Sunday, October 4, 2020

The Weekend

 Apparently I'm too busy on the weekends to actually pay attention to this blog so I have to do a 3 day catch up. 

Fridays we don't have a full day of school other than a quick spelling and math test, so we try to keep it open-ish. Two weeks ago we started a Friday tradition of a creative writing assignment using story dice, and as luck would have it, my Amazon order of new story dice arrived the night before. Special for October (of course), I ordered "Ghost Story Dice" so the boys could try their hand at some fun and not-so-scary stories. These dice were the same as their previous "Pirate" dice, in that you roll a set of 9 dice and the pictures that are face up are required to be a part of your story. The ghost stories were a smash hit, and for fun I thought I'd start sharing one or the other's story each week. Here's Camden's super cute ghost story for this week:

Once upon a scary time, I lived with a witch named Mary and a Vampire named Dracula and some elves to keep me company. Our house guard was a headless horseman that I hypnotised to be friendly. We live in a haunted house on a swamp.

Today Mary is teaching me how to fly a broom. I was a pro on the first try and it was so fun! I felt the big cold breeze on my face. I touched the clouds, they were so fluffy and I brought a piece of a cloud to the ground and showed the Mary the witch. The witch and the vampire are basically my Mom and Dad, except a Mom that knows magic and a Dad that has long canines and drinks blood soda.

Dracula taught me how to turn into a bat and I did it and my vampire canines moved in my teeth, but I didn't want to taste the taste of blood. My headless horseman guard taught me how to ride my black horse named NightShade. The elves taught me how to jump high like them. I looked in the mirror and saw my sharp canines. Then I went to bed.

The next morning zombies came to attack and my headless horseman guard killed a couple and then I got on Night Shade my horse. I grabbed my hockey stick and started hitting zombies heads like "Whack! Whack!" and then they were dead.

It was 12 o'clock and past my bedtime so I said good night to Mary and Dracula and drifted off to sleep.

The end. 

For a boy of 9 that can't stand writing, these story blocks have really changed his perspective on how storytelling can be fun. 

And if I don't tell him that he's actually learning while doing such writing, then it remains a positive experience for both of us. 




Later Friday evening we made "knuckle pumpkin patches", which is simply, drawing some rolling hills in light colored pencil, then painting your knuckle orange and stamping them all over the paper and adding some darker lines and vines to make a pumpkin patch. The kids LOVED this art project. I loved taping it to our pantry doors. 



Fast forward to Saturday now. Saturday was a BUSY day. After 3 weeks of rain, clouds, wind, more rain, and did I mention rain, the sun came out and it was a beautiful fall day. Three of us families decided to get our kids out of the house and hike up a mountain, because what else do you do in Alaska on a sunny day. We headed up a 9 mile roundtrip hike with our 10 kids in tow and made it up to a beautiful alpine lake (Shelly Lake). We had to keep wrangling in Camden and his bestie Amelia, because them and their endless energy and strong hockey legs would have been miles ahead of us slow draggers if we let them. It took all day and we were plum exhausted by the end of it, but it was a great day with great friends and fantastic views. 










Sunday (today) it was once again rainy and disgusting out, a perfect day to sit on the sofa basically all day and be completely worthless. Okay fine I took a Lysol wipe to the kitchen counters and ran a load through the wash, but otherwise useless. We did pull out a new Halloween jigsaw puzzle that my mom sent us, which we've discovered Cam is completely obsessed with puzzles, as he sat there for an hour and a half trying to find all the edge pieces. Later after dinner, instead of our traditional Sundae Sunday, we made caramel apple nachos, with apple slices, caramel, candy corns, peanut butter bites and sprinkles, and watched Hotel Transylvania. That was as much excitement as my post-mountain-hiking bones could handle anyways. 



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