Cindy's Life as She Knows It

My favorite day of the year is Christmas Eve.  I love the anticipation that it holds!  Here at our house we have dinner and then, with whomever drops in that year, we wait impatiently for the first sound of the firetruck slowly going up and down the neighborhood streets with Santa sitting high on top waving to everyone below.  This year we had my mother in law, my younger daughter, Keri, and her roommate and her roommate's little girl, my older daughter, Kris, very sick little granddaughter, Natalie and MomMom in addition to my sons, my husband and I.  Full house!  Around 7pm we heard the first strains of the siren and if we stood at the front door and looked across the neighborhood we could just see Santa about 4 streets over, slowly gliding by on the top of his truck.  Squeals were heard all around (from some much older than 4 and 7 lol).  We passed the time and then heard him again.  Back to the door!  More squeals!  Finely, around 9p...

December was a crazy month.  I am like everyone else, trying to squeeze it all in and never quite living up to my own expectations.  Dakota was on overdrive and I had a hard time dealing with that.  He was quite literally vibrating with excitement and just couldn't think of anything else.  Then, before Christmas ever arrived, he would burst into tears because he was going to miss Christmas when it was over!  It was a crazy couple of weeks.  In the middle of it all our baby granddaughter got sick.  Thursday, December 22nd she just wasn't acting right and by the time her mommy came to get her she was feverish and glassy eyed.  They took her to the emergency room that night when they couldn't get her fever down and she was diagnosed with RSV, a virus that attacks the lungs of very small children.  It can be spread to anyone, but those over two or three usually just have a cough and cold.  Natalie got very sick very quickly.  Christmas ...

From the moment my then six year old son laid eyes on his brand new baby niece it has been love at first sight.  He was able to come into the delivery room within minutes of her birth and see her on the warming table and kiss her head as his big sister held her daughter for the first time.  He cried as he left the room, so moved by the emotions that he was feeling. That evening, when we went back to the hospital after going home to change, Dakota got to hold Natalie for the first time and that tiny little girl opened up her eyes and gazed at her uncle and he was hooked, right there, forever.  From that day forward she has been his focus.  It was hard on him when, for the first two months of her life, she lived in North Carolina, but from the day she moved home in late July 2011, she has been his princess and he has been her brave and fearless knight.  He has held her, rocked her and sang to her.  He has fed her and whispered sweet nothings in her ear....

This week we are doing some schoolwork, but it's been laid back, starting at 10:30, taking an hour for lunch and finishing up by 2:00.  Daddy is working nights so he sleeps til noon, but then he's here in the afternoon so Dakota wants to have his attention.  We are talking about the constitution, Ben Franklin and Paul Revere in History so that we can start in on the War of 1812 and the Civil War after the holiday.  We haven't been doing any science/health at all because I just have no desire to start a new unit at this point.  We have been reading another Magic Tree House, Christmas In Camelot, but doing painting and projects with it instead of written work.  Workbooks for Language Arts.  Regular studies for math and spelling.  Crafts and Christmas music for art and music.   Wrestling for PE.  This Friday will be our last day for the year.  I am hoping to start 2012 off with lots of prepared lessons and...

Yesterday we made our second trip in about four years to Chesapeake Beach to cut down our Christmas tree.  In years past we had always just gone to the local tree stand and bought one, but about three or four years ago we decided we wanted to cut down our own.  This year we went a little earlier than we normally get our tree, but it was a free afternoon and evening so we jumped on it.  My husband, two sons and my older son's best friend hopped in the truck around 3:00 and headed out.  We plugged in my teenager's Ipod and all sand loudly to a variety of songs as we headed south on a clear, chilly day.  We arrived at the farm around 4:00 and headed out to find the perfect tree.  We had only been walking a few minutes when the perfect one jumped right out and called my name!  There it was, perfectly shaped and ready to be taken home!  We cut it down, wrapped it up and piled it into the back of the truck.  ...

Today we had a great homeschooling day.  Natalie arrived late so I had time to get my materials and ideas together.  Koda asked to do his new USA puzzle around 10 and I said yes.  When he finished, I gave him the large USA floor puzzle to do.  Then we layed out our "flashcards" of the states that I got at the dollar store and matched the capitals with them.  It was a simple idea that Dakota took to right away and he loved matching them up and learning ones we didn't know.  Next up was reading and he went in on my bed and asked me to bring the baby in so he could read to her.  She happily played with her toys and her toes and he felt important being able to read aloud to her.  We moved out to the livingroom and got into the recliner with ...If You Lived in Colonial Times by Ann McGovern (love anything by her).  We got through the first 32 pages and laughed together at the foods they ate, the things they had to do at school and the "medicines...

Today is December 1st, the first day of the Christmas season in my mind.  I have vowed, as I always do, to try to do one Christmas based activity a day this month.  Today was very hectic for me.  I had work to do this morning and I spent too much time on the phone with my mom and my friend :-)  By the time we got around to schoolwork it was 1:00.  We finished our Thanksgiving on Thurday Magic Tree House book and watched the next segment of the Liberty's Kids series.  I got constantly interrupted by phone calls and the baby and decided that I just was going to let it go.  For our Christmas activity we got down all the Christmas decorations from the attic and, after dinner, made our first batch of chocolate chip cookies.  We have already been watching movies together lately and tonight we watched Mickey's Christmas Carol and part of Winnie the Pooh before interest was lost and I was left to myself.  Taking this opportunity for the gem that it w...

...it's off to work we go!  Thanksgiving is over (can that possibly be true??) and it's time to get back to business and a schedule around here. There won't be any official homeschooling, as in new units etc, because we had our first yearly review on the 18th, took all of last week off for the holiday and now we have lots of cub scout homework that's due tomorrow including reports, posters and projects that we have been putting off.  Of course, all that stuff is educational and I am sure I will be able to record it in our log, but, as always, I wish I was more organized today and knew what I was supposed to tackle first and had my supplies together. After a trip to the pediatrician for both Natalie and Dakota and a stop at my job to drop off and pick up work, we got home and had lunch and then started our school day.  Dakota read and then went onto Spellingcity.com to practice last week's spelling words that were introduced, but never worked on.  We tackled the bo...

This has been a full and crazy busy Thanksgiving week, thankfully with a healthy family, much unlike last week.  My husband had the week off for vacation so we took our little son and our granddaughter to Arundel Mills with us to get a new cell phone.  Dakota got in the hamster balls at the food court and wore himself out while we let Natalie sit on the table and entertain us.  Tuesday we left early and took our boys to Ocean City for an over night excursion.  We stopped for breakfast at Bob Evans and then went to Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in Cambridge on the way down.  We stopped and walked a trail and Dakota got the idea to "try out" this dark black mud that they have put down near the water and before we could get to him he was sinking and lost both shoes on the way out!  Dad to the rescue, holding onto a tree branch and leaning out with a stick to scoop up the shoes, getting his shoes black and almost sucked off in the process....

Today has been a quiet day with videos and reading as our base for homeschooling.  Dakota and I are both recovering from a nasty bout with the stomach flu and it's nice to have a pj day and keep things quiet.  As I write this, however, Dakota must be feeling back to normal because he is thumping his chest and singing Cotton Eye Joe :-)  We started our next Magic Tree House book this morning - Thanksgiving on Thursday.  Again, I print the word wall vocabulary strips from Edhelper.com and Dakota is so excited to find out that he is familiar with many of these words.  I find that he stumbles over an easy one, though, and it opens the door to further explanation.  We read three chapters and do the simple comprehension questions we find posted online at http://www.mce.k12tn.net/reading31/thanksgiving_on_thursday.htm .  Next we watch the first episode of Liberty's Kids, The First Fourth of July.  It's a little too old for him and we have to watch care...

Today we had a field trip to Sharp's Farm in Brookeville, MD.  It was a gorgeous drive and we had lots of great people who joined us on the trip.  The kids sat down and learned about what the pilgrims used to survive when they came to the new world.  Dakota was amazed that they used shells and gourds for plates and bowls and pitchers.  Then we went to the Pilgrim Chores building where the kids learned what chores were done by the men and what chores were done by the women.  Our next stop was games, of course a favorite for all the kids.  They got to run around and burn off a little energy and then hop up on the wagon and take a fun hayride.  The kids all squealed and giggled when the big tractor took us all through the water!  Our last stop was the corn maze.  It was a little sparse this time of year, but enjoyable all the same.  The rain held off, the temps were mild and we got back into the car two and a half hours later feeling tired,...

If you are a follower of my blog you know that I am an Archbishop Spalding Cavalier football mom.  Every season is emotional for me, watching my son from age six to eighteen, but this season was his last and it was a special one for us all.  Our coach, Mike Whittles, is an awesome man.  He is the friendliest man you will ever meet and he truly loves football and his players.  He expects alot from his boys, but in return, he gives so much more. We have been involved with alot of teams over the years, but never before have I witnessed the emotions that play out on the football field at Spalding.  Coach Whittles and all his assistant coaches, including my husband, not only give football instruction, they give love.  They hug the boys often.  They express their feelings openly. It is not unheard of to hear the words "I love you" from coach to player or player to coach.  It has been an awesome experience being a spectator to such love and I ...

This past week I have felt like I am on a merry go round moving at top speed and I just want off!  I have been running, running, running non-stop and when I am not running and I am home there is so much to be done that I am overwhelmed.  Today I was supposed to do all my shopping early and then clean the carpets and do my work tonight while the guys went to the Towson game so that I could relax tomorrow.  Right......NOT.  I ended up shopping all day, bringing the last of the groceries in at 6:00.  I spent way too much money trying to shop for the two weeks and also for Thanksgiving and spending money on some Christmas things too that I really shouldn't have.  Oh well.  So now tomorrow, instead of relaxing, I will be cleaning this filthy house, cleaning the filthy carpets, wiping up the filthy floors, doing the laundry and then working.  Sigh.  It just goes round and round and round. 

Today, Dakota, Natalie and I went to Goucher College to see the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers.  It was Natalie's first show and she loved watching the dancers, but the applause had her jolting around and stiffening her body.  It was unexpected to her and she was startled.  Dakota really enjoyed it.  When we got home I had plans for lots of schoolwork, but I am wiped out from the constant go, go, go of this week and we are sitting together munching popcorn and watching Pochantas.  Maybe we'll get some reading in.  Maybe not.

Today we had a program at our co-op to Meet the Composer.  Mr. Keith Derrickson runs a program where the kids gather around and Beethoven appears via time machine, complete with whirling disco lights. He arrived and captivated the children, talking about his youth, playing pieces of his music and making them giggle using a ventriloquist dummy.  He took them through his growing up years and through the time in Vienna when he was studying music as a young adult.  He acted out how Beethoven looked ot be snubbing people (and got a bad reputation for being grumpy and rude), but in reality, he was embarrassed by his hearing loss and couldn't bear to let people know. The hour program was just right.  It was fantastic and I can't wait until the spring when we will invite him back to do a program on Johann Sebastian Bach.  Great job, Mr. Derrickson!  Thank you so much for making Beethoven fun!

Friday night, November 4, was one that I have both looked forward to and dreaded for many years.  My "boy of fall", my eighteen year old son, Brian David, would play his last game at "home" at Archbishop Spalding and one of the very last games of his long, thirteen season football career.  Brian couldn't wait to start playing football.  At the time, Anne Arundel County was starting it's first year of 65lb ball, the youngest they had ever had, and Brian was so excited to start!  A friend of my husband's called and asked him to help coach and there you had it...history in the making! Coach Baublitz began his long and successful football coaching career, leading his son and "running the table" through his football years.  From that late summer day in 1999 to this late fall evening in 2011, my son has put his heart and soul into more games than I can count.  He started out at 42lbs, small but full of fire. There was never a player h...

I used to be really good about taking a few minutes each day to write in my blog and I enjoyed it, but I let life get in the way and I am behind.  I am going to try to improve!!  Today was not a perfect homeschooling day, but we are salvaging what we can.  I had to work (transcribing from home) to get my work in by noon and we got a very late start.  I let Dakota sleep in and then play for awhile and then he sat beside me reading while I finished.  The baby played and slept and after lunch I had Dakota watch a video on music with great vocabulary called Magic Musical Voyage while I got myself together and had my own lunch.  He read a book to the baby while I opened my computer and prepared and then he hopped up in the recliner with me and we read/discussed the thirteen colonies and the French and Indian war.  He had some great questions!  We stopped after briefly touching on the Revolutionary War, which will be our topic for the rest of the week....

Today is Halloween and we had a full and fun day. We started out with Social Studies, making a poster for manners and doing a few other homework assignments from our Cub Scout handbook.  We had an early detour in our plans when Natalie wasn't feeling well and had to be taken in to the doctor.  Poor baby has walking pneumonia!  I am glad we got her in early and caught it before she got really sick.  After that we visited the Arbutus library to take back a bunch of books and to get a new stack for this coming week, including some new drawing books by Ed Emberley that are Dakota's new favorites.  He as a "creation" book now for all his writings and drawing. We came home for lunch and then I let Koda do a little reading before he and I read a stack of Halloween books.  We read Stellaluna, Charlie Brown and more.  We then continued our Digestion lesson for Science and Health by watching Bill Nye the Science Guy and then did our math.  We h...

Today was our annual trip to Clark's Farm in Howard County.  I've been going there for many years now, since Brian David was little.  I remember some of my friends with their babies, who are now older than Dakota!  Today I had my baby boy, who is almost too old for the attractions, and my daughter with my granddaughter, who was really too young this year to enjoy it.  We met three of our favorite families there along with some other homeschool friends and spen the morning feeding the animals, going on a hayride and picking an itty bitty pumpkin.  My favorite part of the day was going with our friends to the evergreen maze and watching Dakota and his seven little friends running with each other through the maze, laughing and chattering with each other while we mommies tried to keep up.  I am so glad that Dakota and I have found close friends who we see at most events and that our group is slowly growing to include more wonderful women and their awesome kids....

Yesterday was a really busy day.  We are working on bones and the skeletal system right now for Science and Health. We are having fun with that, making pasta skeletons and reading fun books.  We also started reading A Good Night for Ghosts, a Merlin story in the Magic Tree House series.  I love those books and I'm glad that Dakota does now too.  This one is all about New Orleans in the early 1900's and they go back to find a young Louis Armstrong and set him on the right path to becoming the King of Jazz.  Not only was I able to pull a great music lesson out of there, introducing Dakota to both jazz and Armstrong, but we are also adding to our vocabulary with alot of words he is unfamiliar with from the time period like streetcars.  He had no idea what they were until we saw some great drawings in the book.  Every kid has their hot button....the one that will make them do just about anything to receive it.  For some kids it's M&Ms.  For...

After a day off for Columbus Day, another day off because I couldn't get enough done on our day off and then co-op and a game day playdate on Wednesday, we finally got back to the routine today.  WWe started working on the human body for Science and Health....talking about skeletons around Halloween seemed too perfect to pass up!  We are going to continue learning about bones and the human skeleton for science and go through the systems of the body for health.  Everything came together for geography/social studies/history.  We read a few different sections of 100 Explorers and talked about Columbus and then Magellan and Drake.  We had previously mapped Columbus's route on a world map on the wall and today we added the route around the world for the other two.  We talked about how their adventure and success traveling around the globe convinced the rest of the world that the Earth was indeed round!  Then we read a great book about maps and globes and di...

Today was the observed holiday for Columbus Day and since my older son had the day off I decided ot give Dakota and I the day off too.  We had covered Columbus in great depth (for a first grader, that is) last week.  We read books, mapped his route, talked about his ideas, did some fun papers and then on Friday we made stand up replicas of the Nina (that Koda pronounces "Ninna"), Pinta and Santa Maria and of good old Columbus himself.  Our day started with friends stopping by early.  We ladies had coffee on the deck and the kids played inside.  After they left I decided to tackle the rest of the move towards getting all Dakota's toys into his room and making Natalie's room the nursery with a homeschool cabinet and closet.  It took me about 90 minutes to clean Dakota's room and finish squeezing the last of his little toys into the remaining nooks and crannies while he did a lite brite sheet.  The hubby came home for lunch so we stopped for a lit...

Today I had dozens of things that needed doing, but when Dakota woke up he was eager to get his school day started.  It was a laid back day, sort of fly by the seat of your pants.  We started out with science and continued learning about the layers of the Earth and volcanoes.  I put up a poster with wonderful visuals of the inside of a volcano and we talked about that.  We did part of the SchoolExpress Earth packet and then got out our Oriental Trading compass craft and used a hot glue gun to put that together.  Dakota really liked this part!  Afterward he watched a Magic School Bus video MSB Blows It's Top.  For literature today we read Little Quack's Bedtime and Ping for pleasure and then got into a lesson on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling.  Koda liked the story, but completely missed the lesson learned.  We talked about beauty only being skin deep and loving everyone for who they are, no matter what they look lik...

Last night my husband and had a date.  This doesn't happen often this time of year when time is short, work is piled up and football is in full swing.  We used to go to the Ravens games all the time many years ago, but when our older son got to be 7 or 8 it became the thing to do for father and son and I rarely went.  Then, as the son got to be a teen, I was no longer enough fun to take to the games.  I didn't yell loud enough or often enough, wouldn't paint crazy things on my skin or tolerate stupid behavior from intoxicated people. So I stayed home and really, I didn't mind.  The little son came along and he and I hang out on Sundays, although he's starting to want a little more fair sharing of the tickets!  So anyway, last night my husband asked me to go on a date with him to the Sunday nght game at M&T Bank Stadium between the Ravens and the Jets.  He even made reservations at Nick's Fish House for appetizers and we arrived at 5:00 an...

Yesterday we had scheduled a trip for our co-op to go to Fort McHenry, home of Francis Scott Key and the Star Spangled Banner.  It's only about ten minutes from us and it offers lots of educational opportunities, but also has wide open spaces for the kids to run and play in.  Of course we woke up to impending rain, as is the case almost every day here lately in Maryland.  The skies were gray and most of those who did say they were coming backed out.  My friend Kelly had never taken her three little girls there and she had really planned for this day, so she said she was packing her raingear and they were in.  Since it was close and Dakota and I had planned to go as well, we packed up the baby and our own rain gear and headed to the Fort.  Once there we were met by another friend, Barb, and her three young sons.  Dakota and I have a Passport to the Parks book and we got to put our first set of stamps inside.  Then our three families...

Today is Johnny Appleseed's birthday, one of my favorite "Today's Specials" to do as a homeschooler.  This morning we started by reading about apples and about Johnny Appleseed then went in to slice and apple and find the hidden star.  We went to this website, http://www.cooks.com/rec/doc/0,1713,144191-253197,00.html  to get an easy recipe and made some tasty homemade applesauce.  Dakota was old enough now to help with the apple parer and to use a plastic knife to slice the apples and put them in a pot.  We let them simmer while we made an apple tree from tagboard and construction paper, using his traced arm as the tree trunk and his stamped thumbprint as the apples.  By the time we were finished it was time to add the cinnamon and nutmeg and turn up the heat on our applesauce.  I love extending a simple lesson this way.  The house smelled wonderful and my son felt very accomplished, having made a nice treat for the family (even though he won't to...

Every September I start off with a bang, loading the homeschool schedule and asking way too much of my child and of myself.  I want to fit it all in, cover every subject and have everything go smoothly.  I do this EVERY year (for twelve years now!) and you would think I would know better by now.  I end up very stressed out with a stressed out child and I doubt my decision to homeschool at all.  And then I breathe.... The past two weeks I have felt like a spring pulled to capacity and ready to sproing off into the atmosphere!  I know that my hormones were raging as well, which didn't help things.  I was tense this past Wednesday morning, even though it was the first time in four years that I did not have to teach a class at co-op.  I hadn't followed up on the classrooms being open.  I got a late start.  Dakota was on my last nerve.  Same old, same old for the past few weeks, but I really felt like I was losing it.  So I get the kid...