A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 We made cookies. Lots and lots more than are seen here, but I mostly didn't have my camera with me. We did our family nativity. I'm not including the whole performance. It was a doozy! This might have been our last year of a full nativity production because everyone has outgrown the costumes.  Lola barely fit in our Mary costume, and the arguments  discussions it took to decide who would be whom were almost traumatic. Maybe it's time to pull out a nativity set and have kids move the pieces around as we read together. Over 20 years of acting it out in person will be hard to put away, though. Maybe I should just sew some larger costumes! We finished our Christmas picture book collection.  I didn't count them, but there were 24 gift bags and many of the bags had two or more books in them, so we might have read as many as 36 picture books together this December. On Christmas Eve the weather was very mild, so we had a fire in the yard and roasted hot dogs and s'mores fo...

 Everyone had money from doing yardwork for neighbors, so everyone needed an individual shopping trip. I love taking my kids shopping . . . one-on-one. We talked budgets. We made lists. We went to the dollar store. We went to the thrift store. We imagined what each sibling would like. We talked. We laughed. We planned and plotted. It. Was. So. Fun. And . . . How crazy is it that we have robot security at the shopping area!?!?!?! It rolls around the parking lot, then it returns to what I assume is a charging station and surveys the scene. Seriously, it feels like we're living in a science fiction book. One of my favorite moments is when a kid looks at something totally random and says, "This is perfect for ________!" I hide my dubiousness and ask, "Oooh!  Why is that?" Then the kid gives me a perfectly rational explanation for why a jumbo calculator or a miniature leopard print sketchbook or a pack of batteries is the best gift ever for a particular sibling. We g...