Rock Climbing Fun

Haley's American Heritage Girls troop has been working on their rock climbing badges.  This past Friday the girls all met at a local indoor rock climbing gym to learn the basics.  Who would have thought she would love it so much!  She had a blast!

Needless to say, the boys weren't too happy that they didn't get to climb.  Daddy now has to take them for a boy's climbing trip in the near future to make up for it.

Blast Off!

This day is the direct response to allowing my husband and twin boys access to an awesome hobby shop for obviously way too much time while Haley and I went shopping at Joann's.  Dummy me thought that they would have a nice time "browsing" all of the fun boy toys there.  But no...rather than just looking as I do, he left with a big model rocket, engines and all.

Notice Ryan WAY back in the distance with his fingers in his ears?  Yep, that's my boy.  He's not really into loud noises.  This was one of several different launches.  Haley's best friend Jaiden did the honors for this launch.

 Here goes Adam's turn being the official launcher!  One nice thing about this particular rocket was that every time it went up, it came back in one piece and was able to be launched again.  Even though the parachute didn't work and slow its descent as evidenced by the picture below.  It went really, really high too!

 Here's Adam with the launcher thingy.  No idea what its called.  Not my area of expertise.  The boys (both old and young) had a blast though.

We girls did our best to fly Haley's new dragon kite that she got for Christmas.  Never did manage to get it to really fly though.  She sure wore herself out trying though!

All in all it was a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon with family and friends!

Mercury Models!

This particular activity didn't exactly turn out as planned, but the boy's enjoyed it none the less, so I guess we'll call it a success.  We're studying the planets again this year along with lots of other fun earth and space science.  This week we learned about Mercury.  Since Haley was taking AGES to finish up her math, the boys and I did this particular activity without her. 

First, we mixed up a big batch of salt dough from a recipe in the textbook.  I suppose it should have been thicker and maybe it would've worked better.  We were supposed to have balls, but ours looked like blobs.  The dough was just too soft to hold the sphere shape needed for Mercury.  So, we considered it half of Mercury.

Then, once we had our Mercury model to work with, the boys proceeded to make craters of all depths and sizes to recreate the surface of  Mercury.  You may have noticed that they are in their pajamas...yes, that's a big perk of homeschooling.  They don't have to get dressed!  Nothing says school time like PJ's. 

The boys really had fun figuring out all kinds of objects to make different types of craters.  Pencils, crayons, and even odd shaped Legos were used.  We sat the models aside to dry for a few hours and to share with daddy when he came home.  As I said before, I obviously need more practice on salt dough, because the models dried on the outside, but stayed gooey inside.  We finally gave up and simply threw them away. 

Happy New Year!

Well, I can't exactly say that I'm sorry the holidays are over.  I don't know why, but this year it all seemed more stressful than usual.  Every year I say that I'm not going to wait until November to start thinking about Christmas, and every year, I procrastinate until the very last minute.  So, if the holidays are stressful, I'm the one to blame. 

We did take a nice long school break throughout much of December.  This is due to the fact that we just had so many illnesses, extra curricular activities, out of town company and just plain craziness, that we really needed the time away from school.  Its been a bit of a shock to the system getting back into the swing of things this week however.

I have been so bad about posting on the things we've been doing and learning about.  I don't even know where to start.  We have some fun activities planned later this week, so I'll do my best to post about them and share some pics.  In the meantime, from our family to your's...Happy New Year!!

Visitors...

Last night we had a very unique visitor to our house.  Never in the twelve years we've lived here have we had a visitor of this kind.  We've had opossums, wild turkeys, deer, snakes, hawks, but never this!

It was about 11:00 pm and I let our three dogs out to "do their business" before bed and they ran out started barking like crazy right beside the house.  I turned on the porch light and this terrified little face is looking up at me.

 

Poor little guy was just hungry and apparently came to our yard because of the cat food bowl on our porch.  He thought we were asleep for the night.  He got away from the dogs by climbing up the side of the house between the house and the fence.  He got himself wedged in and couldn't go up or down.  After quickly getting the dogs inside, snapping a couple of pictures, I got a broom and used the handle to give him a little boost up and in an instant he was gone.  I'm just so thankful that the dogs didn't catch him.  Is he cute, or what?

Busy days...

Well, as you may have guessed from my lack of posting, I've been super busy.  Just to catch you up on what's been happening in our lives, we've been keeping up with school work, Haley's choir class started back, we are participating in a weekly co-op using a Catholic classical style curriculum, I'm teaching science for this co-op, our church's Parish School of Religion is starting back, so I've been gearing up for that, I've been adding Friday get together and PE activities to my homeschool group's website, handling membership for that same group, running my bow business, re-signing the boy's up for Cub Scouts, becoming a leader for a brand new American Heritage Girls troop just for homeschooled girls (Haley is now a member), going on vacation to Florida for my family's annual family reunion and a quick trip to Ft. Myers Beach (I'll post pictures ASAP), oh and lets not forget my falling down the stairs the night before we left for Florida and spraining both ankles.  Thankfully only my right ankle is still giving me trouble.  I am feeling quite lucky that it didn't get broken, considering how bad it hurt and how hard I fell.

So, as you can see, we're really, really busy right now.  As I write this my kids are tearing newspaper into strips preparing to make two volcanoes that the kids in our co-op can paint on Friday.  I'm just praying that paper mache' dries really fast so that its ready for paint on Friday!  Anybody else feeling rather overwhelmed?

Making Volcanoes!

My children and I are participating in a homeschool co-op for the first time in many years.  We're using a Catholic Classical memorization program called Classically Catholic Memory.  We meet once a week on Fridays with a bunch of other Catholic families.  I'm  teaching science for the co-op and we're getting ready to study volcanoes.  So, to prepare for our lesson and activity this week, my kids and I had the fun task of making a paper mache' volcano.  I've only done paper mache' once in my life, so I wasn't sure how it would turn out.  Here are the kids having fun making a HUGE mess in my driveway.

Here are the two finished volcanoes.  This week we'll be painting them in preparation for the following week when we'll explode them!  The kids are all SO exicted!

They turned out pretty good I thought.  Now if I can just get the eruption to be impressive enough for the kids to be impressed.  I think they have visions of lava shooting up several feet.  I'll let you know how it turns out.