Just a Bit o' Housekeeping

I've been visiting my sister in Dayton for a couple days. While I was there, I noticed my blog in her bookmarks. Of course, I couldn't resist clicking the link. Well, lo and behold, my blinkies were all just red X's. Am I the only person who can see the blinkies?

More March Madness

Can a friendly family contest be considered gambling? Upon hearing of our March Madness contest, both my sister and my sister-in-law suggested we were teaching our children to gamble. I guess the word "bracket" conjures up images of betting pools and big pots of prize money. I just want to clarify that I do not approve of gambling and that's not what we're doing here. No one wagered anything.

We filled out our brackets free of charge and everyone is having a great time rooting for their picks. Unfortunately, I've lost my lead. Evan has been hot and cold about the contest but tonight he was enthusiastic to be in the lead. After two rounds, the score is:

Evan - 51 points
Adam - 49 points
Me and Ryan - 46 points
Jeff - 45 points

So, I'm not winning anymore but at least I'm beating Jeff. hee hee hee

March Madness

I'm not sure why college basketball gets a whole month of madness devoted to it. I never see anyone going mad over my interests. You never see Crop 'til you Drop at the insane asylum. But anyway, the boys are going crazy for basketball and Jeff is encouraging it!!! As if there's not enough sports talk around here, he printed brackets for all of us and we made our picks. We're earning points for picks that win, 1pt for the 1st round, 2 pts for second round, etc. The person with the most points earns a $20 gift card from Wal-Mart. It's the only prize we could think of that would appeal to everyone in the family. LOL And guess who's winning with a total of 15 correct picks so far in the first round???? You know I wouldn't be asking if it wasn't ME!! All these little basketball fanatics are being beaten by the mommy!! BwaaaaHaaaaHaaaa I can just picture my new electric knife or maybe some sandals. Don't ya just love basketball??

As for Adam and Ryan, they're grounded for the week b/c of disobedience. That means no basketball games on tv. So today Adam drug out his radio. It was actually quite funny. He's only used it to play cds and had no clue how to tune a radio!! I'm not sure if that's funny or sad! But at least he figured it out quite quickly and found a game. Now he's waiting for the announcers to actually say a team name so he'll know what he's hearing.

We've finished up a couple books this week. We finished Turn Homeward Hannalee earlier this week and started Shades of Gray. I stayed up late one night and read all of Shades of Gray in one sitting. It was very very good. Turn Homeward Hannalee was good too! I will recommend them both for a study of The Civil War. Today we finished our read aloud, Across Five Aprils. I managed to read it without crying but I was really watering up a lot at the end. We'll start a new read aloud next week.

Evan has been laying around all morning complaining of a tummy ache. He threw up a little and actually fell asleep in the family room floor so I know he was really sick. But when he saw Ryan eating candy after lunch, he suddenly felt much better! He was sure he could keep some candy down! I told him he had to eat lunch first and he agreed. But now I'm afraid to feed him for fear I'll be cleaning it off the carpet later!

Sign of the Times

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Sequential Spelling? It starts with simple sound patterns and builds up to longer words. So, essentially, the kids are doing really easy words, like in, and really hard words, like beginning, in the same lesson. I'm really only explaining our Spelling curriculum so you'll understand why my 3rd and 5th graders are learning to spell log.

Here's the scenario... Adam and Ryan are sitting at the table with their spelling notebooks. Evan likes to watch. I give the word and a sentence. They write the word. I spell the word. They correct if they're wrong. One of the words was log. I gave my sentence, "Put another log on the fire." Evan says, "No, no. I have a better sentence: You need to log on to eBay." :oO ... perfectly normal; perfectly normal. What five year old boy doesn't love on-line shopping?

I'll give you three guesses...

Name the nastiness and you get... um, nothing really! But better guess before you read more. The answer is coming.

Is it spring yet? Sure feels like it today. It was in the upper 70s here so we skipped our regularly scheduled roller skating and headed out The Hundred Acre Woods.

That's where Adam and Ryan decided to disobey me and hike to the creek where Adam fell in up to his neck. I wasn't being a mean mommy. I wanted them to play at the creek. It was just too far to go in the limited time we had today so I told them to wait until next time. They came back dripping and late. We rushed home to fix dinner. A friend of Jeff's had gotten some tickets to see The Harlem Globetrotters so we had to hurry. I totally would have cancelled the game after their disobedience but since the friend had gone out of his way to get two extra tickets for the boys, I didn't want to do that. They are going to be grounded for the rest of the week and weekend though. Rye is already moping about missing Nascar on Sunday.

I didn't look much better than Adam! I stepped in a giant mud pile while trying to steal some tadpoles. It looked like dry ground... but I sunk down to my ankle. ick! I did manage to bring home a huge glob of frog's eggs. I'm way more excited than I should be. We tried the tadpole thing before but they died. This time I'm going to the homeschoolers' best friend, Google, to find out how to hatch and grow frogs. Frogs' eggs are very interesting and gross at the same time. I'd never seen the actual eggs before today. They feel really slimy too. Nah, just kidding. That's not my hand. I stole that picture from the internet.

YAWN

What is with this baby??? I know I'm not going to get much sympathy here but this is a problem that's ruining my whole day. Why is this child waking up at 7am (besides the obvious answer of that when's Jeff gets up but Jeff assures me he is not waking the baby)??? Daylight Savings Time isn't even here yet!! I can not function at 7am. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed. I am not a morning person. This is the sole reason I decided to homeschool. Okay, not really... but it's a definite advantage!!!

I'd like to tell you what we've been doing with school but I'm too sleepy.

Finally Friday

We were actually brave enough to venture out of the house yesterday and today and no one got hurt!!

Today we took a quick walk to the library. It's pretty warm but the breeze is cool and strong. I wouldn't have wanted to be out there any longer than we were but Adam and Ryan are playing in the back yard right now. They think they're going to fly a kite but I think the wind is too strong. One thing has gone right this week! Remember how I couldn't reserve any more library books b/c I had an over due book that I couldn't turn in b/c we aren't finished with it yet? Well, I had already requested the next two books on our list and they went ahead and sent them. So I got the books I need! Yippee!

Last night we went bowling. Evan bowled with his cast and still beat me! He did have the advantage of bumpers! We went with our Sunday School class and most of them have young kids so it was a wild night! LOL

The past two days have been light on the schoolwork. We're keeping up with our reading but only did Math today. School was preempted the beginning of the week and we couldn't do a spelling unit in two days so we just set aside all table work for the week.