Cotton, noodles, and 71 picture day

Last night we played Blokus and then got everything ready to venture over to a local cotton farm. We were all pretty excited, I mean after all, we have never seen cotton actually being grown! We loaded up work gloves, lunch, and the new wagon for it's virgin outing and trekked over to the cotton farm. Many things happened to make this a difficult trip today, none the less, we made it, after going back to the house twice and 3 stops along way!

The strange part about this cotton farm was the fact it was right in the middle of the city. In fact the partial city block of cotton we were picking is the remainder of a 110 acre farm originally established in 1859 to grow cash crops as well as some livestock. The girls liked picking the cotton. The boys loved playing on the tractors, go figure. We live in the country so we are around animals a great deal and we live near farms, but we have never seen cotton growing in Texas, even on a small scale like this.

After our adventure to the cotton farm we ran over to see Aunt Jessie and sign some papers for her. The boys played with their dinner and the girls, along with a friend from our unschooling group, played on the computer. We tried to teach Jessie and Kaylee how to play SET, it took them a bit to catch on. It took me and Mady a bit to get it all too, but it is a fun little card game.

Hopefully the boys will learn to sit in chairs one day. They will not sit in highchairs-they must stand in them, which is far to scary for me. We did away with they highchairs a couple of months ago after trying them out again only to find Luke and Ezra still enjoy standing in them more than sitting.

I have a couple of pictures of Niki with a pantie liner on her eye I want to post. I am sure anyone reading this is wondering, what the hell is Niki doing with a pantie liner on her eye. Niki is our storyteller, very imaginative kiddo. She was in the bathroom when she found the liner and unwrapped it and stuck it on her arm, sticky side on her arm. She told me it felt like an arm massager. Then she went on to stick it on various parts of her body, one of which was her eye. Once the liner, er, I mean patch, was on her eye she was transformed into a pirate captain. Of course everyone in the room had to get in on the action and soon we were all pirates. It was a 71 picture day on my camera. Don't you just love watching your kids?

Niki and I are watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and trying to go to sleep early so we can get up early for the Stock Show!

Fun with words...

We had some of our friends over this afternoon to hangout and play with the girls. Since Mady is almost 10 and most of the friends she normally hangs out with are friends she made @ school she usually ends up talking to the grown ups. Mady often pops up with random statements in the middle of a conversation. I am glad she feels comfortable enough to join in. I am easily distracted though and with all the little ones around, I often loose track of what we were talking about!

Something I found entertaining was when Momma Duff and I were talking, while the kids were climbing on the parallelogram playhouse, we had some questions about the word moose and its plural form. Just for anyone that maybe curious, the plural form of moose is moose-spelled and pronounced the same for each form, which is what we thought. Meeses??? Not a word momma!

Here's to toy firetrucks and wagon rides on sunny January days in Texas!

Wagons and skeletons

We have been busy this week even though we tried to chill @ the house and relax. Monday Niki and I put together a small plastic skeleton! Actually, it came in the mail, Niki retrieved it and was excited for 2 seconds and I spend 20 minutes putting the thing together and the rest of the day trying to use the proper Latin names of the bones to tell the kids to do things! I had fun anyway!

Mady blew some giant bubbles with some toxic smelling goo she received in her stocking. Bright and early Tuesday morning, Papaw brought us a new wagon! Everyone had to try it out. We talked a little about covered wagons and prairie life but that didn't last long since the kids wanted to pull each other around the house in the wagon.

Today I tried to get the kids to do some schooly stuff. I tried to get Niki to take a look @ some of the Hooked on Phonics books that Mady used...that went over like a ton of bricks! The afternoon was spent in debate about how we spend our time. Sometimes I doubt this path we are on. I read all the time but Mady only reads when I bring it up and Niki wants nothing to do with it. We do manage to read National Geographic together when it arrives in the mail. National Geographic always gets some conversations flowing and the globe gets brought down from its shelf. The girls like to play Brain Age on the Nintendo DS which is a good thing.
I guess maybe I am jealous the kids have so much time to do just about anything they want...the problem is they never seem to want to do much. Mady is still going to her art class but I rarely see her draw. We do crafty things together once a week or so.I know plenty of people that unschool locally. The parents of the older children are reassuring. I suppose when they get older they will want to be more involved and more interested...?

I wanted to write about Samurai sword fighting after watching Kill Bill 2 last night but I have not had time to do any searching or reading on that today. Do you think I can find someone locally to teach me Samurai sword fighting? LOL