A cold couch

This is what my neighbors do when you've lost your mind from too many snow days:

Rabbit Hash

It was Girls' Day Out and so Brenda chose for us to drive to Rabbit Hash (the "Center of the Universe") to hear a band. I envisioned a quaint building where we could sit at a table, have a beer, listen to some really cool band. This is what I got: an actual honest-to-goodness General Store that was packed to the gills with people and a bluegrass band pickin' away in a corner next to the woodstove.See Leslie with a beer in her hand and we had just GOT there. She apparently knew something I didn't.

Rabbit Hash, for those who may not know, was and is the first municipality to elect a dog as its mayor. We watched a pseudo-documentary later about Rabbit Hash (www.rabbithashthemovie.com) and the whole dog-electing business and we should've watched it prior to going. Would've explained a whole lotta things.

The girls got a beer and here I am pretending to be cool with my drink of choice: Starting to reconsider the drink here. I'd had about 5 too many minutes of bluegrass.
Leslie, a big heavy metal fan, was just about to die with the music and so we sat on the porch after awhile. Finally, a sunny day in northern Kentucky! A number of dogs meandered about and, something I didn't know, Leslie is scared of dogs. I'm having a lot of fun at her expense with this picture. It makes me laugh everytime I look at it.

Ok, so here's the I'm-so-cool shot of me with my root beer and now ... candy cigarettes:
Now we come to the I-will-get-you-a-funny-picture-so-help-me-God shot: The things I do for my friends, I tell you.

We wandered around and, of course, had to take pictures with the pig crossing sign:Next came the outhouse pictures: (There ain't enough Purell in the world when using one of those things.)The pickers moved outside and then there was some dancin'. I ran off to go talk on the phone ... way down the road.
No, no, really, I had a LOT of fun with the girls. Later on, back at Brenda's house for the showing of "Rabbit Hash," Jeanette joined us. This has to be one Girls' get together that's going to be hard to top anytime soon.

Field trip: Titanic artifact exhiibt & Louisville Science Center

That is all I can show you from today's field trip to see "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit" at Louisville Science Center. I would've bought the souvenir book but after I'd plunked down $46 for the exhibit that took all of about 20 minutes, I wasn't about to fork over another $20. Cheapskate, I know.

Each of us were given boarding passes of passengers who actually were on Titanic and we were all women - Mrs. Jacques Futrelle of Massachusetts returning from a trip with her husband who had signed book contracts for his "Thinking Machine" novels, Mrs. Boulton Earnshaw of Philadelphia returning from a European vacation to take her mind off her impending divorce (scandalous in 1912!), and Mrs. Henry William Frauenthal of New York going home after her wedding in England.
Most of the artifacts were from the kitchen or the engine room. There were examples of 1st and 3rd class china, a bit of jewelry, a pair of shoes and, surprisingly, paper money.

In order to explore and recover objects from Titanic, it requires a 2 1/2 hour dive down and another 2 1/2 back up. Figures at the exhibit showed just a few more than 700 survived the sinking while 1,500 others died, mostly of hypothermia.
What was downright amazing was a portion of the exhibit in which we could put our hands in finger holds and handprints on a simulated iceberg that the sign said was warmer than the water had been when people went into the sea during the sinking.

Once we were through the exhibit, we explored the Louisville Science Center and it kept the kids engaged for a couple of hours. Water was a big factor and The Daisy put together this water cycle puzzle.
Meanwhile, The Boo made bubbles and looked at them through this telescope.
I took this picture because I can tell you first hand from living in the woods in middle Tennessee for a year how important water is when you have to haul it in weekly. That's a story for another time for those of you who don't know. The standing in a bubble activity probably consumed the most of our time. Go figure.

Pop!
The Daisy is such a ham.
Wonder where she gets it?
We moved on to the plastics portion of science and where I was completely useless when the kids asked me to help them construct something. I'm the liberal arts person in the family. Want me to write about what you built? I'm your girl. Helping build it? Nope.
This was a mission to Mars:
On the way home, The Boo - age 3, mind you - said out of the blue,"Thank you for taking us to the place."

How to homeschool on a snow day

First, there's time to catch up on all the stuff you plan to do but just never get around to it. The Daisy really needs to work on her spelling so I got her on SpellingCity.com. It was met with a heavy sigh the next day but I sat and did it with her and it seemed to go better.
Then there is the 30-day trial of JumpStart, which both The Daisy and The Boo did for hours. There is actual learning involved - your student has to complete math or language problems in order to earn coins and "buy" things for their JumpStart house and such.For science, I scammed a project off 5 Oranges blog and we worked on "iridescence." Using ice cubes, salt and food coloring, we watched how some colors melded together while others took a little bit of time to do so. The colors also brought out the cracks in the ice, which was pretty cool.
The result was so pretty I just had to put it at the intro to this post!

Ruining the Valentine's Day surprise

Art project of the day called for making salt dough valentine ornaments so we can get them in the mail. So if you're on our list for Valentine's Day, just forget you ever saw this post.
Once the kids measured all the ingredients (1 cup flour, 1/2 cup salt, 1/2 cup warm water), both took turns rolling out the dough. Good practice for The Boo. The Boo got the large cookie cutter and The Daisy used the small one. The ornaments baked for two hours at 250.
Painting and decorating came next.
And here are the end results:

Finished product from the day we cheated in art

Here are the finished products from last week when I took the kids to a paint-your-own-pottery studio

Snow, snow and more snow

Ok, I'm from the south and all this snow here in central Kentucky? Well, I'm over it.

No sooner does it start to melt and turn everything to mud, but then Winter Storm 2010 hits and there's 4 inches of snow on the ground and more coming down.

This is when having children comes in handy. I asked The Daisy to shovel off the deck and stairs.

You get through that and the next day there's more. Over it. And I'm not the only one. The chickens and ducks refused to come out.

Part of the universe

The Daisy brought this to my attention the other day: She said the sun is blue because she didn't have a yellow marker. Works for me.

Stars, "Horse Show" & money

That's what this week in homeschooling brought.
Our Outdoor Nature Hour was about the moon and the winter sky. Since the past full moon appeared slightly larger than usual due to the closer proximity of its orbit around earth, we were able to talk about the shadows on the moon as we drove home the other night.
I got out our Philip's Planishere, which shows the positions of the stars and constellations for any hour of the year, for The Daisy to find the stars we had just studied (from Orion's belt, Taurus and the Pleides, among others) and she did really well.
In an attempt to be a good and creative homeschooling mom, I've tried playing more games with the kids. The Daisy and I have already gone through "Totally Gross" one entire time and now we're back to her "Horse Show" game. We haven't really yet figured out how to play this so it's still a work in progress, but it's great math practice. And, speaking of which, The Daisy wanted to work on money skills so after she read a section about money in the math notebook, she completed this money math file folder game.

Meanwhile, The Boo worked on his alphabet. We're actually up to J now.