Sketchy Tuesday

(Eli's very Rainbow Chinook Salmon. I love how he saw the salmon and just saw color)

The boys have started up with Sketchy Tuesday with Barb over at Harmony Arts. Each week, the kids get an assignment...something to sketch.

It's a great challenge. A few weeks the topic was "something that blows in the wind." Last week was "draw something you find in a First Aid kid." This week the boys got to study the images of our state fish and then translate into their own art.
(Chinook Salmon by Joe)
When the boys are done with their art, I take photos or scan it. Then I send the art over to Barb who kindly creates a slide show of all the art submitted.

The second favorite part of the week is watching the weeks slide show. We get to look over the entries of other kids around and be inspired.
(Nate's Chinook Salmon with shark teeth, of course)
It's very fun, come join us over at Harmony Arts, let me know & we'll look for your art next Tuesday!!

Lichen it.

Saturday morning, sleep in.
Get up, putz around a little...
exercise,
shower,
eat,
throw in a load of laundry and pick up the house a little. Now it's decision time: should I clean the bathrooms or should I take my boys for a little exploration hike on this beautiful spring day.

Hike wins.


The boys and I had a wonderful time on our hike. I planned this hike as an exploration type...lots of times Ralph and I have destination in mind over exploration. We like to get where we're going and really, the boys just want to look at every.little. thing they see on the ground, climb every rock, every tree they can. So for this hike I took a book of poetry, a camera and plants to have fun with photography. Joey brought a book too. Well, he doesn't really go anywhere without one these days. Nate brought his little notebook to sketch the nature around him, a favorite past time for him.


We walked about 100 yards into the canyon and found a nice spot to flop.

Upon my sister, Hazel's suggestion I decided to check out the lichen in the area. The boys and I made our lichen observations:

• lichen is very colorful. It can be bright, bright in color. Also, it can be plain old black, brown or white
• lichen has many textures. It all feels different. Some is as hard as the rock it's on, some soft enough to sleep on.
• some lichens are flat like paint, some bumpy enough to pick up and carry it home
• lichen seems to live well on rocks & trees both
• lichen faces North, South, East and West. It lives in the shade and full sun.

I took a gazillion photos of lichen, I have a few to share. I've come home, now that I'm "seeing" lichen I'm finding it in the backyard too.

When we got home we did a little homework. We found that lichen:

• is very pollution sensitive. Lichen is liken' clean air.
  
• people used to use colorful lichen to dye wool.
• at times people have eaten lichen or fed it to pets when times were tough and no other food was available. But some lichens are poisonous.
• is created when a certain fungus meets up with alga. When the two meet, lichen grows. No alga, no fungus. It has been compared to a marriage relationship.

It's interesting little stuff, and it sure colors up our canyon. I have noticed that the colors brighten seasonally, so I'm sure we'll be watching it more closely from now on.

Otherwise, we also saw a couple of horses with their people riding in the canyon, a sly little lizard who hid in a crack until we got oh-so-quiet. The most fun was seeing a killdeer (Eli calls it a dead deer, or killed dear) which is a bird. She was nesting on the ground. When Juneau got close she flew away, looking wounded and low to the ground. The first time this happened I just called Juneau off her trail so he wouldn't injure her futher. The second time, I suddenly remembered about the bird that would fly off looking wounded in order to distract a predator from her nest. The boys and I poked around for a minute trying to spot a nest of eggs but then we just tip toed away hanging out the do-not-disturb sign lest we squash the eggies with one of our 12 feet.

All in all, it was a wonderful time. We enjoyed our exploratory time, and I love the we-finally-get-to-get-out-in-the-Central-Oregon-spring feeling. Horray!


Learn some interesting facts and take a short quiz to help you identify lichens here in Lichenland.

Twas the day before Easter...

Rewind a week or so....last Saturday we made a family trip to Home Depot for a store Easter Egg hunt which promised candy for the boys and discounts for the grown ups. We had a lovely time, looking for eggs young and old. Then we hit the monthly kids workshop and Eli and I made a butterfly house together. Ralph worked with Joey, and Nate wandered up and down the aisle looking for more eggs. It was a fantastic family time. I highly recommend Home Depots workshops for the kids. We brought the butterfly houses home and plan to paint them soon.

Eli, digging the work goggles.

This next picture makes me laugh every time I look at it. A great picture of our perfect little family....Eli slumping off down the Eli aisle, pouty because he didn't find an egg (in this aisle.)

Alright, the Puppy Story

Alright, alright already!! You're all dying to know....so to answer some questions, yes...we got a puppy.

Her name is Reesie, and she's 1/2 lab and 1/2 Australian Kelpie. So far she's wonderful and amazingly easier to take care of than Juneau was as a puppy. Two reasons for that...the boys are so loving on her and playing with her a lot & Juneau is teaching her a lot about where to go potty and how to play nicely. Other than that she's busy flipping over rugs and keeping us laughing. So far, so good.

I took this photo for scale. The black spots on the carpet, by the way, are tufts of Juneau's shedding coat. Ever present, until he gets kicked out. Which was today. Anyhow, Reesie is 5 weeks old in this photo. She was young to be adopted, but with a little love and TLC she's really happy and content without her mama.

Oh, but she does love to snuggle. It's nice she's so tiny, it's easy to keep her off the couch otherwise she'd be on it all the time . She just wants to be snuggly. We love little Reesie already.

The Finished Product

You may remember me posting earlier photos of the tranformation of our spare room into a study/homeschool room. We have a nice sized house but our downstairs space needed the spare/guest room that was not useful for us at all. My husband had this idea to add a door that would provide access through our dining area to this room, and it's been a perfect change. I started painting it over Christmas break and finished it over Spring break. I love the color, I think it makes the room cozy and welcoming. What do you think?

This room now is home to my computer station, our homeschool books and another bookshelf. We got a sweet deal just after Christmas on two leather chairs that provide a cozy spot to sit and read or for Ralph and I to sit and chat whilt the boys are bouncing around the living room. The room has a large window that looks out over the backyard, and the trampoline which is a great place for me to sit and watch while the kids bounce away. I love, love, love this room.

While we store all of our school supplies and things in this room (Ralph put awesome shelves in the closet) I've come to realize that I simply love doing our bookwork in the cozy space of our kitchen . We like to do our memory work in this study room, but we do all our other work at the kitchen table. You can see it a little through the doorway to the right there. I use magazine boxes to keep the kids books together and portable. You can see them also in the photo above. All I want to do now is get some fun curtins up, and I'm not in a huge hurry to get that done but that will make the room finished. I'm so impressed with the work Ralph did to add this double doorway and the vision he had for it.

So yes, we no longer have a guest room, but please go ahead and come visit and we have plenty of room for you yet. You can come and cozy up in our study, have a cup of tea with me.

Puppy.Love

Poetry by Joe

(joey on the left)

The Colors Of Nature
by Joey

The trees are green and brown with leaves
so are the bushes.
A black and red robin flies in the sky
The grass is green as green can be.
A chipmunk runs across the grass.
That's one reason I am a friend with nature,
and nature is a friend with me.

She's Still Got It

18 years of adulthood
9 years of this blessed marriage
8 years of mommyhood
35 years of adventures....and she's still got it.

"She," of course, being me. "It?" you ask? Skillz. Organizational-kick-butt-getting-that-house-clean skillz.

Alright, alright what's the big deal? I'll tell you what the big deal is.

Sometimes I forget what a full time job homeschooling is. Normal life for me is such that I have time to keep the dust off the furniture, meals on the table and our underwear clean. Just the basics. I spring cleaned my laundry room a few weeks ago (during a school week) and it took me three days.

So I'm reveling in Spring break. I've taken two weeks, and I'm so grateful for the time not just because I've gotten to Spring clean but because I've been horribly sick. Last week I had an awful stomach flu with the rest of the family and this week I've got a knock-down-dragout cold. So the time off is great. I've been resting so much and just being puny little me. And when I'm not so puny, I've been busy;

• steam cleaned all the carpets in the house
• finished painting our study/homeschool room
• deep cleaned my Master closet
• deep cleaned the coat/game closet
• set up a school plan for the rest of the year
• prepped for school for the last stretch
• started organization of the homeschool/study space

It's a good feeling, two weeks have been a perfect amount of time. I've gotten a lot done, and had time to play with the kiddos. And napped nearly every day.

But I digress, what I'm enjoying is the fact that I can get so much done in such a short period of time. When we're schooling, organization and deep cleaning fall by the wayside. Schooling can be relatively unmeasureable, sometimes I don't realize how much I get done in a day. But a comforting thought is that if I can get so much measureable work done, the unmeasureable work is significant and oh so important.

Seeing the look on Nate's face when he realizes he read an entire book
is my reward. When Eli can't get over himself because he was the first
of the three to memorize the American presidents,
there is my paycheck.
Reading another of Joey's detailed and adventurous books,
that's all the milestone I need.

So, I started this entry thinking on how great it is to have some time off to get things done. How nice it is to see that I can still get it done. But I'm finishing like this: the most important work to be done in the world is oftentimes unmeasurable. I tend to like measurable work, but it's the unmeasurable that is most valuable. Loving, teaching, playing, looking our people in the eyes, talking to them...this is most important work.

And so I look forward to back to school next week. And my house is pretty stinking clean. Ahhhh....that's important too.

A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
Louis Kahn