Stitching Progress

Elizabethan Garden Sampler by Brightneedle

Pinkhouse by Little by Little

Carinne

Katy Horn

I'm back !

I am pretty excited! We have our internet service back today! I just broke down - I need the internet! And when my husband called to get the service re-connected, he found out we could get internet without a full telephone package. The provider does not advertsise it, of course, and the person I talked to said no way. So here I am catching you up and then off to catch up on your blogs!

A week or so ago, we went to a science museum exhibit on - guess what - penguins! They had an area set up with a slide so the kids could slide on their penguin-suit-bellies, and a place to walk around with an egg on their feet. They loved it!

This picture says southern summer to me. My friend K and her family have a Camp Meeting every summer. They have a beautiful camp with "tents" (un-air conditioned buildings) and pews set up in the center for church services. K always invites us over, and the children play and then attend a children's church service. My husband and I were raised Southern Baptist, so along with the bible stories, they are getting some southern heritage lessons!

My Pop always wanted a boy - he got two daughters, three granddaughters and (so far) three great-granddaughters. (Okay, there are two grandsons). But I think he likes us! Right, Pop? Doesn't my little Chipmunk stand out with her blond hair?

Love, love love!

Wordless Wednesday

I am completely out of the habit of blogging. I have been at my parents' house since Thursday, and I am just now sitting at the computer. But I must blog! I cannot disappoint my readers - my mom and my granny! So here is a weekly report of sorts. Yesterday, I was in the same building as Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. It was a homeschool convention. I did not go to their lectures because the ones I wanted are today, and I am not driving all that way again! I picked up my copy of Writing with Ease, so maybe that will improve my blogging! My husband went to a lecture about whining, and he took PAGES of notes for me to read- just what I need! I was there to shop. It was a little disappointing to stand in that huge place and realize I already have most of it! My favorite purchase is How to Teach Art to Children by Evan-Moor. I often overlook Evan-Moor, but I have enjoyed the products I have seen. There are 96 projects about "line, shape, color, value, texture, form and space." It looks completely do-able. My mom looked through the brightly-colored book several times last night, and said she wanted it! I have not made much progress through the MonArt book, Drawing With Children. I read Mill on the Floss and Vanity Fair, but I cannot bring myself to sift through all the information in Drawing With Children. How the Teach Art has minimal instructions and lots of mixing paint shades (on reproducible worksheets) and making textured collages.
I did not buy Miquon Math or Singapore Math to supplement Saxon. I had an armful of cusenaire rods and lab annotations, and then I had an epiphany - I do not have to buy these products because all my friends are. I turned to my good friend E and said, "I do not have to buy these because you did." E's eyes grew large as she looked up above her armload of books, manipulatives and maps. "Okay," she said as she staggered toward the mile-long line at the Rainbow Resources booth. And that was it. It was almost anti-climatic.
On another front, I am re-reading All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I read this way-back-when in a Southern Literature course - Grit Lit. It was wasted on me then. I remember something in my 19-year old soul was moved, but I did not appreciate - no, relish the language as I am doing now ( in my old age of 35. 35?!!!) " The saws sang soprano and the clerk in the comissary passed out the blackstrap molasses and the sowbelly and wrote in his big book, and the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness collaborated to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife, and all was merry as a marriage bell. Till, all of a sudden, there weren't any more pine trees." "So I sat there in silence...and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion." " I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came out to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of a hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of a harness shop is - or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down - the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is a place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him...You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight rale of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlit detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in toils of mortal compulsions." Yes, sir, I can read Jane Austen with the best of you most of the year, but when it is a hot, southern summer, this girl needs Grit Lit.

I am blogging from a friend's house while the kids are in the pool. I broke it to Nutmeg that we will start back 5-day a week school in August. We are still doing 2-day and maybe will continue that until mid-August. We have begun Latina Christiana I. Nutmeg is learning the Ave Maria as her Latin prayer since the one in LC are repeats from Prima Latina. We are planning to do the Agnus Dei next. We are planning to do German Muzzy this fall. Although the French from Memoria Press looks really good too! Maybe next year! I hope to have some great pictures of field trips and cross stitch to post on Saturday. Wish me look as I try to blog from a distance.

Michele

Wordless Wednesday

I made this cross stitch for my mom for 4th of July. It is an older design from a Prairie Schooler leaflet.

We have finally begun our Ocean Unit! We have really been looking forward to this. I was apprehensive about using the Apologia elementary science series, but I think we will be fine. I want Nutmeg to be familiar with the Young Earth and Evolution theories and be able to intelligently disscus them. We don't subscribe to a theory, but view them as THEORIES! I sometimes resent that Young Earth is presented as THE Christian theory. I gave Nutmeg a quick overview of the theories and which one is presented as fact in the Zoology 2 book. She seemed unphased - "Okay, may we do the animals now?" She can discuss the difference between actual grace and sanctifying grace; her mind is certainly more supple than mine so she probably won't have a problem with science theories. She drew this adorable dolphin. We are still enjoying the Draw Write Now series.

Nutmeg and Jerry did this Myth Pocket on Friday. We do not do them regularly, just occasionally as a treat. I will be said when we are finished with this book. I wish there were books on Norse and Egyptian myths as well.

And here is my niece. Babycakes, posing for an All-American photo. See the cross stitch pillow in the background? It is unmistakably Cross-Eyed Cricket. It is dated 1985

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and remembered our soldiers who are still fighting for freedom!

Michele

I am at my parents' house - where internet service is not $86 a month! What have I been doing with all my time now that I have no internet sevice at home? Well, I have been doing more cross stitching, cooking and homeschooling - the things I usually am researching on the internet. I have also been decimating my Japanese Beetle population. I knock them into a bucket of soapy water. A few blossoms fall in the bucket as well. I hate pesticides because my two girls love to play in the flower beds, and I like ladybugs and butterflies.

I have also been tidying various corners of my home. Rat nests, my mother has always called them. Well, I had quite a rat nest in my bathroom drawer. Now it is unnaturally clean. I threw away countless boxes of beige eye shadow!

And I have gone from this

to this!

Maybe I was spending too much time on the 'net.