BAD WOLF

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Cloverload

Some thoughts before I decide between coffee or tea....the clover took over the fairy garden and fairies were dancing all over the lawn cus we gots lots of toadstools (okay, they may be actual mushrooms...I have no clue)...I really have an itch to revamp the fairy garden some....there are pics and vids to upload....I still have decorations I am behind on....despite having a calendar St Lucys' got forgot...will have to make crown today and cinnies tomorrow instead...oh well...lol...still putting together our scoutly group...we still are working out names to it and the levels..all we do know is the first level will be Brownies....love those fairies! Along with our vintage Brownie/Girl Guide handbooks we'll be using the materials from Quest Club, a counterpart to Frontier Girls, along with Keepers at Home to be our merit badge work. (American Heritage Girls will wait till she can join an actual troop.)

I have been sick with a cross between a cold and a flu..at least that's what it feels like,,for the past 2 weeks now. We decided we'd catch up with the holiday stuff first, then next week we'll catch up on our bookwork. Twirly has been having fun with her Brainquest book meanwhile. 

Now..I have a cupboard to sort out. I seem to recall having bought some things for her and her brother back when they were little that they might be big enough for now....

What I Love ABout Homeschooling my Dirlie

You know what I love about homeschooling:

Seeing my daughter have as much fun with a kiddie abacus as I once did:

and getting out of the shower to find love notes written in the fog on the mirror:

 It says "Sara Loves Mom" with a big heart drawn above the words, in case you can't make it out.

And being there for those milestones of lost/found teeth too!

I love you, Twirly-Whirly!
 

Scouting and What Knot

Okay...poor play on words...but I am not up to "very clever" today. It's been a bit of a week...that l lasted a month long, it feels like! The rhythm I had hoped to establish still has not fully materialized...somewhat disappointing...but on the other hand most all is being accomplished so it all turns out fine in the end. Some of the disruption of plans has been outside our area of control, so no use worrying about it, right? and other parts have been due to a small amounts of whimsy taking hold and that's okay too. 

Twirly-whirly has been moving forward with reading and writing in English as well as some Latin and Greek (she is memorizing our Greek alphabet song faster than I for instance). We continue with CC (Classical Conversations) each week too, though I hope to get in more recital time at home...evenso she is remembering the material in song form nicely. Her other subjects/activities are also coming along....ballet show Dec 1...she got her costume for that yesterday...so cute! 

What's been on my mind and back burner on slow simmer has been scouting for the girl...her brother recently became a member of a Cub Scout pack.  I am the Den Mom (Assistant Den Leader to be precise). I am an avid Scouter since my older two were the only two. Anyone who knows me knows this and my dilemma about GSUSA since they no longer quite embody what they began as. I looked for alternatives a few years ago. We joined GEMS, and really love it!

But once the boy and I began scouting together, it showed how not as much like scouting I had hoped it would be GEMS was. Mind you, we are continuing with it cus we both do love it. It just has a diff energy to it than a true scouting program. 

A while back I stumbled across really vintage Brownie books...like from the 20's/30's and I fell in love with it as I could so see TW getting so much fun from it! So very imaginative and yet grounded in real life experiences than the modern version today. So I began collecting.....books, badges, uniformy bits...in order to try to mimic it here at home between the 2 of us (we have tried with mixed results to create with other girls a Keepers Club...refer to Keepersofthefaith,com....folks started out with us but then schedules changed and such and so in the end it's just us). 

I still had trouble figuring out how to actually implement it though. and then along the way I also found American Heritage Girls, the only all-girl org that BSA has a written Mutual Support Agreement with in their history! This said a lot! I found there is a troop not too very far away, but it meets the same night as our AWANA program, which we do not want to give up. So I applied for Trailblazers...the AHG version of Lone Scouting and faster than I knew it, we were approved! It said it could take weeks! Now to scrape up reg fee etc to cover the materials....like I said I had guessed it would take may weeks. 

I am excited she'll be able to do AHG and participate in joint BSA/AHG events/campaigns like Scouting for Food etc. alongside her brother.

The next question tho was what about the homeschool scout club thingy....then it came to me as I explained to her about my idea as I was trying on both the vest and the sash on her...some schools have mascots and spirit clubs and this would be ours. So very soon we will have the first meeting of Acorn Cottage Brownies! I will post pics and such soon. 

Would you believe??? Yeah...we're still not in sync but it's all still good.

I really thought I would have had it down by now, but Life has not yet allowed for that. Evenso, it's all been running fairly nicely if not according to my ideal, which is still be ironed out. I had some curriculum that I thought was perfect before we started, but now I have decided to put it off for now. I will be working on some more fine-tuning later tonight. 

For now, let's just get to the what-we-did-today sort of thing:

The better part of this morning we weeded and slightly overhauled the fairy garden. I removed a small rose plant I had put in some years back as it had grown too big for the small space and made weeding around it bloody (small thorns but way sharp). I moved a daffodil plant...fingers crossed it doesn't now croak. 

Twirly-Whirly helped relocate some of our garden friends (the little statuary that, no doubt, like Weeping Angels,move when you're not looking (there are fey in the garden after all). They are not so dangerous as the WAs of course. 

Twirly-Whirly posing in front of the refreshed garden. She begged me to take a couple of pics herself so here they are:

 Then I took this one as I entered the house:

Well....they do some of it when we're not looking, but I can say the Twirly and I needed otter pops when we were through!


Now here is the funny part...when I went to download the pics from my camera to the computer look what I found!:

I don't know when she took these, but it was after I set my camera on my desk....lol....girl loose with camera....brought a smile to my day to say the least!

That's all for now!

The Lessons *I* Learned This Week! (or how 2nd grade didn't get off on the foot I expected to use!)

At least that's what I finally came up with for the title! I certainly have felt stumbly bumbly all/almost all week. Not what I had hoped for, to be sure! It began well enough when The Boy-o (he's just gotten too big for Boo-man anymore...he is 9, after all) went back to school, and the Twirly-whirly (she still is and probably always will be) had some time for cleaning and prepping the School~House,attending our last Friday Fun at Madrona Marsh (perhaps..lol), followed by returning to ViP soccer that Saturday and the new session of violin classes, and then Classical Conversations the Monday after that (she moved up to 2nd grade Sunday School over Labor Day Weekend..an unofficial start, I spose).

However, drama was already creeping onto the scene when the car behaved very awkwardly all the to and from CC...it ended up in the shop for 2 days..and while it shouldn't have thrown the spanner in (it didn't really mess up my planned schedule, even with taking a taxi to her new Wed ballet class and having to catch a lift back with fellow classmates), it still rather did. You know, you feel like you stepped out onto the figurative dance floor with a full card but on the wrong foot and now you can't seem to stay in step even when there's really no solid reason.

So, here's what I learned...1- Don't get a new dog the summer before school when you really need that time to plan not wipe up pee (yup, cus that happened, and then sadly the dog became aggressive and we had to then give him up!)....and 2-Don't plan to start all your wonderful lessons the very first week of school...build up and that way when the usual hurdles pop up that same week (they always do, don't they?), you won't be forced to reprint blank planner pages and rewrite all said plans the next week or so, like I am doing today! Finally, 3- if you do have to do something drastic like that, just do it...make yourself a cuppa and relax...and remember that's one of the best things about homeschooling: flexibility.

and now back to the aforementioned...who knows? Maybe the next blog will be about what we *have* done! Maybe a pic or two as well! LOL!

Lovely Irony, or how blowing off paperwork got it done....

Ahhhhh....whenever you feel stressed and time-crunched over some project etc I highly recommend going to the park....as I struggled to make our summer plans into something cohesive after my original more orderly plans were tossed sideways with some unexpected (tho great) additions, I decided to say Oh Whatever and took the kids to the SBHN Group at Large Wed parkday....not only did they have fun, but I not only relaxed but got my problems solved too!

So now even though it still isn't in the framework I had originally conceived, all I wanted to cover is still getting attended to...more on that later....