Jiggety-jig.

We took our visitors back home today. It's been nearly a week of daily tea parties.





My girls will miss those cousins.

But we get to stay a few days with them at their house. And their mom is *fun*. When she was visiting at our house last week before she left some of her kids with us for a few days, she did some experiments with my girls.

She got them to drop mentos into pop bottles,

which was exciting.

She explained acidity to them.

She sent Hannah on a scavenger hunt around the kitchen to find liquids to test for acidity or baseness.

I'm hoping Hannah doesn't drive her crazy here at her house with requests for more experiments. So far she's settled for telling her lots of stories. (She told her tonight that in her dreams she's a Professional. "Of what?" A Professional Thinker of Words.)

The cousins are glad to be home, but they're missing the little things about farm life.

Visitors and owl pellets.

I had two friends from college visit today with their kids. This made Hannah's day, week, and, possibly, month.
That child suffers having a hermit for a mother.

Ainsley was friendly, but aloof, staying on the porch or in my lap the entire time.

That child takes after her mother.

Grayson surprised me by not only playing with Shannon, but even climbing onto her lap.

She wouldn't let me take a picture of him in her lap. She has a thing about pictures. Even when she's cutting my girl's hair, I have to crop her out. She's gorgeous. Why are we women so hard on ourselves?

And I got to meet this girl - older by years than the last time I saw her, so almost a whole different person - who is absolutely charming.

She informed me that she can talk to cats. She uses her ears and her hands. So sweet, and it appears that she's correct. She got one of the little nearly-feral kittens to cuddle up in her lap and purr like it was her momma stroking her.

But the visit had its awkward moment. After they came in the house, I was getting Shy Ainsley settled in the living room when I hear Shannon's voice from the kitchen. "Is this a bag of owl pellets on your counter?" Crap! Forgot to move those. Welcome to a homeschooler's house. Owl pellets on the kitchen counter.

The day we sold our house, I gathered up owl pellets from underneath their favorite tree. Have you ever seen owl pellets? I always pictured them as smooth balls of fur that you neatly dissected to find interesting bones. Not quite. They're ragged lumps of fur that have interesting bones popping out of them at all angles and fall apart if you don't treat them kindly.


Our dissecting a few months ago turned up these bones -

All little mice, though I was hopeful for some rabbit bones since there was a rabbit foot nearby.

When I gathered this last bunch up, there was something right next to one of the pellets that hinted at what might be in them -

So I'm on the lookout for bones of my cat's catnip mouse. That should be fun. Do you think owls get high from catnip?

I have some extra owl pellets, so here's an offer you'll only see on a homeschooling blog - if you want a few of these (I don't have a lot), email me your address at unprocessedfamily at gmail dot com. If you're one of the first few to email me, I'll send some your way!

Honeybees are eusocial.

Hannah wants a flower garden this year. Specifically, a butterfly garden. Yesterday we went through our flower seeds and she picked out the ones she wanted (all of them). Then she thought about bees - you know, the 'stinging bugs' - and how they always seem to be hovering around dandelion flowers. The world stopped.

Today she came up to me and said "Do we have any bee books?" No, but let me grab the encyclopedia.


Here we are. After I grabbed it and we sat down to read, I asked her why the sudden desire to learn more about bees. "Because I want a butterfly garden but you said that if butterflies came bees would come too and I want the butterflies but not the bees because I'm scared of the bees but maybe that's because I don't know enough about them and maybe if I know more about them I won't be scared of them and it will be ok if they're there but I'll still like the butterflies better especially if they give me honey but I don't think butterflies make honey but if they did it would taste like flowers and that would be yummy and I can sell it at the Farmer's Market and tell people that it's not from bees and I didn't need to wear a mask to collect it because butterflies don't sting like bees." Good lord. Sometimes I wish I hadn't asked some questions. Not this time, you understand, but sometimes. Other times.

So we learned about bees. She had me read all six pages in the encyclopedia and devoured the illustrations and photos. We learned a lot.

Did you know bees have five eyes? Yeah, neither did I.

They collect nectar and pollen, the nectar being carried inside their body, the pollen on 'pollen baskets' on their back legs.

The only bee that will sting you is a female. Worker bee. The males (they're drones, their only job is to breed) don't have stingers. The queens have a stinger, but it's a different shape and is only used in fights with other queens. (Did you know that kids can't explain about stingers without sticking their rears out? True story. Try it with your own kids.)

This is cool - if a queen lays her eggs and doesn't expose them to the sperm she's storing in her body, the eggs will become male drones. If she *does* expose them to the sperm, these fertilized eggs will be females. For the first three days of the female larvae's life, she is fed royal jelly. After the first three days, the majority of the larvae will be switched over to 'beebread', a mixture of pollen and honey, and these will become worker bees. The larvae fed only royal jelly until they make a cocoon become queen bees.

We learned about the amazingly precise dances the bees do to inform other bees about the location of food. Of course Hannah had to try to do her own waggle dance (round dances are for near food, waggle dances are for far food) and was alternately hilariously amused and hilariously frustrated that I couldn't figure out that she wanted peaches from the pantry. To be fair, I don't speak bee.

Then we learned about bumblebees. Hannah asked why they weren't proud. No, sweetie, not *humble*bees, *bumble*bees. Ahh. Then about the solitary bees like leaf-cutters, carpenters, and masons.

One thing that's wonderful about following where a child's interest leads is learning fascinating stuff you wouldn't know otherwise. If Hannah had wanted to skip around the six pages looking at pictures and hearing random facts that I pulled out of the entry, that would have been fine. By then I was so hooked that I would have finished reading it on my own later.

Word for the day: Eusocial. One reproductive female, others are 'workers' and insterile - even if that is only temporary (worker bees can lay eggs if the need is desperate). Bees are eusocial as are wasps and ants. Only two mammals are known to be eusocial - the naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat. I would be eusocial too if I were a naked mole rat.

You know what's funny? A five-year old that can use 'eusocial' correctly in a sentence. You know what else is funny? Her daddy's face when she springs that on him. Though he's kinda used to it now after her speech to him awhile back about 'alicorns'.

Honeycomb 'candy'.

I found a recipe for Honeycomb Candy online somewhere. Can't remember where now, but it's just as well. It was a horrid recipe. I was really disappointed because the type of candy it was supposed to be was so yummy in Ireland. So I found this one. We'll try it. Later. After the memories of this one have faded from our taste buds. It was that bad. But the foaming and the air pockets were cool.

Daddy helping measure out the ingredients.



Ains sprayed the pan for us. That candy ain't sticking.



Hannah watching the temperature on the candy thermometer.



After it's heated up, you add the baking soda. When you do that, it foams up so fast that you have to be ready to pour it immediately. It will overflow the pan. It's very impressive.

It cooled quickly, so the girls could use their fingers to feel it go from soft to brittle.



We tried it. It was foul. So the girls got to go after it with vegetable peelers. That was fun.



So if you try the recipe I linked to, let me know how it turned out. I'm not going to get brave again for awhile.

Star-gazing.

I asked my dad for his opinion on getting a telescope for a constellation-crazy four-year old for Christmas. His advice was to skip the telescope, which, along with being ridiculously pricey, would likely be too abstract for her right now, and go with binoculars which could get her up closer than you'd expect and be useful for many other explorations. Her attached-to-her-hand magnifying glass amuses him no end.

We decided he was right, but that the binoculars could wait for a bit. They didn't have to. He sent her a small pair and a large pair for Christmas. She bounced around the house telling every constellation story she knew until it was dark enough to go outside and look at the stars.

Once it was dark enough, coats and hats and boots were thrown on. Gloves were disdainfully tossed aside because "Then I couldn't hold the binoculars, could I, Mother?" (This was a rhetorical question.) and "No knock, Momma! So no gove! Noooo!" So I threw their gloves in my pocket (along with a warmer hat for the redhead for whom color is more important than warmth right now) and out we went.


They had to discuss which way would lead to the best star-gazing. Ains kept pushing for the direction that had playing kittens.


And off they went. On a mission.


Trying to get out past our yard light takes a few minutes.


And then we were there! They looked, and what did they see?


Cloud cover.


*sigh* How did I miss that? "Well, girls, lets go look at the chickens."


Ains wasn't thrilled with that idea. I don't blame her. It's hard to look at chickens with binoculars when you're three feet tall, they're a foot tall, and they're a foot away.


So we came in and Ainsley studied the freezer. After thirty intense seconds - a long time in a two year old's world - she looked up and announced 'no mone bac'n'. She was right. There is a dearth of bacon in our house at the moment. The bacon always goes the fastest when we get the pig. Then she disappeared into her sister's room...


where I found them studying glow-in-the-dark constellations (Andromeda, Cygnus, and Orion reside on her ceiling)...


and spying on kittens playing outside the window.


Great Christmas present. I can see much Discovering in the months ahead.

Intermittent Reunion

My husband's family has a reunion of sorts for all of his siblings twice a year - summer and winter. Most of the siblings live within three hours of his hometown, so we usually converge there. This year we went camping in some beautiful Wyoming mountains.

We camped a lot growing up. Real camping - backpacks and all. This wasn't real camping. We parked right off the mountain road and half of the families had campers. I was jealous.

Here are nine of the seventeen grandkids - what can I say, we are, for the most part (read: everyone but my children and me), Mormons. There are nine children in my husband's family and it's always a boisterous, fun group. The cousins are a fun group of kids.

After a morning of running around camp, almost everybody went on a four-wheeler/motorbike ride up the mountain. Hannah and one of her cousins stayed behind because they were picking princess flowers. That's very important and can't be interrupted for something as mundane as a four-wheeler ride.

I stayed back in camp with Hannah and Grayson and a few of my sister-in-laws. I got to hold my sister-in-law's brand new baby girl a lot more that way. She's only four weeks old. Grayson looks so big next to her!

After we'd packed up camp, most of us headed up to Intermittent Spring.

We had lots of littles with us, so this was the perfect hike for us.

A ten minute hike up a well-groomed trail along the large stream.

Enough interesting things to keep the kids entertained, not so long that they got too tired, even wild raspberries for them to eat!

OK, so that's not the kids eating the raspberries, but they did pick enough for the kids to eat. You'll have to trust me on that.

Here is the view of the spring running at full power down the mountain. To the left of the spring is where the well-groomed trail ends and the abandon-all-hope-ye-who-would-drag-toddlers-up trail begins. We went up it.

This was us smiling before we remembered we would have to go back down.

Intermittent Spring is a really interesting phenomenon - one of only three known natural intermittent springs in the world. The water gushes out of that hole for fifteen or twenty minutes and then, quite suddenly, the water stops. After another fifteen to twenty minutes, the water slowly starts back up and gradually increases the volume of water until it's gushing down the mountainside again. That's the basic explanation. Here's a more in-depth explanation.

I love this picture. I have a very patient husband. That weary rubbing of his eyes is about as cranky as he gets - with the kids. Matt had just hauled the infant and the toddler up the steep part of the trail and the four-year-old was having a hard time because of the periodic leg pains she gets that had hit her a few minutes before. Ains was tired and cranky (you can see her walking away from him crying) and Gray was wanting out of the carrier, so he was fussing and throwing himself backwards in the carrier.

And because these springs are so rare and I know you wouldn't want to miss an intermittent spring montage, here you go. I'm always thinking of my readers.

See the elbow in the picture above? That's Matt's brother making the decision to stay on the other side of the spring while it starts back up.






See that man? That's Matt's brother trying to figure out how he's going to get back over to where we are without getting wet in the now raging spring. To the left of the picture is a rock face that won't let him join us. To the right is the other side of the spring. He was in a quandary. I can't believe I just said "See that man" and not "See that boy".

The following picture is my favorite picture from the weekend. This is on our way back down the main trail. This is Zee. Cute little bug. She had that bandaid on her forehead for the whole weekend. She's going to have a sweet tan line.

Do you see that little hole beside her? That was on a huge cliff face. She was in front of us on the hike down but we caught up to her because she was sitting by the "baby bear cave". You know, if it had been me doing that at her age, it would have been to get out of walking for a few minutes. I saw a lot of cool rocks, beautiful flowers, interesting bugs, and amazing patterns in the dirt when we went hiking as kids. I got the impression that Zee was actually waiting for the baby bear to make an appearance. She's probably just a much better actor than I was at the same age.

"Hannah, look what I found! It's a swallow's egg, I think. The shell is so thin, I can't believe it fell all the way to the ground without breaking! Yeah, you can hold it. I want to get a picture of it. Just don't squeeze .... well, hold still, I'll take *that* picture. Let's go wash you off."

Spider babies

A few months ago, Hannah started noticing little white spots around the farm. I told her they were spider nests with hundreds of eggs in them. When we were trimming a lilac bush a few days ago we came across this - a spider nest with hundreds of babies. Hannah was more thrilled than me.

The night sky.

One of my friends sent me this link.

Plug in your coordinates - it's like having a planetarium on your computer!

http://www.stellarium.org/

The spotting scope.

Diego has a spotting scope. Hannah *had* a spotting scope.

We took the girls to a bookstore and let them each pick out a book with part of our Debt to China incentive check. Both girls picked out Diego books. Hannah's had a spotting scope, Ainsley's had push-buttons to make animal noises and lift-flaps.

Hannah's spotting scope really worked. She would look at things that were farther away and say "Whoa." Ains wanted in on the action, of course, and would put it up to her forehead, between her eyes and say "Whoa!!!" and look proud of herself.

Hannah and I were out picking dandelions for the goats yesterday and there were bees all around us. Hannah, not being a fan of 'stinging bugs', wanted to run off. I convinced her to sit on my lap and watch. Within a few minutes, her nose was inches from the little bees as they gathered from the flowers. She was fascinated with their movements. We even saw one that had full legs - little yellow balls on each leg.

A little off-topic note - I wish I could do up-close photography. I could have gotten some killer photos.

Her closeness was starting to make the bees nervous, so I had her run in the house and get her spotting scope. She was able to sit four feet away and watch the bees work.

Then she left the scope on the lawn and Chin found it. Labradors tend to chew anything left on the lawn. When Hannah saw that this morning she said "Well that's just a bummer, in't it? Dang it. I can't believe Chinde doesn't like spotting scopes."

Now I have a magnifying glass on my list of things to buy - she's becoming quite the little scientist.

Hunting.

Have you ever seen a live, wild hunt? I'm not talking about a cat catching a mouse, but a wild predator hunting down and eating wild prey, without ever knowing they were being watched? I guess you could count a hawk catching a mouse or an eagle fishing, but I'm not counting that. I'm counting what I saw today.

We were coming back into the house from milking and I saw a tiny fly walking along the edge of a white bucket. Not six inches behind him was a tinier spider. I count this as a wild hunt because of the intensity of the attack. As soon as I saw the spider, I knew he was stalking that fly. He moved quickly and when he was half an inch behind the fly, he jumped fast and hard and landed right on the fly's back. The fly tried to take off but couldn't fly far because of the weight. It fell down, but the spider's string saved them and they hung there, fighting, until the spider could drag the fly back up to a level surface.

I was surprised by how captivating the whole thing was. This was a spider and a fly, not a lion and gazelle or wolf and elk. But it was definetely predator and prey. Hannah was fascinated and wanted to watch until it was all over. Somehow she's gotten to four years old without knowing about spiders having strings coming out their rears. Don't know how that oversight happened.



I wish I knew how to take better, up close, pictures. I could have gotten some killer (pun not intended) pictures for you.