Why I love this!!

Well another year almost over and I've been a poor blogger at best.

I do have to say that while this year has had it's ups (it's almost over) and it's downs (my weekly decisions to abandon homeschooling) I can only look back and be thankful for the time I've had this year with my children.

I've loved it so much I just bought Jonah's math curriculum for next year. And I must say, it's incredibly rewarding to show your 8 year old daughter a stack of black and white Saxon books and hear "Oh, cool!" Yes, she is a geek of her mother's caliber, and I LOVE IT!

To get to the point of this post...

One of the things I love most about homeschooling is that my daughters work together and are not only learning, but are quickly learning how to learn. After finding a beetle on the back porch, they decided to look to the internet to settle an argument as to whether the beetle was male or female. So they googled.

And the beetle, to the best of their knowledge is a female.

Jonah's Pilgrim Poem

Jonah wrote this poem today:

Some were cold
some were old

We ate corn
and babies were born

We scrubbed
while others rubbed

Thank you, God!

Dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, dead ant, dead ant....

Poor little ants. They had no shot at life in this house. We started with 17 keepers (lost two right out of the package). In this picture we had 3 hanging on to life. But today there is one lonely ant repairing tunnels. You can see where these three created a little ant burial mound. They dismembered and drug each ant up to the top and buried it. So sad. There are still several on the sides and in the bottom not even pictured here. Uncle Milton would not approve.

DRUMROLL PLEASE!!!

Our Chicken Mummy is wrapped.

Apparently, we had an extra-juicy chicken. (Tyson, eat your heart out!) But it was finally dry enough to wrap, so today was the day. The smell was very faint compared to those first few weeks. Although, Jonah did say "this smells like a dog", and Jorja responded with "no, it smells like poop!" I think it smelled of rotten cloves.

The girls lost interest in wrapping toward the end, so they watched cartoons while I prettied it up.

Enjoy the slide show:

We learned about the Phoenicians Today!

And as a fun (and tasty) activity, we made Phoenician bread (AKA: pita bread). It was really pretty easy and actually tasted good. Mommy might keep this recipe on hand and use it for making sandwiches and to go with occasional meals.

Here is a slide show of our bread making:

Chicken Mummy Update, Part Deux...

One of the new favorite "words", if you will, around our house is *hurp*. It's that kind of throwing up in your mouth sound. Delightful imagery, I know, but sometimes the only way to describe something is to sink to a 12 year old boy's level.

*Hurp* is how I would describe the chicken now. The smell, I admit is not as pungent as the first salt change, but still there, and the chicken is much smaller. We should have weighed it before and after, that could have counted as science and math!

Anyway, I still can't stand over it and breathe once the bag is opened or *hurp*. I tried turning my head to the right and taking a deep breath to clear my sinuses, unfortunately, I forgot I had set the open bag of chicken-moistened salt in the right side of the sink and well...*hurp*.

We are 6 weeks into the mummy, so theoretically, it's finished, but I'm going to give it one more week in the salt mixture, just in case. That being said, look for pictures and a description of our wrap job and sarcophagus in the next week or so.

Chicken mummy update...

Well, she's still here. Getting new salt about once a week or so. And still kinda gross...perhaps grosser than ever...

How much do you love your mummy?

My girls are pretty darn proud of theirs! Their chicken mummy, that is!!

First, we all put on rubber gloves to keep germs off our hands...no one wants salmonella!!

Then, we mixed up our salt mixture - salt, baking soda, baking powder and ground cloves to kill the inevitable smell.


Then we washed and dried the chicken before putting it in the bag of salt




And here is our famous soon-to-be mummy chicken. Looks fantastic doesn't it? What? You can't tell that's a chicken in there? Hmm. Too bad for you, because it smells much better than it looks!


The good news is that Jorja only ripped off her gloves, touched the chicken and "tasted" it once. There has been no #3 or puking, so I think we got lucky. Let's face it, if someone was going to have gastrointestinal issues, it would be Jorja.