Oh Ok I've already typed one very grumpy, cranky, people shouldn't even have to read it blog today elsewhere. So, I'll try my best to spare you. In fact I'll try to post the positive side of things here.

1. Although I can't find homes for the puppies we rescued and I spend a great deal of time trying to keep my floors sanitary. They are healthy, growing and cute.

2. Although I was late to the fall festival due to many many things going wrong at the last minute. Due to the fact that I was late my booth was given over to a youth member to run leaving me free to enjoy the festival with my family. Cecil was late but did make it in time to eat with us and play some games. The festival was even bigger than last year and had a great turn out of non church members which is our goal. It truly was a wonderful community family friendly event! Kudos to the awesome woman who organized this!

3. Although I've had/have a lot of issues with my neighbors...the list of their deeds would make the average neighbor shudder... (I am really praying for strength to continue to stay on friendly terms for witnessing and ministry's sake.) However, last night really took the cake. I took their daughter to the fall fest with me because they were taking their son with some friends to a haunted house several towns away. I knew they would be late which was really fine. If they were too late I'd just let her stay the night and send her home in the morning in time to get dressed for school. But around 11 PM we got a call that they and their friend had been arrest for PI and DWI. Could I come pick their son up? Well yeah! It was more like how fast could I get there! No kid should have to be sitting at a jail while their parents are sitting in the drunk tank. So I went to get him. We didn't home until around 2 AM. The bright side of this? He was ok. He was alive. They didn't wreck. And someone cared enough to come get him. Hopefully what I did will have more of an impact than what his parents did.

4. Cecil has been promoted. He has done this job before with no pay increase and been demoted due to lack of a college degree. When offered the position again a couple of times before he has been leary. However, we talked and prayed about it when it was offered again. This time it does come with a pay raise and bonus package. He has also been promised a lightening of his work load so he can once again join us in a family life. I pray this was the right decision. It sure sounds like a good thing. I guess time will tell.

5. Lately with just life stuff I'm feeling a strong need of the Lord for strength and guidance which no matter how that may sound is actually a good thing.

Remember the mystery snail egg clutch I was so thrilled about? Well, they hatched and.... so did the second clutch that the snails laid and... we are still waiting for clutches 3 and 4 to hatch. Needless to say after the first 100 or so baby snails some of the excitement has died down! We are raising the first two batches in a separate tank to protect them from being eaten. However, I told the kids that the next two batches can fend for themselves. In fact I got caught last night feeding a few baby snails to the fish! LOL I've tried to explain to the kids that this is good food for our fish and... Where on earth are we going to keep 100 grown snails anyways??? It goes with out saying that any new egg clutches will be removed before the children know about them! LOL However, I am still glad we had the wonderful experience of hatching our own snails.

You want some irony? I decided it was time to clean my son's tank in his room and discovered that he had an infestation of wild snails clogging up his filter system! As I was scrubbing out his filter to remove all the snail eggs and little wild snails (I guess they came in some of the food or something) I just couldn't get over the irony of carefully raising one set of snail eggs in one tank while unknowingly having an unwanted colony growing in another! LOL

Did I also mention that we caught 2 baby fish in the living room tank and that they are doing fine? Hopefully they will be big enough to put back in the big tank soon. Meanwhile I think one of my platys is pregnant. Babies, babies everywhere in my aquarium!

Here is the icing on the cake. As if we didn't have animals/baby animals running out of our ears around here a stray dog had a litter of pups under the vacant house on the lot next to mine. Well, I got worried that we'd have a pack of wild dogs running around if something wasn't done. Plus, the last person that lived on that property had 5 dogs which all died because the fleas where so bad on that land. So I had my son and another neighbor hood boy catch them. They were so infested with fleas it took 2 baths to get them off. They were weak and terrified of people. I wormed them and fed them and we loved on them. It has now been just over a week. They are now very healthy lovable pups. I've found a home for one. My family wants to keep one, ugh. But I still need a home for the last one. If I don't find a home soon I'm going to take it to the pound. I'm afraid if it takes too long to find it a home it will never leave.

Animal count at my house at this moment:
1 cat
4 dogs
1 rabbit
3 guinea pigs
1 aquatic frog
16 fish
3 adult snails and around 100 hatched baby snails with 2 egg clutches.

Ouch! I wonder if I can apply for farm aide to feed this herd? LOL The bad thing is we were at a stand off. My husband and I were firm. NO more pets. This was it. Unless some of these passed on. Which with this arrangement should have meant no more new animals until at least 4 more years based on most of these pets life spans. Then the puppies came. Guess who wants to keep one puppy? Daddy. Sucker!

For Brandon's first semester of Zoology he is studying Flying Creatures of the Fifth day. To that end we have been making our yard more bird friendly.



Of Course Humming Bird Feeders are a must. We had about 20 HB zooming around fighting over the feeders for weeks but I think they've moved on now that it is cooling off a little.



We moved our bird bath under my wisteria vines and Brandon made a bird feeder from the pattern out of his science book.



This last one was fun. We made our own Suet! The recipe was made up of lard, peanut butter, oats and bird seeds. Then you freeze them into blocks. Our batch made up 7 blocks of feed. The book made it seem like the birds would be flocking to this thing like crazy! Although I have seen birds eating at it so far we've had no really eating frenzy! LOL

We've been waiting and waiting and finally the magic day came! I went to feed the fish Saturday morning and what to my wandering eyes appear? But a tiny little egg clutch! Yeah and Hooray! One of our snails crawled up to the top of the aquarium and laid her eggs. Now we just got to wait... hope the eggs stay out of the water but stay moist enough not to dry out ..... and in 2 to 4 weeks we can have anywhere from 30 to 100 baby snails! SO COOL! I mean so cool it might be KEWL!

Honestly, what is more nerdy than a homeschool mom with an egg clutch to show off?


These are our three snails. One on glass, one on tree, one in rocks. Two are blue mystery snails and one is a golden snail. We had 2 of each but one of our golden snails suffered from an unfortunate incidence. I have no idea who Mommy and Daddy are but aren't they cuties!

From the beginning I desperately wanted to install the love of reading in my son. I bought his set of Dr. Seuss before he was born. I've always read to him. My husband has finally stopped looking at me like I'm stupid for buying him books instead of toys for Christmas and Birthdays. You know that look that says, "Yeah right, like a kid wants a book for a present!" accompanied by the sarcastic eye roll. I remember his Kindergarten Sunday School teacher was so impressed with how well he knew his Bible stories. "Well, duh he had only had me read his whole Toddler's Bible to him a few 100 times!"

He has always read well enough but preferred me to read to him. This was mostly due to his desire for meatier novels that were above his reading level. Together we've read Eargon, all the Chronicles of Narnia, all the Harry Potter books (well, almost finished with book 7), 5 of the Redwall series books, and Black Beauty plus a few more books here and there. Lately when different friends or family members have heard Brandon ask me if I will read to him I've been getting this response, "Why doesn't he just read it himself. He is old enough!" I'm thinking that they think he can't read well on his own which is not the case. He has read several chapter books on his own and even a couple of larger novels. However, that is not the point. We enjoy the time together. He enjoys being read to and I like the books too! Has it bothered me that he doesn't read much on his own? At times. But I felt it would come with time. And it has....

Some of our new curriculum has forced me to look high and low for books to supplement our lessons. So first to our local (very small) library. Here he got two very decent sized books all his own even though he was still only half way through the last Harry Potter book. Then to a larger library in a near by town where he got two more books. Lastly we went to a used book store where I remembered I had some credit. Here he got 8 more books. Actually he gathered up 14 and I made him cut back a bit. Now these last were Goosebumps books (not exactly quality novels) but hey the kid is excited about reading.

Yup, I've installed the same love of reading that I have myself. Why, I was up until 1AM myself last night just because I couldn't put my book down without finishing it. I woke up a tired Mommy and decided I just had to suck it up and do school any way. After all I knew I had to get up early and I stayed up reading anyway! So, I had my bagel, sipped my coffee and bravely woke my little students up ..... Only to discover that my boy decided to stay up until around 3 or 4 (he's not sure) in the morning reading!!!! So, I have installed the love of reading. It's nearly 11 and my son is still in bed. Now What? I guess we'll do school when he gets up. You can't educate a zombie.

This year we are using Diana Waring's Ancient Civilizations and the Bible. So far I'm spending quite a bit of time worrying that I stepped way outta our league. We've always done the formula of read, do vocabulary and worksheets kind of history. And because of this we've always hated our history curriculum. So, I stepped out on a limb and got a curriculum that requires more from us. One of my biggest challenges is finding the additional sources and materials for him to use. I've always used curriculum that had all we needed to avoid this problem. We have a very very small local library. They don't have a single thing we need and when I asked about them borrowing from other libraries she said, "Well that is usually so slow you'd be better off going to the other library and getting it yourself." Hmmmm.... alright.

For Brandon the hardest challenge has been no worksheets. This curriculum is all free thinking, logic, researching, and writing reports. These are not Brandon's strong points. So either he will fail history this year or he will develope these valuable skills by the end of the year. He has plenty of imagination. This is more about learning to harness it into something useful and workable.

Four weeks into the school year and we are still in Unit One which covers Creation and the Flood. It basically starts out with an article, then we listen to a couple of CDs (What in the World's Going on Here? and True Tales) with interesting information, then we have a discussion, Research and report (He wrote a paper about the Behemoth and his belief that it is a dinosaur), then more researching and reporting (Writing is not his favorite past time so instead of a hand written report this time we got the information off the internet and he attached it to a large poster board for a presentation. It was over metallurgy.), then there was indeed some vocabulary, then a time line and a map, then it goes on to add Art, Science, Music, and Cooking into the picture, ending off with Phase 4 which has the children express themselves in any way they chose in order to get across what they learned in this Unit.

We've only gotten as far as Art. To go along the same path that he was already on with his Metallurgy presentation we chose to work with copper. The point to this project was that with actually working with the material he would think about early man and how clever he would had to of been to be able to make things with copper, bronze, and iron. Much less consider that they first had to mine these metals. Again, I am not so sure how much thinking about early man Brandon did while working on this project but he did learn that working with metal wasn't as easy as he thought it was be. He started very enthusiastic, thinking this was going to be all fun and games. He was going to make all kinds of things. Being Mom I quickly crushed his dreams and pointed out all the problems he would encounter with each project he proposed. As I said great imagination very little logic going on. He'll do great things one day when he gets those two skills to line up. I finally got him talked in to a project I thought doable. He didn't seemed too thrilled starting out to abandon all his wild dreams that he had for the copper. However in the end he seemed very proud of the work he accomplished.


I wish I had remembered to take some before shots. I always forget that! Any way for the basic idea Picture a really old mail box hanging off (nearly falling off) a old rotting post with the numbers clumsily painted on so that the UPS guy can find us. So first he went out and took a few swats at the mail box to knock it off the pole. Then I painted the post dark green to match our trim.


He hauled the mail box up to the house painted what we couldn't cover. Then covered the box with copper sheeting using screws, nails and prayers. The trickiest part was removing the old flag set up and building and adding the new flag. The stage shown in the pictures was Bran's favorite part. He torched the copper to make it different colors.

After we finished the mail box we started to paint new numbers on the post but then decided that it would look better if we made them from copper wire. Let me tell you the copper wire was pretty thick and not all that easy to bend! If you attempt this let me advise you that the number 4 is hard to make! LOL Believe it or not reattaching the mail box to the post was the hardest and our least favorite part! But we got it done.

However, before I show you pictures to that... I want to give a heartfelt plea not to look at the un-kept yards shown in the pictures. One is the neighbors so I can hardly be blamed for it's condition and our's well....I worked on a mail box all weekend with my son instead of the yard. I'll mow, weed eat and such some time this week I promise!



Yes, I know the post leans a little. (OK ALOT) First off on the other hand it is firmly in the ground. Second off I didn't want to dig it up to straighten it. Third I have no post hole diggers with which to dig another hole to replant it. And Fourth in Brandon's own words, "I kinda like it leaning, Mom. It matches our house. It wouldn't look right if it was perfect and I don't really like perfect anyways."

So we have a new mail box... kinda. And it is now firmly attached to the pole... that is leaning a little (a lot).... And we love it!

No dear friends and family members I haven't forgotten to post about Brandon's birthday. He turned 12 on Sept. 14 and yes, I did take pictures. Happy Birthday my precious first born son! What a little man he is turning out to be! I had little video of him blowing out his candles but I couldn't get it to load this morning. Grrrr...it bee's that-a way sometimes, ya know? I'll try again later.

He seemed to enjoy his birthday. I'm sure his favorite part was trying to open the presents I wrapped with masking tape! Muahwahahahah! LOL


He too got a home made cake. This time it was marble cake with white icing. I tried to make it special for him. Don't laugh I'm no baker and HE liked it which is what counts!