Thursday

Balance

Let's start at the orchard, shall we?

Picking apples.
Perfect.

What actually turned up, however, were peaches!  !!  :)
Even better.
Peaches for eating
peaches for freezing
peaches for jam.
How divine.
(Hopefully we'll get back for more apples next week....)

To the park!
We were outside of our neighborhood, so chose one we haven't been to in a couple of years.
And guess what?
Friends were there, too!
Excellent.

Home to drop off Papa so's he could go to work...

and to lunch with the three of us.
Our favorite lunch place has a patio, and a little stream with ducks and birds flitting about.  Always nice, that.

And then a walk around the little nature park behind our lunch place.

 

To the grocer's for a few bags full of things,

and to home.

To a new Zoombinis (Mountain Rescue),

jumping,

making final plans for a girly playdate tomorrow,

Jumpstart,

and Owls.
"Look, Mommy... isn't this owl in-stra-sting?"   So of course we had to read about them.

All is well here.

wednesday perfect.

researching and ordering new 'puter games

tidying up

jumpstart world first grade

and still.  :)

the (preserved) fall leaves are done.  (I'll be showing you how that went.)
much, much different than wax, I thought at first.  waxed ones keep their (curved and crackled) shape, these are flat and pliable (rather limp)... and they feel like silk leaves.  that was a surprise, that the texture was so interesting.
Maddie said... "Ooh, what's this??  It feels like a peach!"
she's right, it does.
as the day wore on, however, they started curling as they dried.  which I actually prefer, as a little natural curve is what I wanted.

jumpstart for Madd, still.  :)  she's loving it, today.

Othello for Trevy and I.
I won--but only barely.  I reminded him that I was playing ruthlessly (and I am the Othello champion), ergo he had nothing to be ashamed of.  : )

loves to the green babies.

drawing
(for all three)

jumping

'puter play.
jumpstart world first grade for one (surprise!!!)
and cluefinders: reading for the other.

minecraft for one,and the geo-shapes game for Maddie and me.

 

pokemon research

and Freddy Fish 4: The Case of the Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch.

Trev picked out cuisenaire rods to play with today.
"wanna play now, Bud?"
yup.
division, today.

Nim!  love nim.

play of the rasslin' sort for the babes,
and sudoku for the mama.
love that.

yup.  that's pretty much what my front porch -and front yard- usually look like.  : ) yes, I do feel sorry for our neighbors.  however; I love my children even more than that.  (and I did suggest the backyard and a lowered clothes line when Maddie was playing pioneer the other day and wanted to hang cloths on the front fence.  :) )

it's not so much the Doing that was so lovely today, but rather the Being.
lots of laughter, and spirits were very, very easy.

all is well here.

tuesday

one of those days.
not a horrid day.  just one of those "where's my refund?" days.
it seems that often "in between" days are like that for me.  it's nice to get in there to see what's happening, but just doing inventory wasn't very satisfying for me, yesterday.  i was left at the end of the day feeling discontent, unassuaged. 
but there were a few things that were happy.

maddie engineering, for one.  i said the other day that i supposed i would recover from her love affair with the tellie.  my children are free to watch television, as you probably know, and i don't fuss over it--even when it's an apparent marathon.  so i wasn't really getting edgy about the television so much as i was arrested by the thought that Maddie wasn't being her inquisitive, flitting self.  all of a sudden she had Stopped, and was sitting.  this is the child that as far as i'm concerned is an unschooling mama's dream...always wanting to go, create, explore, express, engineer, investigate... to see her just Stop was rather disconcerting.
i confess i had the thought at Day Two of television... is this the end?
really, i should have known better.  i mean - you would not suppose that a free child would lose their interest in life, right?
regardless, yesterday morning (after already foraging outside amongst the raspberries, blackberries, and grapes for her breakfast) she called to me to come and see her invention.

i was properly and thoroughly impressed.  she had dug tools out of the box, was making holes with screws, utilizing her spare parts... wonderful.
[rolls eyes at herself] apparently my child hadn't rotted away after all.

moving on with our day, then.
we have lots of computer games.  i just recently went through the cabinet next to the computer, and reorganized the babes' games.  many of Trevelyn's have moved into Maddie's domain.  she now has like 50 or something, he's down to ten or so.  so in the name of "let's see what interesting things we have around here", yesterday we checked things out.
we looked at minecraft.  watched a tutorial or two.  asked a couple of questions of friends.
renewed our Jumpstart account (that was for Madd).
got some things out of the drawer for Trev that i thought "maybe".  but no.  they weren't interesting.  (more like quizzes than actual learning and play.)

so nothing new there, but we have several for Trev that we love... the Cluefinders (Reading Adventures) are interesting and fun, Zoombinis Logical Journey is good, we're loving Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail, have decided that MathBlaster is alright again, and of course the Lego games, all of the Zoo Tycoon sets we have, and Spore (and Galactic).
for future play we have Age of Mythology and DK's The New Way Things Work, Carmen Sandiego Word Detective and Super Solvers Gizmos and Gadgets (titles that came in the Adventure Workshop 4-6 grade), and we have Zoombinis Mountain Rescue on its way.

and yesterday we ventured into TimezAttack, to remind ourselves if we liked it or not... it's a good one.

 

so the day continued on like that, and this morning i'm feeling much better, and am actually looking forward to living, as opposed to sitting and sorting through things per yesterday.  it helped that i woke up at 4am, and have not gone back to sleep!  plenty of quiet time to sit here on my laptop... i've been researching new software (reading reviews and comparing them to titles we like), and have placed an order for Crazy Machines: The Wacky Contraptions Game, Cluefinders Math 9-12, Cluefinders 4th Grade Adventures: Puzzle of the Pyramid, and Cluefinders 5th Grade Adventures: Secret of the Living Volcano.  we're due for a few new titles, i think. 

so the things that felt as if they were dragging me yesterday are all put into their proper places, and i feel revived, again.  aah.

now i can get going and get my house and my head ready for a day of playing with my babies.
sounds good to me.

Monday.

First order of the day was preserving leaves... in the past we've always dipped them in wax to keep them, this year we're trying something different... glycerin!  We'll keep you informed of how that goes....

 

I supposed this morning that it might be alright if I got out a few autumn things.  At least the scarecrow.  I mean--Mabon has come and gone after all, even though I pretty much hopped right over it while whistling and looking the other way.  It's not that I refuse to acknowledge it, you understand, but rather that I just feel sort of behind.  :)  Back there, somewhere. Floatin' in the pool with a glass of yummy microbrew in my hand.
Sigh.

So there I was.  Lost in the garage, hoping nothing frightening would attach itself (permanently) in my dreads.

Found the scarecrow.
Then the bag full of jack o-lanterns (I love them so!) and ghosties.
Eventually I found the harvest pumpkins, and the besom for the front door.
I had only planned on getting out the autumn things, but you know how that goes.
May as well make the declaration, hmm?  Hang the hat at the front door.

Oh, and there's Glenda.  She's my favorite.

 

I do love adding that bright orange to my livingroom (oddly enough)....

Big Cat Diary for Maddie (Netflix).

Math 1-2 for Trev and I.
We both figured he was pretty well past any info there, but I thought we could review just to see.  (And he was game.)

Trampoline multiplication.  Something I made up.
I asked what number they wanted to practice with... "Three?"
"Yeah!" they said.
Starting with 0, I wrote numbers around the tramp.  I told Maddie she could find any number that I mentioned, for Trev, he needed to find the answer to the problem.
0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15... and so on.

 "Three times three!"
Maddie made it extra confusing by shouting out numbers... "Three!" she'd say.
This was an interesting practice, for we don't have a requirement of the multiplication tables around here (ie 'here's the table, now you memorize it')... there was lots of adding and subtracting going on as well.
"Well, three times two is... three twice--three plus three..."
"Oh!  Six.  Plus three more is nine!" And he'd jump to the number.
"Three times nine!"
"Uuh...."
"Well, three times ten is....minus three...and notice again that any number that adds up to nine is divisible by nine..."
Lots of fun, that.  :)  (And the babes agree.)

 This is how my children play.  Lots of funny business while games and whatnots go on.  

An' then MathBlaster.  ' Been a while since we've played that one, as we got stuck and frustrated a while back.  We got over that hump, today, finally.  Phew.

And more.

And more jumpin'.

And more MathBlaster.

And more jumpin'.

An' dinner and part three of America: The Story of Us.

And then a little after-dark family bike ride.

Good enough for me.

sunday : red and gold

i suppose it's that time.
not that i don't love fall -for i usually say it's my very favorite- it's just that it's so hard for me to say goodbye to summer.  bare feet on the grass, outdoor musical concerts, swimmin' pools, buckets of sand on the beach... there's just so much living in the summertime.
though nothing is visibly changing much here in the valley yet, it's true that the days are endlessly comfortable, and the nights cool enough for long, warm snuggles.

yesterday we went to our favorite celebrating-autumn-in-all-its-glory spot, to see if it's true; that Mama Nature really is patting us all along.

our bit-of-magic spot was just starting to turn.  we collected a few leaves, and made friends with all the caterpillars.

sigh.  i suppose it's true, then.

we were making a day of our adventuring, so from the mountains we went into the desert, out to the island.  one more trip of the summer.

it's a spectacular world out there, hmm?
even though.