Sprucing things up.

View from where I park the van, November 2010.  I love the way the trees look in November.

We are taking the week off school and sprucing things up around the house.  We've been scrubbing doors and door facings and baseboards and touching up some paint here and there in the kitchen, decluttering, washing windows and generally, like I said, sprucing the place up.  I'm not sure why boys seem to feel that they need to slide over the door facings when they go through a door but their bedroom door facings always need a good scrubbing.  The kids are okay with cleaning this week because they know it will be good for us to refinance and their father keeps mentioning a vacation.   We are going to hold him to that.  Anyway, we are still doing some schoolish things this week, 4H is today, so we'll have an hour and a half of home economics class.  We are also still listening to our book, right now, The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis, part of the Chronicles of Narnia.  We spend about 45 minutes a day on that.  We had a good discussion yesterday about the civil rights movement and reviewed about Martin Luther King Jr and a little bit about Martin Luther.  I'm going to make a note in my attendance book of these hours and maybe count them as a half day later if we need it.   I remember one time when I was in public high school, we missed a lot of school one year due to snow and we had to go to school on a Saturday for half a day.  We went in, watched cartoons, ate lunch and went home.  And it counted.  As a school day.  Part of my educational background.  Honestly, most of my education as a child came from the World Book encyclopedias that we had at home.  My parents bought a set from a traveling salesman when I was in elementary school and from then on, whenever any of us had a question about anything we looked it up together -- which reminds me, my youngest was frustrated with typing last week and asked me what in the world semicolons were for and now I need to look them up and refresh my mind about the rules of the semicolon so I can make sure I tell him correctly.  I may see if I can find some punctuation worksheets and do a review with everyone.  ;-)  Hey, there's a good use for a semicolon - the emoticon wink.

Happy Birthday to my husband today.  I forgot the cake, but I will get it and bake it sometime this week!  For the next 3 months, we're only a year apart.