Creativity this week.

The bunny that my daughter made for the lady at 4H turned out cute.

I'm playing around with drawing with markers and then running a wet paintbrush over it.  This does not look as good in the photo as it does in real life.  It will be a background for something else.

Yes, I'm sick again.  It never ends.

Homeschool Friday Nights.

It's 9:44 p.m. and my daughter just got done with her geometry lessons and is now done with school work for the week.  My son, surprisingly, got his school work done YESTERDAY.  Can anyone believe it?  I almost can't but I know it's true.  They keep track of their schoolwork publicly with their schedules hanging on the living room wall and he does his work sitting in the living room at the computer so I've seen him doing it.  Over the years, we have had a few instances of kids claiming they have done their work and not having done it, but now they are very responsible and accountable, even going to the point of grounding each other when they don't get done., which makes homeschooling so much easier.  :-) 

I am doing better today emotionally.  The biggest drama today was that this lady who had seen my daughter at 4H the other day, called early this morning (before homeschool kids get up) and wanted a custom crochet item made.  My daughter had to wrestle her phone-calling-phobia (no idea how she got that!) and call the lady back.  She really, really didn't want to (as she said, "with a lot more reallys") but she managed to get it done.  We are very proud.

The lady wanted one of these little bunnies, but in a different color, for her daughter.  So guess what my daughter is making right now?

The good and bad.

I had this drawing/painting of mine framed for mom and hung it in her room. 

I had a good first part of the day, getting my work done and getting my oldest son's Easter package mailed and taking care of a few things that needed taking care of and then we had gym day and I got to see my favorite peoples, and then I went to see mom and now I feel like the wind has been taken out of my sails.  She's not coping well with being where she is, but she wasn't coping well with being home alone before and she didn't cope well with the other assisted living place that we had her in.  I kind of have the feeling that no matter what we do, it's never going to get better.  :-(  It's sad.

Random pictures.

Half blue skies, half storm clouds yesterday afternoon.

Sc

Stormy weather.

Zentangling experiment.

Max's funny looking tail.  As he has gotten elderly, he has developed what we like to call "tail pattern baldness" and the top of his tail is bald. 

This is Max from the front, and Freckles, waiting to see if I will drop any of my hamburger.  My toe is in the lower right corner, because other people get their pictures in photos accidentally, but with me, it's toes.  :-P 

Playing around with zentangling.

I think art journaling may have saved my life this winter.  It's been really stressful putting my mom into care and not having her adapt all that well to it and all the worrying and stressing.  My heart seems to be doing permanent palpitations and my right eye twitches all the time and I've gained a bunch of weight, but I'm surviving and one reason I am is because I am pouring my pain into this art and it makes me happy when I look at it.  I'm not sure what I am going to do with it all, but for now, I am really enjoying it.

On the homeschool front, the boy got grounded and the girl did not.  Having gone through this before with my oldest and having him doing well in his second year of college, helps me realize these 2 will probably be fine too, so I am not too worried about it.

This takes a long time, but the effect is kind of neat.

I've tried Zentangling before but this tree trunk was the first one I liked. 

This one is in my comfort zone, just ordinary for me, but I do enjoy doing these.

I was experimenting with drawing poppies from different angles and I really didn't like the way that this turned out, but it's okay I guess.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Third week in a row. Uh oh.

This is the third week in a row that my son has not got his work done by the Friday deadline.  Since he hasn't gotten on the straight and narrow, his sister is going to throw the book at him.  So here's the grounding list.

No books.
No music.
No audio books.
No video games.
No screens of any kind.
and the worst of all ...
No digging hobbit holes.

She is trying desparately to get hers done as well.  Come Monday, will they remember this and act accordingly, getting their work done on time?

I doubt it.

They are incorrigible.

A little late, but ...

my one April fool's joke really didn't happen until last night.  Usually, I am all excited about April fools day for some silly reason and get up and do a bunch of harmless pranks on my kids before they get up, but this year, I was preoccupied with my job and other issues, so I didn't do very much.  On the evening of April 1st, after work while I was making dinner, I made some jello and poured it in the Kool-aid pitcher instead of Kool-aid.  A few minutes later, my youngest son came in the house, poured himself a glass of jello and drank it without noticing, thinking it was cherry Kool-Aid.  I saw him do it, but I didn't say a word.  Twenty four hours passed without incident.  He has a big Gatorade container that he was drinking out of instead of the Kool-Aid.  Then later last night, he got a glass and the pitcher of Jello and tried to pour himself a cup.  It wouldn't come out .  I was watching him and his face was hilarious.  Finally he saw me laughing and figured it out, then got a bowl and a spoon and ate the Jello.  Fun times.

Clovis.

The kids were talking last night about how they like the way we homeschool. They'd rather not have to do anything at all, but since they do have to do school, they like the way we do it.  Our method has evolved over the years from unit studies and individual work on basics to requiring the basics and then unschooling almost everything else.   They will have plenty of stuff on their high school transcripts, don't worry.  Sometimes I've gotten a little over-exuberant in scheduling things to learn about and they have a pretty good base of knowledge in my opinion.  This year we are doing world history again because it has been a while.  I have a timeline of world history and they are reading it and notebooking it.  One day when they were reading, there was a notation that Clovis, the ruler of Gaul, had died, leaving his kingdom to all 4 of his sons.  There had been no previous notation about anything about Clovis, so when told that he died, the kids hadn't known previously that he had existed.  This led to a lot of hilarity with them looking at each other occasionally and saying "Hey, did you know Clovis died?"