Helping in a tiny little good deed.

A year or so ago I got an email in one of my homeschool email groups that someone was looking for a small dog.  I got in touch with the lady I know who rescues dogs, the one from whom we got Freckles a few years back and asked her if she had any dogs available.  She had one, a little Jack Russell named Fritz.  I forwarded her email back to the family who was looking for a dog and I never heard another thing about it, until today.  The lady who was looking for a dog a year ago, was cleaning out her old emails, found mine and sent me a note today thanking me, because Fritz has been part of their family for a year now and they really enjoy him.  Isn't that kind of cool and wasn't it nice of her to let me know that it all worked out? 

It's almost time.

We've been back to school since the first week of August, which, of course, means it's almost time to tweak that schedule a smidge.  I added exercise this week, which I had somehow forgotten.  My daughter and I exercised hard all summer and both of us earned the Presidential Active Lifestyle Award, (the boys claimed to want to wait to do it until it cooled off) but then in the last couple of weeks, we have been slacking.  So I added it back into their schedule.  I don't know what I'm going to do with me now that it's too cold for me to get in the pool.  :-P  Back to their schedules, I'm also going to add in a Physics course I got from Currclick last year when they had a sale/promotion thing to help a family in need.  I may take out one day of notebooking to make up for it or I may just add it in.  I might make them do a notebooking page on the physics lesson of  the day.  That might be very interesting.  The notebooking is going well. I still haven't found my camera cord, mainly because I haven't looked for it, but my daughter got a new camera and so I might get her to snap a couple of pictures of their notebooking pages to share with ya'll. 

Sometimes I hate technology.

I have opened up something on my work system that's not supposed to be open and I have this little toolbar at the top of my screen that I don't know what to do with.  About 3 or 4 months ago, I accidently opened this miniscreen to the left of the page I type on and I have not been able to get rid of it either.  If I don't get some kind of technical support for these issues, I might eventually open up enough mysterious toolbars and thingies so that I can't even see the screen I'm supposed to be typing on!. 

Okay, maybe not.

We did not end up doing school yesterday as I said we were going to.  I had all the symptoms of accidentally ingesting gluten -- headache, aching and fatigue.  I took a nap that lasted about half of the afternoon.  It seemed like old times before I went gluten free.  I don't know what caused it, but since it is a rare thing now instead of a daily way of life, now when it happens, I go ahead and take the day off rather than subject the kids to my headachey-all over achey, crabbiness.  They were thrilled.  Today, it is school as usual and my youngest had already gotten started when I left for work this morning.   

Labor Day.

It's Labor Day in the United States today.  We don't really celebrate it at our house.  I always just go ahead and work on the minor holidays.  I don't get paid if I don't work and we don't usually have anything planned on days like this.  We are kind of anti-crowd and since everyone else is doing things this Monday, we'd rather do something at an off time which is something we can do because we homeschool. That way, we can have the place to ourselves.  A couple of years ago, we went to a local lake on Labor Day evening and stayed until the next morning, on the Tuesday and totally had the beach to ourselves.  We also pretty much had the lodge to ourselves, including the game room and the restaurant.  It was really wonderful.

So for today, we're going to do work and school.  We might do a notebook page on the history of Labor Day.  I really have no idea how it got started, so it might be educational to me as well.   It's looking really a lot like fall around here lately, the skies are gray, it's raining and leaves are falling.  It's also kind of cool.  The temperature this morning was 63.  It kind of makes me start craving fall foods and fall experiences and it has definitely started my youngest son thinking about Christmas.  Now that seems a little soon to me!  

Busy weekend.

We've got 3 birthday parties this weekend, so I probably won't check in again until Monday.  I hope you all are having a nice weekend~!

Dietary Issues.

This is unrelated to homeschooling, but since my blog header says "random thoughts", I'm covered.  :-)   As some of  you may be aware, almost 2 years ago I read an article about how going gluten free could help with my symptoms of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and modified my diet to be gluten free.  I feel so much better it is almost unbelievable to me.  I didn't know I'd also get rid of most of my sinus/allergy problems (maybe all?) and my daily headaches, but I did.   I've been trying to tell anyone and everyone with an autoimmune disease or chronic fatigue to try it.  I didn't direct any of my comments about it intentionally to my children, but my oldest son, after keeping up with me all day and realizing that he was more tired than I was, went gluten free himself almost a month ago.  He also decided at that time, since he is also lactose intolerant, to go completely dairy free as well.  (before that, he had been eating small amounts).  Since he did this, I've really been struggling to come up with things to buy that he can eat and things to cook.  It' really made me re-think every single thing I buy and cook.  But, the good news is, he also feels better and more energetic and though I've been stretched with my cooking creativity, I'm kind of getting the hang of it now.   Really, there's not much of a point to me posting about this on my homeschool blog, other than to point out that I am also learning some new thing at our house this semester and since it was on my mind because I have to go to the grocery today, I thought I'd share. 

Cool chart.

 

I saw this on Pinterest and thought it was very interesting.   I want to give credit where credit is due but I had a hard time figuring that out.  On Pinterest there was a link to this blog but I couldn't find the chart on there to list it.  It also lists this site at the bottom of the chart, but I couldn't find the chart on that site to link it either.  See if you can click on it and enlarge it enough to read it well. I couldn't get it any bigger.  Maybe you could find a magnifying glass and read it or just look at it here, where its a little bit larger.

Okay, someone way smarter than me, Gidget, found the original.  Here it is!   Take a look.  It' worth a read.