Camp Timberidge

I had the opportunity to sign my girls up for a day camp in March.  Button Hall, a fellow homeschooling friend, has been running this camp for 14 years now and kids love to attend it.  All slots are usually filled within a month of open registration.  The girls were excited to attend, as they have never experienced a real day camp before.  They chose to attend a session that featured horse back riding, greenhouse operations, and Chinese language and culture.  Delaney had fun and would love to attend again, Cailin, --not so much--she did come home twice with a smile on her face, but she really hated missing opportunities to earn money by mowing with her brothers so that put a damper on things somewhat.   I think the topics were interesting to her somewhat, however, she felt there was way to much lecture and not enough hands on working of projects, so all in all, this wasn't a good experience for her.  Lucky for her, she'll be able to attend girls camp with the Young Women next year....she's really looking forward to that.  But enough of me telling you about her thoughts, here's her own opinion:

Cailin
Let me start this out on the right thought. I didn't like going to this camp. I smiled in a lot of the pictures, all of them, yes, but please remember that they are fake. I considered this camp a waste of my day. It was too often and too long and was too boring. It only actually got a little interesting on the second to last day, when it was too late to do anything about it. The Chinese section of the day, which took up all the morning, made absolutely no sense and bored me to death. I don't know how I survived the teaching part of it. And if you ever wanted to do anything in China, you would have to learn a lot more characters that supposedly have some very ridiculous abstract relation to a poorly drawn picture. Take 'house' and 'see' for example. They look nearly exactly alike, and the house character supposedly has a roof with a pig under it. I don't get how that means house. Pigs and houses are two extremely different things. And see is supposed to be a hand over your eyes. ??? That did not come to me at all!
After a very long and boring lunch period that lasted an hour or more, we went to ride horses. That was by far the best part of the day but it did not last long. For starters, it lasted a measly two hours for which an hour and a half you did nothing but crafts and a weird quiz on the parts of the horse. As if that is ever going to come up in anything important. What is the lower back portion of the horse called? My question is, who cares!?
After that we went to the greenhouse. The first 3 days all we did was discuss about what we were going to do. We never actually did what she had said we were going to do on the first day. We did something entirely different. I didn't like sitting on their porch and discussing the whole time, and only for a few minutes going to the greenhouse, and there we discussed more.
Once Thursday came, we finally did something. The Chinese was still annoyingly tedious and only after the really long extensive lunch did anything good happen. Instead of being led on the horse like a baby, I was taken off the lead rope. And how much good did that do me? None. My horse Sunny was being very annoying and unresponsive. She made what could have been really fun a pain in the neck. And that was the last day with the horses. Then we went to the greenhouse and actually did some stuff there, like hooking up pipes and stuff and sprinklers or whatever.
The day of the celebration came the day after that. We had to rush to finish the greenhouse thing because we didn't do anything the first 3 days. Then we had to hurry back to the cabin for the ceremony stuff and that was annoying too. I didn't appreciate being video taped singing a ridiculous song about playing hide and go seek in Chinese. That was too...ugh.
Mom wants me to say some good things too so here I am.
I did like the horses. Sunny is quite sweet when she isn't annoying. My horse instructor was kind.  I met a new friend, Grace, she likes Pokemon just like me. It was fun to get to know her. That's it really. Good bye.

Delaney's thoughts:  will come later

In the greenhouse

On the last day of camp.  We went to the cabin in the woods, here they gave presentations of what the did during the week and sang some songs for us in Chinese.

In the barn.  This is where they would mount the horses.  Delaney had an extremely difficult time with this.  I think it was physically difficult, but also quite intimidating due to the size of the horses.  However, she did an amazingly wonderful job overcoming her fears.  Even Button Hall, my friend and director of the camp commented on how proud she was of Delaney for 1. trusting her to help her, 2. not giving up by trying every day even though she was afraid, and 3. overcoming her fears...she wants to come back next year because she really enjoyed riding the horses.   At one point during the week she asked her daddy for a blessing to help her with her fears, we also reminded her to talk with her Heavenly Father in prayer to ask for his help too.  She's been doing a wonderful job in overcoming many fears, this week gave her more chances to battle  fears and win.

Jesse Bear What Will You Wear?-- a B4FIAR book

 While Cailin and Delaney were away at Camp Timberidge, Liam and I rowed our way through our first book of the school year from 'Before Five in a Row".  I'll be using this book as our guide for his preschool/kindergarten studies.

He had so much fun practicing his cutting, gluing and coloring skills.

We talked about what Jesse Bear ate and other healthy foods.

 In the book Jesse Bear played in a sandbox....Liam quickly jumped on that as an idea for our activities.  He's been asking for sand to fill the turtle box for the past few months.  He finally got his wish.  It was so cute....we were loading the car after our purchases. I was walking away to place the cart in the stall and as I was coming back Liam was grinning so big and holding up his thumbs in the 'thumbs up' fashion.  He was Sooo excited.  Who knew a couple bags of sand could make him so happy.  (one week later, he's still just as happy too!).  Of course after a playing session in the sand box these two little ones were in great need of a bath!    As it turns out, Jesse Bear had a bath too! Hmmm, I wonder why? :)

 Math...this is Connor's passion and, he's eager to share his love of math with Liam.   I had Liam cut out some bear faces, then Connor hid them.  As Liam found the faces he added one to another till he got to six.  Afterward Connor read more to

 A game of rhyming words....we had the most fun with this game when we got silly and created our own nonsense words...Mommy-wommy, Liam-beeum....silly-nilly!

 I'm working with him on recognizing the alphabet and the sounds the letters make. Here we had a game of putting a clip on the letter that matches the first sound of the picture....s for sun, b for bath.

On Thursday, Brianne joined in the school fun with Susan, her therapist.  She's doing great with her fine motor skills.....and getting better every day with speech and gross motor skills.  She's now walking up to 8 or more steps, then pivoting and walking a few steps more before she falls down.

Even though day camp for the girls is over, we're not finished rowing this book.  I still have a few other activities planned, so stay tune for a few additions to this post.

Growing Frog and Chicks

It was the end of April and the school year was starting to wind down a bit.  I was getting tired, yet I knew that we should continue forward.  We still had a few more lessons of math, science and history to accomplish, plus we still had to complete our testing for the year, but my heart just wasn't into school.
Then came along an email from a fellow home schooler that she had lots of tadpoles and wanted to share some.  Her neighbor's pool had been the spawning area for local toad and now these little ones were about to be displaced, as the owner's of the pool wanted to get it ready for the upcoming summer season.   This was just the thing to get me excited and 'back into school'.   We headed off one Thursday afternoon and pick up some tadpoles.  Thus began our mini unit studies on frogs and toads.

I found some printables on the life cycle of a frogs and we read many books about frogs.

....and we kept watching our tadpoles of changes.  We often raided two local ponds for fresh food.  One at Randolph Park, and the other at our local veterinary clinic.  We are friends with the vet, and Jared Morgan said we could get grass and leaves (covered in delicious algae) for the tadpoles.  However, we didn't see much of a change in the little toads.     The Morgan's had come over to our home for something, and Dr. Morgan said that the water was too cold for them to grow....so outside they went in the sun....yet, still they didn't change.  By this time two months had gone by, plenty of time for them to have changed.  So, I called up Dr. Morgan and asked if we could put them in his pond at the clinic.  He gave the okay and so we got them ready to transport. 

We put them in the ziplock bag and then set the entire bag in the pond.  This way the water inside the bag could slowly adjust to the temperature to the water in the pond.

About 15 minute later we opened the bag, but didn't pour the tadpoles out, we just set it in the water and let the tadpoles slowly swim out.  Most of them did and after another 15 minutes or so, we pour the remained ones into the pond.  Then the waiting game began.

I waited too long....about 9 to 10 days later, we came back but couldn't find one single tadpole!  I was sad and I thought that they didn't survive the change of the temperature--culture shock of sorts.  But that wasn't the case at all....Jared said he meant to call me and tell me that they had morphed and changed so quickly that they went from tadpole, to toadlet ( with their hind legs and tail) to fully formed toads within one week!! By the time we got there they had all jumped away to find new homes.   I was bummed that I had missed it, but glad that they didn't die.   After staying the same for so long, I didn't realize they would change so quickly when given the perfect environment.  A lesson learned for me!!

A week or so later, while on a walk, we did find a little toad near the path we were traveling....so even though Delaney, Liam and I missed the chance to see them change, we did see the final product!

We've tried hatching chicks a few years ago....that was a bust too.  This year, I'll try hatching painted lady butterflies and making an ant farm....hopefully we'll have better scientific fun with them!

A side note---I knew Liam liked his 'Thomas the Tank Engine' shirt, but until I started posting all these photos from many different day....and he was wearing the same shirt each day....did I realize how much he LOVED that shirt!!  What's funny is that he's noticed it too....and now's he's off to find it.  I know where it is--it's filthy!! and need to be washed.  I hope he won't look in the laundry room. ;)

Understanding Brianne

Ahhh-(o) n-zum =  I want some or you want some   This word has slight differences day to day, but generally we know what she means.   Cailin figured out this word.  Way to go Cailin, now we are better able to communicate with her and that has greatly reduced her screaming at us, and general happiness all around. We're now trying to figure out what other sounds mean, as she is clearly communicating with us, we're just not sure what she is saying.

Hahh (with a clear inflection of Hi) = Hi!  Hello, good to see you.

I -id -idt =  I did it!!  She's saying this often lately as she's mastering walking.

Daaa= Daddy  She'll use this sign only it comes off more as a cow than father, so Barry has to wonder (in good nature) what she's really trying to tell him. :)

She's still saying 'I love you" and she's giving smacking type kisses. (as opposed to open mouth kisses)  Wonderful, use that lip muscles!!  Her speech therapist is so proud!!

She also says UP and Don (down)....she's learned this from Susan, her early intervention specialist.

WALKING!!!

 Brianne is walking!!!  Day one--four steps.
Day two--four steps fall down, get up again...four more steps.
Day three--she'll pull herself up from the floor at the corner of the kitchen near the mantle, then she'll walk six to eight steps...pivot and walk back again.  She'll do this over and over.  We can't get enough of watching her and clapping for joy as she does it.  She's all smiles and loves the attention too!!  What an accomplishment!!

A boring blog post about my garden.

What a beautiful rainbow....you can barely see it, but it's actually a double rainbow.  For the past week or so, it's been rain off and on.  For the past  few days we've had a reprieve from the scorching and terribly humid heat before the cool 70 degree weather.  So, it's been a roller coaster of weather.   Humid high heat with lots of storms. (Many of our friends, after a few days of storms were without electricity for days {one was without for 1 week})  Many trees were downed.  Our neighbor lost two trees...however we sailed through just fine.  I had clothes on the line and only one item came off.  Amazing!!  Tender mercies!!
We've needed the rain quite a bit.  It's defiantly perked my garden up....with out me having to increase my water bill  (last month it was $125.00, so I'm thankful for that too!)

This is the year of tomatoes and yellow squash.  Every year something seems to hit and grow prolifically...this year it's tomatoes.  I got Barry to go along with making cages for supports, as I've been wanting to make them for a while.  This year my wish came true.  I love them

Delaney is 46" tall....and some of them are taller than her.  I wonder if they'll get any bigger.

It's also going to be the year of the yellow squash.   I planted three hills of yellow summer squash and three hills of zucchini.  Then, in another spot, on another day, I planted six hills of cucumbers, two of pickling and four straight eights....at least I thought they were straight eights.  In actuality I planted  four more straight neck summer squash....stupid me.  I noticed the seeds were different, but it didn't dawn on me that the seeds weren't cucumber at all, I just chalked up the difference to variety differences, not produce differences.  So if any one has any great ways to use this veggie, send them my way....or better yet, let me know if you want some, I'll send some your way--unless a bug hits the vine!!  But let's not think in that direction :)