My Ebenezer

Seth is my creative kid. While that has presented many a challenge in homeschooling(!), the flipside is that it provides great entertainment to all. He is funny, and just thinks differently than the rest of us.  Case in point:  Seth went out to collect the clean laundry from the dryer. I thought it was taking a little long, and then he came in like this! And it's even funnier from the back! I had to take a picture quickly because Seth said he was really hot in all those clothes!  Still laughing over here. I needed a little comic relief today!

Once or twice a month Jen and her kids come over for art and geography. We have certainly come a long way since the early days  of doing this! For example, this year we have been able to use paint in almost every lesson. (When we first began the kids were ages 3-7, and there was no way we were painting! Far too messy!) For our Christmas art class we usually make ornaments, and for the class before Valentine's Day we make Valentine cards.  Here were a few of the samples I made to spark the kids' imaginations: Actually, never mind. I just have the one example. My phone is trying to send the other pictures, but it's bogging down and taking forever. Nobody has time to wait for that! If they arrive sometime today, I'll try to load them onto this post. This fish one is what I'm planning to give to Josh for Valentine's Day.

We've been strugglin' over here in Homeschool Land. Assignments missed or done half-heartedly, subsequent discipline crack-downs completely and hopelessly ineffective...it's been extremely discouraging actually. And then I thought maybe a reward would be better than a crack-down. (I know, many of you have suggested as much to me and are probably smacking your foreheads at me right now.) So last week, I wrote out all of Noah's assignments and extra-curricular expectations on a checklist and told him that if everything was checked off (and verifiably done in totality) by Friday, I would take him to Starbucks, Just Him, and we would get a coffee together.  And he did it! Every question answered, every quiz taken, every page done.  So above is the photo we took when at last we were able to sit down at a table and enjoy our reward.  Confession: I think this is our first alone "date" we have had since before Seth was born! It was long overdue. In all of the s

As usually happens when I take an extended break from blogging, I'm having a bit of a rough go deciding what to write about. It's not that I don't have enough ideas; it's more like I'm trying not to firehose you. Some topics I would like to talk about sometime: 1. Parenting. Oh brother, I feel like that could be the new theme of this blog, with every post written on that subject. News flash: Josh and I are not great parents, and most of the time we feel like we're fumbling (did you like that? I'm watching the Superbowl as I type this so there you go). We're dropping passes left and right. Lots of refereeing and unsportsmanlike conduct going on. Okay, I'll stop. 2. Homeschooling and our future plans. Last year was horrific and this year has been no better. I've got my eye on the exit in a big way, and so we're just praying for clarity.  Above all, we want to do God's will. If He wants us to keep homeschooling, then I want to fulfill m

This was our Christmas picture this year. It was taken in early December when we went on a camping trip to the Florida Keys. That vacation was like an oasis in a drought, and so I love seeing this image; it refreshes me.  The whole trip was studded with God's kindness and blessings, and I wanted to make sure I recorded them here. Being a journaler, I've already recorded many of the blessings in my paper journal, but I thought it would be nice to remember them here too. I'm sure there were more items that I've failed to notice, but here are the big ones that we want to remember: 1. The weather was gorgeous! Sunny, highs in the 70s, beautiful evenings. 2. Lots of conversation time for Josh and me in the camper while travelling. We logged quite a number of hours on the road for this trip, thankfully not all in a day or two, but spread out over the course of a week. Josh drove the whole time, and most of the time I was able to sit in the passenger seat and talk with hi

I may be back on a blogging kick; the next few days will tell. I do this though. I have several activities that barely squeeze edgewise into my life and, because I'm doing well to fit them in at all, I most definitely cannot do them all at once. They are, in no particular order: blogging, drawing, reading, decorating, organizing, and grading. Ha! Ho ho! *ahem* You would think grading should be an everyday occurrence like brushing my teeth, but it's not. Just the other day, I sat down to grade papers and realized I hadn't done any since early in Nov*cough*ber.  As a result, there were assignments for a certain student that had fallen through the cracks (ie: hadn't been done) that we had to catch up on. We spent a solid morning last Saturday taking 13 quizzes that had been missed last semester. Yikes! A very big and real part of my life right now could be categorized under Interruptions. For example, I was tweaking the above paragraph (which I had begun just after brea