Summerschool 2: Popcorn & Scizzors

DAY 1: One day I had the brilliant (read: horrifically messy) idea of putting popcorn in the touch-table. No, not popcorn seeds, but actual popped popcorn! We put the popcorn popper in the touch-table, along with a big bowl, some spoons and scoopers and things, and ran that thing over and over until the touch-table was full of popped popcorn and Orville Redenbacher was well on his way to another purchase by our family. The kids couldn't have been more elated. They loved pouring in the seeds, scooping the popped corn away from the popper, scooping it into jars, eating it all the while. Yes, despite my efforts to reinforce the idea that the popcorn needs to stay inside the table, this activity made a huge mess. Popcorn everywhere. BUT, they had an absolute blast - and for several days. Summerschool that first day was super easy, and provided hours of entertainment. (sorry, no pics. Would have been fun to document the disaster though :)

2: The next summerschool I drew a few trees on construction paper and filled a jar-lid with Elmer's Glue. I showed them how to dip the popcorn in the glue and put it on the tree. I think I even sang the "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" song at one point. The kids got it to varying degrees. Seville went so far as to draw her own tree. Trajan did pretty well with gluing the popcorn on, but ate most of his popcorns after dipping them in the glue, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to convey to him that ed to work, that he could eat the other popcorns but the glue-dipped ones were for his tree. He continued to think of the glue as a dipping-sauce. Oswell showed little interest in gluing popcorn on his tree, but really wanted to draw with the markers and then wanted to play with the scissors, which I had gotten out to cut out some leaves and bugs and things for added fun.

Trajan's Tree

Oswell's Tree (lots of marker-drawing, not so many popcorns)

Seville's Tree, complete with rabbit-dwelling in the trunk next door

Seville added a Cardinal with a long tail to the "example tree"

3. Since the scissors had been such a hit, once Jared got fed up with the mess and threw out the popcorn, I just put all the kid-scissors in the touch-table along with a bunch of things to cut: construction paper, ribbons, yarn, junk mail, whatever. They spent tons of time over the next several days cutting things up. Not really related to popcorn in any way, but one thing led to another.

Summerschool 1: Birds, Eggs, Nests

Though I didn't necessarily intend to have "themes" to the weeks of summerschool, it's actually worked out that way so far (all two weeks!). It has just helped me to come up with ideas for simple things to do that tie together. This week was about birds, nests, and eggs.

When Jared was fiddling with the basketball hoop we discovered a Cardinal's nest in the trees lining our driveway. I saw a couple of birds repeatedly flying to and from a single spot, stood below it and heard cheeping. I got the ladder while the parents were away and sure enough! There were these tiny, featherless, little things opening their enormous mouths to the sky! (sorry sweeties, I'm not your mom).  So we've had fun watching the mom and dad take care of those babies.

I decided to use our resident birds as a jumping-off point for summerschool this week. Here's what we did:

DAY 1: Making birds: I cut out a basic bird shape out of poster board, 1 for each kid. I got my supply of feathers and gave each child a bottle of Elmer's glue to squeeze on their bird shape (and tried really hard not to micromanage their glue usage. They each have their own way of squirting it!). After they got the glue on (by which I mean all over the place), they could choose feathers to put all over their birds. Here are the finished products. I even found exactly 3 googly-eyes in my unboxed-so-far craft stuff.

DAY 2: Making nests: We went outside in the morning, each with a bowl (would have used paper bowls, if I'd had them, but I didn't. Instead we lined a regular bowl with wax paper. Paper bowls would be so much easier). The cardinals had flown the coop and evacuated the nest by then. I read online that they don't re-use their nests, so I took the liberty of taking it down, showing the kids how it was made, and talking about what birds would want for their nests. Then we all went around the yard and collected stuff for making bird nests and put it in our respective bowls (pine needles, sticks, grass, feathers, flowers in some cases). While we were out and about we saw a rabbit, some cool green beetles, and Seville caught a frog, so lots of good outdoorsy-stuff going on. When we were done collecting (and I could sweat no more, about to collapse of pregnant-heat-exhaustion) we went inside and glued the nests together. We basically liberally drizzled Elmers glue all around/on/through our nests and left them to dry. It took them a couple of days, but then I removed them from the wax paper and bowls, and we had little nests.

DAY 3: Making eggs: we made salt dough, and I taught them how to roll a little ball in their hands or on the table to make an egg. I had to make a lot of eggs for them, but they had fun. They also got to experiment with making snakes.

DAY 4: Painting the eggs we made yesterday

DAY 5: We pulled the nests out of their wax paper/bowls and put the eggs in. (We actually went to a park this day for our main event)

The Epiphany

(only 6 of 7 pictured here. That's me on the bottom left)

When I was a kid (one of 7 kids, I might add), my mom determined that there was no way she was hauling all of us to some summerschool/summercamp activity thing, especially at great financial expense. She saw the flier we brought home and the crafts on there and thought "well I can do THAT." And so she did. My memory (probably flawed, but still) is that every day during the summer, after we did our chores she would do "summerschool" with us, which amounted to a creative project, outing, or other fun event for us kids. She did everything from birdwatching to knitting to ceramics.  Though I'm not as craftily proficient as my mom, nor probably as ambitious, given that I am about to have 4 kids 5 and under, I had an epiphany recently.

My beautiful, beloved house I left behind

The backstory: Moving here (to Raleigh, N.C. from Portland, O.R.) has been really hard. One of the hardest things about it is that I feel like I've been robbed of my spring and summer. The last chance I have to bond with my boys before a new sister comes, the last chance to spend time with Seville before she is whisked off to a state-run education - gone under the pile of boxes and paper and endeavors to find doctors and mechanics and stores and put up shelves and safety locks. Just as life was getting barely easy enough to breath now and again, my spring became immediately consumed with preparations for moving across the country.

My new house.

Now that we're here, my time has been consumed with the desperate endeavor to set up a home before the baby comes, and to do this while taking care of my kids, not letting the house become unmanageable, and doing it all while increasingly pregnant. It did not start off well. It's not like I had 15 minutes of spare time before we moved, so I don't know why I thought I'd have it after.  As the saying goes, I couldn't seem to get beyond the urgent things to the important things. Especially being pregnant I am completely sapped of energy and my hips just won't let me walk as much as I need, bend over to put anything away, move a box, etc, so everything is slowgoing, and the progress I do make is excruciatingly inefficient.

After some tearful expressions of frustration and trying to figure out what to do, Jared and I came up with a new plan to try: I would make sure kids were kept more-or-less alive (fed and dressed and stuff), but I would not clean anything up really. We bought a bunch of paper plates and I got to work. My plan was to spend every morning (the few minutes I have after food and clothing is dealt with) doing “summerschool"  with the kids. During naps, in the afternoon, I would spend some time with Seville, and some time moving in. When Jared gets home he makes dinner, cleans the kitchen, and helps get the kids to bed. This allows me to focus on a few “important” things during the day, leaving a few of the “urgent” things to him.

The change in all of our happiness since this started is marked, and such a blessed relief. After a week and a half, everything is better! Seville is enthusiastic about finding out her chore each day (!) so we can do summerschool. The boys run upstairs to get dressed so they can participate.  I have a daily sense of peace about how I spend my time and that my kids aren’t being short-changed and sacrificed on the altar of my busy life. Jared is a rockstar and my hero. We can’t go on like this forever, I expect, but for now, it is life-changing.

I’ve decided to [try to] blog my summerschools, so that other people can get ideas for things to do, and see what we’re up to. I haven’t done well at photo-documenting so far, and maybe never will, but it’s worth documenting anyway, if only so I can feel good about my efforts during my down moments.

A Random picture of my happy kids, for good measure

Since I’ve rambled on here for a while already, I’ll save my first summerschool documentation for another post. Let this one serve as encouragement for any other bewildered, stressed, anxiety-ridden mom who wants to provide more things for her children than she possibly can, as a single human being.  My advice so far: find a way to work something "important" into your daily routine. I know that may be basically impossible for some people. It sure seemed so for me, and would be without Jared's support. Unfortunately, I cannot endorse the idea of stealing my awesome husband, but I hope you have one that can help, or the resources to find another way.

Weekend O' Airplanes and Sickness

We had planned to try to spend the weekend at North Carolina's famous beaches, but I was too sick to go so we stayed "home." We did muster ourselves out the door for an hour or so on Saturday to take the kids to Observation Park - a park at the airport with an airport theme. It's pretty cute. There's an observation deck to watch planes taking off and landing. You're right next to it so you get to hear their jets in all their glory too. They play a feed from the radio tower, so you get to hear what air traffic control is saying while you watch. They also have a play area and big sandbox, and a tiny runway for kids to run around on. I think it's pretty cool, especially for those like me, for whom all things airplane invokes a childhood sense of jubilation and excitement.  Here's a video of Oswell pretending to be a plane on the play-runway. You can see the real runway in the background:

I only regret we didn't manage to get a video of the boys reacting to a plane taking off. It was pretty cute - they got super excited every time. They have both been obsessed with planes  - especially since we went for a ride in Grandpa's plane just before we moved. They think every small plane is Grandpa's plane, and that's what they say when they see one: "Gampa's pane!" :)  I couldn't even get Trajan to leave the observation deck and go to the playstructure at the park. He just wanted to watch planes, even though the wait between take-offs was often 10 minutes or something. He would just patiently stand there saying, "nother pane?"

After we got home, the boys went and found their little toy wind-up planes I got them recently, and proceeded to "fly" around the house - to the dinner table, up the stairs, back and forth in the living room.

I'm pretty sure today  marks the second Father's Day in a row that I've been too sick to do anything for Jared. Which means he's getting hosed, and I feel bad. I've been so sick the last couple of days that I can only get out of bed for short periods of time. My laryngitis has been so bad that I literally had to whisper for about 24 hours - it actually made more sound than trying to talk, which seemed to just shut my throat up completely. When I woke up Saturday morning I couldn't breathe and was so panicked. Jared told me to calm down, take a puff of Oswell's ventilator. It eventually subsided, but I've never experienced my throat being closed like that - it was scary. Now I know how asthmatic kids feel, I guess.

Hopefully we'll manage the beach trip next week. In the meantime, we're just hanging out in a holding pattern (no pun intended) waiting for our house to close so we can move in. Just under 2 weeks now!