Playing with Fire Day

Inspired by Chanukah, the kids were itching to set all kinds of things on fire. The solution: Playing with Fire Day!  They got to light matches, melt candles, burn twigs and set whiskey on fire till their heart's content. 

Besides just generally having a good experience from being given some freedom they learned a few things. Avigayil learned that when you blow on a large fire it fuels the flames - and if you want to put it out it's best to smother it. 

After multiple frustrating and failed attempts to set whiskey on fire outside, Adin and I learned that whiskey has to be warm to catch on fire. Which makes sense because you aren't actually catching a liquid on fire, rather the whiskey vapor. 

Here's a cute photo of the kids all working together:

And some videos:

Maple Syrup Snow Candy

Here's a super easy and fun candy making project inspired by the Little House series. Seems like there's a variety of ways to do this but we did it a quick and easy way. The girls filled a bowl with some fresh, clean snow. I put some maple syrup in a pan to simmer until it was reduced by half, then slowly poured the thick mixture onto the snow where it quickly hardened into maple candy. It was so simple, exciting for the girls and I got to feel like a homesteader, which I like. 

Melted Crayon Art

Inspired by the blog paintcutpaste.com we tried out this fun melted crayon art. 

Avigayil went for the relaxing, playing, abstract technique. 

Aderet used oil pastels to create the classic rainbows and flowers.

Traditional Chinese Food

We didn't celebrate Christmas today the traditional Jewish way - Chinese food. 

Since there are no kosher Chinese restaurants in the area we made our own. 

All of the kids helped with the prep work - but I only have a picture of Adin and Jake.

Here's Adin chopping the chili peppers while schmoozing with his friend Jake:

Here's the Beef and Broccoli

General Tso's Chicken (which I kept calling General Chow's) 

Spicy Szechuan Eggplant

Warm Cobbler on a Cold Day

It's been a bit of a disorienting day for me; with Gavriel back home, it being a holiday (but not our holiday) and a few other things that are cycling through my head and aching in my heart. With that said, there was also so much good that happened today so I wanted to share it here. 

Even though it was coldy cold outside today I managed to get outside for a walk. I have a goal of doing 60 days of 60 minutes of self care. I know that I'm a much happier and healthier person when I walk, mediate and do a little yoga - yet somehow those things always find a way to the back burner. My goal is to walk for 30 minutes, sit for 15 minutes and stretch for 15 minutes. Really, I hope to go beyond 60 days but thought that was a realistic amount of time to commit to. ***A week later I'm noticing that It's not realistic for me to do all 3 of those things every day but I have managed to walk and/or sit every day***

We had a bunch of apples that were past their prime, so I made a yummy apple blueberry cobbler with a topping of almond flour, gluten free oats, brown sugar and earth balance and ate that for dinner (everyone else had mac and cheese). 

Here it is:

 I also started making a winter hat for Avigayil from this rainbow yarn she picked out last week:

The funnest part of the day was watching Avigayil bang away on her newly put together drum set. She and her friend Gabrielle had great fun starting their band. This is actually the first time she's ever used a drum set - I'm excited to see what she'll do after some lessons.


Another good thing is that that it's starting to snow, and even for this non-celebrating Jewish girl there is something special about a White Christmas.

Little House in the Big Woods

It's almost 11:00 on Sunday night and the kids are just getting to sleep. Gavriel has been gone since Tuesday night so we've been pretty lax around bedtime and wake up time. Avigayil and I didn't wake up today until almost 10am. Thankfully, it's been a pretty easy go of being alone with the kids this time. I think it's a combination of them getting older, homeschooling and me being in a particularly good parenting groove (they come and go so I enjoy them while they're here).  Now that I know Gavriel is scheduled to be home in a few hours, I am feeling my stamina waning, and very much looking forward to a break tomorrow. It's also just not as much fun without Gavriel around.

We had a mellow day today. We all got up late and then hung around in our jammies drinking tea, reading books and playing go-fish until almost noon when we had breakfast. Adin eventually went over to play at a friends house and the girls and I went to buy some honey-comb and go to the library. Aderet, who will be 8 in March, never got our of her feety pajamas. She just squeezed her fleeced feet into her boots and left the house that way. I figured, if she doesn't mind I guess I don't either; we just told everyone it was a self declared pajama day and that worked. 

Avigayil got excited about buying some honey comb after reading about Pa's adventures in collecting honey in Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I always like it when I'm able to accommodate those wishes. I've been reading the series out loud to all of the kids but there's something especially fascinating about it to me and Avigayil. I think there's something in both of our natures that longs for a life that's quieter and simpler. I find myself so drawn in listening to descriptions of Ma spending a good chunk of her day separating individual corn kernels from their hulls, making straw hats or cooking down pumpkin for pies.

Here's an excerpt from the end of the book that touched me:

    When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "what are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"

    "They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep now."
   
     But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

    She thought to herself, "This is now."

    She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

Master Plan Take 3 - dance between structure and emergent energy

To quickly catch you up if you haven't read Master Plan and Master Plan Take Two...

The basis of Master Plan was we are going to have a highly structured morning with a full on check list and get all of our school work done sitting together at the dining room table in one hour.  What went wrong with that is that my kids all fought for my attention and distracted each other and boy did that hour get long.

So, Take Two - my plan was to work with each kid individually while the other kids had "research time" (time to explore any topic they wanted) on the computers. I worked with each kid between 30 and 45 minutes and then adding on transition time, so that meant that everyone was getting at least 1.5 hours of computer time.  Also, what was meant to be research time quickly became half research time and half game time... and down from there.

The good thing about Take Two was that by working individually with each of my kids they really learned what they needed to do and gained the ability to do it independently. Yeah for little triumphs! The other thing we learned is that the more screen time my kids get the more miserable they are to parent.  They now have 1 hour of screen time a day - usually at night after dinner is cleaned up so that gives me and Gavriel and hour to get stuff done, or talk to each other or just decompress before the bedtime routine starts. Adin usually uses his time to play a game called Stronghold and the girls have been watching some shows (My Little Pony, Horseland, and now Avatar).  We do find that screen time is such a slippery slope and are constantly having to reign in how much and what they are watching.

What was also challenging about Take Two is that we were stuck in the house all morning and I felt that we were not getting anything done besides Math and some basic Language Arts. So, I decided to loosen the structure and let the kids know that they could do their assignments at any point during the day but they had to get them done in order to have screen time at night. Screen time is still the biggest motivating factor for my children. I definitely have mixed feelings about that - the details of which will maybe and maybe not be discussed at another time.

That created a little honeymoon in our home where I felt like we could flow a little better and follow emergent energy and now I feel that we are ready to make a shift again.

This seems really true to me about homeschooling - at least the way it's working for us - we are constantly having to reevaluate what's working and what's not and making tweaks here and there. For me it feels like a dance between making structures and then feeling restricted in some way by those structures so we loosen up and then at some point things start to unravel a bit too much and I start longing for a bit more structure. I do keep fantasizing that one day we will find this magical sweet spot or that the movement back and forth between structure and emergent energy will somehow flow sweetly. However, right now it's still a bit clunky.

Here are some things that I feel need to shift right now:

We need a regular wake up time! Our natural tendency seems to be to keep waking up later and going to sleep later. This does not work for us for two main reasons. 1. Gavriel has to go to work and he needs time in the morning to do Hebrew with the kids. 2. When the kids go to sleep too late Gavriel and I not get enough time with each other.

We need a better line up of fun projects.  I really love the idea of un-schooling where kids will take interested in some subject or activity and I can somehow easily facilitate that in the moment. What seems to be true for our family right now is that we do a little better with some structure. I feel like I need to expose them to things that they might take interest in or they might not.

It's also true that sometimes I will overlook something that they are interested in because it somehow does not match the picture in my head. For example, Aderet is obessed with listening to Harry Potter books on CD (which is it's own funny story because she had originally insisted that even if I took it out from the library she would definitely not listen to it.) Today, I had a plan that we would sit on the couch together and snuggle while we read Little House in the Big Woods and thought of some projects we could do. But Avigayil and Aderet really just wanted to listen to Harry Potter. So on one hand I was enjoying that they were really into something and on the other hand I was having to fight back the voices of judgement in my head that they were just sitting there.



The kids need to get out of the house more.  Once a week the kids all go to Boulder Explore. Adin seems to really enjoy it - especially the social aspect of it. Aderet claims to not want to go at all - and I guess for my sake I want to believe that she likes parts of it. Avigayil is somewhere in the middle. Adin has also been going to a computer class though science discovery, he started in a club that is meant to inspire writing called Druidawn Creations, and he also goes to Judo twice a week and is a Mother's helper for Mitten on the Thrusdays that he does not go to Druidawn. We've been to the Blue Skies park day a couple of times recently which was good as well. The girls don't get out as much but I'm trying to change that. I just signed them up for a homeschool rock climbing class at the East Boulder Rec Center and they are on the wait list for gymnastics. I'd also like to sign them up for one of the Science Discovery classes or some other class.

The basic theme is that I'm ready for a little more structure again. Thank G-d tomorrow is Friday so we can rest into Shabbat and start the whole project up again next week.

Seeing the Good

It's been a few weeks since I've written. I won't be able to catch up on all that we've done here but I'd like to share some pictures and some general themes of our lives right now.

First, the present. I am tired!!! Avigayil has not been sleeping well so last night that looked like be sitting up with her from 4:30am to 5:00am and then her crawling into bed with me - and I don't sleep well with anyone in bed with me. However, I've been getting much better at not taking my grumpiness and spreading it around. Better. I did have a few moments this evening. But I also just had a moment where I turned it around.

 It's 10:00pm, Aderet is sleeping, Gavriel is sitting with Avigayil while she goes to sleep and Adin just finished his shower and plopped himself on the couch to finish reading "Twilight". (On a side note - he told me he thinks it's kind of boring, he doesn't like all the drama). Often (code word for most of the time) I tell Adin he needs to go read in his bed and that I'm too grumpy to see kids this time of night. However, this time I decided to turn on the gas fireplace and sit down on the couch next to him to write. He seemed really pleased with this change which already felt good. Then, I saw that my computer needed it's plug and I said out loud to myself something like, "Ugh, I need to get the plug." At which point Adin immediately asked, "Do you want me to get it for you?". WOW! It was amazing to notice how immediate my mood of spaciousness and generosity caught on.

One of the themes that I've been thinking of lately is that there are no perfect days but lots of perfect moments. Writing this blog has helped me to notice those moments more. I've also started a gratitude journal where I write 5 things every night that I am grateful for - this has been a wonderful practice for me and I can already see the fruits of my labor.

Here are a few pictures of perfect moments that I've been able to capture. There have been so many more.

This is Aderet happily working on a rug made from a hula hoop frame and old t-shirts. If you want to learn how to make it you can go here.

Here's another one of Aderet helping her Abba to change the strings on his guitar.

A blessed moment where Adin and Avigayil both voluntarily chose to get on their computers and write some stories. Adin wrote a really funny one that even had Newtons 3rd law.

This is a video from our trip to the Aquarium. The voice you'll hear is Aderet's.