Field trips & tours

Gearing Up for Civil War Days

May 31, 2013 By Alicia

This is how we study the Civil War.

Anna and I went and picked out dresses to borrow from the Wilder Pageant for our upcoming reenactment roles at Wasioja’s Civil War Days. The dress I like best is apparently far too scandalous for the times since too much skin shows, so I may wear it for the ball (ladies were allowed to show more skin at night) or improvise something with a shawl and long gloves. Or I might wear the more respectable dress. We’ll see!

We’ve been to Pipestone’s Civil War days but this event is a new one for us. Daryl will be playing old time music and the boys will be teaching children’s games like rolling hoops and the game of graces. The girls and I are mostly “atmosphere girls” — our job is to make the scenes look that much more authentic.

That’s sort of what we did at Pipestone’s Civil War Days last summer.

(Speaking of which, I must go off on a tangent and rant for a moment! See the fabulous hotel rooms we were in while we were in Pipestone? That’s the historic Calumet Inn, which we fell in love with. It’s got vintage furniture, sweeping staircases, period wallpaper, stories of hauntings and a blood red carpet throughout that just gives it so much character. We found out today that the Calumet Inn is being featured on Gordon Ramsey’s hotels from hell show! They’re filming this week and I will be horrified if they modernize that fantastic old place too much. I’m very curious to see what the show looks like, since we absolutely love that place and the food is divine, which is quite rare in this part of Minnesota. It’s possible that some of the other rooms were pretty dreadful. We were in two rooms and one was certainly a lot more charming than the other. Still, I hope they don’t change too much! Time will tell!)

Anyway….

We have two weeks to finish getting everything in order and get all the research we want done. I’m going to find some good reading materials on the time to add to it, too.

It should be fun!

Filed Under: Field trips & tours, History

50 Things We Learned About in the Badlands

May 28, 2013 By Alicia

We’re back from a fabulous four days in the Badlands of South Dakota.

This was the first time the kids and I had ever been there, though Daryl was there years ago.

It was absolutely magical! Not only is the landscape breathtaking, but it’s rife with educational opportunities and it’s all sorts of fun to climb and explore.

It will definitely be a regular vacation stop for us.

We all agreed that May seemed to be the perfect month to visit, too. The weather was warm but not hot, the landscape was green and filled with the start of wildflowers, there weren’t many people yet, and hotel rates were cheaper since it was before Memorial Day.

Thank goodness we homeschool and can go on adventures all year, instead of waiting until school is out and the rates are highest.

There were so many magical experiences…. watching thousands of prairie dogs running around and chirping at us, seeing our first burrowing owls (read “Hoot” to fall in love with these darling birds), having bighorn sheep crossing in front of us on the road, driving past grazing buffalo (no fences!) in the park, seeing spectacular views, climbing landscapes that felt like the surface of Mars…

And there were so many educational aspects too…. touring the Minuteman Missile museum (SD was once filled with missiles during the Cold War and you can still tour one site!), earning ranger badges at the parks, getting up close to animals we’d only seen in zoos like pronghorn antelopes that just lay in the grass as we drove by, learning how the Badlands were formed, seeing fossils preserved under glass at the site from animals that lived there millions of years ago, learning the Native American history of the area, stopping at educational sites along the way and so much more.

Here’s 50 fun subjects we learned about on our quick trip!

burrowing owls
prairie dogs
bighorn sheep
bull snakes
The Cold War
Minuteman missiles
The Great Inland Sea
black-footed ferrets
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
short, medium and tall grass prairies
Wall Drug
molting
animal sounds (miss Fiona learned many!)
new words (Fiona again — including vulture, buffalo and goat)
Dr. Seuss and how his books were written to help children deal with fears of the Cold War and to diffuse politics
Lewis and Clark
long boats
The Corn Palace
pronghorn antelopes
two-layered animal coats
erosion
soils, sand and dirt (components, how they’re made, etc.)
fossils
Native American names and how they’re given
the meaning of Badlands
outlaw history
wagon trains
The Wall Wildlife Museum
baby prairie animals (Fiona)
baby forest animals (Fiona)
ghost towns (we explored one, Okaton)
mesas
buttes
Pine Ridge Reservation
vulture courtship
Greek myths (on tape for the drive)
baseball cards
Lovecraft/Cthulhu (Victoria’s reading for the trip)
Mt. Rushmore (we didn’t visit but we learned about it)
vocabulary through Bananagrams at the hotel
river bluffs and landscapes
glaciers
prehistoric animals
magpies
coyotes
South Dakota geography and news
distance (we drove across the Missouri River and found out it was exactly a mile even though it seemed small)
paleontologists
change, time and impermanence (Jack had a bit of an existential crisis at ten about how “someday this will all be gone” and we talked about how much it had changed and the vast amount of time it had all been there.)
“Prairie Dogs Have Plague!”

Stay tuned for pictures of the ghost town we explored and more.

Filed Under: Field trips & tours, Geography, magical moments, nature, pictures

Checking In

May 19, 2013 By Alicia

What a terrible blogger I’ve become!

I swear, there’s something about having five kids that is somehow ten times as busy-making as having four kids. I love it, but my does it interfere with my productivity!

We’ve been busy bees around here…

The boys and I went to the Science and Nature Conference.
The whole lot of us went to a homeschool day at the petroglyphs, where we taught kids how to make their own atlatls and hunt the buffalo (the wind meant they had a rough go at it!).
We all went to a PBS screening of a show they produced about parks in our area, at a nearby historic theater. It was fun seeing “our” parks featured and seeing them interviewing our friends from the park.
I’ve been busy planting my garden for the year. In so far: red and orange carrots, lots of lettuces, spinach, lots of kinds of peas, potatoes (which got overly wet and rotted so I have to replant), chard, turnips, dill, cilantro, nasturtiums, beets, lots of tomatoes (started indoors early), eggplants (ditto), basil, sunflowers, borage, and probably a few things I’ve forgotten! And I’m not even a third of the way done….
We’re planning a trip to the Badlands next week.
Anna spent 5 days with family friends in Northern Minnesota.
Daryl and the girls have been doing a lot of birding.
Anna and Victoria have been doing lots of biking.
Victoria has been doing a lot of photography.
Daryl and the kids are in the Wilder Pageant again. Toria is sitting out this year and Fiona will still be home with me, but the rest of them will be busy with rehearsals soon.
We’ve been enjoying the warm weather (at last!) with lots of time outside — playing in the sandbox, heading to the beach, climbing trees, riding Big Wheels, playing ball, going to the park, walking the dog, working in the yard, making mud pies, you name it.

I have a list of 100 things I want to learn/teach in our homeschool by the end of the summer. We’re having fun working on it. The kids helped make the list and I have no idea how many we’ll get done but it’s a fun goal.

We’ll be doing some Civil War reenacting next month and there’s all sorts of homeschool projects I want to get to and books I want to read with the kids. My to-do list is several thousand items long, I think.

This year is so much better than last year at this time! Some experiences really do keep you focusing on the big picture and counting your blessings. I am so grateful to have last year that far behind us and Toria healthy and tentatively cancer-free.

I’m hoping it will be a pretty awesome summer. I’ll do what I can to help make it happen!

Filed Under: Daily log, Field trips & tours

Checking In…

April 10, 2013 By Alicia

My goodness, I’ve been gone a lot lately! We’ve been so busy for being recluses.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to….

Daryl had his recheck for his hip replacement surgery at the Mayo. All looks great and he has the go-ahead for physical therapy.

While we were there, I surprised the kids with $10 each to spend at Rochester’s giant thrift store, Saver’s.

My boys pooled their money for light sabers, nerf guns, tech toys and mini figurines.

Anna used her cash for yarn, an awesome high-tech watch, a wizardry book that goes along with Harry Potter crafts, and a 39 Clues card collection case.

Victoria spent it on nothing but books (The Outsiders, Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451…). And then talked me into buying an enormous stack of extra textbooks for her (organic chemistry, psychology, biology, surgical nursing, algebra one if I got her the others…). That girl sure makes me smile sometimes.

Jack and I have been playing this game like crazy to help him learn his multiplication facts (and also because it’s just plain fun).

Here’s a bit of what I posted about it on Facebook:

It’s called Roll n Multiply and you play it similarly to tic tac toe but it’s far more fun. Jack and I love it. You roll two dice and multiply the numbers (they are 10 sided), then put the game piece with that number on it anywhere on the board flipped to your color. The object is to get 4 in a row. BUT, if you roll a number that is already on the board you can take it and use it elsewhere (whether it was yours or your opponent’s, you just flip it to your color and put it where you want it), so you can move things and unblock lines that were blocked before. So if I had 3 in a row and Jack blocked me with his orange 24, and then I rolled 6×4, I could flip over his 24 to purple and win. It’s part luck, part strategy, part math. We play it a ton of and both of us like it. There’s a cheat sheet you can use if you don’t know your facts too, and I think Alex will be able to play it fine even though he’s only 5 and doesn’t know most of his facts yet. You really don’t need to know them but they end up learning them accidentally very quickly. I highly recommend it and I promised Jack I’d buy us a set of our own. You can check it out at the MSU library as soon as I return it and see if you guys like it. It’s nice and sturdy too, which I like. Here’s the link on Amazon (different cover now but the inside looks identical).

We stayed at a hotel for a couple of days while we were there for the recheck and had fun swimming at the pool, putting together fun gourmet (gluten free, vegetarian, etc.) hotel room meals and splurging a bit one time.

We finished off our visit by stopping by a fabulous HS family’s dairy farm to meet up in real life for the first time after us moms had known each other online for years. It was a really special day and so much fun. None of us could stop smiling afterwards and we can’t wait to visit again.

I was too busy having fun to take any pictures but I think Toria and Anna got a few. I snagged this from my friend’s FB feed of one of their new babies. I love the fact that every single one of the 90+ cows has a name (Vanessa, Molly, Avery….) and that they are treated so lovingly (Avery steals peanut butter cups). We learned so much, too! And we just plain adored their family.

In other news, someone made these beautiful flint-knapped driftglass arrowheads for our family. Daryl struck up a conversation with the artist a few years ago as Daryl was looking for sharks’ teeth at a small local lake and this man was looking for arrowheads. They’ve networked a bit since then (the “primitive tech” community is a small and friendly one!), and my sweetie offered him some big chunks of good flintknapping rock that we had sitting unused in our garage. In thanks, he made these for all of us. Aren’t they beautiful?!

We’re also working on our seeds, readying the garden and so much more. Poor Fiona has been in and out of doctor’s offices and ERs the past week (she’s okay) and so much else is going on, but that’s a good bit for the first catch-up!

Oh yes, and we’re in the middle of some crazy winter storm that’s got people all around us without power and everything is covered with ice. Trees and power lines are broken left and right, and there’s some pretty dire situations all around.

Hopefully all of that will pass quickly. Minnesota winters are a bit like movie bad guys. Every time you think they’re finally dead, they grab your ankle and come after you one more time. I’m just pretending it’s green out there and going on with my garden planning.

Hopefully it will be less than a month till the next check in!

Filed Under: Daily log, Field trips & tours, Math

Home Again, Home Again…

August 19, 2012 By Alicia

Oh, we’ve been busy again! Egads. We have a few days off now and I’m so happy to be able to putter around the house, read books and play outside with my kiddos.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been up to!

We took part in Civil War Days…

Daryl taught the telegraph to people, Jack and Anna taught old fashioned games, and the rest of us were dressed up for atmosphere.

Somehow I managed to avoid taking any pictures of myself, but I was dressed up this time too. Our dresses were borrowed from the Wilder Pageant and I felt decidedly frumpy compared to some of the gowns on other reenactors, but quite a few little girls came up and complimented me on my dress so it must have done the trick! I loved my hoop underneath!

Even Fiona dressed for the part!

They put us up in the historic Calumet Inn, which was absolutely delightful. It’s over a hundred years old and full of ghost stories, period furniture and other whimsical extras. The food at the Calumet restaurant is also incredibly good, should you ever find yourself in Pipestone, Minnesota, and in need of a bite to eat!

We went to a ball downtown, strolled the streets reading the history on the buildings, watched two epic Civil War battles and much more.

Jack and Daryl took part in a Flim Flam event. Flim flams were basically old time scams that came to town, full of people working hard to swindle you — gamblers, gypsies, fortune tellers, snake oil salesmen, etc.

This one was at the historic Hubbard House in Mankato. Daryl played the part of J.D. Wyatt, riverboat gambler. Jack was our pickpocket! He even pretended to pull pocket watches from people’s pants and approached people with hands dangling with watches, saying “Hey mister, wanna buy a watch?”. He’d take off running when a plant would shout, “Hey, that’s my watch!”.

Great fun! (More pics to come, this is from the historic society’s Facebook page and I haven’t downloaded my own yet).

We went to Tiffany’s and looked after her kiddos while she was having her new baby!

Anna and Jessie went on a billion walks and picked up bags and bags of trash in the woods. Jack and Jack hung out in the new tree fort and played games. Daryl and Victoria went exploring and helped keep everything running, while the littles just happily played and I cooked meals and did my best to keep everybody happy and things relatively tidy.

Meet Miss Millie! She was 6 pounds, 10 ounces, 3 weeks early and absolutely healthy and adorable.

We made a play kitchen on the side of the house with pallets and such. We’ll add more as we go, but it’s great fun already and it’s stocked with fun stuff like old utensils, spice and parmesan shakers, dishes and so on.

Anna and Jack have been making plays and movies with their friend Logan. They tend towards scary movies. The one they’re currently working on is entitled “The Doll” and involves a very creepy toy!

Here’s a scene from the end!

In other news….

Victoria is spending a week with friends in the Twin Cities. Another friend is flying in and the family is taking them all to Duluth, which should be great fun.

Fiona is talking (she says Daa for Daddy and Ta-aa for Toria, plus perhaps a few more like dog), crawling, standing and growing up far too fast!

We’ve been busy with harvesting and putting food up. We take care of an elderly neighbor’s apples from her apple trees for her, picking up the duds from the ground each day and taking home the good apples for sauce and crisps and such. We also buy up canning (blemished) tomatoes from a local farm family and roast them for sauce, put up dozens of red peppers in frozen slices for cooking throughout the year and so on.

Here’s tomatoes and onions roasting for Daryl’s simple roasted tomato sauce, which is such a tasty way to take advantage of fresh, local tomatoes this time of year.

Anna finished reading “The Secret Garden” and has moved on to another historic book (I can’t remember which). Victoria is still reading like crazy, and Jack has been happily checking out lots of library books too.

Alex is learning more sight words, and happily doing addition problems for fun.

I’ve been reading a mystery novel! I can’t tell you the last time I read a fiction book, but it’s been quite a few years. This one (“The Witness”) is massively long but I’m nearly to the end. I’m really enjoying it!

That’s a bit of what we’ve been up to, and I’m tired of typing. I’ll try to post some helpful and fun stuff soon and get back to regular blogging. I miss it, though I have to figure out how to make time for everything I want to do in a day…

Filed Under: Daily log, Field trips & tours

Teaching the Past

March 1, 2012 By Alicia

We had a fun family adventure last week! Daryl, Jack and Anna taught hundreds of school kids about old time games and music.

The program was for a school district about an hour away (a homeschool friend on their library board recommended us), and they paid for us to spend two nights at a local hotel and reimbursed our gas and expenses, which made it into a fun family (working) vacation.

Anna taught kids how to roll hoops. Jack taught the game of graces. Daryl taught how to play the spoons and the washboard, plus talked about the way people lived during Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time in our area.

We got to visit with some wonderful homeschool friends we don’t get to see often, went to a great photography gallery (where they gave us two gorgeous books of photography as a thank you from the town!) and had a great few days.

Jack and Anna were exhausted — physically and emotionally — after two days of so many excited school kids. I was so proud of them, though, and I heard one little girl shout as she left, “This was so fun!”.

Indeed!

Filed Under: Daily log, Field trips & tours

A trip to 1900

June 20, 2009 By Alicia

Today was the Victorian lawn party at the Betsy-Tacy society and they asked if the girls could dress up in period clothes and volunteer as costumed actors to help set the mood and show the kids how to play with the period toys.

The kids played, made friends, had ice cream and lemonade…

Alex made a friend so I had to get a picture… just as his new friend kicked him in the leg! So much for new friends! The singing cowboy was neat though.

There was even a horse drawn carriage!

And we took a ride!

The girls sat on the back…

…While the boys rode with me.

Alex LOVED the ride, and went “clop clop” for the rest of the day talking about the horses, even though he looks miserable here!

Then the kids and I went on a historic home tour. It was so fun and interesting!

Here’s a mini tour.

House #1 had enormous burgandy velvet drapes and a “pass through” in the dining room for the cook to put the food so the company would never have to see the help!

House #2 was owned by the head of the university theater department and his wife.

They were such neat people! They were totally kid people and they gave us lots of information about the house and where they got the stones for the floor and so on.

The man told us that his grandson calls their shower the dagger shower because it’s a European walk-in shower and if you turn it on full force it pushes you against the wall!

House #3 was the most beautiful outside and so huge and spacious.

A friend of the owner’s showed us around and apparently he rents the top floor but he is too messy to let people see that floor. My kind of guy!

The house was once a sorority house, frat house and group home and the owner went to masses of work to restore it. It’s huge and beautiful! There are reading rooms and an enormous dining room and a porch you’d never get me off of.

House #4 was a B&B on sale for only a little more than a half million dollars!

This is the only house I took pictures inside (with permission) since it felt intrusive in people’s homes.

The owner gave the girls a lot of background information about the house.

She explained that the fresco on the wall was done by a traveling painter who would have gone door to door painting scenes for a living. Frescoes were painted on either wet or dry plaster. This one is “winter” and “autumn” is in the dining room.

Sorry for the blurry pics, I had the flash off! Here’s where breakfast is served!

The girls on their way up the stairs…

The suites…

This one is the Betsy-Tacy room!

House #5 was the most whimsical to tour!

The owner is a retired shop teacher who has traveled around the world and does welding and woodworking as a hobby. He built on many rooms and built a garage with dormer and an amazing all-season porch that said “Live Like You’re in Heaven on Earth” on a plaque.

It felt like it inside!

He showed the girls some of his carvings and they were so intricate.

He got the kids interested in learning to wood carve and then when he saw how delighted we were with his work he gave us a tour of his yard. It was so delightful!

It was FULL of whimsical statues he’d made like these.

The gardens were amazing and I wish I’d taken a billion more pictures but I was trying to chat and be discreet and not be too much of a tourist in the man’s yard.

He even brought the girls inside his garage and was showing them how to use a lathe to carve these wonderful spindles he was making for a cabinet for a friend.

After the tour we headed down the street to Great Grandma Leuck’s house for a visit.

Doesn’t she look fabulous for 94?!

Daryl’s mom hung out with us too, but the only picture of her had her hand in front of her face. You just have to imagine her there. She wanted to take us out to dinner but had to go, so she slipped Daryl some cash to take ourselves. We ended up at a Chinese buffet.

Sushi! Victoria was in heaven.