In Honor of Veterans in the Family

For my cousin. US Navy 1992-1996.

For my dad. US Navy, 1968-1972, US Naval Reserves 1972-1994.

For my father-in-law. US Army, Vietnam 1966-1969.

For my husband's grandad. US Army, WWII, European theater.

For my grandad. US Marine Corp, WWII, Pacific theater.

For my great-great uncle. US Air Force, WWII. Shot down and killed over France.

For my cousin serving in the US Army now. For my grandmother's husband, WWII. For the veterans in our family who served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Happy Veteran's Day

World War II Redux

As a part of our (mostly unsuccessful) summer schooling experiment, we planned several field trips. One planned trip was to the county airport to eat in the restaurant and watch the planes land and take off. I should note that we live in a rural area, so there is really no security that prevents you from entering the lobby (or the two gates, for that matter). Reading in the local paper that there was to be a visit from two refurbished World War II airplanes solidified our plans.

In preparation for our afternoon, I dug out an old book that my grandma had given me when I was little. It was titled Air War in Hitler's Germany, and the cover says it is a part of the American Heritage Junior Library. The most notable thing about this book is that Grandma had written in it in Sharpie (she did that a lot with books, boxes and other items; once, I saw her basement cupboards lined with white paper on which she had written when she had cleaned them and when they were due to be cleaned again. I am failing mightily to live up to these standards of cleaning.). In this case, the Sharpie was to commemorate her Uncle Arthur, who served in WWII.

My grandma idolized her uncle. Arthur Stiles was about 10 years older than his niece, Mary Lou, who was teenager during the War. My grandma's mother came from a large family; she was the oldest and there were siblings that ranged on down to the age of her daughter, my grandma. Arthur was a radio man on a Flying Fortress. He wrote her letters and called her Hootie Ki, teased her about her lousy math grades. And then his plane was shot down in France.

My grandma didn't talk about Arthur very often, at least not to us grandkids. I knew that I had had an uncle who was killed in World War II, but I didn't realize then what that must have meant to the adults in my life who were children during that time.

Newspaper clipping from the Clearfield Progress, 1993.

So, off we went to see the planes and hopefully for Ethan and Meghan, to learn a little more about family history.

It was beautiful August day in central Pa; hot and sticky, made more so by climbing in and out of tight spaces.

Kids viewing forward area of B17 Liberator.

Ethan, walking on a gangway between landing gear on his way to the rear section of a B24 Liberator.

Manning the waist gunners' station.

Kids in front of the B 24 J Liberator "Witchcraft".

Requisite picture of the kids holding up the plane.

A B17 Flying Fortress.

Pilot and co-pilot stations.

Photos of Arthur Stiles at the radioman station on the B17 Flying Fortress "Nine-o-nine".

Message to Hitler in the bomb bay.

Ethan and Meghan, waiting for cold drinks and pie in the airport diner.

In honor of all WWII veterans, living and remembered, this Veteran's Day.

Weekend on Chocolate Avenue

Yes, it's been A Long Time. So far, not so great at blogging regularly, but here's an update.

For our daughter's birthday, she decided that she would accept a family weekend trip in lieu of a birthday party with her friends. And for those of you who have not yet paid for a child's birthday party at a kid-friendly location with cake, refreshments, favor bags, decorations and balloons. . . yes, a weekend trip for four is cheaper.

Sleeping in a hotel room is so cool!

Thankfully, Meg had a good example in the form of her brother, who had chosen similarly last January, when we spent a weekend in icy Erie at Splash Lagoon, the indoor waterpark that advertises that it is 84'F year-round, which, in January, was a major drawing card.

Meg chose a visit to Hershey Park. Unfortunately, the kids are getting to the point where they really don't want to stand for pictures, so there is not as much pictorial evidence as in trips past (for said evidence, I would present the 600+ pictures we took at Disney, however it would take 56 hours to upload them. You're welcome.)

In front of the Milton Hershey statue.

Chocolate World. Almost as good as Spaceship Earth at Disney.

Very excited to see VERY large chocolate bars.

Face painting at $15 a pop. We made her spend her own duckets on that one.

M.J. and Eth

O.K., Mom. We'll smile if you absolutely require it.

Parakeets, or why I was holding a dead bird on New Year's while my husband was in Florida.

The Parakeets

What are they good for? This is the question my mother-in-law asked the other day, and she has a good point. What are the parakeets good for?

First, I need to tell the story of how we came to have Snoopy and Woodstock. Yeah, I know, real creative on the bestowing of names, but I can only blame that on the kids. We didn't actually start with Snoopy and Woodstock, but, instead, Snoopy and Jack. However, Jack is now in the backyard, so Woodstock stepped in to keep Snoopy from being lonesome.

My friend's mother has had parakeets for years. They were trained, and would talk; they would sit on the back of the couch and watch TV. Low these many years, they started laying eggs!! For awhile, my friend's mother would toss the eggs, reasoning that no good could come of this development. But, then, as animal lovers often do, she felt bad, and let them keep several eggs. Predictably, the clutch hatched and suddenly, she had not two parakeets, but eight parakeets. At this, she decided that eight were too many, and started searching for appropriate homes. And, animal lover that I am, I caved. They would be fun for the kids! They would talk and sit on my shoulder! How fun this was going to be!!

Jack and Snoopy

Christmas break of 2007 found us bringing home two cute little parakeets in a shoebox, spending an inordinate amount of money at Petco, and setting up parakeet home within our own house. This involved figuring out a way to fasten the cage to the table, as the dog and cat were very interested in this new development. After bungeeing the cage to the plant table, displacing all but one plant, we were good to go. We spent the rest of Christmas break watching them, trying to get them to sit on a finger, and singing repetitively to them. Also, we spent it packing for Matt, who was going to Florida to see Penn State play in the Outback Bowl. Since he would be returning one to two days after the rest of us had to be back at school, I stayed home with the kids.

Jack and Woody, eating special baby parakeet food. Actually, we now believe that only Woody was eating it, as he was territorial towards Jack, and Jack was too passive to fight for sustenance.

Unfortunately, the two selected parakeets had some sibling rivalry issues, and New Year's Eve found me looking concernedly at one little guy sitting in the bottom of the cage with his aqua-colored feathers fluffed and dusty-looking. At 10 p.m., he was looking decidedly unwell, and I called the vet, to find out a sick call on New Year's Eve would run about 150 smackers. Before I could make a decision, the thing died in my hand. Ethan and I sat and cried our eyes out over little Jack. There is something so pathetic about a dead bird, and little Jack was no exception. We put him back in the shoebox, and set him out on the porch to await burial.

Beautiful Florida, where Matt was blissfully unaware of pending parakeet death.

I then had to call my friend to relay that I was an unfit parakeet mother, and was offered a third bird (she was getting desperate for homes at this point, as she'd had no other takers). Woodstock came home (in a clean, non-dead bird shoebox), and took up residence with Snoopy. No other issues arose, and they have lived happily with us for almost three years.

Woodstock

So, how has it gone? The training, the speaking, the flying about the house?? Not well. These birds are afraid to leave their cage, and when taken out, they fly immediately back in. Every day I chirp, "Hi, boys!", and every night, I sing, "Good night, boys!". Nothing. They mimic no household sounds, no whistles, no words, no computer chirps, even though they sit right beside the thing. They bite when we have to hold them to clip their wings. They live only for themselves and for the fun of throwing all the seeds they don't like on the floor. That, and ringing the bell in their cage in the early mornings, usually on Sundays.

Woody and Snoopy, freaking out when I open the cage door to snap a picture.

They think I am going to try and take them out.

What are they good for? No idea.

Well, they make a cheerful noise in the house. And that's about it.

Summer School Topic 1 Culminating Activities

Well, after not a little fighting, whining, and yes, learning, our first summer school theme is complete. Thank God. I nearly didn't make it. Bless all those homeschoolers who toil on throughout the school year; I do not know how they do it. Finding topics and fun activities isn't the problem. Having earnest conversations with people about little known and perhaps boring (analemmatic sundials, anyone?) topics isn't the problem. Stopping summer school involving brother-and-sisterly-love from becoming alternative placement programming would be the number one problem. We almost didn't survive the teasing, taunting, and bickering. That aside, it was a good first theme.

After settling down, Ethan and Meghan picked their spelling words, and wrote sentences, similar to their school year assignments. They also practiced some random math facts that they selected - Ethan choosing 6's, 7's, and 8's multiplication tables and Meghan some triple digit subtraction.

Then we got into the nitty gritty. Meghan began to take some data on the daily comics, reading them all for several days, circling the ones she liked and crossing out the ones she didn't like or understand. Then we took her data and made a bar graph:

(Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, The Phantom, Zits, and The Family Circus)

We did a little online research, and discovered the current longest running comic was the Katzenjammer Kids, and that and the actual longest comic (yes, that was what she meant, not the longest running, but the longest, physically) is one that was created for the London Comedy Festival and was on display in Trafalgar Square; it was 88 meters long. Peanuts, Meghan's favorite, is the longest told by one person, at 17897 strips.

Meghan's final activity was to make her own comics:

Cute, no? Slippy the Babydoll and her adventures feature prominently in many stories and drawings of Meghan's.

Ethan drew his own ideas for a candle clock and a water clock:

Ok, I think I get the candle clock. However, the water clock leaves a little to be desired, in that I don't think he got the connection between how fast the water runs and how fast the hands on the clock go around. Dry in the summer and the days are longer? Maybe, but I don't think that's the level of understanding we were going for. . .

Then Ethan did some research on timekeeping in general. After choosing a timekeeping instrument (the astrolabe), and after reading a chapter from The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon (yes, my favorite book series, why do you ask??) in which a Revolutionary War-era family receives an astrolabe, he began writing a fictional story of his own titled The Cursed Astrolabe, using what he learned about the history of time keeping.

**Insert The Cursed Astrolabe here

in APPROX. THREE WEEKS

including whining time**

Ethan suggested we make a fieldtrip out of visiting a museum in London in which the oldest working clock is displayed, as well as Trafalgar Square to visit the longest comic, but I think we'll need to pass on that, barring some heroic fundraising on their part. . .

Picking our first topics for Summer Homeschooling

This summer, the kids decided they wanted to be home-schooled. This stemmed from a conversation about how 'boring' summertime is, and how they didn't want to just watch TV and go to the pool everyday. Then I called the aliens and told them to bring back my biological children and take these ones back to Mars. The community pool and watching TV were what I lived for every summer, but apparently, my kids have taken all my lectures about being 'life-long learners' to heart. And I thought no one was listening. Lucky me.

They had no problem devising a list of topics, which included Quantum Physics, as well as how to make stop action videos with snapshots. Hmm. Well, we decided to start out a littttttle less ambitiously.

Day One of the Cutshall summer homeschooling project. Ethan has picked the history of timekeeping for his first project and Meghan wants to know the history of comic strips. They picked spelling lists, developed "I wonder..." statements, and wrote down what they already knew about their topics.

Meghan: I wonder why comics are called comics.

I wonder how many comics are in color.

I wonder how long is the longest comic. (I think she means longest running.)

I wonder if there are comics in other countries.

Ethan: Are there ways to keep time other than sundials, watches, and clocks?

How do clock makers know where to put the gears in order for the clock to work?

Are there different types of of time keeping in other parts of the world?

Surprisingly, they seem to have lots of facts about their topics, and have come up with good spelling lists. Ethan's includes horology, sexagesimal, and chronometry. I think we'll be doing some definitions this week!

Zaniness, disguised as a girl

My baby is a crazy girl. And I can prove it.

Let's look at take 2 first, shall we?

This was taken after her older brother's orchestra concert. All I wanted was a nice picture of the two of them, dressed in something other than t-shirts and sweatpants.

"Stand up by the piano, and I'll take your picture."

Here's the reason we had to have a 'take 2':

It does have that certain je ne sais crazy to it, no?

Freaky Fotos, part 2

More freaky photos...

Meg, sporting a Na'vi blue look.

See?

On this one, I couldn't figure out what that blob was on the left.

Um, yeah, that would be my son.

Freakity freak:

Not freaky. However, we are showcasing the large chin inherited from his papa:

Meg, laughing at another picture.

A bit freaky, but I love this one the most! Green teeth and all.