A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

 Pixie is working hard and playing hard! She's just now home from safari and prepping for a week of teaching and loving on the orphanage babies.   Get this! Uganda honors International Women's Day as a full-blown holiday--everything closes for celebrations. I'm not asking for that here, but I'm sure impressed with Uganda! Here at home, we're freezing--not every day, but a lot of the days.  We're facing overnight lows in the 20s this coming week, but there's going to be one 60-degree day, and I've got nature studies planned for that day! In the meantime, we're reading together a lot. We finished Along Came a Dog , and now we're reading this at bedtime: We finished The Children's Book of Heroes , and now we're reading this: It's full of fables, poems, fairy tales, and sweet little stories that are fun for the younger set of kids. We finished Mary's Garden and How it Grew , and we replaced it with: We started the section called Fores...

Over the weekend, Nature Angel inspired the kids to create a city in our yard.  They played for hours ! "Oh, Mom!" Belle said ruefully, "We almost had a normal week of school!" This was late Thursday morning as we regrouped after the police caught Brother for us about half a mile from home. I'd given chase and gotten within 10 feet of him, but then we hit a hill, and his adrenaline-driven 52 lb body glided up the hill ever so much faster than mine did. He was rounded up, and appropriate information was shared with the officers from each city involved (we live on the border of the two cities), and we were all home within the hour. It was only half an hour later that Brother's dissociative episode ended, but everyone was so wiped out that Sir Walter Scott stayed home with Brother while the rest of us went to dance. (If I weren't the teacher to more than half of the children, and if my children didn't comprise nearly 1/4 of the students, ...