Today I’m trying to get our bedroom finished.  I cleaned it out last week, but now I’m organizing it.  Part of that is that I want to paint our dresser.  It is gorgeous, solid wood, and hand-made by my great-great uncle.  And stained a very ugly orange-tinted stain.  So I’m going to change that.  But first, the room must be finished.  So I will attempt to have that done by the end of the day. 

I generally operate with a list, even if I don’t follow it unbendingly, it at least keeps me remembering what needs to be done, and when.  But the past few months have seen me not writing lists.  Somewhat unusual for me, but it’s also been kind of nice.  So much pressure from so many directions, so to have the grace to give myself that break has been good.  However, I believe it’s time to write some lists up again.  We may have a moving deadline in our future, and I’d rather approach that date well-prepared.  And if we don’t sell and move, then my house will be more efficient.  That’s only a good thing.

So off I go purge and organize.  I guess you could call it early spring cleaning.  What about you?  Is anyone working on anything in their house?

We’re in a bit of a sheepish mood here lately, with all this Shaun the Sheep business.  I posted a link to a fun Shaun site the other day and Daryl has found even more.  I’ve been putting Shaun stuff up over at the Magical Childhood blog too, and now Daryl sent me this fun site where you test your reaction time by shooting tranquilizer darts at fleeing sheep!    Poor sheep!  But it’s awfully fun!

I also happened upon a rather ghastly photo of a sheep born (stillborn) with a human face.  Shudder.  That’s not at all in keeping with the type of sheep school I’m in the mood for!

Risa also recommended “Sheep in a Jeep” and I’d forgotten that book.  I also want to order “Russell the Sheep” from interlibrary loan.

Any other sheep-related recommendations?

Don’t forget that the Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend. Cade and I are planning to do it and I’d love to read about your birds.

Over the weekend, we got more than two feet of snow, the most ever recorded in one snowfall in Baltimore. Tomorrow, the National Weather Service is predicting that we’ll get hit with another 10-20 inches. It could be a long time before we can go any further than the garden with the kids.

So, what the heck, we’re going to do another Five in a Row book. We could use some extra fun and structured activity to get us through the long days at home, and we’ll never have a better time to do one of the curriculum’s snow-focused books. It may never snow like this again during Alex’s childhood!

Katy and the Big Snow was written by Virginia Lee Burton, who is better known for writing Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and the Caldecott Medal winner The Little House. It’s about a plucky, determined snowplow (Katy) who single-handedly rescues the city of Geoppolis when the lesser plows prove incapable of handling a Really Big snowfall.

It wasn’t until today that I realized that no, we really won’t be getting out any time soon. So we didn’t start Katy until this evening, and I didn’t have time to do any advance preparation. (I regret not being able to get to the library, because there are so many fantastic snow-themed picture books out there – and we don’t own any of them.)

We read through the book and spent some time studying the pictures in detail. Then I introduced a Language Arts lesson on personification. I pointed out that in real life, snowplows don’t talk or have feelings the way that Katy does in the book. Personification is taking something that isn’t alive and making it act like a person or giving it a personality. We flipped through Katy again and found the places where the author gives Katy human characteristics.

“Does this sound like anything we’ve seen on television lately?” I asked Alex. Her eyes widened. “Yes! Beauty and the Beast.” “That’s exactly what I was thinking of,” I said. We watched a clip of the song “Be Our Guest” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and talked about the personality and human actions of the candlestick, teapot, and clock.

Then I told Alex that the book suggested that we make up our own story about something that wasn’t alive having a personality. I wasn’t sure how she would take to this, because we’ve never tried anything like it before. She was tremendously excited. She selected an object (a handkerchief) and started to tell and act out a story while I transcribed it as best I could. We only had to prompt her once, with “How did the handkerchief feel?” Other than that, her story flowed freely.

Once there lived a handkerchief that always loved to clean things. One day the handkerchief fell down while cleaning and looked like a piece of junk. A fine little girl came and found the handkerchief and said, “Mother, I found a handkerchief. You said I needed one to do my job of dusting.”

The handkerchief felt sad because all it had to do was dust and get waved around, and it just got dirtier and dirtier. He wanted to hold another handkerchief that didn’t have personality and clean with that.

The girl sang: “Aaaaaaaaah.”

The handkerchief one day got left on the girl’s bedside table, and here he was. He managed to get into the girl’s smiley face cup. The cup flew up onto the girl’s sewing box and then flew off to the handkerchief’s home. But he fell off, and the girl found him again, and dusted and dusted.

“You did a good job,” said the girl’s mother. And the girl said, “Yes.”

The girl fell asleep in her chair and dropped the handkerchief. The handkerchief managed to get away! It managed to get away and scurried to its box across the room. And then it went back to the handkerchief home, and the handkerchief jumped for joy.

But then the girl found the handkerchief again and dusted and dusted. Then the handkerchief died.

I love that story! And I think she will definitely remember the concept of personification, even if she doesn’t retain the exact term.

Missed Saturday by a few days didn’t I?

 I volunteered to run the concession stand at the theater during the current show’s run. The money benefits the scholarship fund for the Studio (class) side. Between that, workstudy for our own tution, and daily general life the need to fight with wordpress was not a high priorty.

 So here is one of the ideas that has me so geeked. I found the idea at Melissa Wiley’s blog Here in the Bonny Glen. Scroll down and look at the coloring books her children are busy coloring. That is a coloring book of family members given by their own dear grandpa – how cool is that!!

 In the comments Lori posted a link to Crayola KidsZone. I did sign up (using the code she posted) and gave the program a whirl. Ummm…it worked great but….not for a gift.

 First: the picture cannot be save to a home computer. I had to print it off right now. The printed picture revealed…

 Second: The sight added a frame with the Crayola brand in LARGE letters smack dab in the center of the bottom frame.  Tacky as a halter top in church.

Third: The lower right corner proudly & prominently displayed “Created by Stephanie”. No, No, No. Created by Mommy or by Granmma or by Grammie but NOT Stephanie. The Crayola site is good for kids wanting to create but not Mommy or Gramma.

All is not lost. Eventually I did remember that Picnik had a sketch feature (free). Other photo editing programs may have the same ability, this is just the one I use.

 Beautiful isn’t she?

 It should be noted that not every portrait creates a good sketch but I am enjoying playing with the pictures and creating pages.

 Homemade, personal and right in my budget, no wonder I’m so geeked!

(I am so frustrated with wordpress right now Icould just scream)

Percy Jackson is a huge part of KarateKid’s imaginary play, since he adores the five-book series by Rick Riordan.  This week, we decided to do some special Percy Jackson and Greek mythology studies to gear up for the first movie, The Lightning Thief, which comes out on Friday.

Originally we weren’t going to do a fancy muffin tin today, because there wasn’t a specific theme, and we were scheduled to have a Shakespeare planning session with our homeschool group starting at noon.  Unfortunately, the leader of this project wasn’t feeling well today and had to cancel the meeting.

I couldn’t very well have the chicken nuggets and frozen veggies I’d planned back when I thought we needed to make a quick escape!  So I took the kids to the supermarket for a tour of their Mediterranean bar to pick up some Greek food.

We brought home a mixture of green and black olives with feta cheese in a Greek dressing, frozen spanikopita, fresh dolmathes, pita chips, tzatziki (yogurt with cucumber, lemon, and garlic), and hummus.  KarateKid also made a plea to remember Dionysus with a bottle of “wine” – sparkling grape juice.

The kids loved the olives, spanikopitas, chips and tzatziki.  They weren’t crazy about the strong feta cheese or the dolmathes, but they both gamely ate everything!

We have been enjoying our Netflix streaming through our blu-ray player to watch Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Greek Myths.  KarateKid and I have also been working through a fun etymological study of English words with roots in Greek Mythology at this site.  More fun Greek stuff is planned for the week ahead, and then the big movie on Friday!

So that brought us to 11am.. our day was pretty much shot ( Eric comes for lunch at 11:45 and is home for the day at 2:35)..and I had told Declan he could have a day to mourn his fish. BUT I wanted to do something with the kids..we went into science mode.

First off was Borax snow flakes:The kids were not told what would happen so they had to “guess”… Taejan thought the pipe cleaners would disappear ,Ziah had no guess and Declan thought they would become fluffy.

after not even 2 hours we have crystals!!

Next I decided to take the lightbulb I blew up cleaning and make it educational..lol

Then we broke out one of the Myth Buster’s science kits I got the other day..

Up first was learning about how the gas in our bones really can predict the changes in weather…our “diver” sank and floated depending on how much air pressure there was:

Then we grabbed the tornado connector thing I bought a few weeks ago and made lots of tornado’s. We even added rice so the kids could see what happened to objects in a tornado:

After that one ( we only did that about 30 times..lol) we tried to blow a balloon up inside a bottle. We learned it wouldn’t work because there was already all the air the bottle could take:

Then we learned if we put holes in the bottle the balloon would indeed blow up:

Then the kids had fun trying to blow it up thru the holes I had put in the bottle:

then I should them that if I blew the balloon up ,covered the holes with my finger, added water to the balloon then let go something cool would happen ( it’s at the end of the video).

After that we brought out the Dangerous Book for Boys Chemistry set:

We made some solutions and used a 9volt battery for some cool reactions:

Prussian Blue ( detects the presence of Iron)

and we also dissolved copper in a test tube and then we dissolved the copper in a penny ( Declan loved all 3 of these!!)

can ya see the copper on the paper towel?

it wasn’t the best start of the week but we made it great don’t ya think? ( and shhhh don’t tell my kids they did a ton of school today..lol)

Of course the theme this week at I ♥ Faces is kisses. I have the perfect picture….

More kisses here: http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/

You know it’s cold when the mice insulate their hole in the garage. I think our snake, Gus, that lives under the porch is hibernating right now. The mice have taken advantage of that and procreated a bit. I hope Gus wakes up hungry.

Dance starts today, Hannah is excited! I changed the hours again so we will get home and have a breather before I need to take Joel to CAP, nice. Tomorrow I have a painting co-op (musical painting), I think it will be fun. Wednesday is a kids meeting at Mcd’s with our HS group, Thursday is a co-op (Teddy bear tea, which reminds me I need to fix bunny before that), Friday is a co-op about storytelling and then we’re going to CU Boulder to do some Navajo weaving.

That’s our week in a nutshell.

FOR TODAY

February 8, 2010

Outside my window… the sky is dove gray and there is a lovely soft snow falling. I don’t know if it will last, but it’s really beautiful out there right now…

I am thinking… about the last few things I need to do to get ready for M’s surgery next week.

I am thankful for…  so many things right now. For everything falling into place for the surgery, especially after it came so close to blowing up last week, for things going well while S was here, for E (dd#1) and the grandkids getting safely through the snowy weather on their trip east, for the pharmacist letting me know we are going to have to go back to weekly blood draws… BEFORE I missed one, and it was too late, and I ran out of the medication M takes that requires the blood work (the new pdoc should have told me this but didn’t…) not doing the required blood work on time could have been really bad!

From the learning rooms…I’m going to get things somewhat wrapped up this week in preparation for not being able to get much done school for the next couple of weeks. We’ll finish up as much as possible, and hopefully even get ahead a bit.

From the kitchen… the cookie jar is empty and I have a craving for peanut butter cookies. Guess what I’ll be doing this morning?

I am creating… R and I have been enjoying the new drawing book I bought, so we’ve been drawing more. I’ve also been working on a guitar strum I’m trying to get down.

I am going… nowhere today, tomorrow we have the pre-surgery tour at the hospital, and Friday we work at the library.

  I am reading… The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, it’s a novel  but it’s good and was written by someone who seems to really knows horses. We’re still reading The Cricket in Time’s Square for our read aloud, and should finish this week.

I am hoping… that this week is easy and calm, with no surprises.

I am hearing… the rumbling and gurgling of the boiler, otherwise all is quiet.

Around the house… nothing much going on, just waiting for the new floor to be installed in the living room.

One of my favorite things… the it’s-a-staying-home-day feeling. We’ve got nowhere to go today, it’s nice not to have to schedule our day around whatever errands need to be run.

A few plans for the rest of the week… finish up the pre-surgery stuff; take the tour, get the equipment delivered (wheelchair, etc), find out for sure if M needs to donate blood in case he needs any during surgery, make a list of instructions (for the animals) for while I’m gone, get the month’s shopping done (a little early, but I won’t be able to go for awhile so it has to be now), draw blood (today! don’t forget…), work at the library, make sure the home health people are arranged, call the CNA and makes sure she knows what’s going on and that we’ll probably need her for more hours for awhile, make sure the pdoc on the CL team knows to include M in their rounds each day… riding lessons (another one I’m in danger of forgetting!). Hmm, I think that’s it. (This will make a good reminder list for me this week.)

A picture I am sharing…

Snowy Emma, in the gray of early dawn, after keeping me company while I did the barn work.

Visit Peggy’s blog  for more about The Simple Woman’s Daybook