I'm glad

the busy week is over.  I want some down time.    This week has been kind of good and kind of awful at times and I'd like to get off of the physical and emotional roller coaster for a while.   VBS and the field trip were good, but a lot of other things have been going not as well.  My work, for example,  has been very, very difficult this week with my computer locking up multiple times and my husband has been working on figuring out the cause but it's not completely resolved yet.   I never know when it's going to lock up and so I am kind of a nervous wreck about it.   It's kind of like waiting for the other shoe to drop.  So far, so good today but I'm not counting on it to continue.  It might and it might not. 

This is what I feel like doing.

Field trip. :-)

We took a field trip yesterday to Fort Harrod.  It is a state park and therefore counts as one of our summer adventures.  It was also very educational and so is being counted as a field trip for this school year.  We've already taken 2 field trips and we aren't officially starting school until August 9. 

One of the coolest things about the state park there is this tree, it's an osage orange tree and it's about 200 years old.  It's grown along the ground for some reason and is great for the kids to climb on.   The thing that was not cool was the weather.  It rained just before we went which apparently turned the whole fort into a sauna.  We were lucky that the sun did come out for our visit, but boy was it steamy.  Still, fun.

July 28.

It's a busy week, but nothing compared to the summer reading week where we were only visiting our home occasionally, for 10 minutes at a time.  The younger two kids are having a great time.  The older one is just having a regular week, I guess.  He's teaching himself a programming language (unschooling!) called Python and making some games on the computer that are fun.  My daughter is almost finished with the beanbag chair and then the 20 year cleanup can begin.  I'll take a picture of the chair when it's completely done.   It's a good thing because Freckles seems magnetically attracted to that room and keeps going in there and coming out covered in styrofoam.  She came out the other day completely white with some even stuck to her eyeballs.  Eeek!   Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a picture of that and this is just a regular, sans styrofoam, picture of Freckie. 

In the back of my mind, I'm planning school.  I've come up with a start date and a list of potential subjects.  I'm thinking of rotating everything on a 2 week basis so I can get everything in.   I'll try and post more information on our schedule as it becomes more fully formed. 

Another busy week.

This week the kids have VBS but since it's in the morning, I can drop them off and then come here to Mom's house to work using her high speed internet.  Then, I can go get the kids and come back here and continue to work.  I wish I could get it all done during the 3 hours while they're gone but I can't.   Still, I've got my dictionary back, I'm logged in as myself and there is work so I am definitely not complaining. 

I haven't really made much progress in planning school but I did make an extensive list of what I want the kids to learn and do this year.   It's probably way too much but some subjects I want extensive practice in (like math) and others we just need to touch lightly on to make sure they have some familiarity with them.  I'm also going to try and make sure that we have time this fall to do the rest of our adventure list and put in plenty of exercise and outdoor time.   I think I need to amp up the home-economics requirements too.  They all know how to do laundry and general cleaning, but they need to do more meal preparing and planning and a few other things.  They'll be so thrilled, but hey, they need to be able to do these things.  

Even if I don't have all of my plans in place, we'll get started, we'll add things as we go and drop off things that we get tired of or that don't work.  It'll be fine.  We'll probably start school on August 9. 

Okay, I did it.

I opened up my Rainbow Resource catalog and started looking through it.  So far, that's it.  I did fill out out a couple of blue cards to request that the library buy me a couple of things, but I haven't bought anything myself, I have not finalized any plans and I have no idea where to start. 

Is that progress?  Probably not. 

So many ways ...

that my workday can go wrong.  It's Murphy's law in action around here this week.  The other day it was a virus that made me lose my dictionary.  Since that happened, I've had to stay logged in to my husband's administrator account or not be able to access the internet.  I can't access the internet as myself for some reason.  My husband did come over here and get the dictionary working, but I walked away from the computer for a few minutes this morning (because I had no work - another thing that can go wrong and will) and when I came back, I was no longer signed in as my husband and couldn't get anything to work.  I couldn't re-sign in as my husband because he does not trust me with any of his passwords.  So finally, I got logged in as a new user under a new profile that my husband made for me when the virus stuff happened and it seems to be working although I've had to go in and make all the adjustments to Microsoft Word that my company requires (not letting it make automatic changes to things like 1/2 and hyphen, not correcting words with numbers in them, not spell checking things that are all capitalized, etc.) and so anyway, it is 1:27, I have barely even begun to work and I'm already tired.

I hate Murphy's law.

Addendum:   Now it's 1:35 and I've discovered that since I can't sign on as my husband or myself, I've lost my spell check dictionary. 

Again. 

:-(

Pumpkins.

We are not be the best gardeners in the world but our pumpkin vine is growing all over the backyard and we were pleased to find this big boy under the edge of the deck. 

and this one came up voluntarily in the front flower bed, probably because of the jack o lanterns being carved there last year. 

Where to begin?

 I've barely begun to look at what we are going to do this year.  I am starting to feel ready to get back to school, even though, of course, I haven't got half the stuff done this summer that I wanted to.  Pretty much the same thing happens every summer, so I am not surprised.  Anyway, for the planning, over the next few days I'm going to write down the subjects I want to teach, then I'll start looking at my catalog for resources and then I'll start trying to fit it into a schedule/checklist for each kid and one for me.  I have to tie my exercise to the kids school or I won't do it -- ya'll know how I am!  I might also put writing a few pages of a book (I really want to write a book) in there for myself to do.   Right now since I was cleaning and grocery shopping all day, I'm tired, so I don't know how far I'll get on the list. 

The picture is of the new board game we picked up today at Goodwill.  It's called Cranium Super Showdown.  It's really fun, similar to Apples to Apples but the judge has to decide who would win a contest.  In the picture above, the contest is a game of pin the tail on the donkey and the contestants are  Tarzan with a lightsaber and Dora the Explorer with an extra half an hour to get ready.  We laughed a lot while playing.  In this case, the judge wisely decided that Tarzan with a lightsaber, blindfolded, playing pin the tail on the donkey, would be too dangerous.   :-)