Chickens and Unschooling

I'm going to try something new this year. I will endeavor to post something, however small or seemingly inconsequential, on here, every day, for the next year.

Welcome to 2020 folks.

Last night we went to, what has become, the traditional New Year's Eve house filk. M took C and our friend K out first, then I brought up H and S after H got off work. New Year's Eve is an all hands on deck pizza holiday, so the only way H could join in the party was to arrive very late. It turned out not horrible timing this year, since one of the hosts also had to work and made it home only a few minutes before we showed up.

We sang a little, white elephant gift exchanged, sang some more, toasted the New Year, then even managed a little more singing.

We got home around 2am, everyone got to bed by 3am, so we slept in today a little more than usual.

The kids all had fun. They spent a lot of time in the gaming room, and each kid won a t-shirt (C won two).

Each of our kids ended up spending a good deal of time with a friend's three year old. A few times she played with C by running the halways, and they went swimming Sunday morning. I've been told she referred to C all weekend as her best friend.

C attempted to attend all the D.R.E.A.D. fleet panels, including learning sword fighting techniques with ballon swords and the treasure egg hunt they sponsored because the last day of the Con landed on Easter.

H went to several panels involving a local artist drawing, then painting a big cat. He gave her the graphite drawing at the end of the painting panel. She also went to a writing panel on including religion in your world that she found interesting enough to excitedly talk to me about it after it was over.

S went to several costuming panels, but what seemed to spark her creativity the most was a conversation about horns in the Consuite. She dived into a creative endeavor as soon as we got home and was still working at it when the rest of us went to bed. Some glorious cardboard horns were waiting on the kitchen table when I got up this morning. I have yet to determine exactly how little sleep S actually got last night.

M got to show off his new, two necked Chimera guitar, made by Emerald. It took only four days to ship from Ireland. M was super lucky that it arrived at our house during the approximately two hour window on Saturday when I was home dealing with the animals before picking up S from her ceramics class and heading back to the Con.

There was some small amount of filking each night. M and I helped voice a Firefly radio play - M was Wash, I was Kaylee. On Saturday, before heading to the filk, I hung out at the Manticore Navy's room party, which being conveniently located next to the pool, allowed me to let C swim for a couple of hours.

I had a panel where no one showed up, so I played to an imaginary circle of children and figured out three Tom T. Hall songs I can comfortably play on the ukelele. Later that day I went to a harmony panel that was very informative and enjoyable.

On the last day of the Con, M and I split forces. He went home early and let the birds out for me, then made sure there was some food waiting for us when got there. I stayed till 5pm so the girls could do more panels and C could squeeze every last drop of fun out of the gaming room. He wants to buy an old X-Box and an X-men game now.

I was a little behind on the acquisition of pumpkins this year for Halloween. As a result, I ended up with a couple of baking pumpkins instead of proper carving ones. We got even busier than normal and those self same pumpkins avoided their intended fate and ended up living on our kitchen table for nearly a month.

Their innocent, unused status, may have remained constant had S not suddenly decided she wanted to make a pie for Thanksgiving.

She looked it up on Youtube. She got confused enough by what she saw to ask her Dad if he knew how to make a pumpkin pie. He did not, but he shared with her his favorite baking cookbook. The cookbook that not only told her how to make the pie, but how to cook the pumpkin.

So last night, S made a pie.



This is now a tradition.

Bonus points, C finally got the baked pumpkin seeds he's been wanting since I first brought up the concept of pumpkin carving a month ago. It's impressive just how many seeds were crammed in that little bitty pumpkin.

Christmas snow trip!

Nov 24th-27th: Thanksgiving weekend, in-laws visited. I did most of the cleaning and did most of the cooking this year. BTW, last years cranberry recipe with using only 1 cup sugar instead of 1.5 was spot on this year.

Dec 2nd: Hubby's fancy pants work Christmas Party.

Dec 4th: 4-H Shooting Sports, normally wouldn't make the list, but this year they are having kids sign up to bring snacks, and C volunteered to bring oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. We baked them the day before, and the amount looked pathetic enough, I added orange slices to calm my worries of ending up with not enough food. Good thing I brought extra, we had another 4-H group there, and the leaders had not bothered to give the snack bringers (us) a heads up that there would be twice as many people as usual at the meeting. Also, new Shooting Sports rules dictated the kids not shooting would have to be collected on the porch and reasonably calm and quiet (I could see this going terribly, terribly wrong with C and his natural energies, especially since the only game they had handy was bananagrams). I ducked home and retrieved my Uno deck, and probably played over a dozen Uno rounds, and have become the official parent to keep the non shooting kids occupied at all future Shooting Sports meetings.

Dec 9th: EVHT (girls' homeschool teen group) Christmas party. Potluck with White Elephant gift exchange. S also participated in the ornament exchange like the year before and ended up with a cute owl ornament. I finally managed to evolve my Gyarados, and there were an unusually high number of Magicarps spawning at that park, on that particular day, so I got lots of extra Magicarp candy. A younger brother of one of S's friends was watching me play my game and got admonished by his older sister that he was not allowed to play video games at the park - H and I wandered off after that so she could rant about how people in general were so hard to understand.

Dec 10th: House Filk. Potluck, White Elephant gift exchange. S re-gifted the one she got from EVHT - a giant Superman Mug with hot chocolate - but ended up with it back by the end because of low turnout and because I stole from her to get a Fluttershy button.

Dec 18th: 4-H Community club and Holiday Party. Potluck and White Elephant gift exchange. S finally got rid of her Superman mug (it even got stolen once - so as H said, who'd have thought the 4-H kids would be more nerdy than the Filkers) and ended up with a pot of candy. C ended up picking the gift he brought - a mug with cookies, candy, and English breakfast tea (he really likes mugs and tea). H ended up with some stuffie emojis that she brought, since the girl who ended up with them didn't want them, so H traded her a coupon for a sandwich place we never would have ended up going to anyway. C finally got to bounce on the trampoline, something he had been politely asking to do at every other 4-H meeting this year. The girls played with him, and as a result, H remembered lots of games they used to play at an unchoolers gamer day they participated in when H was around 7-8 years old.

Dec 20th: H, C, and my karate Christmas Party. Potluck. Demo. Door raffle - H and S won candy, C was feeling sad about not winning, so when my ticket got picked I got a mug and gave it to him. S then played a game of making her container of candy talk to finish cheering C up.

Done. Done. Done. Done. No more social gatherings for the rest of this Month. We get Christmas to ourselves. No extra family, just us. My favorite holiday, if only for the fact that it is just us.

Had to break down and get a new tree stand this year. The old one finally rusted out the bottom. Good points, both the tree and the stand were 25% off.

Decorations will likely go up tomorrow.

George R. R. Martin was the author guest of honor at TusCon this year. I got a children's book M picked up for me at Bookmans, signed. I've never stood in line for a book signing for such a high profile author before. They were very organized and efficient, even had a guy to snap pictures for you with your phone if you wanted, but standing in a line that long made me feel a little silly. Possibly adding to my embarrassment, I was dressed up as the Red Woman from Game of Thrones. It was a hastily assembled cosplay, after M found me a discounted Halloween costume of a long, flowy, red dress a week before the convention.

When it was my turn, George R. R. Martin asked, "How are you?" I struck a pose, and replied, "The night is dark and full of terrors." He then looked up, paused, smiled, and said, "The Red Woman, impressive." After signing my book, he fished in his pocket, pulled out a coin and set it on the table.





I got a shiney! It made everything absolutely worth it.

Only two days late.

H.

S.

C.


Ninnth, the Egg Hunt supervisor.

Slim pickings today, but we are going to Ren Faire...



On another note, the ducklings survived their first solo night in the duck house.