Pumpkins

It's not all apples and squash around here, of course.  There are also pumpkins!  And kids.  That's Choclo in the chair.

(And our new screen door, and the fact that I just painted the front door blue to match the shutters.  And, in the throes of the painting and organizing, we put up a new house number plate and repainted our outside lights.  And, overwhelmed by this success, we painted the mailbox so now everything on the outside of our house matches for the first time ever!)

 Back to the pumpkins, we paint the pumpkins as soon as we get them (after the year when someone stole one from our front porch, evidently thinking we had plenty) and then we also carve them right before Halloween.

Here we have Zorg's tall ghost pumpkin, and Oob's "bumpy" pumpkin.


And we have Klenda's skull pumpkin, and Choclo's skeleton one.

Last, but not least, we have Leena's scary black skull, and Mxyl's Dr. Who pumpkin.

If you haven't seen the logo before, it's a DW (for Dr. Who) shaped like a TARDIS. 

Found the Camera!

 Actually, Leena found the camera.  Thanks, Leena!

Here we are, picking an entire wheelbarrow full of apples.

Why, yes, there is another kid in there! We took a friend along. Hi, friend!

And here we are getting very muddy, picking beets.  It turned out that the farm had received 4 inches of rain the day before we were there.  Water + clay= slippery sticky mud.

Did I mention my plan to hire the kids out as field hands?

Here are the squash: the pale pumpkin one is the Long Island Cheese, and the "zombie pumpkin" is the Blue Hubbard.

And, lastly, no Fall would be complete without a selection of warty gourds!

The pictures are a bit funny with the sizes.  To give perspective, the gourds  all fit in an easily lifted pie plate, but the Blue Hubbard alone is at least 2 feet long and weighs about 20 pounds!

Apple Picking

 Last week we went apple picking up at Larriland Farms with Grammy.  Honestly, despite the picture, we all had a great time!

All the smiling pictures must be on the camera (which I know made it into the car, but has not yet resurfaced).

The kids out did themselves apple picking (80 lbs!) and we got a really great variety of apples: Ida Reds, Magnolia Golds, Golden Delicious, Braeburns and (my favorite) Mutsus.

We also got baby beets which we roasted for dinner that night (swoon worthy), pumpkins, warty gourds, and an assortment of squashes.  I got anther Blue Hubbard, since I liked that so well last year, and I am trying a new strain called "Long Island Cheese."  Seriously.


 So far, we've made 4 apple pies, a large number of apple fritters, apple sauce and apple butter.  And we've eaten quite a few apples!

These have been the best apple pies I've ever made which I think means it's a great combination of apples.

Anyway, if you end up with a load of apples, here's how I make apple butter.  It's a two day, low stress affair.

On day 1,  I sort the apples and take all the ones damaged in any way.  They won't store well, and they are better off as butter.

I wash them, then cut them into quarters and dump them in my biggest pot.  I add cinnamon sticks, cloves, chunks of ginger, and whatever other whole spices I have on hand (cardamom, and star anise were used this year).  I pour in about a quart of cider or apple juice, cover the pot and then simmer it for a few hours.

When everything is soft, I turn off the heat and leave it alone.

On day 2, I push the soft apples through a colander.  This removes the skins, cores, and whole spices.  This is apple sauce, and I usually take some out to keep as sauce.

The rest goes into a big pan with some brown sugar (to taste).  The pan goes into the oven at 275 or so degrees.  It starts out looking like the top picture, and eventually turns dark brown and bubbly like the bottom picture.  It's probably in the oven for 8 hours, and I stir it every 2 hours or so, mostly to see how it's getting on.  When my spoon leaves a trail on the bottom of the pan, it's thick enough for me.

That's it!  I put mine in canning jars and process (cover) in boiling water for 15 minutes.

I like to use apple butter on toast, but also on pork roast. Yum!

The Clothing of an Era

Or maybe the closing of an era! 

I haven't talked much here about coming to terms with leaving Babyville.  I lived there for so long, and I had such a nice time there, that I can't leave without "a sigh and a tear in the eye."

But with all the organizing, I came to the realization that I no longer need to save the baby clothes for the "next one."

And if I don't need to save them for my own children, holding them meant they were not on other children, and maybe not on other children who needed them.

So, I did what I do when things get tough: I threw a party!

I hauled out 21 bins of girls' clothing from newborn to size 10, and 12 bins boys' clothing from newborn to 4T and invited all the moms I knew to a tea party and clothing give away.

Did I mention the coats and snow suits?

People came and browsed and chatted and drank tea.  And, God bless them, they hauled away bags and bags of clothes!

Astoundingly, after they left, I realized they had not made a sizable dent in my clothing stockpile, leading me to wonder how many more children I had thought I was having!

To be fair, I have had babies in every size, shape, gender, and season, and I have always had clothes for all of them.  I really had been throwing away the worn out stuff, but I was also loaning out clothes, and they always seemed to come back with more!

So now we are in phase 2: we have been transferring bins to bags, and bringing the bags to the crisis pregnancy center.

So far we've brought them 25 garbage bags of clothes.

That's about a third of it.

Driveway Phonics

I most often use my big flat chalk board for math, and I do love my number playground, but, while we were playing on the number line, I realized the driveway would work for phonics, too.  One of the kids was tripping over diphthongs- this has nothing to do with dorky attire - ch, sh, and th were giving him trouble!

It was easy to draw a train track covered with "ch", leading to a house with a sleeping baby (labeled "sh").  The youngest two had fun running up the tracks going "Ch, ch, ch" til they got to the house and "shhhhed" over the sleepy baby.  I eventually added an arrow sign with "th" as in "this" way.

Then I needed somewhere the arrow to point to, so I drew a silly frog and a set of lily pads for skip counting by 5s up to 100.  That was fun, especially when I realized I could also use it to have them count by 10s.

I remember thinking someone could do elementary school with nothing more than a bucket of sidewalk chalk and a library card, and, really, that's not far from the truth. Except for rainy days, I guess!

Alkali Metals

We were talking in chemistry  about displacement reactions: chemical reactions in which a more active element pushes out (displaces) a less active element.

I was explaining that  certain groups of elements, say the alkali metals, all react the same way because they have the same number of electrons in their outer shell (valence), but that as you move down the chart, the reactions tend to be more active (with more and more electrons, that outer shell is further away from the nucleus and the pull of the protons). 

That put the kids in mind of this video:

Mount Vernon

 We loved Mount Vernon!  It was totally worth the substantial amount of money!

Here we are in front of George Washington's actual house.  You can see a bit beyond the house, that it's sitting on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River - very beautiful.

We got a full tour of the house (no photos allowed) and it is set up exactly as it was at the time of Washington's death, right down to the shades of paint.

The location is really beautiful, and we spent quite a bit of time wandering through the gardens and outbuildings.  This is the view from the back lawn.

The kids had fun with the adventure maps provided to them at the outset.  It was Talk Like a Pirate Day (Did you notice the eye patch?  I didn't at the time.), and it took us a while to realize that they do these maps all the time.

 We had spent several hours there before we realized that there was a separate museum (I mean really?  The whole place is a museum!).  That was partly because they built the museum part underground so that you could still see Mount Vernon as George Washington saw it.

I must say, we see a lot of museums, and theirs was fantastic!  It was every bit the equal of a Smithsonian.  It also had a 4D theater with real fog and snow (snow!) and so forth.

And they had a children's section with dress ups, games, head cut outs, crafts and all sorts of great things for 8 and under.

The whole thing was very, very well done, and we loved it!

Happy Birthday to The Emperor!

 Yes, The Emperor had another birthday!  In commemoration of this glorious event, I give you, not one, but two seriously fuzzy selectively focused pictures.

I am suffering from phonecamsloth (a sad disorder in which you convince yourself that your phone camera will do the job, even though you know it won't, because it's too much work to find your actual camera).

 But, we all had a great time, and it was all clearer and brighter in real life.

Although, going bowling with The Emperor did give us warm and fuzzy feelings!

We did duck pin bowling - it uses smaller pins and balls, and is much easier to do with mixed ages.


In honor of this birthday, I give you 4 big things about The Emperor, and 3 little things.

Four big things about The Emperor:

1. He reads to us!  Currently, he is finishing up Ozma of Oz with the kids and he just started a new Conan story with me.

2. He does a fun and fantastic Catholic Youth Group!

3. He works hard so we can stay home and have Great Adventures in Homeschooling.

4.  He can answer all the obscure comic book and super hero related questions that the kids can come up with.  If that seems small, you've never had dinner with us: We know that Spider-man has been a member of the Fantastic four (kinda), and that he is currently a member of the Avengers, but why did he leave the FF, and have the other members of the Fantastic Four ever been members of the Avengers?  Also, what is the deal with the guy with the crowbar?

Three little things about The Emperor:

1. He loves puns and tongue twisters: Sally's success seemed surprisingly suspicious.

2. He's an awesome (and frequent) Nerf sword fighter.

3. He gives little kids walks... on the ceiling!

4.  He makes me tea (swoon).  It's not just the tea, it's the I'm in a rush to get to work on time, but I'm thinking about you, and I love you, and I want to leave you with something nice to start your day.
Maybe that's not so small, either!

AIIIEEEEEE!

We're having a nasty sore throat/ bad cold go through the house.  It cancelled a planned visit to my folks last Friday, and today I cancelled Chemistry at the last minute.

I had spent a big chunk of the day telling myself I was just "really tired," but not too tired to teach stoichiometry.  Eventually I realized  that "really tired" plus "weak and dizzy" was a bad combination in a chem lab where you're setting things on fire.

Klenda, the only Zoomlian not affected by the cold, got an unrelated ear infection so severe that it broke her ear drum.

The doctor mentioned this casually during our second panicky visit due to extreme pain.

Doctor:  Mmmmmmm.  Looks like her ear drum burst.

Me: (stunned horrified silence while I process that Klenda will be deaf in one ear)

Doctor (still looking in Klenda's ear): Yep, it burst... So, don't let her swim for 6 weeks.

Me: Six weeks???

Doctor, Wellll, it might not take that long.  But, she can just wear an ear plug when she swims.

Me: You mean ear drums heal?

Maybe my problem is just stress.

Playground Hop!

I love Maryland this time of year! Yes, the summers are too hot, and the winters are not cold enough, but springs and falls are long stretches of comfortable weather.

On Tuesdays, the oldest four Zoomlians are taking a 2 1/2 hour history class, so it's all Choclo and Oob time!

I will be doing lots of focused educational stuff on some of those days, but, for our first time out, I decided to do a playground hop (like a pub crawl, but more fun!). 

7 and 5 are really golden ages for playgrounds.  We dropped off the older kids and spent the time going from playground to playground... playing!

Sometimes it's as easy as that.