Outside of one of the nearby towns, the Anderson family and some of their neighbors annually put up a dazzling array of Christmas lights. Visitors are generously allowed to park and wander. (Click HERE for an online article about it.) It is something we love every Christmas and this year family friends invited us to join them...
During the recent Olympics in Brazil, University of Georgia students earned 10 medals. If UGA was a country, it would rank 27th! (Click here for a related article.) Our family had a great time this summer cheering on our athletes.
Tonight we attended a public event welcoming back UGA's Olympians. It wasn't about seeking autographs, but rather I wanted Eli to see that the people he watched on television in far-off Brazil are real people who have the drive and discipline to excel. The event was even better than I hoped. These athletes took the time to chat with Eli, asking him about his favorite sport and encouraging him to practice. Eli even got to try on bronze, silver, and gold medals! (We were surprised how big and heavy they are.) And we got to say both "congratulations" and "thanks for making our summer even better" in person. The local BMW dealer provided three posters for collecting signatures as we met the Olympians. It was a great event!
Today is Ground Hog Day. Since it falls on a school morning, the local park and zoo offered a groundhog program yesterday. All I have are some phone snapshots, but I'm eager to get back into blogging mode after the long work period and holidays, so...
Eli and his buddy, Niels, made a groundhog cookie.
Here is the template -- Vienna Sandwich Cookie (Keebler) body, M&M ears, frosting eyes and nose, plus a chopped mini marshmallow for teeth.
Eli decided to be non-conformist and made a groundhog face.
Now on to making a groundhog mask...
Again the non-conformist, Eli decided to use the whiskers as long teeth.
See the resemblance? (Eli's school has been helping to raise money for a new groundhog habitat at the zoo. We told the groundhog that we're working on new digs for next year!)
By the way, did you know that it takes the wingspan of two kindergarteners to equal the wingspan of a bald eagle?
Happy Groundhog Day! Pennsylvania's Punxsutawney Phil ground said six more weeks of winter while Georgia's General Beau predicted an early spring. We'll see who is right.
When Eli attended a Waldorf preschool in California, we participated in an autumn lantern walk for kids that was quite magical -- sunset, kiddos, and candles glowing in homemade lanterns. Thus when I heard there was a similar event here in North Georgia, I tracked down information about it.
We found the group wonderfully welcoming.
This morning after breakfast, Eli and I made a candle lantern out of a jar, tissue paper squares, thinned glue, and some wire.
This evening as the sun began to set...
We found the group and hung out with them in the cool evening.
Kids ran across the grass in packs and waited for the darkness to settle.
Apple cider made it a little easier to wait.
Lanterns were ready.
There were extra lanterns for folks who forgot theirs. The organizers thought of everything -- spare candles, lighters for the grownups, and even flickering electric tealight candles for the lanterns to be carried by wee tots.
There were various designs of lanterns, everybody bringing what they'd like. Next year we want to try this sort of lantern made from paper wrapped around a balloon and stiffened with glue. Once the glue is try and the balloon popped, the resulting lantern is held aloft by strings and a stick.
But Eli was pretty happy with his lantern too.
The group paused to read a poem in unison from little cards printed out on thick paper and brushed with autumn watercolors. (Such a lovely little touch!)
Ready?
Off through the Historic District...
We made a detour through our favorite independent book shop...
Then through a dark, leafy alley...
Into the neighborhood...
And back at last for a rest on the grass.
To see our lantern walk in California beneath the eucalyptus forest, click HERE.
At the first hint of fall, it is easy to go leaping for all things pumpkin. Coffeeicecreamteacookiemilkshakecupcakelatte! Mmmm. There's something about that orange-packaged swirl of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves.
But every year I remind myself that it is worth hitting the pumpkin pause button until the heat of ginger and cloves is truly needed. The first glow of autumn isn't immediately flaming orange. It is a blush of yellow and russet across an apple. Before cinnamon and nutmeg can rush headlong into October's spice cake, November's pumpkin pie, and December's gingerbread, this flavor duo first has the job of welcoming early hints of cool weather. Cinnamon and nutmeg weave a milder web from weedy end-of-summer to yellowing September by balancing the crisp, cidery tang of this season's fresh apples.
Thankfully, this seasonal kitchen magic requires a day-long trip up into the green hills and smoky blue mountains.
Uh oh. Apples may be too big of a challenge with a loose tooth!
Inside the Mercier Orchards sales building. Hmmm. Still too hard to eat with a loose tooth even if it is coated in soft, buttery caramel.
Ah ha! Fried pies -- flaky crust but soft inside!
And there was a small petting zoo too.
One Mama's Two Cents:
This was our first time at Mercier Orchards in Blue Ridge, Georgia. In the past, we've always gone to Hillcrest Orchards in Ellijay. Both orchards are fun for families but somewhat crowded. The biggest difference, however, is that Hillcrest offers far more for kids. Brian and I preferred the rolling hills and views of Mercier plus they had a wider range of foods, books, kitchen gear, etc. for sale. I'm guessing for the next few years we'll head to Hillcrest but gravitate back to Mercier when Eli outgrows the games and playground equipment.
Click the Links for Apple Posts:
Garin Apple Festival (California, 2008)
Homemade Applesauce 2011
Hillcrest Orchards, Ellijay 2012
Apple Kitchen 2012 (Apple Oatmeal Pancakes and other recipes)
Apple Festival, Hendersonville NC 2013 (Caramel Dip recipe)
Hillcrest Orchards 2013
Apple Spice Pudding Cake
Last month we had a great time attending our first Family Day at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens. The theme for the month was exploring color. Each kid got an activity sheet and a pencil. Soon Eli was wandering through the galleries looking for the first piece of artwork of a treasure hunt.
There were questions about how various artists used color and Eli worked diligently to spell each word of his answers. All through the museum there were kids pointing and pondering and discussing art with their parents.
As somebody with two degrees in Art Education, it made me happy to see!
There were also hands-on stations scattered throughout the galleries.
Brilliant! Eli loved leafing through color swatches or seeing the world turn colors through sheets of plastic.
After he was all finished with his activity sheet, Eli got a button to wear
on his shirt and then joined other kids downstairs doing an art project.
The kiddos cut pieces of thin colored plastic and placed them on a rectangle of clear contact paper. Once they had their design the way they wanted it, another rectangle of contact paper sandwiched their work and this was placed in a paper frame. Eli's finished piece looks lovely in our kitchen window.
One Mama's Two Cents:
We had a great time at the free Family Day. I always mean to take Eli to the art museum more than I do, and this was a great way to have a fun and meaningful experience that didn't last too long or require too much listening. Families can go at their own pace and we stayed about an hour. Family Days are on Saturday mornings once a month. You may wish to go early as it seems to get more crowded as the day goes on!
Click HERE for more information on GMA's Family Days.
Click HERE for another blog post about visiting GMA.
When we got home, we broke out Eli's Learning Resources brand Color Mixing Glasses. If you haven't seen these things, they are really fun and help teach color mixing. The glasses have two slots for slide-in plastic lenses. Kids can mix the three primary colors -- red, blue, and yellow to create the other colors on the color wheel. There is also a pair of clear "prism lenses" that give the world a kaleidoscope effect.
The State Botanical Garden of Georgia offers a fun annual event for families called Insectival. You guessed it! It is an educational festival with an insect theme. The 21st annual event is Saturday, September 13, 2014. Here are a few pictures from 2013...
Making antennae headbands
Learning the body sections of an insect
The conservatory building is filled with interesting things to see
at your own pace.
Don't miss the UGA's Entomology Department's fantastic displays!
Many of the displays focus on ecology, helping kids understand how insects interact with the environment and what we can do to help the Earth.
Close-up peeks at aquatic insects
One of our favorite displays was about termites. We made pen tracks on paper and let a termite follow the chemical trail!
There are several art and craft booths. Eli loved making a watercolor butterfly.
The most exciting part was seeing the release of monarch butterflies.
Eli and his buddy, Marten, couldn't wait!
Out comes the big black mesh box of newly-hatched butterflies...
And up they go!
One Mama's Two Cents:
This is a great event for kids, although it does tend to get fairly crowded as the day wears on. A stroller is do-able; even the gardens have many paved paths. Dondero's Cafe is located in the conservatory building (click HERE for their menu), or you can bring a picnic lunch to enjoy in the gardens. Please note that there is an entrace fee for the festival. Click HERE for the official Insectival website.
Do you love bugs? During our California years, we were lucky to visit two sites where the monarch butterflies spend the winter. Click below for blog posts with pictures. And the picture links below have more information about the decline of the monarchs and how you can help.
Pacific Grove, California (near Carmel)
Point Pinole, California (near San Francisco and Berkeley)
Our summer "Camp Rainbow" theme of the week for June 22-28 was
"Art All Around Us." One morning we ventured to the Georgia Museum
of Art in Athens...
Eli loved that the museum provides kids with an activity bag to use during their visit. There were brochures, children's picture books about art, a sketchpad with pencils, and a small flannel board with felt shapes. Eli worked hard on a sunset image and then sorted the shapes by color to start over on a new picture...
He also loved wandering the sculpture garden. There are six steel plant-filled sculptures by Patricia Leighton called Terra Verte.
He wanted to draw one of the cube-shaped sculptures and spent a lot of time on it.
There was a little frustration because he wanted the lines to be straight, but we talked about how sometimes art doesn't show exactly what is there but rather how something feels to the artist. Eli ended up being happy with his drawing.
Aside from the sheer peacefulness and creative juices of the museum, this visit I particularly enjoyed the decorative arts section and this wonderful old handmade baking cabinet. Now I am daydreaming of teacakes from scratch...
We only stayed about an hour. From my studies in Art Education back in college, I learned that it is far better to give little sips of art that kids enjoy rather than wear them out on it seeing everything. Museums are quiet places where kid joys like touching, jumping, and climbing are rarely allowed, so it can be a little stressful for them. To help with that, we let the kiddos lead us to what interested them most, gave them time to absorb, and then got them talking about what they saw. Everybody had a good time.
Other posts about the how-tos of visiting art museums with kiddos:
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco
One Mama's Two Cents:
The Georgia Museum of Art was free and there is free parking in a shady deck adjoined to the museum building -- which made it easy to visit with kids even on a rainy day. There is also a cafe area where kids can take a break to have a snack and sit for a bit. The front desk staff and the guards were all friendly and welcoming, which earns the place a gold star in my book. And the Museum offers monthly Family Days that show off portions of the collection along a theme and get kids involved in the creative process with activities. We'll be back often!
Georgia Museum of Art Website: http://georgiamuseum.org
GMA Family Days: http://georgiamuseum.org/calendar/family_days
Explanation of Camp Rainbow
Week One: Careers and Jobs -- Restaurant and Bank
Week One: Careers and Jobs -- Pizza Parlor
Week Two: Native Americans
Week Three: Wet and Wild (water creatures and wetland habitats)
Week Three: Wet and Wild -- Home Aquarium
Week Four: Natural History (mud pies and fake rain count, right?)
Week Five: Art All Around Us -- Georgia Museum of Art
For our summer Camp Rainbow group, we wanted our kids to know that there were people living here long ago, and that those people had a culture and a way of life. Last week became Native Americans week. (Click HERE for more about Camp Rainbow.)
We trekked over to the University of Georgia campus. Near the Georgia Center there is a small stone monument...
I don't know if the five year-olds were impressed, but it fueled my imagination! Lumpkin Street runs from Downtown Athens to the Five Points area and has some interesting old buildings along it, but I didn't realize its history was far older.
The kiddos seemed to really like the craft projects. I found an older book at our local library that had quite a few handmade Native American games and other projects. The favorite seemed to be the Stick Game. Each kid decorated three flat sticks -- one with a dot pattern and two with a snake pattern. The opposite sides remain plain/blank.
Then they tossed their sticks in the air and there is a scoring system for the resulting patterns. (American Indian Games and Crafts by Charles L. Blood. NY: Franklin Watts, 1981.)
3 Plain Sides Up = 4 points
3 Marked Sides Up = 4 points
2 Snakes, 1 Plain = 6 points
1 Snake, 2 Plain = 6 points
1 Snake, 1 Plain, 1 Dots = 0 points
We also made some clay-colored play dough using cinnamon and other spices. I have a few pieces of Native American pottery shards that I collected on the Georgia coast, so I showed those to the kids. Then we had fun marking the pottery the way the Native Americans might have.
I showed them how to do simple coil pots as well. (Click HERE for a post that includes the play dough recipe.)
That are some great Native American sites in Georgia that are open to the public, but it ended up being too crazy of a week for a long field trip. Maybe later in the summer we'll go to Rock Eagle, Etowah Indian Mounds, Ocmulgee National Monument, the Chief Vann Historic Site, or the New Echota Historic Site.
This week for Camp Rainbow is "Wet and Wild" (water creatures and wetland habitats). We've got our library books and now we just need to schedule a few adventures with buddies...
Posts About Camp Rainbow:
Explanation of Camp Rainbow
Week One: Careers and Jobs -- Restaurant and Bank
Week One: Pizza Parlor
Week Two: Native Americans
Last post I wrote about Camp Rainbow, our loosely-gathered group of parents and kids who get together for themed fun during the summer. (Click HERE for that post.) During the "Careers and Jobs" theme last week, we decided to meet for lunch at Your Pie, a small chain pizzeria where they make personal-sized pizzas while you watch. After everybody ordered, we read aloud the non-fiction picture book Pizza Man by Marjorie Pillar (from our local library).
I called a couple of days in advance and asked if the kiddos might have a tour. The Your Pie staff were fabulous! They let the kids peek behind the counter and into storage areas, explaining how a restaurant works and answering their questions.
We lifted the kiddos up so they could see into the huge brick oven...
They even experienced the cold of the walk-in fridge.
Then the staff got out some extra dough and let the kids work with it. First the kiddos got to help hand-mix the bowl of semolina and fine cornmeal that keeps the pizzas from sticking.
The kids even got to try their hand at shaping and hand-tossing dough!
After leaving Your Pie, the group headed back to our place where we had a make-believe pizza kitchen set up for play. Here's our brick oven -- a cardboard box with a couple of red light sticks at the back. And the folks at Your Pie were so nice to give us some clean pizza boxes.
One of the moms cut circles of cream-colored quilted fabric to serve as crusts. (She even made them into four slices each and hemmed them!) Dark red fabric cut into wedges with pinking shears were pizza sauce to go on top.
Other moms helped cut toppings out of felt -- pepperoni, black olives, sausage, green pepper strips, pineapple pieces, and tomato slices.
(The mom who made the pineapple and tomatoes really knocked it out of the park. She added large stitches of embroidery thread for the pineapple and then glued together two layers/colors of felt for the tomatoes, trimming shapes out of the top layer with tiny scissors. She said she found lots of instructions for felt food on the web.) Not pictured: Small strips of cream-colored felt worked for shredded cheese.
In addition to the pizza kitchen (pictured above), we had a call center with a toy cash register, play money, and some check-box pizza order forms I created on my computer. We also had a real (but non-working) phone and a couple of computer keyboards that I found at Goodwill.
Even with a malfunctioning chef's hat, Eli was a happy Pizza Man!
Thanks, friends. And thanks, Your Pie!
One Mama's Two Cents:
Our pizza day felt like a real success. Book + tour + play = learning.
The play session got chaotic sometimes and the moms were kept busy deconstructing pizzas to refill the ingredient bins, but everybody had a great time. I think part of the success was that each mom talked to their kid(s) in advance about giving the pizza parlor game a try. The moms agreed that we'd try to keep the kids on task for ten minutes. After that, kids who were less interested could quietly drift downstairs to the playroom. (In preparing for the afternoon, I hid most of the other toys in our upstairs area but also locked the door to Eli's bedroom.) Most of the kids played for at least a half hour and some were still at it when folks had to disperse to head home. We had seven kids (ages 3 to 11), and that was a good number. If we do similar playdays in the future and our group has grown, we may have to limit it (first-come, first-served reservations) just to make sure it doesn't get too chaotic.
We've saved our pizza-making pieces so we can do the pizza parlor again later this summer. Once the summer is over, each family can take a pizza box and fabric fixings to play at home.
I think it was novel and fun for the kids to have a make-believe game created and set up by the parents. Usually kids either get a store-bought type of play set or create their own play set on the fly. The latter is fantastic and the way it should be most of the time! We certainly let the kids adjust things the way they wanted in the home pizza parlor. Still, what stood out about our pizza game is that this time the mamas modeled play ideas for the kiddos. It was refreshing fun for everybody.
Note: The idea for the home pizza parlor came from the Boonshoft Discovery Center in Dayton, OH. Click HERE for a blog post about it.
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P H O T O G R A P H Y
I N F O R M A T I O N
My primary camera is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel T5 with a Sigma DC 18-200mm lens (1:3.5-6.3) or Canon EFS 18-55mm lens. On occasion I also use my iPhone 6. For crisper images (when I'm not in a hurry to grab the shot), I use a Dolica Proline B100 tripod. I often tweak my images using Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.