In my life this week…

I spent a lot of time yesterday cleaning the house. I volunteered to billet for our local homeschooling convention. Thus the house needed some work. I chronicled the day in a ‘Day in the Life‘ post. It was busy but it needed to get done and I feel so much better having the house relatively clean.

With my cleaning of my desk last week after I posted a picture of it buried, I took a picture of the junk ‘drawer’. My goal is to clean that mess for next Friday’s blog hops.

The homeschooling conference starts Friday morning and my wife has the day off to come and join us. I am really looking forward to it. Time to start buying some curriculum for next year.

In our homeschool this week…

Philip had his first speech therapy appointment and that went well. We made some progress and she showed him some tricks. Just having the hearing aid and hearing the sounds properly will make a huge difference. That and a little bit of therapy and we should have his speech clear pretty quickly.

I got a letter from the teacher that oversees his online Chinese saying where we should be in the course. It was a form letter to everyone he oversees. We should be at 75% complete but we were at 48%. Thus I gave him permission to work as much on Chinese as he wants. So in four days he has moved it up to 64% complete. My goal now is to let him do a little each day as we finish our portfolio and then let him have the six weeks after the portfolio to blitz Chinese.

Tomorrow Grandma is going to be watching him while we are at the conference. I need to provide her with things for him to do. Give that she is a former teacher and her background is in history I am going to focus in that area. Specifically I am going to have him researching the Fur Trade. I also plan to have some other activities he can do. He is fairly self sufficient but he does get distracted sometimes and goes too far off course. Unrelated Wikipedia articles ok, webcomics not OK.

I’m cooking…

Last Friday I made Corn Flake cookies. I was certain that we were going to witness the death of the second bomber live on the internet. I had to pull myself away. Making cookies was a way to get myself away from the newscasts. It is also a way that I de-stress. By the time I was done cookies, transporting kids, cooking and eating dinner they had him is custody.

I did a giant ham for Saturday dinner with scalloped potatoes. On Wednesday I made BBQ chicken, Coleslaw and homemade buns.

Sunday I was so sick that I fell asleep at 3pm and with some interruptions I slept through to morning. My wife decide to try the grated frozen butter trick for making biscuits. She said that it worked great and will make her more willing to make biscuits in the morning. She made three batches and said that it was important to have the dry ingredients ready to go and keep the butter in the freezer until the last moment. Once it is grated it thaws very fast. On the show he grated directly into the dry ingredients. That is how my wife made the last batch and she said that was the easiest way. The pictures were take by her as well. I promised her credit. They were yummy.

A photo, video, link, or quote to share (silly, serious or both!)…

You know you are a homeschooler if you have ever had a nightmare about curriculum.

In my nightmare I was trying to pick curriculum but every time I picked a book off the shelf is it was suddenly wrapped in shrink wrap denying me the opportunity to flip through and evaluate it.

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