For my family's sake, I have posted several pictures and comments about Norah's new-to-her bedroom set that we purchased off Craigslist this last weekend. The back story is: I have been checking Craigslist for weeks, looking for computer desks and shelves to go with the white daybed that Norah already had. But, we also needed a new twin mattress... so I was keeping my eyes out for that, too. That's how I came upon the ad for this bedroom set. The back, back story is: A very nice couple in a huge, immaculate home about thirty minutes away has a grown daughter who used the furniture originally. She has gone away to grad school. The lady has a lot of clothes and shoes and is clearing out her daughter's room (that shares a wall with her master bedroom) to have the bedroom converted into a very large walk in closet... Needless to say, I felt very comfortable taking this particular family's used goods. It was clear that they were even cleaner people than we are! Bu
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Showing posts from February, 2011
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Avril just loves her baby right now. (This is a really precious stage that I remember Norah going through when she was almost two years old, too. I remember that Norah was fascinated with babies while she was still very much a baby herself.) So it is with Avril. She will carry her baby over to me and say, "Baby?!" Her tone is always one half-question and one half-answer at the same time. Then she will kiss her baby and show me her baby. She waits patiently for me to say something adoring about her baby. Sometimes she wants me to kiss the baby, too. After I do, she smiles at me and then smiles down at her baby. She kisses her baby again and rocks it in the bend of her elbow. This whole process is pretty dang cute.
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My Resolutions for 2011. Let Norah play outside . We had too much snow in the yard for Norah to play outside, actually. She had to crawl over the top of the snow piles, rather than walk on them because with every step, she'd sink up to her knees... so she hasn't even asked to go outside in weeks. I guess I should will try and take her to the Jump Zone this week. Now that I consider it, the girl probably really needs some exercise. Read through the entire Bible . I'm using this plan . But, I am very behind schedule. I am almost done with all the reading for the month of January, but that doesn't mean much since it's almost March! So, I am almost a full month behind. But... I am enjoying and benefiting from the reading I have done. Hold Dwayne's hand . I'm taking this one off the list, officially. Holding hands is too impractical for us at this stage in our lives. If we were twelve, this might be something. I think I will have to find other, more ef
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Norah found another craft she wanted to make from 100 Things You Should Know About Ancient Egypt . It was a snake game. We worked on this together. We used a plate to trace a circle on the bottom of a box. I cut it out. We printed a free color sheet of a snake online and then Norah colored it and cut its head out. I traced the circles with a quarter and Norah colored them in. Here's the finished game board. We used some markers and a die from another board game we have. The girls played and Avril's marker got to the snake first, so she won.
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This is Norah's narration of the story of Osiris and Set from chapter two of The Story of the World. It took me a while to copy it. As you can see, it's pretty long. One thing about Norah... she's so good at narration that at this point, she can almost quote the stories she hears more than once. So, it looks like we will have to work on her ability to summarize next.
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Yes, my kids are almost always in their pajamas... But, we're stuck in the house almost everyday of the winter and we home school, so getting dressed would be excessive, bordering on eccentric for our way of life... Think about it... But, I'll have you know, in the spring and summer when we are out in the yard watering flowers and picking beans from the garden before we even have our breakfast, we do get dressed almost everyday and almost as soon as we get out of bed.
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Norah finished reading 100 Things You Should Know About Ancient Egypt yesterday afternoon on her own. When she finished, she asked me to help her make an eye of Horus, an idea she found in the book. I found this recipe for salt dough online and we used that instead of clay. I gave her some guidance, but Norah actually did a large portion of this herself, believe it or not. We used the rest of our dough to make a platter. We baked these for two hours and I am letting them cool. We'll paint them another day.
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I finished Sherlock Holmes last night and I started reading Dumbing Us Down (getting a head start on my reading for March.) This book is incredible . I know I use that word a lot, but... If you haven't heard of it yet, if you live on Mars or something (just kidding), this book was written by retired school teacher, John Taylor Gatto, and it is a commentary on what is wrong with the formal school system. Many homeschooling and unschooling families celebrate this book. And, I must admit that I will buy a copy (this one I am borrowing from a homeschooling friend of mine) and Gatto's words will be read and reread and quoted extensively by this homeschool family, too. For instance, when another homeschooling friend of mine (on Facebook) found out I was reading it, she commented on my wall and told me when she reads anything Gatto writes, she feels like he is "directly talking to her soul..." To that, I agreed heartily and here's what I said to her. It sums up how I
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We are slowly moving through our history program The Story of the World, Volume One: Ancient History . I've come to realize that I have to leave a good deal of the additional reading un read and some of the projects, as awesome as they are, un done. I've wanted to do all the additional readings, all the corresponding literature suggestions, all the projects. I didn't want to miss anything. But, I have had to be honest with myself about how unrealistic it is for me to expect to read more than one or two extra books on each chapter and do perhaps one of the projects per week (maybe even one every other week) if we want to finish this book within a year. (And, I do want to finish this book within a year, so that I can start the next book and stay on the four year history cycle.) Thus, we've only just now moved on the chapter three (but we have moved on, which is good) and we are going to do as much as possible by Monday, when, we are, in fact, moving on to chapter f
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That's a rubber band on the blurry finger she's holding up to me. She'd gotten it off. And, as you can see, the other rubber band is almost off, too. These rubber bands were my last hope. The mom whose little children always have neat hair swore they'd stay in, that it was " impossible " for any child to remove them. Ha! I should have known...
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I collected all the pieces of her cabin (Norah had dumped the set into the big pile of Legos) and we built this after dinner the other night. The plan is to re-build and keep all the Lego houses and businesses we have intact until Norah has the makings of a nice little Lego village. We'll see... I went in to check on Norah before I went to bed and I found her sleeping like this. We got this plush horse brand new from the thrift store for less than two dollars. I love thrift stores and Norah loves this horse. But, turns out, it's like her sixth stuffed horse. I'm not sure where she gets all her horses, though, since this is the first stuffed horse I even remembering buying her myself. Have I mentioned how much I love thrift stores now?