Our Tree.

With it being 9-ish days until Christmas, I thought I'd share a picture of our tree but the ones I took of the whole tree ended up being blurry, so here's a picture of our tree-topper, a crocheted angel my mom made. The artificial tree we bought this year is pretty but I find it hard to get excited about an artificial tree. I always enjoyed going out to cut down a tree, bringing it home and putting it up. I love the smell of evergreens. We always got a cedar tree when I was a kid. We'd go to my grandma's farm to cut it. Now we actually live on a small part of that same farm and put up an artificial tree. Better for the allergies.

I guess we'll do 5 more days of school? I'm not sure what we're going to do on Monday. We've got a lot of errands to do and I'm not sure if we will manage school in the midst of doing all that. If not, we'll do 4 days and that will be 73 so far this year. If I'm counting the days right, that puts us finishing right at the end of May if we don't take spring break. Not as bad as I thought. I was thinking, that with all these doctor's appointments we've been going to, we were behind, but we're doing okay. The hard part is working up any enthusiasm for our studies this time of year. I'm ready for everyone to open the presents I got them.

Explaining homeschooling/Field trips.

I was talking to the social worker today about homeschooling. She doesn't seem to know much about it. We must be her first homeschooling family. I could tell that she was curious about what exactly we do. I explained what we do on a daily basis and showed her one of our lists that we work from. I told her about the curriculum that we use (various ones). I also told her about the field trips we've been on this year and started naming them and realize that there had been an awful lot. I can think of almost 20 this year.

Here's a partial list of field trips we've done since January.
Abraham Lincoln dramatization.
Mad Science.
Museum of Art and Craft.
Hayride.
Hubers Orchard and Winery.
Locust Grove historic home.
fire department.
letterboxing.
aquatic centers x 2
Funtopia.
Dinosaur World.
alpaca farm.
veterinarian's office.
Louisville Science Center.
City Hall.
Newport Aquarium
A Discovery Museum that I can't think of the name of right now.
The Ohio Renaissance Faire.
Kentucky State Fair.

Most of these we went with the homeschool group and some were just with our family. I'm not sure how many of the family trips we would've gone on if we hadn't been homeschooling. We might have done some of them, but it seems like we do a lot more fun stuff now that we homeschool. We can sometimes get group discounts with the group and go during off season times and that makes us more likely to go.

Whoops!

I forgot to give the link for the Carnival of Homeschooling. It's here.

Enjoy reading it!

I think we may actually be done.

With the Christmas shopping, that is. We have one thing that we need to take back and get something else, but other than that, we're done. It feels good. I think it was a week ago we started? Anyway, it's done, done, done, done, done! For today and tomorrow, we'll concentrate on our final foster care walk-through which is tomorrow at 1:00. (Pray we find the papers we've lost somewhere in this house!) Then for the weekend, my focus will be getting my lines done for my job as the pay period ends on Sunday. Then, Monday, I'll have to shop for the Awana store. Then, possibly, we can concentrate on school and get a good week of school in before Christmas actually gets here.

My youngest son is "in training" for Christmas. He's decided that I should wake him up earlier every day, so that he's ready to wake up really early on Christmas morning. (Actually, I think he plans to stay up the whole night, but he's currently denying that!)

Various things.

The carnival of homeschooling is up and it is here. It looks long and good and interesting this time. I've not had time to read much of it yet, but the articles I have read, I've enjoyed.

We're almost done Christmas shopping. We've went from not knowing what in the world to get, to getting it almost done in less than a week, including getting my mom and dad's done. I'm hoping my husband gets the boys stuff done today and I can get the girl finished very quickly based on what he finds for the boys. We try to keep the spending and number of gifts for each relatively even and we try not to go overboard. The trouble with waiting this late is that a lot of things are sold out and we have to make substitutions. But, the trouble with shopping early is that the kids change their minds and no longer want the thing they've requested for months ... Anyway, we're almost done and I refuse to worry about it any longer. What's done is done, what's spent is spent. The kids will be happy no matter what.

The youngest is trying to figure out how to get a lot of caffeine in his system and stay up all night Christmas eve, which is difficult since we only drink decaffinated tea, coffee, kool-aid, water, milk and juice in this house. He's thinking of blowing his whole allowance on Pepsi but I won't let him. I want him to sleep!

The kids are still counting down the days. Today is cool because there have been 12 days in December and there are 12 days left until Christmas eve, so both of the ways they are counting are on 12 today.

Youngest son is doing a reprise of Sandra Boyton's song "Banging on Pots and Pans" in the kitchen so the rest of us are hanging out in the bedroom. With the door closed. We don't want to stifle his creativity, but we don't want to listen to him either. It is a school day but the kids are done with their morning lists and are waiting for me to get done on the computer so we can do afternoon lists together. I guess I'd better quit blogging and get my real work done!

Counting the days.

The kids are counting the days until Christmas 2 different ways. We have a little felt wall hanging that they use to count it down and it's got little pockets to put things in and a little wooden candy cane that you move from one pocket to the next from 1-24. They are counting the days of December and have the candy cane on the
11th and they've made their own paper candy cane to count how many days left until Christmas, 14. So they have one of the candy canes in the 11 pocket and one in the 14th. It's funny.

Yesterday, we did school. Math is going well, I think, thanks to the Math Mammoth workbooks we're doing. We also made cookies yesterday during school time. If we'd measured the ingredients and all that, it would have been a math lesson(fractions, measuring) but I cheated and we got a roll of cookies from the grocery store, so maybe that counts as art? They were very artistic but not very tasty, sadly. I think they had a bit too much handling by the artists which made them kind of tough and floury. Anyway, it was fun.

Looking towards January.

I've got this list of things that I want to do or need to start doing with the kids that I plan to do in January. It started out to be kind of a small list, but now it's grown very, very large. In the back of my mind, I'm starting to worry about it a little. I want to change the way we're doing school somewhat. My oldest has said that he's not learning anything from his workbooks and I do want him to learn something, so we're going to add some of his subjects to ours and do them together like we're doing American History. We're going to add in more grammar instruction and writing for the younger two kids (if you hear whining in January, it'll be because of that!). I want to add more chores to everyone's list (or that!). I want to get my oldest enrolled in karate again. I need to see about getting braces for the girl. The list just seems to go on and on. I suppose I just need to tackle one thing at a time ...

Kind of busy weekend.

We're having a kind of a busy weekend. We've shopped quite a bit and we've got a birthday party this afternoon. We're also supposed to be getting the baseboards down in the living room, but that's kind of looking like it might not happen. We've got a foster care final walkthrough on Friday so I was kind of hoping it would be done. Anyway, the floor looks better than it did the last time our social worker was here. It was bare plywood then. We'll just clean it up the best we can and hope she's understanding about construction dust, I guess.

I've also got to get 2 dogs and 1 cat to the vet this week. I hope it stops raining, because I really don't want to take dogs to the vet in the rain. I am not fond of the smell of wet dogs!

We've only been home from the grocery (in the rain!) for about 20 minutes, but it's time to go to the birthday party now! No rest for the weary (or the wicked, I forget which.)