Weekend

Christmas recital Friday night. Thalia sang a duet. Uncle Mark S. snapped a pic with his phone:


Afterwards we all went out for ice cream.

Saturday spent running errands, putting gas in the car before the weather got bad, Christmas shopping, changing family Christmas plans repeatedly.

Sunday morning we awoke to SNOW! Not much, but enough to need a snowplow. Also, COLD! Wasn't it about 57 or 60F just a couple of days ago? And now it's 4F.

Sunday morning Thalia sang again at church, this time with her choir. And Sunday night was the church's Youth Christmas Concert. No pics because by this time I had lost track of the camera.

Then early to bed because we got up at about 4am so Rick could catch a flight to Mexico. Where it's about 80F -- how do you dress for that business of going from single digits to 80s, then back down to low temps when he gets back later this week?

Right now I should be: checking the pressure on my car tires (I'm sure it's low with the temperature drop) OR finishing sewing pants for Annabeth so she has a warm pair for today OR bringing the Christmas plates upstairs OR some other form of Christmas preparedness OR at least doing yoga ... but mostly I'm sitting here being cold.

The Weekend

Friday night: and evening at home, possibly the only one in December. Watched Elf and ate homemade pizza.

Saturday:

Annabeth to choir performance at a Breakfast With Santa, then rehearsal for Christmas musical.

I messed around with Girl Scout Nut Sales, organizing stuff to take to various people. Then took Thalia to dance class.

Pick up Annabeth, pick up Thalia, lunch at about 1:30pm, then organize next outing: and Elf Hunt in St. Charles.

Take kids to St. Charles Christmas Traditions. Wow, it was cold and windy! But we quickly located an Elf:



as well as several other characters, including Jack Frost (my camera froze up, so I didn't get a shot of their hug)


St. Lucia


and a Scottish Santa wearing a kilt (oh, his poor frozen knees):


Then a stop at Walgreens on the way home to visit the hair coloring section, supper, and the girls went upstairs to giggle in the bathroom and do what teenage girls do when they have a Saturday night and a bottle of hair dye. But I think I'm sworn to secrecy about this, so I'm not going to say anything else except this: red.

And somewhere in there I went to the Peanut Pantry to get more Girl Scout nuts.

Sunday:

Sunday morning was the Chidlren's Christmas Musical at church. They performed Angel's Aware, which turned out to be quite entertaining. Annabeth played Gabriel, and as such kicked off the program by belting out a solo and delivering a monologue.


Chorus shot. Annabeth is to the far left, bottom row. Thalia commented that with the big white sunglasses and the way she was over-enunciating her words with a deadpan expression she looked like Lady Gaga.


She wrapped it up with another monologue and solo. She wasn't the lead, but had the big monologues -- Archangel Michael was the lead, but had smaller speaking roles, and Gabriel was the second biggest part. To my knowledge, she never worked on memorizing any of this -- apparently ever since Shakespeare-in-a-week she hasn't needed to really work at memorization. She was totally in her element up on stage.

After that, home to set up the tree. Not decorated, but set up. I was under the impression that Thalia was supposed to wrap gifts at Borders (a Girl Scout fund raiser), but that's actually next week, as we discovered after driving there. I should've spent the evening organizing the Nut Sale paperwork to turn in today, but instead spent the evening trying to figure out what's gone wrong with our computer's ability to open pdf files. Sheesh. So, here it is Monday morning, and I'm already behind. Ack.

Homeschool Update -- what we're doing

MATH

Thalia is working on Jacob's Geometry. We're using the syllabus at Ask Dr. Callahan (I think -- actually, when I try to open the pdf from the website now all I get is a blank page, so it's either disappeared from the internet or I printed out something else from somewhere else, but either way I can't link it. Or maybe my pdf reader is messed up. Which I'm beginning to think is the case). At one point she was severely behind on the semester, at which time smoke started pouring out of my ears and DRAMA OCCURRED. But, lo, she has worked hard for the past couple of weeks, and is actually a bit ahead of schedule now. Which has given her the idea that she could keep up this pace and finish early. Possible, but I'm thinking not probable, since now that she's caught up she's allowed to use Facebook, etc., again, and that's apparently more interesting than whipping through Geometry assignments.

Anyway, this course is like a walk down memory lane -- I loved Geometry, and still remember quite a bit of it.

In th meantime, Annabeth has been alternating RightStart Geometry with Life of Fred Fractions. Things were going well for her until she hit one of "those" spots -- and if you're familiar with LIfe of Fred, you know what I'm talking about -- the spots where they expect the student to pick a concept up out of the ether. Life of Fred, if you're not familiar with it, is written directly to the student. But, alas, occasionally they give the student the questions without explaining how to figure it out. Some kids will thrive in this sort of challenge. Others will start screaming and throw the book down the stairway, declaring that they'll never use this stupid curriculum again. I imagine there are those that fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but we were solidly in the latter extreme. Thankfully we're alternating curriculum, so it was just a matter of using the OTHER program while cooling off about Life of Fred.

HISTORY

When we're all home and have time, I read Story of the World vol.4: the Modern Age at lunch, then we discuss the questions in the study guide. Our current schedule allows this to happen once or twice a week -- very slow going. Vietnam was just divided into north and south, and I think next we're going to divvy up Korea. And we shall all remember Ho Chi Minh's admonition to not take live chickens into houses in the mountains (why? why did he say this?).

Thalia is also working through Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Ancient World. She reads 3 chapters per week; she selects one of them to summarize on paper. She's quite charmed with this so far. SWB likened the planned cities of some ancient culture to the Borg (of Star Trek), and Thalia was totally smitten. We're going to start going through the Iliad -- we have The Teaching Company's 12 lecture series by Elizabeth Vandiver, of which we've listened to lecture #1, we have the Fagle's translation, we have CDs of Derek Jocobi reading the Fagles version. I think we'll just listen to the lectures and CDs, and might not do much more with it. Thalia's interest in the Iliad is fairly minimal, but she considered it the lead-in to the Odyssey, and she likes to read things IN ORDER. So we'll zip through it.

ENGLISH

Annabeth is taking a creative writing class at a co-op. I need to come up with something more for her, but I'm still not sure if she'd do better with MCT, Killgallon, or Junior Analytical Grammar.

Thalia is taking a composition class at a learning center. It's worth a credit by itself, but I'd like a quick grammar review for her to keep the skills sharp. She went through all of Analytical Grammar (it's supposed to last for years and years, but she likes grammar so she did it all). I just figured out that they have review books that cover Homer, and also that cover Shakespeare (next June they'll be doing Comedy of Errors for Shakespeare camp). Very, very cool.

ART

Thalia is in a co-op art class. To bring it up to a half-credit class we're using the Well Trained Mind suggestions of Annotated Mona Lisa and Sister Wendy's Story of Painting to give us some art history.

Annabeth does random art from the Junior Girls Scout badge book, along with various projects from her co-op classes.

SCIENCE

Thalia continues with Apologia science, using the Biology text at a learning center. She really likes her teacher, who seems quite knowledgeable about biology (possibly because she has a PhD in Microbiology); she still thinks the writing in Apologia books is abysmal, and continues to write commentary in the margins when she comes to parts she finds particularly poorly written.

Annabeth is doing a Zoology course in co-op, loosely based on the Apologia Land Animals book for upper elementary. We've been beefing that up with, yes, the Girl Scout Junior Badge Book. Love that book! It's so perfect for girls this age looking for things to do and things to learn about.

OTHER STUFF

Annabeth is also taking geography and a Prairie Primer class based on the Little House books. These are both through the homeschool co-op.

Thalia takes a computer class through the co-op also, learning about Word, Power Point, and Excel (which is handy since these days she's typing up all of her papers for composition, and her biology lab reports on a laptop).

Musical theatre classes, piano, dance (down to only one day per week), voice lessons ... and other stuff I've undoubtably forgotten ... round out our current homeschool experience.

Co-op Open House

The co-op in which I teach knitting had an open house this week. The various classes put on performances or displayed some of their work. I set up boxes and fabric on our table, and then the kids in the class arranged things and made signs. And also, apparently, left a roll of blue tape (everyone proclaimed cluelessness about where that came from, along with extreme vagueness about who made the "do not touch" sign). If you click on the picture you can enlarge it.





This isn't everything everyone made. Some things weren't put on the table because they're unfinished (although other UnFinished Objects were put on display). The pumpkin hat is the one I made Annabeth, which she stuck on the table. The hats to the right were made on a knitting loom -- the girl who made them couldn't find any of the stuff she'd made during class, organization not being her strong point (nor is focussing, nor finishing what she starts ... but she's learned several new techniques, so that's nice). And not everyone made cards to "sign" their work, preferring to remain anonymous.

The purple scarf to the lower left is by a student who struggled and struggled to learn knitting. She managed to learn knit stitch, purl stitch, casting on and binding off during this semester; she then went out and bought a skein of Homespun and knit this amazing garter stitch scarf.

And the alligator scarf to the lower right was knit by a girl who knew solely how to form a knit stitch. A close up:





As you can see, eyelash yarn scarves were popular. We also have some knitting with cut up plastic bags going on.



Overall, the kids have really stretched themselves, learned new things, and had fun. One of the coolest things about the class is that some of the really shy, quiet girls are now part of the crowd, so to speak, at social events like this -- they sit in class chattering away, and it's carrying over into other venues.

One more class this semester, and then on to spring semester and crochet. I'm still not sure how to approach the crochet portion of the class, sigh.

Catch-up post

A quick rundown of what's been going on over the past week....

We were supposed to get 5 new windows put in last Wednesday morning (Energystar windows for the tax credit, replacing some of the windows that had broken sash cords and other issues), but the installer called and asked if he could put them in on Tuesday. So they showed up at 7:30am Tuesday, then tore out and installed 5 windows by lunch time. Woosh! So now we have blind-in windows in the kitchen bay window, which is so very nice. Nighttime shot:



And then it POURED rain on Wednesday morning, so they couldn't have installed the windows then, anyway. So that worked out well.

Wednesday was spent ... what did we do Wednesday? I'm blank on that. Oh, wait! The kids went to see Harry Potter in the morning with some friends -- $5 per ticket at the Creve Coeur AMC 12 for movies before noon. What a deal.

Then Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, was spent at Vi and Chelsea's, which was wonderful. We haven't done that for the past couple of years due to Oireachtas. As a matter of fact, one of the relatives mentioned that he had a coworker up in Chicago for some Irish Dance thing -- aha, that's Oireachtas! It turned out that our relative had sold our dance teacher a new car last month. Small world.

Friday we had Mark and Linda over for supper and then Monopoly. This was the game that gave us the phrase "pants cash" (Thalia hid $500 of her Monopoly money in her pants pocket, so when Rick thought she was short of cash and was charging her for something she just whipped it out, revealing that she didn't need to mortgage property), a phrase that has been used quite a lot in our household. Thus this photo of the historic occasion of the Birth of Pants Cash:


Saturday was spent putting up the Christmas lights. Rick stopped by the store and discovered that they had crab legs on sale, and decided we should have them for supper.


Some of us were hesitant about this.


Sunday at church another mom mentioned in passing that the kids in next week's musical needed to be in costume during that afternoon's rehearsal -- I thought they didn't need their costumes until Wednesday, so oops. And Annabeth's skirt needed to be finished. She's a lead, so the director wanted her all in white. We found a white satin shirt at the Goodwill, but hadn't come up with a skirt. So I had gotten some cheap white satin at Hobby Lobby on Saturday, along with some glitter tulle that was on sale. And made a new rendition of this skirt from 3 years ago, Ottobre 3/2006 #35:



Angelic version:


The glitter tulle is sort of sticky in that the other ruffles stick to it and make the hem length look wonky. But it's a nice touch of sparkle, and doesn't look too weird while she's moving around.


Or maybe the hem really IS that crooked -- now that I look at the close-up pictures it looks worse. But considering how quickly I slapped this together, it'll do. We've already turned out attention away from this (even though it hasn't happened yet) to the NEXT big productions -- we found out yesterday that Thalia will be Peppermint Patty in You're a Good Man Charlie Brown and Annabeth will be Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins. I think the performances are in June. Much blathering about rehearsals in the weeks to come.

Weekend Update

Our weekend started out with a Fall Showcase of musical theatre and drama classes on Friday night.

Annabeth's class performed numbers from Newsies. We were all struck by how LOUD Annabeth is. Not a huge surprise if you know our families, but somehow hearing her belt it out on stage takes me off guard.


Thalia's class performed numbers from White Christmas -- this picture is from Snow:



Overall a pretty good show. Afterwards I brought home Annabeth and 2 of her Girl Scout/theatre friends -- one of the girls needed to finish her sewing badge, so we arranged a sleepover after the performance. And the other girl ... well, she was in Scouts and in the performance and a good friend, so why not make it a party? In the meantime, Rick took Thalia and one of HER friends (older sister of one of the Scouts) to a swing dance that was going on during the performance and running until about 10pm or so.

The sleepover crowd was awake by the time we got everyone home from the swing dance and headed to bed ourselves -- about midnight. And when I got up to let the cats out the next morning at 6am they were already up. Wow. So, after they finished up the sewing badge, played around, and we got everyone back to the appropriate parents (although NOT managing to get jackets and toothbrushes to the appropriate homes -- oops), Annabeth wanted to go see Harry Potter with a friend at the afternoon show. We nixed it, being mean parents.

She sat down to read a book instead ...



And spent about 2 hours there in the chair.


The rest of the weekend was spent dealing with leaves, which is always our November crisis. And practicing for auditions on Monday night -- Thalia's age group is putting on You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Annabeth's is doing some sort of rendition of Mary Poppins (oddly, the musical theatre group Annabeth was in last spring also did a version of Mary Poppins). Thalia sang One Life to Live from Lady in the Dark -- her vocal teacher had recommended it as being appropriate for a Charlie Brown audition since the words and music sort of "fit" the characters of Charlie Brown (also, we've noticed the vocal teacher has a thing for Gershwin). She performed the same monologue she had done during the musical theatre summer camp this past summer. And Annabeth sang Wendy from Peter Pan, which I thought sounded alot like It's a Jolly Holiday with Mary from Mary Poppins.

Auditions were last night (Monday night). We spent the day at various classes, did the auditions, and then scrambled to get ready for the contractor to show up in about 20 minutes to install new windows this morning -- it was supposed to be Wednesday, but he had an cancellation, so we bumped it up a day. Speaking of which, I should probably be getting organized for that, seeing as they're going to take over the kitchen in just a few minutes ....

Knitting!

This week in knitting class we talked about:

Kitchener stitch. I just showed them the example so they'd know it exists, and discussed applications. I never can remember how to do it without looking at directions, so I'm certainly not going to ask anyone else to memorize it. Please rest assured that I don't typically use violently contrasting yarn in these applications, but thought it made it easier to see what's going on.


Matress stitch. This one IS worth knowing off the top of your head, since it comes up so much, plus it's so easy once you see it. I went over it with a few students one-on-one -- people who were going to be using it in their projects.



And three needle bindoff, which is another easy-peasy way to join 2 pieces, although these would be 2 pieces butting up against each other. Again, I discussed some applications, drifting into my sewing mode to talk about the importance of having structure at a shoulder seam (I refrained from mentioning that I thought knitwear designers who avoid shoulder seams for the sake of avoiding seaming, choosing instead something like grafting, are obviously clueless about garment construction ... but I thought it strongly).



I'm not sure -- is this enough about joining? I hit some of the major highlights. I don't want to overburden them, but want them to be aware of the possibilities, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, when making their own design decisions.

Frankly, the main projects right now are scarves and fingerless mitts, neither of which need seaming. Two sisters whipped up a couple of eyelash yarn scarves for a craft fair last week, and were excited to report they actually sold one! Whoot!

As for me, my current projects are also scarves. I've finished the One Row Lace Scarf out of the 2 skeins of Seduce I bought last summer whilst going nuts crocheting all of the Choreography Team collars:




Using size 8 needles, it ended up 5 and a half feet long, which is a great size for me.

And now I've started the Missoni knock-off scarf, using the exact same yarn Selfish Seamstress used (which I supposed makes it a SelfishSeamstress knock-off scarf, yes?). Although I'm using smaller needles due to my eternally looser gauge, which I assume is looser than hers. Not that I would've swatched even if she HAD provided a gauge.




Eventually I'll get around to posting about homeschool again. Really. It does go on here now and then. It's just so ... daily. It doesn't have nice, neat starts and finishes like knitting projects or feisseanna. Or Girl Scout badges (which are, frankly, the most popular posts I write). Until then, you might want to check out the amazing new discovery I've made: you can read much of the Jedi Apprentice series (apparently out-of-print) free online. I'll let you have the pleasure of figuring out where to find it, since I know you'll feel as clever as I did when it works.