Star Wars and Origami

My children have discovered the Origami Yoda books. Dd9, dd7, and dd4 are filling the house with origami versions of Yoda, Jabba the Hutt, Admiral Akbar, and what seems like the entire cast of all six Star Wars movies. To tell the truth, they're kind of driving me crazy with all their paper creations. But at the same time I'm pleased to see them so engaged in a creative pursuit.

Dd9 even includes them in her artwork these days, like in this picture below of a picnic where an origami Yoda protects the S'mores ingredients with a flyswatter while other origami Star Wars characters hang out with family members at a park.

Picnic with Origami Star Wars characters

Brazil Weeks

For the first two weeks of our summer, our family studied the country of Brazil. We watched Rio and educational films about Brazil and its varied geography (the Amazon is an amazing place!), ate feijoada (tasty black bean stew) and drank guarana soda, visited a Catholic cathedral (65% of Brazil is Roman Catholic), and observed a capoeira class.

Thanks to a friend who teaches ESL, we were able to meet with two Brazilian students learning English at a local university, and they did a slideshow presentation about Brazil for me and my children. They were also kind enough to compliment my brigadeiro candies (chocolaty truffles), even though I don't think I made them correctly.

Due to pregnancy limiting my stomach's capacity, I missed one of the highlights of our Brazil weeks: my husband took our older children out to lunch at a Brazilian grill restaurant. If you've ever been to one, these restaurants involve a constant parade of barbecued meats and pineapple, as well as yummy cheese rolls made of manioc flour and lots of cheese.

A most recent birth story

I like to share my birth stories on my blog because I think they're interesting to women, who tend to give birth. Male readers, feel free to ignore.

I opted for induction of labor this time just three days before the due date. I'm of "advanced maternal age" now (which is correlated with a higher stillbirth risk), the baby already felt quite heavy, and after so many babies the chances of my having a successful induction were very high. The doctor had me report to the hospital for the induction at 7 am, telling me that I could eat breakfast before I came. I am very glad she said that and that I ate a large, protein-containing breakfast before leaving home. Due to baby not reacting well to stronger contractions, which made it so the nurses had to repeatedly turn down the pitocin IV drip, it took me eleven hours to go from 2 cm to 4 cm dilation. So boring. But not painful because the contractions were rarely strong. I sent my husband home twice during that eleven hours to be with our kids and take a nap. When he was around, we watched Studio C comedy sketches (Photobombing 101 was hilarious and apropos) together, chatted with the nurses, and made periodic trips to the bathroom.

Finally at 6 pm, I'd progressed to a point where the doctor could do an amniotomy (making the water break), the result of which was that they were able to turn up the pitocin without distressing baby. Baby stayed rather high, though, and by 11 pm still hadn't been born. Hungry and dilated only to 7.5 cm, I was distressed enough by then to ask for some pain relief. They gave me a little Fentanyl in the IV which really helped "take the edge off." Between contractions, I even found myself laughing at Zoolander, which was playing on the TV in the labor room. Shortly before midnight an awesome nurse suggested using a peanut birth ball to open up my pelvis and help baby rotate her way down. It worked like magic. Three contractions later, I was pushing out my baby girl, all 8 lbs 15 ozs of her. The doctor barely had time to run in, glove up, and catch.

And now we have five daughters. It is such a good thing that my husband was never into football....

Home again with my little prize!

Father's Day

A friend told me yesterday that Father's Day is Sunday. Oops. I have been so preoccupied this past week with wondering when I'd go into labor that I'd totally forgotten about Father's Day. While my husband has four (soon to be five!) little daughters who can make him paper crafts and shower him with hugs and kisses, I would like him to have a actual, useful present, too. Which means I need to come up with something. Thanks to Amazon Prime free 2-day shipping (no, this isn't an ad--Colorado residents can't be Amazon affiliates) and gift cards obtained from doing Bing searches, I ordered him a bowtie this morning and it should be here by Saturday (at no cost to me, which is good because that would just be cost to him). Now to see which arrives first, the new baby or the bowtie!

Just hanging around waiting

I'm 39 weeks pregnant. My next doctor's appointment is the day after tomorrow, and I'm hoping to be induced the day after that. I would really, really like NOT to have to rush to the hospital in the middle of the night this time around.

Already done

Dd9 and dd7 finished the summer reading program already. They got all their prizes and even managed to break one already. But they keep reading. It's fun to see how just three days of long reading sessions made them comfortable reading for longer periods of time than they have been used to. Dd7 picked for one of her prizes the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Ambitious, that one. To be honest, I wasn't planning on starting my children on Harry Potter for a few years yet, but the example of an older cousin was a powerful influence on dd7.

Reading, so much reading

I became a bookworm sometime in the middle of elementary school. I think I became so avid a reader partly out of escapism, for my home life had some issues. For instance, our father thought we shouldn't have friends over (he seemed to have some strange idea that we should be spending all our free time cleaning and weeding), so if he came home early and we had friends over (with mom's permission), we'd have to sneak them out the back door or risk his wrath.

Dd9 and dd7 read very well, but neither of them have taken to burying themselves in books the way I used to. I was so engrossed in books that I would aggravate my parents by sometimes not hearing them and not doing what they said. I remember one week, probably in fourth grade, my father punished me by banning me from reading for a week. Being a conscientious girl, I felt like I was even being naughty when I read signs along the side of the road that week; it was truly one of the worst weeks of my life.

Back to my kids. The summer reading contest at the local library started yesterday. They are constantly reading. The two oldest have already earned the first prize. Since they have to read in 20-minute increments to fill in the spaces on their contest gamecards, it keeps happening that I interrupt them with inconvenient requests right when they're in the middle of a timed reading period. So I leave them alone and forget to come back to them at just the right break in their reading intervals. I'm very pleased about all the reading going on, but I wish they would be more available to do the little chores that I periodically need of them.

School's Out!

Both school-age children were in part-time programs, which came to an end as of yesterday. Thus our school year is over, too. We celebrated with corn dogs and soda (mixed with juice) last night. Today the only thing I've required of them is basic grooming and a trip to the grocery store. I refuse to post their summer schoolwork schedule, light as it is, for them until Monday.

We're going to be learning about Brazil for the first two weeks of June, during which time I will hopefully be having a baby. Much as I'd like to go pig out at a Brazilian grill restaurant, I've learned from sad experience that overfilling my belly during the third trimester leads to great pain and regret. I'll just have to make myself some pao de queijo to make up for missing out on roasted pineapple and churrasco. My family generally isn't one for watching sports, but we'll try to catch some of the World Cup soccer championship in a couple of weeks, for it's being held in Brazil! And we hope to catch Rio 2 at the movie theater, if we can squeeze it in. Tico, taco, ya, ya, ya!!

Clutter

I am a fairly relaxed housekeeper. My kids have piles of stuff--er, treasures, including toys, hair things, school projects, folded paper crafts, books, etc.--on every non-mattress horizontal furniture surface in their bedrooms. But I insist on floors being picked up. It's a safety issue. It's dangerous to leave things where someone could step on them during a midnight trip to the toilet. Or where a pregnant, clumsy mom could trip and hurt her abdomen.

For over a year, there has been an old kitchen sink sitting in the middle of the garage floor. I wanted to get rid of it as soon as we took it out of the kitchen, but dh thought there might be a use for it and resisted tossing it. He has since consented to me getting rid of it, for I think it has become clear to him in the last year that we really don't have any use for an aged porcelain-covered sink. However, I didn't get his OK to trash it until I was too far along in my pregnancy to lift it into the back of the car myself. So it's still sitting in the middle of the garage. I've thought the whole time it's been there, "Someone is going to hurt themselves on that thing someday, and then won't my husband be sorry."

Tonight that someone was me. Whimper. While rushing to close the garage door to keep moths out of the house, I banged my shin hard against the edge of the old sink and broke my skin. I'll probably have a horrible looking bruise and end up with a scar. See? Clutter can be dangerous. I'm glad I got injured instead of one of my kids, but I'd rather no one had been hurt at all.

Fast food

I took the kids out for fast food today, which I almost never do. I was lured by the cheap ice cream cones. They were SO whiny afterward. It will be a long time before I make that mistake again.

Summer 2014 Planning

In just twelve days, we finish our official school year. Three days after that, the library summer reading program begins. And within two weeks of that, I will be having a baby. Instead of studying one country each week as we did last summer, we are only going to study five countries, spending two weeks on each one. That should be doable with a new baby and also allow us to go more in-depth for each country.

Here are our "summer school" plans, ready for posting on the evening of May 29th:

Summer 2014 (Daily Learning – except for Sundays)

DD9 
Reading – Whatever you WANT!! (Especially for prizes from the library J )
Math – two pages from Math 4 (need to finish before school starts)
Music – 5-10 minutes each on two musical subjects (can be singing, piano, music maker, trumpet, violin, or recorder but NOT theory worksheets)
Art, PE, history, etc. – any awesome or fun stuff, especially having to do with the countries we'll be studying 
DD7 
Reading – Whatever you WANT!! (Especially for prizes from the library J )
Math – 1-2 pages from Math 2 (Try to finish before school starts)
Music – 5-10 minutes each on two musical subjects (can be singing, piano, music maker, bandurria, violin, or recorder but NOT theory worksheets)
Art, PE, history, etc. – any awesome or fun stuff, especially having to do with the countries we'll be studying
DD4 
Reading – Reading  Lesson & being read to for library prizes J
Music – 5 minutes on a musical subject (can be singing, piano, music maker, violin, recorder, etc.)
Art, PE, history, etc. – any awesome or fun stuff, especially having to do with the countries we'll be studying
DD2 
Reading –Being Read to for library prizes J

Just looking that over makes me really happy at the prospect of summer. The kids will have enough to keep them from too much boredom and mischief, but I won't be constantly supervising assignments!

This post has been included in the Carnival of Homeschooling, found online at http://whyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2014/05/carnival-of-homeschooling-eliza.html. 

Only a month of "mother power" left

This comedy sketch rap strikes me as fairly accurate about the sugar cravings and uncharacteristic grumpiness pregnant ladies often experience. Of course, it's overblown. It's comedy. And it's pretty funny to this pregnant lady.

Sickness and Homeschooling

Happy Mother's Day yesterday!! I spent it all at home, drinking copious amounts of water and resting. Dd7 was sick all of last week, and now dd2, dd4, and I are all suffering from illness, too. These things seem to hit pregnant ladies particularly hard. What better weekend for a mother to be incapacitated, though? No one expected me to make food for them yesterday!

But dd9 has been fine and doing her full load of schoolwork. One unplanned but great pro of homeschooling is how easy it is to keep it up when stuck at home. Be it snow (which is still falling today from a big spring snowstorm that started yesterday), car problems (which really immobilize a family that only has one car), or illness which makes Mommy unable to even vacuum the house, homeschooling still can be done. Not only can it be done, but it should be done. The children get antsy and irritable if they don't have some time spent on concrete learning each school day. Even dd4 has gotten to the point where she requires some reading instruction or a mini violin lesson every school day, or she complains.

Obviously some subjects--most PE, field trips, etc.--will fall by the wayside for those actively suffering from illness. However, in a world where "sick days" are so often total losses as far as productive activity, it's nice to still feel like we're accomplishing something despite sniffles and aches.

Circuses

Dd9's reading texts for the past few days have been on the theme of circuses. Circus bikes, circus clowns, clown makeup, and acrobats. So I showed her this video of several circus acrobats plunging 20+ feet to the ground; the accident--in which no one died--happened just Sunday, making it timely. She wasn't bursting with enthusiasm to be an acrobat before watching the video, but she's quite certain now that if she were to work for a circus, she would want to be an animal trainer. Mostly of smaller animals like parrots, but she'd like it if there were one or two tigers, too. I'm tempted to show her video of this tiger attack....

Never mind. I couldn't even watch it for more than a few seconds. There is no way I'll let her see that. Circuses are exciting because of the possibility of danger, but I don't like it when they're actually dangerous. I approach life with a safety-net-for-all-acts attitude.

Cinco de Mayo

I find it ironic that a holiday celebrating the defeat of French invaders in Mexico now has pro-amnesty rhetoric attached to it in the USA.

Having been a consular officer in a place that used to be a US colony but where now intending illegal immigrants to the USA would have to cross the Pacific ocean--which is far larger than the Rio Grande--to get to US soil, I view the push for "open borders" (amnesty is just delayed realization of an open border) as biased and more than a little racist. It is pro-Mexican, in that it is primarily to the benefit of Mexicans. Yes, other Latin Americans cross the Rio Grande...if they're desperate and willing to pay exorbitant fees to traffickers (mostly Mexicans). There are even some Asians who indebt themselves to organized crime syndicates to make the trip over the southern US border. But what about the non-trafficked Asians and Europeans and all the Africans who just want to make a new life for themselves? No, sorry, finagle to get a visa somehow or you can't come. It's totally "unfair" and based on mere geography.

I'll resist the temptation to dwell on the deterioration of the rule of law that amnesty efforts promote. Suffice it to say that the main thing that keeps the USA from being as unpleasant a place to live as Mexico is the rule of law. After all, Mexico has natural resources galore, tourist sites aplenty, and a language common to many other countries; people tend to prefer Tuscon to Nogales because of criminal and civil issues, not because Americans are somehow inherently superior to Mexicans.

Common Items and Communism

Yesterday we covered the rise to power of Mao Zedong in China. Initially, his version of Communism made the poor people of China much better off. After all, he took away the land from rich people (and then killed a lot of them) and gave it to the poor people! But that's not really communism*, is it? That's actually theft and land redistribution. These actions could have been justified in the minds of some as a "good of the many outweighing the good of a few" scenario except that then he took the PRC in a really communist direction. In the Great Leap Forward, he had peasants' private lands consolidated into huge communal farms that removed individual ownership of even furniture. Among other causes, the lack of material rewards for individual efforts on these communes led to decreased agricultural production and famine that killed approximately 30 million people.

*   Communism, per Merriam-Webster: : a way of organizing a society in which the government owns the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) and there is no privately owned property

I wanted my children to understand the problems with communism, but because most of their time is spent with family--at its heart a very communal unit, especially our home, where I use King Solomon's method of dealing with fights over objects ("work it out or Mommy confiscates the toy")--I wasn't sure how to illustrate why communism keeps failing in a broader setting. I ended up using Play-Doh as an object lesson.

We have a family collection of Play-Doh canisters and Play-Doh shaping toys. Because it is arid here, Play-Doh dries out if not stored promptly and properly. Also, our Play-Doh tends not to stay nice because the children mix colors together and end up with muddy-colored stuff. Yesterday at the grocery store, I saw a sale on individual containers of Play-Doh: just $0.49 each! Each little girl got to pick out her very own color of her very own container of Play-Doh. When we got home, all four played and played at the small kitchen table with their Play-Doh yet never mixed colors. And, except for dd2, they cleaned up the Play-Doh off the toys without adult help and stored it neatly away in the containers.

Give people--even children--private property, and they'll tend to take better care of it and be less wasteful than they would be with common property. I pointed out to my children that their behavior with the Play-Doh illustrates one very basic reason why communism works so poorly.

Obstetrics Wish List

I'm at 32.5 weeks of pregnancy! Hurrah! The home stretch is in sight. My OB even gave me the "go straight to the hospital if you think you're going into labor" spiel this morning. :)

I've been reading a lot about childbirth recently, as I often do when pregnant. Modern medicine is amazing at helping women and babies get through the risky event of birth relatively unscathed, as is evident by what happens in countries that aren't as blessed. Here is a 2004 WHO compilation of perinatal mortality rates by country. The US was at 7/1000--average for developed countries--while less and least developed parts of the world had perinatal mortality rates of 47/1000 and 60/1000, respectively. I feel very grateful to live in the USA and have access to good health care.

However, there's always room for improvement. I have a short wish list of birth-related technology advancements I'd love to see implemented in this country in the next few years:
1) Universally available wireless fetal monitoring during labor; in a time when people are tweeting and Facebooking on smart phones about the progress of their labor, it seems really antiquated that fetal monitors are still mostly wired rather than wireless. It would be great if they could be waterproof, too, for those women who want to use birth tubs.
2) Use of the Odon device to speed up labor and help with obstructed labors. It may have been developed for poorer countries, but it can help decrease the hazardous use of forceps and vaccums in the US, too.
3) More accurate technology to measure whether the baby is suffering from oxygen deprivation during labor. It would be good if we could have fewer unnecessary C-sections and more prompt C-sections for babies beginning to suffer brain injury; unfortunately, at present we often can't know which C-sections were or were not necessary until after birth because fetal heartrate monitoring cannot tell us how much oxygen a baby is getting during his descent. This recent report of MRI usage to "evaluate fetal cerebral venous blood oxygenation" looks like a promising step towards measuring the baby's oxygenation rates during labor, although it's just a first step, for I can't imagine the adoption of a protocol to put laboring women into MRI machines anytime soon.

Legal harassment at our expense

I do a little part-time research for a local lawyer. Most of the research requests have to do with domestic issues such as child support, parenting time (Colorado's term for visitation), etc.

Recently I became aware of government agencies that have been repeatedly coming after a man with limited means--which meant he tried to go lawyerless, but courts are not accommodating places for pro se litigants, so that didn't go well--to try to get years of back child support (that's often a lot of money). Here's the kicker: he was paying child support until the mother of his child disappeared with the child years ago, and he had no way to contact her or the child or even to send child support for the child. The child is now an adult and wants nothing to do with his father. But the father has been sued three times by government agencies for back child support even though the mother concealed his child from him for so many years; he prevailed the first two times, and yet an agency is coming after him yet again. Colorado law has clear case law precedent for excusing that back child support under the equitable principle of "estoppel." I consider it unjust and abhorrent that my tax dollars are going to finance this harassment of a man who has already been a victim of losing his child.

Finally some good news in history!

We just finished learning about World War II and the creation of Pakistan and Israel in our history studies. So much fighting, hatred, death, and destruction! We covered the atom bombs in Japan, the Holocaust, and the mass displacements of people when Pakistan was created. After learning about the creation of Israel and the continued security issues in that region, dd9 said it should be called "Problem Land"; it's ironic how close that is to "Promised Land."

To my relief, I get to tell my children about something good today: our country helped rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan. This was a very positive part of our national history. Yes, the US did it partly to counter Soviet influence, but at its core, it was a large humanitarian effort, and Germany and France would likely be very different today had they not received this assistance right after the devastation of WWII. It takes time to rebuild infrastructure and harvest crops, and immediate aid saves many lives after disasters.

We even found a pro-Marshall plan propaganda film called The Extraordinary Adventures of a Quart of Milk (1951), which showed how good French roads made it possible for milk to get from a dairy to a factory to be made into powdered milk. It can be viewed online for free thanks to the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Too bad Betty Friedan didn't have the internet

I feel very sorry for Betty Friedan. From her book, The Feminine Mystique, she appears to have been very lonely as a housewife and yearning for something more. When I consider that she wrote the book at a time long before the World Wide Web, when a little color TV with three channels was considered as modern as one could get, I understand why she felt that way. What educated, intelligent person is going to be satisfied with mere passive intake of information via TV and books with the occasional phone call to a friend while little ones are napping and laundry is drying on the line? Children are cute and infinitely precious, but not very intellectually stimulating. In fact, I find other people's babies to be rather soporific.

Thankfully, I don't live in her time. Through my computer, I interact with the rest of the world throughout the day. I blog, I comment on blogs, I post on Facebook, I read interesting articles posted by my friends on Facebook, I do legal research for my very-part-time job, I research homeschool resources, I look up the answers to random questions posed by dd9 and dd7, I email, I take a free online course on water from The University of Oklahoma (from which I've been learning so much!), I learn how to fix plumbing problems, I learn how to make a favorite Thai soup, I keep up with recently published scientific studies in fields that are interesting to me, etc. I have a wealth of free music at my fingertips via Grooveshark and YouTube, and if I like a song, I can share it with my friends instantly on Facebook. Were I inclined to political activism, I could easily do it as I sit at the computer overseeing my children's homeschool studies in the morning. And I don't even have a smart phone; just imagine what I could do with one of those!

I love my life as a stay-at-home mother. Yes, I'm on the computer a lot, but I'm right here for my children when they need me instead of juggling out-of-home work with caring for my little ones. I don't think Friedan's central complaint in The Feminine Mystique has much relevance to women now. I think it did us all a disservice in that it fueled the continuing "mommy wars." With technology enabling us to work from home and giving us unprecedented opportunities to communicate with the outside world, it's time to recognize that everyone working in a house can have just as fulfilling a life as those who commute to somewhere else. Of course, I am a bit of an introvert, so extroverts can feel free to disagree with me...or just get themselves a Twitter account. :)

Ship Captains

Remember that saying, "The captain always goes down with his ship"? He (or she) is entrusted with the welfare of everyone on board his vessel and is expected to use his ultimate efforts to save the lives of his crew and passengers. Yet as we saw with the Costa Concordia in 2012, ship captains sometimes choose personal survival instead.

Given the importance of honor in Asian cultures, I suspect that this South Korean ferry captain is going to spend the rest of his life wishing he had gone down with his ship. He allowed himself to be rescued before hundreds of his passengers, most of whom were just school-age students, and those left behind most likely are all dead. I can't imagine the shame of living with having saved my own skin while doing nothing to save hundreds of young people for whom I was responsible. A Korean school vice-principal, who was among those rescued, has already taken his own life.  In light of the current suicide rate in South Korea, I wouldn't be surprised if Captain Lee eventually goes that route, too. The Korean ferry sinking was a tragedy for everyone involved.

Long vowels

Dd9 has known for years that long vowels generally say their name and that they are indicated by a horizontal line over the vowel. She couldn't resist getting involved as I was teaching dd4 a reading lesson today, butting in and telling her what the long sound of a certain vowel was. Just as I thought that we'd moved on and that dd9 was back to doing her own schoolwork, dd9 stood up, held her pen horizontally over her head, and said her name over and over again. She was being a long vowel. She laughed at her own joke till her face turned red.

I admit I inflict some painfully puerile jokes on my children, and I suspect that what I make go around is going to be coming around for a long time to come.

Kites

It's finally spring. We went out two afternoons last week and flew kites. Only one kite flew really well, though, and it was a flimsy little plastic thing that looks as though it might have come from the dollar store. Our bigger, fabric kites just never stayed up for long. The flimsy kite stayed aloft so well that I could get it up in the air and then hand the string over to dd2 to "fly it" for a while.

We hit the dollar store yesterday and bought three cheap-o kites. Also, dd9 used a garbage bag to make a diamond kite, which she wants to try out. Now we just need for the breezes to pick up again.

#432 Carnival of Homeschooling: Homeschooling & Farms

With spring finally here--although I fully expect some more snow before the month is out because that's just how weather is in Colorado--for this Carnival of Homeschooling, I thought I'd look at intersections of homeschooling and farming.

Many parents, homeschooling or not, have a strong desire to teach their children about nature in-depth. My father liked to take us hiking, and my parents had us children grow a garden and raise chickens. One year we even raised a steer in our backyard for a while. He was rather bad-tempered (I wonder if he understood our nickname for him, "Dinner") and got out sometimes, wandering up and down our residential street, which taught us the importance of locking up gates securely.

While this is by no means solely a homeschooler phenomenon, I've seen many of my friends and relatives who lean towards homeschooling raise chickens and/or other livestock, grow big gardens, and dream of the little farm they're going to have someday out in a rural setting. Here are several blogs I found of homeschoolers living (or at least pursuing part of) that dream:

• "Our Little Farm" describes how The Family Homestead got into chicken and goat raising
• This Blessed Life at Rootsong Farm tells of two former city "party kids" who recently moved to rural northern Idaho to farm and homeschool their seven children
• In their 40s, with no idea of how to run a farm, the Harmons left city life in Wisconsin to farm in Arkansas, where they also homeschool their youngest child
• The Hmmmschooling Mom compares her journey from raising chickens to eventually buying a farm to her journey into homeschooling
• The Nerdy Farm Wife homeschools two children on a farm and shares lots of information about her experiments with DIY herb and flower recipes and uses
• The Countrified Hicks--a homeschooling, homesteading prepper family in Oklahoma--shared some pictures of cute baby animals last month
• The Pioneer Woman posted a letter last year asking how families balance homeschooling and farming and got a slew of informative responses
• Tangleweed Farm in California is an organic farm business that got its start as a homeschool project
• Renee at NextGenHomeschool recently branched out from gardening into chicken raising and has experienced both failure and success in that endeavor
• The Stamps Family Farm is run by an unschooling family that took up farming in Iowa in 2009; I'd love to visit their farmhouse kitchen at mealtime!

For those like the Bruggietales in Australia, who have achieved the dream of country life, it's a field trip for the children to go to the city where the buildings and planes are so close together.

I love to encourage my children in their desire to grow a garden. Last week, we focused our Friday schoolwork on learning about seeds and Colorado agriculture.

Of course, there are several carnival submissions that don't really have to do with farm life:

O'DonnellWeb gives us an  informative post on college admissions and interviews. (I can't help but point out, though, that he gives partial credit for his daughter's scholarship-winning interview skills to the nine years experience she has in competitive horse judging, which is loosely connected to farming.)

Henry Cate of Why Homeschool posts about how in both software development and life, it is often not the first solution but the second, third, or even fourth that turns out to be the best one. It's a valuable lesson to teach one's children.

Down a Rabbit Trail: Interest-Led Learning with a Charlotte Mason Flair submits this insightful post on narration a la Charlotte Mason.

Tea Time with Annie Kate shares a summary of the books in the Camp X historical fiction series about WWII. It looks like a really fun series; we're not Canadian, but I might be handing it to my children to read in a few years, especially since it shows that not all the German officers were Nazis (I'm part German :) ).

Nerd Family announces the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, which looks like an awesome contest. I wish my children were old enough to participate. The deadline to enter is April 22.

In closing, here are some free homeschooling resources I found on farming.

• Homeschool Giveaways recently posted "Farm Animals Freebies, Crafts, and Activities"
• Kidzone provides an "On the Farm" five-day thematic unit
• Robin @ Heart of Wisdom, a homeschooler and mini-farmer, glowingly recommends the book Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts and Pieces of Country Life to those who can't move to a farm (not technically free unless you check it out from a library)
• Free Homeschool Deals offers some free farm-related learning resources here

Thanks to all those who submitted blog posts!