Well I know I’m dangerously close to not keeping my blog up again. So here it goes.

My Mom’s gone AWOL weekend was great. We ate well, we drank well, we stayed in a fancy suite, we got manicures and pedicures, I won $50, and we shopped and laughed. What more can you want in a weekend away from responsibilities?

I am not sure if it was the break or that spring is coming but I really got my rear in gear with doing school with the kiddos. I have so been slacking with Emily. I keep telling myself she is only 5 we have years and years to teach her all she needs to know. But it is time to do way more than I do with her. Great news is Brandon is starting to work more independently. And he has caught his mom’s addiction to curriculum because next year’s stuff has come in and he is dying to start it! LOL

My husband, as any one that knows me will tell you, I adore. I do. He is wonderful to me. I am very grateful to God that He provided me with this man. But he was SOOOOOO great about this Mom’s gone AWOL weekend .Really I have never been so spoiled. Buy what you want, stay gone as long as you want, enjoy yourself, live it up, this is your weekend honey, don’t worry about us, and the whole time he was working and taking the kids to work, and rushing them here and there. What a guy! I could really get used to that. So, I have decided I’m going to be such an awesome wife that he’ll want to treat me that way all the time.

First step in that direction, one of the best ways to be a good wife is to be a great mom. If I have the kids and house running well that takes stress out of his life. So, no more kids in the living room and our room. Both children have TVs in their rooms and there is no reason they should bring all their stuff to the other rooms to play and watch TV. Plus it is soooooo past time for them to sleep in their rooms and not the living room or our room. I’m an attached parenting kind of mom but hey this has gone too far!!! LOL So, this weekend we are working on cleaning their rooms and organizing them so that they are such wonderful places to be that they never want to leave them.

Once I accomplish step one It will be easier to keep our room, the living room, and kitchen clean. My next step is keep clothes washed (not being 10 loads behind in other words), kitchen always neat with no dirty dishes, the bedroom a safe haven to come home to at night (right now it looks like his office) and supper by 6 o’clock.

Since he is working 12 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week, I also plan to start doing some the chores that are traditionally his. He bought a great self propelled lawn mower that will help. It is not a riding lawn mower but beggars can’t be choosers. But my absolute biggest goal is to clean out the storage shed and purge purge purge all this Ca- Ca this family has piled up around the house, yard and shed.

So if I’m not blogging for a while..... Hopefully it is because I’m working my tail off .....which hopefully will help with my other goal of losing 30 pounds! Send good vibes my way!

OK I haven't blogged in 2 whole months so here is all the wonderful stuff that has been going on that really deserves a full length page all by themselves but aren't going to get one right now.

1. A close friend of mine, Brandon, and myself went on a Biblical Daniel fast for 21 days. We had nothing but fruits and vegetables. It was all about discipline and putting God first for me. It was very hard and very much worth the effort.

2. Heather and Aaron got married on March 10th. Of course that is her and Em at the top of the page. Isn’t she just beautiful? There are new pictures running down the side of the page also. The last picture is of her and Aaron our new son. It was a wonder and sweet wedding service. I pray many blessings on their marriage.

3. My niece that came to the wedding had 2 children with a stomach virus. To top it off my close friend here at home has 2 children with a stomach virus and it was also going around in Houston. Regardless where we got it the whole family came home from the wedding sick and stayed that way for a week. Cecil and I still have moments when we fill the virus is hanging in there.

4. As you may know from my post around Christmas about Santa paying off our lawyer, Cecil is adopting Branflake. Well, the first court date got cancelled. The judge was busy? Anyway it was rescheduled for today. So, here is my morning so far…..

Just to set the scene… Panic has set in.
Cecil wakes me up around 6:30 this morning.

Cecil: "You have to get up and call the lawyer!"

Me: "What?"

Cecil: "You have to get up and call the lawyer!"

Me: "Why?"

Cecil: "I'm scared. What if I miss heard him?"

Me: "He said 1:30 right, the after lunch session?"

Cecil: "Yes but before he said all cases started at 9 AM and they just saw you as the day went."

Me: *lean over and look at clock* “Well honey I can't call him right now."

Cecil" "No, but ya'll better go ahead and get up and be ready to go by 8 in case when you call him it really is at 9 AM.


Me mentally: Sheesh doesn't he realize he's already got this gig? I mean he has had the kid calling him Daddy since he was 2 years old. (For the 1st year he called him SeeSaw.)


5. Tomorrow is my Moms Gone AWOL weekend. I am off for a whole weekend of fun with some friends. No kids, no housework, no spouse, no responsibilities, nothing but selfishness. We are going to stay in a fancy hotel suite, eat good food, get manicures and pedicures, and shop shop shop. I plan to make the most of it. I can’t believe Cecil is letting me go much less has agreed to spend the money this involves. I may never get a chance to be this self indulgent again! God is good. Cecil is good.


Other than those things the days have been pretty much the same old stuff around here. Lots of school work and lots of house work. We did get our taxes in and bought a bunch of much needed stuff and a few things we shouldn’t have. I went ahead and bought my entire curriculum for next year. I’ll tell you all about my new buys later. Your roughly filled in now on my last 2 months and hopefully I won’t fall off the blogging wagon again for a while! LOL

I know it has been forever since I've blogged. I just got side tracked really. And I know this isn't really what you want to read after looking at the same unblogged page for weeks on end. However, I did at least get rid of the snowmen and changed to a spring look. As I really just spent WAY TOO much time doing just That today, you'll just have to wait for me you fill you in on all the stuff we've been up to until...... tomorrow? Ok look I'll really try to update tomorrow. Promise!!!

Emily has a friend coming over to play tomorrow. So, first thing off the bat this morning she announces she needs to clean her room.

OK WELLL... knowing that Emily is truly my daughter I knew that she wouldn't be able to think of anything else but cleaning her room once her mind was fixed on it.

So.....

I started Bran on some school work and went in to help her get her room straighten to her satisfaction. I was hoping against all odds that this would relieve her mind so I could get her to concentrate on school work afterwards...

During about 15 mins. into the work this is just a few of the things said to me:

"No, MOM that doesn't go there."
"MOM, that goes to the other castle."
"No, we are going to play with that, leave it out."
and my personal favorite...
*heavy sigh* then.....
"MOM, don't you know I want it to look pretty!"

I have capitalized MOM because she said it real snotty like that.

After all this lip I decided I obviously have NO idea how to clean up a 5 yr old's room and left her to it. It appears clean to me now, but she is still in there making final touches. May be one day when she has the patience she will take the time to teach me the proper way to clean.

I am AWESOME!!

OH, OK so is Brandon.

I love building things. OH, the sense of accomplishment! OH, the joy of success. OH, the happiness of showing your husband you can figure out things that he can't and that YES you can do it without him!

In the land of 3 guinea pigs in one small cage there was much trouble. A tad bit of fighting it seemed. So, I was given an extra cage exactly like the one I already had and separated them. OH, the pain and anguish this caused the little dears! They chewed and chewed on the wire between them. They wanted to be together. I really think it was just the small space that drove them to fuss with each other. So.....

I took to two solid metal bottoms and drilled five matching wholes down one side of each and took bolts and wing nuts and bolted them together. This made a little 1 1/2" ledge they have to hop over. Just to be safe I used a wrapping paper tube slit down the side to slip over the ledge to make it a smooth transition from one cage bottom to the other.

Next I took the two wire tops and cut a side out of each one. I left extra wire on one side to wire the two together. Brandon was a lot of help here. Neither of us really had the hand strength to make this an easy job. So, I’m really glad I had his help. I guess this could count as a shop class credit?

The result was a cage twice the size of the original and very happy guinea pigs! When we put them back in they started popcorning. This is a cute little jump they do where they kind of just pop up into the air booty first.

Any way it was great to see them happy again. Also Bran is really proud of the work we did together to make such a nice new cage. He had me take pictures to post.

Laying carpet seems like a simple enough thing, right? You move a little furniture, roll out padding, roll out carpet, and put the furniture back. Simple. Well, I don’t do simple. See my grandparents had a wood burning stove that wasn’t set up correctly when this was their house and because of that our ceilings were stained and covered with soot. Well, actually when we moved in everything was but we had cleaned and painted everything but the ceilings. I decided while the furniture was out of the living room we should paint the ceiling. Since our living room is fairly large I had divided into a living area and a dining area. However, with carpet in the living room I decided I was going to have to move my school room into the living room and move my dining set back into the dining room. So, a one day job became a four day job.

Then I don’t know if I mentioned this but this is gently used carpet given to us by and older couple so we didn’t exactly go out and buy just the right measured amount for our living room. The end result was that we didn’t have enough for every inch of the room. So we have a hallway from our front door to our back door. This in the end turns out perfect, because now all three doors coming from the outside come in on linoleum before you ever step on the carpet. We still have to go get some new linoleum (our current flooring is 20 years old, doesn’t match anything in the room and is u-g-l-y) and we need to get a long transition bar from where the carpet goes to linoleum. I used some of the left over pieces of carpet to make a rug in front of each door and used double sided tape to hold them in place. My biggest concern was that I always sweep up so much sand and dog hair and now it’s going to be all in the carpet… Well, as I’m behind on blogging about this the carpet has been down a week and a half. I vacuum it daily. I know I’ll slack off when the newness wears off but oh well. Oddly enough all the floors seem to be staying cleaner, less sandy, etc. I think the little mats by each door are making a world of difference. Who knew it could be so easily solved?

The dining room looks so nice as an actual dining room. We had stopped eating as a family at the table together every night, but have reinstated that tradition since the change. It has been really nice. I was also really surprised by how homey-er the living room looks with carpet. But the biggest surprise is that we’ve always just used the school room to hold our school supplies but now it is actually functional and we use it every day.

Our FREE carpet ended up costing us supply money to get it laid, plus we paid a neighbor to show Cecil how to lay carpet, then the paint that I added in, then we still have to buy new linoleum to match, BUT I think it has made many well worth it improvements to our house and family.

I have been tagged by my friend Ladyhawk, which is good because I've kind of slacked off on blogging!

THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘7 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 7 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 7 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.”

1) I love lemons! I cut them in half pour on the salt and go to town. However, I don't like anything lemon flavored. No cookies, cake, pie, nothing will do but real lemon with salt.

2) I have a habit of saying bold when I mean bowl. I don't know why I add a "d" I just do. I also drag out aluminum and cinnamon. alummmmmminininummmmm LOL

3) I don't feel like doing housework until sometime around what is considered bed time. Then I get a huge burst of energy and a consuming desire to move furniture and scrub things.

4) I've found teaching phonics challenging because I've discovered that I mispronounce so many words and trying to pronounce them right is almost painful.

5) I'm a compulsive talker or nervous talker, whatever you want to call it. When I catch myself blabbing on… the more I try to stop… the more I go on and on and on and on and on.....

6) I have traffic issues. I can't stand multiple lane highways, overpasses, bridges, road construction, etc. And I don't mean I get irritated by them or road rage, I mean I hyperventilate and have a huge urge to jump out of the vehicle.

7) Once I start something I can’t stand to stop until it is finished. It doesn’t matter if it is reading a book or painting a room, what ever the project is I WANT IT DONE, I WANT IT DONE ALL AT ONE TIME, I DON’T WANT TO PUT THINGS UP AND FINISH IT TOMORROW OR LATTER, I WANT IT DONE NOW! Now, I can put doing things off forever…but once I start I want it done and nothing else exists until it is done!

OK now ya'll know. The secret is out. I'm weird!

Well today is the day. Back to school after the long Christmas break. I tried my best to get the house clean from all the holiday stuff before we went back to work, but then a neighbor gave us their carpet! So now I have this huge roll of carpet and carpet padding in the living room floor until next week when Cecil says he’ll lay it.

We had a great break and I made sure to spend a lot of vegetable (umm….err is that valuable) time with the kids. We played board games, had a fire, popped fireworks, made cookies, set up a bed in the living room and camped out there with snacks and movies. (nope that is definitely vegetable time) But today is back to work day.

How are we doing? Well, since our bed times are shot both kids were still up to around 1-2 AM. This means I was up until 2 AM. However, despite that I got up when DH got up to go to work. I woke Bran up about 30 minutes later and Em up an hour later. I had Bran eat, walk the dogs then do about 20 minutes of exercise to get him going. So far he has done Bible and started his new Saxon 65 (thanks Carmen). He is about to start his history assignment for the day after that I imagine we’ll have to break for lunch.

Emily has drawn a few pictures this morning while I read to her. We read The Story of Exodus, Dr. Seuss’s ABC, Ira Wordworthy, and Puddle’s ABC. Then she did a few pages in her HWT. After that she promptly announced she was tired, crawled into my lap and I’m now typing around her little body in my lap!

Not a bad start I guess. Well, I better get off and get to working with Brandon on his History.

We are all on the hunt for the perfect curriculum. Does it exist? Is it out there? Does everyone know about it and are keeping it a secret from you?



There are literally hundreds of different curriculums to choose from. But how do you know what is best for you and your family?



When I started out (a whole whopping 3 years ago) the first thing I did was order a curriculum kit. I wanted to make sure I covered every subject at my son’s grade level. After all, what if I had to put him back in public school? The last thing I wanted was for anybody to be able to say he fell behind while I was home schooling him! Luckily, an experienced home school mom told me to cancel that order! It was all workbooks. Some thing she advised boys weren’t very keen on. Also, there was very little hands on activities in that particular brand name. So, it wasn’t very well suited for us. That doesn’t mean it isn’t the perfect curriculum for some one else though!



What I’m going the long way around to say is that in order to know what curriculum is best for your family you need to know both your teaching style and your children’s learning style. Each of your children may learn completely differently from each other.



If you are unsure of your child’s learning styles you might want to use something like this chart on learning styles to aid you. Chart on Learning Styles:



http://www.chaminade.org/inspire/learnstl.htm.


The following is a brief run down of the main Teaching Styles:



Charlotte Mason Method - The Charlotte Mason Method a unique approach to education focusing on literature and nature. You can find more information about this method at:


http://www.charlottemason.com/



http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/methods/CharlotteMason.htm



Classical Education Method - You can find more about this style at the following links:



http://www.classicalhomeschooling.org/


http://www.welltrainedmind.com/


http://www.gbt.org/clasced.html




Distance Learning or Umbrella Schools- These are courses your child can take through the internet or via mail. There are many different such schools. These schools provide all your curriculum and often do all the recording keeping for you.



Montessori Method - This method introduced by Dr. Montessori, is based on the idea that learning is a natural, self-directed process which follows certain fundamental laws of nature. You can find out more about this method of education at:



http://www.montessori.edu/method.html


Traditional homeschooling - This form of homeschooling is set up basically like public schools with a complete curriculum, traditional grading system, and record keeping.





Unit Studies Approach - The Unit Studies approach handles all subjects together into one theme or topic. They are usually very hands on. To learn more about unit studies try:



http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8259/unitstud.html



http://www.konos.com/



Unschooling Method - Unschooling or child-led learning is well child led. You take the opportunity to educate your child as they show interest in things. To learn more about unschooling check out:

http://home-educate.com/unschooling/



http://www.unschooling.com/



Eclectic Home schooling Method - An eclectic homeschooler uses bits and pieces of the all the methods to fit their needs. In the end I think this is the method most end up with. This is what I personally prefer.

Remember, to think about your special skills and your short comings.



I have a friend that just simply didn’t believe she could teach. So, she uses ABEKA with the disks that play on the computer each day. Her children go to a virtual classroom and she grades their papers.



We like to read books for our history because we find history text books boring! Also, I’m good at crafty stuff and use that in our lessons, but I know I’m too lazy for the Unit Study approach.

Take all these things into consideration when choosing you curriculum and you might just have a chance. However, sometimes you’ll think you’ve chosen the perfect curriculum and then a few weeks into it you’ll discover it just doesn’t work for you. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times. Don’t use it if it doesn’t work! Toss it aside and find something that does.



To end on a bright note....



I think it’s only fair to warn you that in my humble opinion most of picking a curriculum is really trial and error.



So, what do you use?

Wow, how do you ever get any schooling done with all that socialization?

That’s the question non-home schoolers would ask if they knew any better!



Let’s see I did get some educating done on Monday.



Then, Tuesday we had Story Time at the public Library in the morning. Afterwards we went to lunch with some home schooling friends. After lunch the kids decided they still hadn’t had enough play time together. So, we went back to their house for a long visit. When my husband got off work we went to vote and came home to eat supper and go to bed.



Wednesday we did school! Hooray!!!!!



My home school support group is having an picnic at Camp Ford w/a performance by our local Civil War reenactment group on March 17th! So, Thursday, we spent the whole day with my co-leader’s family again planning and shopping for the big event.



Friday is our group’s weekly park day. So, we headed out at 9:30 am. We went to meet another home school group at 12:00 for a picnic at another park. Then 2:30-4:30 we had soccer. After soccer the kids went home with some of the home schooling friends to stay the night, and I crawled home to rest after a long week!



Today I'll try to get all the cleaning done that I didn't do Monday thru Friday.



Tomorrow wee have Sunday school class, morning services, RA's, Mission Friends and evening service.



Then..... it starts all over...



I hope I can get in more than two days of book learning next week....



Now that I think of it. Next week is Spring Break and my birthday. So, on top of Story Time, preparing for the Civil War Picnic, having the Civil War Picnic, soccer, and spending time with our public school family and friends....

Well I guess school's out for us next week... LOL



Sigh… too bad home schoolers don’t get any socialization….



If they did.... I don't think I'd be able to hold up!