Blanchard "Christmas Eve"

We got together with the Utah Blanchards for "Christmas Eve" on Sunday, 19 December 2021 after church. (Since Ryan's family was leaving the country for Christmas, we wanted to catch them for the party before they left, hence the early-in-the-week date of our event.) We feasted on the usual spread, visited, opened stockings and jammies, and played with trains. 

Then we met up with the East Coast Blanchards on Zoom for a gift exchange. We've started drawing names amongst ourselves for Christmas gifts and it's been such a fun thing to watch what everyone picks out for each other.  Cohen had Callie and got her a mini donut maker. Dray had Sam and got him a hotwheels city shark track. They were both thrilled!  Paul had Gregg and got him a work bench for his garage projects, and Ryan had me and got me some Belgian chocolates - from Europe! Heck yes!  As far as gifty goes, I had Bret and got him an apple peeler corer slicer (after hearing him reminisce happily about the one he loved using at his grandparents' house growing up), Gregg got Paul a pocket bellows for starting campfires and hammock straps, Sam chose some books for Katie off her wish list, and Callie picked out a phone holder for Kage's car.

We finished up with crepe bar and more playing and visiting. And it was marvelous!

Candy Cane Week

Whoa - I have a lot of catching up to do! Hang on tight as we go back in time to the beginning of December and catch up on all the fun happenings of Christmas month (and beyond!).

Here we are in the week after Thanksgiving that I dubbed "Candycane Week" for our homeschool. I had snatched a free Candy Cane Unit Study from some freebie email that I'm signed up for (I snag a lot more than I ever use from those giveaways, but this one, for some reason, actually got incorporated into our lessons. I penciled in various activities from the packet to fit into our weekly structure of Mondays = Art, Tuesdays = Poetry, Wednesdays = Nature Journaling/Study, Thursdays = Music, and Fridays = Science. Of course there were activities that didn't fit any of our daily categories, so we just squeezed them in as we had time and inclination. It turned out to be such a fun week of candy cane festivities to get us in the Christmas mood. Here are the highlights:

Monday, 29 November 2021: Candy Cane Painting and Drawing Lesson

We cut out candy cane shapes in card stock and then dipped them in a tub of shaving cream that had been swirled with red food coloring. Once they dried, Callie strung them up on a string to make a cute garland.  The kids also enjoyed doing an art for kids hub lesson drawing candy canes (sorry no pics of that, whoops!).

Bonus! After we were done "painting" it made
an excellent sensory activity.

I just have to interject this in here because it's hilarious! So I was going through my 
Google photos albums one evening, matching up its guesses with the correct people
I have saved in my folders. It is amazingly accurate and can spot people in backgrounds
or with sunglasses and hats on and like 99 % of the time the matches are correct. Not this time!
I guess when the algorithm fails, it fails spectacularly. It cracked me right up. Ahem. And now
back to our Candy Cane Week recap.

Finished garland number one.

Finished garland number two.

Tuesday, 30 November 2021: Candy Cane cookies + Candy Cane books

Tuesdays are our poetry teatime days, and while we rarely have any special drink (maybe a little glass of milk if we're feeling fancy), we do quite often make some sort of fun treat. And today's treat was candy cane shaped and colored cookies. (I opted for almond extract in this recipe instead of peppermint extract like I had seen in another recipe and I think that was a great choice. They were delicious!) While we ate our cookies we read a few Candy Cane-related books. (Not exactly poetry teatime, but close enough.)

(Note: A Candy Cane Christmas came from Tomie dePaola's memoir
called Christmas Remembered.)

Wednesday, 1 December 2021: Candy Cane Videos

We didn't have anything nature-y to do with candy canes for our Wednesday, so we substituted a couple of fun youtube videos of how candy canes are made. Here's the one for a handmade version at a candy shop, and here's the factory made kind.

Thursday, 2 December 2021: On Thursdays we do music appreciation and piano lessons. I thought it would be fun to tie in The Nutcracker, since some versions have a dance of the Candy Canes, so we watched that and then listened to a couple of podcast episodes on Classics for Kids about Tchaikovsky.

We also had some fun Candy Cane Math instead of our regular lessons. These were in the packet, and I just printed them off at the library and then wrote in math facts that the kids would know. Sam had addition and subtraction up to 10 and Cal had multiplication. They had fun solving the puzzle as soon as I had it cut out for them.

Friday, 3 December 2021: Candy Cane Science! I was saving the best for last . . . a whole slew of sciencey things roughly candy-cane adjacent that I had found in the packet and supplemented with some rather old pins from pinterest that I dug up.  We grew borax crystals, determined what would make a candy cane dissolve fastest, built a candy cane structure, made peppermint fireworks, and attempted to bend and shape candy canes (this one didn't work so well). What a grand finale of candy cane fun (and learning)!

Pipe cleaner candy canes ready for borax crystal formation.

Writing hypotheses about dissolving candy canes.

The experiment is on!

Meanwhile: let's build something sturdy with candy canes
and hot glue.

Water is winning!

Vinegar in second place.

Milk is hard to see, but it's shrinking, too.
Oil is not doing anything at all.

Peppermint fireworks in a dish.

Softened (and ballooning) candy canes.

But they just snapped instead of bending.

Still smiley all around.

Photos from Phones - November 2021 Round Up

After all the Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas flurry of fun at end of the month, here's what is left over of our "ordinary" days of November.

11.1.21
(we tallied every Tesla we saw on our drive to, through, and from Vermont
and when we got home we graphed them for math. #nerdalert!)

11.1.21
(our total miles for this year's drive)

11.2.21
(A handful of books set in Vermont that we checked out once we got home,
fun to read after we’ve been there and knew where they were talking about.)

11.2.21
(ploppy pumpkins for our art project this morning)

11.2.21
(thanks to the library for supplying the supplies
and instructions)

11.2.21

11.3.21
(sunrise at 7:49 am (!!))

11.4.21
(sassy sunset and s'mores)

11.4.21
(sticky smile)

11.4.21
(amazing!)

11.4.21

11.6.21
(this book wasn't that great, but I did like the little
poem of gratitude quoted at that Thanksgiving scene)

11.7.21
(Gregg caught them looking at Nat Geo Mags
at Gma's like this)

11.9.21
(We listened to this one earlier this year on libby, but the only other version our library has is on kindle. We listened on libby again this morning while following along on kindle on my computer, and all the technology rigamaroll was worth it because the art is marvelous! Get your hands on this one in whatever form you can! It’s a gem!)

11.10.21
(post-covid test lunch reward = Arby's)

11.10.21
(they got colds, which we thought were just colds,
but wanted to be sure and also wanted to be able to
reschedule their covid vaccines which had to be canceled
because they woke up sniffly and sore-throated the morning
of their appointments. So we tested at Walgreens and then
picked up Arby's afterward)

11.10.21
(and then we headed to the skate park to scooter around for
a while)

11.10.21
(I love this skate park in North Ogden
and I love the views!)

11.10.21

11.10.21

11.10.21
(a nice dusting of snow up there on Ben Lomond!)

11.10.21

11.10.21
(for future reference . . . so we can remember
how in the heck to get this tangram back in order ;)

11.11.21
(tree fort building happening in our backyard)

11.11.21

11.12.21
(siphon science!)

11.12.21
(and then some balloon rockets because Sam checked out
a book called LEGO Man in Space and in the back it had
this project and he wanted to try it. How could I say no?)

11.12.21
(His rocket looks pretty cool, but unfortunately
didn't go very far on its string. Ah, well. That's science
sometimes!)

11.12.21
(ditto for Cal's, though it did actually ove along
the string a foot or two. We'll have to try again
after some redesigns.)

11.13.21
(I do love a book with an interesting structure, and this memoir definitely has that! Written in short entries in alphabetical order, it’s totally unique and clever and fun and entertaining. But her thoughts can be deep and thoughtful, too. I really enjoyed this. (She has another called Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal that I read a handful of years ago, which actually is newer than this one, but my library finally got this first one so I was excited to finally read it, and now I want to read the other one again!))

11.13.21
(see what I mean by clever?)

11.13.21
(I can relate to this feeling with rearranged furniture -
it reminds me of when we had to shift things around in our living
room growing up to fit in the Christmas tree and I loved laying on
the couch when it was moved across the room and enjoying the new
view and feeling excited about the "freshness")

11.13.21
(Here’s an entry that I particularly loved
and seems particularly relevant as we think about Thanksgiving. :)

11.13.21
(Thankful, cont.)

11.13.21
(another one I loved)

11.14.21
(this lightbulb was dangling by a thread from the socket by the
kitchen pantry. Good thing Gregg had the tools to get it out! Yikes!)

11.15.21
(We have recently become big Miranda Paul fans (after watching a writing workshop from her on RAR about creative nonfiction). We checked out everything we could find by her from our library and they’re all winners! Our faves were Little Free Libraries, Adventures and Whose Hands? (One more called Beyond missed the pic, but you should read that one, too, if you can.))

11.15.21
(it was not without some drama (I'll let you guess
who caused it ;), but we did it! The kids got their
first doses of the Pfizer vaccine!!)

11.15.21
(Grandma B showed up with donuts to ease the pain)

11.15.21
(pushups in the parking lot, just like the army folks
who administered the shots suggested)

11.15.21
(I needed new snow boots (my 15+ year old and faithful ones
bit the dust and were buried in the dumpster last year)
and Nate sold me on Muck Boots. So far, I'm loving them
(but I haven't had much snow to really give them a proper
testing yet).

11.16.21
(learning a bit about Charles Schultz today with some picture book
bios and Art for Kids Hub drawing lesson)

11.16.21
(And then a viewing of Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving, complete
with our own Thanksgiving "feast" of popcorn, pretzels, toast and jelly beans
fruit snacks/gummy butterflies/lego candies)

11.16.21
(time for a haircut, by yours truly!
It's harder than it looks!!)

11.16.21
(ta-da!)

11.17.21
(it's that time of year again! we made a little field
trip up to Snowbasin to check out their
snowmaking operation after dinner)

11.17.21

11.17.21

11.17.21

11.18.21
(sourdough pumpkin chocolate chip muffins! Yum!)

11.18.21
(we have been loving this book this month.
Here is the author talking about her book
so you can hear how that big word is pronounced.)

11.19.21
(Ready for my booster!)

11.19.21
(Boosted! I decided to try the mix, with a Moderna booster
after my two Pfizer doses. Gregg went for the triple Pfizer. I felt crummy for
about 33 hours, about as bad as when I had my second dose (aches, skin sensitivity, 
joint pain, headache, chills), and then at 8 pm the next day I realized I felt great!)

11.19.21
(We love this story and love that it’s based on a real-life man!
 (Look him up after you read it! So inspiring!))

11.19.21
(the author's note just gives you a sneak peek. At Girls Camp
this summer, one of the leaders, Kristin, talked about him in a message
at testimony meeting and it was so inspiring then, too)

11.20.21
(Sam's latest remodel to his Ferrari -
he wanted it documented, so these pics are his)

11.20.21

11.20.21

11.21.21
(We were do obsessed with all the mushrooms in Vermont, we continued the obsession with books when we got home. These were especially good, and paired well with some straight nonfiction books about mushroom life cycles (which I forgot to snap a pic of before returning) for a few more weeks of mushroom lovin’.)

11.21.21
(Lots of goodies and favorites for Thanksgiving Month reading!)

11.29.21
(I discovered this and a handful of others in the same series (Kid Authors, Artists, Scientists, Presidents, etc) by accident and we’ve fallen in love. Each chapter is about the length of a short podcast and talks about a famous person as a kid. We have learned so much! We’ve listened to this Athletes one straight through on a longer drive, but have just dipped in and out of the others and it works great either way.)

11.29.21
(We’ve had fun reading a LOT of different Little Red Riding Hood retellings the past few weeks. We compared and contrasted and the kids wrote and retold their own versions. 😍)

11.29.21
(drawing pictures for subrtaction word problems)

11.30.21
(just because I like to see how we set things up 
each year)

11.30.21

11.30.21
(never done extra stockings on the laundry
room door before; I like this idea, Cal!)

11.30.21
(a cute candy cane garland from Candy Cane Week)

11.30.21
(more candy cane cuties)

Every other round up here (whew!):

2021: Sep | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

2020: Dec | Nov | Sep | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar Quar + Mar | Feb | Jan
2019: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sep | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan
2018: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan
2017: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

2016: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

2015: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

2014: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June | May | Apr | Mar | Feb | Jan

2013: Dec | Nov | Oct | Sept | Aug | July | June