New Blogs

The kids have both started their own blogs. I have them linked on the side so you can check them out. Samuel has several links on his about knights. He is planning on expanding the links to other areas of interest. Right now, though, he is focusing on knights. He picked out a new knight book yesterday that he is really enjoying by Usborne. It has several internet links to all things to do with knights and these are the links he has chosen to put on his blog.

Eva's blog is about how much she loves animals. She plans to take lots of photographs of animals and all of the other things she loves and post them on her blog.

We have spent the last couple of days (and plan to spend a couple more days next week) figuring out if the kids like the classes we are trying out at Village Home. So far we have not really found a match for either of the kids. Eva said no to Spanish for Preschoolers. Samuel was disappointed with both his playful inventions class and the drama class he tried out today. He has decided to try them both out one more time next week to see if he enjoys them any more. Eva is also going to see what their little villagers class is like. It is a kind of preschool-y type of class for four-ish year olds (and threes and maybe a five or two), all homeschoolers I am told. And then because we dropped one class and are thinking of dropping some others, we signed up for an art class, because as Samuel says, those are always fun. If Samuel doesn't like the drama class next week I may sign him up for another drama class at a children's theater in Portland. But for right now we are just figuring out these classes. And that has turned out to be plenty for now. Even if we end up dropping all of the classes it has been a learning adventure for all of us and helped us to clarify what it is we are all looking for, myself included. And yes, next time I may go to the meet-the-teacher night to see if we can glean any extra information about the class and/ or teacher before hand.

We are reading many many books about cats and dogs and horses this week. Eva wanted lots of cat and dog books and also books on spiders (imagine that!) and a book on crystals and rocks and a great book on eggs (that was my pick and it was enjoyed by all). Samuel wants to know more about horses and even how to take care of horses. We are also reading this interesting and enjoyable series by Mary Pope Osborne (she wrote the magic tree house series) about the Odyssey. She has adapted the stories into six short books for kids. They are really fun and Samuel is loving them. They are a bit over the top for Eva, though, and a little more gruesome than I imagined they would be. She is very faithful to the original! I just saw she also has a favorite Greek myths book and favorite stories from the middle ages and I think those will be our next stop.

Eva eating a peach near the sunflowers that she planted. We planted the sunflowers at different intervals this year so they are all coming up tall and short and blooming all around.



Here are some of the taller guys. They are taller than me!



This bee is really enjoying the sunflowers we planted.



The autumn light creates long shadows on the tomatoes who are finally turning red. The next few days of heat will probably turn several of them and then it is spaghetti time!



Eva picking flowers in her maiden costume. Today she asked me what the difference was between a maid and a maiden and it got me thinking about the origin of the word maid. It is embarrassing to explain these things to my very open and optimistic daughter. I feel sad but she tosses it off happily!



More lovely flowers Eva picked.



Lovely rainbow in our back yard.

“The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes”
- Tolstoy

Eva took some photos of some of the largest spiders living in our front yard. We counted five giant spiders last night- there are others but these five all have bodies of about a 1/2 inch and their bodies plus legs are about 1 1/2 inches, maybe a little larger. They are big. I think four of them are banded garden spiders. One of them I thought was a large yellow garden spider but after looking at photos I don't think so any more. I lost the link of the spider I thought it was. Oh well, suffice it to say she is one large spider!





Two of the spiders were frightened by the flash. They ran off of their web to their hiding spot. The other three stood their ground, with one of them even displaying at the camera, putting her forelegs out to show us she was fierce and prepared to protect her web and/or eat us. It was tricky for Eva to get so close without running into the webs. I thought they turned out pretty good.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now, Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
The Tempest, Act V, Sc. I

Today the kids and I met some friends and went to Oaks Park's Not-Back-to-School-Day, a day set aside each year just for homeschoolers to have fun at the small Portland amusement park. Ride bracelets are thrillingly cheap and the kids went on several today. It was a lot of fun, although I have to say for myself that I think I have had my fill of spin-around-until-you-are-sick rides, at least for this year!

scooter race gone mad

Tonight I heard the kids out on our patio racing their scooters and then I heard a lot of crazy screaming and crying and just general frustration and obvious dissatisfaction, so I went out to see what was up. This is not entirely foreign around here but it did sound more urgent than even the more usual outbursts.

When I got outside both kids were beside themselves and very angry and frustrated. When I heard the story I couldn't help but smile. Ah. An exercise on who won. Samuel was using his scooter, one of the kinds you stand up on and push off with one foot. Eva was using her scooter, the kind that you sit down on and has four wheels and you push along. If I had to bet money on them, I would assume that during this game Samuel would win every single time and Eva would be more and more frustrated. Because one, it isn't much fun and because two, Samuel is not always the most graceful of winners and will let Eva know that she has lost every single time. There are times when he works with Eva and she wins some and he wins some and the *game* goes more smoothly. This was not one of those times.

What I did not know was that during these races, Eva's friend Lizzie was also racing. And would you believe that Lizzie, not Samuel, was winning every single time? For those of you who don't know Lizzie, she is one of those grand childhood friends that only a child can see. We don't call them pretend because who am I to doubt the reality of my child. We do admit that they are invisible to most of us and can usually only be seen by the child who knows them. In this case, Eva is the only one who sees Lizzie. So you can imagine Samuel's frustration when Eva would announce AGAIN that Lizzie had won that race, NOT Samuel. Samuel would race across the finish line, triumphant and shout "I won!" And Eva would smile slyly and say, "Nope, Lizzie won that one too." Oh was Samuel upset. That must have happened a couple of times at least by the time I got out there.

But! If you knew what kind of scooter Lizzie was riding, you wouldn't be surprised that she had won every race. Lizzie's scooter had wind machines (and it is very windy tonight!) and windmills all over her scooter and Lizzie's scooter had a cup holder (reminiscent of the cup holder on Samuel's new booster seat in the car) and Lizzie's scooter was comfortable enough to sit on with all of your legs up and the windmills just wheeled it along. No wonder she won. I offered to get Samuel a windmill for his scooter to give him a leg up on Lizzie and he was most decidedly not amused. I should say that at first he did smile, but then he remembered how upset he was by the whole thing and he yelled again. And what did he yell? "Lizzie can't race with us any more!"

Maybe Eva isn't the only one who can see Lizzie :)

blog on sleeping

Here is an interesting blog with a post on bimodal sleeping. This is a neat concept to me, as someone who has been labeled a "light sleeper", a.k.a. someone who wakes up in the night if something is going on (e.g. earthquakes have woken me up, babies have woken me up, dogs tick tick ticking on the hard wood floors have woken me up, lights in the hallway have woken me up...).

Bimodal sleeping is thought to be the type of sleeping our ancestors engaged in, those who lived out on the savannah before electric lights kept us up to all hours of the night. It is characterized by two sleep sessions during the night separated by a light waking time of an hour or so between them.

"With artificial light, modern humans have essentially managed to extend their daytime activities late into the night, when all other sensible creatures are busy sleeping.

As a result, we have compressed our natural sleep into artificially short nighttimes, but not all people are so easily tamed by artificial light. Some people, who may just have very strong circadian rhythms, still have this primitive bimodal sleep that they confuse with a sleep disorder."

spiders

Well, I have already posted about spiders once recently. But I do love them so. Spider season is a fun time and it is in full swing now with the spiders getting bigger and bigger. I counted at least 7 different spiders and 5 different species making webs in just one window of my home. I love spiders and we co-habitate well together. I have been running into more and more webs that are suspended further and further out from tree branches and rose bushes and plants and in the car window and suspended from the roof and seemingly in mid-air. The other day I walked into three giant spider webs complete with spiders. They don't want to be on my head any more than I want them there and it is a mad scramble for both of us. And these are big spiders too, the larger banded garden spiders and they are getting bigger by the day. Then, if that weren't enough for one day, I put on my jeans that I had drying out on the clothesline and there was a spider, complete with web, inside one of the legs. I guess this is why I haven't found very many ear wigs lately.

The kids and I have also been going again out at night with a flashlight to check out the spiders. This is a great time to see them. They are out in all their glory, often catching several insects. We keep track of the biggest spiders and check on them periodically. There are two right now in the front that are vying for largest-spider-in-the-yard-status, otherwise known as the big-ladies. I like to find their hiding places as well. Usually you can trace one of the web lines to a leaf or flower or some small hiding place and if the spider is not in the center of her web, she can be found hiding behind the leaf, etc.

For those who haven't seen the link about the giant spider web in Texas... What fun to think of those spiders weaving those webs together.

And here is an interesting biology blog...