First Day at Labyrinth Homeschool Co-op

The kids had their first day at the Co-op today. APD is taking Spanish (if they find a teacher), Writing, Chemistry / Physics, and Journalism. RMD has Spanish (again, if they find a teacher), Musical Theater, Animal Science, Writing and Grossology. RMD loves her science classes. APD says he is going to have alot of homework, but he likes hanging out with his co-op friends. I am most excited about my own classes - weaving and knitting!

Reverse Trick-or-Treating!

While working on a fair trade project for the Justice and Peace Commission at church, I found a really cool website. It's called Global Exchange - Socially Conscious Gifts. The coolest thing on it is a Reverse Trick or Treating Program. Here's what the website says:

Hundreds of groups of Trick-or-Treaters in the United States and Canada will unite to:

END poverty among cocoa farmers
END forced/abusive child labor in the cocoa industry
PROMOTE Fair Trade
PROTECT the environment A pleasant surprise will greet nearly a quarter million people distributing candy at their door, when youth reverse the Halloween tradition to hand adults a sample of Fair Trade chocolate.

The chocolate will be accompanied by a card informing recipients of poverty and child labor problems in the cocoa industry, affecting mainstream candy enjoyed at Halloween and around the year, and how Fair Trade certified chocolate provides a solution.

Parents of last year's youngest participants raved about how Reverse Trick-or-Treating transformed Halloween into a meaningful event when youthful activists can give back to their neighbors and to cocoa growing communities. Read more reactions in our newsletter article here.


This is right up my alley! Every year since the kids started trick-or-treating, I've had a problem with both handing out and collecting a ton of junky candy. A few years we opted to give out junky Oriental Trading toys in lieu of candy, but that didn't seem right either. Now there's an alternative! I think RMD will go for it. Stay tuned....

First Homeschool Week

I don't plan to do a homeschool blog post for every week, but this week was our first and it was pretty productive.

RMD made it through 4 math lessons, 5 vocabulary lessons, 4 grammar lessons, 2 outlining lessons, many Critical Thinking exercises, 3 history lessons (we are studying England - late 1500's), created her Timeline book, restarted piano lessons with Alex, began learning about Bach and the baroque period and spent at least 1 hour a day reading. She also prepared for our Mother-Daughter Book Club meeting on Friday (Wise Child by Monica Furlong was the book).

APD completed a similar amount of work, and also his science work for Labyrinth.

In addition to all this, they helped me turn 27 pounds of tomatoes from the farmers market into sauce. We went to the Fair on Wednesday - planning to see rabbits of which there were only 6 - and of course riding the rides and eating cotton candy. They also spent all day Thursday at wilderness class.

The best part is to see them having fun doing their work and also doing it together! It's amazing how well they get along while homeschooling. This was definitely not the case when they were in school full time. And it's not always the case while homeschooling either. But, it really seems that time together creates a cohesive bond. Just one more homeschooling advantage!

The first day of school

but not for us!

Here's how we spent the first day of school for most of the kids in our school district - climbing to the top of Little Si!

I found a good blog

For some reason this morning, I decided to try and find articles about tween / teen cell phone use. (For the record - I see no point in a kid having a cell phone until he or she is driving or at least in high school...) See this article for a good discussion about the issue.

Anyway, not much in the way of cell phone articles that I agree with, but I did find lots of articles on an interesting Blog site! Here are some of them:


Millionaire Mommy Next Door - Affluenza

Millionaire Mommy Next Door - Parenting With a Purpose

Millionaire Mommy Next Door - Changing the World

Millionaire Mommy Next Door - Shadow, Apprentice, Find a Mentor

MMND - Demystifying Investing

It's All About Me

Someone (a non-blogger, I'm sure!) asked me who exactly I did my Peru blog for and why would I want to continue to blog now that we are home. The answer is - they're for me!!! Now, I actually love the fact that anybody that wants to, can read about our trips and my daily random thoughts. Especially my mom and friends afar that I don't see often. But, I would blog even if nobody read them. The daily stuff is just fun. I went to a journaling workshop last year with a friend - it was given by our favorite retreat center leader, Dani. Dani said everyone should try and write 1/2 hour per day. About anything we wanted. She held a 6 week long series of workshops on it, but I didn't go because she lives about 1 1/2 hours away. But, I always meant to start writing, and now I have. And the trip stuff I really love. It's a new form of scrapbooking. Part of the fun of scrapbooking for me was always telling the story - and I always wrote it up on the computer, even though all the scrapbooking magazines said to do it by hand to be more personal. I just always found that my stories were too long and I could more accurately document my scrapbooks if I typed everything. The problem was, none of the stories ever were done in real time fashion because it is so time consuming to get out all the scrapbook supplies, order the pictures, arrange them, crop them, choose the paper and all the fancy, cutsy stuff, you get the idea... So, I am now 3 years behind in scrapbooking with no timeframe for getting anything done. I don't even really want to continue, except for the fact that my hundreds of dollars of scrapbooks and materials call my name every so often. I DO, however want to continue to take pictures and write down the memories of our fantastic trips and now I have a new way - Blogging! It's real time with the added bonus that anybody that wants to can share the fun. But really, it's all about me.

The Plague Strikes Again!

Here's an interesting article published 8/30/2008 - The Plague Threatens Ferrets, Prairie Dogs

Just goes to show you learning about the plague is still relevant.

I also found another interesting book to introduce to the kids. It's called Outbreak - Plagues That Changed History