Show off

My friend Rachel has a great photo blog.  And by 'great' I mean, how does she have time to do anything else.  Pretty super awesome.  One of my favorite things that she does is "Show off your shot".  Although I've been tempted, I've never ponied up and actually posted any of my pics for it.  But today, I figure why not.  Now, we'll just have to see if I did it right...

Gwen checking out the view from the corner tower at Fort Nisqually

Fort Nisqually

Last weekend I stumbled upon the fact that it was free day at Fort Nisqually.  We've been meaning to go there for years but never have actually gotten around to it.  We really were just intending to walk around and look at the buildings, we had virtually no expectations of the place.  We were quite surprised to find this little gem sitting in our backyard all along.

Although it has been moved, it is the original, built in 1833.  We were really impressed.  The girls especially liked the blacksmith.  Matt and I adored the characters.  All of the volunteers and employees have a historical persona that they become while within the walls of the Fort.  They pulled it off wonderfully.  We really talked a lot about necessities with the girls.  The amount of work it took to make a pair of shoes or a dress.  The laborious tasks of washing laundry or making a meal, which required a lot of water hauling.  Gwen really seemed to get it.  It was a lovely way to spend the afternoon.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.
-Confucius

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 6, 7 & 8

Boo.  Day's 6, 7 & 8 were epic fails.  I was sick as a dog.  I slept.  That's all I know.  Pretty sure the kids, hubby, and pets were fed and watered while I was ill; everyone is still accounted for.  All's well that ends well.

I had no accomplishments except surviving.  -Frank McCourt

Back to SCHOOL!!

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 5

Monday I tried to take a hiatus from the strike drama.  We had a play date with one of Gwen's friends.  The day mostly consisted of art projects, dress up and box fort adventures.  (BTW, the box fort is worth it's weight in gold.  Just sayin.) 

Ready for the dirt.

Pile o'dirt

Rake...and Thatch...and Rake...

A couple of our friends are in the midst of a huge landscape project and needed to off load some dirt... well... a lot of dirt.  Conveniently, I'm always looking for a project and have been wanting to level out the backyard... Let's just say Matt is super excited to get started on this one.  I raked and mowed and thatched and mowed and raked and raked and mowed... I lost track... in preparation for dirt application.  To which Matt responded with: "Wow, it looks way better now.  Do you really think we need to do anything else?"  Bah, funny man.  Hours after the dirt appeared Gwen realized it was in our back yard and said: "Um, where did all that dirt come from?" Me: "Oh, Mike brought it over." Gwen: "Mike's just going around dumping dirt in people's yards?" Me: "Um, not exactly."  Here are some pics of the start of this fantastic project.  More to come.

After the play date Gwen and I headed to Costco so we could blow wisely spend some money.  Gwen brought along her birthday stash of cash and made a couple pretty awesome purchases including one of these.  She picked out the kit that had a weather, robotics and mad science set included.  I'm pretty impressed with it.  I'm sure you will be seeing some pics of the experiments.  

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 4

Matt's chalk tribute to 2nd Cycle

I had to work friday, but Matt had a full day planned for the kids.  Just before lunch the fam headed down to the Frost Park Chalk Off.  The Chalk Off is a weekly event every friday held at a former fountain downtown. Neighborhood artists, kids, and downtown workers on lunch break come out to enjoy some chalk art.  Here's some of the art; butterflies (not pictured) done by my big girl and a (for real) homeschool friend.  Friday was also Park(ing) day.  So, Matt and the girls toured the scene.  They got freebies from vendors and had lots to tell me about when they stopped by my work to say hi on their way home.

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 3

Matt and Gwen passing out oatmeal chocolate
chip cookies for our teachers.

Today was fairly low key.  Gwen and I are managing the start of a head cold so most of the day was devoted to movies and books.  We watched a great National Geographic Special on volcanos that Gwen (and I) thought was awesome.  We finally watched Secretariat; nice flick.  Matt got up early and made cookies for the teachers.  We brought the cookies to them around noon.  They were very grateful, as many told us that they weren't going to have time to get lunch due to them having to be elsewhere (for negotiations or meetings).  It felt good to get out there and talk to them.  To tell them to keep it up.

I've been rather consumed with the negotiations, or lack there of (http://weteachtacoma.org/2011/09/15/tacoma-teachers-offer-new-proposal-school-board-offers-nothing/).  Since we don't have cable I haven't been watching the news, only reading it from internet sources.  I'm really feeling for my neighborhood teachers.  It's an often thankless, frustrating, emotionally draining job that rarely gets the respect that it deserves.    I've read the complaint over and over that both sides are putting the children in the middle.  The children are in the middle, of course they are.  It's their classroom, their teacher, their education; anyway you slice it- the kids are in the middle.  The kids have to be in the middle, otherwise it's not about the kids!  UGH!

All of the drama with the "us and them" union vs. district garbage just has my stomach in knots waiting for my own union contract to expire in December.  All of us nurses are well aware of the battle that is coming; looming like a thunder cloud waiting to clap.  Last contract was hard enough; we spent months without a contract because the negotiations weren't going anywhere.  The thing I keep repeating to myself is that I am SO grateful that my contract negotiations are, for the most part, hidden away from the media.  We nurses usually don halos, in the eyes of the public.  But if our employers were allowed to ridicule our intentions to the media the way the school district does, it would get really ugly really fast.  It's all rather depressing.

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 2

My box fort is cooler than your box fort!

Today was a task list and I was at work.  Here's what the fam did while I was away:

• Showers
• Breakfast
• Dishes
• Harvested beans, peas and strawberries from the garden
• Walked Frankie
• Birthday Thank You cards/work book pages
• Stripped sheets/laundry
• Lunch!  
• Bike ride to the library
• Rang our bells for the Teachers at Hoyt
• Stamped and mailed Thank You cards at the Post Office
• Played at Puget Park with other "homeschoolers"
• Rang our bells for the Teachers at Mason
• Bike ride home
• Nap for Tula/Reading for Gwen
• Party in the box fort
• Play with the private school neighbor kid who went to school today
• Dinner



Party in the box fort!

• Kids played outside while we decide if our daughter was going to school or not; answer: Not.

Thank you TEA/TPSD for giving us a lesson in right and wrong.  We will be homeschooling our little girl again on thursday, with a field trip to the lines.  Take care teachers, we are with you.


"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind." -Kahlil Gibran 

Adventures in Homeschooling Day 1

In support of the TEA/TPSD teachers strike I will be blogging our family's activities.  Both in support of our teachers (good god I miss them already) and to remind myself that there is a very good reason for my children not to stay home with me everyday to attend public school.

Monday night we were sure school would be canceled so, I started thinking of smart nerdy things to do with my kids.  Top of the list was the Science Center, perhaps I just wanted to relive the butterfly mayhem.  Got the Robocall; no school; shocker.  Planned the day.

Tuesday morning we headed north.  Got into the parking lot and found this:

FRICK!  Craptastic.  Now what?  Quick searches of other local attractions (thank you iphone) and some quick math based on the 6 of us, yielded this +9.5% sales tax:

Woodland Park Zoo: $87
Seattle Aquarium:  $81
Seattle Children's Museum: $45

We joined the Science Center to avoid such dilemmas! Now, it's not just that mommy is cheap; daddy's cheap too; and so's Auntie Heather.  How on earth do people have large families and actually afford to do anything?  Ugh!

Beechers Cheese

So, we decided to be tourists.  Albeit, cheap tourists.  The kids didn't know any better.  We scoffed at the closed science center and quickly changed directions and decided to tour the piers and the market.  It was great.  We had fun.  My girls were rather awful and I wished that I could give them to someone else for 6 hours; did I mention that I love teachers?  We toured the piers.  I was reminded of the Seattle of my early 20's.  We took the stairs up to the market and the kids all commented on how the stairwell smelled like pee...nice.  We bought lunch and ate it amongst the bums in Fireman's Park.  We watched the bicycle cops ride through and watched the fully uniformed Park Ranger meander about.  Seattle's weird.  Part of me misses it; part of me just wants to bathe in hand gel.

All it all, I'd say it was a success.  We all survived.  We made a memory.  We came home, went to REI and then... we stopped at our farmer's market to get our produce.  I love Tacoma.

My Favorite Orange Cat

Tula's Orange Cat Tattoo. Helping all my little girl's dreams come true!

I was recently reminded of a conversation that I never want to forget.  Quite a while back my girls were sitting at their desks working on an art project.  They were chatting about all the things little girls chat about and I was eavesdropping like a good mother.  My ears perked up and I almost choked on my coffee when I heard this:

Tula: "When I grow up, I want to be an orange cat!"
Gwen: "You can't." all too matter of fact.
Tula: "Why not?" panic.
Gwen: "Cause you're already just a girl." paired with a simple shrug.

I was captured by many points of this conversation.  1) That big sister with 2 more worldly years under her belt, recognized that people could not grow up to become animals.  2) That big sister had no qualms with squashing the hopes and dreams of the wee one.  3)  That there was something significantly less than by being just a little girl.  And 4) That at only around 3 years old, Tula had discovered what it takes most of us decades to do.  Emulate the cat.  Relax. Take a nap in the sun. Nothing is that big of a deal.  I sure hope she continues to want to be a cat someday.  Those traits may be really helpful to off set her sister when my house is full of teen girls.

Corruption

A frequent topic of conversation among my peer mothers, is keeping our kids innocent.  Letting our kids have a childhood free of corruption; free of the things that make them grow up too soon. We've tried to keep our kids in a bubble.  No cable, very little reference to pop culture... well, I mean current pop culture, they're pretty well versed in Dylan and Bowie, but I digress... Gwen has however, taken a strong liking to Katie Perry.  I'm not sure if it's the Sesame Street video of her that we saw months ago or that she is... well, I'll admit, kinda cool... But none the less, there is something cringeworthy about your 6 year old singing, "I think we kissed but I forgot... Yeah I think we broke the law, Always say we're gonna stop-oh oh ohhhh..."

Yikes...  But it got me thinking.  I remember being 6.  And, I'm pretty sure that I was a cool 6 year old.  My parents were young and hip.  I had lots of super cool older cousins that had MTV and kept me in the know.  I liked to dance on the ceiling with Lionel Richie... I thought Twisted Sister was AWESOME!  A quick search yielded the top hits of 1986 and amongst them, a somewhat raunchy song that I remember singing as a child, Kiss by Prince and the Revolution.  NICE.  Now, I KNOW I sang that song and I think I turned out ok.  I think if Gwen sang along to Kiss I'd cringe about as hard as with Katie Perry... or perhaps more.  So, I guess it's ok, right?

Prince - Kiss by cdipre

Cyclocross

Ring it, Baby!  Ring that bell!

Go RICH!!

Some days, their resemblance is startling.

There is just something wonderful about little girls.

Matt has wanted to get into Cyclocross ever since he learned about it.  I think this is the year he actually will.  I went to my first cross event on Labor Day with the fam, and I must admit the energy is palpable and contagious.  By the time we left I wanted to ride cross, and trust me, I really don't want to ride cross!  The girls had a blast and seemed right at home, but then again they've attended several events like this with Matt.  It was great to go and cheer on our friends.  Gwen is becoming quite expert with the cow bell. 

Rest break.

This is the life.

Courage Classic

 

While I was unable to ride this years Courage Classic, I was able to help Matt and his team out with fundraising.  About a week ago several of us got together and did a stationary ride to raise more funds.  All of the fundraising for the Courage Classic goes to the Child Abuse Intervention Department (CAID) at Mary Bridge Children's Hospital.  This year Matt led a team of 49 riders across Snoqualmie, Blewitt, and Steven's passes raising to date, more than $47,500.00!  I am so proud to be associated with such generous, giving people!  While I can't boast the beautiful pictures that Matt has of his ride, I can share these pictures of my ride.  Great weather, great ride, great cause, great day.  

"What we do for ourselves dies with us.  What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal."  - Albert Pine

Big Time

Humoring Mother.

Holy Cow.  Girlie has a locker.

Hang on tight.  We're entering the Big Time.  Gwen informed me last night when I was trying to help her with something, that "Mom!  I just turned 6.  I can do it."  Sigh.  Independence.  Finding the balance between raising an independent child and pulling all my hair out is difficult at best.  Today we started school.  3 outfits and 2 backpacks later (the new backpack "just doesn't feel right on my back!" so we opted to use last years small one...) we set off for school.  I must have donned my Harry Potter invisible cloak because as soon as we pulled into school I was gone.  "Hey Peregrine, how was your summer?  Did you do anything cool?"  Chat. Chat. Chat.  May as well have included, "Don't mind my mom, she's got her invisible cloak on."  We locked up her bike.  Loaded her junk into her locker.  Headed to class.  I barely got a hug out of the deal.  One day, it will be an asset to her (and to me) to be independent and head strong.  Today however, it just made me feel like my little girl is entering the Big Time, and I'm just holding on trying to enjoy the ride.

She made Matt haul her new lock and all
of her stuff.  I told you she was smart!

Headed to School!

First Day Duds

It's official.  She has her own desk; her own locker.  This is something big.

My Birthday Girl

How very fast 6 years can fly... 

Gwen's birthday always seems to sneak up on us.  Well, as much as anything can sneak up on you when someone in your house starts a countdown 364 days before an event... Gwen plans birthdays like bridezilla plans her wedding.  While her birthday was Tuesday, she knows her "BIRTHDAY!!" isn't until her par-tay next weekend.  She is still planning and re-planning for that party.  So, on her actual birthday we stayed home, ordered takeout, ate homemade cheesecake and opened a few gifts.  It was lovely.  I can't believe how fast time flies.