Yellow Belt

Damek earned his Yellow Belt yesterday in Jiu Jitsu.  So proud of him!  He's been training for about a year and a half now, and in the last few months has really made a lot of progress.  I love going to his classes and watching not only him, but all of the other students as well.   I find it all very fascinating, and understand why martial arts are considered an art form.  Damek trains at Team Fusion Academy in Salt Lake City where they teach Gracie Jiu Jitsu with an emphasis on Self-Defense.

Here's a video of Damek receiving his yellow belt from his instructor Eddie

Damek & Eddie (the main instructor at Team Fusion Academy)

Eddie is the main instructor, and there are also a handful of other instructors (6 in all I think) that rotate coming to help out in the classes to give one on one instruction and individual attention to the many students in the class (25+).  They also have classes for young students ages 4-6 and adults.  All the instructors are very knowledgeable in jiu jitsu and seem to have a passion for working with children and it shows.

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Beans in the garden

Even though it is still going to get down to freezing before the month is out (meaning May) we relented and planted our bean plants yesterday.  We'll watch the weather, and cover them if need be;)

We have a mix of Blue Lake Pole Beans, Bean Contender, Harvester Bush Beans & Christmas Lima Beans:)

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Sunday, April 28th, 2013

A few snippets of yesterday:

Kyan watering the seeds I planted on saturday:  Feverfew, Lupine, Chamomile, Milkweed, Butterfly Flower, & Showy Goldeneye (a Utah Native).

lazy morning reading books about a quick trip that is in our near future

Echo

Kyan blowing bubbles with a friend

temporary tattoos

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Working Together

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Stair Play

The boys and their friends have come up with lots of different games to play over the years on our staircase.  They have used the race tracks in the past to roll marbles and cars down, but this was new with the drum at the bottom.  The marble makes a pretty good sound before it goes rocketing off in any which direction:)

Later the boys had fun sliding down the stairs in their sleeping bags.

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Roots & Shoots

I'm organizing a class on gardening at a homeschool co-op that we are attending once a week, and our first project, a few weeks ago, was planting bean seeds in glass jars.  The boys (as well as the other kids) really had fun with it, and have been tending to their bean plants regularly, so much so that they are outgrowing the jars and are ready to be planted outside.  Only problem is we still have a few weeks to go before the threat of frost is past;)

I got the inspiration for this project here.  We rolled up a piece of construction paper and inserted it into the glass jar, filled the jar with soil (we did plant a few seeds in the soil) and then inserted bean seeds between the construction paper and the glass around the diameter of the jar.  The point of planting them this way is so you can see the whole growing process (both roots & shoots) as it happens, whereas the root process is normally hidden under the soil.  "So cool!"  The boys said:)  You also want to wrap paper around the outside of the jar to keep the beans in the dark while they are germinating.  Decorating the outside paper is purely optional:)

sliding up the paper to see the process

Bean shoots emerging

roots reaching deep

Reading for planting outside!

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re-growth

Just a few of the things that are regrowing around the yard.  The raspberries & strawberries are also regrowing their leaves now that the chickens have been banned from the garden for a week now;)

Violet

Maple Tree Blossom

Cherry Blossom

Daffodil

Artichoke

Rhubarb

Lovage

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conversations

Typed up this post a few months back and never published it, here it is now;)

I love having conversations with my kids.  Love finding out things they know that I had no idea about, it is always fascinating.  One subject always leads into another one and so on and so forth.

Yesterday I was researching martial arts movies to see if any of them focused on Jiu Jitsu (one of Damek's passions), I called him downstairs to watch a trailer from this website, and then we ended up watching all of them.  Took me back, as I had forgotten that Lee and I had seen 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' when it came out in theaters in the year 2000.  Remembered after watching the trailer.  Damek thought the trailer for 'Drunken Master' starring Jackie Chan looked hilarious:)

Our conversation then lead into a discussion about the ratings on movies, due to 'Drunken Master' being rated R.  We talked about why some movies might be rated R, and although neither of my kids have seen an R rated movie, I certainly wouldn't be opposed depending on the movie and the subject matter as well as why the movie got a R rating.  One movie I told Damek I wouldn't be o.k. with them watching (as it was one that was disturbing to me), was Inglorious Basterds, which Lee and I watched a bit ago.  We looked the movie up, and I read him the plot line, which of course then led into a conversation about Nazi's.  We've had lots of conversations about Nazi's, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust and recently read a book about Anne Frank.

The conversation then turned into a discussion about the Swastika, with Damek telling me that the Swastika used to be a symbol of good luck & peace (I had no idea!) in some ancient religions including Buddhism.  I asked Damek were he learned about the swastika and he told me it was from a youtube video about banned Pokemon cards.  Apparantly there is a pokemon card that depicts the swastika, not for the Nazi meaning, but for it's original meaning, but since most people see it and think Nazi, it was banned, and the symbol was replaced with something else.

More proof that learning happens all the time:)

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Connections

We rented 'Wreck It Ralph' the other night.  Kyan and I went to the video store to see if they had 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind' (short story: we requested it off Netflix last week for movie night, it came, we had pizza ready, sat down to watch and the damn disc was cracked!), they didn't, and then Kyan spotted 'Wreck It Ralph' and wanted to rent it so we did.  After watching it multiple times over a couple of days, Kyan was walking around the house singing "O-re-o, o-ree-o" over and over again   I knew that came from a song I used to listen to.  I had to look it up on the computer "oh ya, Metallica's 'Frayed Ends Of Sanity'", so I dug up the disc, put it in the computer, uploaded it and played it for the boys   While searching for the song, found out that the original song came from 'The Wizard Of Oz', so the boys and I looked it up on youtube and played it 

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Damek and I are currently reading a book titled 'Mathematicians Are People, Too; Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians' by Luetta Reimer & Wilbert Reimer.  He (and I) are really enjoying it.  This morning while reading about Joseph Louis Lagrange, who was a french physicist and mathematician, we got out the globe to locate Dunkirk, France and Barcelona, Spain.  According to the book, Lagrange led the Units and Measures Committee who decided to determine the length that is one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator (which would later be the unit of length known as the meter).  In problem solving measuring the distance, the French Academy of Sciences authorized a precise measurement of the meridian between Dunkirk, France and Barcelona, Spain.  Given the measurements, scientists used astronomical calculations to determine the total length and to find the length of the first meter.

A couple hours later, Kyan picked up the globe started studying it, pointing to different places and guessing what they were.  After a few minutes of looking at the North and South poles, he said "it looks like the Antarctic is warmer than the Arctic".  We looked it up here and found that he was right:)

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