How I Was Taught to Ski by Beaverman

By now I think I may have already mentioned this to anyone actually reading this blog, but last week I was taught to cross country ski by a beaver. Or a man. Or a Beaverman. I'm not sure.

It was an unexpected twist to the snow adventure that my son and I took last week. It all started after my "unsocialized" homeschooled son worked at the church rummage sale all day without his parents around: one was working and the other one was peddling Girl Scout cookies. My son was picked up on the front porch at 5:00AM, and he did not return home until 3:00PM that afternoon so he had plenty of time to check out the merchandise. He was assigned as a "floater" at the sale, relieving the other youth for their breaks, but found the "Sporting Goods and Hardware" section to be in particular need of help. Apparently, he spotted a snowboard being sold for the whopping price of $5. Having been taught from an early age never to pass up a bargain, he bought the snowboard, brought the thing home, and for every day afterwards was snowboarding in the living room. This is what happens when you are brought up as a desert rat. This is also what happens after Shaun White sweeps the Winter Olympics just weeks before the snowboard is spotted, and you are a homeschooled kid who has just spent the last month using the Olympics as the basis for geography, history, and science lessons. (I'm adding another link here for a good science site.) This is the second time we have used the Olympics in our homeschooling adventure; the first time was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I was recently "organizing" homeschool stuff (ha ha, the task that never ends) and came across the 50+ page "Educational Kit" that I printed off during the Beijing Olympics (x 2 kids = 1 printer cartridge), and I'm just so thankful that we didn't get knee-deep in the Chinese "fuwa" mascots again because that was a lot of ink! Remember them? They looked like little Pokemon, but they were a fish, a flame, a panda, a bird, and an antelope. All color ink, by the way. So this year's Olympic studies concentrated in the online.

Anyway, time had come to take the kid to the snow so we decided to try cross-country skiing, but we brought the snowboard along. The thinking here was that if we got really good at cross-country, then we could take on the half-pipe later in the day. We are nothing if not optimists. The other thing at work here was the fact that the one and only time I went skiing, when I was just about the same age as my son, I ended up riding the ski lift downhill after a little mishap where I failed to get off at the top. I'm still recovering from the humiliation of arriving alone back at the embarkation spot with my skiing companion laughing his way down the hill. I will try downhill skiing again when I get good enough to ski to the top.

So we arrived at the Flagstaff Nordic Center all set for a day of "easy" cross-country skiing, and I encountered yet another skiing obstacle: I couldn't get the ski on. There were seven of us enrolled in the beginning class, and they all got their skis on prior to the instructor's arrival at the meeting spot. So when the instructor walked out there, all six of them were there (my own son had already disowned me), but I was about 20 feet away at the ski put-on place frantically trying to shove right boot into right ski to no avail. Here's where I first encountered Beaverman. I had heard stories about the infamous half-man, half-beaver Scottish hobo, but I hardly expected to find him in the Coconino National Forest teaching ski lessons (although stranger things have happened to me.) I'm sure it was him. When I master adding photos to the blog, I will post a picture of him, but he was most certainly my cross-country ski instructor, taking time out of his busy day munching wood to get me skiing. Thankfully, Beaverman also got my ski on.

But my troubles did not stop there. As it turns out, Beaverman quickly identified that I had not yet mastered walking. So while my six other classmates were already far ahead, Beaverman removed my skis, and instructed me to "walk around for awhile" until I got the feel of it. I have a long history of sitting in the back of the class, never asking questions, figuring stuff out for myself, etc. so I was really happy to have all this extra attention! It was so great to have come all this way to walk around in the snow! I think Beaverman sensed there was some hostility because after my walking demonstration he said, "Here, come give me a hug, you're doing great! What do you do for a living?" I said, "I'm an emergency nurse." To which he said, "Oh, well there are no lives to save here today, we're just having a good time." Hmph.

Things did get better, and as soon as I got my skis back on, I pretty much ditched Beaverman. At the end of the class, my son and I did a loop trail, on skis, and it was really fun. So I'm recommending cross-country skiing. Thumbs up. We also stopped at Montezuma Castle, and we're still pondering how it is that Montezuma Castle and Notre Dame Cathedral were built the same year. It's mind boggling. Here are some photos to compare:

Julius Caesar, Loch Ness Monsters, Olympics, and Komodo Dragons

Wow, it's been almost a month since I've blogged! In January, we began reading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. We are using the "No Fear" version by Sparknotes. On one side of the page is Shakespeare's version in iambic pentameter which gives it a sing-song quality. On the other side is a more modern translation that is easier to understand. We were laughing at Act One, Scene One where they translated Flavius's words to, "Get out of here! Go home you lazy men!" I wouldn't have guessed that Shakespeare would write something like that. We also saw the play, and we're going to see the movie, or at least everyone else is. I have no intentions on seeing the bloody, tragic Julius Caesar again, not that I didn't like it. I also wrote a paper on Mark Antony's speech. I will share it with you as soon as possible.



I have been doing a lot of writing recently even though I haven't let you see it yet. I wrote a story called "My Night with the Loch Ness Monster" for my "Fantasy Fiction" class at Eagleridge. It's about a girl who finds a Loch Ness Monster egg and helps get the baby monster back into the loch it came from. I also wrote an article on Dian Fossey in my Composition class, also at Eagleridge. The next article we'll be doing in my Composition class is one on "The White House Gang," Teddy Roosevelt's children. The latest thing I did in my "Fantasy Fiction" class was write a summary on the book The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. I'm also writing two stories right now. One is unnamed, but the other one is so far called "Terri Cooper." This blog is also one of my at-home writing projects. I want to share all of them with you. I will let you see them..... once I'm done with them.


While we have been doing all this writing, we have also been learning about the world around us. Since the earthquake in Haiti to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, our month has been filled with world geography. We even have our world thinking day celebration in Girl Scouts coming up! How do we get our answers to our questions? Well, one of the books we have been using is The Handy Geography Answer Book. It gave us answers to questions like: what is the fertility rate (average children per women) in Haiti? 4.7. What is the fertility rate in the U.S.? 2.1. What languages do they speak in Haiti? French and Creole. What about in the U.S.? English and Spanish. We can even look up populations and laugh at 4.7 of a person being born. Because of the Olympics, we looked up a lot more places than just Haiti and the U.S. We looked up just about every country that participated in the Olympics. We also decided, because we're learning about the world, to start learning German. I love it. I've been teaching it to my best friend and now we speak German(or Deutsch, pronounced doy-tch) very loudly in the car. My mom has lots of German books and just got a clearance ($2) German phrases and expressions calendar with a phrase for every day. I don't know what's more fun: teaching the phrases to my best friend Brenna, learning the phrases myself, or saying them with Brenna.

On Friday, February 19th, we went to the Phoenix Zoo to draw animals with a homeschooling art class. Even though we used only one type of pencil, we bought three different types: B, 2B, and 4B. Our teacher, Ms. Brown, sold us our special sketchbooks and gum erasers last year when we took a class with her. Some of the tips she gave us were to: look for basic shapes in the animals body, squint your eyes to see details better, look for the outline of the animal, and instead of looking at your paper, look at the animal and let your brain take control and focus on what the animal really looks like instead of what it's supposed to look like. We drew giraffes, zebras, ducks, komodo dragons, and elephants. Brenna went too. It was so much fun drawing pictures and laughing at our horrible imitations of these more realistic looking animals. It was truly a unique experience.