Move along January

We've gotten off rather lightly with both snow amounts and temperatures so far this winter. I am willing January and the rest of winter to pass quite quickly so we can get to spring and better weather. There is a very cooped up feeling in NH in the winter. Sure we can spend time outside with snow sports, nature walks and such, it's just not very pleasant time once you start to feel chilled! The recent snowstorm, a big one, stayed south of us and here we are towards the end of January with just a few inches of snow. It has been very cold for several days though and I have one frozen plumbing pipe(hot water to kitchen sink). Thankfully it's supposed to warm up some in the week to come and that should resolve.  So not much snow, not as many very cold days as usual and not as many frozen pipes as usual, I'll take it but I do want winter to move along because while it's still here anything could happen.

This week we had co-op, snowboarding, taekwondo and a trip to the nursing home to take mom out for her birthday. The wild turkeys paid us a few visits, Choco the old ferret considered doing evil towards Lily the hamster and the dogs and cats are in and out and in and out, wanting to enjoy the outdoors but quickly deciding that they are cold and coming back in the house again.

Colin

A nice, if cold day on the mountain. Colin coming down from a run.

Colin heading back to the lodge for a break.

Not much snow so far this winter.

View down the road and the lake is beyond the trees.

View up the road.

Ineffective sunshine.

Small sign of spring, well not really this is indoors!

Just another winter homeschool week

We still haven't had a lot of snow though a few inches arrived the end of the week. It is colder, still not a terribly cold winter, above average, that is good. Homeschooling and everyday life are plugging along. We had to miss a visit to my mom due to that one snowstorm, that messed up our currently tight schedule since mom counts on our visits and it's a week where it will be hard to fit it in another day. Hopefully we can figure out something.

Hayley and Colin had another snowboard day at Sunapee. I hit the trails myself on my skis and did pretty well.

There's Hayley zooming down the mountain.

Hayley with her lesson group, male teacher and three boys, Hayley is the only girl in her group.

Felix finds a different use than I had intended for my fabric bins. I guess they do make for cozy cat beds.

Mom's hamster Lily hanging out in her ball while In change her cage.

I gave Lily a "snowfall" look by sprinkling some white bedding on top of her blue bedding.

Lily hasn't worn out the second spinny wheel yet. She runs and runs while Tristan does some schoolwork on the same table.

The turkeys were out right after the Saturday snowfall, they seemed to enjoy pecking around in it.

Off into the woods go the turkeys

Wild Turkey heading into the woods.

Tristan is in the description part of his writing book. The birds fandex is because he had to describe certain birds.

Then Tristan had to describe ways people might enter a room, this sentence asked for ways girls might enter a room.

I'm glad to know that as a girl I can teleport into a room!

Homeschooling- mid year update

I'm only homeschooling 2 now and Colin, at 17 and in his final year of homeschooling, is very independent at this point, so this update is mainly just about Tristan.

Things are looking good in our homeschool, very optimistic that we'll hit summer break on the early side this year.

For history we planned on doing Ancient history for a start and we did complete that a little before Christmas break. Now we've moved on to the Middle ages, which will go a little quicker since Tristan recently had a whole year of Middle ages study in junior high. This year we're using a combination of Diana Waring materials and Story of the World. It's car schooling at it's best, listen and discuss during the otherwise wasted time getting back and forth to co-op, research further as needed when back home. Since we won't take as long with Middle Ages as we did with Ancients I think we'll get through Early Modern Times before summer break too.

                                              

For math Tristan continues on with Math U See. He is on track to finish algebra well before summer.

We use a combination of materials for language arts. Vocabulary cartoons are a fun and easy way to learn new words. Spelling You See has been a convenient spelling curriculum for us for the past couple years. Jump In is the writing curriculum we decided on for this year.

 Jump In may be for reluctant and eager writers but it's not a favorite for Tristan. I offered for him to try something else but he decided to press on since he was already about a quarter way through the curriculum. This is not his favorite subject at all.

Tristan's formal biology study is done for this year. We broke it up into human body, he did last year with older brothers,  Botany, which we focused on over the summer and Zoology which Tristan studied by taking my zoology class at co-op (and just living his life here in the wildhomeschool house!). In my co-op class we did lapbooking and also a novel study. We used Jr. High and High School level lapbooks. It went very well. Below are pictures of Tristan's completed lapbooks.

First we studied Veterinary science and completed a lapbook.

The last lapbook we did was a novel study on The Tarantula in my Purse and 172 Other Wild Pets.

Unable to find what I needed for sale I finally created the lapbook myself and was quite pleased with it.

                                           The middle lapbook we completed was on birds.

Through the semester Tristan and the other students also completed zoology coloring book pages, these are meant for high school and college level not young kids. They dissected owl pellets, did several labs including finding and comparing the true nutritional content of several dogs foods and also a lab on how the gizzard works in birds.

Finally we wrapped up the class with final animal projects. Tristan chose to do his project on tigers.

Tristan and his Tiger project.

It's nice that Tristan has completed his biology studies since he'll be busy this semester learning lines for and practicing two plays. He's doing both plays through his drama class at co-op. The high school play is based on A Midsummer Night's Dream and is called A Super Groovy Night's Dream. It's Shakespeare (sorta) in the 60's! Tristan is also taking a part in the Junior High play since the Junior high class is smaller and they needed a few extra actors. That play is called Becoming Shakespeare and is about the early life (young adult) of Will Shakespeare.

Things are looking good mid year here at our wild homeschool. Summer break will be here before we know it!

It was the first week after Christmas break and all through the house....

....every creature was sleepy and didn't want to get up.

Sleepy Felix the cat on top of sleepy lizards in cage.

Breaks are refreshing and it's so hard to get back to normal after a break. Oh well, it was time to do just that. Back to homeschool, co-op, taekwondo (actually that didn't take much of a break), work, and on to snowboarding and skiing.

It was hard to get Tristan up for co-op on Tuesday. I'm sure he's thankful that I didn't take a picture.  We made it in time for co-op and his drama classes with not much time to spare.  I'll share a nicer picture instead.

One of Tristan's headshots from theater camp last week.

Monday and Wednesday featured Taekwondo classes as the guys work towards their 2nd degree black belt. While the guys were off punching and kicking and such I worked some more on my pantry remodel which is basically done except for figuring out if it's the way I want it.

Thursday was hit the books hard homeschooling. I'll cover our homeschool week in a separate post.

Friday was snowboard lessons at Mt. Sunapee for Hayley and Colin while I chaperoned a ski group of younger kids. Colin does not like or need lessons anymore but that is the price to pay for getting the school group rate 5 week program. He only has to take a one hour lesson and then has several hours of free snowboarding. I think Hayley still likes her lessons, she started snowboarding later than her younger brothers and is still fine tuning her skills. I did pretty well myself if I do say so for skiing blue to black trail on my first time out this year. I enjoy green trails and find them relaxing, I like the challenge of blue trails....after the first couple weeks of  a new season..... once I brush up my skills. I do not like black diamond trails whatsoever, even if they're just a small part of a more challenging blue trail, Especialy on all man made snow, with icy patches! I'm glad I didn't break myself on that first day out.

This is what it looked like from up top EXCEPT those lakes in the distance were not frozen at all, they were still shimmery

water. My camera battery had exhausted itself by the time I got here so I couldn't take my own picture.

                               I got these awesome shirts for a New Years present for all of us.

I'm not sure all of us like them as much as I do, especially those of us who are male. I found it hard to read Trevor's reaction. He being our biggest star wars fan in the family and certainly a liker of cats, I thought he might like this shirt.

Well, I didn't take a picture of his reaction so I'll post a nicer photo of Trevor in a star wars t-shirt that I know he likes

Star Wars shirt, no cats

Also on Tuesday we ordered our baby chicks which will arrive the first week of May. We ordered them from mypetchicken.com. It was hard for me a vegan and person who cares deeply about animals to decide to have chicks shipped but I was in general happy with what I read about this company, how they treat their chickens, how they ship them and how the post office will handle them. They will just be one day in the mail since I chose express shipping. Why do we even need them being a family that rarely eats eggs (and me a vegan who never, ever eats them!)? They will hopefully be a valued part of the family, will bring enjoyment just by being them, will provide those who do wish to eat eggs some that were humanely procured, they will provide humane eggs for the dogs and cats, they will provide wonderful manure/compost for our vegetable gardens, they will help us be slightly more self sustaining.  We will be able to purchase less pet food and less compost and manure from the store. Yes we'll have to buy chicken feed  but I hope to eventually have the garden feed the chickens a large portion of their diet. I'm researching. And...they'll just be fun and cute.

Some of our chickens might look like this, ahhh the cuteness!

This weekend I should have more time to update my blogs and catch up on other things. We won't be visiting my mom at the nursing home since they've had an outbreak of stomach flu. Mom is fine so far but neither she or we want to expose the kids. Even if just hubby and I visit we could bring the bug home.

Last day of Christmas break

Oh why must our lovely Christmas break end? We've had three weeks off from many regular commitments and hubby had quite a few days off from work. We've been able to visit Mom without it being crammed into an already busy schedule. We saw Star Wars as a family at the movies, A Christmas Carol at the theater, went to Animal Adventures, attended the play Tristan was in, 101 Dalmatians, had several nice meals and a couple feasts and enjoyed some downtime.

We got fiber optic internet installed, what a great thing that is, so much faster than DSL! A worker from Texas installed it since our local company figured once everyone is hooked up in this little area there will not be enough work to keep local people employed so they might as well contract it out. It was a banner day at our house when the big Texan, who was extremely scared of our dogs, installed the new equipment. No more asking who is using all the internet or can I reset the box (modem). The slow internet times family of 6 was the cause of a few family squabbles and I don't just mean the kids!

Tomorrow regular weeks start again and we add in the kids snowboard lessons. I got out my skis today, haven't gone yet due to late snow and the fact that I'm not working at the ski area (strangely I miss it, but we do need to keep me relatively ready to go at a moment's notice until we get mom more settled at the nursing home). I will ski later this week when the kids snowboard. At first I found only one ski pole, thankfully I found my second one, didn't want to be a one pole skier! Especially in iffy conditions with the lack of much natural snow so far this year.

I wandered around outdoors a bit today and missed my vegetable gardens and apple trees, now that everything is covered with a coating of snow there will be no more gardening until spring. It was an extended season this year, that's for sure. I am hoping for a short winter too and an early spring. It could happen, never expected to get no snow until after Christmas, we do get lucky years when it comes to winter...once in awhile.

Probably should take down this little greenhouse now the snow has come.

These little solar dancing animals lived in the greenhouse. They will still dance, does that mean we would get some use out of solar even in the winter?

The snow has come.

Isn't this a silly bird feeder? I couldn't help myself and bought it.

The nice box which brought our internet into the current technology, Yay fiber optics!

My skis...and poles are ready.