These are my guys! Saturday our state geocaching organization had a terrific all-day event at a local lake and state park. We had to be back at a decent time so I could attend the dinner and Relief Society broadcast at my ward building, but in the meantime we had a terrific day! The organization had 48 caches out, and we located 14 by 1:00. If we could have stayed another 5 hours we would have found more! We met a terrific family from about an hour away with whom we "teamed up" to find several caches. This is a favorite family activity of ours. See www.geocaching.com for caches in your area, then grab a GPS, some insect repellent, a few little trinkets to leave in the caches, and off you go!

Last week we had a lovely afternoon pursuing the migratory birds that have descended upon us! One of my favorite things about living here is our proximity to the Mississippi River Flyway. We had a lovely afternoon, spotting many small birds, large flocks of white pelicans, probably 30 or more of these beautiful great egrets. They are so graceful! We also spotted THREE great blue herons, but they were exceedingly skittish and we didn't get any photos--it was all we could do to get enough of a look to ID them. We are heading out to our nature center this afternoon in hopes of spotting some more species "on the move" south!

Where does the time go? We've just been in our usual whirl. So much for life simplification. I think I'm not good at that. My question is always--so what goes? What do I not need? If there is anything NOT necessary I haven't found it yet, sigh.
Anyway. Just finished reading Wide as the Waters, by Benson Bobrick. Very interesting tracing of the development of the King James translation of the Bible, and how it changed and affected so much around it. Very interesting book. It took me a long time to read it. :-) This book was in the footnotes of Elder Hales' talk last October in General Conference, "Preparations for the Restoration and the Second Coming."
Then in one day I ate up the small assignment for my Mother's Education Course to read one-third of A Girl of the Limberlost. This is my third time reading it. I still love it.
Anyway, so last night I began Eve and the Choice Made in Eden by Beverly Campbell. It's a "thinking and sinking" book. I'm reading in bits so I have time to ponder and think in between. Very enlightening already.
I'm home from church this morning with two coughing kids.
I simply cannot believe that September is half over already.

I'm in need. :-) My endless-towering-stacks are still there, but to my dismay, my nonfiction choices outnumber my fiction choices by something like 4 to 1. For years and years, it has been my practice to read one nonfiction, and then one fiction, and repeat. Lately I have switched that to TWO nonfiction, one fiction, and still I am in real danger of running out of suitable fiction! Alas! Dismay! Help!
I need ideas. Obviously I'm well covered for some time with nonfiction--some forty on my shelves at the moment, waiting. But my fiction choices are dwindling. I just had to consign yet another to the ash heap--Marrying Mozart, by Stephanie Gowell, which proved to have enough crude moments and not enough lovely ones to seal its fate. Most of the ones I have remaining are heavy--two Scott novels, Lorna Doone in very tiny print. Sigh. I have The Once and Future King on my couch at the moment, but am afraid--the Ambleside Advisory has some warnings about it on the site--what if I don't like it? Sigh. I have a fairly low threshold for crudity, sleaze, language, inanity . . . I guess you could say I'm picky. LOL The last novel I successfully managed nearly died a number of times--The Book of Light, by Chaim Potok, which had a few scattered vulgarities which, in a lesser book, I would simply not have tolerated.
Suggestions, anyone?

I just finished Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It had been recommended to me so many times--every time I told someone I was reading everything I could find on balance in women's lives, someone would insist "You must read Gift from the Sea!" I am partial to Anne Lindbergh's writing anyway, so I was eager to try it.
My first reaction was disappointment. How am I supposed to gain insight from the life of a woman so very different than I--a woman who can fly off to a beach home (a beach home? I can barely afford the home I have!) and spend several weeks alone. Who took care of her kids? Who did the housework? Did she just put them in the freezer till she came back? I'm not really relating here, LOL. And shells. Lindbergh's thoughts were centered around shells. I know NOTHING of shells. I grew up in Kansas and live in Iowa. Not a lot of personal experience, to picture the shells she describes and think "Oh, I know just that shell, and I know what you mean!"
My second reaction was that I did like some of the thoughts that she expressed. A few quotes I liked:
"The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between the two extremes: a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return."
"The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask."
"This is an end toward which we could strive--to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities."
"But neither is the answer in dissipating our time and energy in more purposeless occupations, more accumulations which supposedly simplify life but actually burden it, more possessions which we have not time to use or appreciate, more diversions to fill up the void."
"It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next . . . how to exorcise it? It can only be exorcised with its opposite, love."
"Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures--an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant."
So, nice quotables for my journal. I picked up some worthwhile small shells, perhaps. But the overall message of the book left me strangely cold--as if Lindbergh and I were really talking at times about different things. She seems to have a quite different view of relationships, of solitude, of religious purpose, than I do. She quotes a passage from Rilke that gives me, for some reason, that creepy chilly feeling up and down my spine: "Solitude is not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. Naturally we will turn giddy."
Silly of me, I suppose, to expect that everyone will understand my religious perspective--but I find my heart disputing this. True, in this imperfect world, we must come to terms with solitude--we are separated from God, from one another, by barriers we rarely contemplate, and only effort and care and thought and prayer can form the connections we want. But we are born for the connections. We are incomplete as we are, and must find the path to constant communion with our Father and also with our eternal companions, even though it take longer than our span of days on earth.
My ideas of this relationship with our companions likewise differ sharply from Lindbergh's. She again quotes Rilke: "And this more human love . . . will resemble that which we are with struggle and endeavor preparing, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." Lindbergh goes on to discuss married life as this--two solitudes that bump into one another at times, as in a dance (the old kind, the carefully choreographed dances of Austen's time, now curtsy to your partner, touch and circle him, and move on, out of contact . . . ) This conception of marriage leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Can this be all our Father meant when he commanded us to be "one"? Not that I have this down perfectly, myself, in my own relationships, but I'd be eternally depressed if this "separate solitudes" is all that there is.
Bottom line: I'm not sorry I read the book--at only 138 pages it did not require much from me, but did not provide much food to satisfy the hunger of understanding the concept of balance and how to apply it to my life.

This is a picture of my dh--he recently celebrated a birthday. I won't tell you which one because we are the same age, lol, and I'm not admitting to it yet. Anyway, he got a new GPS device for his birthday, which renewed our interest in geocaching, a very fun hobby. :-) He came home early Friday, picked up the boys, and went out and found two caches, and then Saturday we went out to our local nature preserve and found three more. Fun! You download information on caches from a site like www.geocaching.com and use the clues and coordinates to find the caches, hidden in a variety of places. There is usually a log book to sign in, and various "goodies" which you can take if you leave more. A related activity is letterboxing, which is very similar except no GPS coordinates are used, just the clues.
It's a fun way to get outdoors, learn some geography, and have fun as a family.

I finished Last Child in the Woods yesterday. Most of the last section consists of ideas to change the alienation of children from nature. The author has some very interesting ideas. One mistake he thinks environmentalists make is in discouraging fishing and even hunting--Louv thinks this can be an important gateway to interest in nature. He writes, "In an increasingly de-natured world, fishing and hunting remain among the last ways that the young learn of the mystery and moral complexity of nature in a way that no videotape can convey. Yes, fishing and hunting are messy--even morally so--but so is nature. No child can truly know or value the outdoors if the natural world remains under glass, seen only through lenses, screens, or computer monitors." He also writes of the bond that fishing can forge in families; I've seen this in my own. My husband's father loved to fish, and this became one of my husband's favorite memories of his father. He in turn has taken our sons fishing. It is a link with Grandpa which is especially important since Grandpa is no longer here.
Louv also discusses schools and how they present nature to children. His upshot is that most schools in America don't even try. He holds up European schools as doing a better job of this; in fact, I was so delighted with this quote from Finland's Ministry of Social Affairs and Health: "The core of learning is not in the information . . being predigested from outside, but in the interaction between a child adn the environment." Wow, that sounds very Charlotte Mason to me.
He also takes on city design and landscaping--and here I so agree with him. Leveling all the ground everywhere, making developments of identical houses with little cookie-cutter yards covered in nonnative grasses that must be kept mowed and trimmed--why do we do this? I live in one of these sorts of communities, and I hate it. I would much rather be on the edge of town, still close to the town things but with an edge of wildness--a small ravine, the edge of a woodland or meadow, a creek--this is how I grew up, in a town so small that nearly everyone was near the edge of town, vbg. Louv points out that there is no reason we HAVE to design towns like we do now--he brought up many ideas from planners. It's odd, many of them sound strangely like Nauvoo's large plots. :-)
I took my children yesterday to one of our area's "wild" parks. It is a few minutes' drive from my home; if only it were within walking distance I'd be thrilled. But instead of being leveled and planted with Kentucky Bluestem, it has areas of grass around a few playgrounds, and the rest is left close to wild, with a few benches scattered about. We sat, yesterday, looking down on a pond surrounded by meadow and woods, and just soaked up peace. We watched the butterflies, chased a small garter snake, surprised an enormous turtle on a log. I imagined towns with wedged sections like this scattered all throughout, with local residents keeping them trash-free and maintaining wildlife habitat--what a lovely thought.
An interesting part of Louv's book is his emphasis on what nature means in the spiritual life of a child--something I've never heard discussed by many leftist environmentalists. Listen to this quote:
"God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art, but nowhere with such texture and forcefulness in detal and grace and joy, as through creation, and when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so people can't fish, or by making so many rules that people can't get out on the water, it's the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last Bible on earth. It's a cost that's imprudent for us to impose upon ourselves, and we don't have the right to impose it upon our children."
Or this one:
"We cannot care for God if we do not care for his creation. 'The extent tha twe separate our children from creation is the extent to which we separate them from the creator--from God."
I think of the stories President Hinckley has told, of things that affected him as he grew--watching the stars at night, working in the orchard, caring for trees. How I want this channel to God to remain open to my children, to this generation from which will someday come another living prophet--will he have such stories of nature to tell, that nurtured his beginning faith and spirituality?
I often don't know what I think of specific nature "controversies"--global warming, Arctic drilling, etc. But I do know this--the lives of our children are being impoverished by our keeping them inside, playing computer games and watching TV, and letting them outdoors only to play organized sports. They are missing out, and Last Child in the Woods is an important step in raising awareness and the beginnings of an action plan.

More "Last Child in the Woods" commentary.
Louv interviewed many naturalists, educators, parents, psychologists for his book. Some quotes that struck me:
"Natural spaces and materials stimulate children's limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity observable in almost any group of children playing in a natural setting"
Hmm. I've always tended to blame the difference in what I see of this sort of play in my children, as compared to what I remember of my childhood--I see the discrepancy, and blame TV, Palms, iPods--the electronic world. Well, maybe that is part of it, but maybe another part is that they just don't have the open spaces, mysterious scary woods, etc. that I grew up with. We've bought more "stuff" to entice our children outside more--swingsets, sandboxes, play equipment--but that hasn't seemed to solve the problem. Perhaps there is something to this, that a vacant lot, a forest edge, a prairie meadow, a creek, would solve--these are things I had, as a child, that my children do not have.
Being a CM mom, I was particulary receptive to Louv's chapter "Don't Know Much About Natural History: Education as a Barrier to Nature" This quote led off the chapter: "To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk thorugh a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall." Thomas Huxley
An educator quoted in the book said this: "The society we are molding these kids toward is one that values consumer viability. The works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold are seldom if ever taught to children . . . Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment."
I must admit, I see this in my current town of residence. The local elementary school has an award-winning wetgrass prairie restoration project on its ample grounds. The children get to see it, look at it, study it---but, during recess, it is "no-touchy" Someone could get hurt in there, or muddy, or something. We recently built a five-figure-price-tag wooden play area for the children to play on, instead. Our message to the children is loud and clear: Play on the constructed structure, clinically study the sedges and frogs. Don't play with them. Don't form a relationship. "Nature" is something we study with a grant, or doctor up when it is ruined--not our natural environment, a place to play and dream and live. No wonder the children are growing up detached.
Why else don't our kids have the same opportunities to form relationships with nature as those in past generations? Louv cites many: our view of time. Playing at a soccer game is a good use of time; meandering through a woodsy area, wading in the stream, or looking up at the trees, is wasting time. Our fears--our kids, roaming at large far from home with no adults, could be abducted. Mugged. Fall out of a kid-constructed tree house and break an arm. Fall in the stream and drown. Or get dirty. Or something else awful.
I still remember the reaction of the mothers in my hometown when I was eight, and a boy in my class in grade school simply disappeared on his way home from the public pool, never to be seen again. Our tiny town was in an uproar. Mothers who previously only cared that you came home for lunch and dinner, suddenly wanted to know where we were every minute, wanted us in sight at all times. It disgusted me then, but now, as a mom, I so understand!
Or back to the educational issue--Louv quotes a biologist as saying "Humans seldom value what they cannot name." I suspect Charlotte Mason would have nodded her head vigorously at that.
Then Louv takes on environmentalists themselves! Perhaps, he posits, in our haste to protect everything, environmentalists have managed to abstract nature to a distance too far for the children to connect easily. No touching, camping, fire building, tree houses, forts, fishing, hunting--but care about it anyway. No relationships allowed! He cites community rules that attempt to keep children out of nature areas, homeowners associations that ban treehouses, the left's war on Scouting, the "scare tactics" used by some environmental educators. What is the possible future, then, of enviromental activism? Louv reminds us: "Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD; passion is personal. Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature."
What is the fix for all this? I haven't finished that part of the book yet. Stay tuned. :-)

We are knee-deep in our new school year. Things are going relatively smoothly, although we are running into our perpetual problems with the "extra" stuff--much of it is getting pushed to the sides and rarely done. And Tallman, who, now being in 7th grade, has much more expected of him, is taking some time to, um, enjoy the transition. Hopefully it'll iron out.
But unfortunately, nature study has suffered for us in the first weeks of the year. That, and finding a place for swimming practice during the day I'm reading a book right now, though, that is really pushing me to reconsider nature study and its place in our lives. It is Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv. I first heard of this book last year from another CM mom, and instantly put it on my list, tracked down a copy this spring, and it has finally worked its way to the top of the towering to-be-read stacks. :-)
Louv asserts that a sea change has taken place in the way we raise children--children are spending much, much less time in the outdoors. Oh, they might be playing soccer or skateboarding around a park, but much of the outdoor time of our children is programmed-taken up by organized sports, or experienced with an Ipod on, or something like that. Children have had little time to form relationships with the world around them--build a tree house, throw pebbles in a stream, watch the clouds, see the stars, put obstacles in the way of crawling ants, meander through the woods listening for one's friends. This matters, he says, because the consequences of this nature-deficit are showing up in surprising ways--time spent in natural settings is beginning to be correlated to childhood obesity, ADD, depression, lack of creativity and imagination, truly CARING about nature and the environment.
Well. I must admit that my family stands guilty as charged, despite our attempts at nature study. As a child, I was hardly an outdoorsy girl---but sense of place, of the world around me, was nonetheless an important part of my life--bike riding through the tall grass, sitting under the perfect oak tree, the woodsy area at the end of the trailer park that perpetually seized my imagination, and to which I would walk, drawn as if by hypnosis, despite my mother's forbidding my ever setting foot there--she believed there to be a homeless man with a knife back there, I never knew why she thought that---the dips and swales in the road around our house in the country (how could anyone ever think Kansas was flat? Try riding a bike up and down those dips and hills), the evergreen tree that made a perfect shady "room" underneath, where I could even escape the notice of my mother, the deep crusted drifts of snow along the side of the plowed road in the winter. My children simply do not have access to places like that. The sky--always in Kansas the sky--deep blue, or the brassy, vibrating heat of a summer afternoon, the puffy clouds--or the ominous, mile-high black ones, and the stars. Oh, the stars. I think half the stars in the sky I saw as a kid have been erased. The schoolyard--we had the typical blacktop, it is true, and I did play on that some--but we were on a quadruple-block lot, and a good half of it was just open grass. Nothing in particular, no playing fields, just grass. But enough of it for the imaginative child to stage wars, jousting tournaments, pioneer wagon trains (yes, I was that imaginative child roping all my friends into my fantasy world, lol) And one special tree--a pecan tree. It was pure gold--nuts, shells, shade, leaves, sticks--and a V in the trunk low enough to climb on!!!! True, the teachers immediately called us down if they caught us up there. But as soon as their backs turned, we scampered right up anyway--Kansas, being short on trees, is especially short on good climbing trees. Our trees tended to be enormous lone oaks with no low branches, or tall cottonwoods--not much to climb on.
But my kids? They play in the back yard, sure, and we go on hikes. But I don't think they've formed the relationships that Louv is talking about, that even I, a bookworm afraid of spiders, managed to develop as a child.
OK, this has gotten long. I'll post it, and follow up soon with some quotes.

Well, we just returned from a brief "back to school vacation" in Nauvoo. We had a MARVELOUS time! It just so worked out that we got a room (a beautiful one at Nauvoo Family Inns and Suites) the very last week of the scheduled summer performances, so we could see the regular summer shows like Sunset By the Mississippi. We also really lucked out, and were there the last week of performances by the BYU International Folk Dance Ensemble. These young people were absolutely amazing! We went one night, with the boys sort of thinking "what a sissie thing to go do", and we were ALL so impressed, we had to go back the very next night to see the other part of the program! We were thrilled both times. We got a photo of a few of the performers in their Ukranian costumes. I'm so grateful that this great program exists to preserve this beautiful part of the heritage of many people, and bring it to average American midwesterners and others.
And even better--a folk music ensemble called Mountain Strings opened and filled in during costume changes of the performance--they are every bit as amazing!!! We loved them so much we bought their CD. LOL
We saw many sights, had a lot of fun, got some work done at the temple, saw many shows, and PMM had quite a week. He was an "apprentice" at the Browning Gun Shop, and a "dauber" at the Print Shop, and was pulled up on stage during the performance of a children's show called Just Plain Anna Amanda! Cheery and Tallman were "pressed" into service as pressmen during a demonstration at the print shop, too. We couldn't have asked for a better family time. Our only complaint--the mayflies were absolutely thick! This was the third mayfly outbreak in Nauvoo this summer, some of the missionaries told us. We walked down Parley Street to the river early one morning, and they were just in curtains. It was sort of icky. We almost skipped going down to Sunset by the Mississippi that night, as we were sure they would be terrible. They were, but fortunately mostly stayed above us, in the lights, so we could enjoy the hilarious performances. The young performance missionaries that are there this summer have some real personality! Two of them, including a young Sister Osmond, do a fantastic Devil Went Down to Georgia, and several of the young men do a skit called "The Audition" that is the funniest thing I've seen in a long, long time!
I'm so grateful to have a place like Nauvoo so nearby, I wish I could "can" some of the entertainment and the wonderful testimonies borne to us so I could pull it out in those difficult moments!

This weekend we took a hurried trip down to Kansas to go to a family reunion at my aunt's house. My last remaining grandmother was there, the one I always think of as "Little Grandma" She was never very big to begin with, but now at age 89 she's really tiny. She's been ill several times this year, and I guess I am feeling like each time I see her might be my last, especially after losing my other grandma in February. Grandma's memory has suffered, and she may not remember by now that I was there, but at least I knew I was there. Grandma is quite a lady--I was really blessed in the two women who were my grandmothers. She was a domestic woman's woman--talented seamstress, great cook, gardener, canner. Since I planned as a girl on being the ambassador to France or some such thing, and having a staff, LOL, I was too busy and too shortsighted to learn much from her. I've been kicking myself ever since starting my family.
There were cousins and second cousins, all also gathered to see Grandma and visit and catch up. To my great delight, I discovered that my father's cousin has an oral history and digitized photos of my great-grandmother and her family. It was a lot of fun! I was struck by how GOOD these people are to whom I am related-- different from me, perhaps, in lifestyle and religious belief, but they are the good, solid people of this earth who would stick together and do anything to help family. I'm glad to have them!

Well, here is our First Day of School 2006/07 picture! Tallman is in 7th grade this year, Cheery in 5th, and PMM in 1st. We began on Monday 08/07, so we have an entire week under our belts as I write this, and it went fairly well. The new books are being enjoyed, we got done most days in pretty good time. We have a few bugs to work out with PMM's work, as there were a few days his work wasn't done until evening time, when I could spare some more time for him. Tallman reports that he likes all his science books and programs the best, Cheery asserts that Shakespeare and his Leonardo da Vinci biography are his favorites so far, and PMM loves his MathUSee and The Great Eight Spanish. My, I'm starting to look SHORT when standing next to my kids!

Wow, where on earth does my blogging time go? If I get any slower at updating the blog, it'll be Christmas before I finish my we-just-started-school posts. Argh!
This is Tallman at Scout camp. He had a terrific time; it was a fabulous experience for him. He loved camping, he talked and played and made friends, he got three merit badges, including archery, which I understand is difficult to qualify for in one day--there are proficiency requirements. But Tallman did it! He must have some of my mother's archery genes, and they obviously skipped me. :-) But it was a great week for him, and I am glad he had a good time---and even more glad he is home!!!

Well, almost there! Yesterday I got Cheery's and much of PMM's things all lined up. Whew! Then we went last night to Tallman's Scout camp Parents Night. That was fun, but very hot and sticky. It rained last night, not enough, but a little anyway, and is supposed to be some cooler today. Tallman is headed to the archery range today, I hear. :-)
Anyway, Cheery is doing many of the same things as Tallman for school. They are doing the same Latin and physical science programs. Cheery is doing MathUSee Epsilon this year, and doing most of Ambleside Online Year 3. We didn't do as much fiddling as we did with Tallman's Ambleside schedule; Cheery will pretty much be doing it as written. He is VERY enthusiastic about Shakespeare this year. For a "back to school" treat, we got him a Shakespeare Treasure Chest with activities and stuff in it, and he carried it around all day yesterday! LOL He was recently in an Activity Days play, and loved it. He might have the boards in his blood, lol. I'll be checking into some local outlets for that if he remains interested.
And now for the PMM. I know what we're PLANNING on for him, what I don't yet know is how much he's going to sit still for. He is officially "first grade" this year. He will be beginning MathUSee Alpha, and continuing with Teaching Your Children to Read Using the Book of Mormon. He has really thrived on this. He'll be doing Ambleside Online year 1, but at only half-speed--I really want to take the time to see that he picks up narrating, and copywork, and all that, and I know I won't do a good job of that if we are rushed. He is excited to begin regular copywork this year.
Today I need to finish setting up things to start PMM's new Spanish program, The Great Eight Mealtime Kit. The goal is to have the entire family speaking largely in Spanish at dinner time. We'll see how it goes-it is a very new program that we found at our local convention this summer. Also, I will be going over a late addition to the older boys' schedules--a communications program called Say What You Mean. I'll be going over it--I think it is possible to integrate this into the boys' narrations so they'll be getting the benefit of the course, while not doing much "extra" work, using as fodder for their communications and speech assignments, the books they would be doing written or oral narrations on. Those are my jobs for the day! Then tomorrow the schedules can be printed, the assignments sent off to the boys' Palm devices, and we'll be ready to go on Monday.
We are also planning something new for us this year--following the Ambleside schedules, plus an exam week each term, will make for 39 weeks of school. We've never done that before, lol. So the last two weeks of each term are going to be "crazy weeks" We'll be setting aside all of our normal schedules except for the Ambleside reading. The boys will have the terrific Business Math program from simplycharlottemason.com to help keep their math skills sharp, they'll read, and then we'll do those "other projects" that sound like fun that we never find time to do. A play based on one of our readings, perhaps, or extra field trips, art projects, whatever we can come up with. This will also be a great time to get videos of the Shakespeare play for the term and all that. I think it'll help keep things fresh and hopefully avoid burnout.
Well, I'm off to convince myself that I can teach PMM to set the table using only Spanish!

School planning update:
I got the music for Term 1 selected and made up song booklets for the children. Dh will burn a CD for me later. Our devotions are all set--"music mornings" twice a week, readings from The Book of Virtues for Young People and A Story to Tell once a week, a conference address once a week, and reading from Church History for Latter-Day Saint Families once week.
I set up our new Latin program for the first week. We'll be using Volume 1 of Latin in the Christian Trivium and I'm just delighted with the professional materials and the free support. :-) We're going to be happy Latin campers this year.
I also got Tallman's materials planned out. Some of these we'll be using with the other children, too.
He'll be in MathUSee, finishing Zeta and later, beginning Pre-Algebra.
We'll be using the terrific Spelling Wisdom materials for dictation--Tallman is in Book 3.
He'll be reading most of the selections in Ambleside Online Year 5 for history and literature and nature study, although we've tweaked a few things, changing some biographies around to make room for George Q. Cannon's Life of Nephi, and the Leaders in Action bio of Stonewall Jackson, of interest to us after visiting his home in Virginia.
We're adding for his devotional reading, Righteous Warriors by John Bytheway, Youth and the Temple--by the temple-drawing guy whose name I just forgot, and I have a migraine and don't want to get up, lol, and To Grow in Spirit by Joe J. Christensen. Practical skills will be addressed by reading Created for Work--OK, I forgot that guy's name too, and The Young Man's Handybook: Preparing Your Son on the Homefront by Martha Greene at Marmee's Kitchen.
The two older boys will do God's Design for the Physical World for science, we are going to read Much Ado About Nothing (also a high-interest thing at the moment, as we saw a superb performance of it in May), reading Plutarch's life of Tiberius Gracchus, and studying Mozart for music and Meindert Hobbema for art. Tallman will top things off with a technical-drawing program, as he has expressed intense interest in NOT having to do frou-frou drawing this year. LOL
Whew. Not bad for a lady with a migraine. On to Cheery's schedule tomorrow.

School starts a week from today!!!
I did not get much accomplished today, probably due to the raging migraine I ended up with after sleeping two hours last night--I was in "brain whirl" probably due to sending ds off to camp in 100 degree heat. Anyway. I cleaned off all our school bookshelves, completed and mailed all our state paperwork, found the books we'll need for morning devotions, and used my new speech program (from www.nathhan.com) to evaluate the PMM, since his pediatrician keeps bugging me about him being difficult to understand. WE don't find him all that difficult to understand, PMM has a way of getting his ideas across. Actually, at the same age, I thought Cheery was harder to understand, and he went through three long years of therapy at the public school. We don't want to repeat that, hence our purchasing materials to "do it ourselves." Turns out, with all that complaining by the pediatrician, PMM is not doing badly at all--he has trouble with "sh", "l", "r" and "th", it is true, but most of those are not recommended for treatment at his age. The only sound he has consistent trouble with that needs addressing at age 6 is "ch" So we'll work on that this year.
Still to try and do tonight--make up little folders with the words to the songs we are going to work on learning this term. I need help burning a CD of the songs, but dh is heading back out to camp with Tallman, so it'll have to wait.
Ds at camp is thrilled and delighted. He will be working on his Reptiles and Amphibians, Environmental Science, and Archery merit badges. All the other boys in our troop decided to take the same ones Tallman wanted to take, so they are "en masse" and following his 6'2" form. They are ordering pizza for supper tonight, and all the boys are sleeping in one tent together. It's not supposed to get much cooler than 80 degrees, so not sure how much sleeping they will be doing! I just hope they stay safe and have fun.

Argh, for some reason I am totally unable to post pictures on any of my blogs, since Thursday. I'm most put out. :-) I have things to say and things to do, but keep getting a "page cannot be displayed, try later" message. So no pix today. :0(
Tallman left early this morning for his very first Boy Scout camp. I think I'm OK with that, but worried about the weather. It is supposed to be over 100 degrees today, and very humid. I got sent home early last year due to heat exhaustion, and I hope Tallman has a healthier and better experience. But he is excited and ready to go. Crazy kid LOVES camping, and he loves Scouts.
So I'm here alone with Cheery and PMM (dh is at camp too) and this week will be taken up with putting the finishing touches on our new school year, which begins next Monday. Partly to keep my thoughts straight, I'll likely be doing a list of "what I've done and what's left" each day to keep myself on track. But first, I have to go clean the bathrooms. LOL A never-ending job here in Boyville. Although with only TWO here all week, maybe I can stay ahead of them.
Nah. LOL

Tallman at his first Court of Honor last night. He advanced to Second Class and received several merit badges. Tallman does not like to swim, so had been sort of "stuck" in advancing but he has worked very hard at something he does not like, and is advancing now. It won't be long before he qualifies for First Class. He reports to his very first Scout Camp on Monday! He is getting so grown-up. :-)

A scene from the pageant in Nauvoo. We went on a very hot and sticky Saturday night. It was a wonderful production; it's the first time we'd seen the new pageant, first shown last year. Every time we picked a time to go last year something happened, lol. But we got to see it this year. There's a new stage, although I have no idea how the actors don't slide off of it.
We'll be going back to Nauvoo for a few days soon; that's where we will take our annual Back to School vacation. :-)

This is so funny! I was telling a funny PMM story on an email list I recently joined, and the list/website owner created a Purple Crayon Award in his honor! Look here to read all about it! (you'll have to click on "Purple Crayon Award on the left-hand toolbar)