A quiet week at home

This week, we discovered the website, Khan Academy. Benjamin, Oliver, and Isla have been wanting to spend all of their time playing there, reviewing math skills and watching computer programming videos.

Benjamin and Oliver finished their Pinewood Derby cars. They decided to have Nebraska themed cars for racing in New York. Benjamin's car is a corn cob and Oliver's is the Nebraska football field. On Wednesday, there was a preliminary weigh-in. Chad is going to help set up the track tonight and the big race is tomorrow.

When the boys are busy working on writing or math, Isla has spent an unprecedented amount of time playing with her LEGO people and My Little Ponies. Joyce is impressed and very glad that we allotted space in the car for these toys to come along! It does mean that we have to be careful moving around the small house, as we never know when a pony or LEGO girl might be napping in the middle of the floor. Benjamin was pleased to finally get to play with Isla's LEGO friends by capturing them with his Clone Trooper LEGOs.

We've been trying to heat the house mostly with fire, and Joyce is getting better at keeping the fire going. If we were pioneers without backup electric heat, however, we would surely have frozen to death by now. Today is a colder day, since Chad didn't have time to chop any kindling and Joyce is not confident enough with the hatchet. Maybe this afternoon, we'll have to go hunt for kindling in the woods.

Oliver has nothing to add today, as he is re-reading The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen from the Future. He got it free from the county library. They had a winter reading program and all three kids got to pick out a free book upon completion.

Home school is new

Homeschool week one

We've managed to complete our first full week of home school with a minimal amount of whining from both the children and Joyce. Everyone has quickly discovered that it is more fun, and we feel a better sense of accomplishment, when we set the order and objectives at the start of the day rather than deciding as we go along. It was Joyce's idea, but Benjamin and Oliver also agreed to give ourselves a name. Hence, we call ourselves the Besch Brassil Academy for Traveling Students (B-BATS) and we managed to make a school banner together.

We also had the perfect temperatures for lots of fun snow hiking...cold enough that the smaller creeks stayed frozen and the paths were not sloppy, but not so cold that we didn't want to be out.

Speaking of being too cold to be out, we also had our first weekend field trip to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We drove up on Friday night and woke up to -4 F with a crazy windchill on Saturday. We spent most of Saturday indoors, but we still had to walk to get to Parliament, which hurt our faces! Before touring Parliament in the afternoon, we spent over three hours in the War Museum, learning about war from Canada's perspective from the early First Nations settlement until today.

Freezing outside after our tour of Canada's Parliament building

Sunday was a much nicer day to be out. We spent the afternoon ice skating on the Rideau Canal. All the kids spent a lot of time skating, but we had also rented a sled so that we could cover some distance when they started to get tired of being slow or falling down.

The other big news from the week was that Chad, after trying to weasel his way into Cornell twenty years ago, finally managed to get a Cornell ID card. Take that, Cornell!

Settling in

A panoramic shot of half of our house. 

 January 11, 2015

We have been in Ithaca for three days and are feeling pretty settled in our dodecahedron house in the woods. The first two days were spent almost entirely in stores finding food and some of those little things that we find necessary. The house is fully furnished, but we wanted a non-stick skillet, a mixing bowl and a big pot for cooking pasta. Chad, who tore a hole in one of his two pairs of pants, needed to find some new jeans. We found lots of things at the dollar store, but we also visited Target, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Old Navy, TOPS grocery, Wegmans grocery, Ace Hardware and the Salvation Army. Isla found a kid’s digital camera and the boys picked up the game of Life at the Salvation Army, but we didn’t find any of the kitchen things we had hoped to get there.

At the house, Isla was very pleased with her toddler bed covered with the moon and stars and new bedding. Benjamin and Oliver were a little disappointed that the house wasn’t quite the big open circle that Joyce had apparently described, but they are getting used to it and are enjoying the small space now. Chad has been happily building wood fires in the heating stove every night and Joyce has been tucking clothes and belongings in every corner and shelf available.

This morning we attended Mass at a small and joyful parish nearby. There was a children’s liturgy for Isla during the Mass and the boys will be able to attend Faith Formation classes after Mass in the future. Joyce met another mother who homeschools her children and another extremely friendly mother who shared lots of information about children’s activities in Ithaca.

In the afternoon, Chad, Benjamin, and Oliver went for a hike in the surrounding woods. They found a dead deer carcass, and Chad saw a muskrat near the frozen stream. The boys got to see the muskrat tracks. Since their hike the children have spent the rest of the afternoon staring at screens, followed by violently throwing toy ninjas across the room and then pretending to poop out LEGOS. Isla has turned into a dog named Isabel and will only communicate by barking and pawing at our legs.

Benjamin wants to be sure that you check out his Scratch creation: the Yule log.

We are off to a great start.