Blending A Family of Dorks

Matt, Davis, Tyrion and I all love to spend time outdoors so we typically spend a lot of time in the warmer months exploring local walking trails.  The problem is we tend to stick to the same familiar spaces and while it's still enjoyable, it's not nearly as exciting as exploring someplace new.  So our goal for this year is to explore more of the nearby trails. This goal was inspired by a book Matt was given by a co-worker which has information on a variety of trails in Haverhill.  We plan to work our way through the book this year. Kenoza Lake Trail Map Last weekend we started this exploration process by trying out a new trail around our favorite lake. We've spent a lot of time on the trail around the Basin and on parts of the Castle Trail but it wasn't until we looked at the trail map in the book we received that we realized how many different trails there are around Kenoza Lake (and how long some are). We decided to start off on the other side of the l...

One of the advantages of homeschooling is the ability to really engage in whatever is most interesting to the child being homeschooled. Davis has always been interested in anything to do with science and nature so when I saw a post on a Facebook homeschool group I'm a part of about a class on rocks and minerals, I immediately said we'd be there. This class was planned and scheduled by a fellow homeschool mom who has boys very close to the same ages as my boys so I knew this would be a great one for Davis and Tyrion.  Of course Davis got a lot more out of it than Tyrion but it was still fun for Tyrion to have the chance to touch and pick up a variety of different rocks and just be around other kids learning things at the same time. Between Davis and I we took a lot of pictures so I'm going to let them do most of the talking for us. First up are pictures of the tools used to mine rocks and crystals.  The kids each got to choose a few rocks from this bin ...

Davis recently recorded a series of videos that the edited along with pictures into a YouTube video guiding people through the nature he has found in our own neighborhood. While I held the camera and showed him how to use the editing software, he did all the actual writing and directing as well as the editing to create this video. We were really lucky to see a bald eagle and some smaller birds as well as some beautiful river views and we discovered a small creek nearby where we hope to see some other animals in the future. He had a lot of fun filming and editing this so hopefully we will be doing more of them in the future. We would love to hear what you think of this video and if you have any advice or topics for future videos.