Cheating on the homeschool art project

Super cold was forecast so I got the kids out of the house while the gettin' was good on Thursday. We went to the local paint-your-own-pottery shop and the kids had a blast. The Daisy and I did this long ago, probably when she was 3 and we were visiting friends in Orlando. This was the first time The Boo has done such a thing.
Here they're getting started:


Finished products:


We'll pick them up in a week after they've been fired and they'll look totally different from this.

A 3-year-old's perspective on things:

Outdoor Nature Hour: winter cattail study

It has been too cold to stop and study our cattails. Why I chose to study cattails on the landfill road when there are perfectly available ones just up the road baffles me. Must've been one of those days.
We started our study back in the fall and now we were back to observe the flower spike was starting to let go of its seeds. The Daisy helped it along quite a bit.


The Boo found it a handy sword.

Cooking school

There's this kitchen playset from my grandmother's church that we nabbed when the church was renovating some years ago. I played with this stuff when I was little so there's all the sentimentality attached with it. I painted it when The Daisy was little and just moved stuff around recently in the wanna-be living room.

That made the kids take to it again and play some.

The other day they donned aprons and made me a delicious meal of Playdough something or other.

Early January snow

These are scenes from snow we had earlier this month. The cold was unbearable. I think the high reached 19 degrees during the entire week. Of course, all the animals' water buckets were frozen so that meant hauling hot water out to break it up. I had a momentary frozen pipe ... that would have been my breaking point, I tell you, if it actually had remained that way. The kids enjoyed sledding down the hill, coming in red-cheeked and shivering. Yes, that is a baby lamb in the creek with the kids. We were babysitting our friend's animals while she was away. The chickens were about to mutiny. I'm telling you they looked out the door of the coop and say,"Oh, no way."

Homeschooling through games

This really is one of those "good mom" ideas. When homeschooling doesn't involve just sitting down to do a myriad of worksheets from a notebook. As I tried to promise myself at the start of this school year, there would be more games.
The Daisy got this game called "Totally Gross." It's a science game and appropriate since our tri-state homeschool group is focusing on science this year.
You roll the dice and if you answer one of the science questions correctly, you get to move that many spaces on the board. There are, of course, the obligatory questions about boogers and poop. The object is to try and get a Totally Gross card.
Here The Boo shows off his toes as my Totally Gross card called for checking your feet for calluses.