:: this moment ::

:: this moment ::  A photo from the week. Not too many words. A simple moment, extraordinary, special. Something I want to remember, cherish, to pause over. If you have a "moment" leave a link in the comments for others to find and share.

inspired by soulemama.

Project :: Coffee Cozy for Miss. Julie

A couple of weeks ago I discovered it was my friend Julie's birthday. Now not only is she a friend now, she was a friend many years ago in college, she is also #1's Girl Scout leader, and just a great person to have in our lives. This particular day happened to also be a Girl Scouts meeting day so I knew we'd be seeing her.

Well, we should have a gift!

After we got some school work finished I headed out to my sewing room and whipped up a coffee cozy. Seriously these things take no time! I have a serious button shortage, especially large, fun buttons so I actually had to pick out a button then find fabric to match it instead of the other way around. The pattern can be found here.

A quick trip to Dutch Bros. for a coffee cup and gift card and we were in business.

History is Alive :: Elephant Ears

Remember how excited I was that we got to Rome in our history? We talked about the rise of Rome, we talked about the politics of Rome, we talked about the Romans adopting and renaming the Greek gods, we talked about the roads and art and buildings of Rome, and we talked about gladiators. Before we left Rome for some talk of India and China we talked about the Punic Wars.

The Punic Wars started in a dispute over trade routes and lasted over a hundred years. Mostly a sea battle, the Punic Wars kept going with Rome winning some battles and Carthage winning some battles. Until a Carthaginian general decided to try something new. He brought elephants through the alps to fight the Romans. The Romans, never seeing an elephant before fled. The plan did work, the Carthaginian army marched up and down Rome defeating village after village. But while the army was busy doing that the Romans sailed to Carthage and defeated the Carthaginians once and for all.

What better way to remember a lesson about the Punic Wars that to make elephant ears!!!

:: supplies gathered

:: I made bread dough in the morning and let it rise while we did our other school stuff.

:: a project for everyone to sit at the table and wait patiently for their elephant ear. Hot grease and kids don't mix.

:: digging in and LOVING our elephant ears.

:: I love these hands-on projects. Thank you SOTW and activity guide.

Getting organized

The other day I read this post by my friend Alysun. It made me think about my #3's problem with clothes. He can't put them away, his sister (who's in charge of that chore each morning) couldn't put them away, even I had a difficult time getting all his clothes to fit into their drawers. The result?

Drawers overflowing and a tub that is supposed to hold Playmobile figures being used as a clothes dump. And much of those clothes would end up in the dirty baskets in the laundry room since they were just laying about...know how much I loathe washing clean clothes...

So I took a deep breath and went in to do something about it the other morning. Really it didn't take too long. I sorted through all his clothes and even though he hadn't grown out of much of it I put them away for the next 4/5 size wearer. I also got a small pile of just plain done clothes and tossed those.

Isn't it lovely???

And it got me thinking. This little bit of time invested. I got such great results but I also got a basket full of clothes that needed further storage.

I do have a system for all the hand-me-downs. But I haven't been using my system in the past few months. Really it's just been a dump it out there in a basket or bag or something and do it later plan. Not working real well and I was beginning to have difficultly walking around in the area of the garage this system takes place.

So I gathered all the tubs, baskets, bags and piles I could.

Checked sizes and dumped into the right tub. I had to add two more tubs but I got everything in.

Another item off the list. Once they were all stacked up, in a weird order too since I'll need 2T next and my cousin wants to go through the 0-3m one before I'll be doing anything with the 6-7, I could walk in the back room of the garage so nicely...it was like having another room added on.

Thought I'd show off my wonderful packing/moving/storage organization while we're here.

I read about this idea in the Duggar's book 20 and Counting. Basically as I packed over a year and a half ago for our move to Eugene each box got an inventoried card of what was in that box. Each card and box got a matching number. The cards are kept in a recipe box type holder. When we moved in to our house we didn't unpack all of the boxes. Some are stored in a loft like attic in the garage. Some are in the back storage room of the garage. Some were in my sewing room. Each box that was unpacked, that card got pulled and tossed. Each box that got stored, the card was marked where the box was located. If I took just a couple of things from the box, I made the corrections on the card and everything got put away. I have to tell you that though labor intensive on the front end, this is an invaluable system for me. If I'm looking for something; tax papers, a toy that someone realizes never got unpacked, a pair of shoes or a dress (I was pregnant when we moved so had all of my regular clothes in boxes) I can just look through the cards, find which number box the item is in, and Mr. Wiedz can find that box (we took care to store the boxes with the numbers showing). And I can add to it. As I add clothes storage tubs, I just fill out a new card, mark the box, and put everything away!

I'm linking up to raising arrow's homemaking link-up this week. Go check out some other great homemaking tips.

:: this moment ::

:: this moment ::  A photo from the week. Not too many words. A simple moment, extraordinary, special. Something I want to remember, cherish, to pause over. If you have a "moment" leave a link in the comments for others to find and share.


inspired by soulemama.

:: Yarn Along ::

Joining Ginny, over at small things, again with yarn along. A single photo of a current knitting or crocheting project with a current read. I am really loving these posts, taking a moment to think about what and why I'm knitting or reading. I read...a lot. And I knit...not as much as I'd like but I do have 2-4 projects going either on the needles or in my brain. Leave a comment to share your yarn along.

I'm a day late with my yarn along this week but with no Mr. Wiedz my mom has come to spend the week with us. She's been awesome being an extra set of hands, running with me to practice, games, doing dishes, running errands, visiting and basically just being a cool mom and grandma! Yea for Mom!


But I have been knitting...I'm still working on both the produce bag whenever I'm sitting in the car for an extra minute or at the ball field. I'm done with all the increasing that makes the bottom so I'm on the lovely, no-thought-required K2Tog, YO row then K all row of the body. I think I'm going to like the finished product. And I'm still working on #2's sweater. He's completely decided on a sweater now instead of a vest. I'm going to try a percentage pattern, found a great tutorial here.


On the nightstand :: The Rebellion of Jane Clarke by Sally Gunning. I love historical fiction and this book is a great one! 

History is Alive :: Saturnalian Gifts

We got to Rome! I am excited about this because it means we are nearing the end of our history book. I have loved The Story of the World and will continue next year with Volume 2, but it is nice to know that we are nearing the end of the book at the same time we are nearing the end of the school year...we did it!

*Of course as soon as we did a chapter in Rome and I got all excited, we moved to the far east to catch up on what was happening there...we'll be back Rome...we'll be back.*

Much of our early reading in the fall covered Greek gods. The kids really had a fun time with this and by the time the Greek history came up we were ready. So when we got to Rome we learned that the Romans adopted many of the Greek gods and goddesses as their own but changed names, and a lot of words for things like planets and days of the week and months of the year are named after these Roman gods and goddesses.

From the activity book we made little clay figures similar to the gifts the Romans would make and present in a festival to honor the god Saturn.

Gathered supplies:

Used a reciepe that called for coloring the dough instead of painting...genius, no messy paint.

Everyone set to creating. My kids love dough play, though we did have a little problem with copying ideas. #2 copied #1's idea to create Saturn the planet so #1 copied #2's idea of the little person-looking thing. They got over it.

After some time in the oven to dry up and some time cleaning off a shelf for our display, we had a place for our Saturnalian Gifts.

Science Sunday: Science Factory

If there is one thing I've "failed" at this year, it would be science. We started ok with an animal unit. Reading about a different family of animals each week, getting support books from the library, making a narration page, coloring a picture (can I just say how awesome goggle is...just add "coloring pages" to anything and you get so much!), and adding a miniture picture to our animal classification poster. After 12 weeks or so though we were ready to be done.

I had plans to do an anatomy unit next and a garden/nature unit this spring. Then my friend and I decided to do anatomy next year with Apologia, kind of co-op style. I'm excited about the Apologia books, I think it will be a great science and I know my kids will enjoy meeting with their friends to do the work. But instead of skipping only the anatomy section of my plan...I kind of let the whole science thing slide.

The thing is...my kids LOVE science. Each week they would beg for it. They missed it. And I felt guilty that they had no science.

So I've been trying to work it back in. I've used some of the plans I already had for the nature/garden unit, and we're planning on a science fair #1 is putting together (more on that later), and to fill in I found a Girl Scout badge with lots of science experiements we're working through.

I'm going to use Sundays to record our science adventures. First up, The Science Factory.

The Science Factory is a local hands-on museum-like place. Mr. Wiedz's Aunt and Uncle got our family a membership for Christmas and a few weeks ago I took the kids for the morning. We had a fun morning and can't wait to go back.

Rowing :: Caps for Sale

We took two weeks to "row" our latest book, Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business. The boys didn't seem to sure of it when we started but right from the first reading it became a treasured book. And they loved the activities we did. I didn't get to everything in the first week so we used a couple of days in a second week to get everything done. I also got Circus Caps for Sale at the library and we enjoyed reading that go-along.

Fun ::

The peddler balanced his caps on his head so we practice balancing a stack of pillows on our heads. Oh, the boys thought this was great! And the big kids abandoned their independent work to join us too.

Seatwork ::

Whose Hat, printed from homeschool share. I should have colored it myself and just let them play with it. The coloring was too complicated and there was too much of it, so they lost interest pretty quickly and didn't really get the idea behind the activity. Cute book though.

Making $.50

I got this idea from Michelle at delightful leaning. I made up a word document with space to rub coins that equaled $.50. #3 got it and enjoyed it. #4 just made a mess, though #2 tried hard to help him. It was a tad difficult to rub the coins, everything tried to move but #3 got the idea.

Painting ::

Another idea from delightful learning. The boys painted a tree during our first week, actually #4 completely covered his entire page with brown paint. During the second week I cut out the tree shape and they glued them to a clean page. Then we used an ink pad to make fingerprints that we turned into monkeys, Ed Emberley-style.

I love how he held his hands together...getting the most control? Concentrating? Adorable.

Links ::
homeschool share - lots of activity ideas
delightful learning - inspiration and ideas