Halloween Costumes

I already more or less wrote about our Halloween night, but let me sum up: Andrew worked late so I sent the kids out to trick-or-treat for themselves for a while before joining them because we weren't getting any trick-or-treaters out anyway. It was such a cold night (for us southerners) that the youngest few wanted nothing other than to go home (they reasoned we didn't have to go door-to-door collecting candy since we had a big ol' bucket waiting for us at home and kept saying things like, "It's almost my bedtime!" (but then, of course, they didn't want to go to bed once we got home)). The houses in our neighbourhood tend to have rather large yards so it took a lot of walking to get not much candy, not that it was a terribly difficult or unfamiliar walk (we walk around our neighborhood all the time), but I imagine it would have been nicer if we had been warmer. 

The one picture I took of the kids on Halloween

Sew...

I'm not very good at sewing and, in fact, until this year had never used a sewing machine (at least not really; I'd tried to use my great-grandma's sewing machine but it never would work quite correctly (it probably needs more than a little tune up given that it is a relic)) but somehow or other I decided to do some sewing with my little Activity Day girls.

After learning that it would take them a full hour to sew one straight seam (by hand, but still), I decided that if we were to ever finish this project I'd better help them along a little bit.

We're making scrunchies—with a bow!—because apparently scrunchies are back in style. Most of the girls got the scrunchie part finished but not a soul had started on their bow. 

I asked my co-leader if she'd sew them up for the girls and she said she would but then some family stuff came up and she ended up being a little unaccessible the last few weeks so today I decided to sit down and do it myself.

I've been practicing my sewing skills by making cloth napkins out of old towel-things Karen had (because that was an environmental change the kids decided we could make—no more paper napkins—but, honestly, we go through a lot of napkins at the dinner table (we are messy, messy people (may we please grow out of that)) so I keep having to make more to keep our inventory ahead of our demand (and we still run out).

I'm 16 napkins in (I believe) and so by this point in time I can sew a mean straight(ish) seam. I've never turned corners or attempted a curved stitch—until today when I stitched together eight little bows for my activity day girls!

Miriam went ahead and turned hers right-side out and it doesn't look too shabby so hopefully all the others will turn out just as well. I figure that as poorly and lopsidedly sewn as they are, I probably did no worse than the girls would have done (and I did it in a fraction of the time).

So I'm basically a seamstress now, right?

DNA extraction

We've moved on from human genetics (a bit) to discuss the life cycles of plants (since that's where our textbook went next). I decided that instead of planting seeds in different environments, we'd do some DNA extraction for one of our experiments (since we have acorns sprouting (or not sprouting) all over our yard currently and since my kids know the parable of the sower, this didn't seem like a very riveting experiment to do (What?! You mean the seed left on the empty lid didn't sprout even when left in the sunny window while the see that we put into the soil, which we made sure got plenty of sun and water did sprout?! Who would have thought?!); we do, however, have an oak tree growing in our kitchen window sill (and several sprouting all over the lawn, but none sprouting on our driveway; go figure))).

Like I said, this textbook sometimes feels a little juvenile for Miriam (and sometimes even for Benjamin). 

The DNA extraction, though, was right up our alley. I'd seen this idea pop up a few times over the years and decided to pull it out now since we were studying both DNA and plants and happened to have a few pumpkins on hand. 

Weirdly, while I could find several videos (like this one) telling how to extract the DNA, none of the videos discussed why anyone would ever need to extract DNA from something. Fortunately, a quick internet search gave me plenty of reasons why (genetic modification, crime scene samplings, cloning, and so forth) so we had plenty to discuss.

After pulverizing a bit of our pumpkin in the blender (with some water to make it nice and juicy), I scooped some into baggies for each of the kids to squish and added some dish soap and salt (our washing solution). Once their pumpkin puree was thoroughly mixed with the soap and salt, we ran it through a strainer and (since I couldn't find any cheese cloth) some paper towels. 

Here we are squishing our mixture into our strainer:

DST has us all like...

Why do we do this to ourselves? We've been willingly walking into jetlag for decades...and to what end? I suppose one nice thing about it is that my children can play outside until it gets dark but we still get to eat dinner at a decent time once they're driven indoors...

Alexander was rather thrown off by things. He woke up at his usual time on Sunday morning, which meant he woke up early for the new time, and then he fell asleep halfway through sacrament meeting and didn't wake up until halfway through Sunday school. Once he was well-cuddled, we went to nursery where I sat him in a chair and walked out of the room. And—miraculously—he didn't start crying immediately. Rather he participated (silently) before getting weepy (but not unconsolably so).

He was only in there for about twenty minutes and his leaders did end up bringing him to me just a few minutes before church let out, but all in all he did a fabulous job. And he was so excited for his little handouts. His teacher makes great handouts that he plays with all week long.

Last week they got a little paper suitcase with a picture of someone praying, a picture of someone reading scriptures, and a picture of someone being baptized. This week they got a little bag with different books of scripture to put inside as well as a little sunshine on a stick.

His leader sure loves her Cricut (and he sure loves that she loves it)!

We talked a lot about how we found each other, just like Llama Llama and his mama (because mamas come back for their babies). Hopefully next week will run a little smoother than this week did and Alexander will be a little bit braver because, as I mentioned, he was a little thrown off by this new schedule that's been dictated to us.

He was so out of sorts at bedtime—so beyond ready for bed—that he bit me!

Some fun stories about my cool kids

I don't know many Halloween songs, but when I was in nursery with Alexander last Sunday (because he still won't stay in there by himself; I actually tried leaving him but his leaders soon called me back in because they couldn't handle his...passionate...expression of separation anxiety) his music leader sang a Halloween song with the kids, so I recorded her singing it with them so that I could learn it.

It's just a short little song, but both Zoë and Alexander love it.

Here they are singing it before bed tonight (the tune is a little more...melodic...in real life, but I think Zoë did a pretty good job carrying it on her own):



Zoë sang it for Andrew the other night and when she did her big "BOO!" at the end he pretended like she'd really scared him and she started cackling. "Hahaha!" she squealed. "I scared you...with fear!"

Alexander simply sings, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah TREE! Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah ME! *silence, silence, silence* Ooo-oo! Ooo-oo! Ooo-oo! BOO!" because he's really big on syllables but not so big on enunciating sometimes, even though he can say "skeleton" and "pumpkin" and "werewolf" and all sorts of Halloween words.

Anyway, I love that we have this little song to sing with each other in October now so I'm glad Alexander's teacher was able to pass it on to us. I'm hoping he'll go into nursery easier eventually (we've only been trying for six months now). I pulled out Llama Llama Misses Mama and we've been reading it daily this week and talking a lot about how sometimes babies go to their own classes and mommas go to their own classes but that mommas always, always, always come back to pick up their babies.

We'll see how tomorrow goes.

*****

Triumph

So, once a quarter (or so), Rachel's school gives the children a recess. They don't typically have recess (or any sort of real break), even though the CDC recommends that all students K–12 be given 20 minutes of recess daily (a lot of upper-grades schools seem to be unaware of this), so these recesses are a real treat.

The recesses are "sponsored" by PBIS, which stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and which seeks to help schools establish, well, positive behaviour through incentives rather than punishments. Not that they are against punishment when it's necessary, just that people are often more motivated with positivity than with negativity. So, they're trying to get schools to use positive reinforcement methods as well as fostering connection with students.

Because that's what we're learning as a society: that connection is important.

Dependency on drugs and alcohol (for one example), and bullying behaviour (for another), can often be traced to the inability of someone to connect with anyone else. They feel alone. So if we can teach kids to have real, meaningful relationships (and if we treat them with respect rather than always throwing the book at them) a lot of future problems in their lives can be avoided.

Obviously I believe this program should be welcomed into Rachel's school with arms wide open (because it seems to me that they really struggle with this (the entire district, really)).

But that's just my opinion.

Anyway, they just had their first PBIS-sponsored "walk and talk," where they skipped out on their "connections" classes (which is just their elective course, not a core subject) and were given a snack (a bag of chips and a water bottle) and then had to walk a lap around the field before being allowed to—for once—freely associate with one another.

Rachel is pretty good at surrounding herself with good people. She walked around with some friends (acquaintances, really, since they don't get much time to foster relationships at school) and at the end of their time they decided to pick up some litter around the field (arguably a very good thing to do).

Unfortunately—and unbeknownst the vast majority of the students—a couple of students did not choose such a wholesome activity, had a little disagreement, and ended said disagreement with a physical fight.

Rules

School here continues to be...interesting. We are actually enjoying homeschool at lot more than I thought we would and Rachel is still enjoying middle school...but it's just not the experience I would have wished for her...so we're looking into alternatives for high school right now. The problem with that is that sometimes colleges don't look too kindly on homeschool transcripts, so I'm looking into ways to ensure that my kids can still get into the colleges they want (AP exams will help and we're looking into dual enrollment as well, then there's online high school, and, of course, they can get the HOPE scholarship if they score above the 75th percentile on the ACT or SAT) but we're still at the exploratory stages of everything so...who knows).

The high school handbook is online and reading it gives me the chills. Here are some excerpts:

"Students are expected to conduct themselves as mature young adults while on...camps."

Fine. Cool. Neat. Normal.

But then the normalcy devolves into this:

Tragedy

An email was sent out from Rachel's school yesterday morning informing parents that a student at her school "was killed last night" and that they had extra support staff on hand. But that was all the information they sent out, which wasn't really enough information to calm my nerves. In fact, it was just the right amount of information (ie. not enough) to pique my nerves!

There was nothing about it in the news that I (or Andrew) could find.

So we went along our days, wondering what happened, wondering how this would effect Rachel. I texted her in the morning just before school would have been in session, but she didn't answer. She did, however, text me shortly after school let out. When I heard my phone buzz I immediately ran to it to see who it was and was glad it was her.

"Our bus driver got everybody cookies!" she informed me.

"So fun!" I said. "You'll definitely have to make them a thank you card!"

And that was it until she got home.

"How was school?" I asked her at the doorway.

"Fiiiiine," she answered, suspicious of my peppy-mom routine (I might be a mother but I am not typically ver peppy; I'm more of an "Oh, you're home! What time is it even?" mom than a waiting-for-you-at-the-door-with-a-smile mom).

"Anything...weird...happen today?"

"No."

"Nothing at all. Like, you didn't hear anything about anything or..."

NaBloPoMo

Years ago I thought NaBloPoMo was a joke. Like it was hard to write a blog post every day for a month? Please. That's child's play...

So I tried my hand at NanoWrimo and discovered that I'm really not a novel-of-that-length kind of a story-weaver (and that's okay because there are books of all lengths in the world). I never did finish a NanoWrimo novel. But I got my blog posts in, by golly.

And then I had more and more and more children and I'm finding that, actually, it is difficult to write a blog post every day, so perhaps NaBloPoMo would be a good thing for me to attempt once again.

I told myself this earlier in the day.

And then Alexander took until right now (it's 11:20 PM, for the record) to fall asleep , which means I was held hostage in his doorway for hours this evening (and my phone won't log on to blogger so I can't write form my phone).

So I suppose this is my first lame post for November.

Here's to more loquacious future!

Family history festivals

We finished reading Sylvia & Aki together the other day, which has been providing us with plenty to discuss during our social studies time (it's about two girls whose lives intersect in WWII: Aki is sent to a Japanese internment camp and Sylvia's family rents Aki's home and farm while they are away (and fights against segregation in California schools—the Mendez vs. Westminster case); there's seriously so much to digest in this book).

Unfortunately we don't have our new read-aloud book in our hands yet, so today we learned about Día de Muertos and Obon, as well as the history of our own Halloween holiday. I got a little teary as we watched little videos on YouTube, wishing we had a similar thing in our culture. I think, perhaps, the very root of Halloween is that sort of thing—the sort of thing where you acknowledge loss and remember about those you're missing and wish them well—but it's been buried by candy and spooks and general forgetfulness. It simply isn't a meaningful holiday anymore.

But I wish that it was.

I wish that we could build a boat in tribute to our lost loved one(s) to parade down the street. I wish we could bang on drums and gongs and set off firecrackers and yell their name out to sea. I wish we could say, "Hey, everyone! Here is who we've loved and lost! It's been really hard!" And I wish that our community would bang drums and set off firecrackers and say, "We know it's hard. We've lost someone, too. We're here for each other!"

I just think it's a beautiful thing that's missing from our society. Of course we mourn together at funerals and things, but we don't have a holiday with time set aside to acknowledge each other's pain, to remember our family (both here and beyond), and to celebrate life and, ultimately, death.