Busy with School

People say you can tell a family home schools by the projects lying all over the place in various stages of progress.  It's a mess!  That's our house.  Right now several little plastic tubs of stagnant pond water adorn the counter and a microscope is plugged in right next to the kitchen table.  Pond scum is percolating outside the back door, green slime soaking up the sunshine.  Liana had seeds in little dishes trying to germinate in their various habitats around the house, including the refrigerator.  Now the survivors have been planted in containers all in a row on a sunny window sill, Liana hovering over them like a nervous mother. 

Liana also has to collect, name and display 20 leaf specimens for her botany class and some of them at this moment are pressed under stacks of heavy books, the unidentified mystery leaves shriveling crisp and brown on the dining room table.  If she doesn't know their names, they get tossed, I guess.  Today I will help her iron wax paper to the perfect, flat leaves and she will cleverly think of a way to mount them.  

Our house is cluttered with books of all sorts--right now I can see Hamlet, Microscopic Life, and Trees of North America.   Scattered around them are papers upon papers, including Arielle's colorful drawings of her lab report, colored pencils left out.  Then there are the notebooks and the workbooks and the math CDs and Spanish worksheets and the textbooks.  My house is rarely neat, and often chaotic, but who would want a different life?  Certainly not me.

A week ago we all went to a nearby park and with a soup ladle attached to a big stick with electrical tape, Fred scooped up slimy, green pond scum.  He also pulled up some deeper water and we put them in four little containers and fed our samples some food to make our cultures--hay, rice, soil and egg yolk.  We kept these at home in a shoebox about four days, each getting stinkier by the hour. 

We were certainly rewarded for our hard work!  We made slides and observed numerous microscopic creatures.  The more we watched, the more we saw!  It was fascinating!  To our delight (and horror!) we found a "huge" transparent larva.  It looked like a big, hairy monster, with a hook on its face reaching out to other creatures, all from its tiny drop of water.  The amazing thing is that if you looked at the slide you could see nothing.  Yet here in the microscopic world, a myriad of organisms go about their business of eating and swimming and whatever else these creatures do. 

The year is just beginning.  What other new discoveries will we find?  Would I be observing microscopic life or discussing Shakespeare or gathering leaves if not for my girls?  How boring life would be!  Sometimes I long for the school days when we cuddled on the couch with a good read-aloud or made projects of sculpy clay and paint.  But these new adventures will later be memories we hold dear in our hearts.  And then one day it will all be over and the girls will be grown up.  I want to hold on to these days forever.