A Picture Perfect Day

           Today I was able to steal my Mom's camera. And so I took these pictures and many more.

A non lake version of a cattail

           This is some plant that I saw at the top of our hill that I thought looked somewhat like a cattail. (Also known as Mullein or Pioneers Toilet Paper.) And so seeing as it seemed to be posing for the camera I decided to give in.

My shadow is following Me!

           There was very nice lighting and since the sun was going down I found a shadow of Me waiting at  the bottom of the hill for the real Me.

the Moon and A Meteorite, can't get much better.

           Then I saw the Moon with a jet passing and I got separate shots of both but, this one put them together so nicely.

             There was an airplane following the jet about half an hour later and I took a picture of it at Harrison's request.

I'm a Star!!!!

            Then I got all my siblings (We all had been banished from the house by our evil ahem, nice Mother.) To pose for me as I took their picture.

Chocolate! Chocolate! Mustache!

             When we had, had hot chocolate earlier today Gregory had been messy and Mom didn't notice it and so there he went with a mustache throughout the day.

pretty picture

              I was actually able to get them all around smiling (I really don't know what Harrison is up to but, it may be he just hasn't had enough practice smiling with his teeth.) And as I said the lighting was perfect.

I'm a little Egyptian

            Beatrice wanted to pose again so they tried the Egyptian walk but couldn't quite get it right so they look more like little teapots. I have another picture of them doing this but Gregory was in the middle of falling and alone Bea looked like she was trying to model something.

A bad self-portrait

            I had decided that there needed to be a picture of me on this day so I tried to do it by myself and it didn't turn out so well. Oh well.

Natasha's house

            I liked the way the sun was on her window so I took the picture for that reason and only that reason.

  Adios,
Margaret

Learning

Life goes on and learning happens in so many ways. Some people learn by doing, some by seeing and some by hearing. Some of the ways and things we have been learning are in this very educational piece.

This fall I learned of icivics a pretty cool website. It kept the kids busy learning and being entertained. They now know more about the amendments than I do which isn't really to hard to do, but it was fun to run for office, decide the outcome of real court cases in the past. If you want to become more civicly aware check out this site.

Did you know that if you mix hydrogen peroxide and yeast you get a really good explosion. I was cleaning the goo off of every surface in my kitchen after Harrison learned how much oxygen can be created that way.

Did you know that eventually water balloons always break when filled with water. For some reason they were rolling around my house for few days as babies and they always seemed to break at the most inopportune times. I have now banned water balloon babies in the house.

Harrison has learned how to figure the surface area and volume of an odd shaped solid, he is getting this from his math text. Gregory has been learning multiplication, he has been learning it at odd times with his daddy.

We have learned all about finances and running our own business in the books Lawn Boy and Lawn Boy Returns both by Gary Paulsen and based right here in the metro area. Gary is a Minnesota native and it is always fun to read a locals work. In these books you read about how a 12 year old boy accidentally becomes a successful business person when his grandma gives him his grandpa's old riding lawn mower as a gift for his birthday. Written in a very entertaining way it has us all laughing away and wanting to read the whole book right then and I think we may be actually learning something at the same time. How fun is that!

Margaret made a lovely dreamcatcher the other day by reading a Double Dare book for girls and seeing the instructions there. It probably won't hold back bad dreams but it is pretty cute wall art. She also learned how to go the bathroom in the woods and so many other random goodies. We read a sweet story from the library about dreamcatchers  called Grandmother's Dreamcatcher. 

Travis and I have been having so much fun finding out how much each of our appliances cost to run with Travis' new toy Kill A Watt. We now know that the top loading washer takes .30 kwh which equals 2 pennies of electricity at our rates to do a load of denim. It also used 4 sink fulls of water. Our front loader used almost 2 sink fulls of water and .13 kwh which equals 1 penny at our rates and this was a load of towels. Fairly equal weighted loads. Now something that was very interesting to us is that our coffee pot uses about the same amount of energy to brew a 12 cup pot of coffee as the front loader did to wash that load .14 kwh. We have only had Kill A Watt for two days so that is as far as we have gotten but we can't wait to find out how much everything is using.

Now I am waiting to learn who will be leading our country for the next 4 years. Has our state decided to limit marriage, have we decided to reduce voter fraud, will St Paul continue to raise property taxes so every student in the public system can have their own ipod. Questions I hope my morning paper will answer!

God Bless the USA!
~Anna