Plans for today.

Today's plans involve cleaning up this messy house, doing school and work. Gosh that sounds fun. Our study of American History has brought us as far as the war of 1812, so we'll be studying that today. I'm off to find free printables on the internet.

My youngest is coping with being grounded fairly well, I guess. I suspect that the older two kids are taking pity on him and playing with him more. He's a little desperate for entertainment I think, because I'm pretty sure he was playing Barbies with my daughter the other day.

Happy Birthday!

My oldest is turning 15 today. I am in complete denial. How could this have happened so quickly? It doesn't seem that long ago that he couldn't say his "Y" sounds and told me "My father is not listening to lou" and "I love lou". So cute.

I love lou too. Happy Birthday!

Yesterday.

We went to the park with our homeschool group, a group of people that I have truly grown to love. The only problem was, we were plagued by yellowjackets a little bit. They attacked my lemonade pitcher and finally, I just put it on another table and let them have it. We homeschool moms had a really good time discussing our struggles with schooling our children to people who really understand. We concluded that although it's not always easy, it is worth it. And, having had my kids in public school, I know that really it's not much more work than that. Sometimes my kids would have 4 hours of homework in public school (which probably would have only been 1 hour if you subtracted the 3 hours of whining, but I digress).

Anyway, we had a good time and at the end of the playground time, one other family and our family went on our first Letterboxing adventure. A letterbox is a plastic box with a notebook and a rubber stamp in it. The person who hides the box puts clues on the letterboxing web site so that others can come and find the box. They are supposed to bring a compass and their own rubber stamp. They follow the clues (like a treasure hunt) and find the box (hopefully) then sign it and put their rubber stamp in it. They take the box hiders rubber stamp and stamp their own letterboxing notebook, which is a record of all the letterboxes they've found.

Our first experience with this was very fun. We didn't have either a compass or a rubber stamp (I left it at home) but we set off anyway. We followed clues in the park past some silos, past a deer enclosure, up a trail to a sign that said 'shortcut' and then walked 16 paces and looked to the left for a teepee of trees and then followed the rest of the clues to the box. We had to dig it up from under a log! We all signed it and carefully hid it back where it was, then we updated the letterboxing website that this box has been found and is still there. A treasure hunt that I didn't have to make up and hide the clues for. How cool is that?

Doing what you say you'll do.

This is a hard one for both the parents and the kids. My youngest has had 'take a shower' on his list of things to do and always says "I'll do it later". Last night I got thoroughly fed up with his procrastinating and saying I'll do it later and I said "okay. I'll leave you alone, but if it is not done by bedtime, you're grounded for 2 weeks." Guess what. It was not done by bedtime. That kid gets to watch TV and play video games again in on October 9. I'm not sure what we're going to do about Saturday morning cartoons, since he lives for those and it is the new season. I might let him watch those and then get off of grounding say on October 10? The constitution does protect us from cruel and unusual punishment, after all.

Nothing to write home about.

We did do school today, but it was not all that exciting. We read a little about Lewis and Clark, did a little activity on Sacajawea and then did the usual math, reading, and all that, but for notebooking, we just did a coloring page. I just felt kind of blah all day. I was tired from working all weekend I guess. Hopefully, the rest of the week will go a little bit better.

More Notebooking. (Can you tell I'm proud of them?)

I've got work downloading from my job, but I'm taking this little break to share some more notebooking pages. These are all my daughter's more recent ones. I'm not sure what my youngest has done with his notebook at the moment; (I worked from morning to night yesterday and the house is upside down) but here are hers. She's doing such a good job on them. The bonus with notebooking is that they are neat enough to get shown to people and every time they get shown to someone, it ends up being a review. I heard my daughter telling her dad all the battles of the Revolutionary War when she was showing him her pages earlier and he was quizing her about what the stamp act and the intolerable acts were. Cool.

The top one is the word Revolutionary and she's made a kind of a crossword with the battles of the war going across the word Revolutionary. The second one is a lift the flap page about the constitution. The third one is an illustration of the 3 branches of government, judicial, executive and legislative with drawings of the white house, the capital and the supreme court. If you click them, they'll enlarge. I'll try to get some better pictures.

* These are supposed to go in a 3 ring binder but my daughter doesn't like that they are "bumpy" and so, keeps hers in a drawer in the little plastic homeschool organizer thingy we got this year. My son's are in a binder. I can't comment in the regular comments section for some reason.

Zoey and Sammy's bad day.

Zoey and Sammy (our kittens) were both neutered the day before yesterday. Today, they seem fine, although they are both sleeping a lot. Zoey has decided that she wants to sleep on top of our cat carrier that my daughter left outside on the deck, once she had smashed it flat. Her little belly looks pitiful, but she's still cute as can be. One of the ladies at the vet's office just fell in love with our little Zoey and kept talking about how cute she is.

As for me, I'll be working all weekend, as long as there is work. Blah!

Job.

For the third day in a row there's hardly any work in any of my transcription accounts. This is not the first time this has happened, but it is the longest stretch. The bad part is that this also happened last week and the week before. There will probably be work this weekend, but it's very difficult to do a week's worth of work on a weekend.

I wrote a resume this morning.

Sigh.

I wish I didn't have to, that I could just take a break for a while. But I can't.