While we were in Vermont one of our favorite haunts on Nenny and D.Pa’s property was Hemlock Brook. On one walk there we counted twenty eight Salamanders. And Rebecca had to touch each and every one. Some of them ran away, but she got her finger on most of them. They are poisonous, so they tend to hold still and say “Hey, I’m red. It would be a really bad idea to eat me, right? Right? You know that, right?” Near the end of our visit we researched the salamanders, made a terrarium, and kept one to watch for a day before setting it loose again.

Hemlock Brook is a lovely place, with enough water to make pools to splash around in, although not big enough to swim in, lots of big rocks and sticks to move around, diverting the water, making damns, deepening pools, mucking around in the mud. Lots of wonderful moss covered fallen logs to sit and walk on too, and little waterfalls and tunnels. I really wish we could have brought it home with us. The water around us in the South SF Bay Area isn’t nearly as clean, many of the streams are contaminated by mercury from natural sources and mining in the coastal mountains. Ick.

Penelope’s favorite thing to do at Hemlock Brook was eat mud. In case you were wondering, and I know I was, the brook gets it’s name from Hemlock the tree, not Hemlock the poisonous shrub. No relation. But still, my husband and I have an ongoing debate, how much mud should you let your children eat? How much mud do you let your children eat?

Sometimes you just need to take two things that you like to play with and put them together. Like rocks and blocks. This time it was water and LEGOs. Take one large plastic storage container filled with water, some LEGOs, and mix. Or the bathtub. LEGOs are great with water, because when you snap them together they capture air, which makes them buoyant. Rebecca and her friend Samuel did need to do some experimenting with base size vs height though, Rebecca’s first attempt at a boat was three times as high as it was wide, so it tipped right over which she found very concerning!

After the LEGOs, all sorts of things ended up in the water. This is a boat too, can you see the passenger?

We are in Vermont visiting Nenny & D-Pa, my inlaws. D-Pa sells gorgeous hand turned wooden bowls at the Woodstock Farmer’s Market, and he loaned the front corner of his tent to Rebecca, to sell a handful of lavender dolls and lavender wands. She helped make them, although not really enough, since we only had that morning to make them and I was experimenting with the process anyway. But she did sell them herself! This picture is from just after we set up, and she is feeling shy. D-Pa gave her some selling advice, like, oh, smile, would you? Heh. She did let people take her picture holding the doll when they bought it, which for her is an enormous concession. I was surprised, but she’s growing up! She knew she needed to do it for the customer. I’m glad I remembered to have her put on a clean shirt!

She sold all three of the lavender dolls, and two of the three lavender wands. I was SO glad that someone bought the lavender doll that she had drawn the face on. It was really more of a scribble than a face. Although, actually, she might have been just as happy to take it home to play with. I don’t think she has any concerns that people might not like her faces, and in her mind perhaps they are just as nice as the ones I draw. So now I have to figure out if I should help her learn how to draw ‘nicer’ faces on her small wooden beads, or if that would just make her feel like she couldn’t do it. Tricky tricky, she’s really sensitive about being corrected. We’ll be here for another 3 markets, so we’ll see if she even wants to make something for next week.

After the market we went to the drug store and she bought a stretchy plastic duck. And I thought, sure, I’m teaching her about making and selling things, and natural rewards for working, but why oh why does she have to have such different taste in toys than I do? Sigh. I’m sure my mother wondered the same thing.

Things to work on:
Rebecca doing most of the making, even if they don’t look as nice.
Teaching Rebecca about giving change… young 4 may not be old enough for this, but we should try some play-acting. She could just ask how much money she needed to give back.
Getting her a money board to clip her bills on to help with figuring out change, or just a wallet to collect it in.

Does anyone want a tutorial about how to make lavender dolls? You can find the lavender wands over at 5 Orange Potatoes, although we skipped the ribbon this time, so they aren’t very practical, really.

What do you do with a 5 gallon bucket of lemons? Make a whole lot of lemon juice ice cubes. I love having lemon juice ice cubes around, they are great for that quick fix of lemonade or adding to iced tea. Using the lemon juicer is also good for coordination and hand strength! No, she didn’t do the whole bucket.

Starting the wee one off with the painting thing. Liquid water colors and fingers. Two months ago technically, looking at the EXIF. Oooh, I’m too busy, aren’t I? Hmm. What to do. I’ll have to think about that one.

What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.

One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.

Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?

[Recently all my comments have started being flagged as spam by Akismet, so if I don't respond to your comment by email promptly, okay, it always takes me a couple days, but if it takes me a week, sorry, I forgot to check my spam comments again. Dunno what I broke...]

While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..

We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!

I helped with Rebecca’s class science fair project (she goes to a co-op preschool), and we did plant dyes. It was a lot of fun, I did a live drawing story, telling a story and drawing pictures at the same time, for the motivation, which I’d never done before. Thankfully it was an easy audience! Here is my story:

One day the kids in Miss Leslie’s class went to the farmers market, looked around at all the different tents selling all kinds of different fruits and vegetable, and bought a red cabbage, carrots, onions, and beets. Then on the way home at the top of a hill someone thought it should be their turn to carry the carrots, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the onions, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the beets, and there was a little disagreement about who should be carrying the cabbage. There was a little bit of tugging, someone bumped somebody, and the whole class rolled down the hill together with the vegetables. At the bottom they picked themselves up, and being sturdy 3&4 year olds no one was hurt. But someone noticed that there was orange all over their pants, someone had a green knee, someone was brown all over, someone’s shirt had a big red splot and one kid’s face had turned purple. Well, they wondered, where did all these colors come from? So they went back to the classroom and set out to find out.

And let me tell you, a jar of cabbage juice that has been unrefrigerated for a week smells awful!

We didn’t set the dyes with anything, we just juiced the vegetables, stuffed muslin in with the juice in jars and let it sit for a few days. In addition to the vegetables we also used dirt and grass, which the kids collected. What smells worse than a jar of old cabbage juice? An art rack full of hanging strips of muslin that have been marinating in old onion skins, beet juice and cabbage juice. It was raining outside, so the rack was drying inside. I’m glad I wasn’t working in the classroom that day, when I came to pick Rebecca up, wow did the room smell. But it was all for SCIENCE! Hmm.

There are 8 spots in the watercolor tray, and we have 8 fingers. Obviously this is not coincidence, it is a mandate. Today we had a very spotty watercolor painting.

Here is a 100% child led activity. I was dragged. Really.

I was cutting loose threads off a red canvas shopping bag that I had just washed and dyed yet another load of clothes pink with, I’m starting to learn, really, although I just did it again with a purple blanket… And Rebecca wanted to make a new bag with the threads I was pulling off. I think she was upset that the bag was loosing threads, and had a hole in the corner. She asked if we could make a new bag, and I grudgingly admitted that *theoretically* we could make a very small bag, but it would be a lot of work. From there I was dragged into helping her set up a tiny cardboard loom, warping it for her and finding a large needle to use to weave the weft threads. From there she wove her little postage stamp of red cloth.

Later when she was helping me make the bed she said, “Wow mama, someone did a lot of work making this big sheet!” So there you go, the last couple months of chaos we’ve become unschoolers.