Operation Decoration

TREE TIME: It occurs to me this morning that we're already a week into December. That means Christmas is only two weeks and two days away! How the hell did that happen?! :0
But there's no time to worry about where time went. We needed to get busy on the Campus Christmasification program!

While the kids worked on some schoolwork, I rooted around storage closets and managed to find our fabulous foil-y tree. So we started with that. Annabelle was enthusiastic about the process. She carefully took each of the 70 branches out of their protective sleeves and handed them to me for placement in the "trunk."

CJ helped stick a couple of boughs in the trunk, but he was mostly happy to leave the "heavy lifting" to us.

UP TO THE TASK: Right after the tree, out came CJ's favorite Christmas decorations - a small collection of nutcrackers. He was so happy to see them and has played with them all day long. I do believe they all now have names/titles/ranks. The largest one is King Cracker and the lesser ones must call him "Sir." :)

CJ had lots of questions about nutcrackers today - most notably, do they work? I told him the ones we had were mostly ornamental - they're sold to be used as decorations, not really to be used as tools. That said, I thought we should try them out.

Fortunately, we had peanuts around. The kids cracked several with nutcrackers of all sizes. It made quite a mess, but they had fun.
In case you were wondering, as CJ was, when nutcrackers were invented, it's likely that humans have been using tools (like rocks, for instance) to crack nuts forever.

For more specifics, we turned to the Leavenworth Nutcracker Museum on the other side of the Cascades from us. The museum reports the oldest known metal nutcracker dates to the third or fourth century B.C. The Leavenworth museum has a bronze Roman nutcracker dated between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D in its collection. The earliest wooden nutcrackers were just a couple of pieces of wood fastened by a leather strap or a metal hinge. By the 15th and 16th century, wood carvers in Europe were making ornate nutcracker. In 1872, a man named Wilhelm Füchtner is said to have made the first commercial production run of nutcrackers, using a lathe.

I'm sure lots of lovely nutcrackers are still made in Europe, but but I'm guessing that 99.9 percent of the nutcrackers we see in stores 'round these parts are made in China.

TIMELY TITLES: Today we read two books about Hanukkah. The first was "The Best Hanukkah Ever," in which a family misunderstands their rabbi's suggestion to buy gifts "that will be treasured forever." The family thought of gifts they personally would treasure forever, rather than what the recipient would value. Fortunately, the rabbi was able to set them all straight in the end.

The second book we read was "Elijah's Angel," which told the story about the friendship of an elderly black Christian man who was a barber and woodcarver and a young Jewish boy. The boy loves Elijah's woodworking and is thrilled to receive a gift from him, but there were two problems - it was a Christmas gift and it was a "graven image" - an angel. The boy is afraid to show it to his parents, but he finally does. The parents are very receptive to the barber's gesture is an act of kindness and friendship, which is always welcome.

The kids liked the story but the illustrations, well, not so much. They were colorful, I'll give them that, but the style, hmm, well, perhaps CJ said it best. "Why does it look like he doesn't have any skin?" he asked, pointing to one character. And he was right, the guy (who was, in fact, Elijah, the star of the story) looked rather like a burn victim. What I found most disturbing was the characters hands. They were disproportionately huge compared to their bodies. It creeped me out. I couldn't get past it (can you tell?).

IN BALANCE: The kids got their science homework done today. They were supposed to round up several objects around the house and try to balance them on their finger. They tried lids, remotes, LEGOs, paper plates, Pop Tarts, lots of toys and a banana.

They recorded their trials and tribulations on a sheet to turn in tomorrow.

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: The new math chapter we started today is about weights. To help the kids get a feel for it, I found a few props around the house - a couple cans of pop, some small freeweights and a postal scale.

We talked about ounces and pounds, grams and kilograms.

Hopefully these concrete examples will stick in the kids' heads as we put pencil to paper on these weighty matters.

WHAT'S GOING ON?: Oh, how the "mighty" have fallen. According to a new report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States has fallen from top of the class to average in world education rankings.

The report compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and of the 34 OECD countries, the U.S. ranks 14th in reading skills, 17th for science and - are you sitting down?- 25th for mathematics.

Unfortunately, the story I read was long on stats. Are we getting worse, or is it simply others are getting that much better?

No matter how you slice it, we are getting our asses handed to us. ...