The Carnival of Homeschooling.

There is a lot to the carnival this time. It has taken me a couple of days to read through it, in little snatches of time here and there, but it's worth the effort. Here it is.

My Iced Tea Habit.

I'm trying to lose weight and part of that includes trying to give up my iced tea habit. I have been drinking 4-5 glasses of sweet, wonderful iced tea each day. As of yesterday, I cut that down to 1 with the intent of going down to 0. It has been very hard on me. I'm starting to drink water instead which, of course, is very healthy and very tasteless. Still, I need to do it. Sigh.

The Choice. (ta da!)

By popular vote the kids chose Inquisitiveness for our next KONOS unit study. There are 43 weeks of studies under this unit. It is a whopper. If we do the whole thing, we won't need another unit for the rest of the year. It has a complete earth science curriculum in it, instructions on how to write a research paper, geography, mapping, way too much to name (especially since I carried the book to the orthopedist's office to work on while waiting and left it in the car!) It's really something. I've been enjoying just reading through the activities. I'm going to try something a little different this time. I'm making notebooking pages for the kids to use to notebook the unit, with the vocabulary words and things like that to use as a guide, to make sure we've studied everything we want to out of this huge unit. I'm excited to get started on it. We may go ahead and do a quick look at the military unit which is under Obedience, right after the Kings and Queens/medieval unit we just did, because the boys are interested in that.

For those dear readers who don't know, KONOS is a complete curriculum for K-8 grade and it will cover all the basics when supplemented with language arts and math, for those of you who are wondering how I'm going to teach everything the kids need to know. I'm aware of scope and sequence and the KONOS book has the same scope, but maybe a difference sequence or order than what the public schools are teaching. Just to be on the safe side, I plan to buy The Checklist and check things off that we have studied. We'll get there and we're having a good time on the trip too. I really like this curriculum.

My older son is doing the Alpha Omega Lifepak curriculum for 9th grade, but he also participates in the hands-on, fun stuff we do for KONOS and he will be writing a research paper this year. ;-)

Just a quick update.

HEALTH NEWS:
My daughter broke her left arm, again. It's only been a few months since the last time. Technically, that time, it was her hand and this time, it is her forearm, both bones. The kids were playing a game involving jumping over a string and she jumped, tripped and fell. Consequently, I did not get to work as much as I wanted to last night, because we were in the ER. Tomorrow she gets a cast on and I guess we'll just go from there. We need to do school tomorrow, so I guess she'll be doing it one-handed.

SCHOOL NEWS:
I'm going to let the kids pick our next Konos unit and depending on what it is, we may start it tomorrow. If I need to gather a lot of books and materials, we'll wait a couple of days. We could use extra work on the 3Rs anyway.

WEIRD NEWS:
One of our lizards (green anoles) shed it's skin today and it was pretty creepy looking. We've recently acquired the lizards and the two of them and the live crickets that the eat have taken up residence in oldest son's bedroom.

Other than that, things are going along here in the usual crazy way.

Back to work.

It's been a very slow week at my job. The hospitals have not been sending as much work as usual, so I've had more free time this week, which is good from the standpoint of free time, but bad for the old paycheck. Today, they've sent tons, so guess where I will be all weekend long ... working. Oh joy.

Morning Glories.

I wasn't kidding when I said that now that my camera cord was found, I was going to show you all the pictures I took this summer! Okay, maybe not every single one, but here's one of my morning glories. I really have enjoyed them this year.

Sunflowers.

Okay, now that my camera cord is found, you all will have to look at every picture I've taken this summer ... so here are some pictures of our sunflowers that got taller than the roof this year.

Linc's Bad Day, episode III.

Our cat Linc leads a wildly exciting life. He has gotten his entire head stuck in a ziplock bag and got stuck in a tree before and I have blogged about him. This time, he got a hematoma in his ear, which means that his ear blew up like a balloon and he had to go to the vet for surgery. Now he has a permanently droopy ear. He's still very handsome, I think.