about 35 minutes and once cool, turn out onto a pretty plate!

It is quite yummy and would actually be suitable as a coffee cake.  (I'm eating some as I drink my coffee right now!)  It's sweet and buttery and I'll definitely make it again.

Of Books and Potholders

I haven't been feeling all that well, so I haven't done a lot of crafting lately. I did start Maddie's second sock during some traveling to and from My Mother-in-law's this past weekend, but that's not very exciting, is it? So if you want to see something interesting, pop on over to Homeschooling Maddie and check out Maddie's adventures with dyeing and weaving on a potholder loom.

And if it's books that you are interested in, pop on over to Booga Talk to hear Pete and I talk about the books we are reading (me ~ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Pete ~ Sister Carrie), have read and want to read. We also have a book give away in the works. Check it out!

Homeschooling update

I finally posted over at Homeschooling Maddie.

Felt Beads!

When I was at the Fold on Saturday, I saw the wall of merino fiber in every conceivable color and homeschooling crafts came to mind!  I grabbed a bag and tried to get a bit of just about every color so that Maddie and I could try our hands at making some felted beads.  Aren't the colors gorgeous all piled up together?

I gathered the necessary tools, which seemed to be only dish soap, towels and a bowl for the warm soapy water.  (I just kind of surfed around the web a bit this morning to see if I could find some different "how-to's" to lead me in the right direction.)

What we did was this:

1. Chose the color we wanted and broke off a bit about twice the size of the finished bead.
2. Rolled it into as smooth a ball as we could manage and then dunked it into the bowl of warm, soapy water.
3. Fished it out and started gently rolling it between our palms to get it into a spherical shape.
4. When it got too dry we dunked it back into the warm soapy water.  When it got too soapy we dunked it into a bowl of warm, plain water.
5. Repeat 3 & 4 until the bead is the size you want or until you are plum worn out!

Here are the finished beads and the bowls of water.  Not much output, but we also tried some beads with some BFL and they just didn't work out at all.  And keep in mind -- you have to roll these for probably 5-10 minutes each (5 for me, 10 for Maddie who didn't use much pressure).  Maddie thought it was a lot of fun though, so I'm sure we will be doing it again. 

Oh -- and see her sheep up in the left hand corner?  MSL Kids had a section on sheep in the Winter Issue and this was one of the crafts.  Cute, huh?

So here is a close-up of our beads.  I'm thinking that I want to try some with other colors layered on top, or maybe I could embroider them after they dry.  I seem to remember seeing something like that somewhere.  Oh the possibilities!