Here’s a picture from our school day. Croquet was commonly played for recreation in the early 1900’s (before everyone began staying inside to watch TV). :::snort::: Anyway – we had a blast. Zander was a bit unpredictable to say the least. He kept taking MY ball and putting it back to the beginning….”Mom, you touched the tree you have to go back”. He had lots of new rules.

Mom – notice the tag? I decided to let him wear it inside out as long as he was clothed! LOL Now - it's 12:16 a.m. and I need to make a point of getting to bed before mid-night now that we are starting school bright and early. {G}

Monday with PURPOSE

Ah finally, a Monday with purpose. I lived on adrenaline all day. I hadn’t felt that churning, gotta keep multi-tasking, feeling in months…and it was sort of fun. :::snort::: I quickly quelled the panic.

We got far more school done than expected. I ordered more stuff and researched the more obscure credits that Jamin wants to work on.

Comedy of errors today: the disc that has Josiah’s finished work to be printed for last year’s portfolio won’t print. The computers say it needs to be formatted – but it worked 1 minute before that message. He had to redo a bunch of work. THEN the printer won’t print. This affected handouts I wanted to make for my small group and for Bible Study tomorrow. Ah well – it will save me some time. LOL Tonight the printer says the black ink cartridge is installed wrong – but it’s BEEN working fine since I changed it. Josiah lost his daily log book. We have to send this to NARHS…..we were sick. He eventually found it. The copy machine will NOT work.

Accomplishments: What a great day! I can say I got SOMETHING done. Not only school and ordering…BUT….I cleaned the back yard. I realized tomorrow was garbage day and I had 2 big cans that were empty. We threw out enough stuff to fill both of them, swept, washed, reorganized….now I’m ready for fall.

Mom’s Night Out tonight was fun. We didn’t get home until 10:00 p.m and that isn’t going to work well with Mike being gone. BUT I enjoyed my evening. It turned out that there was no one in my small group so I got to go to the one on devotions. I enjoyed hearing some new ideas….well really being reminded of some old ideas. LOL Oh – when Adrienne introduced me she said something about me having homeschooled for years, having 9 children, 2 graduated and “one on the way”. I said, “One WHAT? Mike’s deployed”. OK I cracked myself up at least. :::snort:::

A funny is that I spent lots of time last night and the last few weeks really trying to find the right curriculum for a credit in “culinary art”. I happened to check the “High School Course Description” book that NARHS sends out…they HAVE a two page course written up…..even a few texts that we could use. I think I will still look for a textbook – but it was nice to find the write up if I end up going that route. LOL

I have to share this GOD THING. I’m totally excited. I think it is a good thing. I’m trying to pull together the info for a credit for Jamin that will consist of editing and trying to get his book published. It’s not HARD to come up with enough for a credit…it’s the publishing thing that had me stumped. I mean he doesn’t want to self-publish…he wants it published. I entered the world of markets, agents and such. . . and promptly felt overwhelmed. Mike gave me some suggestions that we will work on. AT our MNO we have a table of freebies and a table of things for sale each month. I mentioned that if someone saw a book on publishing a book – I NEEDED it. At the end of the evening, the lady who I had commented to came up to me and pointed out a lady I didn’t recognize. She said that she was about to or had published a book. I went up to her and we visited. She is NOT from our town. She was in town and came to MNO. She is willing to email and share what she has learned with me. The GOD thing is that she told me about a group for Christian Writers. They pair new authors with established authors so the established authors can mentor the new author. They LOVE to have teens join. It costs…but it doesn’t seem to be more than music lessons…and this is HIS DREAM. I always tell them “it’s your dream, make it as big as you want it”….so I don’t want to come back and say, “Never mind “. I think it may be called the Christian Writer’s Guild or something. I don’t know if participation in that alone would be a credit according to NARHS but I’ll look into it. Is that God or what? Well worth getting home at 10:00 p.m.

We are all really excited to be back in school. I guess we’re funny that way.

SCHOOL DAZE

We have BEGUN! I thought I needed this week to mail of portfolios and plan…but after 15 years of homeschooling it really doesn’t take as much planning as it used to. I already had TOG Year 4. I know what workbooks they need. I frankly don’t think we NEED workbooks but the younger ones like to play in them and so I buy them. After last night’s ordering spree and library searching, I was fairly confident we could begin.

We did. We got through way more than I expected. We are studying the 20th Century this year.

Here is what the kids are doing (as of now). It’s all falling into place, though I have to really search to follow some of Jamin’s interests.

Zander
~Picture Book Activities: Fun and Games for Preschoolers Based on 50 Favorite Children’s Books
~Preschooler’s Busy Book: 365 Creative Games & Activities to Occupy 3 – 6 year old

Nolan
~ Speech Therapy – they’ve not called and I need to check into this.
~Math games, teaching concepts and fun pages, Family Math, living books, Critical Thinking Skills Math
~Finish Sing Spell Read and Write
~TOG
~Explode the Code
~Getty Dubay handwriting
~Finish Apologia Zoology

Arielle
~Math games, teaching concepts and fun pages, Family Math, living books, Critical Thinking Skills Math
~TOG
~Wordly Wise
~Explode the Code
~Spelling Workout
~Getty Dubay handwriting
~Apologia Zoology
~Red Herring, Fallacy Detective, Building Thinking Skills as we work in

Jared
~Saxon 8/7
~TOG (all core subjects and a few non-core)
~Wordly Wise 3000 – book 4
~Spelling Workout
~Easy Grammar Plus
~Apologia General Science
~Red Herring, Fallacy Detective, Building Thinking Skills as we work in
~Lots of handwriting practice this year
*Jared informs me he needs lots of science, math and English for the Academy
*Volunteering at House of Faith - Community Service

Jamin
~TOG (US History, Church History/Worldview, Fine Arts, Lit, Composition, Vocab)
~Foundations of Personal Fitness
~Culinary Art
~Writing to be Published
~PE
~Alg 2 a (1st half)
~Logic I (1st half of Mars Hill)
~Spanish 2
~Global Communications or some such title (GPS)
~Plan to run older boys through Dave Ramseys 7 week class on personal finances and then have them to a budget, check book etc….I may work this up into ½ a personal math credit or we may do it for fun.
*Volunteering at House of Faith - Community Service

Josiah
Had all credits needed after Sophomore year. He wants to do a few more things this year.
~TOG 4
~SAT PREP (not for credit just for practice)
~Plan to run older boys through Dave Ramsey’s 7 week class on personal finances and then have them to a budget, check book etc…. I may work this up into ½ a personal math credit or we may do it for fun.

*Josiah is working as many hours as possible. He has a financial plan that he is working towards. He wants to have enough saved up for a good car and a year of college by the end of this year. See what listenting to Dave Ramsey will do to you? :::snort:::

Redeeming the Hour

It is after mid-night but I have finished! I ordered all videos for the first 9 weeks of school from Netflix. I made a list of all the library books for the first 9 weeks. I ordered quite a few of the spine books that I need for the first 9 weeks.

NOW - I'm feeling better prepared for school to start. I'm going to bed and praying I wake up to school before noon. LOL

SUNDAY

The day began VERY early. I decided to get up and study I John before Sunday School. I’m not sure how Monday is going to go – and really I hate feeling “pushed” when prepping for a Bible Study. I did some more thinking and a few word studies; I think I’m set.

We went to Sunday School and then out for breakfast/lunch. We meant to go back tonight to church but during the afternoon Josiah began feeling ill….and I was right in the middle of lesson prep when it was time to leave. We decided to stay home.

Meanwhile, during the afternoon, we tried to watch “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. This was an OLD show – 1980’s. I thought it would be funny but old enough to be safe. WRONG. The theology was terrible in it, the acting was strange and finally a naked man showed up. We popped it out and will send it back tomorrow. I planned school. I also made sure I had any notes down for small group for tomorrow’s Mom’s Night Out. I’m leading a group that will discuss homeschool methods. Search as I did, I still haven’t found the old standby that all honest homeschool mom’s will admit they use at least ONCE a year or so: “the make it up as you go” method. The kids watched some Hogan’s Heroes. Jamin, Arielle and I went out to find the cache near our house. We found it….cactus, deer and a cache is VERY bad shape.

The girls arrived in WA. Thus another year begins. We will begin school tomorrow. Sorta/kinda. We have stuff that the kids can begin and really we have most the stuff…but I’m still needing some planning time for some of the electives that Jamin wants to do. I also want to take time to gather material for at least the first 9 weeks (books, hands on material etc). We’ll begin but *I* won’t stress about how much we get done this week. The children on the other hand are probably going to stress because some of them are much more “traditional” than I in their expectations of what “school” is. LOL

RECIPE

Someone asked me to post a recipe for muffins...but I thought it was a comment on their blog....I can't find it now...so if someone wanted our banana muffin recipe they need to let me know and I'll email it to them. LOL

BLOG COMMENTS:

I've set blogger over and over to let me know when comments are made so that I don't miss them - but they aren't consistenly doing so. LOL Let me answer a few right here:

**The deer you can feed so close sound cool, it sounds like here are many of them.**

The deer are cool. There are lots of babies right now and that is fun to watch. Our goal is to feed them really, really close...like hand...but at this point we throw and get out of their way and they work their way up. At night they wander our neighborhood. Many leave corn on their walk.

**sleepless kids**

Seems to be the time of the year. Let's keep track and see if this happens every 3rd week of September. LOL

**computer breaks as incentives**

Jodi - I'm going to have to implement this myself...breaks for ME for a job well done. LOL

** Bri always wants to go for the ones that have us hiking miles in the woods!**

Debbie, we love caches that take us through the woods - but Friday the weather was still 96* - the snakes would be sure to be awake. I'm thinking it will be another month or so before we head back to the state park - miles and miles of woods to tramp through! With Mike gone, I'm content to find the park and grabs and the ones hidden at malls and city parks. LOL

Renee - praying as you wait and wait to get out of TLF. I do think you could geocache in Germany. One local cacher has been responding to my logs on geocache and saying that he has cached in Iraq, Israel and Egypt. You go to geocaching.com and type in your country etc to see what is hidden in your country. You'd be pleasantly surprised to see how widespread this "game" has become.

**I think you are very brave doing so much geocaching with a snake fear. You just might make that 120!**

Thank you, thank you Jodi for remembering my phobia and recognizing how brave I AM. LOL

I think I'm caught up again, now.

Remember ladies, cut up your greens and keep choosing joy! {G}