Mount Vernon

We live in a really fantastic place to homeschool.  There are so many wonderful museums near our home.  And so much history all around this area.  Last week we visited Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington.  We had never been there before even though we have lived here for nearly seven years.   Well, we were really missing out!  George Washington said (paraphrased) that it was the most wonderful place on earth.  I find it hard to argue with him.  It was beautiful!  I wanted to sit on his back porch all afternoon and take in the view of the Potomac and watch the kids run around his lawn.  We spent all day, 9:30-5:00, walking around his estate.  When it was time to go I was sad to leave.  It is really a beautiful place.

 

a ha-ha wall

Placing flowers at George Washington's tomb

 

Playing "Revolutionary War soldiers" at Mount Vernon.  How awesome is that!

A large old juniper makes a perfect fort.  It's all hollow underneath.

 

Good bye for now, Mount Vernon.  I'm sure we will be visiting you again soon.

Remember, remember the 5th of November

Guy Fawkes Day.  Bonfire Night.  Since we happened to be studying this period in English history right now, we tried to have our own celebration here "across the pond" in our own backyard.  The kids made paper guy dolls and we lit up a fire in our new fire pit.  We roasted hot dogs and burned the guy dolls. 

 

The kids had a good time even though we had some trouble keeping the fire going.  In fact, we had to roast the marshmallows over the stove after the fire went out and refused to light up again.

 Fun, fun! 

My first hat

After a couple of late nights tidying up, we are mostly back to a normal level of mess around here.  Thank goodness!

I wanted to share something that I made a few weeks ago.

This little hat is my first attempt at knitting in the round.  I think it turned out pretty well.  I forgot to start it with a couple inches of ribbing so it has a rolled edge instead.  I wasn't sure how big it was going to turn out, either.  While I was knitting it I told the kids that it would be for whichever child it fit the best.  C won.
 

Too much stuff!

Today we had the exterminator here spraying our house for carpet beetles.  Yuck!  I had to unload everything out of our closets and pull things away from the walls.  He went through the whole house.  Every room, bathroom, and closet, the garage, the basement, and our storage room.  As I was running around ahead of him picking up stray toys, books, and lost socks (among other things) I had one thought in my head..."How on earth did we accumulate so much crap stuff?"  One of my many New Year's resolutions that have been ignored this year was to take a car load of crap stuff to the Salvation Army at least once a month.   To get back on track I am going to have to donate eleven car loads this month.  It's going to be nearly impossible.  But it would feel so wonderfully liberating.  I must do it.

A few pictures of what my house looks like right now:   Aaaagghhh!

All this stuff crap is suffocating me!

Happy Halloween

This little girl has been obessed with "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" ever since Gramma came for a visit and played make-believe with her. Every morning when it is just me and her in the dimly lit kitchen in the pre-dawn hour, Mama Bear and Baby Bear share a bowl of porridge. It fills our tummies and warms my heart. And this Halloween has given me the perfect opportunity to bring out the old bear costume I made for M so many years ago (with Gramma's help, on a hand-me-down sewing machine with a broken foot pedal.) It was his first time trick-or-treating. He was 22 months old and the costume fit him perfectly. T is 30 months old and it's a bit big on her. Even so, it is perfect. I have a feeling that she will be wearing that costume for weeks to come. :)

Oh, the irony

I started this blog to encourage myself to do more fun and interesting stuff with my family. Ironically, we have been so busy doing fun and interesting stuff for the past couple of months that I haven't had time to catch my breath, much less blog about it. I kind of went crazy signing my kids up for activities this autumn. We've been on field trips to the National Zoo, the Baltimore Science Museum, Anne Marie Gardens, the Library of Congress, the American History Museum, and Historic St. Mary's City. We have had family visit and lots of playtime with friends. The older kids played soccer in the Upwards league. M entered an original Lego creation in the County Fair and won 1st prize! J and C entered handmade stuffed animals in the fair and won ribbons, too. They had art lessons. They started gymnastics and horseback riding lessons. M continues with jujitsu. And they are in the Christmas Pageant at church this year and rehearsals started a month ago! And we have joined a second homeschool group. And I'm taking T to the library story time, too. Oh, and we are trying to squeeze in our school work sometimes!

It's been fun, but exhausting. I think we are all ready to start slowing down and spend more time at home. Plans for November: cooking, sewing, knitting, reading, drawing, and celebrating the beginning of my favorite time of the year.

Birthday Bread

I've been making all of our bread at home for a while now. Okay, so I mostly use the bread machine. But it's still better than store-bought sandwich loaves. It's good bread. The kids like it. The main problem is that I can only make one loaf at a time. And with the kids getting bigger, they are eating more. It's gotten to the point that I practically have to run the bread machine twice a day to keep up with demand. So I've been trying to figure out how to work in baking bread in the oven into my routine. I figure that in the oven I could do several loaves at once.
To help me figure out how to do that, I recently bought this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, with some of my birthday money. (Thanks Mom and Dad!) It is amazing. The idea is that you mix up a huge batch of dough, keep it in your fridge, and then you can just pull off what you need each day and bake it up. I have now made several loaves of the basic boule recipe and the kids eat it so fast I haven't been able to get a decent photo of it. All I can show you is the book and our bread plate with a few crumbs. It is so good.