Seaman Family Adventures

On Black Friday, while everyone else was shopping, I had fun baking and decorating cookies with my kids and their cousins in Knoxville. Of course, it's always more fun when you get to mess up someone else's kitchen.

Sara and Rebecca were not too old for the fun!

All the girls were trying to be artistic,

But the boys just made creations like this one which they aptly named "Don't Eat Yellow Snow"

Indiana Jones and the Search for the Yellow Shiny Thing @ Yahoo! Video

Rebecca called this one "Martha Stewart in Jail."

Speaking of Martha, I don't think she'll be calling us to feature our cookies on her show or in her magazine, but we had fun with our own photo shoot featured in the slide show below:

Costume Parade

2009-11-10T13:07:00.003-05:00

Here's a video I put together for a Panasonic challenge.

Celebrate Fall! @ Yahoo! Video

I think one of the most interesting things to note is how Rebecca has changed. She's "come a long way, baby!" from her days as Wonder Woman. This year she went as Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Instead of relying on mom to dress her in her pajamas, she made her dress herself - and also made one for a friend! One thing hasn't changed, though - she still loves chocolate!

From Elizabeth Bennet

Happy Birthday, Caleb!

2009-10-31T09:23:00.004-04:00

From Caleb

I can't believe my little boy is twelve years old now! He had a great time yesterday having friends over, playing capture the flag, watching "Pirates of the Caribbean" on the Blu-Ray (again!), and working on the 1294-piece Lego set and 2000-piece puzzle he got for his birthday (everything he loves comes in little pieces, great!).

I put together a slide show of past birthdays, but a few years are missing because they're either not in albums yet or are on a hard drive that isn't easily accessible.

Also, I'm working on transferring all our past video into digital format, and I found this cute video of the older three kids singing "Happy Birthday" to Terry - who just celebrated another birthday last week.

Happy Birthday, Daddy! @ Yahoo! Video

Hiking the Balds

2009-10-22T09:32:00.009-04:00

From 10-20-2009 Hike

"It is the most beautiful of the high mountains . . . where a person may gallop his horse for a mile or two, with Carolina at his feet on one side and Tennessee on the other, and a green ocean of mountains rising in tremendous billows immediately about him." ~ Elisha Mitchell, 1836

Well, Terry and I didn't have horses, but we did see some beautiful scenery during our hike on Tuesday. We are so blessed to have these mountains close by! We could spend a lifetime and not hike all the trails in the immediate area. We hope to eventually be able to do a good portion of the Appalachian Trail in NC and TN.

This hike was mostly along the Appalachian Trail near Carver's Gap. The kids opted to stay home (party poopers!), so it was just Terry and me. Most of the leaves were gone at the top of the mountains and not yet peaking at the bottom, but there were some red berries and bushes that provided some contrasting color. We also saw snow that fell recently, though it was plenty warm for us - in fact, we both got sunburned.

From 10-20-2009 Hike

How to Do Stop-Action Videos (A Tutorial for LiHD Families):

2009-10-12T13:12:00.002-04:00

First a little background – Last year, Panasonic had a challenge for the LiHD families. They were going to choose a family to attend the Olympics in Beijing, and they asked us to submit essay entries. Well, we did our essay, but we really wanted to go, so we thought we should send a video as well. We really thought lots of families would send a video because we all had this cool video equipment, so we thought we’d better do some sort of special effects. We wanted to try and use the green screen, but we decided stop action animation might be a little easier to do.

Terry and I had grown up with Gumby and Pokey and also Mr. Bill from Saturday night Live, and we had seen some stop action animation videos on YouTube. So we did some google searches to find out about the technique and brainstormed possible ideas. The result was a stop action “torch run” through our yard and a claymation Olympic ring sequence at the end of our short video. We were really happy with the results. We knew even if we didn’t win that we had really created a great memory.

Here is the video below, complete with music:

Panasonic Olympics @ Yahoo! Video

The kids caught on to the technique and spent quite a bit of time over the next few days doing videos. Rebecca made a claymation dance movie, and Nathan made an Indiana Jones Lego movie. Here they are below, complete with music:

Claymation Dancing @ Yahoo! Video

Now for the instructions:

• You will need three pieces of equipment – a digital camera, a tripod and a computer with movie editing software (you can use Pinnacle, Microsoft MovieMaker, Roxio or iMovie). We used Pinnacle as it was the software we had received from Panasonic, so I will give directions that are more specific to Pinnacle but could be adapted to any software.
• Set your camera to the lowest resolution. This is important as you will be taking lots of pictures and if they are on high resolution, it is much harder to work with them in your software program. The boys have several movies that still haven’t been constructed because they accidentally forgot this step.
• Do a trial movie first – we suggest something easy like going down the stairs sitting cross-legged or showing a piece of clay growing bit by bit.

• Set up your scene and tripod. Try to keep the action in a small enough area that you do not have to move the tripod during the entire scene.
• Take your photos. If you make a mistake, just keep going. You can delete it later. You will need about 500 pictures for a 2-minute video.
• Once you have your pictures taken for your trial movie, import them into your movie software.
• Go to Edit movie
• Select all pictures
• Set the time on the pictures to about 0.05 seconds.
• Add titles and music if you wish.

Now you are ready for a bigger project:

• First, you need a plot. Here are some ideas:

1. Rebecca has had fun with Claymation dancing. Our daughter is great at making nice looking figures from clay, but you could have plenty of fun with Playdough. After all, Mr. Bill wasn’t that artistic.

2. You can also use Lego figures to make action movies. My boys have made movies using Indiana Jones Lego, Star Wars Lego, and Secret Agent Lego. If you need good music to go with action movies, I suggest getting a John Williams CD or one from Henry Mancini. Even though this music isn't "cleared" for use on videos, I think it’s OK to use it on your TV at home. At least, I don’t feel guilty since we did purchase the music! So far, yahoo video has allowed the music on all our videos to stay!

3. You can make yourself a musical instrument. We did this with our Chopsticks video. We used chairs at an airport to represent a keyboard. If you do this, when you add the music, you will need to use a metronome to get the timing exact.

Chopstick Animation @ Yahoo! Video

4. For the holidays, you can try setting up the tripod while you trim the tree, wrap a package or make cookies. Just have someone taking a picture every 30 seconds or so. Then add holiday music. We did this last year while setting up our tree, and we also did a “disappearing pumpkin pie” video.

5. Do a school assignment – this is how the Hamlet video came about!

• Set up your scene. Try to keep the light source steady. For instance, if you’re filming outside, you need it to be sunny or cloudy but not constantly changing or your video will not look as real.
• Set up your tripod, take your photos (don’t forget to lower the resolution) and load and edit them just like you did your trial movie.
• When finished, we usually save the movie three ways: as a file, as an upload to YouTube or Yahoo, and as a DVD.
• Then share your video with the LiHD family!

And now, for a video never before shared with the LiHD family. Here is a video made by my youngest two sons, Caleb and Noah (who were 8 and 10 when this movie was made). It would have been featured long ago, but an argument broke out over what music to use!

The Agents and the Search for the Golden Treasure @ Yahoo! Video

Hope you are inspired! Our next goal is to learn to use the green screen. We understand the concept, but we haven’t actually tried it out in a video yet.

We Ate the Louisiana Purchase!

2009-09-28T09:32:00.003-04:00

We discovered several years ago that salt-dough maps were not worth making. After all, what can you do with them when you're done? So we converted to cookie maps. We recently finished up a study on the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Here is our cookie map.

Lewis and Clark are not to scale. Well, actually the whole thing is not to scale, but Lewis and Clark are particularly large! At this size, it wouldn't have been much of a trip!

We used candy corn for the Indian tribes,orange slices for the mountains, and chocolate chips for the Buffalo herds.

It was a fun project. After taking photos, we dug right in. Nothing much is left . . .

We are seriously considering a "Lewis & Clark Expedition" of our own next summer. We are looking into renting canoes for the Ft. Benton to Judith Landing portion in Montana and/or a hike on Lolo Pass in Idaho. Would anyone like to join us in St. Louis and head west?

Here is another fun picture from last week's school. Nathan built a periodic table from Lego for his chemistry class at co-op.

Noah's Birthday

2009-09-21T20:43:00.004-04:00

From Sept 09 - Noah's Birthday

I can't believe Noah is ten today! He celebrated his birthday on Saturday with a party at the lakefront in our neighborhood. He invited his brothers and the neighborhood kids to a "Survivor" party. Rebecca and I helped plan the team challenges. They had a treasure hunt, filled buckets with lake water using only one cup per team (and a little help from a rainstorm), had an eating challenge where they ate baby food, and hunted for the right key to the pool gate at the bottom of the neighborhood pool. It was a simple but fun party! Here are some photos:

Our Spot

2009-09-15T07:56:00.006-04:00

From Sept 09 Camping Trip

It seems that most families have a spot that they love to return to over and over. For many, it's a place on the beach or in the mountains or maybe even Disney World. When I was growing up, our spot was Gunner Pool - a camping spot on a clear creek in Arkansas. Our family added another spot - Devil's Den - in later years. Terry's family's "spot" was his grandparent's cabin on Boone Lake (which ended up being our first home!). These places bring back great memories of adventure and togetherness.

Terry and I found our spot thirteen years ago at Little Oak Campground on S. Holston Lake near the Tennessee/Virginia border. It's a little hard to get to - you need to travel more than 20 min. down a deserted gravel road - but for us it has been worth the drive. It's a great place for skiing since there is a slalom ski course in a cove just five minutes from the campsite. The campsites are huge and have great views. There is no electricity, but that just serves to keep the crowds down.There is nothing like the combination of mountains, a clear lake and quietness to nourish your soul.

Here is a slide show of our weekend there.

Also, I've been trying a great free program for doing something called a "photosynth" (you can use it free at www.photosyth.com). Anyway, I tried a couple with our spot at S. Holston, the first one is in the fog - the second in the sunshine. It's a fun tool for photos!

My First Bagels!

2009-09-08T07:39:00.003-04:00

From For Blog - created Sept 09

First, a little background. My kids are starting to eat us out of house and home! My older two are especially fond of blueberry bagels. If I allowed just Nathan to eat his fill, I have calculated that my bagel budget would be $40 per month! And that's just for one child. So I decided to try making them myself - mostly just to see if I could save some money but also because I was curious about the process.

You see, I've had some excellent bagels when visiting different parts of the country, but we don't have much in the way of gourmet bagels around here. You are pretty much stuck buying Sara Lee at Walmart. There is a nice bagel shop (Manna Bagel) run by some Messianic Jews in the next town over, but they visit the Holy Land and close their shop about six months of the year - plus my cost savings would definitely disappear if I went that route. So having had a Southern Baptist grandmother instead of a Jewish grandmother, I had to rely on the internet for this one.

I used the recipe on this website and added dried blueberries. Rebecca thought they looked like huge, soggy Honey Nut Cheerios when they were cooking.

From For Blog - created Sept 09

In spite of that unappetizing metaphor, they actually turned out quite good!

From For Blog - created Sept 09

They were crispy and crunchy with a nice blueberry flavor. They really needed a few more blueberries to be wonderful - which may put my cost up in the Sara Lee category unless I can find a cheap source of blueberries. It really wasn't difficult or messy to make them, and they have no added fat -which leaves plenty of calories left for the cream cheese! I can't wait to try some new flavors like cinnamon, chocolate, bacon,cheese & onion, Asiago cheese, etc.

Our Trip to the Historic Triangle

2009-08-31T21:04:00.003-04:00

We had a great time on vacation last week! We saw Appomattox Courthouse, Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg and Nauticus. We also spent a beautiful afternoon at Virginia Beach.

Several folks have asked us why we didn't do Busch Gardens. Well, besides the high price, our kids have never really enjoyed amusement park rides (though Terry and I enjoy them immensely), and Terry and I don't particularly enjoy standing in line. I guess Terry and I need to go by ourselves in the off-season or something.

My favorite things were listening to the reenactor at Appamatox Courthouse (he was really good, and at $8 for the whole family, this was the best bargain of the trip), Yorktown (where we ended the day with a free Air Force band concert), reading on the beach, and my date with Terry at Shield's Tavern in Williamsburg (where they served a Wildberry Crunch Pie that was too die for!). Our youngest boys really enjoyed the Nauticus museum in Norfolk, and the oldest kids liked Jamestown and Williamsburg best.

All of the Historic Triangle places were featuring games for the month of August. So our kids got to learn to play lots of games that were played by Indians and English Settlers from 1607-1776. Most involved gambling!

The kids enjoyed dressing up at Yorktown and Jamestown.

I'm going to post some more pictures on Facebook in the next day or two.

A special thanks to Mom and Dad for letting us have a week at their time-share!

Our First Notebooking

2009-08-13T17:36:00.006-04:00

This year we are doing something different. We are spending one morning a week just creating notebook pages (think scrapbook page with a scholastic theme). My kids generally like to create, draw, arrange, etc. and I think this will give them a creative outlet and help them remember what they learn. It will also help use up all the scrapbooking supplies I have now that I have mostly converted to digital scrapbooking.

For now, I'm going to let them choose what to notebook about themselves- as long as it's something they've been learning about or reading (in other words, not just something about Star Wars!). Today, Noah chose to do some pages on Captain John Smith, who we've been studying about in preparation for our field trip (i.e. vacation) to Jamestown in two weeks. He's working on a time line. Here's what he's gotten so far:

One interesting thing we learned about John Smith is that prior to the Civil War, he was much more of a national hero. During the war, an historian from the north (Henry Adams) wrote many things to undermine John Smith's reputation- it was pretty much war propaganda. Now the truth is coming out! Many sources (besides the writings of John Smith himself) now corraborate most of his stories. He was a true hero!

Caleb did a page on the 2009 Tour-de-France. We learned a lot about the race this year and watched most of the stages. Caleb even signed up to do his own "tour" online and mapped all the routes he takes around here. He rides quite often now - in fact, he rode twenty miles this afternoon!

Nathan decided to do some book-report-style pages on Rakkety Tam, one of the Redwall books he read this summer. He has become a real fan of the series. Here's his first page:

All in all, it's been a good first week of school. We have enjoyed learning about Jamestown, John Smith, and Pocahantas and are simultaneously learning about the Santa Fe Trail (Santa Fe was founded in the same year as Jamestown). The boys wrote stories about a buffalo hunt this week, and Nathan's made me laugh out loud! He wrote it from the point of view of a buffalo that took revenge on the Indians.

On with the Show!

2009-07-30T13:20:00.004-04:00

I keep singing the Bugs Bunny Theme Song in my head:

Overture, curtain, lights,
This is it, the night of nights
No more rehearsing and nursing our parts
We know every part by heart
Overture, curtain, lights
This is it, we'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it

Tonight what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it.

The kids have been working hard at rehearsals for six weeks now. Tonight they preview their show to a live audience and tomorrow is opening night! They have nine performances over the next three weeks.

Here's a family portrait of the Cheaper by the Dozen cast:

From Cheaper by the Dozen

And here are the kids in their cast T-shirts (artwork by Rebecca!):

From Cheaper by the Dozen

Backyard Bounty

2009-07-22T15:04:00.002-04:00

From Plums

All this fruit came from our backyard! I just feel too guilty letting it go to waste, so this year I went into high gear. I just finished putting up 36 pints of plum jam. It's a good thing that the kids like it because I have a feeling they're going to be eating it for a while. Also, be sure and put "plum jam" on your Christmas list because I'm sure Santa is planning on getting you some!

After all the jam, I still had some extra fruit (a few apples and blackberries), and I put it all together to make a "Backyard Cobbler." It was really good!

From Plums

4th of July

2009-07-05T21:41:00.006-04:00

Panasonic asked the LiHD families to share our 4th of July traditions, so here's my version.

First of all, I hear there is a move to start calling this holiday "Independence Day" again, and I have to agree that it's a more meaningful designation. After all, we call it "Christmas," not the "25th of December."

My idea of a 4th of July celebration involves a cookout with extended family which includes homemade ice cream for dessert. It also involves some purchased fireworks like firecrackers, bottle rockets and sparklers and a trip to see the town's fireworks show.

Anyway, our idea of what this holiday should be has had to be modified a bit because we don't always have extended family around and there are some unique opportunities to celebrate where we live. So this is what our celebration weekend looks like now: We attend an annual parade and 1940's USO show in nearby Jonesborough, Tennessee. This year we also participated in a kid's revolutionary war battle reenactment at Sycamore Shoals State Park. We have great fireworks right in our neighborhood (on a vacant lakefront lot), so we don't have to battle any traffic or crowds to see a great show. This year we added a new tradition after stuffing ourselves in a backyard cookout - we read aloud the entire Declaration of Independence!

Here are some shots from the parade:

not exactly 76 trombones, but at least several

representing the "Overmountain Men" who mustered in this area to fight for Independence at the Battle of King's Mountain

notice no Union Soldiers, for in the south the Civil War has never actually ended

a reluctant participant

friends Josh and Laura O'Bryan, cast members of the USO show - which was the best ever this year!

getting candy thrown on the parade route

And now for the Battle of King's Mountain:

kids sworn in

This gal looked too pretty to fight!

storming the "mountain"