Veronica Boulden

Dwayne and Brandt took Norah and Samantha to meet Tui T Sutherland in NYC on Saturday.  The girls are both obsessed with the Wings of Fire books.  

I just didn't get around to buying glasses in time, and I am not sure I wanted to spend the money anyway, so we made a bunch of solar eclipse viewing boxes using instructions we found online from several good sources.

When we moved into this house, our front walkways were rotting, unsightly, and unsafe, and our hillside was really wild and unmanageable, covered in unkept bushes, trees, and weeds of all kinds. So we hired landscapers to help us, because we needed professional help and advice.  This was too big a job to do or plan for ourselves. The landscapers built a new path leading from the driveway on one side of the house to the front door and from the top of our hillside down. The landscapers also cleared stumps, and stones from right in front of the house up the hill to the tree-line, making it possible to grow grass in that section and making it possible to have beds of flowers around the biggest rocks that couldn't be moved.   On the other side of the house, we had the landscapers clear out tons of overgrowth, but we could not afford to have them do more than that at this point. So we got their advice about what to do there, and we watched as they worked on the othe

After the girls made their wineberry tarts , my kitchen looked like the Swedish chef had been there. Flour everywhere! I was like, "What did you do?!  Did you actually throw it??!" So then I showed the girls this video. The fact that my girls all laughed to the point of holding their sides at this video assures me that all is well deep within their souls. So now we have started watching random Muppet videos like this together when they ask and we have the time. And now Norah is doing an impeccable Swedish chef impression. It brings me so much joy and pride and I feel so rich when she does it that it almost feels wrong to be so blessed. To be able to laugh at what's really funny is the greatest wealth there is.       The capacity for mirth is the surest sign of a healthy soul. And there are few things more telling than what sort of things make a body laugh.

Avril's most recent doodle 

Update: The older girls made tarts with all the extra wineberries we collected .

My niece Sarah's getting married in October! Sarah's mom, Lisa, lives here in Connecticut now, too. And our mother-in-law and father-in-law are here in Connecticut visiting both of us for a few weeks.  So Lisa took her younger daughter, Samantha, and I took my van that seats eight, and my oldest daughter Norah, and we took Mom, and we hit the road.  We stopped in New Jersey for like, a minute, and picked up Michelle, my husband's sister, and then kept on going. (My little girls stayed home with their dad and Grandpa for the weekend. My nephew stayed home with my brother-in-law. So, basically, all the men were given the responsibility of keeping all the other children alive. They did well.) We arrived in Virginia the night before and settled in.  (We did lots of stuff like eating at restaurants, swimming at the hotel pool, exercising at the hotel gym, and shopping, of course. But we were really there for one thing .) The shower was lovely! There was a ton of de

I have a soft spot for birds. I have loved them hard for a really long time. I really wanted a parrot or conure, but we couldn't afford one.  We had a baby and were struggling to pay rent for just a one bedroom apartment. Priorities, people. My friend offered to give me some canaries for free. I enjoyed looking at them, because they were pretty. But they were also pretty dull, since I couldn't ever hold them and they had no personality whatsoever. A few months later, my husband's cousin traded me my quiet (dumb) canaries for her smarter (louder) cockatiel. She was a school teacher and she had gotten complaints about the cockatiel in the classroom/s. I enjoyed that bird. I fed him from my plate (Don't judge lest ye be judged) and he climbed all over me and even took showers. But he pooped everywhere. Birds do doo-doo. And we had a baby who was beginning to crawl, and then toddle, and she was starting to grab at everything, and birds are fragile, and I

I am grateful: to begin our fifth year of homeschooling with the help of Classical Conversations. I am grateful: that my oldest begins Challenge B this fall. She is excited about the new things she will be learning and doing like formal logic, mock trial, and science fair.  And I mean what I said.  She is actually excited about the learning she will be doing, having taken real ownership of her own education last year in Challenge A. I am grateful: that I will be "a Challenge B mom." So that means that I  will also be learning that formal logic, and doing mock trial, and science fair and all that as I teach my daughter those things at home. I'll say that I am also pretty excited about the new material before me, too. I am grateful: for new challenges this year such as high school transcripts. I am making the choice to begin keeping a transcript for my oldest, grading her work in an official capacity, and translating that work into high school credits. That will b