Friday bullets, Jan. 12, 2018

It's been one of those crazy weeks where I seem to only barely manage to keep my head above water. This inevitably happens on weeks with doctor's appointments, especially ones which involve driving 100+ miles. Having a couple of people down with various illnesses didn't help either.

• I know more than a few people, both with children requiring lots of appointments and without, wonder how homeschooling works when you do need to take time out for appointments. Well, first of all, I find it is all easier to change our style of homeschooling based on what life is looking like at any given moment. Times that are calm with not a lot of appointments, we can be more schedule and workbook oriented. Times with craziness or appointments or surgeries or any of the other surprises life tends to throw about, it is useful to think of education in different terms. This has been a more unschooling sort of week than is typical, but then, I've never even pretended to subscribe to any single homeschooling method. Why be constricted? I know that unschooling (learning without prescribed curricula or textbooks or plans), makes more than a few people nervous, and I'm not sure I could even do it full time, But that said, it is often during our unschooling seasons that I am most aware of what my children are learning. Maybe it's because it is more organic and driven by the individual? Anyway, I took some pictures to show you what I mean.

As I had mentioned earlier, we have made a brief stopover to Easter Island/Rapa Nui on our way to New Zealand. Nova had done a really great series about lost civilizations where various experts and scientists tried to recreate how different things were accomplished. The moai on Rapa Nui were one of them. We watched the show on Monday, because that's what was on the schedule, but also because more than a couple of people were sick, and it seemed like a low key activity. 

So back to the photos. Everyone was very taken with the island and the statues. The top picture are moai created out of Lego by K. (Really, in K.'s world, something doesn't exist until it has been recreated in Lego.) The bottom two photos are G.'s work. One of the hypotheses of how the moai were moved, was that they were put on a sled and rolled over logs. The next day, G. had built the top set-up, then she calls to me and announces, "This would not have worked because they could never have turned the sled!" She then proceeds to show me how the sled could not have turned. The second picture shows the moai on the sled. 

There was quite a bit of other learning that happened, and this was just a small bit of it, but it does show how life and learning go on, even in the midst of other stuff.

• I have been working on getting the amount spent on groceries under control. This means paying far more attention than I had been to sales, and planning my meals around those things. I will admit to having gotten out of the habit, and it showed. I've also decided that I need to be a little proactive in taking advantage of those sales for future use. You know, buying a lot of something at a good price and storing it for later. Here is what I came home with on Wednesday.

Yes, that is a lot of red bell peppers and poblano chiles. They were both on sale, with the red peppers being really quite low. I'm in the process of slicing half and dicing the other half in order to freeze them. You can't eat them fresh that way, but I use them enough in cooking that they will be really useful. The poblanos, at least those that don't get turned into chiles rellenos, will be roasted, diced and frozen.

• H. read all of Green Eggs and Ham to me today. She had absolutely no difficulty on any of the words, and she was understanding it. I know it's not a difficult book, but it is not entirely made up of easy words. You have some 'would's and 'could's, and you need to know what 'e' on the end does as well as what happens with two vowels to be able to read it. Another milestone was that I think the rhyming was actually helping her. Anyone with a child whose first language was not English knows that rhyming is one of the last things to develop. 
• There is a grassroots campaign among children for us to get a pot-bellied pig which is at an animal shelter. I think a good part of the reason is that it's name is Fifi. Well, that and the cachet of having another extremely unusual pet. As A. mentioned last night, we left normal behind a long time ago. There are some bad stories about dogs and pigs, though, so... 
• The second session of the women's Bible I'm in started Wednesday night. You know what was the most exciting thing to me? I wasn't the 'new girl'! I knew people, they knew me, it felt like a huge relief.
• P.'s second semester French class at the local community college was cancelled at the last moment due to low enrollment. I'm both annoyed and frustrated. Anyone local know of someone who would like the money that the community college would have gotten, to tutor P. through the second half of her French book? I could do it, but in reality it is more likely to happen if I outsource it.
• Olive is now up to 80 pounds. She can easily rest her head on the dining room table without stretching. Not that we encourage that behavior.
• Q. continues to lay eggs. I have quite a full glass of them in the refrigerator now. She is laying an egg at least probably twice a week these days.