Potential and Kinetic Energy

We learned about the different types of energy today. Mallorie made a boat with a propellor to demonstrate potential and kinetic energy.

This is the first attempt, the cardboard only lasted about six runs.

We switched to a plastic boat for the rest.

It worked! We even gave a Lego girl a ride.

Fire Belly Toad

We have four new pets. Thanks to the library's summer reading program we have fire belly toads. They are cute and jumpy. Above is their habitat, I hope it is big enough to keep them happy because they can live for 20 years.

This is them all smooshed together in a corner.

This is their food. 

2-4 crickets every 2-3 days. We have 24 crickets. They are almost as cute as the toads. Their names are Giant, Shiny, Lily, and Rainbow Dash. 

Tooele Arts Festival

Every year we eat dinner the the arts festival in Tooele. 

Matthew waits all year for the bratts from the Catholic Church. He will have this a few times this weekend. We all eat then check out the talent and always find stuff we want to buy.

The food was so yummy and the weather was perfect.

BBQ nachos

The world's dumbest stroller, but super cute girl.

Back in the saddle

Sisters

Math concentration

Math non-concentration

Joseph Smith Movie

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is making the movie Joseph Smith: The Prophet of the Restoration available as a download. This is the movie that plays at the Legacy Theater in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, because of this option it will not be release as a DVD.

BBC book list

This is a book list I found on one of the blogs I like to read. The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. I have read about 1/3 of them, how about you?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare—does reading some of them count?

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger—my brother said this is the best book of all time

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez—

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding—hated this book

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens –2^nd best book of all time

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens—it’s all about the food

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I found the list at this blog

Anniversaries

I just noticed today that my last post was posted on our anniversary and I didn't say anything. We have been married for nine years. It sure does not seem like long ago that we were married, but with Miss M being almost seven it must be true. We have both come a long way and I am very happy. Tomorrow is the day we look forward to and celebrate more. Miss Mae will have her golden birthday and we were sealed in the Salt Lake temple four years ago. That was a great day. What a tough road that was to get to, but as I found out it was not the end that I thought it would be, but only the beginning and the years since have been some of the best and most annoying years of my life, after all, I am one half of the married partners. I have made many mistakes and will certainly make many more, but thankfully my wonderful man is so forgiving and has a really bad memory for the wrong things I do. I am thankful to be a part of a family and to be a part of the lives of these wonderful people. There may be memories I would give up, but I would not change where we are for anything. Here is a picture of our wedding day. Tomorrow I will post a picture of our family at the temple.

Erin taking steps

Matthew took some liberties with the camera sorry!!

More Fun School Stuff

We have been having so much fun with school lately. We read about the enslavement of the Isrealites and how they made bricks, so we made our own mud bricks. We used a little bit of flour, some dirt and grass, and enough water to make a paste. They baked at 200 degrees for a long time. We shaped them into bricks and decided that we would like to have a mold if we were going to be doing this every day. Here is a picture of Sister Sue making a wall with the bricks we made


Next we read about the Phoenecians. One of the things that these brave explorers were known for was the purple dye they made. We made our own purple dye from blueberries. We put them in a pot with water and boiled them for a half an hour then soaked our fabric for at least 5 minutes and now we have purple fabric. Here are the girls holding up their fabric, now we have to decide what we are going to make with it.


Today as we studied about explorers who discovered America we talked about what it was like to be a sailor. One of the things they did for fun and function is tie knots. We learned to tie a bowline knot. This is a rescue knot so it should come in handy. Here is a picture of them rescuing their dolls from after they had fallen off the ship at sea.


Miss M tied hers all by herself, Miss Mae tied hers with my help, and I tied Sister Sue's knot.

I love homeschool. We have so much fun.

Here is another random picture. This is one of the reasons that I taught Miss M to read....


So I would only have to read Green Eggs and Ham once a day instead of multiple times.

This is a well used book at our house!

Fun music finds

For music this year we are studying "The Story of the Orchestra" where we isolate individual orchestral instruments and learn to hear their sounds. I am amazed at how we are able to hear the different instruments when listening to a whole orchestra after isolating it for a whole week. In our quest to vary the songs we use to learn the instruments I have found some really fun videos on youtube that I thought I would share
This one is just weird:


This one is so pretty:



Did you know that if the french horn was stretched out it would be 12 feet long?

I fell in love with the oboe:


I also now love the bassoon:


If the contra-bassoon were stretched out it would be 16 feet long!!!

This song is beautiful and the dancing/skating is amazing:


There are many more, but I am short on time and you don't watch to sit and watch videos all days. We are having so much fun with this. I love to hear my children in the car trying to pick out the different instruments as we drive down the road listening to music. I would rather hear an argument about oboe vs. bassoon than about the toys they would like to bring.

Finished a McGuffey's book!!!

Miss M finished another McGuffey's Reader. There are six books total; a pictoral primer, a primer, then first through fourth. She started learning to read with these about six months ago. We learn phonograms and then read short stories or sentences that utilize them. Sometimes there are lists of words that I assume are supposed to be spelling words, but I didn't use them as spelling words. She is slowly learning the rules of spelling and didn't want to put any pressure on her. Nevertheless, she learned to read all of the words and to read with out using monotone. She was so excited to have a reading lesson today because she got to use the first reader which she thinks is the first "real" reading book.

Family Proclamation Photo

We declare that God's commandment to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.

Four children may not seem like a large family to some, but to many of the people we know, we are crazy. When we announced that we were having our first everyone was happy, our second people thought it was o.k., but when it came to the third and fourth we endured many comments along the lines of why? and how are you going to afford another baby? These made us very sad because we know that each and every child is a miracle and a sacred trust from God. I feel privileged that he has entrusted us with four daughters to guide through this life safely back home to him. We will gladly accept any blessings He chooses to send our way (yes I have come to terms with having another baby) and will be excited to meet any other members of our family.

Family Weekend

We had a great family weekend. My husband went on a trip to the temple with the youth in our ward, they met at the church at 6:30 am. I love this time and the only way it could be better is if it were earlier. My girls love it when they wake up and their daddy is home, they miss him so much when he is at work. Even though he wasn't there when they woke up, they knew he would be there for lunch.

We did nothing the rest of the time. We sat around and played with each other Saturday afternoon, ate dinner with Grandma, then had church today. I even got my husband to read a scene from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew with me. He was Petruchio and I was Kate. I think he really liked pretending to throw food around and be mean. We do not have very many weekends like this. Usually my husband has some youth commitment or work or we have so many errands to run on Saturday that we can't wait for Monday so that life can slow down again.

I used to want to be going somewhere all the time, but now I just want to stay home. I love being here at my house especially if I can just relax with my family. After spending so much time having to be somewhere, I am incredibly grateful for my time at home and really look forward to weekends like this.

Beauty and the Beast

We are really into fairy tales at our house. This may be an understatement. We read fairy tales, we draw fairy tales, we act out fairy tales, we even live a fairy tale sometimes (many days I really feel like Cinderella with all my work and somedays like the Step-Mother with all my barking). Most every day we are watching the clock and the driveway for our handsome prince to come and take us away to our happily every after, usually just the backyard, but it seems much more fun when we are entertaining him rather than just each other....but I digress, back to the post.



We read multiple versions of each fairy tale and usually pick a favorite to keep as "our" telling of the story. I have only read two Beauty and the Beast stories and that is because I did not read this one first. I can't bring myself to read another one. This one is not easy to read and it is very long, we usually spend three or four days reading it, but we are never disappointed. I know the story and how it ends, yet I still cry every time I read it. Beans (aka Miss Mae, more on this later) is especially touched when I read this book. She tells me that she is not scard of the Beast anymore just sad for him. My girls always beg me to start it over again as soon as we finish, so we will take a long time to look at all of the gorgeous paintings that illustrate the book. We just finished reading this book again this week.



The Beast in this story is very mean and very scary, but the more time we spend with him, the more we see that he is really just very sad and very lonely. He has learned to be kind and loving despite his curse, but has been rejected so much because of how he looks and how he used to act that he is feels that no one will ever know the real him because no one wants to anymore. He is very hard on himself.



Luckily for the Beast he meets Beauty Fortune. He falls in love with her and eventually she grows to care for him as well, just not romantically because she is waiting for a prince to come along for her. By the time that she realizes that she does love him it may be too late.



I have been this Beast at times in my life and sometimes I still find him creeping into my thoughts from time to time. Luckily for me I have five Beauty Fortunes who love me no matter what I sound like, look like, or if I act crazy sometimes.



Families are like that though, at least they should be. A good friend of mine always tells me that "home should be the safest place for people to make mistakes." This is because it is a wonderful place to learn from mistakes without having to feel humiliated because we make them. This is my goal everyday, that my home can be a place where those who are here feel safe making mistakes and then learning from them, including myself.

One sentence that's it!

I started off my month long celebration of the family by using the Proclamation in our devotional. I was so excited to share this with my children because they have heard us talk about this document, but I don't think that we had ever taken the time to explain what it is, where it came from, and why it is important. We spent much more time this morning doing the "spiritual message" portion of our school morning and we only got through one line. I am not really surprised by this because it is about my girls' second favorite topic, marriage (first is princesses).

They are still young enough that they think that they can marry their daddy. I had to explain to them this morning that he was already married to me and that they would have to find another man to marry. We talked a little bit about the kind of man that they should look for to marry; they don't know any boys right now that they could marry, none of them have jobs. I was able to testify of the importance of not just marriage, but marrying right, in the temple and to the right person. It was a great experience and I am so excited to study this with my girls.

Celebrating the family this month

I am going to be participating in a month long celebration of The Family Proclamation. This will celebrate the 15 year aniversary of the prolamation.

We really love being a family and love to celebrate this fact. I also don't think that I use this document enough and know that my children don't appreciate it enough. I am going to use the proclamation everyday for our devotional lessons and spending as much time together as a family as we can.

Here is a link where you can get all of the detail about what this is.

My Home Library

I recently catalogued our home library. This took me weeks of taking books off of shelves, piling them on the couch and typing them into the computer. Only one person could sit on the couch for three weeks and if you did you had to worry about one or two mountains of books falling on you (which would have messed up the (dis)organization I had set up). This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time. A few years ago I read an article called "Our Refined Heavenly Home" by Elder Douglas L. Callister of the Seventy, it was reprinted in the June 2009 Ensign. There were many things in this article that caused me to pause, but because we are such a book loving family, one part especially stuck out



"There was a fine library in the home of President Gordon B. Hinckley's youth (1910-2008). It was not an ostentatious home, but the library contained almost 1000 volumes of the rich literature of the world, and President Hinckley spent his early years immersed in these books"



We have lots of books, at least I thought we had lots of books. When all of the books were listed we have over 500 books, some of which are picture books. I am not sure if there were many picture books in the Hinckley home, but even if there were, my children have only half as many books available to them. I seriously need to work on that.



This year we also got rid of books (this at first seemed a sin to me), but we set a standard in our family of what is an acceptable book and what is not. We defined those that are acceptable as Classics or Living Books. These are books that are worth reading more than once. The ones we got rid of were what we (and Charlotte Mason) call Twaddle. These are books that don't have moral value, didn't inspire us, or were just plain dumb (or dumbed down). I am so glad that we did this, now I know that whenever one of my children picks a book from a shelf she has an opportunity to be inspired and to learn. More importantly they can never be accused of wasting their time just reading.



Along with increasing the number of books we have also made it our goal to replace as many of our favorite paperbacks with hardcover books. I am also having a hard time with this because even though my copy of Jane Eyre is held together with a rubber band and I am so worried about losing pages every time I pull it out, it has all of my notes in it. I guess getting a new copy will just give me the opportunity to re-learn from the book. I will be able to start fresh with, hopefully, a new set of epiphanies. Just writing that makes me want to leave this post and order a new copy from Amazon. As Matthew would say, just put down the keyboard, walk away, and no one will get hurt.

10 things I am thankful for today

I just wanted to write about some things that I am thankful for. We were counting our blessings today and this is my top ten list (not in any particular order):

1. My awesome husband. He just keeps going and going no matter what and he tries really hard to make my life easier and me happy.
2. Six braids for three girls. My three girls let me brush and braid their hair today, they look so cute when they don't have orphan hair.
3. Eight teeth for my almost eight month old. She is finally back to her smiling happy self, no more constant, nerve grating crying.
4. My homeschooling/parenting mentors. I have learned almost all of what I know about raising my girls from some very smart people. Now I just need to more consistently apply it.
5. The Good News of the Gospel. This really should be number one. My testimony and my membership in the Lord's true church are my most prized possessions. This is what I most want my children to learn from me.
6. Air conditioning. It is really hot outside and I don't like to be sweaty. Yesterday Matthew came home from work with heat stroke, (headache, weakness, vomiting, etc) this proves to me that I am supposed to stay inside where it is cool.
7. Books, Books, Books. I love to read, and am so thankful to my parents, my Aunt Peggy, and Mrs Loop for teaching me this and cultivating a love of learning in me.
8. My daughter loves to read. One of my biggest fears is that my children will not love books like I do, but Miss M does. I have to force her to stop our reading lessons so the others won't feel neglected.
9. Grocery stores. Because I don't have to work so hard to get my food I have more time to read.
10. My bed. I have an awesome bed and it feels so good to climb into it every night. I have been so tired lately and love the soft warm place to recover. 10a is that I am not tired because I am pregnant, I am tired because I have been eating too much junk food (cookies are too good to pass by, luckily they are all gone), too much sugar really is bad for your brain.

Does Anyone Else Think This is a Bad Idea?

We needed to trim some branches off of our power lines today. They were too tall for our ladder and Matthew had the brilliant idea to stand on top of our Suburban, in the wind, and use a saw on the end of a ten foot pole to cut them down. It is a good thing that we are not unionized in this house or OSHA would be shutting us down right now (on second thought maybe that wouldn't be so bad).

my extraordinary girls