Friday bullets - February 18, 2022

• I am a little sad that it is Friday because that means our two week school break is at an end. It was nice. It makes me look forward to summer. 
• Don't get me wrong, I enjoy homeschooling my children, it's just that it does take a chunk of time out of the day.
• The other evening at dinner, L. announced that she was only going to refer to herself in the third person. There was massive revolt from everyone else at the table. Thankfully, I think she has laid those plans aside for now, but points for knowing what third person is.
• I think the plan is for J. and TM to head out and buy a new washing machine tonight. It is a sad state of affairs when doing laundry actually sounds like how I want to spend my time.
• R. had a great day today, doing a variety of activities and voluntarily switching between activities instead of endlessly doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. 
• I love having social interactions because it feels as though for the past two years that hasn't happened. This week I got to spend time with a friend teaching her to knit, one of my riding students who has become a friend of Y.'s and her mom, who has become a friend of mine, came over and visited when the weather for riding was bad, and I went to a new friend's house (the woman who taught the weaving class I took) and we spent a couple of hours talking weaving. 
• For two days this week the water was thawed in the barn. It was nice while it lasted. We are back to frozen water again. 
• We have all been watching this season of The Amazing Race. G. and L. were saying that they really, really wanted to be on it as a team. After the last episode where the participants had to eat the Corsican delicacy of cheese with maggots in it, G. is now not so convinced that being on the race sounds like fun.
• D. had a negative Covid test a few days ago so he is all cleared to finally leave his dorm room and resume normal life. 
• D. is also excited because he is now fully funded for his summer research internship. His proposal is: Developing a New Molecular Method of Identifying Bacteria Present in Dicty Farming. Dicty being Dictyostelium discoideum which is a social amoeba, or so I'm told.
• TM's big news is that he has signed a lease for an apartment and will move in at the beginning of March. It is close to his work, so he'll be able to go home and take care of Aster on his lunch break. He is very excited about this new stage of life. 
• We are very proud of both TM and D. 
• My seeds that I ordered are starting to arrive. Very soon it will be time to start some seeds. It seems very difficult to believe at this point that we will ever be above freezing for more than two days at a time.
• Both G. and L. randomly announce that they wish it were September because they want to go to Yellowstone.
• I have also been informed that we do not own enough documentaries. All the ones we own have been watched many times and new ones are needed. (We do not own an insignificant amount of documentaries, I just seem to have insatiable children. No, I have no idea where they get that.)
• Even the documentary children have their limits, though. I have a DVD which teaches how to spin with a spindle. (I thought it would be useful to watch to see how others teach the skill because I'll be teaching it this fall.) I offered this to them and they did not seem to think it was interesting.
• On the topic of documentaries that are deemed interesting, does anyone have a good documentary title about the history of Chicago? That is G.'s newest request.
• Among the sentences that I have found myself typing more than once this week: No, you do not need a virtual school/curriculum to successfully homeschool your child.
• I'm thinking of hosting a homeschool parent retreat. We could talk about how to navigate hard days, different ideas for learning, and high school. Would anyone find this interesting?
• We are almost done with the Incorrigibles, but there was a quote from today's chapter that I had to share with you. "The only difference between a dream and reality is a to-do list." 

And with that, I'll say goodnight. I'm sure there will be more education/homeschooling posts once we are back into the swing of things.