Here I am!

Sorry - I was out of commission for a week or so with the tooth and all. I have no idea how people become addicted to pain killers, because I absolutely could not function on them, even on the lowest dose. I could barely keep my eyes open, and I felt just plain weird. Weirder than normal, that is. ;P

Last weekend I went with N's girl scout troop to help chaperone on the encampment they were going on. It rained for most of the weekend, but we had a good time. Days were better than nights. Nights involved tears, fears, and eventually the shuffling of adults to ensure that each cabin had a grown-up to make the girls feel better. These were the same girls who, when orginally given the option of having girl-only cabins, or cabins with a grown-up, unanimously chose option numero uno. In their defense, the cabins were a bit creepy - they had no doors or windows, just openings at either end of the cabin. LOL - it's a good thing we didn't tell the girls that there had been a bear sighting on the first afternoon when we arrived at camp, or they never would have slept the entire weekend.

I really had a good time. Lots of singing, being outdoors, hiking around - pretty much what I did for a living before I had kids. I'm not sure why it never occured to me that becoming a girl scout leader would have allowed me to do all these things for the past four years. Better late than never, and now I get to help out a troop and I don't actually have to lead it. Best of both worlds.

The homeschooling is going well this year. We've made the observation that N. can actually read fairly well - she just can't read aloud very well. I bumped her up a level in her reading comprehension activities because the lower one was getting too easy. If I went solely based on how well she reads out loud, she'd be two grade levels lower. I'm sure there's some explanation for the short-circuit that gets in the way of the words coming to her lips. To be honest, she's always talked kind of slow, too, like she has to plan what she's going to say before she says it. Interesting observations. Anyway, my real point is that she's reading - just don't put her on the spot (unless it's to ask what she has been reading about, and then it will spring forth like a fountain, and she won't stop talking, lol).

We're about a month into Spelling Power, and still liking it. She's retaining the words, which is good. We had a lot of homophones this week (great/grate, made/maid), so I made up a crossword puzzle to reinforce meaning and spelling. Found a free puzzle generator at edhelper, which was a lot faster than trying to draw one on my own (which I did end up doing when my printer stopped working the other day).

Lots of story problems in math this week, because I'm fun like that. Actually, I think it's a really good way to reinforce the conceptual parts of math. What's the point of memorizing facts if you don't know how to use them? And she's much more excited about doing story problems than she is about sitting down to a list of mulitplication and division problems.

This week our Real Science-4-Kids Pre-level One Chemistry books arrived (ordered from Rainbow Resource)! We read the first chapter together (alternating reading aloud at each paragraph), then did the experiment. We saved the write-up and discussion for the next day, partly because the lab and reading had taken over an hour, and partly because it let some of the lessons sink in and allowed us to discuss it more before she put it into words. Even little brother likes it, and has been asking us to read to him from the textbook at bedtime.

It looks like we start cursive next week in our house. With N's input, I found a couple of "modern cursive" instruction/workbooks that look like what she's interested in learning. When compared with HWT, this is more like what I remember from when I was a kid. She likes that it's "prettier" than HWT's cursive.

Little brother had his first vacation day from school (a teacher inservice day) on Friday. You'd think he'd sleep in, but Noooooo - he was up when Daddy left for work in the morning. And Big Sister followed shortly thereafter. Helloooo??? What about my Mommy Time??? They parked in front of the television for a while, we did some schoolwork (Brother doodled on the dry erase board and wrote some words), and then we went to the library for lego club with our homeschool group.

Guess what??? My tomatoes began ripening this week! We had our first frost last night, but the romas are covered, and I'll probably bring them in later today. Next year I start seeds in January!