An Ode to an Onion

I planted it.
I watered it.
I watched it.
I picked it.



I ate it (with some quinoa and bok choy).

Here's a question that's been trolling around my brain for some time: Is it possible to enjoy something you're not very good at doing?

Take gardening. I love it. I love planning where I'm going to plant what, getting my hands dirty, watering early in the morning, patiently waiting for signs of growth, being surprised by what I find in the garden - yet I'm by no means a proficient gardener. If my family had to rely on my ability to grow food, we'd surely perish.

Of course, visiting someone else's garden is no help at all. The grass is always greener, the tomatoes redder, the zucchini longer, and the herbs taller. Still I love my little hopeless garden, in all it's stunted and straggling glory.

So I continue to water and pick and plan and watch. I may be no good at it, but at least I can enjoy it, and every once in a while eat something from it - even if it's just a small onion.

As We See It

So often when children draw, they draw from their imagination.



Like elephants in pajamas,



or royal mice (a gift from my little artist friend, Olivia).

Sometimes they draw things from experience,



such as a synchronized swimmer's ballet leg, performed by my synchronized swimmer hundreds of times.

When Lori of Camp Creek Press began posting observational drawing art lessons back in February 2008, I jumped right in. For Valentine's Day, I bought my kids (and myself) a sketchbook, just for observational drawing. We sketched a few times, but my kids weren't thrilled about our little lessons.

Our interest in observational drawing was rekindled when George brought home a dead Io moth found in a parking lot one day.



Rather than all of us sitting down at once, I set up a comfortable drawing area in the living room, with the moth in the middle and the sketchbooks around it, and encouraged my kids to sit down when they had a chance and draw a picture of the moth.

This seemed to work much better than our previous attempts at observational drawing.



For our recent Neighborhood Math and Science meeting, I brought a basket of ordinary objects from around the house and made each of the children a little sketchbook out of card stock and blank paper. I heard a lot of "I can't draw that!" comments, but eventually they were drawing.



Some children spent the entire time working on one single drawing,



while others tried to draw every single item from the basket.



I encouraged the children to draw the items from different angles, notice small details (like the little hairs on the carrot), think about scale, and observe the shadows around the object.

A fellow parent even joined the fun and sketched a few objects. He commented that observational drawing takes a lot of patience and concentration. I agree, and I think that perhaps observational drawing is a good way to develop such skills, especially if they don't come naturally.

I kept one of the small sketchbooks for myself, and plan to keep it close by this summer and fill it up with my observations.



I'm beginning to remember how much I like to draw.

Camping Was...

Sunny.



Dirty.



Caffeinated.



Creative.



Of all the activities I packed for the kids, the tracing paper was by far the biggest hit. Heather of Five Sweetpeas gave me the idea, and at the last minute I found a tablet of tracing paper to throw in with our art supplies (which included a clipboard full of blank paper for each of us - also a big hit).

I used to draw quite often when I was a teenager, but have done very little drawing as an adult. I had a drawing epiphany last week while tracing a picture from a coloring book onto tracing paper for my great nephew (can you believe that I'm a great aunt!) - drawing a picture is simply drawing a series of lines. Of course this seems so obvious, but it helped me immensely to get over my personal drawing hurdle by breaking the art of drawing down to the simple drawing of lines. Duh!

I hope to share this new-found knowledge with our neighborhood math and science club tomorrow. We will be exploring the art of Observational Drawing. I can't wait to share the results - I can only imagine drawing with ten children will be inspirational.

P.S.



Happy Bench Monday! Don't forget to deposit your butts.

I'll Be Seeing You

In some new unfamiliar places. I've been getting around lately, and haven't told you about my adventures.

Eren, our favorite Vintage Chica, interviewed me for her Summer Unschooling series.


Helen, purveyor of Homeschool Style Bytes, shared my recipe for homeschooling.



Kelly, of The Misadventures of Kelly and Kelly, interviewed me about sewing.


And finally, our local magazine for parents, Sacramento Parent, published my article about unschooling, in which I share my recent interview with Mary Griffith, author of The Unschooling Handbook.

Also in the Sacramento Parent magazine this month is an article on the class size increase here in California (have you heard we have no money?), written by Lisa of Paper Cup Poet. She asked me what we're doing in response to the school crisis:

Molly Dunham, a mother of two who lives in Auburn, joined her neighbor in creating a math and science club for their neighborhood kids (ages 4-11) when he saw less-than-challenging lessons coming home from his children’s school. Their first project involved hatching 1,000 turkey eggs. “We charted how many were hens and how many were toms. At the end we graphed the results on the computer and printed out a bell curve, then discussed probability.” At their second meeting, the group built a geodesic dome out of newspaper. “The kids worked together, rolling up newspaper into tubes, taping the tubes together… it was a blast!”

My neighbor and I hatched the math and science club idea a few months ago. He hosted the first meeting back in May, and yes, we hatched 1000 turkey eggs. By turkey eggs I mean flipped coins, heads = hens, tails = toms. We put ten coins in a clear plastic container with a lid (taped on), put the ten children in five pairs, and had each pair flip the container of coins 20 times and record the results. Five pairs x ten coins x 20 times = 1000 coin flips.

My neighbor set up a spread sheet and had the two oldest kids in our group enter the results. He then generated a bar graph, and sure enough, it was a bell curve. It was also a great way to introduce probability in a hands on, visual way.

Our next math and science club meeting was also quite visual and hands-on. We made a geodesic dome out of newspaper.





This project involved problem solving and cooperation, as well as A LOT of newspaper. The kids and I will definitely do this project again.



Our neighborhood group has met five times so far, and we've done some amazing projects. I've learned quite a bit myself. I planned on sharing the rest of our activities with you this week, but we received an unexpected invitation to go camping tomorrow. So instead, you'll be seeing me next week.



I've started my Summer Lovin' link list on the right hand side bar, and will continue to fill it with fun and frugal activities that we're enjoying this summer. Feel free to share any fun and frugal ideas so that we can try them too!

Picked

With the help of the awesome random number generator, we've got a winner of the wrist pincushion.




Cassandra of Dandelion Bones!

Thank you for all your lovely comments - it was truly a pleasure to read about the Billy Vance's in your lives. In fact, my mom and I were chatting on the phone about some of the comments the other day. We both loved Rhea's comment about humans being like hens, our mouths like beaks. Having watched a lot of people and a lot of hens, I concur.

When I pulled the carrot seen above, I couldn't help but think of the comment from ... : "if you let the baby stand up like that he'll be bull-legged".

I stumbled upon some beautiful ribbon the other day and plan to make several more wrist pincushions. I haven't done the whole Etsy thing for a while, but I'm considering setting up a little shop with a few handmade items. We'll see how much I can accomplish this weekend.

I found a great post from MooMama (thanks to her comment on yesterday's paper crane post) about 100 Fun, Frugal Things To Do With The Kids. So many great ideas! I was inspired to do something new, fun and frugal with the three girls at my house today.



We made maple sugar. Avery has been asking me for weeks to buy maple sugar from the spice lady at the farmer's market, but with cherries, berries and stone fruits in season, I'm hesitant to blow a chunk of my budget on a small jar of maple sugar. But with a surprisingly small amount of maple syrup, we were able to make our own jar of maple sugar while having fun in the kitchen with friends.





I'm sure this activity will be remembered long after we run out of maple sugar.

I have many more fun and frugal summer activities to share with you next week. I plan on starting a new list on the sidebar of all the fun things we do, complete with links to the instructions when available.

I wish you all a safe, fun (and hopefully frugal) holiday weekend!

Sadako and The Thousand Paper Cranes

Blair of Wise Craft recently posted a fabulous list of books for young girls. As the mother of a young girl, I'm always on the lookout for books that are both interesting and appropriate for my daughter, as well as books that I'd enjoy reading along with her. Though it didn't make Blair's list, I wanted to share a book and a project that my daughter and I recently enjoyed.

The book is Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a short book (read aloud in less than an hour) about a young girl in Japan who becomes ill with radiation sickness several years after America dropped the atom bombs on Japan. The story is sad yet inspiring. We were inspired to start making origami cranes.

I don't know that we'll make a thousand, but if we did, this is what we would do with them.



This paper sculpture hangs in the library of our local elementary school. It is quite breathtaking. Makes me wish we had a huge room with vaulted ceilings to suspend our own sculpture.



Coincidentally, a homeschooling friend of mine had introduced the Sadako book to her daughter the very same week we read the book. One afternoon, we got together and our friends showed us how to fold cranes. Here's a tutorial for folding paper cranes:


How To Fold An Origami Paper Crane (Orizuru) - The funniest bloopers are right here

And here is a short video (found via Folding Trees) about Sadako, presented in origami stop motion animation:



We're currently re-reading The Boxcar Children, and I must admit I enjoy the original story so much more than the subsequent mysteries. My son absolutely loves Benny, and I love hearing him giggle every time Benny does something silly (like cutting the letter J in his dog's fur - boy, did that get some giggles). The story makes me want to find an abandoned boxcar on an obsolete train track and set up house. I wonder if this boxcar is available?



Get it? Soule Train. I bet there would be plenty of room to suspend a thousand cranes inside.

Thinking of Billy

Billy Vance lived next door to my in-laws for over twenty years. She became a surrogate grandmother to my husband. George remembers her fondly, and even though I only knew her for a few years before she passed away, I will never forget Billy.

One afternoon, not long after George and I married, we were sitting on Billy's porch. She returned a food storage container to my mother-in-law, and in so doing, gave me a precious morsel of advice.

"Never return an empty container," she told me. She had filled the container with candy.

I took her advice to heart, and have tried to remember (though not always successfully) to include a little something - candy, cookies, muffins - when returning a container to a friend.

I thought about Billy this morning as I sat down to finish some hand sewing I volunteered to do for a mother on Avery's synchronized swimming team. She's making 8 elaborate headpieces for the girls to wear in their water routine next month. She pinned several pieces together for me to stitch up, and when I finished, I had a pile of her straight pins. I thought to myself, "Billy would return these in style."



So I made a little pincushion, which I will give to the mom tonight when I return her straight pins. The pincushion, inspired by Green Kitchen, took me about twenty minutes to make and made but a very small dent in my stash. In fact, I have more ribbon and more elastic and I'd like to make another. Would you like one?

Leave a comment and I will randomly choose a winner at the end of the week. Have you had a Billy Vance in your life? If so, I'd love to hear about her and any nuggets of wisdom she passed on to you (though it's not a requirement for the drawing).