~ Momentary Thoughts ~

This evening was another divide and conquer evening.  It's baseball season for Thing Two.  By the way, Washington Nationals team is doing REALLY well this season.  Thing Two's team name is The Nationals!  :)

Thing One was home from TKD, we'd had our English Muffin Pizza's, and he was off playing on his IPod.  I took the quiet opportunity to just sit on the deck (with a glass of wine of course).  Was interesting to hear the different birds talking to one another.

There was the angry hummingbird, who I evidently disturbed by coming out onto the deck.  Some will go into the trees and watch to see what is going on, then come back to the feeder when they realize someone is just sitting down.  Not this one!  He hoovered, flew away a bit, came back, circled, hovered, and flew away for the time I was on the deck.  I'm thinking, "Bird, you're crazy!  We both want quiet.  I don't plan to bug you!"  It was a loose for the bird.


Somewhere uphill, it sounded like a momma bird was getting after her brood.  If you could putting words to the tweets, it would have sounded like a teenager coming in late, after school, with a bad grade.  Could just hear the "Really?  First week of school and you already have a bad grade!"  Made me snicker.


Downhill somewhere, and again putting human sounds to animals, it sounded like two teenage girls, unwinding from the week of school (can you tell school just started?).  It was just tweet, tweet, twEeT, tweet in a happy chirpy sound.

The contrast between the last two sets of birds just made me snicker.

 

Birthdays

Kevin's birthday is today! Nothing to special had been planned.  School, dentist, life still needed to happen.

No surprises on presents either!  :(  Here's a look at his presents this year:

Although he was with us when these were bought,

it made for an easy, good breakfast that we don't buy

all that often.

A box from each boy.  Again, not a surprise!

We had catfish for dinner and for dessert - ghirardelli brownies; home made vanilla ice cream; and home made, hot fudge sauce.

 Now it's time to unwind from a long day of life and start all over again tomorrow!
 

What does homeschooling look like?

For every family that educates their kids at home, school will look a lot different, from one day to the next and from one family to the next.

At our house (and a few other home schooling families I know), the first day of public school is WAY different than a "normal" day of school, just because we want to emphasize the flexibility of home educating.

Ours looks something like this, for today anyway:

• up to early in the morning, as I had to much going on my mind.  Mostly I wanted to make sure that I had time to make t-shirts for the family.  An idea I had awhile back to make new Thing One and Thing Two outfits for the boys.  The last was done in 2004 around Halloween.  It was time to update the picture on my sidebar!

 October 2004

 September 2012

• Got the shirts finished, washed, dried.  Got myself ready for the day and Thing One and I were out the door for what we thought was 2 & 1/2 hours of therapy.  Due to illness and other unknown reasons, it was only an hour!  Woo Hoo, we got to come home early.
• Oldest was eager to get to NEW math and wanted to watch the related video.  Lucky me!  I misplaced the DVD, but found it after a brief frantic search.  He breezed through math and grammar and almost forgot spelling.  Thing Two did his while we were at therapy.
•  While Thing One was plugging away at his work, life kept moving on.  I spread out at the dining room table to pay bills and such.  Charlotte was in her spot like today was the same as any other day.

• Took some time to go out to lunch and run a few errands.  We decided to go by Cafe Rio as they have $1.50 tacos on Tuesday.  Awesome, inexpensive food and par for the coarse we saw folks we know from church.

Men in my life!  Kevin has "Parent 1", I have

"Parent 2".

• We came home very full and still had Mystery of History, Five in a Row (Roxaboxen), and Beyond Five in a Row (Cricket in Times Square) to read through.  This is how the boys entertain themselves while I read, a Klutz Lego set.  Definitely worth the money.  This set is only brought out during school

• Now we are transitioning to afternoon events and divide and conquer.  Errands for Co-op on Thursday and baseball practice for Thing Two and TKD and Scouts for Thing One.  I may go crash and burn for a few minutes.

This, like I mentioned, is a rough sketch of a day in the life.  Hope your day has been wonderful.

Crock Pot Meals

Our days seem to be crazy! School, therapy, sports, church, youth group, worship rehearsal, scouts, co-op, mom's meetings!

I'm in the process of trying to find good crock pot meals for those days where I can find time to fix dinner, in the morning, but not in the afternoon.  I do have the "Fix it and Forget it" books, but there seems to be a lot of recipes that use a can of "Cream of ______" soup.  Will give it another reading, on another day.  For now, here are a few that seem promising.

Beef Stew
Easy Slow Cooker Pot Roast
Fiesta Chicken with Rice and Beans
Slow Cooked BBQ Ribs
Lasagna
Texas Pulled Pork
Loaded Baked Potato Soup

Okay, spent some times looking for recipes; this is a good start.  If you come back on another day, look for "crock pot" under Labels!

The 1st of September

Have been back up and running for a couple weeks or so. Turns out there were loose cables within the works.  When Apple took it apart to diagnosis the problem, they fixed it by putting it back snuggly.

So now that I am back up and running, I've been updating various lists and such (boys summer reading) and need to get to my 1,000 gifts list (I found some from awhile back I want to add).

Now to working on adding audio books to computer, then phone for our car rides to Gainesville once a week!
 

Taking a break

blogging for awhile. My second Mac had an unfortunate run in with second sons breakfast! Found out tonight it would be just about $500.00 to repair. That is quite a large chunck of change to put into something when the original price was a bit less than that. Not sure when or if it will get replaced.

For now adu!  May be back someday toblog, but may not as well,
 

Curriculum - to many choices?

Even though we have officially begun the 2012/13 school year, even though this is our 6th year homeschooling, even though many things, making the right or best choice for curriculum seems to induce a panic attack to some extent.

Fortunately, we've been at it long enough that we've figured out what works on most subjects.  Some subjects, boys have requested the next level, so no extra thought there.

This year is a tad bit different, we have a 7th grader.  He'll be in high school before we know it.  He'll be wanting to look at colleges and start applying before we know it.  Need to start prepping now, so that the stress of high school level isn't as great.

Many blessings though, through this transition.

1. Have heard many good things about Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) first hand.  Some negative first hand too, but it wasn't a nasty type review, more of a "don't get why we need to add this sort of word so many times!"  I can work with comments like that!!!!
2. Rainbow Resource staff has been very helpful in exchanging items and making recommendations for a new foreign language.
3. Thankful for many home school friends who've used specific subjects and can share insight as well as know our kids a bit and can weigh in with a valid opinion.
4. Having a co-op to go to so I don't have to teach every subject.  Both kids are getting science outside of the house as well as a fun class.

The line up for class this year is as follows:

• both boys:  Mystery of History Volume 3 (their mutual agreement that we needed to finish the series before doing something else), foreign language of some sort, physical education
• Thing One:  Pre-Algebra (MUS), Apples Daily Spelling Drills, Daily Grams 7th grade, IEW B, Beyond Five in a Row, Science, Robotics, Life Skills, Electives (Boy Scout Merit Badges and Requirements)
• Thing Two:  Delta (MUS), Spelling Workout, Daily Grams 4th grade, Five in a Row Volume 4, Science, Builders, Life Skills

What are your children studying this school year?  Are they excited?  Hope so.  =)
 

Third Day

As I typed the title out, made me remember the group "Third Day" and thought I'd leave it as is, to make whoever reads this wonder. Wonder what the gist of the post would be about. Am I going to share a Third Day video that I enjoy or am I going to go into some kind of detail about the third day of something ~ like school, which today was.  =}

Originally it was about school and how it seemed to get easily derailed!  Have been dealing with major allergy issues the last couple weeks and had had enough.  Made a doctors appointment to discuss what to do about it.  Got a prescrip for a couple different things that will hopefully do the trick; if not will have a couple very disappointed boys at our house.  A while back we'd promised them kittens; a situation came about where the price was right, but the addition of two more cats seemed to have been to much for me!  Will have to see how a few things pan out!

Third Day - the group!  Took some time to see which videos struck my fancy right now.  This one seemed to be it for me today.

 Enjoy!!