My girls are participating in a summer musical produced by a local children’s theater group.  There are between 100-200 people per cast, and 2 casts.  Needless to say, an 8 year old and a 5 year old are not going to get huge parts.  In fact, during this entire 1.5 hour play, my girls are on stage the last 10 minutes.

The original fee for this was pretty reasonable for a 6 week activity.  But tack on the cost of costumes, driving to rehearsals, and tickets so hubby and I can watch the play, and we are probably spending $200-$250 combined for the girls to participate.

Not to mention my stress level regarding the costumes(being pregnant really exaserbates things likes this)–I hope the director isn’t going to be irritated that my daughter wants to be a tulle skirt wearing racecar driver.

Is the value for my children worth this, or is the time and money better spent elsewhere?

They have fun.  My 8 year old wishes she was on stage more(and she could’ve been, without lines, if I had been willing to commit more time and costume money) and my 5 year old is just excited to be a part of it.  This week is the big week of the show, where every single day has 4-6 hour time commitments.  But dividing that $100 dollars by 2, they could have each done a week’s camp somwhere else.  Would that have been more fun?  That $200 could have purchased family passes to the Zoo and Museum, with money left over.  Would that have had more of a fun factor?

Then there is the learning.  I would say the big learning here isn’t about stage presence, or acting.  It is that you don’t always get the part you want, and you have to put in a lot of work for even a tiny sliver of stage time.  A good lesson, yes, but worth their only summer activity?  They already know the whole “you don’t always get what you want lesson” from never getting a candy bar in the checkout lane.  Does it really take this kind of committment to learn this lesson?

And yes, we all know “There are no small parts, just small actors”.  Trust me, these conversations about value are not being had with the children, rather between my husband and I.  They committed to being in this play and they are going to do the best darn job they can, and follow thru on their commitment.  Because that is how we role in this family.

But when next summer roles around, you can be sure we will be having a much deeper discussion about time, money, and value with our oldest.

If you live in the Denver area, make sure you visit zoo lights at the Denver Zoo.  It is a great family tradition and if you bundle the kids up well enough, they won’t complain about being cold!  Oh, and make sure you bring your camera with CHARGED batteries, or else you’ll end up with one crappy picture, like the one I took.We made the mistake of going on a Saturday night(what was I thinking?  I homeschool!  We could go ANY night!).  It was really cold and I thought it wouldn’t be busy.  It. was. packed.   But beautiful.  We paid $24 dollars for our family of 4.  Yes, is a lot, but much less than a movie and we actually interacted and got to see some animals!

Emily immediately  noticed the zoo had changed a ton of their lights over to LEDs.  According to their website, 90% of the lights are LED and the rest are wind powered.  Mike and i were discussing how much more profit they are getting this year because their power bills must have been *MASSIVE*.  We made the switch this year from our 13 year old lights that we bought(and seemed like we paid a fortune for)in college to LEDs from Costco(cheapest place to get them)when my husband had spent over an hour trying to figure out which bulb was burnt out.  After much swearing, he agreed “it was time”.  On the outside of the house, we put up 3-4 strands of energy hogging C7 bulbs that twinkle.  I have a soft spot for twinkle bulbs as they are the ones we had on our tree during my childhood.  Don’t mistake “twinkle” for “blinking” either.  On my twinkle bulbs, each bulb is controlled by an individual twinkle controller which makes it turn on and off independantly of the others.  It is really very pretty.  But I do shutter to think of the electric bill this month.  I turned down the heater at night a couple more degrees in order to try and offset the cost of running the lights.

I am working on a list of fun and educational things to do in the area with your children.  It is ongoing, but instead of hiding it in the “draft” portion of my blog, I decided to post it and work on it on an ongoing basis.  You can find the list here, or see the tab above.

When you start homeschooling, you often hear the same comments from many different people. I don’t know if the comments are different for people who never sent their children to public school. Here are the 5 most popular that I have heard this year, and how I would REALLY like to answer them!

5.  So, will you have Prom in your Living Room?

My kid’s 8…..is prom something YOU are concerned about?

4a.  Isn’t the local elementary school good enough for you?

Nope, its not good enough.  Not even CLOSE to good enough.

4b.  Well, did you think about sending them to the other schools in the area?

Really?  There are OTHER SCHOOLS?  Boy am I an IDIOT.  I didn’t even THINK to research other public and private educational institutions in a 30 mile radius before I chose the most LIFE ALTERING option there is. 

3.  What about SOCIALIZATION?

Well, I am trying to keep her locked in her bedroom alone as much as possible, but damn, she figured out how to open her lock with a penny and I’m back to square one.  Have any suggestions?

2.  Wow.  I could NEVER do that.

Why?  Are you stupid?

1.  WHAT are you DOING to YOURSELF?

I still haven’t come up with a comeback for this one.  If you have one, let me know.

Since we are wrapping up our first semester in the next couple weeks, I thought it would be nice to reflect upon my first semester as a homeschooling parent:

5.  Siblings who are together more fight less(its true—we used to fight daily when Emily came off the bus…now we have 3-4 hours of happy imaginative play a day…when we aren’t doing other things!)
4.  We can learn more in 2 hours than a class full of children learns in a week.
3.  Camille can learn thru osmosis(anything multiplied by zero is zero, anything multiplied by one is itself)
2.  Socialization IS a problem–because we spend WAY too much time doing it and still don’t do everything we    want to do!
1.  I ADORE my children and LOVE spending time with them, more so than I ever imagined!  They are unique, engaging individuals and I am so grateful that I was forced into homeschooling!  I don’t want to stop!  I am the luckiest Mommy in the world!

For a Charlotte Mason type activity, we decided to create our own fall wreath from organic materials found on a nature walk in our neighborhood. Armed with buckets, Emily and Camille spent an hour riding bikes and scooters up and down the sidewalk, buckets banging their legs, looking for beautiful leaves to use on our wreath. They also collected crabapples from the ground next to a crabapple tree and cool pieces of bark.

Today, we cut a circle from a big piece of cardboard(a GREAT way to incorporate Math and show its value to Art: we decided what diameter we wanted the wreath to be, divided that by two(to be the radius of the circle), measured a piece of yarn that size and tied it to a pencil. The other end of yarn was attached to the center of the piece of cardboard. We learned that the diameter of a circle is twice the radius.

After cutting the cardboard piece out and cutting an appropriate sized hole in the center, we used a hot glue gun(well, I used the hot glue gun) and attached a layer of leaves to the cardboard. Then we used the other things we found(berries/bark/etc) to add dimension.

Husband was unsure about the “plan” before we did it and was pleasantly surprised at how nicely it turned out.

Not bad for a free art project! Learning points we touched upon included:

• Deciduous and Coniferous Trees
• Geometry–radius/diameter/circumference of a circle
• multi-media art–creating dimension and texture