Homeschool Stuff

Well, we've been busy with all sorts of stuff for the past while. Seems like I'm running in so many different directions all the time, and never quite catching up on what I should be doing.

Eldest has had her birthday. She is now 14 yrs old. Normally, whatever day the kids' birthdays fall on, we do the actual celebrating on the weekend after. This year, however, she insisted she didn't want a party or anything of the sort. Well, we couldn't just ignore her birthday, so we kept it as family stuff only. We're still going to bring a cake to share for park day, but not making any issue of it, like candles and what-not.

Her actual birthday wasn't all that pleasant for her, unfortunately. We'd gone to the waterpark the day before. The kids had a blast, but Eldest was feeling quite ill the next day. Aside from being achy all over, and generally feeling really nauseous, her eyes, as she described them, felt like they'd been pickled. Just too much chlorine and muggy air, I guess, as she feels like this after every trip to the waterpark. Such a shame, as it's so much fun.

So, it was the next day that we took her out. From us, we gave her a dollar amount to buy whatever she wanted from Michaels. She picked up papers to make more shadowboxes, as well as beads. She's started to make necklaces. Just a couple so far, but they're quite beautiful, and she wants to do more. I've never been keen on stringing necklaces myself - I'm never happy with how mine turn out - so my beading runs towards peyote stitch and other flat, needle woven stitches, so make rings, bracelets, amulets bags and the like. That's not her thing, and she definitely has a good eye for combining colours and bead styles.

When we were done at the Michaels, it was off to Walmart to get the sewing machine she's been after for quite some time. It's a Brother, so she named it Cadfael. :-D Now we just need to re-arrange our very large, very sturdy desk (thanks again, Teebucket!!) so that she can use the back for sewing. I'm allowed to borrow it, too. ;-)

Later on, when Dh left for work, we were to meet at the restaurant of her choice. We *should* have been there early enough to get a table before he got there, but the bus was so late, the next one actually passed us shortly after we got on, and we spent the rest of the trip catching up to it between stops. Eldest chose Boston Pizza for her birthday dinner - after making us promise not to mention to the staff that it was her birthday. Some restaurants do things like bring over a piece of desert and sing Happy Birthday when they find out there's a birthday, and she wanted no part in anything like that. I have no idea if BP does that, but she didn't want to take any chances. *L* I'm not a big fan of BP, but this time, the service was absolutely excellent. The food was ok - Dh's steak was well done instead of medium, but still good. I had the Ribber. I don't know why, but none of their entrees include vegetables, which I find myself really missing. Eldest, however, chose a pair of appetizers for her meal, and just just LOVES the stuffed mushrooms with shrimp. They're really good. She also picked some... pizza bread, I think they're called. They're basically mini-cheese pizzas with some sort of tangy sauce under the cheese instead of pizza sauce. They were ok. Youngest had a cheese pizza and loved it. :-D

And that was how we celebrated Eldest's birthday. She seemed to really enjoy it. :-)

We've made a couple of library trips since I last wrote. Among the stuff I'd picked up before was books on papercrafts, a hobby I really enjoy. These inspired the kids a bit. Youngest has been having a blast making nesting origami boxes with lids. She can make the teeniest, tiniest ones! While we were at Michaels, she picked up some paper for herself to make more stuff like that. :-D So I've also been picking up more papercraft books, some books on polymer clay for the kids to get some ideas to use the Sculpy III they got for Christmas, plus some books on beading, which is where Eldest got her inspiration. I also grabbed a book on how to start a crafting business for Eldest. The last trip was just me returning a few things (though I forgot to return some Cd's - a bunch of Mediaeval Baebes discs), then quickly grabbing whatever I thought would be of interest for the next week before the library closed. I found a book on Krakatoa that I'd been interested in for quite some time, The Day the World Exploded. While looking for that, I grabbed another about Mt. St. Helen's, plus a couple others on climate. I also snagged a VHS on Michelagelo and the Sistine Chapel. I was looking for more of a series on philosophy for Eldest as well - I'd borrowed one of a 6 DVD series but we'd never finished watching it before we had to return it. It didn't occur to me that the entire series would be gone when I came back a week later. :-P

The kids have both been doing a lot of watercolour painting lately. Youngest bought herself her own set of watercolour paints, though she'd accidentally picked up some oil paints at first. She's since offered them to me, so they won't go to waste. I've always been tempted to try my hand at oil painting. We've since picked up a few small canvases, but we'll need to pick up things like linseed oil and terpenoid before I can actually start. Hmm... that reminds me. Since she'd used her allowance money to pay for the oil paints and ended up giving them to me, I'll need to remember to pay her back for those.

Eldest has been working diligently on her comic book pages, as well as other pieces, some of which have been scanned and uploaded to her art and comic blogs. Youngest is definitely inspired by her sister and doing a lot of drawing and painting of her story characters.

One of the things we've been letting slide lately is the girls' French. They've reached a point where they need more help than I can give them, so we were going to shift it over to evenings so Dh can help. He suggested, however, that we give them a break until we can get a new microphone headset for the computer. The software we use has a section with speech recognition that allowed you to learn to speak the language, and it uses the oscillations recorded to match with the original to determine how well you've pronounced it. Unfortunately, every time you start to speak into the microphone, the computer starts to spin and hum, which the microphone picks up and the software records, as if it was part of the speech recognition. So instead of a 2 second long recording of "une fille," you end up with a 30 second recording of the computer humming, and you can't stop it. Of course, the software can't recognize whether or not you've actually pronounced anything properly. A microphone headset *should* get around that. We keep forgetting to pick one up, though.

And that's some of what we've been doing lately.
:-)