A little light reading.

Guess what youngest son is reading now?  His geometry textbook for next year.  It's Life of Fred, so it is a combination of a geometry textbook and a funny story book.  He's already been rereading his textbooks for fractions and decimals and pre-algebra this week.  He's always said that he doesn't like math but he's good at it, but now he might just be starting to like it.

Random pictures, summer 2012.

Cat posters on my daughter's door.

My 10 dollar yard sale chair.

Nerf darts, in storage.  These things are all over the house. 

Youngest son's 4H poster.

Ikea shower curtains that I'm using as window curtains.

My favorite Ikea pillow.

Pillow my daughter made.

Youngest son's favorite books right now.

Pool.

Heroscape board set up.

Pumpkins growing in the front yard from last years jack o lanterns.

Youngest son's library selections this week.

Daughter's needlework from last year.

My husband's needle work from years ago.  Thus hung in our oldest son's nursery but is now in the kitchen.

More of the same art wall, kitchen.

My daughter's owl drawing.

More art wall.

The yarn pile.  Her room needs some work, but we're working on the kitchen right now.

Girl shoes.

I did mention that it was going to be random pictures didn't I ?

Wow.

Curious Boy's Book of Adventure

This is the latest book my youngest son is reading.  It's about building treehouses, learning to fish, safe ways to build a fire and make S'mores and various other things.  He's really enjoying it and has been scouting the area around our house for the perfect treehouse tree.  Yesterday, he said that a book he had read recently said to put down the video games, turn off the TV and do some fun stuff.  He said "I already have all day long to do fun stuff because I don't have screen time."  I asked him if he was glad we did screen time the way we do and he said that he was, because if we allowed him to play video games all day long, he would and he'd miss all the coolest stuff.  Wow, validation on screen time control policies from my baby.  They really are growing up.

Pretty good.

Max and I had a pretty good night's sleep.  Okay, I really don't know if he did, since he sleeps on the bedroom floor but he only went out once at 5:00 a.m.  I took him to the vet yesterday and his blood sugar was still over 400 and she upped his insulin dose a little.  Maybe it's doing the trick, because he has not seemed as crazy-thirsty.  That's good.

On the homeschooling front, the kids realized yesterday that we only have about 14 days left to do.  They are very excited.  Also, both of them missed the 4:00 deadline yesterday and got grounded.  Youngest asked if there was anything he could do to get ungrounded, so I decided on 5 chores.  Then my daughter thought this was a good idea so we got a lot of little cleaning tasks done last night.  It was great from my point of view, I'm embarrassed to say.  I had had a doctor's appointment yesterday regarding possible damage to my vocal cords from singing in the cantata (all clear!) and then had to take Max to the vet so I was working later last night.  It was nice to have my chores done by someone else.

This freed me up, after work and dinner, to go outside and do some weed whacking.  Then I got roped into playing stick ball with the kids.  My youngest son is going through "The Big Book Of Fun Stuff" that he got for Easter and getting us to do all kinds of interesting things like playing stick ball with real sticks (of which he has a huge collection).  Last night, he told me a bunch of riddles that are in the book.  He's really  having fun with it.  I recommended this series of books to a friend of mine's son and then her son told her that it had some marginally bad words in it, nothing serious, but some, what we would call, rude words.  Still, they are not popping up in my son's conversations and he needs to learn this stuff outside of public middle schools, so I'm not personally upset about small things like that.

Audio Books.

Tonight when it was bedtime (a minute ago), I went outside to tell my youngest who was listening to an audio book out on the front porch, to turn it off and come in because now it's time to listen to our group audio book and then after we finish that, we'll go to bed at which time, I'll have to turn off my husband's audio book (that he fell asleep listening to) so I can go to sleep.  Then youngest son will turn his book back on to go to sleep by and daughter will turn her audio book on to go to sleep by. 

Current selections include Eldest, On the Run, A Wrinkle in Time and Horatio Hornblower.  

One advantage.

One advantage of the fact that we've all become audio book addicted in this house is that we don't have to worry about mispronouncing words as we hear them pronounced correctly when we are learning them.  I remember when I was a kid, I read the word misled as something like mice-uhled. until my 8th grade class was reading aloud and I realized it was pronounced miss-led.  Oh, yes.  That makes much more sense.  A disadvantage to my kids is that they might not immediately recognize the word in print.  I have been looking for vocabulary lists based on the books we like, but so far, haven't really found any.  I will keep looking though.  Another advantage to audio books is that, when you listen to a book while driving or working, it makes the time pass so much faster and it is easier to share books as a family.

Unexpected math lesson.

My son wanted to do another experiment from the Big Book of Boy Stuff yesterday.  He wanted to make homemade root beer.  So while I was at the store, I picked him up some root beer flavoring (who knew this even existed?) and some soda water and when we finally got home last night from all our after school activities (9:30 p.m.) the younger 2 kids made root beer.  I didn't expect it but I kept hearing them doing math calculations.  It seems that their syrup was supposed to make 3 cups, but it only made 2 1/2 cups and they were supposed to add 5 ounces of soda water to every 1/2 cup of syrup.  Youngest son wanted to just pour it all in, the whole 32 ounce bottle but the girl wanted to be precise.  I heard them arguing him saying "It's not an exact science!" and her insisting that it was.  Finally I went in and helped them, but we used the girl's math, because she was so determined.  It ended up being a little strong and needing a little bit more club soda added to it, so the boy was right.  For some reason, it smelled like root beer, but tasted kind of like wintergreen life savers.  It was fun anyway.  Today, they are going to do a more old fashioned recipe with that does not have club soda, but instead uses yeast to make the bubbles?  I can't say that sounds appetizing to me.

Zombie raisins.

My youngest is still going through the Big Book of Boy Stuff.  One of the experiments says that you can rehydrate raisins in water and they will turn back into grapes.  The infamous box of raisins from the fair the other day are now soaking in water.  They've been in there since yesterday.  They have plumped up but apparently they don't taste anything like grapes, hence, my oldest son called them Zombie Raisins.

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.

5 Good Things.

5 things that were good about today.
1.  I woke up in a better mood today.  No blahs.  This is critical to how the day turns out.  Sometimes I just have a funk wash over me and I can't seem to do much about it.  Thankfully, not today.
2.  I made vegetable soup.  It's good.  I used up a can of peas that didn't have a label on it.  I had been wondering what was in there and in the hopes that it was a vegetable, I opened it today.   That worked out.  Pineapple would have been weird in the soup. :-)
3.  The kids did their schoolwork with minimal nagging from me.  There was some nagging but not too awful much.
4.  We have finished the read aloud of the 39 Clues book that is a book that I have to read and have gotten to the next one which we have on audiobook and I can listen (and possibly fall asleep).  
5.  The mail came today and I got 2 of the books I ordered myself for Christmas.  One is a gluten free recipe book and the other is a Katie Fforde book that I haven't read yet.  I enjoy her books, which are romantic comedy. 

An addition to the schedule.

A couple of weeks I added a small thing to the schedule for the kids.  It says "15 minutes outside with Mom".  That's a new one.  They've had to go outside before, but now they have to go outside with me.  I am getting all kinds of walks in and the outdoor time is good for me.  What gave me the idea was this book  .  It is written for younger kids, but it does emphasize how good going outside can be for all of us and it's got a lot of good ideas in it.  I checked it out from the library and read it and put the item on our schedule and now next time I go to the library, I'm going to get it out again and maybe write down some of the ideas for interesting things to do, other than just go for a walk, although the walk in the moonlight we just took and the walk the other day in the rain were different and fun.  One other thing that I do remember from the book that the kids and I want to do is to take a picnic of hot muffins and hot chocolate outside on a cold day.  I think it's cold enough now in the lower 50s, but the kids want to wait until it is at least 40, maybe 30.  That should be quite bracing.  :-)

Busy and funny.

We've had some busy and funny times the last couple of days.  We've had things to do pretty much every day this week and also, in between, we've been screening comedy videos for a fun night we're planning at our church tonight.  I think the winner is going to be Tim Hawkins, I'm no Rockstar.  We watched it last night and it is just about the funniest thing I've ever seen.   Today, if we get time we'll watch Insanitized, his other DVD and see if it is just as funny.  That one last night made my cheeks hurt.  :-)

I'm at work right now, but I keep thinking about other things.  I'm having a hard time working because I'm so distracted and also because I'm cold!  One of my hands is completely numb.  I have turned up the heat, but it doesn't seem to be making any difference.   I'm also sincerely hoping that the kids get their school done in a timely manner today (unlike yesterday!) and we have time this afternoon to get ready, to make the dessert we're taking tonight and generally get ready.  Since I'm in charge, I'm nervous.  I'm really good at planning things, but I tend to obsess a little over whether everyone I've invited is having fun.

I'm reading a book called Nurture Shock, which is about what the scientific studies say about raising children, versus what we as a society do.  Right now I'm reading a fascinating chapter about how much sleep kids need and the effects a lack of sleep has on them.  I'll try and sum up the whole book later, but I have already read enough (I'm on chapter 2), to think that everyone should read it.

A better day.

I guess it is.  It started out better.  I didn't drop anything in the toilet and that is always a plus.  I am at my mom's house working now and it is going okay.  I'm typing echocardiograms mostly.  My husband has a plan for fixing the Suburban and has ordered parts which we hope will arrive tomorrow.  I kind of hated missing the field trip yesterday, but at the same time, I didn't mind all that much since we've been to that same orchard several times before.  I looked at my blog posts from 3 years ago in October and I had mentioned going there and also we were reading the same read aloud book that we're reading now - Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, a funny coincidence.

I'm still debating whether to take a couple of days off from school later this week and call it fall break and do some fall cleaning and home maintenance.  I keep waiting to hope that I will feel better physically, that maybe my iron pills will kick in and I will be full of energy, but that has not happened yet.