School's Out (Forever!)

In our little corner of the world, we are surrounded by family and good friends. We spent the entire summer with both. Unfortunately, yesterday was the first day of the school year for some of them. It was interesting to hear about the first day of school. One of our neighbors had his first day of 1st grade, which was his first day of all day class. When he told me he had a busy day learning, I asked what he learned? "The inside rules, the outside rules, the lunchroom rules..." I swear that is exactly what came out of his mouth. It made me want to cry. Are there rules for outside? I mean common sense says stay in the fenced schoolyard, but beyond that? So after our friends answered out questions about their day, they asked questions about our day. When are you going to start doing school? Have you tried to explain unschooling to a schooled 1st grader? LOL How about a 13 year old girl that hates school? I just said we "do" school every minute of every day all year. We miss them when they are in school. Fortunately, our family wakes late, and they only have to wait a few hours to see friends from across the street. These hours are filled with various things from day to day. Here is how our day looked. We watched some movies from the library about mammals. We decided we are going to use our tiny baby pool to build a frog pond in the backyard (after we let Sarah borrow it for the RE conference.) We Googled "build a frog pond," to see what should and should not include in a frog pond. We played with our Nintendo DS'es and had a lesson in home economics while we cleaned the house. We watched Bill level a spot in the backyard for the new patio! Daddy arrived home and complained about the school traffic. Dom drives through 2 school zones on his way to the office! This morning is killer bc the concrete is begin poured for the patio so we are restricted to staying in the house. Finally, the girls wake up! I think we may leave the house while the work is being completed. There are a couple of museums here in town we have never been to. I think, since school is back in, maybe today is a good day to visit. For fun, I put in some "craft" pics that Mady and Karae made @ the last sleep over before school. We also shot off a rocket this weekend! That was a blast! (Pun intended!) Mady got to ride Bunny around for the first time this wknd. She still needs to gain some weight but she looks much better.

As a side note, while I was mowing the yard yesterday morning, a bee found my ankle to be to close to its' hive. I have a huge, painful, swollen knot on my lower right leg. I included the pic of the hive. While I love observing wildlife, this wildlife is a bit too dangerous to have right in the backyard. I will spray them with water later today, then take the nest down. I don't think the bees will die, they will just be knocked loose from the hive so I can remove it from the fence with a rake or other garden utensil.

As another side note, our new chinchilla has been acclimating to our house for a few days now so, it is now time to let him explore further. For safety, and sanitary reasons, we use the exercise ball to allow Snowball to roam the house while we watch. He is the softest little critter you could ever lay your cheek on and a hoot to watch jump around.

Hide

We had many friends over this week! I tried to post pix of everyone but I know I missed some. Some of my pictures inside came out very blurry, I think this was due to a lack of decent lighting.

One of our friends introduced us to a new website where we played a game called Pandemic II. Mady and I have had fun playing this game on and off this week. It has also made for stimulating conversation. In Pandemic II the object of the game is to kill the world's population by customizing your own disease. You do this by earning points and buying disease traits. There is a good deal of strategy and just plain paying attention going on with this game. Mady is into it!

It was fun to have only unschooling friends over one day this week. Usually we have a mix of schooly families, traditional homeschoolers, and unschoolers. This was the first time our house was filled with only unschoolers. It wasn't our entire group just a few families, that made it fun to watch all the action unfold. In the living room the little ones devised twisty, turny, train tracks with the occassional help of an adult when asked. In the kitchen there were crazy computer games, my room with the 2nd computer hosted YouTube and music videos with some insane dance moves from the kids, and the backyard had the wet trampoline which is a huge hit with everyone.

While the adults did visit some I think we played just as much. This is one place where one can observe the difference between unschoolers and more traditional homeschoolers, in my opinion. More traditional homeschool families don't play as much as this unschooling family seems to. The adults usually gather around somewhere and chat. Traditional homeschoolers seem to be very quiet, even in play. Not always, but overall, this was a difference I noticed. Unschoolers seem to say whatever is on their mind whenever it strikes them, while traditional homeschoolers still seem much more quiet.

Here is an example. Niki and one of our friends (both of whom happen to be the same age and have very close b-days) said let's have a contest to see who is the cutest/coolest. Both began listing traits, that in their minds, were traits of people that must be cool.

Coolest
cool moves
look cool (??)
do sports

Cutest
their own person
sense of style
smiley

We kept asking the kids what cool and cute meant and how would you describe it? They kept giving us these answers. Finally, Niki said, (after some prompting,) "Let's use the dictionary. I'll get it!"

cool=attitude and manner, moderately cool, reducing comfort, not excited, showing dislike

We determined the definition we were looking for was attitude and manner.

cute=clever or sharp, or attractive

It was determined we were talking about the attractive cute.

In the end, the kids decided one of them was the coolest and the other the cutest. It was fun to ask the kids questions and see where their minds would take us! I like that we ended up @ the dictionary-that seems logical to me. We use it often @ our house. Niki likes to look @ it like it is any book to read. My grammar and vocabulary are slowly evolving since we have all been reading and researching much more over the past year. I know the exposure to more words, reading, word puzzles, logic, and dictionary play, is expanding their minds further than what they would be getting in school. The fact that they are in search of it on their own makes me smile even wider. I have memories of hating to get up and go to school bc it was so snoringly boring. My kids won't ever have to feel that way. I am grateful we have this opportunity. I am also grateful we have like minded friends to share it with. Thanks you guys for hanging out @ our tiny house and letting me observe and interact with all our awesome kiddos. I can't believe it has been an entire year already. I love watching all of our kids grow up-but it makes me cry too. I wish I could keep them little forever...sometimes! (Hide is a friendship song by Creed.)

Friends in Low Places

I had to help my sister with something for the police academy. The Cadets are currently doing the DWI portion of the training program. Clearly you can't learn about the effects of alcohol on the human body without some human bodies. I volunteered to allow the FWPD to serve me alcohol and use my body as a subject in the DWI training. The evening started out with all volunteers being weighed in and the trainers mixing drinks according to a scientific formula. (blood alcohol content=BAC and is reported as grams of alcohol per liter of blood.) The goal of the evening was to have a room full of volunteers with differing blood alcohol content for the cadets to test. The evening progresses interestingly enough. Some people were very inebriated. The person with the highest blood alcohol level ended up @ our table. I won't name names but I think you will know who it is from the pix. I was asked not to photograph officers or cadets @ all, and I could only take photos of people with their permission. I walked to each table before the first drink was consumed and asked if I could take photos and BLOG this. Not one person in their sober state denied my tiny request. They all wanted the website name. I passed it out to some of the cadets.

@ the end of the night my final blood alcohol content was .97. I was legally intoxicated. Julie's BAC was greater than mine I think. I believe I have a picture or 2 of Jules in her highly intoxicated state. I can always tell when Jules has had a little much bc she begins to...talk! I have pictures of Julie talking. We had a blast and I think the cadets found it fairly easy to tell who was drunk and who was not. Apparently the pen test is designed for you to fail, period.
Here is a link to BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters

Each volunteer had a DD for the night so there were no worries about us breaking any laws but everyone should know their rights. We had a good time.
Usually the trainers have board games and what not for the drunks, er um, volunteers to help pass the time. For whatever reason, there were no games last night. We made our own. We played tally the curse words of our drunken table mates and harass thee officers assigned bathroom guard duty! There were officers assigned to watch the restrooms in case we tried to sneak something in or out I guess. Someone pulled out a fake million dollar bill...I don't know, people are crazy after a properly formulated drink. The picture that shows everyone sitting in a group of chairs in the center of the room was when the sobriety tests began. I had to stop shooting then since the cadets were the ones testing and I was ask not to photograph them.

After it was all said and done, we went to Ol' South Pancake House. Damn, you want to go there? I don't have my letterbox clues! (Yes, there is a letterbox there!)Jess went on to explain to us how the sobriety tests work. Verrdddyyy interesting.

Thank you for being a friend

I am going to run out of songs about friends! I have some pix in my camera now from this week. These are from last week! Thanks Christa for sharing your house with us.