Bridgetender school break

After working pretty hard for many weeks, Bridgetender school is taking a spring break in between units. The curriculum I have tried this year is Tapestry of Grace, and so far, I am fairly pleased with it. I was looking for something that was sequential, had a list of books for history, history questions and suggestions for literature and arts and crafts. Plus it helps me in organization and in getting the kids to take control of their schedule a bit. It took me a while getting used to the format and to find everything, but now that almost a year is under my belt, I think I will be staying with it. The only problem I have is that they are a believer of having the kids read dumbed down versions of the classics. I would rather have them listen to an audio version of the book or have me read it to them, though I have tried some of the books. Incredibly, the book they recommended that was a kid's version of Le Miserables was actually pretty good. Who knew that the behomoth of a story could be succinctly and coherently reduced to 20 pages or less ;-)?

For spring break, we had some big plans, some of which will not happen. Monday was a day to relax after SportskidzAZ and music lessons. Our plans involved fishing, a day trip to Old Tuscon Studios just south of Tuscon, a day-long hike around Pass Mountain and two days of mostly relaxation. The kids lost the privilege of going to Old Tuscon Studios due to mulitiple instances of poor behavior from nearly all of them. The day-long hike, involving 7 miles around a cute little mountain became a little daunting because it is reaching the 90's in the afternoon and when the longest we have hiked has been 3 miles. I think it will be something we will do as a family maybe sometime in the fall or winter.

Tuesday night, we went fishing and had a picnic dinner at Riverview park in Mesa. Elizabeth, for the first time, caught six fish with her fishing pole, after two or three disappointing ventures. Kyle also caught four fish. Everyone except the youngest learned to bait a hook with a live worm. We initially brought Jacques with us, but it proved to add to our frustration in helping the kids and getting everything set up. He was distracted by all the scents and dogs. So, eventually, Eric brought him back home, which is just a few minutes away from Riverview Park

Yesterday, instead of traveling for 5 hours round trip to Tuscon, we went to Shadow Mountain in Phoenix about thirty minutes away. In the morning, when I started searching the internet for places to hike, I stumbled upon an article at Arizona Central about a hiking series called "Seven Summits around Phoenix." I thought it would be a great goal to climb all seven summits by the end of the year, even though the hiking season will soon be coming to a close due to heat. I decided to start with Shadow Mountain because it was short and listed as the least strenuous. Like many of the cute mountains, Shadow mountain is surrounded by homes and we parked in a neighborhood to get to the trail. The hike is about 1.6 miles, though the trails are more or less "use" trails rather than groomed trail. Whoever was in the lead got to pick the route, though I did over-ride a couple of decisions. We ended up climbing up two little summits and across two saddles to get to the highest peak. I put together a "movie" of the event from the pictures that we took. Don't expand it to full screen. I tried it and everything is fuzzy.

The rest of the week will be relaxing and doing little things, like going to the library to get books for next week, finishing up our shoe and sandal shopping for the girls. We are currently searching for stores that cater to girls who do no like pink and bling on their schoes, which is the current taste of our girls. Jessi has accepted a shoe with minimal pink, but Elizabeth refuses. Friday is also Park Day with our homeschool group, which is an event everyone looks forward to attending.

Next week, we will be returning to the grindstone. ;-).

A day trip to Sedona

I have the greatest husband in the world. An old college room mate called a few months ago to tell me that she would be within a day's drive and would like to meet me at a halfway point. My husband took a day off of work to homeschool our kids so I could go to meet her. He sacrificed one of his few vacation days (as he just started a new job five months ago). I left on Wednesday evening and returned on Thursday evening.

One thing about driving from Phoenix to Sedona is that getting out of Phoenix is roughly half of the driving time, especially in rush hour traffic which is not nearly as bad as Chicago rush hour traffic. Really! Also, Arizona is an awesome place to drive because a lot of the highways have a 75 mile/hour limit once you leave the city. However, there are no road lights, so once night falls, 75 feels pretty fast. It also means that you see nothing except what your headlights illuminate in front of you. So when I drove into Sedona at 7 p.m at night, I didn't see any mountains. Inky blackness extended beyond all the shops, galleries, hotels/motels/inns/resorts and restaurants. Sedona could have been one big valley as far as I was concerned.

However, this is what I woke up to:

Isn't it breathtaking?! The mountains seemed to form layer upon layer. You would get past one layer and find a whole new set of mountains. We got to "rock and roll on a very bad road" to see the ruins of an Native American pueblo built into an awesome cave. There are so many trails to hike that I could spend a week there and still not have explored them all. However, if I had formed my opinion based on what I had seen in the dark, I would have passed it off as merely a tourist trap (which it also is) and missed the glory and splendor that God created. It also made me wonder, however, if the residents of Sedona, the people who wake up to these views 365 days a year ever say to themselves, "Oh yeah. Another beautiful day to look at mountains (yawn). BORING!", or even "Mountains? What mountains?" I mean, really, if you had an awesome view to look at every day of your life, wouldn't it become ordinary and commonplace? Would it lose the luster? You might have to go to Detroit, Michigan (which I did visit once and was not impressed) or Rockford, Illinois (in which I lived for three rotten, no good years) to be able to renew your sense of wonder at your hometown and really appreciate it. At this point, I will leave you develop all the emotional and spiritual lessons that can be gleaned from this insightful insight.

My girlfriend and I had fun chatting about all sorts of stuff, taking a couple of hikes, and shopping, which, because I wasn't hunting for something in particular and because it didn't involve noisy malls, it didn't inspire anymore stanzas to the Malls--How do I hate thee? poem. We had lunch at a western themed restaurant with a fabulous view, too. I think it was the same one at which our family ate when we visited Sedona almost five years ago. I also had a vision for what to do to fill up the shelf high above the dry sink: buy a few, funky, tall, glass vases of different colors and shapes and put one of those rope lights behind them to turn on at night. However, I won't be buying them from the shop in Sedona which inspired my vision, considering one of them was about 1/3 of the cost of a small car.

All in all, it was a wonderful, lovely day in which not one conversation was interrupted by a child's need/scream/question/comment. Thank you, Eric. You are my knight in shining armor!

A trip up Pass Mountain

One of the many highlights of my in-laws trip was an early morning hike with my two daughters and niece up Pass mountain, part of the Usery Mountain range. Pass mountain has really cool, cream colored "scar" running near the top. It is volcanic tuff--rock formed by ash. It glows orange in the evening when the sun is setting. Our goal was not to make it to the top of the mountain, but to see the Wind Cave, a section of the mountain carved out by the wind. Actually, you can go on, but there was a sign that said that the path became very dangerous and I really didn't feel like doing something dangerous with pre-teen girls.

We started our journey in the wee hours of the morning. I woke my neice and daughters up a little after six a.m. and loaded up the camelbacks, some fruit, cheese snacks and stuff we might need on the trial, like bandaids and hand sanitizer. I also remembered the camera. Woo Hoo!. With one extra long stop at Dunkin' Donuts for sugar and carbs and a bathroom break, we started on the trail somewhere around 7 a.m. Part of the delay is that I had to return a second time because the donuts that M and I had chosen were so horrible tasting, I had to return them. What is the point of consuming a thousand calories in fat and sugar if you don't enjoy it? I wouldn't recommend that particular Dunkin' Donuts to people. Note that in the first picture, the girls are wearing jackets. Yes, sixty degrees IS cold if you are in Arizona.

Wind Cave trail is a 1.6 mile trail with an 800 foot elevation gain. We started out with what looked like a dry river bed on one side. The reason it looked like a river bed is that it was a lower area and had a high concentration of Palo Verde trees whereas we were surrounded by various cati and scrub brushes on the other side of the path. In Arizona, trees don't shed their leaves in the fall, they shed them in the summer, when drought conditions do not give them enough water to be able to photosynthesize. Also, most trees have small leaves in the desert to minimize transpiration, which is the trees breathing out moisture with the carbon dioxide. As we passed by palo verde trees, I saw tiny, cute leaf buds emerging from the stems. It took us about an hour to climb to the wind cave. The fact that it is a cave should tell you that we didn't reach the summit of the moutain. There were a couple of times when the path turned sharply and we started going the wrong way. Fortunately, the wrong way soon became impassible, which caused us to look around for the real trail. A few times, we walked over large bolders that served as a bridge over a little crevice in the path. With the way they were tumbled together in just the right way to support each other, I wondered if this was engineered by the park service or an act of God designed to help hikers. The wind cave is part of the tuff, so that when we approaced the cave, we got to see the it up close and personal. There were bits of granite "marbles" embedded in the tuff as well as large tracts of...lichen. We made it to the wind cave in about an hour. We spent some time resting in the cave. Basically, it is an indentation carved out by the wind. We didn't stay long because there was some evidence of a bee hive formed in one of the crevices, which made at least one of the girls nervous. We ate the cheese and started walking down. Even though we carried camelbacks, which hold at least 64 ounces of fluid, one of the children had gone through most of her water on the way up. Therefore, I had to share some of my water on the way down. It took us about 45 minutes to get down, mainly because we took fewer breaks. By that time, the kid's camelbacks were all drained, which meant a stop at the potty before heading back home. We were home by 9:45 a.m., ready to go to bed, or at least rest ;-). The hike was made possible by Nana and Poppa, who had brought my boys with them for a sleep over the previous night. Otherwise, the hike would have been a bit more daunting, especially with a four year old. I think I will wait another year, or maybe wait until I have another adult, to go on this trail with my youngest.

The only thing that I was hoping to see was a little more wildlife. With cooler temperatures and the early morning hours,theoretically, we should have seen a lot more animals. However, with four chatty females acting as an early warning system for the animals, the only thing we really saw were birds, other hikers, and one baby rabbit. However, the rainbow made up for the lack of fauna. It "rained" that morning, and by "rained" I mean that water fell from the sky, though very little of it actually touched the earth. Seeing the rainbow as we started our descent was very inspiring. It was as if God were blessing our hike that morning. It must have worked, too, because, for once, my youngest daughter did not cry and whine at all about being too tired to go on. It was definitely an awesome hike!