Happy Thanksgiving!

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

This year I was talking to a Swiss friend and I was mildly surprised that they do not have an equivalent holiday. 

After talking to another friend from Guatemala, I think I understand more why this is such an American holiday.

The original feast was in thanksgiving for a good harvest, but it was also in thanksgiving for the native people who had saved their lives in a peaceful cultural exchange. 

Has America always lived up to that hopeful encounter? No!  But the American dream is that people from all over the world can come here and that the peaceful exchange of knowledge in an atmosphere of good will can enrich us all.

More Gingerbread

 Choclo finished (and ate) his gingerbread house!

He wanted a "tower house" which I took to mean a sky scraper.

As you can see it did not last long...

Amusingly, he actually bit it, just like this.  

After a few tries he went with the more ordinary way: breaking and eating, and he invited everyone else to join in.  Yum!

And Star finished this darling little Irish cottage to take home to her family for Thanksgiving.

It's modeled after a music box her family has.

A very sweet idea!

I think that just leaves making a house for Oob, but that will wait until after Thanksgiving.

Gingerbread!

 Long time readers of this blog know that blog silence in mid-November (as opposed to all the other random blog silences the rest of the year) can only mean one thing: gingerbread! 

Indeed, this year we have Klenda and Leena entering the Darnall's Chance Gingerbread Contest.  We also have some others in the works that are not for the contest, more on them later.
UPDATE: Klenda won second prize!

First off, we have Klenda's excellent "Cajun Christmas." (Fr. Mark, this is for you!)



She put an amazing amount of detail in this one: swamp grass, gators, cypress knees, squirrels and Christmas lights, even algae on the water!  This has to be the most challenging  house she has ever done.


The idea of doing a tree house is always appealing, but doing a weight bearing tree out of edible materials is incredibly difficult.

She came up with the idea of a laminate tree: layers of gingerbread glued with royal icing, then coated with royal icing.  Amazingly, it works! The tree is bomb proof!  Great job, Klenda!


This was Leena's first gingerbread for the contest and I think she should get a prize for best first entry!

She named hers, "Have a Huffy Puffy Christmas!"

After a few years of doing this, I think the best  gingerbreads are the ones that capture a moment, and this one is great!


I love the cobble stone path and the wolf's red nose!




For fun, she put little Swedish fish in the pond watching the wolf. 

Doesn't the house look scared?

Why the Zoomlians Like Being Home Schooled

Because their teacher considers Weird Al to be a critical part of American cultural development from the 80s forward.  Also, of somewhat lesser importance, but a part of our  Futures Past segment of US History, Star Wars.  So, on a relaxed Wednesday morning, we find ourselves watching this:

Choclo and the Tooth Chicken

There are good things and bad things about being the fifth kid.


On the one hand, your worn down broken in highly experienced parents may forget to tell you that your baby teeth will fall out.

On the other hand, by the time you get your first wiggly tooth, The Tale of the Tooth Chicken has grown to epic proportions.

Some explanations were necessary, and we are very grateful that there were a good three weeks between, "Why is my tooth moving?" and, "My tooth came out!"

And the Tooth Chicken came through in a blinding flash of rainbow feathers.  This time he left a glittery ball and a light up top, both inexplicably green.

US History: the Totally Awesome 80s (Dude)

You know you're a dedicated home schooler when you use your high school yearbooks to define "big hair".

Since I have not given birth to you, I will refrain from showing you my yearbook and instead give you a picture of Morgan Fairchild because I wanted my hair to look like hers.

Do I even need to say it didn't?

Actually, my hair was very short all through the 80s, so I missed out on the big hair thing, but I could dream...

What else was there in the 80s?

Why, yes, we were still doing the Cold War!  In fact, we reached new heights of anxiety, or at least I did.  In the beginning of the decade, I  was absolutely convinced we would have a nuclear war before 1990. At least until Gorbechev came into power in the USSR. Watching The Day After in 1983 did not help.

Mt. St. Helen's erupted, covering  a great deal of my extended family with an inch or two of ash.

I remember they sent us some. Evidently everyone sent out of state relatives envelopes of ash, many of which broke open and gummed up the postal machines.
My grandma cleverly sent ours in a plastic tub in a bag in a box.

I also remember visiting the site ten years later and seeing the curved ash embedded trees jutting out of the mountain like fossilized ribs.  In between were drifts of pink wild flowers.

The 1980 election was the first one where I understood what was going on.  Our school held mock elections and Reagan won by a landslide.  This was about a week before the real election in which Reagan won by a landslide. I remember being weirded out that he had been an actor.

The Challenger exploded.  Chernobyl melted down. Reagan, Lennon, Pope John Paul II were all shot.

It was the age of "Just Say No" to drugs, red ribbons (AIDS awareness) and MADD.

It was the decade when we got a microwave, an Atari, and a Commodore 64.  This computer was so primitive that instead of a disk drive, it used cassette tapes....

This is also the decade that gave us boom boxes, cordless phones (slightly smaller than a shoe box but slightly more clunky) and VCRs. 

The 80s were a wild time: The colors were black and neon anything!  I learned to drive!  Gas was 99 cents a gallon! Rubic's cubes!  Pac-man! Members Only jackets! Sunglasses (at night!)!

I graduated High School, went to College, and, somewhere in between, met the Emperor!  He rocked my world enough that I don't remember much else after that.

But if you really want to know about American culture in the 80s, you can't go wrong with a look at Michael Jackson!

Guest blog by Mxyl

Today we went to the US History Museum to wrap up our war section on our US History mega unit!

1st, we went to the Revolutionary War section.

 Here Choclo and Oob are watching a short Revolutionary War video and then--I think--looking into barrels to smell the kind of food that they had in that time(you know, the kind that molds fast--I decided to skip that section).


Next, we did the Civil War (not to be mistaken for a civilized war) in which we learned (painfully) how long setting up for a picture could take, which explained why there were very few pictures had people smiling in them.

Then, the Prime Minister decided
we should do a less, shall we say,
somber picture.  Please observe.

Well.  Moving on.










We had a fabulous time with the WWI/WWII (our Grammie Ann was a WAVe in WWII--and she reads this blog; go Grammie!) and Cold War sections (no pictures, though...) and then did the War of Vietnam!  This was what we'd been looking forward to, having our grandfather as a Vietnam Vet and all, and we learned that the Vietnam War was noted as a "TV War" (though I have no idea what so many cameramen were doing in the middle of a full-fledged war) and
even got a photo or two of us next to a helicopter from the V. War.

And then we finished it all off with seeing the real star-spangled banner!








And we are up to the 21st century on our history unit!  We'll post the '80s, '90s, and '00s in later posts!

Driveway Math

 With the nice weather, we've been spending afternoons outside.

All that nice blacktop makes me think of hopping on the driveway math!

I did a space theme.  There is an ordinary number line on the left, but on the right, we go from 2 to 20 counting by twos, each on a different space thingy.

Trust me, I'm a scientist, space thingy is the correct terminology, the way I draw them!  (Did I mention my field is immunology?)

At any rate, I was quite pleased that I could come up with 10 space thingys to draw, and particularly pleased with 12 which started out as the sun and turned into a supernova (but actually looks like a chrysanthemum in this picture).

Naturally when I got to the end, Choclo and Oob had conflicting opinions on the final number and drawing...

I ended up going up from 20 to 100 by tens, although you have to loop around a bit to hop on them all in order!

Golden Afternoon

Choclo: Dinosaur Hunter

 We've been watching Planet Dinosaur , (not to be confused with Dinosaur Planet, although their website is fantastic!) and this seems to have reignited Choclo's fascination with all things dinosaur.

We have also been taking advantage of mild weather and the peak of the leaf season to go on frequent rambling walks.  Choclo uses these walks to hunt for dinosaur fossils!







Among his recent finds, we have (from left to right): a tooth from a small T-rex , two neck bones from a rockasaurus, a tail bone from an armored dinosaur, and the club of an ankylosaur.

I know this, because he told me....






In case you aren't up on your dinosaurs, here is an ankylosaur, swinging his club at a T-rex.

As for the rockasaurus, well, I guess only professional dino hunters know about them.....