I call it preparation for homeschooling.

I’m even brave enough to come in a different room to the computer and blog while he’s playing.  Luckily only one other toy, a monster truck, so far has been paraded by for permission to dunk.  I gave him a measuring cup and he went to the counter and got the measuring container and funnel used to fill my steam cleaner (beside his tractor below) and started counting how many half cups it would take to fill up the big measuring container through the funnel.  Kids just soak (pardon the pun) up knowledge no matter what they are doing.

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I have read more in the last week than I’ve read in Caleb’s lifetime.  I have a mix of books here, everything from discipline to nutrition, homeschooling to sleep solutions, and vaccines to fussbusters on the go.  Right now I’m in the middle of The No-Cry Discipline Solution and The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers.

Thanks to several points made by the sleep solution book, I’ve moved bedtime around a bit and have been experimenting with moving naptime a bit.  I actually don’t think naptime needs to be moved, but I have discovered that Caleb was staying up past his natural bedtime, thus becoming overtired and getting his second wind.  Of course this makes bedtime a battle of wills, who can outlast the other.  Then when Scott wakes Caleb to tell him bye in the morning on his way out the door, it is like trying to wake the dead.  He is in a very deep sleep.  So I moved “Lights Out” up to 8pm, with our bedtime routine beginning shortly before 7pm, *knock on wood* things are running a bit smoother and he actually woke up about 6:35 this morning.  This tells me he is getting a more appropriate amount of nighttime rest.

I finished up the book I was previously talking about, Kid Cooperation, and I highly recommend it.  It is an easy read with lots of real life examples (exchanges between parent and child), and gives you a bag of tricks to encourage cooperation in a positive way.  So far, the No-Cry Discipline Solution is very similar in content (same author), but it goes more in depth, without as many real life examples (thus far).  It also gives you a few more skills for your bag of tricks.

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One last warm and fuzzy (quite literally) story for 2008.

Perhaps I should have been “unschooled.”  In my readings about homeschooling, I’ve become quite familiar with this term, meaning child lead learning.  Teachers/parents make learning tools accessible to children and help them to pursue their own interests to the fullest on the premise that children have an inborn hunger for knowledge and will learn what they need to know in the process.  So in other words there is no curriculum or lesson plan is used.

Well last night, I checked my mommy board (I hate that term) real quick to see the results of a friend’s ultrasound today (she was right thinking pink! haha) and I stumbled across this video someone had posted.  The story brought tears to my eyes, but of course my -is this real- alarm went off.  So where do you go when you need to check a story’s validity?  Why Snopes.com of course!  And it is absolutely true.  I was amazed.

Alternate youtube video link

So on to the unschooling part.  First I had to look up the story and read everything there was to read on snopes.com.  From there I said “Hmm, this was in the 70′s, I wonder if Christian is still living?”  So I looked up lions on wikipedia to see what their average lifespan is.  Then Scott asked why Christian didn’t have a big mane in the video.  So I continued reading the rest of the article, including information about the mane.  Then I saw that the animal conversationalist involved, George Adamson, was killed, so I looked him up to read more about him.  I would have liked to continue reading about his work and “Born Free,” but I had to go put Caleb to bed!



After watching the video with her daughter, one of the moms on my board said her daughter asked, “Mommy can we get a baby lion?”

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We’re having it.  I think it was about 60 yesterday?  So why not make use of it.  Caleb seemed to sense early yesterday morning that it was not as cold outside, and randomly asked to go play in the sandbox.

Though he looks armed and dangerous….he didn’t actually throw this sand.
Not for the most part anyway.

I can hardly believe tomorrow is the last day of 2008.  My brain has shifted gears here in the last few days with the realization that I have a lot to think about, a lot to plan, and a lot to learn about homeschooling.  I can’t believe Caleb will soon be four.  The older he gets, the faster it goes.  My brain is a bit of a wash today.  So any fellow homeschoolers with advice on where to start, feel free to leave words of wisdom.  It is a very overwhelming feeling!  (As far as comments, be patient with me.  I’ve had a massive spam attack on my blog the last few days.  A few “good” comments [the non porn related ones] have ended up in my spam list, so if your comment isn’t showing up, rest assured, I am trying to remedy the problem and make sure regular commenters are on a safe list.)

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I’m going to venture to say we did our share of home learning today. Caleb had a blast getting this on the wall. This is another one of those things I’ve been watching for over a year. I saw it go on sale around Christmas last year, and I’ve been checking on it frequently ever since. Finally, I got impatient and emailed FAO Schwarz to see when and if it might go on sale again. By some ironic stroke of luck, a representative emailed me back the very next day to let me know that it was the sale of the week, and was indeed $75 off again. When I headed over to the website to order, it said it was out of stock! I was absolutely crushed, but I decided to give the store a try. They had plenty available and were happy to send it to me. I dream of going there. It seems like it would be so cool.

The pictures definitely don’t do this map justice, but it is in the hallway, so it is hard to photograph.  We were working our way across, so Asia and Australia were not completed yet.

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Just another example of one of the many reasons I am choosing to homeschool.

Texas school district to let teachers carry guns
HOUSTON (Reuters) – A Texas school district will let teachers bring guns to class this fall, the district’s superintendent said on Friday, in what experts said appeared to be a first in the United States.

The board of the small rural Harrold Independent School District unanimously approved the plan and parents have not objected, said the district’s superintendent, David Thweatt.

School experts backed Thweatt’s claim that Harrold, a system of about 110 students 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth, may be the first to let teachers bring guns to the classroom.

Thweatt said it is a matter of safety.

“We have a lock-down situation, we have cameras, but the question we had to answer is, ‘What if somebody gets in? What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s just common sense.”

Teachers who wish to bring guns will have to be certified to carry a concealed handgun in Texas and get crisis training and permission from school officials, he said.

Recent school shootings in the United States have prompted some calls for school officials to allow students and teachers to carry legally concealed weapons into classrooms.

The U.S. Congress once barred guns at schools nationwide, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck the law down, although state and local communities could adopt their own laws. Texas bars guns at schools without the school’s permission.

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; writing by Bruce Nichols in Houston, editing by Vicki Allen)

I think the key words in this report are “small, rural” – it can happen anywhere and “unanimously” – not one person on the board said do we really need to do this? Nor have the parents. This is sad. Very sad.

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We actually did this two days ago, I just haven’t had time to blog about it yet.

Sometimes I think, as mothers, we should take a lesson from the girl scouts. Give out badges if you will. In the early brownie days, you pledge to donate your sleep to the needy, aka your darling child, and you earn and proudly display your diaper changing badge on your sash that doubles as a burp cloth. You master knot untying – doing your little girls hair, dollars and sense – it doesn’t make any sense how much this kid costs!, and cookie sales – if you let Mommy talk on the phone, I’ll give you a cookie.

But there’s always more room for improvement on your burp cloth, the 3-in-1 model that displays your badges, catches baby spitup and becomes a snot rag down the road. See, there are what I like to call extra credit projects. The ones for which you really earn your badge. Like say for example, building an igloo! Sounds reasonably simple and fun right? Especially in the middle of your living room floor. I mean, it can only be so messy right? Now this is just my personal opinion here, but I think I ought to get credit for the Great Outdoors, Art in 3D (yes they have those, both of them, I looked it up), and Messiest Project EVER (Maybe the website has an older version of the list, but I couldn’t find this one on there).

Can you get bonus points on an extra credit project? If so…I made a visual aid.

Back info: Despite me explaining several times that people who live in igloos are called eskimos, Caleb is hell bent and determined that penguins live there. I sent the husband to Michaels Craft Store in search of some animal Toobs. He picked up the Arctic one, for obvious reasons, and a penguin one, as apparently a penguin is not included in the Arctic Toob. Okay, now if you’ll look carefully at this next picture with me. See the little sugar cube on top of the glob of icing in the middle of the igloo base? Caleb put that there (imagine that) and he said, “This can be the time out chair for the penguin when he doesn’t listen!” …moving along…

He got icing on his gnat catchers. And didn’t notice. (Yes they really do catch gnats, at least mine do. He has third generation eyelashes. Bet you didn’t know they could be passed down eh?)

Glory be, it is almost done.

Please let me interrupt your train of thought to share with you the story of that little decrepit car (pictured below). You can’t tell from the picture, but he is Herbie. In the most rudimentary way of speaking. Caleb fell in love with Herbie, Fully Loaded when he caught the last half hour after his nap several weeks ago. So what would any good Mommy do? Head to eBay looking for a Herbie toy. My God, that is outrageous. I love my kid, but there is no way in the name of Zeus’s butthole I’m paying seventy three dollars for 5 matchbox cars. People are crazy, crazy I tell ya. I scoured the internet with no luck. Seems anything Herbie related, old or new, is a bit of a collector’s item. So with the constant begging, pleading, whining, and nagging gentle persuasion of my son, I secretly dug through old model car paints and located the necessary colors to make a Herbie. Caleb already had this tiny VW bug, and he was almost the right color (I painted the decorations on a 1/87th scale car okay? So sue me, I didn’t paint it white first). I surprised him with it one afternoon. It is not something I would brag about (or show you closely / in person) because the paint job leaves a lot to be desired. At least it did before he nearly rubbed all of it off playing with it so much. In case you’re wondering, this car gets tucked in on his bedside table also, nuzzled right up against Twilight Turtle. At least my good deed was well received, I do believe it made his week.

As I said, ahem, penguins live in igloos, and he will not be convinced otherwise. And they dance on top of them too.

And jump up and down, until the roof caves in. Then they all pile in through the new igloo skylight, because Lord knows, they wouldn’t want to use the door.

One last thing before you go. Allow me to share with you a completely and totally unrelated little brain fart I just had. The kid wasn’t the only one doing some learning yesterday.

The other day I learned: If you roll silly putty into a ball and leave it on a flat surface, it will not hold its shape, it will turn into somewhat of a small puddle, but still with the same putty consistency. Weird.

Yesterday afternoon I learned: If said silly putty is left on your bed overnight by your darling child, it will chemically bond with the force of industrial strength super glue to the fabric of which your comforter is made (think gum in hair X10). Attempts to remove it will have mixed results depending on fabric type. On a quilt made of varying textures, say for example, faux suede? Your efforts will not be rewarded.

The bright / glass is half full / I’m a ray of sunshine side: Luckily the silly putty was sparkley silver in color, and it just looks like dried snot on the comforter. Mmmmm.

And since you’re a mom, your comforter has probably already been spitup on, peed on, puked on, snotted on, and sneezed on, in no particular order, so you do your best to get it off, then shrug your shoulders and smile to yourself about how lucky you are to have a healthy, bright and beautiful child. And I know I tend to use sarcasm every now and then (see I can’t even type one sentence without it) but I do mean that, I am blessed.

So tell me, what fascinating tidbits of knowledge has your child/children imparted on you?

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Since it is the middle of summer, which I don’t like, I decided to pretend like it is the middle of winter, which I do like. Nah, this summer actually has not bothered me as much as it usually does. It should be in the upper nineties right now, but instead the high is 75 on Wednesday!! I’m just enjoying it while I can, I know the unbearably hot will return shortly.

I jotted down several winter activities for us to do over the coming days.  Just brainstorming over the weekend while I was putting him down for his nap one day. So today, we made snowmen! I found a recipe for white chocolate buckeyes that were decorated to look like eyeballs for Halloween. We built snowmen with them instead, and decorated them with mini Reeses Pieces. They came out pretty cute and Caleb loved it! He was laughing so hard at one point he could barely breathe!  He decided that the mommy snowman needed orange hair.  I ate her, and now I feel sick, so plan to eat your snowmen one section at a time!  :)

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You’ll need:

Donna Young’s Color Wheel (we used the circle one instead of the pie slice one)
Food Coloring
Ice cube trays
Several glasses, preferably clear or white
Heat (the sun, a microwave, etc)

Optional:
A teaspoon or syringe
crayons or markers

We have talked about mixing colors to make other colors. I even tried to show Caleb a little with some bathtub paints, but it was difficult to see the change, as the colors were muted and didn’t blend well. The other day, I got out some regular old food coloring. Not my Wilton gels, which Scott says I could open and blow the fumes at something to change the color. No just the good old food coloring dropper bottles. I put one drop per cube into an ice cube tray and stirred each color individually. Stick it in the freezer, unstacked if you have room. My best guess is that the bottom layer took longer to freeze, thus the color had more time to settle to the bottom some. The top batch appeared brighter because they froze quicker I presume.

Anyway, place red & blue, blue & yellow, and yellow & red ice cubes in three different containers. As they melt, you will be able to use the secondary color produced by mixing the two primary colors. If you’d like to take it a step further, you can mix one primary with a ‘neighboring’ secondary color to see what shade you get (this is where a teaspoon or syringe might be helpful for mixing even amounts) If you’d like, you can have some crayons or markers handy to fill in the color wheel as you go or try filling it in after the project (the colored water probably won’t be vivid enough to see on the paper). If you’re working with the younger age group, it may help to write the color on the chart with a corresponding marker first. You can even display the chart in your art area for reference!

After mixing the primary + secondary colors to see the different shades, we dumped the remainder of everything into the middle, which more or less made black (we didn’t measure)

Then I just sat back and watched.  He had a blast just dumping the water back and forth, so I think this is something we’ll revisit from time to time with various projects.

Footnote: I’m delighted to have found these little clear cups in the kitchen utensil section at Walmart.  They will really come in handy in the future.  They had yellow, red (mustard/ketsup dishes) and clear.  They are thick hard plastic, exactly what I’ve been looking for when we decorate car cakes.  You could use them for paints, candy dishes, sorting things, the list goes on…

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