Phoebe's 13th Birthday

Phoebe turned 13 in all its glory. 

We have three teenagers in the house now. How different this stage is than the child/toddler/baby stages were. Phoebe is a delightful young lady ~ tall and beautiful. She lives on the edge of emotion ~ silent and brooding at times, demonstrably excited or angry or hyper at others. She's so talented with her art and sewing projects. She always asks what we ladies are discussing in our Educational Get-Togethers and has firm opinions about the topic and wants to know what we decided when I get back from the group. 

Dad and I took her to the art museum as her birthday activity and then had Rosella's cafe for a snack. Elizabeth made a Boston Cream Pie for her cake. 

These were some of the paintings and drawings she's done for Art Class at Co-op. 

"What?! What's so funny?"

What she said as she stuffed her mouth ~ popcorn in one hand and strawberries in the other. She can't wait to have a boyfriend who dumps her so she can binge on a whole gallon of ice cream while dramatically crying and watching chic flics. I think that's what she was pretending in this scene here. 

Seattle Visits San Antonio

Tonya and Cory, my younger sister and brother, made the flight from Seattle to San Antonio to visit us for my birthday and get the cousins together. Had we ever had all the "Clouse" cousins together? I think not. This was a first. Cory, as a matter of fact, hadn't met our youngest, Harrison. 

They stayed at a hotel with a nice windowed elevator. Jordan, Tonya's oldest, is autistic and he LOVES elevators. I didn't get all the pictures of him in all the elevators he went in while he was here. But he went in quite a few. :-) It gave us time to talk while he was zooming up and down and making them stop at every floor and getting out to watch them from a balcony to observe their mechanics. 

Standing around the hotel figuring out plans for our weekend. 

The Alamo was at the top of the list of places to go. 

The fountain at the Alamo. I can't believe they moved all the canons. They tipped them upright and made them into part of the fence lining the waiting area. I don't know why they did that. A hostess said it was because everyone was touching them too much. But they won't touch them if they're a part of a fence? That doesn't make sense. 

We walked some of the Riverwalk after the Alamo. Ate at Rita's on the Riverwalk. Mexican food, of course. Their homemade guacamole was especially good. 

We didn't get any pics from Saturday ~ that was hanging at home, flying kites, having coffee and dessert at Elizabeth's Avocado Cafe, park play, back home to hang out.

Sunday was church, In-N-Out Burger (a first for Tonya and the boys and maybe for Cory too), and Cory took me out to Pappadeaux's to celebrate my birthday! We knew we wanted seafood and I had always thought it'd be fun to try Pappadeaux's since it was Cajun. We ordered so much food! I ate on the leftovers for three meals. But we got lots of seafood. Alligator (tastes like a mix of chicken and calamari), crab cakes (the best tasting dish, imo), boudin' (Tonya's favorite of the night), gumbo, crawfish, salmon..... And then Cory ordered Cheesecake. We brought half of that home and the kids finished it off. 

Monday was our last day together. We visited Hemisfair Park downtown and discovered there was much more to it than we've ever explored. 

There are all the rope/climby features that the kids head straight for. 

And we played corn-hole, ping pong, checkers and chess.

And then we drug the kids away from climbing things and headed toward other parts. We discovered butterfly gardens, hula hoop fields, splash pad, large sand area, restaurants and coffee shops. You could spend all day there, for sure. We might try that sometime....

Jordan is feeding the birds. They enjoyed him, he enjoyed them. Unless one squawked too close to his ear. Then he chased them. 

Seeing the cousins together and enjoying each other's company was especially a joy for me. Jordan is often off on his own, but he would tease the girls sometimes and give me hugs and ask lots of questions and go on the elevators with the kids. Joshua played games, and connected with H and Phoebes on Roblox, and helped Jon build a fire in the backyard. 

Mimi and Papa stopped by on their way back to Missouri. We ate at Cracker Barrel (Liz' choice). I tried their fried chicken livers and I was mightily please with them. I wouldn't order them all the time as a favorite, but they knew how to cook 'em. 

At the mall ~ Lego store, Apple store, Kate Spade ~ ooo, get out of there! $300 for a dress! 

Jonathan ~ since he's taking violin lessons, we have him play a piece for whatever family comes around to hear. 

I was honored that Cory and Tonya spent their vacation time and money to come visit us. It was truly a joy ~ a great time of getting to know one another anew and reminiscing. Love you all! Mimi, Papa, Nana and Aupa, siblings and nephews.

King Ranch and Kites

We met up with Mimi and Papa in Kingsville to celebrate Papa's birthday. The last few years we have talked about touring King Ranch, but then Papa would say, "We'll do it next year." So this year we finally said, "Let's do it!"

It's quite the story of a guy who grew up poor but went on to make a fortune. He wanted the railroad to come near his ranch, so he built a town. He started a printing business and newspaper. He had almost a little village on his ranch so that his "Kinenos" (ranch hands) could live with their families and have school for their children. They bred a better cow. They bred a better horse. They made their own saddles and wove their own saddle blankets when they couldn't find such that were good enough. I was pretty impressed by the time the tour was over. Lots of vision and business sense. 

That there is a javelina. 

It's supposedly a different family than the wild hog; they run all over King Ranch.

Ah, my precious Phoebe. 

She is getting ready to go to a Murder Mystery Birthday Party right here. She was playing the part of a snobby actress. She couldn't wait. 

And do you see that book shelf? Phillip bought me a new bookshelf for all our school and personal books. It doesn't hold them all, of course, but we now have a place for all our current books so they aren't stacked up in weird places in the garage. I love the look of books on shelves! 

Phillip made this trench run set for Harrison and his Star War ships. He drew up the plans on the computer and figured out how to make the trench so it could be torn down and put away. Pretty ingenious and super fun for H. 

This was so pretty! Phoebe is going through Discovering Density , and this was the first experiment using different kinds of liquids and figuring out how to layer them without them mixing (the densest liquids must be put in first, etc.)

Neighbor friend and Harrison heading to an empty field to fly the kite for the first time this year.

We've been working hard on the homeschool scheduling app that Phillip built. We've got lots of bloggers reviewing it and an online convention and google ads and spiffing up the website.... Lots going on in that area. The kids and I have been using it every day since last August and it definitely makes my homeschool life easier. Phillip is doing great work.

Lots of Field Trips

Or at least those are the pictures I took..... field trips. 

February blah's are a real thing. I've read about other homeschoolers having them. I'm sure school teachers do as well. I didn't think it pertained to me. But alas, I find this year that it does! You just don't want to do anymore school! But you must press forward if you're going to finish before summer. 

And my kids have become sticklers for their summer. They want to have ALL Of It. And they always do, no matter if we finish the end of June or the beginning. We do 36 weeks of school ~ no more. Their breaks were had throughout the school year if the summer happens to be a shorter one. I guess it's the living in a neighborhood full of kids knocking on your door that makes them aware of any loss of summer.

Anyway, we're pressing through the blah's.

We joined a couple of families to celebrate the birthday of one of their boys. He wanted to celebrate at this park called Mud Creek. 

We've had our own doin's with Mud Creek and they weren't pretty. They were hot and creek-less. I decided that place was a bust and never went back. 

But there is so much more to Mud Creek! You just have to take the path less traveled. The path that I didn't realize was a path. It leads to caves! And woods and trails and this cool hole in the ground that probably would be an excellent place to explore and get into trouble if it wasn't capped by an iron cage. 

Our kids total a dozen. I met the moms through a facebook homeschool something-or-other. We meet together every couple of weeks now to discuss educational related items and chapters from a book called The Great Tradition, edited by Richard Gamble. I read Plato and Clement of Alexandria and it's awesome.

And then we joined one of the families atop the parking garage near Scobee Planetarium and we watched the Lunar Eclipse. The Super Blood Wolf Moon to be exact. There were hundreds of people there and IT WAS COLD! So cold. We had blankets and our box of hats and gloves, but we're pansies with cold weather since we've been in the South these past 10 or so years.

There were quite a few telescopes there and we looked through several high-powered ones to see the moon. 

I take a picture of our water tower every so often. Why do I love it so much? It makes me happy for some reason. Liz said it reminds her of a benevolent robot watching over us. Like from the When the Tripods Came series. 

On the way to Mid-Winter Camp we stop at Bon Ton Meat Market and get snacks. And they have these yummy little pies. I took a pic to ask Phillip which one he wanted. He chose cherry. He wished he had chosen peach. I wished I had chosen one of my own. 

On the way to Mid-Winter Camp we also always pass by Bastrop State Park. This year we left a few hours early and spent some time hiking the trails. There was a fire there in 2011 and then a flood in 2015. The Park is recovering from the fire ~ it's really neat to see the new growth and watch how a habitat recovers from a large forest fire. The first year we went to camp we could see that there had been a recent fire, so every year we get to watch the progress of growth as we drive through the Loblolly Pines. 

Liz.

A dew-laden dandelion puff from a walk in the neighborhood. 

Mummifying a Chicken

That's right. We did it. We mummified a stinkin' chicken. 

The kids were horrified. Embarrassed. They thought it was too much of a homeschool thing to do and didn't want the neighbors to know. Even now Phoebe is shrieking, "No one wants to hear about a mummified chicken!!" 

Well, I'm a homeschool mommy blogger and I'm gonna tell the story. When you kids read this in 10 or 20 years, you'll be glad I documented the process so that you too can embarrass my precious grandchildren with a mummified chicken.

So we are studying Ancient Egypt and Her Neighbors for school. And a mummified chicken deal came across my screen at some point and I thought, "Hey, that fits right in with our ancient studies, and it will be a good hands on project for the kids." And I put it somewhere on a schedule to make sure it would get done. 

We mostly used the directions from this blogger. I enjoyed her descriptions and pictures. She did say it was by far the stinkiest thing she'd ever done, so I was expecting foul odors. But we never had any. At all. Maybe we're really good at this. I was very impressed with us.

This was after the first changing of the "dressing."

I'll lay out a step-by-step process below, so we'll breeze through the pictures first. (Jon just walked by with a big groan, "Are you blogging all the chicken stuff? Uuuuggghhh.")

These are the ingredients used in the mixture we stuffed the chicken in every week.

Just about there. See how the skin is yellowing? It's doing what it's supposed to. With no odor about it.

Mixed the stuff up in this big bowl.

Put that chicken in a Ziplock and pack it with the mixture. Set it in the garage for another week....

She's finally done!

I got more gag reflex from the kids than from anything else in their young lives that they've had to gag reflex about. My momma taught me how to cut up a chicken when I was young. It was something you learned. There's no gag reflex in chickens! You just do it! 

We oiled it, sprinkled generously with cinnamon and wrapped her in cloths.

I told Liz to get me a pan or piece of cardboard or something to display the chicken on. 

She got me a box. 

I must say we could have done a better job wrapping the thing. I'm sure the professionals of Egypt who spent 40 or 70 days (Google gave me conflicting info) mummifying a pharaoh did a much better job. But they were getting paid. And weren't dealing with gag-reflex children. 

The thing is now buried in our back yard. We should be able to dig it up in a few years and it will seem just as fresh and pert as the day we bought her in HEB. Right? 

Mummified Chicken Recipe

Ingredients:

Alcohol (not that kind. The Isopropyl kind.)

A small whole chicken

Paper Towels

Gallon size (or larger) freezer bags

4 boxes of salt (we used boxes of canning and pickling salt because it was cheap and seemed to work just fine)

4 boxes of baking soda

4 containers baking powder

Rice

Spices

Linen strips (we used cheesecloth)

Vegetable oil

1. Rinse off the chicken and take out any innards that might be stuck inside (heart, neck, gizzard, etc.). Some people save these innards to mummify separately and put in canopic jars. You can also make a sarcophagus and amulets, but I was only interested in the chicken part. 

2. Dry off the chicken (inside and under wings and everywhere). Pour rubbing alcohol all over it and inside it and pat that dry.

3. Mix up in a large bowl: rice (half a cup maybe? it helps soak up moisture), a box of salt, a container of baking soda and baking powder, some spices (cinnamon or cloves or nutmeg). Spoon mixture inside your chicken. Place chicken inside large freezer bag and stuff the mixture all around it. Our gallon size wasn't quite big enough to be able to shut it once we filled the bag with chicken and salt mixture. So I fit another bag on top of the other and it all did fine. Like I said, we never had smells. 

4. Do step 3 as often as you see the salt mixture getting wet. A couple of the blogs I read said to change it once a week, but I think we did it about every 5 days. By the way, the Egyptians used Natron instead of salt ~ it's a naturally occurring mixture of soda ash and baking soda.

5. Once the salt mixture is no longer showing signs of moisture, your chicken should be mummified! Ours was a dark yellowish color. I was expecting more of a change in appearance. It was definitely shrunken. I could seal the whole thing with all the salt in one bag toward the end. The legs had the look of a smoked leg of turkey. Anyway, the only way I really knew it was done is because the salt wasn't wet anymore. I believe we took 5 weeks to complete this project. 

6. Rub off as much salt mixture as you can. Pour oil on it (we used vegetable oil; I'm actually not sure if that was a good idea or not, but the thing sat in our garage for several days and all I could smell was cinnamon). Shake spices all over; we just used cinnamon since we had quite a bit of it. 

7. Cut up linen strips of cloth or white cloth or sheets or whatever you have or can find at the grocery store (which was cheesecloth for me). Lovingly wrap your family chicken (it's like a pet by now, right?) in these strips of cloth. Some people dipped the cloths in a watered down glue so that they would harden. This is more like what the Egyptians did. They wrapped amulets inside the different layers of linen and then poured resin over it to harden and protect the body from moisture. This makes me wonder if our buried chicken will indeed be its fresh self in several years. We'll keep you posted.