The Carnival of Homeschooling is up!

Here's the link.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but throughout the day when I'm waiting for work to download, etc., I'll be reading it all.   Beware though, one of the blogs has music and so if you plan to open them all up while you're working and then read and close them one at a time throughout the day, the music might scare you half to death, like it did me!  It's on the post called "Reminders" for further reference.  I do not care for sites that open music and ads because of my habit of opening them and reading them later.

Fun Valentines Stuff

I was looking at Amanda Bennett's post on her Unit Studies page on Facebook and she listed this site, Technology Rocks which has all kinds of fun Valentine activities to do with your kids.  I love the heart shaped paragraph and I think I might write some personalized paragraphs to my family with it.  :-)

How cute is that?!

An experiment from the Big Book Of Boy Stuff.

We did this earlier.  It's called Grape Lightening.


Take a seedless grape.  Cut it in half, but not all the way.  Leave a skin attachment between the two halves. Remove the stem. Put the grape on a plate facing up.  Put it in the center of the microwave.  Put the microwave on high power and set it for 10-40 (we did 10) seconds.  Now turn it on and watch.  You should see sparks and maybe even electric arcs between the grape halves.  At some point, the grapes will split all the way apart.  When that happens, stop the  microwave, because nothing else will happen after that. 

It's pretty neat.  You should try it.  Luckily, grapes were on sale this week at the grocery store so we had some.

Big  Book of Boy Stuff 

Book recommendation.

Big Book of Boy Stuff 

My oldest son enjoyed this book and checked it out of the library at least 5 times a few years ago.  I was browsing at the library the other day and happened to see it and brought it home for my youngest.  He's loving this book.  He stayed up half the night the first night reading it and he has plans to do a bunch of experiments that it has in it.  He has also been asking us a ton of riddles and silly questions like "If vegetarians are people who eat vegetables, what exactly are humanitarians?".  He's already made plans to either purchase the book or check it out of the library a bunch more times like his brother did.  I need to check and see if there is a Big Book of Girl Stuff for the girl.

Sometimes I just don't want to.

One of my kids kind of got after me recently for not doing something that he thought I should do.  I might should do it but I don't want to and you know, sometimes when you get up and work 5 days a week,  take care of a house, get groceries, take everyone everywhere they need to go and generally all around be responsible, you just don't want to do anything else that requires getting dressed and getting somewhere.  I think every now and then I should get to play hookey with no good reason.   :-P

Saturday.

Last night the roving teenagers that go through this house after midnight, were rapping.  Saturday.  No School.  Saturday.  No School.  Saturday.  No School.  Word.

Friday.

Youngest son set his alarm at 6:00 a.m. so he could get up and finish school today.  When I got up at 9:00 a.m., he was almost finished, working on handwriting while listening to an audiobook.  I kind of wish I'd gotten up early and did the same, but I really enjoy my sleep so I didn't.  One advantage of my writing my own schedule and working at home is that I get to sleep until I wake up.  Now the girl and I will be working most of the day and youngest can gloat that he's done.

Murphy's Law?

It's not been the best day.  Not terrible, just kind of annoying.  I got up feeling all dizzy and went to the doctor thinking I probably had an inner ear infection.  I had one maybe 6 months ago with the same symptoms and she treated it with an antibiotic and I got better.  This time, she only gave me an anti-dizziness pill.  Since my dizzy episodes only last about 5 minutes or less and this pill is for the symptom, not the underlying cause, I don't know that it's gonna help.  Then I came back home and had to finish work.  I had a particularly irritating, really, really long report ended up being 7 pages, single spaced typed and at the end, he said that he wasn't sure why he'd been consulted because this patient's problems were outside his specialty.  I still get paid for it, but otherwise, what a waste of time.  Then I took the kids to youth group, ran a bunch of errands, came home and spilled an entire gallon of tea when I was trying to get it out of the fridge.   The towels we used to clean it up are in the washing machine right now and I am going to relax quietly for 1 hour before bed.  Sigh.