Homeschooling Adventures Continued

Oh I forgot Omsi! With a bunch of science lovers in our house, we LOVE Omsi. And they sometimes have homeschool labs, so of course we sign up for every one we can!

L might be too little to participate but she is just too dang cute to not include: 

 Dude got to learn about chemical reactions, make elephant toothpaste, and see a rocket explode and shoot across the room.

 The girls got to dissect a squid, which they LOVED. They keep asking when we get to dissect something again. I'll have to think about that one.

 But of course we weren't going to just leave after that. We had to play with slime.

 And pretend to be astronauts and all sorts of good stuff. 

AND I didn't even lose anybody, so I'd say it was a good day of school!

Homeschooling Adventures

Eugene Symphony Field Trip:

They're super stoked to be there

Fish Hatchery Field Trip with Fossil: 

Against my better judgment, I let them feed the fish while walking the planks. I did not allow the younger girls to do it. They were unhappy about it.

Like I said. Unhappy.

All better! Even if it was, in my opinion, too chilly to be swimming outdoors!

 State Capital Field Trip and Scavenger Hunt:

Found the seal!

 Outdoor School on the Oregon Coast:

The weather was...uncooperative. At least we got out of there before the typhoon hit!

So we warmed ourselves by the fire. 

All classes were outside. Brrr! Didn't bother this guy because he got to play with real skulls!

 Making Geoboards:

Hoping this keeps them busy for a minute or two!

Happy Thanksgiving

It seems that Thanksgiving is so often overlooked. I mean honestly, the day after Halloween the stores are decked out in Christmas colors and demanding you fill the stockings. But I love Thanksgiving! There's no wrapping presents and no spending monehy but there's lots of family and even more food! We had a great time. We went to John's Incredible Pizza the night before so Nana didn't have to cook:

And laser tag the day after. The oldest three have found a new favorite thing to do! Seriously, the all asked if they could go to laser tag for every birthday for the rest of their lives. So guess I'm off the hook for parties! We even went to the old place that Coop and I last went to for my 16th birthday! Ha. Can't believe it's still there. Total blast from the past, and yes, one random kid that got stuck on our team whispered to his friend, "great, we're on a team with a bunch of old people," but these old people got 1st and 2nd place twice!

And we went all out on the turkeys! G made a fruit turkey:

 Dude made a veggie turkey:

 And the girls made chocolate turkey place settings:

The only problem was, turns out they were all too cute for people to eat. They hardly touched them, or the turkey cheeseball! Ha. But it was fun and there was plenty more to eat, believe you me.

Introducing... Terrier Porter!

I know it seems like we maybe lost our minds (again), but really, this was a very reasonable thing for us to do. See, the kids have been BEGGING us for years to get a dog. We've been putting it off for years. Good, legit excuses like, not until we have our own house, or not until we build a fence, or not until everybody is out of diapers. While they waited for all our excuses to run out, we discussed the fact that if we were to ever give in, we'd need to do it on a dog that worked for us. We decided it couldn't be a puppy, meaning it needed to already be house trained. That it should be medium-sized and good with kids. Well, to turn this (already) long story, that dog materialized and was being offered to us by a family we know that needed to find a home for their dog for totally reasonable reasons. The kids were over the moon and covered the walls of our house with signs like these:

 

And so Porter joined our crew! And suddenly found himself the center of SO MUCH ATTENTION. And yes, L is petting J and Dude is petting L. Sometimes they get confused.

 He joins them for school

 and keeps on eye on things

 until he gets sleepy.

M was alarmed to discover on the first day that he runs faster than she does. 

Ha. She's kind of proud of her speed, and rightly so. But he's faster. The kids are absolutely in love, and from the way he acts whenever we come home, I'm quite certain the feeling is mutual. My favorite thing? When he's outside and wants to come in he stands up on his two back feet and jumps straight up and down. I could watch that endlessly. Oh, and watching L try to play tug-of-war with him is absolutely hilarious.

So now we have a dog. An extremely well-trained dog but a dog nonetheless. Heaven help us.

This is Halloween, This is Halloween!

G outgrew her skeleton shirt this year and passed it down. There may or may not have been tears. And L may or may not have been protesting her sister photo bombing her picture here (And I may or may not be hiding in my room eating all their candy!).

This was the first year we allowed the bigs to carve their own pumpkins. They've always drawn the design and we, or I, have then spent hours cutting out 7 pumpkins. Fortunately they chose nice small pumpkins for their first try. 

 And it was a success! I will never carve 7 pumpkins in one night again! J just kept saying how pleased she was with herself and M obviously felt pretty good about her efforts too!

And you can never forget G. 

 So with that idea of doing less, or attempting to for the first time in my life, I BEGGED and BEGGED and PLEADED and BEGGED the kids to not need to have family themed costumes this year so that we could maybe just re-use some of the previous ones or even just dig into the dress-up box and not spend a dime, but they would not be moved. They even got together and agreed on a theme when I, seeing my last hope, declared that there would be no family theme if everybody wasn't on board. So MarioKart characters it was. However, I swore off making the karts. If they wanted karts, that was all up to them. There were quite a few hours spent cutting, taping, and painting cardboard in the garage. 

 

I was able to pick up a pink dress for Princess Peach along with a red and green shirt for the girls at Goodwill, some plain caps at Michaels and a yellow t-shirt at Walmart. Then I pulled out an old dragon costume that Dude wore as a baby and transformed it into Yoshi by covering the wings with a shell and cutting off claws and fangs. I did, however, have to sew the jumpers for our cross-dressing oldest girls but they made their mustaches and decorated their hats), sew yellow jammie pants for Dude and create an entire spiked shell and horned hood for Bowser. I did my best to keep it simple! When looking for Bowser ideas on Pinterest, one amazing lady admitted to having spent like 42 hours on her son's costume! I can guarantee you, I did not. I was worried that my stickler for details would be disappointed, but he LOVED it!

In fact, they were all pretty thrilled with the results. Sure, the Princess's crown didn't stay on and turns out that cardboard karts REALLY slow down your trick-or-treating but they were pretty darn cute, even if somebody did mistake L for Godzilla. Ha! And I'm proud of the older girls's hard work. That's not to say that I won't be begging again next year...

Crazy little people

L came walking in pulling a xylophone and said, "mommy look!" I replied, "what a nice xylophone." She looked at me, at it, and then held it to her ear with a slightly quizzical look and asked, "hello?"

Happy mom moments:

After dude drew a picture in church of Kylo Ren killing Han, Coop told him to draw something happier. So he drew flowers. Flowers being killed by Kylo Ren.

I was just told the RS president was in primary and asked G her name. She said it but she didn't understand twice and then G said, maybe "I'll just tell you a different name instead."

Oh and during the primary program, in which G clearly had no idea what where or who she was, we just barely stopped her from slingshotting her headband into the congregation by shaking our heads so vigorously that she actually noticed, and slowly lowered the weapon. When the teacher tried to help Dude with his part, he shook his head, looked alarmed and whispered emphatically, "I don't need that. I. Have. It. Memorized." Awesome.

After reading Corduroy, I asked dude and G to draw a picture of themselves in our house with a stuffed animal. Apparently Dude believes we live next to a jail?

For bad monsters of course.

And G thinks we live in a tent with the sheep. Ha! At least there's something to count when we can't sleep? 

G just said to Coop "mom told me to tell you to make her nachos right now or else mom will buy a gun and shoot you with a hard dart." Dad: "Nope. "Then, "Dad. I want you to stop doing what you're doing and make what I want. Think about it. In your head."

Me: "G! How could you not have seen your blanket?? You walked right over it!"

G: "well, when I walked by I was looking at the ceiling. I thought it was probably on the ceiling."

G: "look at me mom! I'm so awesome."

Grace is making up the words to a new library book she's reading to herself. Just overheard, "why did you say Boom-Shaka-laka? Bc you're awesome. Oh, ok!"

Watching Dude do math is hilarious. A word problem said a fish store had 90 fish and a customer bought 40. Dude then spent the next five minutes telling everyone who would listen, "WHY WOULD ONE PERSON NEED 40 FISH?!?!?!?" He ended up decided after considering many possibilities that the most likely reason was the guy had as a pet this giant worm thing that lives deep in the sea and eats lots of fish. Right.

Next time, maybe I shouldn't make the smoothie so thick. And yes, I did take a picture before helping her. But I felt bad about it! Face freeze!

L looked at this pic of herself and cooed, "oh what a cute little face!" This right after she'd whined and whined about her boot hurting her, only to pull a fork out of her boot minutes later.

When soccer took over our life

J's on Team Artemis (they play on full-size fields! Holy running!):

M's on the Seahawks (she was quite upset that their name didn't make any sense with their color! She wanted to be the Blazers. Good girl):

Dude's on the Hawks where they don't keep score (try telling that to the kids), and parents aren't to yell instructions from the sideline but only encouragement equally to all players on the field:

So yeah. Our Saturdays are toast. And at least one somebody has practice every evening of the week, except Friday when they go to Show-Stopping Singers. Oh and Coop is M's assistant coach. Thank heavens we decided G wasn't old enough to need to play yet!

P.S. Sometimes soccer weather in Oregon isn't all that great!

Summertime Busies

(Just found this post that I never actually published!)

L: what doing mama? 

Me: putting on mascara. 

L: why?

Me: to make my eyes pretty.

L(said in a tone that says I'm being rediculous): you no pretty mom! 

This is the face of exhaustion.

On a separate note, we happened upon an excellent way of getting through church with L! Have Grammy offend her by saying no so that L pouts on the ground. She's so dang stubborn that she will then refuse to get up or look up, and will in fact lie there so long that she'll fall asleep. Most delightful first hour of church we've had in years! Course then she may not be too happy to wake up...

Courtesy of my sister: 

G: when I grow up, I wanna be a cheetah.

Dude: you can't be a cheetah! you cannot grow up to be anything but a human.

M: you can be anything you want to be.

(So amazingly indicative of their personalities!)

She's got her own style:

Do you know how hard it is to ride a bike with somebody asleep on your arm?

Science and craft day at the library was awesome. Including the moment when L walked into a little girl who was holding her freshly painted masterpiece, and ended up with it plastered to her hair. I only stopped laughing long enough to take a picture.

Oh and there was reptile day at the library - EEK!

Read this line to G in a book, "and her heart melted." G a few pages later, very concerned asked, "so did she not have a heart anymore?"

Seconds after getting out of her bath. This girl.

Blueberries for Sal. 

25 lbs of them in less than an hour with these stellar helpers! Sure, some ran out of gas a bit before we were done and sure some of them probably should have been charged for their weight gain but I'm still impressed!

So I'm taping this instructional watercolor video and G walks up, I guess thinks I'm talking to her and starts saying ok after every sentence I say.

I just asked the kids to come do their chores and M pipes up, "it's Sunday! No work on Sunday!" Dude clarifies, "no work for ANGELS on Sunday." Not even sure what to say about that.

But we've been having tons of fun lately too while my brother's family was in town! We went to the beach where we ran like crazy from those ice-cold waves:

Dug holes to sit in:

And got comforted when the waves were faster than we were:

Oh and we went to the zoo:

And to Omsi too: 

Future chemists in the house?

Or perhaps Martians? Only time can tell.