A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 This week was so fraught with trauma, that I don't even want to write about it. Our daycare is mostly closed (the parents of The Munchkin and Sugar Bear are crazy enough to choose to stay with us). I'm not ready for school to start. Brother and Beowulf are having dangerous breakdowns, and we've had to use the safe room again. Before the disaster that ended our daycare. The boys' leaders sent a few pictures of camp. One afternoon, I took the kids to the swimming hole.   And there has been more Pokemon play than imaginable. It's been dangerously hot outside, so I haven't required outdoor play.   All of the kids purchased new sets recently, and Mister Man's arrived in the mail this week. We've committed to Teaching Textbooks for the year.   Everyone is happy with it.   We finished the biography of Julia Morgan and Life of Fred: Cats. We are still reading In Search of the Castaways . . . maybe we'll finish it this week!! Nature Angel is recent...

 We had company over last Sunday, so I didn't get to write. So, here we are with another week having passed . . . and so many things have happened! My own kids were coming and going all of the days. At first, Mister Man and Brother left for Boys' Camp.  I have no pictures of that adventure (the men leaders are not as adept at taking and sharing pictures as are the women leaders), but the list I've heard so far includes cliff jumping, tubing, kneeboarding, wakeboarding, shooting (with shotguns, pistols, and potato cannons), hiking, and lots of eating. They came home happily rosy, rumpled, and stinky! We sent them to the showers immediately. :) But they came home to no power in the house, so it was just as hot inside as it was outside.  We'd had a gigantic storm the day before that knocked out the power of well over 100K people in the general area.  We'd already gone 24 hours without power--which means we'd already hit the laundromat, I loved watching them watch t...

Last Sunday, Sir Walter Scott watched Field of Dreams with the kids.  It was the first time watching it for most of them (if not all).    When it was over, the kids had a lot of questions, so Sir Walter Scott pulled out photos of when he was able to actually go there. It was a sweet shared moment of family history . . . and perhaps a laying of groundwork for a Dad-kid outing someday. Then it was Monday, and we got up and began getting ready for the day! My youngest sister hosted, my middle sister and some of her family traveled from Utah, and we drove back and forth each day.  Each sister took a day to either provide food or entertainment, and Grandma/Grandpa helped with everything. I was on the first day's entertainment, but it was the first day, so everyone was kind of getting used to one another and catching up.  My attitude about activities this day was to hang out, swim, and jump on the trampoline.   Card games! The trampoline was in almost const...