So,  if I tell about my homeschool planning ,then I can enter the cool contest at the "Front Porch" http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/HSBCompanyBlog/554821/.  Check it out. 

Now I will grace you all with my super extraordinary abilities with planning. 

First, I look at what really worked well the previous year.  I write that down so that I will continue or reorder it for upcoming year.

Second, I look at what really didn't work.  I make a separate column on my paper.  In that column I make note of the subjects for which I will need to do research to find a new curriculum or method of teaching or learning.

Third, after I've decided about which methods or curriculum I plan to use; I order them.

Fourth, I lay out an "optimal day" plan.  This is what I would like to have happening at each time slot of my school day with the boys. 

Fifth, we start schooling and see how it goes.  It usually goes well for the first couple of weeks.  Then life and all of it's distractions hit and we just keep doing our best.  If the schedule doesn't get perfectly kept.  We don't worry, we simply keep making adjustments and do our best to learn and have fun!

Well, that's about it.  I hope I win the cool planner.  Good luck to all the entrants!

Well, it's time for another blog entry.  It's been a while.  Now this year has sped by so quickly I can't believe it.   Life is very different this year.  Hubby has a job where he has to commute so far that he can't come home until the weekend.    It's a trusting year.  A year were we feel our need of God. It's stupid, I know, but I sometimes forget how much I need my Jesus.  But not this year.  I need him every hour ...

We have also been working on our garden.  The boys have learned the fine art of weeding.  Gardening is relaxing for me.  Well tomorrow is coming soon so I'll bid you adios. 

If you give a mom a muffin, she'll want a strong cup of coffee to go with it...She'll make herself some .  Then her four-year-old will spill the coffee, she'll wipe it up. While wiping the floor she'll find dirty socks.  She'll remember she has to do laundry.  When she puts the laundry in the washer, she'll trip over boots and bump into the box of Goodwill items.  Bumping into the Goodwill items will remind her that she has to get these boxes out of her basement and into the car.  When she puts the boxes in the car she'll find a bag of groceries and this will remind her that she's got to start cooking dinner.  She will get out the chicken defrosting in the fridge.  Then she'll try to find her cookbook '101 Things to Do With Chicken'.  The cookbook will be sitting under a pile of mail. She will see the phone bill which is due tomorrow.  The checkbook will be in her purse that is being ransacked by her six year old.  As she bends down to rescue her purse, she'll smell something funny.  She'll change the baby's diaper.  While she is throwing away the diaper and searching for the hand sanitizer, the phone will ring.  Her four-year-old will answer and hang up.  She'll remember that she wants to call a friend to have coffee.  Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup in order to stay awake for the rest of the day.  And chances are....

If she finds her cup of coffee (which she now has to reheat) her children will have eaten the muffin that goes with it.

-Anonymous

It was the first day because it was January first, 2008.  It was a day of laughter for many reasons.  We were at the neighborhood annual sledding party.  It was fun and food for all the families around.  But for me there was a fresh first out here in the frosty forest.  Little man, the bounciest, most rambunctious of our pack was assigned to me to supervise.  The others prefered the steeper more challenging sled runs.  So they all were off experiencing the rush of speed.  Little man and I were on the bunny hill.  He at the old age of three, didn't remember other winters.  So sledding was new and scary. 

Now I am usually so taken up with teaching my other boys that Little Man and I have only a little time together each day.  More often than not it is only enough time for a good round of Green Eggs and Ham or Frog and Toad.  But this New Year's Day was a peek into the future for me.  Little Man learned to sled on his own.  I taught him.  Perhaps that doesn't sound like a  terribly amazing feat for a mother to do with her son.  But I have this mothering issue that I promised myself that I'd never have.  You know, the one where the first born has two million baby pictures and each child there after has fewer and fewer until the baby of the family has a high school grad picture and that's it.  So believe it or not, a friend taught Little Man to walk.  His brother's taught him to write his name.  His gramma taught him to do puzzles.  And on we go.... Well so I probably taught him something, but I'm sure I was on autopilot and I don't recall it at all. 

Anyway there we are out on the snow he was laughing and we were sharing a great moment.  Then I realized it.  I am going to have a great future with this guy.  I'm homeschooling!  And I am going to get to teach him many more things.  We are going to have more days of laughter. (and many of frustration too, I know)  But this baby is mine for his childhood and I get to love on him and watch him grow.  We are going to have a life of laughter.

Well, Howdy,

I guess it's about time that I checked in.  My boys and I have been learning so much.  Most recently we have finished our rather laborious task of running some old rocks through our rock polisher.  They turned out so nicely!  But my it was a tedious task and very slow and time consuming.  The boys of course never tired of it.  And though it was long.  I learned so much.  I saw lessons that I couldn't yet share with my crew of eight years old and unders.  But I thought that I'd jot them down.  Perhaps one of you might enjoy my musings. 

To polish the rocks we had a small black rubber tumbling can.  We filled it about a quarter full of rocks, some nice hard quartz and others just old rocks we picked up on family walks.  Then we added some coarse grit, just sandblasting stuff.  And lastly we filled the tumbler with water just enough to cover all the rocks and grit. Then we sealed it up and set it on our little machine that just rolls it around for a week.  The next week we took the rocks out and washed them and the tumbler out real good.  Then we repeated it with fine grit and ran it for another week.  The third week we repeated the washing and ran it again with the water and some pre-polish. (Whatever that is.) Lastly we did a run with the rocks, water, and polish.  Then we really washed them well and did they ever shine. 

Well, that may not be very interesting to any of you, but perhaps these parallels will.  I tell you when I saw the beauty that had been locked inside of those dull old stones a Bible verse came to me.  1Peter 2:4-5   ...To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ....

One of my most favorite pastimes is finding parallels between the things of God and nature.  And so I saw a parallel that helped me see, yet again, the tenderness and mercy and grace of Jesus.  Water in the Bible is often symbolic of God.  (i.e.  the woman at the well)  And as Peter has done; people can be easily compared to stones.  Well, if Jesus is the water and people are the stones, the grit can easily be thought of as the hardships and sorrows that people experience in life. 

It can easily be seen that with these ingredients and an element of time the end out come can result in not only having the edges knocked off of our character, but the entire of our lives being transformed.  We come to God as a common, dirty, useless old stone.  But when we submit ourselves to him living in us and dwelling with us, just as that water was wherever those tumbled stones were a miracle begins.  No one and nothing else other than God working through the hardships of life could ever make something beautiful out of one whose heart is deceitfully wicked.

And how kind he is.  And how compassionate to give us rests, times of refreshing inbetween our struggles.  Those times where he picks us up and washes the mire and the mud of our own filth from us are more than deserved.  Then places us back to go at life again. We often see it in a more pessimistic way.  But his ways are higher than ours, he sees those corners of our personality being softened and shined.  He sees the dull old man dying and the new man being revealed from within. And when he has finished with us (for he who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it) we are no longer what we were at all.  We have become a jewel. (Malachi 3:17 And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels..)  We will be a beautiful treasure that speaks of his great power and mercy and a glorifying honor to Him. 

Well, you might think that this is all I saw.  And it might have been if my eight year old hadn't shown me something else.  I let my little man hold the finished stones to admire while I was doing something else.  When I came back he was rubbing the rocks together.  I told him to stop.  He looked at me with confusion and said that he was just polishing them some more.  That was when I saw it. Without Jesus in our lives there is still the whir and tumble of life.  There is still the grit of hardship and sorrow.  But instead of becoming a thing of beauty.  The rocks would be broken, damaged, and scratched.  Some kinds of stones would crumble and become nothing under these circumstances.......How very like life without Jesus.

Hello, all,

The clock is tick tocking and the stars are twinking.  It is a quiet evening.  The kids are snoring and hubby is out helping out at the church youth group.  I am alone with my thoughts and I suddenly thought that I haven't checked in for quite sometime. 

 I am definately an eclectic homeschooler. 

Have you ever looked up the definition of Eclecticism?  I hadn't until now.  It is the most encouraging thing... have a gander at it!

Eclecticism: The use of an eclectic method; the practice of choosing doctrines from various or diverse systems of thought in the formation of a body of acceptable doctrine....it selects from each its psychologically satisfying doctrines, and thus gains whatever consistency the eclectic system may have from the inner conformity of the eclectic's own temperment.

After reading that don't you think that we all are eclectic in our own way.  None of us are clones of another.  Each of us brings individuality to our circles of influence, our homeschools, and life. We choose from the practical, the inventive, the intellegent, and the beautiful and we add them to our own lives in our own individual way.  Well, I'd better run.  Just a pondering from me.

Ok so I'm always helping my kids to study.  Now it's my turn.  I've been turning my devotion time into kind of a study time.  So God brought me to this portion:

Well I may as well be honest up front.  I love to write and I'm horribly inconsistant.  So writing daily or even weekly entry would require a lot of self discipline.  I get in these make over moods where I push my self for a few weeks to be or do something difficult.  Then I tend to drop the thing all together or add it to my assortment of random habits or hobbies.  This is something that bugs me about myself.  But I don't really know what to do about it at this point.

All that to excuse myself for not writing for a long time.  Kind of silly I suppose, but that's me. 

Guess what I had misplaced three library books and ended up having to pay for them.  They were so overdue.  Well, today we found them at the bottom of my one year olds toy box.  Go figure.  Our library is really decent and actually returns your money if you return the lost books.  So that's happy.   Well I'm totally overusing the word well and I'm rambling.  So I'm taking that as a sign that I stayed up too late last night and it's getting late again.  So I'll sign off for now.  Thanks for taking a peek at my little blog. 

We have had quite the month. With four camping trips, two out of country groups of relatives visiting, a pile of swimming lessons, a birthday and a wedding; our schedule has been non-existant.  So now we begin our homeschooling afresh.  It's kind of nice to return to the comfort of our routines.  Funny how you can get sick of them after too long without a break, though. 

Anyway did lots of crafts and science experiments today.  My 5yrDS has more creative energies than the inventor of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  If  you've never tried the experiment Tightrope Walking Water, you'll have to check out my first entry in the Cool Science Catagory.  We did our experiments and logged them in our Science Notebooks.  (Thanks to Cindy Rushton for her many excellent Notebooking ideas!)

Well, hubby wants a turn on the computer.  Will write again soon now that we've returned from our crazy summer.

     One of my little boys dances to a tune that is known to some as Aspergers.  I just got a new book in the mail called Homeschooling the Child with Aspergers Syndrome  by Lise Pyles.  I'm looking forward to gaining some new insights from it.  I sure wish I had been able to read more than the introduction last night.  Today was a very beautiful sunny day for most people in B.C..  But for Mr. Man the day was rather stormy.  Well, as the keeper of this hive it was my job to manage each difficulty.   

      As a child I was sure that parents always knew just what to do.  But now that I'm the parent I see that a great deal of parenting involves flying by the seat of one's pants.  However I begin to see that I'm not very good at piloting my pants.  I usually crash.  So this morning God gave my sleep clogged brain a gentle nudge.  I looked up "from whence cometh my help"  and was refreshed with the reminder of  God.  My eternal perspective sometimes gets misplaced under the great piles of mothering and life.  Then, when God refreshes me with the realization of Himself and just what it is that we are doing on this earth, it is as if I am coming up for air after being under water for a long time. 

Well, long story short, I didn't crash today.  God helped me steer these shorts of mine around all the land mines through which I had to fly today.  He is so good.

    That's my life.  I'm a beekeeper.  I didn't choose a life of raising those honey producing insects, but I have found that my life closely resembles it.    I'd better be studying and learning all the time so that I can keep on top of this job.  What job is that you may wonder??  What life is like beekeeping? 

It's parenting four busy boys in a small house.  Many have done it before me.  Many are doing it now.  But I've never been here until now.  So I'm figuring out my role.  Finding out the sweet rewards and the bitter stings associated with this job. 

These buzzing boys can emit all the noise of  a hundred beehives in one brief blast.  They have all the drive and energy of every worker bee.  "Keeping" them makes the sweet honey in my life.  And as any other mother might know there are those instances where (after only two hours of sleep) the stings of "beekeeping " are sorely felt. 

So I begin my blog.  It is a look at  how my eyes see life and learning and how I am building my beehives.  The nectars of life that my family has been supping upon.  And the insights from God that are shown to this small beekeeper. 

Please come and visit me often. I promise I'll tell you new things always.