Early morning friends

Calvin has had an adorable habit this year of getting up at the crack of dawn in order to be ready in time to walk his best friend to the bus stop. Aside from the cuteness, there are many hilarious things about this. First, I think I posted a year or two ago, or maybe even both times, about how nice it was to be able to sleep in, especially on winter mornings, instead of having to live on a traditional school schedule. Second, the bus stop is across from our house, so in order to walk her to the bus stop he often actually goes around the corner to meet her at her house first.

No doubt, it's cute.

This morning, as usual, even though it was frigid and snowing like crazy, he was up and out the door at 7:40. He meets his friend and they talk, play, do I-don't-know-what, while waiting for the bus, which comes around 7:50. The bus stop is right outside our door, and his friend usually has a parent there in addition to other parents there on foot or in cars, and now that it's cold I usually shut the door firmly behind him and go back to my coffee until he returns and we start school. This morning, though, I looked up from my crossword to find that it was already 8:00 and no kid. Jon and I both yelled upstairs—had we missed him? Nope, nowhere in the house. I looked out front—everyone was gone from the corner. In the moment before actual panic set in I quickly scanned the whitened neighborhood for signs in the snow, and there he was.

He had shoveled our driveway.

This is not what I meant...

...when I said I wanted to freeze some extra pumpkin to use over the winter.

Viking bread

Our week was all about Vikings, and since our homeschool gathering was cancelled for the afternoon, we had some free time on our hands to spend in the kitchen baking like Vikings. Or maybe not exactly like Vikings; we didn't have to grind our own flour, and there was no raping or pillaging. But our Story of the World book suggested a recipe that looked suspiciously like any old bread recipe sans yeast, and while I'm not sure how that really brings us closer to the Vikings (again, no raping or pillaging, and where's my dragon boat? I want to speak to Thor!), it was a fun afternoon in the kitchen. Our very modern kitchen.

Oh, and did I mention that Calvin did this one all by himself? Truly all by himself. Of course it helped my sanity that the bread went into a cold oven. There's a first time for everything.

Oddly I have no after pictures, but without yeast the after looked a whole lot like the before.

Growing

Homeschooling provides some unique and fun opportunities. Like having your own fungus garden. Jon and I came downstairs one morning last week to find this warning on our counter:

Of course, what he really ended up growing after some time was fungi. But no need to mince words here. It was a successful experiment in more ways than one.

Turkey Trot

At Calvin's annual physical, his doctor asked him about the amount of exercise he got each day. Now, in the past we've been pretty lazy about this on a regular basis. We go hiking on a lot of our weekends, and some of our weekdays, and we'd go biking every now and again, but on a lot of our school days we didn't have structured exercise mixed in. When he asked us the same question last year, I realized that with homeschooling there was no gym class, and we started training for our local Holiday Hustle run. The first few runs he ran some and walked some, but when the race rolled around, after a month of running about 3 times a week, he finished in about a 10 minute mile.

But when the question about exercise came up this year, we were a little more prepared. Since Calvin learned to ride his bike sans training wheels this year, he would break up almost every fall school day with periodic rides around the neighborhood. And since he met the girl who lives next door and the two became fairly inseparable, he's spent almost every afternoon riding bikes or racing through our yards. His pediatrician listened to his answer this year and replied, "Oh, so you participate in the sport of RALAMM, then," which he explained gleefully to our blank stares meant "Roll Around Like A Mad Man."

And yes, I'd have to say that he does participate in that sport a lot these days. And between that, the regular biking, and the Parkour class he took weekly through our homeschooling group this year, when we started training for the one mile this year, he nailed it. The first time out he finished his mile in 10:30, no walking, and probably would have gone faster, but I was pacing him. We kept to a steady training schedule anyhow—on Sundays he and Jon biked 3 miles around Hudson Mills while I ran, and twice a week Calvin and I would run a mile together.

This year we're busy on Holiday Hustle day, so he signed up for the local Turkey Trot charity race instead—one mile around Hudson Mills trails—and the day for that was today.

Cold and rainy—not a perfect day, but not terrible like running in the Shamrock Shuffle in several inches of wet, wet snow, either. To get my own run in for the day I started out from home intending to meet Jon and Calvin at the starting line, about 6.5 miles from our front door. Unfortunately I underestimated that distance by about a mile, so I missed his take off, but I did get there just in time to see him cross the finish line less than 9 minutes later.

Maybe next year we'll sign him up for the 5k.