April Fool's!

Thalia is in charge of snacks for her Cadette troop today. So she sliced up pound cake,


toasted it (actually, I did this part, and it was really a pain to do),


mixed food coloring into vanilla frosting,


and made faux Grilled Cheese Sandwiches.




We considered making faux Tomato Soup out of vanilla pudding and food coloring, but decided not to.

EDITED TO ADD: People believed she actually brought grilled cheese sandwiches for a snack! What a hoot!

"This looks better than I thought it would."

Gee, honey, thanks for the vote of confidence



Okay, so she thinks the armscye needs to be scooped out more. And I have no idea how we ended up with 3 different lengths in the hemline. And in real life I don't see a fold line from the corner of the neckline to the armscye, but in the picture it looks like there's one. Then again, she was messing around seeing how it looked with her arms straight up in the air, so maybe the folds WERE there.

BUT, I think we're ready to refine the pattern pieces, then start cutting into the fashion fabric. Then figure out what needle to use for that fabric, and whether I have a press cloth around here somewhere.

This just might work out.

Tuesday's To-Do List

- Haircut

- Clean rat cage. We now have 3 rats. I need to write about.

- Stop by city hall to get some stuff I should've gotten last week.

- Grocery.

- Follow up on phone message someone left on St. Patrick's Day when I was too focussed on Irish Dance to deal with the real world. Oh, hey -- the woman called me back this morning, and it's already done! So, check that one off!

- Laundry.

"Did you bring someone else's socks home from camp accidentally?"

"No. Those are mine."

"I don't remember you having any tan socks like this."

"Those are white socks."

Long pause

"Oh."

- Homeschool stuff.

- Stop by Hancock's for a button, Kona cotton, Vogue patterns on sale. Do this while kids are at dance.

- Also stop by Target for printer ink, taco sauce, and other stuff I can't remember right now. Should probably make a list.

- Thalia needs shoes to go with her Easter outfit. Also, I need to put together Easter baskets sometime soon. Do we have any eggs for an egg hunt? Will I have a chance to deal with any of this today? Maybe we could look at shoes after I pick Thalia up from her science class this afternoon.

- Work on AnnaBeth's Easter dress. We couldn't find a pattern for what she wanted, so I'm making it up, sort of morphing a Burda and a Kwiksew. Trying it out in scrap fabric first:


So far it reminds me of uniforms from fastfood places in the late 70s/early 80s.

- Also, make Easter dress for me sometime ... fabric is washed, pattern located, but will wait until AnnaBeth's is done.

- Deal with vague feeling that I'm forgetting something really important that needs to be done today.

What We Did This Weekend

AnnaBeth left for a camping trip Friday afternoon. Rick went to the NCAA basketball tournament directly after work. That left Thalia and I to spend the evening however we chose. We decided to select food that a) Rick can't eat due to food sensitivities, and b) AnnaBeth doesn't like ... so we got Chinese. We also got a movie we figured neither Rick nor AnnaBeth would enjoy -- Julie and Julia. It was a nice evening.

Saturday was spent looking at carpet for the family room. We brought several samples home, which the cats enjoyed clawing. I sort of hoped Black Cat would throw up on the one sample, since Ms. Snooty Salesperson from Snooty Carpet Place assured us that anything like that would clean up easily with water. So far, though, it has been at least 72 hours since a hairball. Drat.

I also made the muslin for Thalia's Easter skirt on Saturday.

Sunday we went to early church, then Sunday School. Home early, quick lunch, and then Rick took off for the Sunday NCAA game. I ran some errands, then went to pick up AnnaBeth from camping. She looked so pale -- I wondered if something had gone horribly wrong or if she was starting to get sick. She said she had fun; I think the main issue was that she doesn't do well with crowds of people and had just spent 48 hours with a large group. We skipped all of our usually Sunday afternoon/evening stuff, and hung out at home. I worked on Thalia's skirt, we watched Bob Newhart reruns, and had another quiet evening.

Must go now -- Black Cat seems to be contemplating a hairball regurgitation, and I must contemplate whether to move her to the carpet sample.

Weekly Report 3/26/10

MATH:

Thalia is working in fractions (chapter 11) in Jacob's Algebra.

AnnaBeth is still working on decimals in RightStart Level E. Yesterday were problems using retail gasoline prices ... the examples in the book were around .99 and 9/10s. "Isn't that pretty cheap for gas, Mommy?" Um, yeah.

SCIENCE:

Thalia's co-op class is studying light, which she says is extremely boring.

AnnaBeth has been working on various Junior Girl Scout badges. Aside from finishing up the Science Discovery badge, she's also working on the Oil Up badge, and has started the Earth Connections badge's plant identification activities (learning 10 trees and learning about 5 native plants along with their traditional uses).

WRITING

Thalia wrote a persuasive paper guided by her Jump In writing program. When I cautioned her about overuse of exclamation points (one is plenty for a short paper) she made a caustic comment about the writing in Apologia Physical Science, which she linked to a further caustic comment about a popular fiction author. Ahem. Life with a middle schooler is so fun.

AnnaBeth studied poetry in Writing With Ease 3, which uses Lewis Carroll and Jack Prelutsky as examples.

GRAMMAR

Thalia is working with pronoun antecedents in Analytical Grammar. By the way, as of last week she has finished the punctuation sections of Analytical Grammar, scoring quite high. So why was there a big fat comma splice in the first paragraph of that persuasive paper? Are we planning on applying any of this swanky grammar-stuff?

AnnaBeth is on lesson 65 of First Language Lessons 4. The week started with a poetry review in which she recited from memory "Afternoon on a Hill" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysse Shelley, "How Doth..." by Lewis Carroll, "Learning to Read" by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats. The rest of the week has been spent on types of sentences and direct quotations.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Thalia continues Mango Spanish.

AnnaBeth has completed the "basic" level of Mango French and is now trying the "complete" level. Although she's learned how to say de rein, but A Femme d'un Certain Age says to use je vous en prie. But perhaps that's for older women, and not 10 year olds. Or perhaps for the upper class, and not we peasants. Ah, the subtleties! If we move to France I shall be paralyzed with indecision over which to use.

HISTORY

We should've studied the opening of Suez Canal, but we didn't. But, it will still be there next week. That's the great thing about history -- it sticks around. We should get to it next week, so stay tuned.

Work in Progress Wednesday

What's going on here:

1. Sneezing. When the maples start to bloom I start to sneeze.

2. Hairballs. Another sign of spring -- the cats shed, and Black Cat starts hocking up hairballs all over the place. Good times.

3. Sewing. Thalia wants a hot pink pencil skirt for Easter. I found a pinstripe gabardine in the clearance section of JoAnn Fabrics -- $3 per yard.



I started laying out the muslin yesterday (making a muslin because, let's face it, pencil skirts never fit correctly right off the bat). And it's still sort of laying there


while I sneeze.

4. Finally delivered the Girl Scout cookies to the homeless shelter. They count towards the Feinstein Challenge tally for the shelter, so they also get $61 to spend on other food. Cool.

5. Getting AnnaBeth ready for camping this weekend. Highlight: needed boots with 1 inch heel for horseback riding (a Girl Scout Council rule around here -- no clue if other Councils have this rule); found a pair at Goodwill for $2. Woosh! Lowlight: she's apparently bent on destroying herself before she goes -- so far she's had a spectacularly huge bug bite on her leg (we think she sat on a spider), and as soon as that started to heal she fell off of her scooter and banged up knees and feet. Amazingly, no broken bones from the scooter incident. But each time something happens she panics about the camping trip. I'll be glad when this is over.

Junior Girl Scout Science Discovery Badge -- Homeschool-style

AnnaBeth missed most of the meetings in which her troop worked on the Science Discovery badge, so we've been working on it here at home ... and counting it as homeschool science. I love the Junior Girls Scout science badges -- they're so wonderfully open-ended -- so this hasn't been a hardship at all.

Activity 1. Chemical Appearing Act.

As written in the Junior Badge book, you're supposed to combine 4 Tblsp of cornstarch with 1 cup of warm water for the "magic ink", then paint or write with it on paper. Next, put a Tblsp of iodine tincture in 1 cup of rubbing alcohol and paint the iodine solution over the paper to see your secret picture or message magically appear.

But I had a hazy memory that you don't need rubbing alcohol for this. So I looked up and used these directions instead.

What neither the website nor the badge book mentions is that you need to test your paper with the iodine solution before you even begin this project. Some paper has a sort of starchiness to it that develops the iodine solution whether there's cornstarch on it or not. Our printer paper came out purple even without cornstarch, but our art sketchbook paper worked beautifully.



2. Light and Reflection.

The badge book has a rather lame set of directions for making a kaleidoscope. I really like these directions better. Although I'd see about getting some plastic mirrors to cut up and put inside -- so much more reflective, and probably about as easy to find as the heavy plastic they're calling for.

In any event, we totally by-passed all of this and bought a kit. It really IS easy to put together. We didn't discover the directions inside the box lid until we had it all done -- we had just lined it up according to the diagram on the bottom of the box.






3. Water Tricks.

Make a needle float on water. The badge book didn't suggest using a tissue to lower the needle into the water (which is sort of a standard suggestion for this particular experiment), so we tried it without the tissue. Some needles sank, but some floated.



View from the bottom of the dish. The needle in the hazy distance is the one currently floating on top.



Also, find out how many drops of water you can put on a penny (this experiment always bugs me because drop sizes are going to vary). Then put a dab of soap on your finger and touch the water to see what happens.




I had found some nice kid-friendly explanations of surface tension online, but, alas, didn't bookmark them.

4. Can't Live Without It -- make a collage about sciency stuff, and 5. Act Like a Scientist -- draw/identify/classify some stuff -- we skipped these.

6. Become a Scientist. AnnaBeth made it to the meeting where a scientist was interviewed.

7. It's a Hands-On and Happening Place. Visit a science museum. Ummm, yeah, maybe we'll have time for that ... we haven't been all year, although we used to go once a month.

8. Environmental Observer. We copied off the Stream Health Checklist in the badge book and took it with us to a local stream. The checklist asks you to rate the cleanliness, water flow, clearness of the water, amount of wildlife, odor, etc. etc. as simply Good, Fair, or Poor. It was a nice way for a kid to begin thinking about these things.



9. See What? Optical illusions. AnnaBeth had fun with this site.

10. Here's the Rub. These are friction experiments that AnnaBeth did in a meeting. And Thalia did in Apologia Physical Science. You know, send something down a ramp that's been made slick or sticky or gritty, then compare speeds. If we'd done it at home I would've used the slide on our playset.

So, more than 6 activities completed, and we're done with the badge!