How to entertain preteens

First of all, I dislike using the word “preteen”. Mostly because it involves the word “teen” and having something in my house that’s considered a “teen”, current, pre, real, implied, whatever, instantly makes me nauseous.

But Calen is twelve and a half and I basically can’t pretend anymore.

Calen has two best friends here in Kodiak, Noah and Todd. The three are thick as thieves and have been for the past two years. Todd moves away this week to mainland Alaska. 

Military life is hard, man. Especially for the kids.

This past weekend we had the two boys over for a final sleepover.

Sleepovers with preteen boys (cringe) are easy and require three simple categories to be successful:

1. Video games

Make sure the controllers are charged, move the TV upstairs (bonus points if they already have a TV in their room) and you’ll never see them for the rest of the night. 

2. Snacks

Pizza, pizza bites, pizza bagels, pizza flavored (whatever), Cheetos, fruit snacks, pop. Actual meals are optional. Whatever you do, don’t let the snacks run out.

3. Airflow 

Boys stink. Make sure wherever they are holing up at has some sort of consistent airflow, like an open window, or a fan. You might want to do a drive by spraying of Febreeze too for good measure.

And that’s it. They stayed up until midnight (I had to convince them to go to bed so they would be reasonable human beings the next day), I think I saw them twice to reload on snacks, and the controllers never died. They had a great time.

It’s Fall Y’All

It’s September, and you know what that means in this house. Pumpkins! Pumpkin spice candles! Pumpkin bread! Apple butter! And finally being able to tap into my Fall Pinterest craft ideas.

The best part of homeschooling is incorporating what I want. I declared an art lesson today, even though they aren’t technically enrolled in any art electives. 

Who cares, I’m the principal, I do what I want. 

And fall art projects are my second favorite. Christmas is always number 1. Obviously.

Today we made fall trees using sharpies for the trunk, and a multitude of fall colored crayons for the leaves. Calen mentioned “I haven’t used crayons in like, two years!” Which is true, but it shows they’re still good to keep around. For emergency uses, like Pinterest.

Calen is my artist and of course took to it (and any art lesson) well. Camden is a reluctant artist, however once started he gets into it, and he always does more than the requirement. For this one, he decided to add a “camping tent and campfire” underneath one of his trees. 

I hope they never outgrow crafts. Until like age 40.

Home Economics, Alaska Style

It’s the second day of (home)school and I don’t know if it’s the air pressure change or what but we were over it before it even began. All aboard the struggle bus, there’s room in the back!

By TWO FREAKING P.M., which is three hours past my usual ending time for school, the boys were done, I was done, we were DONE. So I slammed the teacher book shut in dramatic fashion and said “screw it let’s go on a field trip.”

Where do you go on a field trip in September in Kodiak? 

The river to go fishing, of course. 

We headed to our favorite fishing spot on the Buskin and immediately had our bear sighting of the day, a giant of a sow across the river from us that we had woken from a nap. She, as most bears on Kodiak, was completely bored with our presence, yawned, turned her back to us and plopped into the tall grass to take a nap.

Whatever, Bear.

Our not so favorite spot at the mouth of the Buskin

The fish weren’t biting and we decided to risk going to the dreaded “Mouth” of the Buskin, hoping it was early in the afternoon enough to avoid the mass crowds of people that usually swallow up that spot.

Mass crowds as in like, ten people. But there are things in which I don’t share well with people. The beach. A bag of Doritos. Fishing spots. 

We marched down to the mouth and lo and behold, people. Gosh, don’t you go to WORK or something. We lasted about three casts before I announced “nothing’s biting this spot is stupid let’s go back to OUR spot”, which actually was true and in which the boys whole heartily agreed. So we got back in the car and drove the 3 minutes back to our spot, where the bear popped her head out of the grass and I swear rolled her eyes at us before disappearing again into her nap. 

WHATEVER, bear! 

In the end we came home with two pinks, one humpy and one ocean going. Calen is working on a Fishing merit badge, so we took them home so he could learn to clean a fish once Brad came home from work.

Nothing says “welcome home honey” like a 5 gallon bucket of salmon sitting in the kitchen sink staring at you.

Learning to clean a fish. This was all Calen and Brad because this is man's work, or something. I want no part in it. 

Brad took over and taught Calen how to clean a fish because let’s face it that’s just not my jam. The humpy was pretty pale and we decided to bake it and add it to Rebel’s dog food. The ocean pink was pretty enough that Calen seasoned it and baked the fillets and it made a tasty dinner! 

Salmon. It's what's for dinner. 

That’s like, earth science, biology, home economics and health class all in one, right? 

Haunted House For Sale!

 It's been just as busy a week as it was this past weekend. Let's face it, perhaps I really can't update this stupid blog every day. 

Watch, as soon as I say something like that, I'll do another 365 day blogging challenge or something outrageous. 

This week was full of Halloween crafts, because obviously. My favorite was a two-day haunted house activity. The first day we painted a moonlit sky scene using various shades of purple. After it dried (the next day actually), we used construction paper to create a template for a haunted house to glue onto the moonlit scene. Then, as part of a writing project for school, the kids had to write a "For Sale" ad about their haunted house, being as outlandish and ridiculous (and creepy) as humanly possible (while staying relevant). 

Calen's "Hotel" (as he described it) features 35 floors and 820 bathrooms, drawbridge, levitating tables, witches for housekeeping, and a  627 degree hot tub.

Camden's mansion features 999 bedrooms, a cemetery back yard, piranhas in the hot tub, a fuzzy wampa carpet and a vampire butler, of course. 

Yesterday we took the handful of toilet paper rolls that I've been hoarding and painted them purple, then the boys cut out their own bat wings and glued eyeballs on to turn them into a unique little bat family. Add some hole punch holes on the bottom and we strung them up upside down in the dining room. 

I mean, everyone should decorate their dining room with toilet paper rolls. 

Today our friends came over and we decorated our first big batch of Halloween cookies! The dining room table was completely overrun with two dozen cookies, frosting tubes, sprinkles and candy eyeballs (but of course), and half a dozen kids completely out of their minds in the upward spiral of a sugar rush. 
 

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. 

This Is Halloween

 It's October 1st and that means Halloween has quite literally exploded in our house. I mean, we only get 31 days to enjoy the decorations, so they better go up the first day of the month. Brad pulled down all 8 totes of Halloween decor from the garage the night before and by the time he came home this afternoon, the candy corn lights were up, the eyeball tree (yes we have an eyeball tree) was decorated, and the outdoor electric jack o lantern's were lashed to the front porch. 

Hey, when it blows 70mph every week during yet another random day of "Alaskan weather", you need to tie down basically everything involving outdoor decorations. 

We try to make Octobers super packed full of activities. Crafts and holiday treats are my absolute favorite thing ever and so every year as the holiday season rolls around and the kids are still happy and willing to do crafts, I'm taking full advantage of it, bucko. 

Today we started 31 Days of Halloween in a simple matter by spending the better portion of the day unloading totes and stringing up lights and decorations. It's fun doing this while the kids are home this year, because they would watch me open a tote and exclaim "Oh! I forgot we have that!" which made me question whether we had too much Halloween decorations, and then I laughed at myself because there's no such thing as too much. 

Frankenstein does math lessons

Decorating the eyeball tree!

In the evening, we made our first batch of Monster Munch. This is a precise and careful concoction of....basically whatever we have laying around that can be mixed together in a sort of white trash Halloween themed Chex Mix. Today we used plain popcorn as the base, added some pumpkin spice caramel corn (that I shamelessly bought online from Target), candy corn, Muddy Buddies, and "Vampire Kisses" (Hershey kisses with strawberry filling), and purple and orange sprinkles. 

Monster Munch complete, we dove into our Halloween pajamas (an annual tradition), oozed around the house pretending to be mummy's and skeletons and then watched our first Halloween movie of the year: Nightmare Before Christmas (a big family favorite) and then spent the rest of the evening singing "What's This?!" as it was inevitably stuck in our heads.

 

When mummies attack

It's going to be a great month!

Right Brain Vs Left Brain

 I know you aren't supposed to compare your kids. 

I know this. I do. 

But you know what you do when you have multiple kids? You compare. It's human nature. It's practically law. 

Teaching both kids at the same time, I've had to work hard not to compare. I shouldn't compare. Calen is in 6th grade, Camden is in 4th grade. What is there to compare? Calen is a natural wizard and self-educator in all things. Camden needs more one-on-one visual learning and a lot of review. I shouldn't compare them. But like every parent in the world, I do. 

This school year we are working on Weather as our science unit. This is incredibly fitting as over the summer Calen got about 2/3rds of the way through his Weather merit badge for Boy Scouts. The teachings are basically the same, but of course each kid has a different level of work and writing to go along with it. This makes it a little easier to not compare, but not really.

Because I always try to make things more interesting, I was scrolling Pinterest while the boys were reading their books on the French-Indian War, (or something, I suppose I should pay attention to what they're learning too. --Just kidding, I do. Kind of). I found a neat and easy science experiment that visually shows air pressure that only involved the stove, a pan, and some empty pop cans with a bit of water in them. Count me in. 

We put the pop cans (with a bit of water) in the pan on the stove and waited until they boiled. When they reached boiling, You take some tongs and flip the can upside down into a bowl of ice water. 

Note: My tongs apparently are slippery tongs. I could not get a good grip on these stupid cans. So I covered the tongs with packaging tape and then wrapped them with thick rubber bands to give them a "grip".

When the can sits upside down in the bowl, the can instantly (and I mean instantly) crushes itself! Why? Because when the tiny bit of water in the can boils, it turns to steam. Steam is a gas and not actually oxygen. When you flip the can into the ice water (so that the can opening is submerged), the cold water instantly turns the gas back into liquid, leaving nothing (not air, not gas, nothing) in the inside of the can. The air outside the can pushes into the can and squashes it like a bug!

Back in my day we would just step on cans to smush them and didn't need stoves or tongs or ice. 

To prove that the kids paid attention to this experiment, I had them write a diagram showing why this experiment works. And this is when we have to try to not compare. 

Calen, with his nice handwriting and his wonderful artistic ability, draws a beautiful two-page diagram of the experiment, complete with neat, legible labeling, careful illustrations and a clear cut explanation of how the experiment worked. Of course he's two years older, but when he puts his mind to it he always does careful, meticulous work. Of course as a bonus he will also verbally point out and elaborate on every.single.little.detail for a full forty minutes without taking a single breath. The kid has a word quota he needs to meet every day, before noon. 

Nicely drawn, careful captions, easy instructions

Two pages, even

Camden, on the other hand, is a bona fide Picasso. He has a vision, a great vision, but his execution on paper is come sort of cross between someone writing calligraphy with their foot and a minor gas tank explosion. It's all there, the diagram, the drawings, the labeling, the arrows, the explanations, but more like how those fancy artists stand 6 feet away from their canvasses and sling paint at it. That must count for some sort of Social Distancing 2020 extra credit, right? Verbally, Cam knows exactly what every scribble means, and translates it very well. It's kind of like a corn maze. You can try to go through it yourself, or you can ask for a map and then the picture it's trying to make is crystal clear. 

What the hell exactly is going on here?

I feel like these illustrations accurately depict each of their brains. Calen - methodical, clever, detailed, organized. Camden - chaotic, exciting, mysterious, and fills up every inch of space available. 

Whatever, you both get A's. I told them to draw a diagram, not to draw a masterpiece that would be framed in the Alaskan Art Museum. Though, if that were the case, Camden's almost certainly would have won, because museums like that weird abstract crap. 

Leaving Us In The Dark

 It was a dark, nasty, pouring down rain fall day. Normally this is one of those gross days where I turn on every single light in the house like an anti-environmentalist because I hate the dark! Unless it's fall, in which I turn on all my Christmas fall lights and light all the pumpkin smelly candles in every room and it's just great, thanks. 

As I'm warming up my coffee for the 294th time and reading the teacher manual for today's lesson, it suggests that after lessons we turn off all the lights and see what it's like to not use electricity for the rest of the day. 

Well, I'm about 3 days behind on laundry and there's a hockey game on TV tonight, so how about we do school without electricity. Besides, it's now still dark at 8:00am when we start, so it will be more effective. 

So I reheat my coffee one last time (because I'm pretty certain the early settlers didn't have microwaves and I'm not about to start a campfire in the pouring rain just because I drink my coffee too slow) and kill the lights, all the lights, except for some candles which I put on the table. The kids really enjoyed the novelty of doing schoolwork by candlelight (especially since said candlelight had a specific banana-pumpkin smell) and we talked about what it would be like to live 100% without electricity like the early settlers did, and how I broke some sort of time continuum by reheating my coffee in the microwave for the 296th time (okay listen, it's really hard to drink your coffee while it's still hot while talking all.the.time during lessons). 

About halfway through lessons I was totally over it being so dark in the dining room (which already has very little natural light) so I plugged in our strand of lights that I keep around the window. We declared these "oil lamp light", since they were invented just around the same time period (1740s), but alas since I'm not my mother and don't have any actual oil lamps, Christmas lights had to suffice. Fake it till you make it, you know. 

During the middle of some math practice, a friend of mine sends me a screenshot of her 6th grader's math lesson. Something about fractions and how to get their denominators to match and who actually cares if their denominators match or not in the real world?! We hadn't covered it this year in math yet (I actually thought it was her 8th grader's math) but since Calen at 11 and a half is basically halfway towards a PHD in math, so I tossed the photo in his direction just to see what he might do with it. 

Instantly he was on his feet and to our white board, staring at the screenshot on my phone, and doing his best Winnie the Pooh "think, think, think!" imitation. I told him it doesn't matter but he insisted he knew how to do it he just needed to recall it. Within a couple minutes he's suddenly scribbling a bunch of numbers on the board and explaining it to me, of course I'm staring at him with a blank stare because I have NO IDEA what he's talking about because math just isn't my thing, man. So then I asked him to repeat his little lesson on 6th grade fractions (which I am CONVINCED I didn't learn until like, 9th grade, or possibly even later than that, like never) so that I can record it and send it to his buddy. 

This is how friends help friends with math homework in the information age. Cell phone recordings, Facetime, instant messenger. 

Also, I still don't see how finding the common denominator matters at all ever in the real world. 

It just never stopped raining today, so we made a second round of apple cider donuts from last week, because every Monday is better with donuts, and then the boys built Tinker Crates (another super awesome subscription box - Calen's based around engineering, Cam's based around geography) for science today while I rode our stationary bike in the garage to work off that donut I just ate. 

This kid and this hair

Calen building some sort of "gravity timer"

Camden's crate was about Madagascar, and he made these cute little fuzzy lemurs and a tree and "launcher" to flip them into the tree

Calen Cooks

 We've had a pretty low key and quiet weekend over here. After a busy week of getting back to a school routine, plus Boy Scouts and soccer, it was nice to just lay around and do nothing. 

However, Calen did cook for us yesterday night! We used the last recipe from this month's Raddish Kids cooking subscription. Sweet potato gnocchi made from scratch!

This was pretty involved, for a Raddish Kids recipe. It turned most of the kitchen into a fluffy floury dirty pan mess, but it was fun watching him roll the little gnocchi's, boil them and then fry them. They were delicious just plain (covered with a little melted butter), but we added the smallest amount of red pasta sauce as well just for an extra kick. 

Calen's really turned out to be quite the chef! 

Yo Ho And a Bucket of Apples

 We had a busy couple days so here I am playing catch up. 

Who's bright idea was it to relight the fire under this blog the first month I attempt at homeschooling, anyways?

Yesterday I was itching to do a fall craft because it's you know fall and the only thing that was missing from my house full of pumpkins and fall leaf garlands and pumpkin-banana candles burning and apple-cinnamon muffins baking was a craft. We crashed through our school day (which again is based on early settlers) and after a quick search on Youtube found a great video on Johnny Appleseed (that's a little more grown up than the Kindergarten version of him). So they watched the video and then we did a fun little craft where we stamped apples in multiple colors on a piece of paper and then weaved brown construction paper over the top of it to make it look like a basket full of apples. 

I'm counting my blessings that my kids still like to do crafts - even Calen, at 11 1/2, who still finds them incredibly fun. 

Today, we had a shortened school day (as our main curriculum is technically 4 day weeks) but I also needed to head to a house across town to clean it (a little side job, because I don't have enough to do). So we flew through a spelling test, a quick math lesson x2, and then ran to the house with the kids in tow. I was thinking there had to be something they could do while they were there that was school related, so I packed up a couple of spiral notebooks and this little box of pirate themed storytelling dice that we bought at a mom and pop toy store in California several years ago. The idea is you throw the dice, and whatever pictures end up front side up (a sword, a pirate ship, a shark, etc) you have to make a story involving each dice. We've done it a bunch of times verbally but I had an "aha" moment that this would be a great way to do a writing assignment for school. 

Camden hates writing. Calen loves writing. So when I announced to the boys that they had to write a full page story while I was cleaning this house, Calen was like "YES!!" and Camden was like "UGH!". Calen rolled his dice and flopped on the floor and wrote not one but two pages worth of a wonderful story. Camden struggled to figure out how to get started....but once he did get started, he took off, and wrote a fantastic story about a pirate that sailed to a tropical island to sell shark fins and got attacked by a gigantic king crab and once defeated it, feasted on it. 

Well I'd count that as a success. This might become a weekly thing.