Last week started off pretty good then very quickly went downhill. We had to say goodbye to our sweet Maggie Jane Friday after she suddenly and unexpectedly took a turn. Cats often hide their illness and pain and Maggie must have been hiding something for a while, which breaks my heart. She was the sweetest troublemaker, independent and sassy, smart and goofy, kitty. We were lucky to have her in our lives for as long as we did. We will miss her very much as she was much loved.
Read Last Week:
I actually didn’t read anything. It was a really rough week.
Reading This Week:
I have certain book series that I save for when I really need the most comfort, and the Jan Karon Mitford series is one of them. After last week, I needed some serious comfort reading so I pulled out At Home in Mitford for some cozy self-care reading.
We were all over the place with tv last week. The USA Ghosts, the British version of Ghosts, a little bit of the Great British Baking Show, and Miss Scarlet and the Duke, Season 2. We also finished up The Woman in White which was excellent.
I also watched the Disney cartoon The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as well as the Tim Burton movie for the movie posts Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I have been doing. We usually post them on Thursdays but with the week I was having we moved our post. It will be posted tomorrow, on Halloween, instead.
As for listening, mainly Taylor Swift’s Midnights. Last week I mentioned I was sure how I felt about it, but now I am really enjoying it.
We started off the weekend with a birthday party for my youngest (as of right now) niece. We haven’t seen them in far too long, so it was so nice to see her and her sister’s sweet little faces.
We unfortunately had to leave earlier than we had planned due to an issue at Billy’s work. He had to get down to Detroit and fix the issue which was a bummer, but we had a nice time until we had to go.
Then Saturday was the Detroit Zoo Boo! We went with my brother and his fam, my SIL’s mother, Michelle, and my mom. The kiddos looked so cute!
It was the most beautiful fall night, if not a tiny bit too warm to start with. I want fall to be fall darn it. But it was an absolutely gorgeous night to be out and about, and everyone was so relaxed and just enjoying the event. We have gone before in the cold and rain, so this was a nice reprieve from that! I particularly loved seeing the animals framed in the autumn light and foliage. We wandered around, taking our time, making sure to visit as many favorites as we could.
I even tried a cider slush, which was delicious!
It was late when we finally headed home, and we were all full of happy moments and ready for bed. We had an early morning coming up, after all!
The next morning Billy, Wyatt, and I were off on another adventure – Billy and I feeling barely recovered from the weekend thus far but we were more than up to the challenge.
We wandered around the orchard and peeked into the corn, soaking up the October sunshine. After we had explored to our heart’s content we headed back to the shop for pumpkins and doughnuts and cider.
It was a perfect, peaceful moment. We had the whole area to ourselves, and we took a moment to just be.
Billy and I enjoyed our drinks while Wyatt played in the dirt, because we are those parents. You would never guess that up until two years ago Wyatt would not sit on the grass or touch dirt by how filthy he is here, but it took me years of working with him to get to this place. We were all in a place of happy. The orchard we go to makes their own hard cider and we always treat ourselves. I had a cranberry cider while Billy had elderberry, and both were so good.
When we got home Billy and I had to hit the house and clean up! We spent the weekend playing, and the house needed some love – plus my brother and fam were coming over that evening for a fire and we needed to make things presentable. We had popcorn around the fire and good conversation, and it was the perfect end to a fantastic weekend.
We are winding up our month of Hispanic artists and it has been a really fun unit! We started Frida Kahlo last week and will continue with a few more art projects and books about her this week, before adding in Jose Posada, just in time for the Dia de Muertos.
We read a book about Frida from the Little People, Big Dreams series which I absolutely love. I introduced who Frida Kahlo was and Wyatt and I put together a little Frida doll kit from Michael’s Craft Store. It was a super simple sewing project, with a big plastic needle and holes to thread through, and then the rest was all felt stickers. I did the sewing to help Wyatt out and he added the rest!
Our state for the week was Nevada! It always surprises me which interesting facts Wyatt chooses as his favorites. For Nevada he thought it was really cool that it became a state on Halloween (in 1864) and he also really liked learning about the blue tailed skink. That part wasn’t too surprising.
For our supplemental language arts we read The More You Give and we discussed how love can be shown by different acts that can’t be held in your hands, like pancakes in the morning, growing strawberries together, all these little things that are really actually really big things. I had hoped to make a felted acorn with him to accompany our reading but we just ran out of time!
I am super excited about this week ~ rather than study a new state this week for social studies, we will be instead learning more about Dia de los Murertos. We have talked about it here and there, visited ofrendas, but we will be digging a little further this week. And all the art we are going to do! (hopefully lol!)
What We Used:
This section contains Amazon Affiliate links. In addition to the curriculum I am creating for him, we also use curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful, The Waldock Way, and Blossom and Root for phonics, reading, science, and social studies.
Hi all! I hope you are having a great weekend! Ours has been very full but fun. We had a birthday party, trick or treating at the zoo, and this morning we are heading out to the orchard for apples and pumpkins and doughnuts! And hard cider because the orchard we go to makes their own and it is fantastic.
Read Last Week:
I devoured this book! I could not stop reading it – it was wild and weird and I needed to know the end so I just kept reading, waaaaayyy past my bedtime. It was a bit of a crazy read but I really enjoyed it.
Reading This Week:
So, I have three books left on my October TBR, and not enough time to read them all. Gone are my days of reading 2-3 books a week lol. I am not sure which book I will end up reading – two are shorter so maybe just maybe if I try hard I can read two books. We will see!
We are still watching Ghosts, which makes us laugh. We also started watching The Woman in White and it is so good!!!
Tonight we are watching a double feature for Spooky Season Cinema – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the cartoon and the movie. These are my favorite spooky season movies so I am excited.
I also started listening to Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights. I love her Evermore and Folklore albums but I am not sold on this one yet.
And that is it for me today! I hope you all are doing well.
On Monday, Billy surprised Wyatt and I by taking a vacation day! We considered going to Greenfield Village but it was cold and then started to rain so we switched plans and went to the museum instead. Greenfield Village and The Henry Ford Museum are two parts of the same museum and we haven’t been to the actual museum in quite a long time. It was definitely time to go back. And they have a special exhibit right now, the Heroes and Villains: The Art of the Disney Costume exhibit!
We loved it. These costumes designers are so talented, with billowing dresses, perfectly tailored suits, and all the various whimsical fairy tale touches.
Billy and I couldn’t believe how tiny these actors and actresses must be to fit these wee little outfits!
We all had favorites:
Ok so I had two favorites. The costume that Julie Andrews wore as Mary Poppins, and Keira Knightley’s Sugar Plum Fairy gown. Wyatt loved the Captain Jack Sparrow costume, and Billy loved Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent dress.
After goggling over the costumes we moved on to the rest of the museum.
One of my favorite permanent exhibits is the Your Place in Time exhibit. It takes you through the different generations and highlights the different technologies and pop culture of the day. The 80s bedroom was so me. I even listened to Depeche Mode and had a moody James Dean poster. Wyatt is such a music kid – he enjoyed listening to the music of the 50s and 60s, especially The Beatles. And while I might be a Gen Xer, I think it would be really cool to live in the hippie geodesic dome. (not to be confused with the Buckminister Fuller Dymaxion House that is there which is also super cool)
I always have to go visit the William Hopson sign too. His story is so crazy, and romantic to me. Lol. He was also a bit of a looker. He has a page on the Smithsonian site as well – he was a well known and beloved pilot in his day.
Billy and Wyatt were more excited about the trains and cars – and there are so so many. Seriously. I did take this photo of the stagecoach trailer that belonged to the Lindberghs. Anne wrote her novel The Steep Ascent in it!
And in case you have wondered where certain items from history end up, check museums. They are probably there. The Henry Ford has a sort of macabre collection of items within its walls – including the car Kennedy was in that fateful day in Dallas, and also the car Reagan was in the day he was shot as well. It is strange and eerie and sad to view the Kennedy car; I wasn’t alive at the time but I have seen the footage numerous times and can picture Jackie trying to climb out the back very clearly, and it brings that day to life for me, as learning about history should, even the sad and tragic moments. The Henry Ford also has the chair Lincoln was assassinated in, and Edison’s last breath. We didn’t do the whole museum this time but we will go back. We use our membership pretty heavily, and my favorite thing about a membership is that you don’t feel you need to get everything done in one day.
And on that note, we were ready to head home, one of us with a little souvenir.
Wyatt and I have been hitting the library hard this month, checking out and returning books, for both school and pleasure reading. It is not unusual for us to leave with 25 books at a time, which seems absurd but we need them! We really do….
What We Have Read So Far:
How to Haunt a House was a cute little book about little ghosts in ghost school, learning how to haunt a house. It was a non-scary Halloween story and pretty silly too.
Halloween is Coming explores the excitement that builds before the holiday. We liked it because of the disability representation, and because it was fun autumn read.
No Such Thing and There’s a Ghost in this House were very similar – both have a little girl main character who exclaim there is either no such thing as ghosts, or that they have never seen a ghost in their supposedly haunted house. In No Such Thing, little readers can have fun spotting the ghosts that the little girl doesn’t see, and in There’s a Ghost there are see through pages that make the ghosts appear on the pages. Both are really well done and fun, and I love the art in both. There’s a Ghost in this House is a bit creepier than No Such Thing.
Wyatt absolutely loved Inside a House that is Haunted, Trick or Treat Crankenstein, and A Tiger Called Tomas. These three were his favorites besides the above ghost books – all of the ghost books. Inside a House that is Haunted is a progressive, repetitive story like There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, with picture clues as well. Wyatt loved this one and I did too, because Wyatt had so much inadvertent speech practice with it. Trick or Treat Crankenstein is about a little boy who was so excited for Halloween only to have the day not go as he had wished. Wyatt was loving this story. And A Tiger Called Tomas was adorable – I loved the art, and this story of a boy who is shy and unsure. His Halloween costume lends him some confidence with its anonymity, and he learns that not only do people still know who he is, but that they like him.
Finally Stumpkin and Samurai Scarecrow. Stumpkin was sort of sad for me – this poor little pumpkin who is waiting and waiting to get picked and no one picks him. But it does have a happy ending! It was very sweet. Samurai Scarecrow is a cute little sibling Halloween story. Yukio is so excited for Halloween, but he gets tired of his little sister Kashi following him around and copying him all he time. He gets annoyed with her and lets her know it. Then feels bad about it. In the end though they make up but how it happens is a pretty big surprise!
On Our Shelf Waiting To Be Read:
There is still time before Halloween so we are going to keep on reading! We have some waiting on the shelf to be read which we will get to soon – and maybe a few more after these even!
I would love to hear your Halloween picture book favorites!
Today’s brew of the day is Cafe Bustelo. It apparently has more caffeine than I am used to in my coffee. So if I get a bit off topic and rambly today, blame the Bustelo!
This past weekend Billy went camping and Wyatt and I had a quiet weekend at home. Which was nice, we watched movies and read books and took some walks including one along the riverfront. When Billy got home though, he seemed to bring chaos with him (thank you Lisa for this description lol). He hadn’t been home for an hour when the hose on the washing machine broke, flooding that area of the basement. Then about 20 minutes later, we heard a loud bang from outside somewhere near and then the power went out! A transformer blew and took out our neighborhood’s electricity. I had to race around putting towels on all of the gecko tanks to try and trap the heat in and was stressing about what we would do if the power was out for a long time since it is so cold right now. However, our city manufactures its own electricity and they had a team out to fix it right away. They are usually quick like that if an outage occurs but it made me think about getting a generator! The three of us and the cats could always vacate to my mom’s house but I don’t see us lugging the five lizards and their setups out with us too! Lol. Billy ran up to the store and bought a replacement hose and fixed the washer so that is all taken care of as well.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a few YouTubers that I really like and want to support, even in a tiny way. So, I budget a few dollars a month for Patreon and choose a few to subscribe to for a while. Recently I switched them up and started being a patron of The Night Owl Podcast, and Alexandra Roselyn, a booktuber who always picks the best middle grade reads. I love to read middle grade, as a preview of books for Wyatt but also just because. She reads a lot of other genres as well, but I mainly started following her for the MG content. Anyway, she just launched a Patreon and she has put so much thought into it! It is designed with a whole secret society theme, and even the most affordable tier has a ton to offer, with two book clubs, liveshows, printables, a discord (whatever that is, can someone please explain to this Gen Xer? ) , and just a bunch of goodness. All for $3. I am sort of excited about this. She has set it up like a little story, a “club” name, it is just really cute. I am not sure if the middle grade book is designed for parents/educators because her YouTube seems to target that demographic, or if it is for actual kids, but I will be participating in the Adult Cozy Reads book club.
So I have that going on. And just in time for tea season! I have been stocking up on teas, from our favorite indulgences to our normal everyday tea. In our case, that is Red Rose tea, my favorite. I am so distressed though that the little ceramic figurines are no longer included in every box! You can still get them by ordering tea online from them but it makes me sad. For me, it was the adult equivalent of fishing the toy out of the cereal box. Apparently not everyone appreciated the little ceramic figurines so they moved it to this situation, but…it’s the end of an era I guess.
I decided to switch up some artwork this past week as well. I found a box of frames in our basement that I had forgotten about, left over from an old photography show I did, and put them to use! I framed my grandfather’s library card, my grandfather’s swim team picture (he is bottom row, second from left), and a painting Wyatt did of a butterfly. I also framed my grandfather’s report card but I gave that to my brother as a gift.
Edited to add: About a year ago I started listening to a podcast called Your Own Backyard produced and written by Chris Lambert, an investigative journalist. The podcast focused on the disappearance of Kristin Smart, who went missing after a party in 1996. Lambert’s work on the podcast and investigative abilities renewed interest in her case, and also produced evidence and witnesses. The energy of this podcast kept the case moving and yesterday, Smart’s family received justice after 26 long years – Paul Flores was convicted of Kristin’s murder. The podcast is very sensitive, compassionate, and well thought out, without the sensationalism that comes with some true crime podcasts. I hope that today Smart’s family has some sense of closure, and I hope that they continue to get answers.
And that is about all I have this morning! I am going to go read a few blogs, and drink my coffee and eat my apple pie for breakfast before starting our morning for real. I hope you all have a lovely day!
Circumstances have aligned that are going to make going places and doing things much more accessible for us. First, the wheelchair! Wyatt is working on walking but just doesn’t have the stamina or endurance to go very far, so we need the wheelchair until he gets there. And we have one now and life is easier! Second, the pandemic has reached a point where I feel comfortable taking Wyatt into places like museums again. We still wear masks but things are better for us around here. So I was super excited to take Wyatt to the museum!
We rolled up early in the morning., bright and early at 9 when they open. We are get up and go people, we are up early anyway (thanks to early bird boy) and I also like how empty a place is that early so, there we were. The only other people there seemed to be the people going to the Van Gogh exhibit (which I need to get to before it leaves) so we sort of had the rest of the museum to ourselves for quite a while. My mom went with us, as did Billy since he had the day off to go camping. (he headed out after our field trip). We had a great time.
First up were the Diego Rivera murals, the whole point to our trip. Wyatt has been learning about Diego River in art and I was really excited to be able to show him some actual, in person, works of Rivera. He could not believe how huge they were. They are pretty awe inspiring.
After we spent some time here, we moved on to the ofrendas, a special exhibit right now. I wanted all of us to see it, as this month Wyatt and I are focusing on all Hispanic artists this month and I also have some lessons about Dia de los Muertos as well coming up. My mom, Billy, and I were very moved by these personal and emotional creations. They were very elaborate and thoughtful. I was not comfortable taking photos of them for obvious reasons, but there were some parts I did feel it was ok to do so. These ofrendas were intended for public viewing to educate but also still were personal to the artist’s family, so it was tricky.
After soaking in the ofrendas, we wandered around the rest of of that floor. Wyatt was more excited about using his wheelchair than he was about the art and we had to keep him in check – I was slightly anxious my exuberant child was going to knock over a Roman bust or something.
Just a few more, I promise.
We didn’t explore the whole museum this time – I figured that this was enough for this visit and we can back and see the rest later. I also wanted to visit the gift shop before we left to look for Frida, Rivera, or Day of the Dead stuff. I could have poked around in there all day but my guys were getting restless.
The DIA offers a free educator pass to homeschool families which is pretty cool! I applied in September and received mine a few days later. I am looking forward to seeing what they offer!
Our first wheelchair field trip adventure was a success and I am looking forward to our future adventures!
It was a great week! As it is Hispanic Heritage month, I thought it would be a great time to study a few Mexican artists, and we kicked it off with Diego Rivera. I knew a little about him previously, but not a whole lot. I was fascinated to learn that he was commissioned by his country’s government to complete a series of murals that was intended to “inspire and reunify the country after the horror of the revolution” (Diego-rivera.net). In our study, I focused on emphasizing to Wyatt how Rivera was an artist of and for the people, and depicted scenes from everyday life, workers and vendors and flower sellers.
For our art project, I thought it would be fun to recreate a version of one of Rivera’s flower seller paintings. I drew and cut out pieces of the actual seller for Wyatt to place and glue to create the picture, and had him cut out his version of the flowers. Then he went back and added in details with crayon. I was actually pretty impressed with how his flower stems turned out, honestly.
In Social Studies, we turned our attention to Texas- this state is so huge and has so much history, culture, biodiversity, just really so much in general, that frankly there was no way we could even really come close to even talking about it all. So, we stuck to the basics like the state flower, tree, etc. I wasn’t happy with what we learned but we can do a deep dive another time.
We of course also worked on the basics – spelling, reading, math, etc but I don’t share too much about that on here, except for our language arts projects. And this week the book we needed never came in! Since he does so much other reading during the week I didn’t worry about it and we will resume that part of school this week.
And, we went on a field trip! However, I am going to do a whole post about it tomorrow. Sorry, that was a bit cheeky of me probably to mention it and then not talk about it but there is so much to share.
What We Used:
This section contains Amazon Affiliate links. In addition to the curriculum I am creating for him, we also use curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful, The Waldock Way, and Blossom and Root for phonics, reading, science, and social studies.
Hey all! The weather here has gotten downright cold at night – and definitely chilly during the day – and I am loving it! Billy went camping over the weekend, so I am not sure he did, but I was all tucked up in our cozy bed with my books and Midsomer Murders and tea and feeling pretty relaxed.
Read Last Week:
I enjoyed both of these reads! A Haunted History of Invisible Women made me think about ghost stories a little differently, and Book of Night kept me guessing! I really liked it. Billy has wanted me to read it for months now and I finally see why! I’m excited for him to get home today so we can talk about it.
Reading This Week:
I have already started These Fleeting Shadows and I have been sucked in. I am so curious and I want to know what the secret to this house is! And I am looking forward to The Raven Spell – I really loved the previous series by Luanne G. Smith so I am anticipating I will like this one as well.
(I’m going to include this whenever we find some favorites online – because I hope that you all will share some back lol)
Italian Sausage Orzo – We loved this. Super fast, super tasty, minimal ingredients and dishes
Watching and Listening:
We started a new show called Ghosts. It is an American sitcom, so very different for us lol, but we love it. It is on CBS, and it just makes us laugh. It is based off of a UK show of the same name so we are going to see if we can find that version too. We are also watching Edwardian Farm for the third or fourth time. I love all of them but Edwardian is my favorite. And..for spooky season we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. Wyatt and I also watched Coco again (ugh it always makes me sob but it is my favorite Disney cartoon right now) but I don’t consider that a spooky season movie.
As for listening, check out the haunted podcasts in my post that is linked above!
And, that is about it from around here! I hope all is going good for you.
Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.. 