How Ready Are You To Start Next Year's School??

This was the question of a poll I participated in and here's my answer :


July 14th -- I'm as ready as I'll get, but that's not saying much! My books and planners are here and I've decided on some of our major projects for the year.


We're doing school part time through the summer to catch up from last year's pregnancy. It's been quite shocking -- we're almost caught up!! Somehow (reflecting on how much we didn't get done last year) I miscalculated how quickly we would get caught up. I wanted to be at 1492 in the fall, but didn't really expect us to get there until January or February. Lo and behold -- it looks like we'll be there by September. It's great! :) Except that I spend all my curriculum $$ on the middle ages and now school will start and I'll need more books! :(


Since I didn't really expect us to get here...I'm fairly clueless how I'll progress from here in history -- we're doing RC History and they don't have specific lesson plans for that time period, yet. I can fudge it, but we never cover things as completely when I fly by the seat of my pants.


So...I was ready, but now I'm not and actually I wasn't all that ready to begin with??? :~[

Baby's First Trip to the Zoo

Dave loves the zoo. I do not. We wanted to do something cheap with the kids this weekend and since we have a zoo pass and since I got out of going all last year due to the pregnancy...I needed to ante up and go. The baby did really well and it was a nice time. Maybe I'll go next time, too!

I love having pictures of my babies with the baby goats. I've got a picture of me when I was little with the goats, too...

Upward Mobility

THE BABY IS INTO EVERYTHING!!! This is enough to make a mama go maaaaddd! Pulling everything out of the way every moment he's awake! We have things with this baby we've never had with the other babies...

• Legos
• Marbles
• DOG FUR
• 4 kids cutting, sharpening pencils...
• I've even fished pieces of the dog's rubber bone out of his mouth!!
  

Homeschooling is definitely more challenging with an infant! I guess God figures I'm up for the challenge - who am I to say different?

America the Beautiful

I completely ADORED this article by one of my favorite authors...here's a snippet to whet your appetite...

In a hundred ways, America is my mother. I cannot count the ways she has formed me and the gifts she has given me: gifts so much a part of me I doubt I am even conscious of them, any more than I am conscious of the rules of grammar as I speak... Patriotism is simply obedience to “Honor your father and your mother.”

What I Love About My Country
July 9th, 2008 by Mark Shea

Decorate your desk...or...Over the river and through the woods

The craft for today involved one bunch of $1 flowers from Dollar General and empty sour cream containers (we needed containers with plastic lids that we could cut slits in). The general idea is here and here. While Ds#4 got paint all over the kitchen floor and I nursed the baby [and accidentally myself] to sleep, Dd#2, as usual, went a little overboard with the creativity. She can never just follow a recipe or particularly any directions. There's occasions where that's not so good (like the refried bean quesadilla she insisted on making for lunch today with swiss cheese which I advised her against). There's other times when it's absolutely darling!

There's an apple tree with apples on the ground, a stone path through an arbor and a stream for her garden.

Pencil Sharpeners...aaaaarrrgggghhhh!

Sing it with me, "Ohhhh Where oh where has my little sharpener gone, oh where oh where can it beeeeee?"

I'm just not willing to spend $70, $50, $25 or even $10 for another electric or manual pencil sharpener that my kids will break or that will break itself or that is "touchy" so that the kids can't use it (some can't have the pencil at any sort of angle but a right angle, some require a particular amount of pressure against the grinding mechanism--the kids just want to get it done).

I've been reduced to hand held pencil sharpeners and thought the loss in technical stature was a little demeaning.

After discovering The Pencil Revolution - that reviews hand held pencil sharpeners, I no longer feel demeaned, but liberated (a great thing to feel after the 4th of July).

I'm going to try the KUM this year ... from this site.

By the way, just for enjoyment sake, read this blog post - it's a pencil sharpener's review of a sharpener I haven't tried and it's HILARIOUS!!

Baby Milestones

The baby got his first 2 bottom teeth at 6mo (he started teething at 2mo.) and his top teeth are just popping through, now. We just recognized them. We had some biting issues with nursing last week, but we're doing better, now.
The baby started crawling FORWARD this weekend. He's still not great at it, but unfortunately he'll get better FAST. My other kids didn't start crawling until 10 months (Ds#5 is 7mo.)

Dd#2 was about to crawl at 8mo, but I fell down the steps while I carried her and broke her ankle, so she crawled at 10 mo, too. Here she is at 9mo. in her cast -- one of the sweetest, saddest most precious pictures of my heart.