Of dead rats and eyeballs.

The dissecting began tonight. Ainsley's first words this morning were "When is Daddy goin' be home to dissect?"

It was a longish day.

When Matt got home, the girls had the craft table cleared and set up for dissecting. He'd told them he'd do one of each of their specimens tonight (they each picked two from the magazine). Hannah picked her cow eyeball and Ains picked her rat, and they got started.

Did you see that? Over there on the left hand side? Here's a close-up.

Damn, he's cute! Sat there through the whole thing, giggling and pointing and trying (unsuccessfully) to get his hands on innards.

I wasn't sure how the girls would go from the idea of dissecting to the actual act of dissecting. We were ready for them to sign out as soon as they realized that they'd have to cut into these things. Not hardly. They are their Daddy's kids.

They were so excited to see the body parts that they'd learned about through computer games and board games.

This first time, they were simply interested in organs (below is Hannah inspecting the small intestines) and the bones ("Can I pull out the bones?" said Ainsley - definitely their daddy's children).

But my husband, he's very knowledgeable and one little question would lead to lengthy answers and even diagrams drawn on the paper table cover.

Which led to Hannah abandoning the rat for her cow eyeball

and Ainsley explaining things back to him - in hilarious three-year-old fashion - with her own diagrams.

Luckily, he realized what was happening and sucked Hannah back in with lungs and a heart. Not often you get to type that sentence out. ("I'll look," she said, "but I won't listen. That's boring and I want to do the eyeball.")

He had them being really hands-on (not that he could stop them) and they loved handling the different organs and cutting them open to look inside. It was really fascinating and I wished that Matt could have kept talking as in-depth as he had been because I was learning a lot.

But it was time to move on to the eyeball. Talk about fascinating. Matt explained to Hannah what different parts had malfunctioned in her Grandpa and Great-Grandpa's eyes which was cool. We learned so much about how the eye works by taking it apart, consulting the eye dissection pamphlet, and handling the different parts.

It was perplexing at times.
And required some up-close inspection.

It was fun.

"Now I want to do the snake!" said Ainsley.

Not tonight. After clean-up, it was time for dinner. During dinner Ains got busy making .... something.

What is it? "It's a spaceship for Donald Duck. It's a swirly twirly spaceship so he can get around."

That's all I got.

It was a science kind of a day - plus we went outdoors.

If I had to classify most of our days around here, I'd say they were artsy kind of days, full of dancing and singing and crafting and pretending. But not yesterday.

Yesterday had a very scientific feel about it. It started out while I was milking the goats and Hannah asked me how the goats make milk and if we fed them chocolate, couldn't that make them make chocolate milk? Makes sense, with the way I explained it to her.

Then we came inside and while I made macaroons, she and Ains made their own special candy using anything that looked like it would be good. Cinnamon sticks, sugar, chocolate chips, salt, candy sprinkles, soy sauce, lemon juice and baking soda.

Lemon juice and baking soda.

That was science right there. Bubbly candy!

Then, as I was doing dishes, I hear 'Let me move it farther your way. Now get on it. We're balanced now!' - on the teepee poles.

Then playing a new game that we just got.

And then again and again. With Ainsley putting lungs on feet and noses on shoulders and kidneys on knees. Lots of giggling.

Gray putting a screwdriver in every screw he could find around the house.

After dinner we opened the big ol' box we got from Home Science Tools.

That was exciting.

Those, my friends, are dissection boards. Dissection boards. I don't dissect. I tell myself I'm morally opposed to it, but it may just not be my thing. I certainly feel morally opposed to it. So the cow eyeball, crayfish, and snake that are sitting in bags on my table? The girl's father can help them with those.

But we got other things too. Things like scales and weights.

And so much more. A portion of our homeschooling budget, well spent.

It was rainy, cold, windy, and snowy. SNOWY. Apart from chores and horse riding we didn't get outside much. But I'm participating in the Outdoor Challenge, so I'll document what we did do. There was dog training to be done,

and pushing around wheelbarrows.

Very important, that.

Outdoor Challenge - Kite flying.

Lisa at 5 Orange Potatoes is doing an Outdoor Challenge this month. Here's ours for today.

You'd think that in an area like ours, with the winds we get, that kite flying would be a common thing. It hasn't been for two reasons. 1) It's *too* windy. If the kids wanted to fly something in most of our winds, I'd have to tie a rope to my kids and end up flying them while they flew their kites. and 2) When the winds are just right, which isn't often, our kites are all torn up from trying to fly them in high winds or dragging them across the ground in no winds.

Yesterday, for the first time in three years, we hit it just. right. Perfect wind, intact kites.

After a little trouble finding the right spot - Ains got her parrot stuck on the one power line -

we hit wind gold when we moved to the goat field.

The hawk kite did well, but the ladybug kite - that one was designed perfectly for the wind we had.

We ended up getting it all the way to the end of the rope. It was exhilarating!

When we were ready to come back in, we pulled the kites down and Hannah's baby goat got curious.

He actually got brave enough to touch it, but never got brave enough to go nose to nose with Bella.

You noticed that, did you?

I'm so used to her now that when I posted the Easter basket picture, I didn't even think about her being in it, but lots of you noticed it.

Meet Bella.

Well, that's not Bella - that's the picture of Hannah's dream chihuahua that's been taped to her dresser for the last year as she's been saving money.

This is Bella.

My little girl has been saving money for a long time. At the rate she was saving, she was going to be at her target amount by the end of the summer and I was happy with that timeline. Then I saw an ad for a chihuahua looking for a new home because the owner had decided she liked Hawaii better than Utah and couldn't take the dog with her. The chihuahua was nearly a doppelganger for Hannah's dream dog (a bit longer and skinnier), 6 months old (so not quite a puppy, not yet an adult - I was very happy with that), perfectly house-trained, raised with a 6-year-old girl. Perfect.

We went to go meet the pup and see if she would be a good fit for Hannah. We didn't stand a chance once they set eyes on each other.

A match made in heaven.

So Hannah stood there, with her little can of money that she'd saved, prouder than I've ever seen her. She counted it all out for the owner, then told her that she was paying Mother and Father back for the rest, which I handed her.

By the time we got back to our house, Bella had decided that Hannah was her very own human and hasn't seemed to suffer from any detachment issues from her first family (which had been in flux for a few months as the owner decided where she wanted to live and had had various friends caring for her puppy while she had gone on her trips). If Hannah leaves the room, Bella's right there with her.

I wasn't sure how this would turn out. I've never liked chihuahuas much. When I thought of chihuahuas, I always thought of short, chubby things like this...

or barky, yippy, snappy things like this...

and I've always had the idea that they're not too clever. I like clever dogs and, well, not to denigrate Cygnus because he's a lovely, loyal, loving lump of a dog that I adore, but he's not that clever.

This dog's gotten under my skin, though. She's got longer legs than I pictured chihuahuas with, the sweetest personality, and a steel trap mind. And she's yippy. But we're working on that. We've already fixed a possessiveness issue she had and we've been working on the 'perfectly house-trained' part of her. Not as perfect as we'd been led to believe.

She came with a kennel, a dog bed, a jacket, a purse (leopard print even), and a bag full of fancy shampoo, conditioner, and ... wait for it ... doggie body spritz. I kid you not. And then she moved here. To a farm. And we've had snowy, wintery weather since two days after we brought her home.

I think she's been wishing that her ancestors had never been brought this far north.

Easter came and went.

With the first proper Easter baskets I've ever done.

Not quite proper - there were no chocolates in them. Felt bunnies, tattoos, some Chinese candies that the kids love, fabric for spring outfits, but no chocolates.

The bunnies were a huge hit -

I didn't have fabric for a spring outfit for Gray, but I needed a filler in the basket, so I put in a scrap of fleece. It was his favorite thing. He carried it around for two days.

Then we colored eggs...

And did an experiment that's been waiting a *long* time for us to get enough pop bottles for.



My sister came over and we did eleventy-hundred Easter egg hunts with all of the kids in our living room (because of the springtime snow). After the seventh hunt, the adults gave up and the kids hid the eggs for each other.

It was a lovely day.

Love is in the air.

Straw Weaving - a tutorial.

This project was so much fun, so easy, and so satisfying that I wanted to put a tutorial together for it.


This is an introduction to weaving that is perfect for children. It introduces the basic process in a way that is much more accessible to a young child than moving a string over and under other strings. While my six-year-old really enjoyed this and has made several, my three year old showed little interest in making one (but a lot of interest in picking which yarns went on the one I made for her). I can see other three-year-olds having a lot of interest in doing this and it would be easy enough for them to do on their own once you got enough lines of yarn on the straw so that they wouldn't have to hold the straws together.

To do this you'll need:
-five drinking straws, cut in half (I cut mine a bit longer, almost 3/4 of the straw to make it easier to handle)
-yarn
-tape

Cut five pieces of yarn. These need to be the same length, but that length is variable. If you want to do a simple bookmark, cut the yarn into 18 inch pieces. If you want to make a dog collar or belt, cut the yarn 12 inches longer than the length of the item you want to make.

Thread each piece of yarn through one of the straws. My husband taught the girls to put the yarn in the straw about an inch and then suck on the other end to draw it through. My girls got proficient at that really fast. Every time I tried, I ended up with a mouthful of yarn and two hysterically giggling girls. When you have the yarn through the straw, fold the yarn over the end of the straw by about an inch and tape it.

Even up the tops of the straws, straighten out the yarn and tie a knot at the end. Cut a length of yarn, about 3 feet to begin with. Hold the straws in one hand as shown below with the end of the length of yarn under your thumb.

Now begin to weave the yarn in and out of each of the straws all the way to the end, around the end straw and weave back to where you the other side. Keep weaving until you get close to the end of this first length of yarn. After you have about an inch on your straws you won't need to hold the straws together anymore as the yarn will do that for you.

Once you have a few inches on the straws, move the bottom inch off the straws. Always leave at least an inch of weaving on the straws - if it all comes off, it is very difficult to get it back in working order.

When you get to the end of one length of yarn, cut another, tie it on to the end of the first length, and keep weaving.

This is a project that you can put down and come back to - as long as you put it out of the reach of 2 year old hands.

When you have it as long as you want it, slide all of the weaving off of the straws and down to the knot on the far end.

Take the tape off of the straws and pull the straws off of the yarn. Tie a knot at that end (this knot will include the end of your last weaving yarn. Now slide the weaving around until it is as even as you want it to be.

We put long ends on Hannah's bookmarks because she wanted to put beads on the long yarn ends hanging down.

You can easily vary the width (more or less straws) and the length of this for different projects, and different textured yarns can make it more fun. This is the one I made for Ainsley.

If your kids like doing this and their interest in weaving is peaked, definitely go get the book that this idea came out of - You Can Weave by Kathleen Monaghan - and get them going on one of the many other weaving projects that are included there.

Another weaving technique.

Monday we tackled straw weaving. It was a lot of fun for Hannah and me, but not interesting to Ainsley at all. Hannah and I made bookmarks for ourselves and I made one for Ainsley.

I'll put up a tutorial soon.

The books I'm using for ideas with the kids are You CanWeave by Kathleen Monaghan and Hermon Joyner and Kids Weaving by Sarah Swett. Both books are fantastic and surprisingly different - normally two books on a technique tend to recycle the same ideas.

Yesterday the girls put the cut ends of the straws to good use.

The loom of life never stops.

A few weeks ago, I was minding my own business when I was hit with a random memory of an art class in grade school (4th or 5th grade) when weaving was introduced and given it's three days allotment. I was totally entranced and worked hard to make several different wall hangings that ranged from the class assignment of different rows of color to an intricate 'sunset over the ocean' scene complete with seagulls. Of course the next week I got scolded for not showing as much interest in sketching a bowl of fake fruit - which was the next assignment - and instead asking the teacher to teach me a new weaving technique that I'd heard about.

It was a random memory with no tie to the present that I could put my finger on. Within three days I was hit with no less than six weaving-related events.

1) In a random web search that had nothing to do with handiwork of any kind, a how-to-weave link popped up.
2) When pulling out a specific craft book in our library, a weaving book next to it fell out and onto my pile of books, so I grabbed it and another weaving book next to it.
3) When I got the one magazine I'm subscribed to, it had an amazing little article on garden looms. Seriously - garden looms??? SO cool.
4)My daughter, who was having a bad day, asked to look in the Rainy Day Box and chose a potholder weaving kit that I'd picked up on an amazing clearance deal almost a year before. She's shown no interest in it the other times she's seen it. After she finished it, she asked to do some weaving that was 'not so confusing' (the 39 different colors were visual overload).
5) One of my favorite bloggers shared a weaving technique.
6) In a yarn sale advertisement, weaving was featured. No knitting, no crocheting, but weaving. So random.

So I'm accepting it. The universe is telling me to weave. Armed with my two library books and the links I was smacked in the virtual face with, we (or at least I) will be doing some weaving around here.

First foray was today. Paper weaving. Basic with a satisfying amount of instant gratification. Hannah weaved together pink and blue paper.

And then cut out a butterfly silhouette and glued it on the top.

(This is a simple project. Fold one of your papers in half top-to-bottom and draw a line 1 - 2 inches from the top short side. Cut a line from the fold to the line. Move over at least an inch and cut again. Do this all the way across the fold. Your cuts can be straight or wavy. Cut your other paper into strips across the short side and weave them into the first paper.)

I tried photo-weaving. I printed out a photograph in color and then again in 'grayscale' (wish I could have made it more starkly black and white) and weaved them together.

I tried to get a good picture, but the above was the best I could do. The colors are more vibrant 'in real life'. It turned out really sweet.

Tomorrow is 'straw weaving'. Very excited about this one.

Oh, did I not mention the weaving quote? During my message from the Universe, I was searching for a quote about the value of sleep for moms - you don't need to ask my why, do you? - and this one popped up. "We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning." - Henry Ward Beecher.

New favorite quote. I love it. (My Soul Manna quote on my sidebar has been changed also. Another quote that includes weaving.)

It's oddly satisfying, following a long-lost passion into the future. It's exciting. Will I discover a latent talent, have a lot of fun, discover that at this point I really don't care anymore?