This 'n' That

My what a week!

My older son's (AD) football team ended their season undefeated! The last game was Tuesday night and we've been resting ever since. They have a couple of weeks until their first playoff game which is nice. Congratulations to the Pony Football Players and Coaches...You Rock!

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AH has been a busy bee. Last Thursday and Friday AH took a kids cooking class and had an absolute ball! He learned to make all sorts of Mexican food as well as scrumptious chocolate offerings! Saturday night was dinner by AH when he made us Quesadillas...Yummy! On Sunday, our oldest, AN, came over to dinner to celebrate her 24th birthday with us. For a birthday present to his big sis, AH made her lava cakes for dessert. They were exquisite. Big sis loved them! We also baked some bars for the football team.

On the homeschool front:
- We've been reading Lord Brocktree by Brian Jacques. He just loves this series of books!
- AH was able to figure out how to fix his electric car so that it will race down the hallway! What a great day!
- We've been studying The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Benjamin D. Wiker as an intro into the world of chemistry! We love it!
- We are plugging along in math.

- Obscurity is the name of a game we have newly discovered. It's a sort of word search game with hardly any rules!!! We don't compete, we play each card together. I think it's helped him with vocabulary and spelling, but don't tell AH that!

- He's been plugging away at Brainology, a program I signed him up for and he is not too happy about. But I believe it'll help him learn exactly what his brain needs to do to learn things.

- He pulled out our box of magnets and accesories for his little cousins this week. It was fun to watch him show them what a magnet can do!

- AH discovered an unopened Bionicle toy that he got last Christmas and started building it.

- Halloween costume design goes under arts and crafts in the homeschool, right? AH is designing his own Willy Wonka costume and is doing a great job. I'll post pictures as soon as Canon sends me a new software disc!

- Tonight our youngest is off at a sleepover at his best friends house.

Animal School

This brought tears to my eyes because I am privileged to live with a Bee:

A Spark!

Sometimes you just know you are on to something when you look into your child's eyes.

Earlier this fall, we asked AH what he wanted to be involved in outside of homeschool. Scouts? No. Football? No. We went through a list a mile long. Nothing seemed to interest him. He is a homebody, as I've said before, and it is important to us that he have some regular interaction with other people! AH asked me about an electric car "club" that I had mentioned earlier in the week. I was pretty sure it had filled up, but emailed the organizer. It was full, but she put AH on the wait list. I was sure we were out of luck, but a few days later we were in! It is called BEST. Each week we meet to work on small electric cars that the kids design and build. We will do this until after Christmas when the kids start designing and building a larger electric vehicle to compete against other teams.

We had missed a couple of weeks by joining late and I was feeling overwhelmed and lost (I know nothing of electricity or cars!!) during one of our meetings. We were trying to figure out how the motor would turn the axle. Where should we mount it, what would we use? I looked around the room at the group of kids each working with their respective parents. They seemed to know what they were doing. I was thinking that I couldn't help AH with this, and how I was a failure as a homeschool mom, when he turned to me in the middle of this problem, his eyes bright and shining and said to me, "This is so fun!" It didn't matter to him that we were stuck. In retrospect, I was probably the only one who thought that. Thank goodness I'm learning to keep my mouth shut and my opinions to myself. He eventually worked out a solution for himself with a little push in the right direction from our experts.

We worked on his car today in anticipation of our meeting tomorrow. He figured out how to attach the battery to the switch and motor. His eyes lit up again today! He's got a game plan and a list of things to buy for his car. Tomorrow will be a great day!

(I'm having computer trouble and need to install some software onto our 2nd computer in order to upload pictures to my blog. My apologies. I would do it now, but it's after midnight and I should rest. I'll upload tomorrow night. ~Barbara)