Drive-By Media

The drive-by media got theirs...again. How long before they quit trying to smear people just for ratings? How long before they quit trying to indoctrinate us and push their agenda on us?

Ramblings

Here is a little bit of everything...

We have two deer in the freezer! Yay! We gave the third one away. Part of the joy of deer hunting is sharing what you get with friends and family so that they can enjoy it, too. It's a blessing.

We had a couple of calm weeks with not much running, but that all changed (again) and we've been running around again. All those ankle-biter appointments, errands (some self imposed, some imposed by DH), family get-togethers...it all adds up. Everything we did had importance attached to it, but it is still a major burn out instigator.

The girls' learning is coming along beautifully. I love being their teacher! Everything we do in learning brings me joy. If they aren't joyful about it, then I adjust my approach until they get excited about it, too. I don't like force feeding them anything that they aren't happy with it...but it's amazing how sugar coating something and making it taste like candy suddenly makes it a big treat. I never learned psychological warfare when I was in the army, but I sure learned it as a commander! :) Some of my soldiers were just big kids, after all. :)

Another two weeks of running and all should be calm again, but then that gets us right into the Christmas season. No one is ever busy at Christmas, right?

Finally slowing things down...phew! But we're still busy?

Cutting out all the extra running has been WONDERFUL! It's been so much more relaxing and pleasant around the house. We still do the things that we love, and we still do extras, just not crazy extra.

We went on a field trip to Brown County State Park last Friday. We got to explore the Discovery Trail (which was very fun) and we got to see the Nature Center and see birds up close. We then had a picnic lunch and played at a playground.

While at the park, a nice older couple sat next to us with their children and grandchildren. They started up a conversation with me, and turns out they were retired school teachers. I don't know what they thought about our rowdy group of homeschoolers, but I think offended them and scared them away because their granddaughter started bawling when one of our parents accidentally scared her. They left right after that without so much as a good-bye. Oh well.

We went to Apple Works today, and got to tour the facilities, pick our own apples, go on a hayride, pet animals at the petting zoo, and pick our own pumpkins. How fun was that??? Even the yellow jackets enjoyed it.

Busy, Busy, Busy!

I finally did it. I got too many activities scheduled and I am officially tired of running around and keeping the tires on my car hot. There are so many things that we like to do, and there are so many things that are necessary, and then there are all sorts of commitments made that can't be avoided.

Groceries, Food pick-ups, museums, HS group, music, gymnastics, library, story time, hair cuts, dentist, orthodontist, playdates, concerts, park visits...the list goes on and on. It might not be so bad except that we live out in the middle of nowhere, which means we spend countless hours in the car just to go somewhere. The nearest activity we go to is 15 minutes away, and the furthest is 45 minutes.

I'm going to sit back and take a hard look at everything going on in our lives and see where we can cut back on "extra" activities and see what is truly important to us and what is merely nice to do. Even though we "primarily" unschool (see previous post), I think that running ourselves ragged is contrary to an enriching learning environment.

Even when we listen to books on CD in the car, and even if they learn something at every location we go (that's the nature of unschooling), we end up exhausted and don't want to put forth any more effort than is absolutely necessary. We end up too tired to do the things in life that we really love, like walking through the yard, painting, crafting, snuggling, reading, hunting, etc.

Where do I draw the line?

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Learning While Sick

Sami has a cold this week, and with the cold comes cold medicine. With cold medicine comes side effects. With side effects come less efficient learning. So what do we do? What ever we feel like! :)

One nice thing about homeschooling is that we don't have to keep to a rigid schedule and "keep up" with what other kids are doing. We can do just what we feel up to that day due to illness, and keep it very light and fun and interesting.

Unschooling happens all the time anyway, sick or not. It makes it a lot easier to adjust to the environment and life events and "go with the flow."

Added 3 OCT 08: Megan got it too!

Busy Week!

We've all had those kinds of weeks, and this was definitely one of them. Despite being so busy, I think we all learned a lot. Between appointments, parties, lessons, music, gymnastics, play dates, errands...there was something going all the time.

The high light was seeing Joshua Bell play his Stradivarius. Bell is a Bloomington, Indiana native who attended Indiana University and is now a lecturer there. The music was FANTASTIC. He played part of the Red Violin score (written by Corigliano) among other pieces. I am not an expert on music, but I sure loved every minute of it.

Sami slept through part of it, but Megan sat in my lap with her eyes closed and patted me through it and peeked at me occasionally. They were not complaining that they were bored one bit...I think the music relaxed them so much that they had a hard time keeping their eyes open. They've been up that late before, but at parties. This was their first time being up late hearing classical music.

The girls have been learning about China for a couple of weeks now. At our HS Fun Club, they got to make Chinese stamps, play Chinese jump rope, and eat ramen noodles with chop sticks. They had a lot of fun with that!

Tomato Worms

Looks like the Newlin household is getting an impromptu lesson on Horned Tomato Worms.

When I went to check our tomato garden, I noticed all sorts of "frasse" (that's caterpillar talk for "poop"). Through diligent detective work, I deduced that there must be a worm...then I noticed the stripped stalks. Boy am I brilliant! :) kidding!!! I ended up finding 17 of the buggers, so I guess I wasn't so brilliant after all...

15 of them had wasp larvae on them. Several web sites state that it's good to leave those worms in your garden, as the wasp larvae will hatch, creating more wasps, which will attack more tomato worms. I went ahead and picked them off and set them on the ground. I couldn't stand to look at them on my plants.

The two that didn't have worms are now in my house, living in luxury in a butterfly habitat and getting regular meals of tomato stalks. They are free of wasp terror, but they will probably suffer at the hands of my family, as we will get them out all the time to learn about them as they will form cocoons and turn into hummingbird moths. ***Please note, ASPCA members: WE WILL NOT HARM THESE CATERPILLARS! CALM DOWN! I WAS KIDDING ABOUT THEM SUFFERING!