In my life this week…

This week revolved around homeschooling and the bathroom with a lot of cleaning thrown in. Ian’s Birthday Party is on Saturday. His actual birthday was back in January but we are just getting around to the party. However that means at least 4 friends from preschool and their moms in my house. It is now presentable and the living room is almost looking like the photos that I see on the minimalist Babycenter board. I had giant Bouncer on the couch while we cleaned the homeschooling room.

The bathroom is coming along great and I should have a second working toilet by sometime on Monday. The tile work is done. We have painting and installing the toilet and vanity. The vanity is arriving in a week but the counter top isn’t for two weeks. As long as I have another toilet I will survive.

I’m Cleaning…

This week’s challenge on the minimalist board was kid’s rooms. Given that all my kids share a room it is rather cluttered but most of that is clothing, books and stuffies. The stuffies are off limits at this time and I need my wife’s help with the clothing so I decided to organize and purge books. Most will go to the thrift store. So I got rid of one box of books.

With the party coming up I need to get the upstairs clean as it was neglected last weekend with the downstairs mass cleaning. It wasn’t bad as we have been better at keeping it clean. It also meant that we went farther in our cleaning. That is good since two of the guests have infant siblings and we have not been baby proof in years.

Since I have talked to a number of the moms about our homeschooling I couldn’t just shut the door to the room so we did some heavy cleaning in there. My wife sorted the book shelf and although I didn’t take any photos she did to it what I did to the one in the kids room. She also eliminated some of our old used curriculum. So we eliminated two recycling bins worth of stuff.

In our homeschool this week…

The cool thing that we did this week was make a battery out of some pennies, lemon juice and paper towels. You have to use post 1982 American pennies and the pennies do not survive the experiment. There was some discussion on website as to whether this was legal. From what I read it was but also I’m in Canada. You do not get a lot of power out of this. The picture shows it lighting an LED. I hooked it up to a volt meter and got between .01 and .02 volts. The system is dependent on the amount of lemon juice so as it dries out it loses power.

Margaret spent a lot of time reading about the native residential schools that were here in Canada. It is some tough reading. The book she had touched on it lightly but it was a sanitized version of history. That led to us having a discussion of what sanitized meant in this case. We then read some web pages that showed the real horrors of some of these places. We got some good notes. Next we need to organize them in to an outline.

Margaret also got to start an eight week art class. The first day they spent learning some sketching skills. Later they will do some watercolor and some acrylic paintings. The ability to sketch something is so fundamental that I am glad that she is learning how to do.

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