Kenedi's History Project 12/08

Parelli, show halter, and hanging out!

Jordin trains Shedahn to stretch his neck out in a show halter pose.
Shahdar finally agreed to let Jaxin halter him. Jaxin uses Parelli techniques to help him think it's his idea to put the halter on. This takes LOTS
of patience on Jaxin's part.
Kenedi is using Parelli techniques to draw MajikAli to her without a lead...too cool!
And I am just hanging out with my horse ...Truly Sequel!

Jaden enrolls in Houskeeping 101

Jaden learned to sweep! Today
he sweeps the dust off the floor
tomorrow he will be sweeping the
girls off their feet! What a great
little man he is growing into.

Our Scooter Bug

Emma is practicing her famous scooter move! Looks like a great imitation of mom's p90x exercise move called Superman-Bannana! Go EMMA!!

Building a grass hut

We learned in US history about the first English settlers to the Americas and how they had to build homes from whatever they could find in their environment. We decided to do the same. Remembering the recent trip we took to Cherokee, NC to visit the Cherokee Indians, we settled on building a sorghum hut weaving the grass similar to how we saw the Cherokee do with their baskets.
We started with the foundation, weaving the cane around sticks we hammered into the ground.
The cane was not as flexible as it used to be as it was fermenting and getting older each day. This made it slow work as the cane kept breaking at the nodes....but we kept on pretending it was a necessity that we finish a hut before winter approached and kept re-weaving the cane to make it work.

We made two 1 ft high walls about 2 ft apart for our "foundation"...and kept on weaving until we had woven a wall to the height of our vertical sticks.

How firm a foundation

We then poured in dirt (which we composted ourselves from our horse manure many months before) between the walls of our foundation.
We watered it down to pack it in.
Next we jammed sorghum vertically into the "foundation"
And then we wove sorghum in and out of the vertical cane. Can you believe the girls and I did all of this without our superman, Thomas? I couldn't wait to show him what we had done "all by ourselves"....I was envisioning sleeping in our hut with the kids and teaching them how to make dinner over a fire...to complete our "history project"

Almost Done!

We kept weaving the cane around, adding more vertical thick canes as we needed to in order to keep it tight. It looked like a giant nest and was very secure. The cane was getting more difficult to work with as it was losing its moisture and breaking more easily. We couldn't wait to put the roof on....
and then a moment of great sadness. I took the machete to cut a hole for the door and without thinking sliced through the side of the nest with the machete (I had planned to simply cut an archway at the bottom, leaving the top snug to keep the "nest" together). As soon as I swung my arm downward I knew my mistake. I cried and cried and cried as I watched our hut begin to unwind itself. I apologized profusely to the girls...and tried to fix my mistake, but alas it was too late both in the day and for the season of sorghum cane...there was no more cane left that was not shriveled with frost....the roof we just began (a tripod frame) lay beside the ruined hut, never fulfilling its mission. We planned to put it on and then lay sorghum leaves on top of its tripod frame...but not this year. Oh I am still crying over my mistake....next year we will do this again and finish our quest to build a home from materials laying around our farm...that we can sleep in just for fun! All in all we spent about 12 hours building this hut over 3 days....we learned how to weave and make it strong and how to not cut a doorframe!!! We felt very blessed that we had a warm home already built to retire to after our experience. How much more tragic my mistake would have been if we did not; especially as it grew very cold and rainy the next few days.

Emma's thinking cap!

Emma is learning to read the newspaper with her daddy and her new "thinking cap"!

Emma learns to Roll!

Knoxville Zoo Fieldtrip