Things we've found to occupy ourselves

Let's be honest, school, life...nothing's been going well.  So here are some of the things the children and I HAVE been doing copious amounts of recently!

YouTube/Video Games/Online Comics - Our internet/computer rules are s.t.r.i.c.t.  You can only use a device with permission, Dad or Mom have to know what you're looking at, you must use the device in a room with an adult, you may not hide the screen from view, you may not navigate away from your page...so, you know, the computer isn't a free for all.  But the kids still enjoy stuff!  Here are some of the creators we love:

Mr. Maker - do you remember this guy from ages ago?  He's just the right level of craftiness for the soon-to-be-six year old, but the eight year old is so artistic that she does all of the crafts, too.

Simon's Cat - A funny little cat cartoon for my cat-loving 10yo.  Many of them are 'shorts' of under 10 minutes, but there are a fewer longer full-length cartoons.

Half-Asleep Chris - We like this guy's cat videos as well!  Now, he also has other videos on various topics, and while I can't picture him discussing anything inappropriate I haven't actually watched all of them so, preview if it matters to you.  But he's very family friendly.

Breaking Cat News - a really funny online comic.  Cats are big around here these days.  If you haven't noticed.

Prodigy Math - I've talked about this before!  My children love the online Prodigy Math Game.  It's free to play, although there are upgrades, which we don't bother paying for.  Children are little good wizards who solve math problems to progress through levels and fight bad guys.  There's no gore or unpleasantness at all.

TVOKids.com - Ontario's public broadcasting children's network.  You can play educational games online at a preschool or school age level (Really, nothing above maybe grade 6 level).  There are no ads.

Jacquie Lawson English Garden - If you've liked her e-cards, and you've taken my advice to buy her Advent Calendar, then you might like this game, as well.  She has an interactive English Garden one, and also a Curio Shop one!  Each game slowly unfolds over twelve days, and then is available forever for you to play.  The girls especially enjoy planting gardens and cleaning the greenhouse and what have you.

America's Test Kitchen - Let's Get Cooking.  Very popular DS game with the 8yo mini-chef, let me tell you.  She made maple glazed pork chops for us from the instructions on here.

Puzzles, of course.  At the beginning of quarantine we did essentially every single puzzle in our house.  So we were a little puzzled out.  But we just picked up a new one so I have a feeling we're about to ramp up puzzle time again.

And speaking of puzzles, adult-level paint-by-numbers are a thing!  I thought I wouldn't like them because I couldn't stand adult colouring books but surprisingly I LOVE THEM.  Here's the one I'm doing right now:

They take quite a while, obviously.  But I think the reason I'm enjoying it so much is that unlike colouring pages, these require absolutely no thinking.  I just put the numbered colour in the numbered square.  Sometimes you need mindless.

More Links To Videos...

Here are some more videos we've watched recently.

Can you turn seashells into glass at home?

Dying fabric with houseplants. 

Solving the incredibly difficult vending machine puzzle box.  (Chris Ramsey uses some colourful language and 2 instances of innuendo.   It took me a minute to catch  them, but they were there. )

The process of learning to use a 3-D pen.

Myth-testing the movie scenes/pranks from Christmas movies. (To see whether you could actually shoot your eye out with a Red Ryder BB gun, they shoot a purchased cow eyeball. )

Time lapse of ants building a nest in transparent gel.

Sneaking peacock eggs under a turkey. 

Building the world's greatest cat castle

And then a Golden Gate Bridge for cats

A review of cat toys

Making a keyboard tuned to cat meows (we got a on a cat video kick)

A house filled with cat walkways

A truly amazing tree house

Repairing a broken butterfly wing

The Zipf mystery

2) A Stroller!

Today's small, annoying task wasn't photographed.  But it did happen!  I gave away an umbrella stroller that had sat in my garage for a very long time, unused, to a lady expecting a baby.  May it serve her well.  That's my irritating task checked off.

So far - not feeling less stressed.  Pushing through.

Book Review -The Boundless

The Boundless  by Kenneth Oppel

Read to the 9yo.

Let's take a moment to appreciate that lovely cover art to start with.  Isn't that striking?  Okay , onward!

This is a novel that bridges several genres if there ever was one.  It's set at the time of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and actually opens with the railway nearing completion.  The historical fact is then heavily overlaid with a thick veneer of fiction and magical realism.  The railway is being completed,  but the work has been treacherous because of...murderous sasquatch?  A historical Cornelius Van Horne is almost swept over a cliff in an avalanche during the hammering of the historic last spike...which is made of $200,000 in gold and diamonds?!  It's all so bizarre and surreal and fantastical!   I remember my long, dull Canadian history classes, and this novel tickled my funnybone.  That first chapter sets us up for a jump three years into the future,  where the young boy protagonist  is now a young man, the poor railway worker father is now head of some department, and the semi-mythical Van Horne has achieved his greatest dream - the building of a several MILE long two-storey train called The Boundless.   And on that train is none other than...the entombed body of its creator,  forever crossing the country, clasping the diamond studded spike.  The perfect temptation for the unscrupulous aboard the Boundless on her maiden voyage.

The Bad
The main problem we encountered (as I've mentioned before), is that I'm reading a sensitive 9yo books that were written for the not-so-sensitive 9-12 year old middle school audience.   As you may imagine, this calls for some on-the-ball editing, which I'm actually pretty good at.  However, if you are just handing the book over, some topics might be more...challenging.   Fortunately my 9yo is not at that reading level so at the moment it's a moot point.

Here are some of the things I edited or was careful of: the son leaves town without telling his mother, a bad guy says bad guy type things, someone is stabbed in the woods ( the murder is part of solving the case in the book), creepy legends are told and creepy creatures exist, the protagonist  ( I think he's 14?) sees a boy and girl flirting and kissing, the father and son have a strained relationship,  a boy thinks about a girl's legs and blushes, and so forth.  For a teen reading this book, I don't think anything would fall outside of what you'd find in, say, an Agatha Christie novel, but for a 9yo, I edited.

The Good

History! Magic!

In short - I'd give it to a teen to read on their own, but not to a younger child.  However with a lot of editing you can make it work around age 10.

1) Around the house batteries!

I'm trying to tie up loose ends, friends!  I'm determined that if I just do one of the tasks I've been putting off per day, it will result in me having a much, much smaller to-do list of little, annoying tasks.  For me, the key is that I get things DONE.  Not done WELL, necessarily, but done.  Perfect is the enemy of good.  And every task has a whole, long backstory, illuminated with the twinkle of anxiety and confusion.

Keep this in mind.

Today, the task is this:

These are dead batteries.   Where I live, you can recycle batteries, and there are multiple places around town to drop them off.  I could throw them away, and I'm sure most people do this, but I feel as if I have the option to recycle,  then I should.

So I save them.  Dead batteries.  In a baggie.  Because this makes more sense than throwing them out, I guess.

But of course I never remember to take the dead battery baggie with me anywhere to drop them off, and they just keep building, and then the pandemic comes and everything closes except the grocery store battery recycling dropoff, and I  need to walk over and that requires time alone unless I'm bringing everyone and...

this is when something in the back of my head goes *ping* in a gentle, bell like tone.  *prepare for shut down in 3...2....1*  And then I mindlessly open a book and eat a piece of cheese.

Today it was rainy, and the dog was acting nuts and I knew she would insist on joining me, and I wasn't sure how that would work, and my injured foot hurt and David was tired and there were all sorts of reasons not to go, but I got the baggie of batteries, and I walked to the store, and I recycled them.  There.  One thing done.  Let's see if I can keep the momentum going.

Book Review (two books today!) - Lost In The Barrens and its sequel

My 10yo is finally old enough to listen to this excellent classic book from my own Canadian childhood, and boy was he invested in it!   It's a story of survival and courage and friendship that really did stand the test of time well.  Which is not to say there aren't aspects of the story that prove challenging, because there are.  The casual racisms of writing set in the mid-century are present in abundance, and if you are unfamiliar with where to skip, or alter terminology, or stop to explain, then some judicious pre-reading might be in order.

However, I think the struggle to edit is worth it, because rarely have I come across such a fantastic example of what a 10yo boy who was stretching his wings would care to read.

Jaime McNair and his Cree friend, Awasin Meewasin, join a hunt with the neighbouring Chippawa tribe in the forbidden Barrenlands, where Jaime's impetuous nature gets them separated from their companions.  They end up spending the winter in the Barrens, and the story gives a good mix of survival and triumph type storylines along with extra adventures that don't play primary rolls in the narrative.  The book ends with their safe return to the forests and their families.

And then, of course, if you read Lost in the Barrens you are left with all sorts of unanswered questions.  What happens to Peetyuk?  Whose grave did the boys pillage?  Do they return to the barrenland homestead?

Well, worry not, because the sequel can answer two of those questions.  Cough.

The sequel is more ethically challenging than the first book, and although (again) I think the adventure story, history, writing, etc. are worth having to stop and explain why we don't use a phrase anymore or having to skip several paragraphs, I can understand someone stopping after book one.  Jamie is less kind, here.  The law is evaded.  There are sad, and sometimes scary legends.  The racism is more apparent in Mowat's descriptions of the Inuit, and so forth.  There was only one scene I skipped entirely, when a young lady dismisses the unwelcome attentions of a man, although I changed how Peetyuk spoke and skipped the more gruesome bits of some legends.

In return, there is a thrilling, fast moving account of adventure and excitement and impending adulthood that offers children a glimpse into history and the feeling that they, too, can be the courageous heroes and save the people from ruin.

Book Review - Everything on a Waffle

I should be upfront here and say...Polly Horvath is one of my top five favourite modern children's authors.  Her writing is just amazing, her characters vibrant and real.  Although there is the occasional phrase I might skip over (usually a swear word), I cannot sing her praises highly enough.  I feel like when it comes to children's literature, authors are so keen to either 'make the story gritty and real' or 'pretend everything is going to turn out like a Hallmark movie' that they forget that the perfect genre for children has already been invented: the classic Fairy Tale.  And that's what Horvath gives us.  Not retelling the old tales, but her own stories in the format of the fairy tale.  There is good, and bad, there is moral and virtue and faith and striving and redemption.  And this is what children want; they want to know that the adults understand the imperfections of their child-worlds.  When I finished the book my 8yo kept telling me how much she had enjoyed it, how the bad person hadn't been empathetic, how the faith in return had been so strong.  It was a story that sparked so many conversations and I'm so happy, because I love all of the fairy stories!