Valentine's Day Activities

This week was full of Valentine's preparations. We made homemade valentines every day. We dropped off a few surprises, and made several batches of cookies. Then on Friday was the big homeschool valentine party with all our friends from co-op school -- about 50 kids attended!  The gal who hosted it was super organized and had craft stations set up in every room of her house.  They made valentine cookies, yarn valentine hearts, stained glass wax paper hears, and stamped valentines.

Big sister A has a very loose front tooth.

It is hanging on by a thread and she is constantly wiggling it.

 There were lots of yummy goodies at the party.  Baby L kept snatching things off everyone else's plate.

In our Meet the Masters class this week we studied a Japanese painter, Hokusai.  It was fun looking at the slides of his paintings, but trying to explain to the kids how to hold the paint brush for each of the different Japanese style brush strokes was too hard for the 5-7 year old activity.

 Brother M made this cool drawing about Hokusai.  This is him in his house, working on his easel, painting "The Great Wave". My favorite part is the chandelier!

Family Schooling Summary: Science Museum and a Visit to Independence Homestead

 Another wild night of getting kids to bed. I just think it's funny when they all pile on Daddy. This will be their last week of sleeping in the toy room in Uncle P's basement.

We went to the Baltimore Science Museum again this week.  They were getting ready for a domino festival so the main lobby was blocked off and the floor was covered with all different colors of dominoes at various stages of being set-up.

 We re-visited the dinosaur exhibit. The kids love it.

 Turns out that baby L is smaller than a brachiosaurus footprint.

They had a new space exhibit. The kids dressed up in astronaut jumpsuits.

They tried to put blocks together while wearing astronaut gloves.

This electric globe made us all think of Grandpa Bob.

They all got wet having fun in the Water Works area.

This was what baby L played with the most.  It simulates an earthquake. You have to build a house with a broad foundation or the shaking will knock it down.

On Saturday, we did some research for our family farm plan.  We had a lovely tour of Independence Homestead with the owner, Harley.  They have homestead pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, and rabbits, so they were a great source of information and first hand experience on all my livestock questions. Harley said that rabbits are by far the best and easiest way to raise your own meat. The chickens are much noisier and cause trouble scratching up the land. Both the chickens and the ducks are very hard to pluck and process for the freezer.  The rabbits are easier to breed, dispatch, and process.  Plus they are nice pets, especially the silver fox breed, are docile and friendly.

He recommended that we raise purebred show standard rabbits, so that our kids can exhibit them in the fair when they get older.

Harley prefers raising ducks for eggs as opposed to chickens.  They don't hurt the garden plants with scratching, like chickens do, and they are quieter. Independence farm has a big flock of the the Khaki Campbell variety.  That breed are "land ducks" and don't need a pond or pool to be happy (so they are less messy).  They lay just as many eggs as laying hens do and are easier to house. 

He showed us how he makes nice light-weight hoop houses for the ducks.  They are easy for 2 people to move around the yard as the duck area gets messy. They use a similar hoop house for their milk goats.  They have alpine goats and one Nigerian dwarf.  I am leaning towards Nigerian dwarfs. We will plan to go visit a couple goat farms before we make any final decisions about them.

I was expecting them to rave about their American Guinea Hogs, since so many homesteaders online seem to love them. They said that they have had a good experience with them in terms of temperament and the meat is truly delicious. (We bought some from their store so that we can try it ourselves).  But he said that having them as breeders and selling the offspring as they have done with the rabbits brought them a net loss.  They are too slow to put on weight compared to regular pigs.  They are nice and small only 100-200 lbs, so you could butcher them yourself. But they are raising the meat for sale and so they have to bring them to an FDA licensed butcher.  Harley recommended that we get some feeder pigs- no special variety needed, and just raise them for a season and get the hang of it before we try some more expensive heritage breeds, like the American guinea hog.

Recommended Reading: January

Jessica Day George has some really fun kids stories. We read both Tuesdays at the Castle and Wednesdays in the Tower this month and have Thursday and Friday on hold at the library. I love the idea that their castle can change sections of itself and give mean guests worse rooms than nice guests.  All the kiddos are enjoying listening to these books in the car.

I read Good Germs, Bad Germs this month and it reminded me why I did my Masters in Public health.  I loved reading about how bacteria has evolved over the last 75 years since the advent of antibiotics. The chapter on the so called "dirt vaccine"  that helps other vaccines work better was insightful, as well as the research that shows how truly interdependent the relationship is between humans and some strains. The research supports my theory about vaginal birth and breast feeding naturally giving kids a better immune and digestive system.  And of course, it supports the idea that our "too clean" approach to everything is at the root of the huge outbreak of children's' allergies and asthma.  It is frightening to realise how adaptable bacteria are and how few options people who catch "super bugs" have. They also mention that small farms could prevent the need for treating animals with antibiotics (as they have to in the stressful factory farm conditions) and that would prevent a lot of needless exposure to antibiotics.

Big sister A just finished book #7 of the Ivy and Bean series -- she wanted me to add that book to our list. She liked it because it was "about science stuff".

I reread the Clockwork Angel series. I remembered how much I loved the ending. It was still a good read, but I was scandalized anew by a couple teenage love scenes.  

I came across Endless Steppe while I was looking at historical fiction books for the kids.  Of course, I wanted to read it when I saw that it was about Siberia.  Another great perspective on the experiences of people during WWII.  It shows that sometimes things that we think are horrible trials are actually saving our lives.