the best season of all- day 10 and 11

We had a lovely, quiet week end.

Children are very happy about having the tree up. Little C. keeps exclaiming "The tree came to visit!" and she touches ornaments all the time.
Yesterday we made our first ornaments of the season. We took out  thick felt sheets and sewn up couple of birds. It was D.'s first big sewing experience as well as needle felting. He loved every minute of it. His bird was an owl and now it guards our tree. He did most of the work himself :)

I made a little dove, C. helped by messing with my thread and picking our sequins :)

Yesterday we read
Toot &Puddle I'll be home for Christmas by Holly Hobbie- another delightful little story about piglets




Today was another quiet day.


We read  The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett.



I'm back to baking, made marble cookies using this recipe. 
The cookies are quite good, but too much work somehow mixing, and separating, and chilling the dough.

We watched Serendipity tonight, very nice:

Science Sunday-The Planets

Last week we started to learn about Space. The first lesson- The Sun went quite well and D. were impatient to learn more.
Throughout the week we talked about what we already know and finally today we sat down and talked about different planets.
The Planets by Gail Gibbons was a great help. We read about half of it and decided to return to planets beyond Earth next week :)

We made felted model of Solar System mobile (something I was dying to do for a while now and,boy, was it a pain to put together as a mobile :D). There is this great tutorial, I, however, totally forgot to even look for a solar system kit, so we had to improvise. :D Initially it was planned as a wet-felted solar system, but since we have never wet-felted before it did not go quite as planned.
We used wool stuffing as a core for all planets (except for the smallest ones) and put colorful wool on top. D. wet-felted it all into balls in the sink and I added some needle felting after planets were semi-dry (we really wanted to hang the whole thing today :D). We attached it with some wire to a wicker wreath (no easy task I tell you) and voila! It's not to scale of course and Jupiter is almost upon the Earth now :D

Some extra stuff on topic of planets study :
Solar System at NASA
Solar System at Kids astronomy
Solar System 101 video

Solar System coloring book via A to Z Home's Cool Homeschooling's great page with many links

The best season of all: day 1

At our house December is a month-long celebration of the approaching winter, of magic that surrounds the season of Christmas and New Year. We don't do proper Advent because it was not part of the culture in which we grew up and I can't really get into it for some reason. So instead we try to  do a little craft, read a  book, bake something delicious every day or two.

Today D. brought a lovely holiday tree from his clay class

We read " Trouble with trolls" (it takes place in early spring actually, which I didn't know :D) , "The Hat" (which inspired us to find all kinds of silly things to use as a hat) and "Gingerbread Baby" by Jan Brett.

We baked our first cookies of the season.

Chocolate holiday cookies:

3/4 c of butter

1 c of sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 big eggs

2 c of flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp soda

1/2 c of cocoa

chocolate chips

powdered sugar

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Mix butter, cocoa, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract.

2. Mix dry ingredients and add to wet ingredients. Fold in chocolate chips.

3. Chill for an hour (if butter was not fully melted chilling is not required)

4. Put little balls of dough on the baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

5. Bake for 12 minutes, set cookies aside to cool. Dust with powdered sugar.

So it begins, we hanged our first decoration in the house, cross-stitching I made last year.

Friday lights

D. and dad made jack-o-lantern, plus D. made one during his clay class. The clay one is the scariest I think (and so does grandpa claiming it's the creepiest thing he's ever seen :D)


D. is still not sure about his costume -he wants to be either an eagle (eeek, how am I suppose to make it I have no idea, although it does remind me about this weird yet really funny movie) or a knight. We'll see. It will be the first year trick-or-treating, past years we just went to the party at the book store, so D. is pretty excited.



I loved the idea of Pumpkin fairy from The Magic Onions, we'll probably do that since D. is not into candy all that much anyway.

Background noise for today is  Kisses and Cake by John Powell ("P.S. I love you" soundtrack), such beautiful compositions and so peaceful.

To friends and visitors- have a marvelous week-end!