pandemic homeschool blues with a side of relish

One day during homeschool our uncle Derek came here. He was our guest speaker. Derek gave us silk flags from San Francisco. They were squarish and weighted so that when you wave them in a special way they look pretty. He helped us practice waving them around in the right way. He also taught about silk and how it's made. We watched a YouTube video about farming silkworms and shockingly it was full of DEATH! The people boil the silkworms in their cocoons! Then they take the cocoons and unravel ALL THAT HARD WORK FROM THAT POOR LITTLE SILKWORM to make silk!!! They keep some silkworms alive to breed them and then KILL THE BABIES IN THEIR COCOONS! I liked spending time with my uncle and practicing with the silk flags.

For Madeleine's 9th birthday party, we invited a couple of masked friends to a little backyard get-together. We made two cakes for the occasion. Our mom made a tall, skinny, chocolate one, and I made a shorter, wide, vanilla one. Madeleine wanted us to make dragon cakes and so we did. Mine was a green dragon on a blue background that I iced, with sprinkles. The icing was remarkably hard to put on at first, because it kept taking pieces of cake, and mixing them with the frosting, which looks pretty gross and definately not particularly profesional-looking. I got the hang of it eventually though. Madeleine and I had come up with a design beforehand and I triend to follow it as precisely as possible. However, when I started with the snout, I made it to small, so it showed more dragon than we had in mind, but it was fine. When it was finally time to eat cake, I tried both, and I liked mine, even though Mom's was amazing as well. That was probably because of all the effort I put in...

An Auction is when some people come to a place and before they start everyone gets a card with a large number uniqe from everyone else's. One peron who is prepared for it goes to the front with some things like pumpkins, apples, carrots, and other vegetables. Then some helper guys bring something up and the person in the front says an amount of money. When he's done announcing, whoever's willing to pay that amount of money holds their card silently. If more then one person hold their card up, the guy in front goes on to a higher number. The last person who is willing to pay that amount gets it. One breezy October afternoon we went to an auction. But this was not just any auction, it was an Amish Auction. As soon as we got there, we went in, found some seats, and settled in. We got some pumpkins to carve and put on our porch for decoration. Some were white.