Week4: Petroglyphs and Catch Up

 What a fun and busy week!! We did very little desk work this week, and instead did a lot of abstract learning! The boys started the week with forest school, saving seeds from their garden, planting cover crops for winter beds, and exploring the forest space at the B Street location. The boys haven't been as excited to go as I thought they would be, but are warming up to it. I think the illusion of all day archery, whittling, and being adventurers that other forest schools advertised skewed what they imagined it would be like! Emmet has been very enthusiastic about the entire experience and seems to be enjoying it the most. Michael is at an age where he is hard to please no matter what I do, so just rolling with the hormones at this point!! And Avery says he is so tired at the end of the day, not a bad thing in my mind, but certainty a negative point for him! So we declared Monday afternoons rest afternoons and we do a bit extra screen time for them to relax and that seems to please all. 

Our nature based co-op has returned to twice a week adventures. To kick off the school year we decided to have a fun kid-created carnival! The boys had a lot of fun coming up with ideas. Michael made a pattern hunt bingo style game he said was similar to a mini game in a Mario game on their swtich. Avery made a magnetic fishing game. And Emmet decided to do balloon pop, which we already had equipment for from a previous carnival event I helped organize for Village Home last year. Another member of the co-op hosted who has a big yard and a bounce house. It was so much fun and a great substitute to our normal kick off the year party at Oaks Park. 

Our second co-op day was a trip to Horse Thief Lake in Washington to see native peoples petroglyphs!! I was SO excited for this trip, I think all the moms were, and I explained to the boys we were going to see cave paintings. Well. It *is* super cool, to us moms who get how old these carvings are, but to kids it was a pretty short viewing session followed by a lot of time standing in the heat! Unfortunately the tour we thought we could do ourselves is host led only, and no host led events are happening because of Covid. And the backup plan after we all nature journaled carvings was to go swimming, but sadly the lake had a toxic algae bloom. Michael (remember the hard to please comment) was FURIOUS. He was hot and very upset about not going swimming and that we did not go in a cave to see drawings. Whew. A difficult day. Luckily we discovered water front part in Hood River, which offered a safe and perfect water spot for the kids, and some shade for us moms! So, luckily we saved the day and made the five hour car trip worth it, ha ha ha. And bonus, we found a skeleton of a rattlesnake! It was pretty cool!

Between our two big co-op days and nature school, we didn't have much more energy!! The boys did math sheets to catch up on our math program. Thinking we need to do less worksheets for each chapter since they get the concepts well and this last chapter was 20 pages of worksheets, which seems excessive. We also read many picture books from the library and that we ordered on the Powhatans and Pocahontas, which was our last chapter in Story of the World. 

Our weekend was jam packed. Friday we butchered our meat chickens and all three boys took a turn evisceratings a bird. Las time only Michael helped out, so the other two got to learn about the organs and connective tissue. Saturday we helped my brother unpack from moving, then we rushed home and hosted John's going away party, social distancing style, in our yard, as he is starting a new job soon. Sunday we had a volunteer day lined up to expand the garden, but had to cancel last minute. Hope to have a few calmer weeks the rest of the month!

Cheers.

The Dillmans