How busy have we been?

I haven't updated in a while! We had a wonderful trip to the grandparents in NC for Thanksgiving. Lots of relaxing fun, continuation of a fun tradition of Christmas light viewing and good pizza, etc etc. We hit little traffic down and back, which we were very thankful for.

It's currently the end of the school semester for me, which leaves me very busy, a little stressed. Along with the start of the holiday season, many of my homeschooling intentions get sidetracked onto other activities.

On Friday we got to see Justin Roberts and the Not Ready for Naptime group at XM. That was lots of fun, participating in what will be their New Year's show on the kid's station. He was lots of fun to listen to and the kids really enjoyed it.

Trevor completed his first semester of phonics- meaning, we've finished the book and worksheets and have moved on to the second semester. It's not much different than the first one, except the book says "Semester 2" on it. He will be learning blends like "sh", and things like "ck", etc. We've been doing more basic addition and Trevor has demonstrated working knowledge of things like subtraction and adding, especially when he was telling Rachael how old she would be as he got older and how she would never be as old as he was! heehee.. He's also well on his way to buying his covetted Transformer's Bumblebee. it's 80 dollars and he gets 3 dollars a week as an allowance. He's saved 34 dollars so far. He's only spent a couple dollars once when he wanted to eat ChickFila for lunch and I said only if he paid for himself. I think he's doing very well for a 6 yr old and such a lofty, expensive goal. I'm thinking of meeting him halfway once he hits forty dollars. We'll see.

We've been doing some history from k12 but our science is still nature shows, and nature based- like our extensive discussions of space, or finding pretty rocks, etc. Trevor adores the "universe" series on the history channel and actually absorbs quite a bit. I'm learning tons, too- like I never knew water could be so dense that the liquid becomes solid, and yet, the substance is not ice. Weird, eh? Trevor thought so, too. I wish we could do that in an experiment.

Anyway, here's random pictures:

We all went to the stream near the house and came home loaded with pretty rocks.


Daddy reading the kids some of the Christmas books we got out of storage.


Rachael helping decorate the tree.


Our Christmas tree!!!! You can see Chaos sleeping underneath the tree. Shadow is under the buck of the tree.


We've been busy enough to exhaust poor Ariel by every afternoon. She passed out while watching The Universe.