What we're reading: Welcome 2013 edition

I can't think of a much better way to send off 2012 and welcome 2013 than with a post about books!

We've been a bit here-and-there with our reading choices lately.

I'm hoping we'll start another family novel sometime in January, but we've been doing shorter and more varied selections through the holidays, and that's been nice too.

We did finish Life of Fred: Honey and have moved onto Life of Fred: Ice Cream. Only one more book after that in Fred's elementary math series, and then it's on to Life of Fred: Fractions, which we actually acquired a couple of weeks ago from another local homeschooling family!

For Christmas, we found a couple of small, short books for Sarah that we thought she'd like. They're called Unlikely Friendships: The Monkey & The Dove and Unlikely Friendships: The Dog & The Piglet, and they're excerpted from a longer book, Unlikely Friendships: 47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom. They're all written by a science reporter who investigated stories of animals that formed, you guessed it, unlikely friendships. My favorite was the one about Muschi the black cat and Maeuschen the black bear, who lived at a German zoo together from about 2000 until the bear's death in 2010.

These are both short books - you can read each one aloud in a sitting - but they've encouraged us to read more about some of the animals included, which has been neat. Plus, WOW, cute photos!

Sarah also received The 2013 World Almanac for Kids, which I expect will give her many hours of browsing pleasure.

Finally in the "gifts" stack of books for Sarah, there was one of her favorites, The Star Wars Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy. Chris's mom gets Sarah one of the pop-ups from the series by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart each year, and this year's was probably Sarah's favorite yet!

And, in what I love about homeschooling, we're interspersing these with a college-level text on the ancient art/science/religion of alchemy, which we found in a used book shop. Alchemy: The Great Secret is pretty cool (and filled with a TON of historic art). Sarah and I have been reading it together and she's done a lot of research on its parallels with modern chemistry, as well as its ties to Roman mythology and, later, Christianity. This is heavy stuff - but she's not only grasping it, she's fascinated! (And, no worries, she is not trying to transmute our kitchen counter into gold.)

On the parental reading front, Chris received for Christmas a copy of the Route 66 Adventure Handbook, and I got a copy of John Holt's Learning All the Time, which I'd read before from our library but wanted my own copy of.

What's your family reading? We call it the family reading roundup; maybe you call it something more formal; either way, the lovely ladies over at Christian Unschooling are doing a blog hop called "What We're Reading" each month that I'm proud to support!

So if you have a post about what you've been reading, please go share it!

A look back at our 2012 Christmas

We just got home from our "last Christmas," with my husband's mom and his sister and her family, and that officially wraps up the holiday for us for 2012.

Here's a look at a few of our highlights from our many celebrations, mostly in photos.

Our one Christmas wish that we're hoping to still make come true for ourselves is a new camera - we use ours for all sorts of projects, including our work-related blogs, and the little point-and-shoot we have isn't cutting it! In fact, we missed capturing some of our most enjoyable Christmas moments this year because the only shots we got were un-view-ably blurry. So we'll see what we can find that fits into the budget!

Above is our tree, fully (and I do mean fully) trimmed, with packages underneath. Since we don't do Santa in our family, it's easy to get everything wrapped ahead of time. We actually have two full sets of ornaments that we alternate - this is what we call the "family" set, and we have another set that is all Irish-themed.

Here, Chris and I are opening our gift from my mom. This was one of the highlights of Christmas for me - it was all edible! (Mom knows that Chris and I are fairly minimalist and didn't need a lot of stuff.) It included some of our favorites - beef sticks, prosciutto, special cheeses, gift cards to the local convenience store for work snacks, and even a gift certificate to our favorite sushi date spot. Awesome!! Sarah took this picture; she liked the "artsy" angle.

Another mega-highlight for me was receiving a copy of Uncle Wiggily and His Friends by Howard Garis from Chris. I have an absolute love of the Uncle Wiggily stories, but the books are hard to find and long since out of print in their original form. This is an incredibly nice copy - which means it probably went for way more than I'd ever spend on myself, despite how much I love it. So it was the PERFECT gift!

At right above, Mom is opening her big gift - which was kind of a family gift. It's a KitchenAid super-mega-mondo mixer. (Not a technical term.) She was thrilled! Our previous mixer was failing (and wasn't capable of heavy doughs like bread any more), so it was great timing! And, we were able to give that one to a friend of ours who just needs an every-now-and-then mixer, so it worked out great.

Speaking of friends, my best friend's husband is a firefighter with one of our local companies, and on Christmas Eve, he and another driver took two engines out with "Santa" on the top, driving all around their township. We went over to the station house to see them head out, and despite the snow and sleet, it was a super-cool way to do something local and fun!

Sarah did ALL of her own Christmas shopping this year. She was very clear on what she wanted to get for everyone, which was awesome.

Here, she and Chris are showing off what I think might have been her finest purchase - a set of Christmas ephemera that he could write about for his blog, Papergreat, inside a 1940s-era box called a Tuckaway. She spent hours at a local antiques market picking out just the right things!

This was another holiday project of Sarah's - painting her own train. One of our family goals for 2013 is to build a real train display, probably O-Gauge, in our basement, but for now, painted had to suffice! She worked very hard on this with my mom! The cutest part was that she had little toy animals riding in the train, and the cars were filled with a tree and packages. Well, on Christmas eve, she emptied the cars and set up a tree and gifts so that the animals would have a Christmas morning. It was super-sweet!

There are two "Christmases" I don't have photos of - the one where Sarah went to my ex's parents' house for their family Christmas, where she got a remote-controlled car that she LOVES, among other cool goodies, and also the one with one of my best friends, Tracey, which involved gift-wrapping, briefly, our big mitten-toed cat, Mitts. Let's just say it's probably better that isn't pictured.

Our final celebration was at the home of my mother-in-law, Mary. Here, you can see her and also Sarah opening one of her gifts - a fun animal-themed game called Hit the Habitat Trail that I think will be fun.

Sarah also got a soft blue LLBean winter hat... which she promptly put on, then topped with her TapOut baseball cap.

Word, from our family's Christmas to yours.

Setting our family goals for 2013 (and a calendar giveaway!)

I'm not a big New Year's Resolution kind of person.

If something's really important to me, I'll make it happen no matter when it comes up, and if it's not (think: all those times I joined a gym), starting on Jan. 1 doesn't help me keep up with it!

That said, I'm pretty big on planning and goal-setting, and in our family, we often spend the weeks around Christmas and New Year's talking about what we want to do and see and accomplish.

Loosely around the time we "started" this school year, Sarah made a list of some things she wanted to learn about and places she wanted to visit.

In good news, we've already visited two of the places on her "trip list" - the beach, in October, and Jim Thorpe, in late November.

The sad thing is, there have been plenty of chances for us to visit some of the more local destinations, but we just haven't planned ahead quite well enough.

In the past week or so, we sat down and decided to put some dates in writing and try to hold ourselves to them as much as possible so that we can visit more of the places we'd like to go.

Around the same time, I received a set of two HUGE wall calendars to review, and my very smart husband said, "Let's put some trip dates on one!"

Winner! Here's a look at how it's shaping up so far.

The calendar is called "Seize the Year," and it's from a startup company called NeuYear.

I don't do many product reviews, but office supplies? Yeah, I can't pass those up. And while I wasn't sure what to expect, it's pretty cool.

These are BIG - 27" by 39" - and you can use them in either horizontal or vertical orientation, as they're printed one way on the front and the other on the back.

The part I like best is the "no-gap" style. I really hate the month-to-month style of most calendars, even online ones like Google Calendar. I want to see the four weeks ahead, not the "two weeks ahead if it's the second week of the month, one week ahead if it's the third week of the month and only half of this week if next month starts Wednesday" approach.

The Seize the Year calendar normally sells for $30, but if you enter the code "OurSchoolatHome" when you order here before Jan. 15, 2013, you'll get 30% off.

We also were lucky enough to host a giveaway for one - that's now been drawn, and many congrats to our winner, Rebecca R. of Raventhreads!

Collages from last year's Christmas cards

When we unpacked our Christmas decorations this year, we realized we had three gallon-sized zipper bags filled with Christmas cards from the last couple of years. I'd saved them from a vague "art project" idea and, of course, done exactly nothing with them ever.

Yesterday night, Sarah took them upstairs to our scrapbooking room and said she was going to make something with them. I was writing (in fact, I was writing our Jim Thorpe post!) and I didn't think too much of it.

When she came downstairs, she said that instead of  making something with each individual card, she wanted to them together and make collages in groups. So she sorted the cards, finding, first, six or seven with Santa on them. She narrowed it down to the four she liked best, chose a background paper to match, and then used letter stickers to spell out "Santa says Merry Christmas," and she wrote "Hope you have a happy holiday."

You can see the finished product above! It was great - and just the start of her collection.

Funny Times features Santa and his reindeer at the beach, over a town on a dark night, and in a snowglobe over a town! This one has a note that says "Hope you have a great laugh this holiday season," and Sarah said she chose the background paper because it said "seriously," and that went well to her with laughter. (It's a pun? It's irony? It's cool, either way.)

Hi Penguin Style is probably my favorite. I LOVE penguins, and I love the message - "Rock your style this Christmas," which Sarah said she chose because all the penguins were wearing scarves and hats. Technically, the top left penguin is not from a card (I think he was a gift tag), so keep that in mind if you're making your own Christmas collage creations - don't be afraid to keep things like interesting wrapping paper, gift tags and so on as well as the cards. And, in a proud Mom moment, Sarah explained that she wasn't sure how to spell "penguin," so she got her National Geographic Great Migrations book and went to the page for the Rockhopper Penguin to find out.

Don't Forget the Little Things This Christmas, the next collage says! Sarah's note says "Remember to have a great day on Christmas," and at the right, it says, "Merry Christmas, everyone." This one got its title because all the cards are small, Sarah said. She also said that some of the "odds and ends" of Christmas, like being with family or exchanging a gift with someone like a friend, it's not a big thing compared to the true meaning of Christmas, but it's still important. And she said that if you donate money or items, to remember that even if it's a small gift, not to forget that you're helping.

This one, Sarah made tonight (after working for several hours on the others last night!) It says, "All the Pets You Have Say Merry Christmas!" Sarah said, "I had all these pet cards... and not a lot of people really focus on their pets at Christmas, so I was thinking that the pets wanted to say Merry Christmas in their own way!" Her note says "Have a wonderful Christmas with your family and pets this Christmas." 

(Sarah also wants me to tell you that the hamster with the bulging eyes, inside his card, says, "Have a Merry Christmas, or I'll Put Some Sprinkles on Your Cookies." Yep. Sarah also clarified that those are "not the kind of sprinkles that you want to eat.")

Sarah says she hopes you try out this idea with your old Christmas cards instead of throwing them out! Her advice? "Be creative and take my idea and use stickers and make your own collage!" She also added that you could use printer paper or construction paper if you don't have scrapbook paper like we do. 

Merry Christmas, from our recycled cards! :)

Linking up today to Homeschooling on the Cheap!

Family field trip to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

When our family visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., back in July, one of the key exhibits we saw focused on Native American participation in the Olympics. And, of course, one of the focal points was decathlon- and pentathlon-winner Jim Thorpe.

In fact, Sarah's souvenir from that stop on our trip was the Sterling Biographies copy of Thorpe's life story! We started reading it right away, and finished it a little more than a month later.

And when Sarah planned out the places she wanted us to visit and the things she wanted to learn about this year, Jim Thorpe made it onto both lists, in the form of the man AND his now-namesake town.

So on Friday, Nov. 30, on a rare weekday off for my husband, we decided to take a family field trip to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, just about three and a half hours away from our home.

The town of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk)

To be clear to anyone reading, Jim Thorpe the athlete never lived in Jim Thorpe. He didn't go to school there (though he did attend the Carlisle School for some time, which is even closer to our home). He wasn't originally buried there.

His remains - and a fairly not-prominent monument - are in the town that was formerly known as Mauch Chunk, in the middle of the coal mountains of Pennsylvania, because it seemed like a good idea back in the 1950s. Jim Thorpe had passed away in 1953, and his widow (his third wife, Patricia) was upset because his home state, Oklahoma, had no desire to put up any kind of monument.

Enter Mauch Chunk, which was merging with a nearby town and wanted to draw some attention to itself.

The town, which had grown a result of the anthracite coal boom (that's a huge hunk of anthracite in the foreground of the photo above, by the way), was actually best known as the home of the gravity railroad. This attraction was kind of the roller coaster of its day, and continued running as a tourist attraction even after the need to roll coal down a mountain waned. Once cars became more common, though, people didn't think it was so fun to take a trolley to Jim Thorpe and ride the gravity railroad, and the town needed a boost.

If you visit Jim Thorpe, it's worth the $5 admission to visit the Mauch Chunk Museum and Cultural Center. You'll get to see a 20-minute film about the town's history, see a model of the gravity railroad system and even check out a small display about Thorpe the athlete.

The downtown is an interesting place to walk around as well - lots of small stores to visit, including a bookstore where we found Sarah's current favorite book, which I'll talk about in my next Reading Roundup post! Oh, and a wonderful tea shop/absinthe house (now there's something you don't get to say every day).

Other things to do in or around Jim Thorpe

• Tour the mansion of industrialist Harry Packer, which supposedly might have been the inspiration for Walt Disney World's "Haunted Mansion."
• Visit the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in nearby Lansford, PA. (We'd hoped to do this, but simply ran out of time!)
• See the Bear Mountain Butterfly Sanctuary. This would have been AMAZING, especially after our butterfly experience in Washington, D.C, but it was closed for the season by the time we went!
• Ride the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway, where a narrated tour shows you why the scenic town was once called "The Switzerland of America."

Jim Thorpe the athlete

Jim Thorpe has been called the greatest athlete in the world - first by Sweden's King Gustav after he won gold in both the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but later by magazines, newspapers, sporting organizations and more.

In addition to his skill in track - and you can see his amazing accomplishments there on the plaque above, which is seen at his memorial - he was exceptional in other sports, too.

He's in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, and, in fact, was the first president of what would later become the NFL. He played six seasons of Major League Baseball - the cause of his Olympic victory dethroning.

The coolest Jim Thorpe sports fact I learned? Thorpe hit three home runs into three different states during one game. It was on the border of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, and when he hit his home runs, one went over the left field wall into Oklahoma; another went into center field, which was in Texas; and the other went over the right field wall into Arkansas. OK, that's pretty neat. (There are some more good Jim Thorpe facts here.)

You can read more about Thorpe's career on his Wikipedia page, which has probably the best online bio I've found for him. (I really do recommend reading a good biography, which will go more in-depth!)

His former home in Yale, Oklahoma has now been preserved and is operated as a museum; while that's a bit out of my travel radius, it's certainly worth a visit if you're in that area.

The Jim Thorpe controversies

Many who are familiar with Jim Thorpe are, sadly, aware of him for his notoriety - he had his Olympic medals stripped from him because he was found to have played professional sports (then a violation of Olympic Committee rules) because he'd been a semi-pro baseball barnstormer for a few months.

It wasn't until 1983, 30 years after his death, that his family received new medals, reissued; no one even knows what happened to the originals, though they're thought to have been stolen.

But there's another controversy involving the town that now bears Thorpe's name - it has since debated changing its name back to Mauch Chunk, because the renaming didn't bring the promised fame or money.

Though it looks like it'll stay Jim Thorpe, you get the feeling from visiting the town that there's a mixed level of interest in the athlete; his memorial, for instance, is outside of the main tourist part of town, and not marked well on most of the visitors' guide literature. Yet the museum had a good display of Thorpe items, and even the local high school continues its support - their teams are the Jim Thorpe Olympians, which was neat to see.

We did enjoy seeing the memorial - and Sarah liked posing like "Football Jim," showing off yet another of the sports he excelled at.

Read more

This post is part of an occasional series of "Family Field Trip" posts, combining our own adventures with resources we've found helpful. Many of these will work even if you can't visit in person!

Earlier in the series, we shared free resources to help you learn about Philadelphia, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell and others to help you learn about and make the most of a visit to Assateague, Md., and Chincoteague, Va.

I've also been doing a loose series of posts good for unit studies. An earlier post in that series shared our favorite Phantom of the Opera learning resources and we also shared our favorite solar-system learning materials!

Disclosure: This post does have some affiliate links, which will make me a little bit of money if you choose to purchase any of the products I've mentioned through them. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it's because we really do believe in the book or item!

Our Christmas gingerbread village

While we were out Black Friday shopping, Sarah spotted this gingerbread village kit at Joann Fabrics. $9.99 on sale, and you could make four mini gingerbread houses instead of one big one! Of course we bought it!

(Don't judge. I like natural foods and do-it-yourself projects as much as the next person, but I'm not baking house-shaped gingerbread. That's my Christmas gift to me!)

Anyway, over the past couple of days, my mom and Sarah have been working on this as their holiday project. And they're adorable!

There's the Scalloped Cottage...

The Awesome A-Frame...

The Yellow Awning Cottage...

And the Pastel Perfect Suite! (My mother claims this bears some resemblance to an outhouse, but the poor thing is cute.)

And, since we have a sugar-loving large dog, these can't sit out just anywhere. They've gone behind the glass doors of our entertainment center, which is a little unusual but certainly a good way to jazz up a DVD collection?!

We haven't had time to pull off something cool like a fun Christmas activity EVERY day this Advent, but we're doing what we can, and having a great time!

I'm linking up today to the All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter Edition.

Around and around we go...

Today's post is just for fun.

We've had an exhausting few weeks in our family - traveling, illnesses, the death of a friend, lots of work projects, company coming - some good things and some bad, but by the end of the night, I'm usually in NO place to sit down and talk about what we have or haven't learned.

I have some great ideas for posts, a bunch of photos to show off of our recent travels, some linkups I'd like to take part in and more.

But for tonight, you get this cute video of Sarah, who is a hula hooping wizard. (I can't hoop. At all. It's pitiful.)



As a fun aside, the hoop she's using is made from recycled irrigation tubing and covered in fabric scraps in blue and green by my amazing friend Tiffy of Love, Peace and DYE. Tiffy is a local crafty lady who can make something cool out of anything. We ran into her at a recent craft fair and of all the awesome stuff she had for sale, it was the hoop that Sarah went for.

(I, meanwhile, got some adorable earrings made from buttons, and Tiffy worked up some adorable ferns for me out of recycled bicycle inner tubes!!)

Keep spinning, everyone. Things will slow down... eventually... but in the meantime, enjoy the hoop!

Sarah's custom version of "The 12 Days of Christmas"

We recently spent a few great family days trimming our home for the holidays. This is a HUGE undertaking for us (just ask my poor husband!) and I'll share more photos soon of how it's gone.

But just as we finished trimming the tree, Sarah dug into our Christmas book tray and pulled out "The 12 Dogs of Christmas," one of our old favorites. (I mean, like, as old as Sarah!)

She read it aloud to us, then we played the CD with its, uh, interesting rendition of the song, and then Sarah sat down with the book and a notebook and pencil.

I was still decorating, so I admit, I didn't pay too much attention, even when she said, "I'm going to write my own '12 Days of Christmas.'"

It was easily an hour or so later that she said, "Wow, Day 11, almost done!" And I thought... wait, what is she doing?

Well, this was it (click the image to see a bigger version!)

She wrote out each of the previous gifts with each day, and customized them to be things she likes, given by people we know.

The final tally?

• 12 castles
• 11 Xbox 360s
• 10 CDs
• 9 candy bars
• 8 chocolate bars
• 7 DS games
• 6 hundred dollars
• 5 golden cars
• 4 million dollars
• 3 lottery tickets
• 2 elves
• 1 hermit crab
• ... and a partridge in a pear tree!

(If you're not from Pennsylvania, you might not understand why #3 would come to mind for a 12-year-old. Rest assured, no future gambling addicts here! We have a reallllllly long-running commercial to the tune of this song for the Pennsylvania Lottery, and I admit we were singing it right before she started writing this!)

She proudly handed over the finished product to my husband, who did a wonderful dramatic reading/singing presentation of it. Then, she handed it to me and said, "You can blog this!"

Done!