A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 We finished the Florence Nightingale biography.   We decided to read Island of the Blue Dolphins next because it's a great book and because it was referenced quite often in The Elephant's Girl .  Everyone was primed to enjoy it, and we all are. But it is totally traumatizing! Disasters strike chapter after chapter after chapter. My kids are groaning, shouting, and kicking on the floor with frustration about the unfairness of Karana's life, and I'm exhausted from the soothing required. However, we're persevering.   They can't stop talking about it. They're not even needing me to be part of the conversation.  Sometimes I just have to stop reading and let them go. Sometimes I shush them and tell them to listen. Depends on the conversation happening. We've read book after book that has really reached the kids' hearts and minds, and I'm thinking I need to move this kind of reading to another part of the day and pull out some dry tomes for bedtime. I...

Random picture of Lola--it's so classically her.  She's got drawing supplies outside without permission; she's on the front porch surrounded by chalk drawings; she's got her manicure set for company as she works on Pokemon art.   We have a couple of birthdays in September, and our activity schedule has been rather full, so we shuffled birthday celebrations around to less full days.  However, that made the first week of September very, very full! Little Princess is our resident baker, cake decorator, and cake decorating teacher, so she was quite busy!!! One simple, elegant cake One fun Pokemon cake--this is Gastly Little Princess could quite successfully open a gluten-free bakery.  These cakes were so delicious, so moist, so fluffy, so perfect!! But she doesn't want to.  So we get to enjoy everything she bakes. :) On the subject of Little Princess' baking, we've accidentally started the tradition of her making us all homemade chocolate chip cookies on dance d...

 We started the week well. Morning Meeting, Symposium, and the first walk since last May! Ants! That's not a booger!  It's sap she picked off a tree and played with for the rest of the walk! Deep in conversation Jes' chillin' And then Brother was angry and throwing things and swinging sticks as weapons with the rest of us trapped in the dining room. I tried so hard to work with him. But I ended up calling 911 and his psychiatrist and his case manager and Sir Walter Scott. He ended up running away. He was gone long enough that I had a chance to throw dinner in the crock pot, organize lunch, suggest some nature documentaries for the kids to watch as school and as a rest, and pack a bag of snacks and reading material for the mandatory psych eval that was sure to follow. The police found him.  (May I repeat my enthusiastic refrain that our police are the best!!) We went to the hospital. He was deemed fit to return home.  (I agreed.) We all spent the rest of the day in a ...