MilitaryKid loves pretzels. So I wasn’t too surprised when he asked for me to purchase the make-your-own pretzel package when we stopped at our Amish Grocery Store. I suggested though that MK make the pretzels and he agreed.

Once home he happily pulled out the bowls, gathered his supplies, turned on the oven, and read the directions. My chin was on the floor. Well, not really but I was shocked. MK still asks me to make his breakfast. And his lunch. And his snacks. Of course I make dinner, but this is a kid who really does not cook, too often. I was surprised. Pleasantly surprised. Actually I was so surprised that MK was into rolling out the dough before I pulled out the camera. Here he is starting the twist.

It was HIS idea to pull out his ruler. The directions said the roll should be 32″ before twisting and that was what his were.

Next he dipped them into a baking soda water bath.

He carefully piled on the salt.

And piled it on.

Oh, they were all gone so quickly I never got any shots of the finished product. Ummmmm.

Tomorrow, Pretzels, part 2

Anyone who has visited my blog for a little while will know that we hike. We hike allot. Everywhere. All the time. Even when it is 95 degrees and most sane folks are at the pool.

We don’t have a pool although if we did we would be in it every day. I know I would be in it all day and all night. DH won’t spring for a pool either although it is the first thing I’d purchase if I were to ever win the lottery. This area of Delaware lacks public pools, or affordable private pools too. Oh well, there’s always hiking or the beach.

So we hike. One of our favorite spots is White Clay Creek State Park. Of course Brutus comes along, on his 6′ lead as required by the State Park.

Pretty hike along the White Clay Creek on a very, hot day. Ironically when we returned to the picnic area where our car was parked the skies opened up pouring buckets on us. Who would have known, but since the car was close by we didn’t get too wet.

Lovely hike. No hills but it was peaceful.

Summer to me is not complete without at least one trip to a fair. The Delaware State Fair is a great little fair, and let’s face it, Delaware is a small state. It is an agricultural state for sure, particularly once you travel south of the ditch (That’s what we locals call the Delaware-Chesapeake Canal) .

Ahhh, the fair. If you haven’t been to one you should try it, and that’s coming from this city-slicker. But DH converted me to needing to visit a fair to make summer complete many, many years ago. You’ll never know what you will find either. Our surprise this year was the ’slow-bicycle race’. Amazingly I got ScienceKid to give it a try.

Yes, the objective is to go as slow as possible. The record was 45 seconds but most kids were in the 10 to 20 second range which is where SK was.

The boys were also dreaming about the rider they would love to find in the shed for them to use. This photo was not staged, other than to ask them to look at me. Do you see that longing in their eyes?

First, though we spent time walking through ALL the barns. Cows,

and cows:

and goats:

and sheep:

and hogs.

hmm. Notice something strange? The cows, goats, and sheep were all eating, but not the hogs. Nope. They are relaxing. So why do we say, ‘you eat like a pig’? In all the fairs I’ve attended I have never, ever seen the hogs eat. The other animals though, always seem to be pigging out. I have seen hogs eat particularly since BIL in Ohio is a hog farmer, but not at the fair. Not the way the cows and sheep and goats are.
In the commercial building there’s always a sand sculptor. This year it had lots of details:

We watched sheep being clipped in anticipation of their show:

and we watched the sheep judging:

We also watched the Lego Building Contest.

And that’s something else I like about a fair. Watching all the competitors. This year I was determined to have us enter several items but I missed the deadline, by two days. Next year though. Next year….

Then there are the rides. We rarely go on rides at a fair since MK loses his cookies so easily but we do enjoy looking them over. This one was a stomach twister for sure and one we had never seen before.

MK and I actually had trouble watching the ride, and watching how the folks were twisted and turned and twisted some more.

Food. Yes there’s lots of food at the fair but I don’t have any photos of the food since I was busy eating elephant ears and…..

Work hard, play hard. Right? Both MilitaryKid

and ScienceKid

did a little project/work for Granddad before we headed back home. They did a nice job in a very short time clearing the weeds from the garden. It wasn’t a huge job and took them barely 30 minutes but MK would rather play all the time. I have not figured out how to alter his attitude and get him to be a willing worker. This has always been an issue with MK, so what is a mom to do other than to have him do the assigned jobs. And then praise the work.

On the way home we stopped off at Myers Farm for milk shakes as their reward for doing a nice job.

Several blocks from the main area of the Central Pennsylvania Art Festival was another little art show. Here on Hiester Street:

A fun street with a great mural.

The artwork runs in the center of the street, and the artists do their work on the street. Beautiful chalk pictures.

Many artists were still working on their art piece:

The artists sit on cardboard to keep from smearing the chalk.

Look at these works. What made it really fun was listening to the boys name the original pieces name and artist. Guess they are learning.

But this one was our favorite:

For five days State College becomes a small town teaming with artists selling their wares of pottery, watercolors, photos, sculptors, jewelry, fiberart, and anything else you can think an artist might make to sell. The Central Pennsylvaia Arts Festival lasts for five days. Five fun days.

Streets are closed, and folks walk everywhere to view the artists wares.

But this small town takes this one step further by bringing in musicians to play jazz, rock, folk, country, blues, oldies, and harpists. We listened to the Rustical Quality String Band:

There were a few instruments we had never seen before. Here’s one and we still don’t have a name for it. Do you?

Then there are the dancers and the magicians and comedians and… the list goes on and on!

This magician was quite entertaining, and a young fella whose age I would guess at 12yo. Magician Joe mcNitt and his lovely assistant Liz truly had great tricks and stage presence. These kids were really into interacting with this young magician. Fun to see.

Ricky Lee was the last musician we watched and this is a rather rare shot too.

We never saw his eyes, and he definitly appeared to be quite afraid of the audience since this is how we usually saw him:

The best act by far was the Footbagger. He was AEWSOME. Footbagging is taking a little hacky sack ball, kicking it into the air, and doing tricks. For 2 or 3 minutes, continuously, to music. Totally amazing. At the end of the show he invited some kids up on stage to try footbagging. Four taps was all these kids could muster but one lucky kid walked away with a new hacky sack.

And the kids, they loved the Arts Festival. They wanted to attend the concerts, and performances, and look at what was being sold.  Boy, did they soak it all in.

For years we have traveled in and around State College, PA and without fail MilitaryKid would ask to visit the Pennylvania Military Museum. If his request fell on his Granddad’s ears he was told that it was too small, or worst, just that look was given. The one that means, ‘you’ve got to be kidding that anyone would ever bother going to that museum.’ Every time I see that look though I would remember where I’ve seen that look before. Every time I requested to go to any museum, all through my childhood. You name it that look was given.
It might be one reason why I go out of my way to visit museums, whether they are large and known, or small and never heard of.

We visit.

And that is just what we did this summer. Finally in MK’s mind. Sure the museum is small. Sure it took us only an hour to travel through it, and no, I wouldn’t return but now we have seen it. Oh, and MilitaryKid was delighted that we traveled through it even though it was short on military stuff.

Can you see the smile on MK’s face? He gets quite excited whenever he gets close to a tank. ScienceKid is doing what he always does at a museum; read the information. MK already knows the facts about this tank though.

They nicely pose for me, but….

Boys will be boys, of course.

So over the last month we have been doing a few things other than contemplating how to speed up MilitaryKid’s math computation, and whether or not we should move forward this coming year or just have MK work on skills and slow down a bit in history.   Today I uploaded a ton of photos and my plan is to write several posts tonight while the boys are at the Demolition Derby. There will be posts on the Pennsylvania Art Festival held in State College every July for 5 days, a visit to the Pennsylvania Military Museum, a Sunday drive through the Amish countryside, the Delaware State Fair, and maybe a few others if I can find the photos for it.

I don’t know about you but I’m finding it hard to find the time to write my blog this summer. Oh, I have composed many, many posts but then just can’t find the time to write it out. At least one thing is coming OFF my plate this week, and that is my physical therapy. YEA!!! My knee is feeling much better since my right and left leg muscles are back to being matched in strength. I even went bike riding with the boys today and just had a twinge of knee pain at the rides end. Good thing it was the end of the ride.

Background:
MilitaryKid is entering 6th grade, has used Singapore Math from the beginning, along with R&S and Calculadders and Math Worksheet Factory. I LOVE math, it is my favorite subject and enjoy teaching it, and do math for fun, but realize I MUST be doing something WRONG. Why do I feel this way you ask? DS’s has learned his math facts but he is SLOOOOOOOOOOW, really SLOOOOOOOOW and I know this. His IOWA test results confirmed my thoughts last year so we focused on speed drills this past year in addition to his normal math work. We did speed drills most everyday, and his speed did improve tremendously but there are those results.

I was SO SURE that his math computation would improve but his IOWA test results just came in the door today. Math Computation at 33% or a grade equivalent of 5.2. I just pulled out last year’s to compare —- he had a GE of 5.8 last year. It wasn’t that he just missed the questions, but he ran out of time on this section too. He didn’t work fast enough, compute fast enough, and accurately. What’s a math-loving-mom to do?

On the positive side his spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and thus his Language area was a full grade level low on his 3rd grade IOWA test. Last year it inched up to just a bit below grade level, and this year it jumped to grade 10.5 (We used Spelling Power for 4th and 5th grade, along with R&S LA program) . Nice to see such improvement. His Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary, including all the individual scores in those areas are whopping great, actually surprising how high they are, and improving every year. But then there’s the math computation……

What do I do? The math computation scores are really just confirming what I had thought but I was hoping it would be better than last year. And it wasn’t. While I knew we had improved, gotten faster, MK still struggles both with working quickly and accurately.

Time? Is that the answer? Just continue with what we are doing and give it more time? Or is there some other approach? No, we will not drop math computation or stop working on improving his math computational speed. I see it as an important foundational stone to working successfully through Algebra, Trig, Calc,….. But what else should we do to improve the speed and accuracy??

I’m walking back from my 2 mile walk with Brutus this morning when a car slows down. Thankfully my neighbors are all quite nice, friendly, and while none hs none seem to really notice that we do hs. It is nice. So my neighbor Crystal first shares some pleasanties about Brutus’ size and whether he is finished growing. He isn’t and should grow about another 3″ and put on another 20 - 50#. He sat looking pretty and I was quite pleased with his behavior.

She then mentions that one of her dear friend’s is pulling her 4th and 5th grader out of the local school system and would I be willing to come to a ’social tea’. Crystal has many hs’ing friends, how or why I do not know but she does, and she is arranging this ’social tea’ so this new hs’er can meet us. What a wonderful friend she has, and how lucky too, to have a supportive friend that will try to get you connected with a support system.

Too often I hear or read about the new hs’er who feels her friends have deserted her when she starts to hs that I just had to share this mornings event. I’m jealous too.