State-by-State: Colorado

C is for Colorado,

the colorful, Centennial State.

We have high mountains and broad plains

and a history that makes us great.

from C is for Centennial:  A Colorado Alphabet

F is for the Four Corners.

Put your hands and feet just so.

Yo'll be amazed to be in Colorado

and in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico!

R is for the Rockies,

the mountains of our state--

or Rodeo, Roof, and Royal Gorge.

We live at heaven's gate!

from C is for Centennial:  A Colorado Alphabet

Colorado is a gorgeous state, and we enjoyed reading about the mountain and snow-skiing this week. The girls finished their state projects in record time!  I am so glad that I printed all the pages out for them at the beginning of the school year!  We are a lot more efficient this year!

Mile-High Strawberry Dessert from our Eat Your Way through the USA cookbook was our choice for cooking this week.  We tried Denver Omelets a few weeks ago, and the girls did not like the onions and ham in their omelets.  It was also more of a mom prepared state cooking which did not thrill my little chefs!  Today it was their turn!  Lyndsey loves to read the recipe, find all the ingredients, and measure the ingredients out.  Lauren learned how to separate egg whites and whip them into a thick consistency with this recipe!  The dessert turned out very yummy!

It's snowing in Alabama!

I must admit that I was very skeptical when the weather forecast said snow for Tuesday.  Then the public school announced closures for Tuesday and Wednesday, and I rolled my eyes.  They cancelled for the "Coldamageddon" earlier this month.  Seriously!  When the 2 private schools that my older kids go to said they would have early release, I was a still a little skeptical.  Well, at least my kids will be home before the streets get nasty was my thought!  By 9:30am on Tuesday, I wanted my kids home immediately.  It was already sleeting, and everyone knows that the southerners do not know how to drive in the ice!  Both kids had rides with friends to get home, I was anxious and praying that they would get SAFELY home.  By noon and after lunch, there was no luring my homeschoolers back to the classroom!  They were waiting on the snow!   Finally, about 4:30 we saw the first snowflakes, Dad was finally home, and there was no holding them inside any longer! 

     It was a layer of ice!  Ice on everything!  The grass was CRUNCHY, but we found the fun!  Leaf skeletons was one of their favorite things to gracefully remove!

Insert a game of table tennis because we do not have a Snowamageddon Champion yet!  This is really not normal...it really cannot be normal...who does this when it is 24degrees outside?

The snow came softly!  The kids were amazed at the beauty of each flake!  

Corynne built a snowman.  Well, actually it is an iceman.  He was less than 6 inches tall!

Pictures in our little snow accumulation before we roll and play in it!!!

 

Playing in the cold.  Tyler always brings things up a level!

After everyone had played enough, we came inside to the roaring fire.  So thankful that we got the gas logs installed this year.

We made Snowcream after dinner tonight!! It was so much fun!  It was a new experience for all of us since JM and I had never had Snowcream either!  Yummy!

Best of all, the snow was still there when we woke up!  

More outside, winter fun this morning!

This beautiful little one had so much fun in the snow!

Rev. Graetz at Gateway

It was so interesting to hear part of Rev. Graetz testimony at church today.  Rev. Graetz was one of the white pastors of a black Lutheran church here in Montgomery during the Montgomery bus boycott.  His family was ostracized by the white community, their car tires were slashed, and his family home was bombed 3 times.  One 2 bombs went off.  "The one that did not go off has 11 sticks of dynamite and a container of TNT, so it would have killed all of us and probably a number of our neighbors.  The Lord didn't let that one go off."  Rev. Graetz and his wife, Jeannie, have recently moved back to the Montgomery area and is working with ASU.  It was such a privilege to hear him.

History is alive, but we have to listen!

State-by-State: Wyoming

C is for Cattle, Cowgirl, and Cowboy;

at Cheyenne Frontier Days you will enjoy

the largest rodeo in all the West---

watching rodeo's best of the best.

from C is for Cowboy:A Wyoming Alphabet

 Traveling down from Montana, we arrived in Wyoming.  It is a country girls state!  We read about the Bighorn Mountains where Butch Cassidy hid, Devils Tower,  Old Faithful, and Yellowstone National Park.  The girls worked hard this week, and we ended with a treat!  Wyoming Cowboy Cookies was their cooking for today.  They made a HUGE batch to feed a herd, but Corynne graciously took some to her classmates the next day!

Hyundai Tour

Today I had the opportunity to take Lauren and Lyndsey to the Hyundai Manufacturing in Montgomery.  Montgomery is very fortunate to be the home of the only North American Hyundai Manufacturing facility.  It is an amazing production facility!  I loved the tour when I went with Corynne in 3rd grade and 6th grade.  It is just so impressive to watch how they assembly the cars use one-time parts delivery to their factory.  It is impressive to watch the robots work and the humans! 

I think the girls had as much fun as I did!  Who can resist when you are riding a tram in and out of buildings watching cars being built and tested in the freezing cold!!!  And it is always cool to see cars leaving the factory with you!!!

Addy: A Civil War Party

The girls read the American Girl Addy Series during our December Fun School.  It was our "history" for the month, and the series completed our Civil War study.  Lauren prepared a storyboard for the first book Meet Addy for our homeschool book fair on January17th.  The girls look forward to have the American Girl parties as part of our history study each quarter.  I had planned on having this party right after the 1st of the year, but I got sick and we went to the Fiesta Bowl.  I told the girls we would have the party on that Monday holiday in January.  WOW!  That Monday holiday in January took me by surprise because I did not even notice it was coming until the Friday before.  Luckily, I was able to text all the moms and go to the store during the weekend to pull this party together FAST!!!

Lauren and Lyndsey made a Sweet Potato Pie and Benne Candy from The American Girls Party Book for the party this morning.

I tried to pull in as many elements from the book as possible this time.  We talked about the Underground Railroad and how Addie and her mother had to look for the lanterns for the secret hideouts.  The girls made mandala boards from egg cartons, and Tyler came down to teach them how to play the game. 

Corynne helped the girls make spool puppets, and then she provided urgent care for each one of them as they kept falling apart!  Then the girls each painted a yellow canary like the canary that Addie loved to watch at the boarding house where she lived in Philadelphia.

The girls tried to play Double Dutch with some rope that we had, but were not successful!  It was a great party to celebrate life in the Civil War Era!

State-by-State: Montana

Big Sky Country begins with B

a nickname tried and true.

Gaze above you to understand,

how a sky can be so grand.

from B is for Big Sky Country:  A Montana Alphabet

L is for Little Bighorn,

a somber place indeed,

where warriors and soldiers lost their lives

for causes they believed.

from B is for Big Sky Country:  A Montana Alphabet

We traveled a little east to get to Montana this week!  The girls completed their scrapbook pages, but we did not get around to cooking this week!

:::Update7/20/14:::

The girls have gone back and tried to complete the cooking projects for the few states that we skipped.  Montana was one of them.  We wanted to make huckleberry pie.  Huckleberries only grow in the moist mountain area of Glacier National Park Montana.  They cannot be commercially grown.  Berry pickers hike into the wilderness areas to secure berries each year.  We looked into buying a few pounds of huckleberries so we could bake a pie, but the least you could buy was 5 pounds and the shipping was expensive.  Then I found www.huckleberypatch.com who ships their pies for a reasonable price.  Reasonable as in I can get the pie for cheaper than shipping the fresh berries!!

 Let me just say that this was THE BEST PIE EVER!  I do not like blueberry, cherry or any other berry pies, but I LOVED this pie! Huckleberries are so sweet and delicious.  The fudge was ok.  It was just too sweet for me, but the pie was great.

Homeschool Reading Fair

This year the girls decided to participate in the Reading Fair.  This stuff is all so new to me even in our second year of homeschool.  What would we do without the internet to visually explain to me what "reading fair poster" means.  I just need visuals not words!  Anyway, the girls read the Addy Series together over the Christmas holidays to finish our Civil War history unit.  Lauren chose to do Meet Addy for her poster.  Lyndsey and I had originally chose to read Charlotte's Web over the holidays, but I got sick and then we forgot to take the book on our trip to Arizona so we had to change to something quicker.  She chose Amelia Bedelia and the Surprise Shower.  She had never read any of the Amelia Bedelia books, and she quickly became hooked.  She has read all the ones we could find in our house, and we have bought a few more.  She loves Amelia Bedelia...maybe they are too much alike!

 

Lyndsey was so excited come Reading Fair day.  She woke up and I found her searching the house for costume pieces.  She found the perfect clothes, and she played the part!

Every reading fair participant received a book for their efforts.  Lyndsey received Curious George Builds an Igloo.  She read the book on the way home, and she was determined to build an igloo like the directions at the end of the book.  I modified the directions...we built with sugar cubes and icing.  She had fun building the igloo over the weekend.  She could not wait to put in the "keystone" on Sunday afternoon!  

Chattanooga Swim Meet

JM took the girls to a swim meet at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee this weekend.  They drove up on Friday night, and they ATE at the City Grill.  Do you see those desserts?  They are going to sink in the pool tomorrow!

 The swim meet was very relaxing as swim meets go according to JM.  They stayed on schedule!  The girls swam Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon.  They did have a great time, and improved their times in a few events.

After the Saturday morning swim session, the girls and JM joined some other Barracudas swimmers for a trip to the Tennessee Aquarium.  they had fun roaming through the exhibits together.  Afterward, the team ate dinner together before the girls began hanging out around the hotel.  Lauren and her friends met up at the couches in the lobby, and Lyndsey's group met up in JM's room.  JM is so much more fun than I am at these events!

 Sunday swim continued a strong streak for Lyndsey.  She does not realize how good she is...humble or too blonde to know...not sure which at this point.    After the meet, JM and the girls visited the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

 Then they stopped by Rock City & Lookout Mountain on the way home.  They had fun!!

 Dad helped turn this trip into a Geography field trip!  Name the seven states capitals', nicknames, state birds, state trees, and state flower.   Score!!! They can do it!  Homeschool success!  I think this trip should count as a day of school!  I mean...they had exercise (swimming), math (calculating when to start the flip turn for the race & comparing their past times for improvement), grammar skills (finding their name alphabetically by age in the race results),  socialization (being with fellow Barracudas), science (aquarium), art (they tattoo themselves for spirit at these meets & look at that drawing A+), and geography (Lookout Mtn).  Yep, it works for me!!!

  

State-by-State: Idaho

A is for Appaloosa steed,

Idaho's own magnificent breed,

developed by the Nez Perce tribe,

a horse of intelligence, beauty, and speed.

from P is for Potato: An Idaho Alphabet

We took a jump up the map to Idaho this week.  Although I started this geography road trip in order of how the states were admitted into the Union.  We have taken a few detours so our states match up with Lyndsey's reading program which is a road trip from the west coast and south and up the east coast.  When she got to states we had already covered, that is when I started jumping around a little so we did not lose a week!! Idaho has been a fun state to read about from Appaloosa to Irrigating crops to Sacajawea to Zinc.  We are enjoying these books and the new things we learn!

French fries and hash browns, bakers and chips,

Potato is our word for P.

With water, the Idaho desert can grow

spuds for you; spuds for me.

from P is for Potato: An Idaho Alphabet

The girls prepared Baked Sliced Potatoes from The United States Cookbook to go with our dinner tonight.  These were the BEST!! We have made them many times since studying Idaho!

Energy put to Work!

There have been a few things around my house that have been bothering me for months and I just could not find the time or energy to tackle them until today.  First was how nasty my bedside lamps had become.  This is not something that I could just put out-of-sight and out-of-mind.  I see them everyday!!  The obstacle is getting all that stuff out of the base!  Well, shake and shake and shake and it does come out.  Before on the left and after on the right.  I know that is pretty obvious!!!  The shine makes me happy to turn on the light at night!

Second chore is truly fueled by Pinterest!  Had I not seen on Pinterest how to clean my pans, I would have never realized they were dirty.  Geezzz!!!!  The girls really got into this challenge!  Thank goodness because I did not have enough elbow grease to finish this on my own!  Look what a lot of Hydrogen Peroxide and Baking Soda will do!  Wow!

Call it Winter Cleaning!  Call me a happy Momma!!

Arizona Tour & Baylor at the Fiesta Bowl

When it was announced that Baylor would play at the Fiesta Bowl, we booked our flight to Phoenix almost the next day.  Baylor is playing in a bowl game and we could not miss the opportunity to go watch them play on New Year's Day.  We left early Sunday morning to catch our flight to Phoenix.  On Monday we drove up to the Grand Canyon.  None of us had visited the Grand Canyon, so we again could not miss the opportunity since we were so close.  On the way, we found SNOW!  Being from southern Alabama, we really don't see much of this white, powdery stuff.  We pulled over on the side of the road to play in the snow for a few minutes!

We made it to the Grand Canyon, and we loaded up on our Pink Jeep Sunset tour.  SO. MUCH. FUN. We went to the Southern Rim which was beautiful.  We enjoyed our tour guide, and the views were amazing.  We watched the sun go down behind the South Rim.  AMAZING.  GOD is AMAZING.  He created such beautiful things!

We spent Monday night at a lodge in the Grand Canyon Park.  On Tuesday, we drove down to Sedona for an off road adventure.  I know the boys had fun in their vehicle, but the girls and I ate their dust the whole trip.  Although driving these vehicles is fun, I really just wanted to admire the beauty of Sedona!

Wednesday was GAME DAY.  We slept late and shopped at the outlet malls right beside the University of Phoenix Stadium.  Then we went to the Baylor tailgate party right about lunch time.

The game was so much fun even though Baylor lost.  IT was worth the trip to Phoenix just to enjoy the Baylor family.  We saw quite a few of our Baylor and Temple, Texas, friends at the game.