This Week in Our News

No Pics this week. I need a new battery for the camera. It's on my list of things to do.

Well for starters, the science experiment for the week: With only one more week left of the pool being opened all week, I thought a water experiment might be nice so here it is. Go to the shallow end of a pool that reaches about up to your waist. Plant your feet at the floor and let your body sit back in the water as if you were sitting on a chair. So first take a deep breath and hold it while you sit in your make-belief chair for a minute or so. How ever long you can. Then let all your air out at once. Watch your body fall backwards into the water. You can experiment with this in all kinds of ways at the pool. Go into the deep end, maybe 5 feet or more, take a deep breath, and dive down to touch the bottom. Watch yourself float back up to the top. Then let all your breath out and watch yourself sink back to the bottom. Is this too simple for you? Well some of my kids are still young. We are fascinated by the simple still.

Next let's talk about literature. I know it is only August, but you can homeschool in the summer without letting them know they are learning. I watched the movie last week, Into the Wild. Great movie, was surprised by the ending, I must say. I didn't really think that was the way it would end. My husband OF COURSE had already anticipated that. OK so he was reading Jack Kerouac and Henry Thoreau, and a bunch others like that. Books that I had always wanted to read but had never taken the time to do so. I went onto my library and realized that I could get a bunch of those books as online books on... I donno, MP3's they are maybe? Then I found them. This series of Henry Thoreau books for KIDS. In these books Henry is a bear doing things that really happened in Thoreau's life. And in the back is a little caption of how his life really was. What he believed, what he did, and the such. A couple that I got are "Henry Builds a Cabin" and "Henry Climbs a Mountain". They are by author D. B. Johnson. They are just these magical stories that introduce this man into children's lives. They are easy reader books. (If you are familiar with easy reader books, this doesn't always mean they are easy for children to read. It means that they are books a parent could read to little children.) But what do my kids love?? They love to be read to. And they are enjoying these books too. This is definitely a find of the week.

The last topic I want to touch on is family. We have been falling apart at the seems for a while. And most of us are trying to get ourselves back together again. So we have been playing a lot of games together lately. Even Daddy Bret is having a great time with the girls with this quality time. I have talked to Daddy Bret as well about the amount of money we spend on birthdays and Christmas. That conversation began when our oldest child sent him an email about something he wanted. He emailed that he knows it is expensive but it could be a birthday AND Christmas present. The cheapest one of this thing was $600.00. I told Bret that is going to be more than just Christmas and a Birthday. We won't be spending so much this year. We will take the extra that we don't spend and put it toward quality time: going to see a movie together, a weekend camping in a cabin, whatever. Does it seem extreme to you to say that we won't be spending $600 between Christmas and a birthday? Does it seem extreme that we used to spend that much easily per child for Christmas? Where do you fall on that pendulum? Us we need to downsize. We have so many things, and not much to show for it.

So I DO have one more topic. Changing over to Public School. As you may know, my 17yo, who is actively rebelling against us these days, is planning on spending his last year of high school in Public School. He is using the guise that he would like to have a program that forces him to be responsible for his work. (However, when we offered to pay for him to be in this great homeschool co op instead he refused. We know that keeping him in this co op would surround him with kids that WANT to learn and are supported by their parents. He would be around teacher that care about the kids they teach. The opposite is true for this particular high school.) But anyway that is not our decision to make. I am sure it is part of his rebelling against our say in the matter. He is doing what he thinks is best for himself for whatever is his reason. So he has been working for the month to get himself enrolled. It has just been a matter of WAITING AND WAITING AND WAITING. No one was really helping him at the school. Finally a few days ago, he brought in the last of his paperwork to the school office. Some lady in the office on a high horse, telling Josh she is doing him a favor, told him all kinds of garbage about how I should have been sending in samples of his work for the last few years so that they can give him credit for the work, and how they would probably not be able to account for his credits for the last few years because they can't prove that he did the work he says he did! I won't go off on a tangent. But in the end I called the BOE and left a message but no one got back to me. I called again the next day (Now mind you this was Friday and school starts in another week.) and told the secretary all the problems that we have encountered trying to get him enrolled. Now it is a week before school starts, he doesn't have his classes selected, he is worried that he won't be accepted as a senior, no doubt there should be some testing he has to do, etc. When I got off the phone with her, within 5 minutes the principal from the high school called me all ready to set up an appointment with himself and the man who handles the homeschool paperwork. Why do I have to get involved? Because schools don't tend to respect the children they teach. (Well that and obviously we were facing a wall of some lady who takes issue with homeschooling and is SEVERLY misinformed.) All Josh could get was the run around. It took me being firm with them to get the job done. Unfortunate, because it was something that I wanted him to handle.