I love the smells of fall, burning leaves, apple smells in the basement, and squash smells in my storage area.  I love the crispness of the air even though it makes me feel cold.  I love to see my breath float up.  I love a hot tea after being outside for a time and have become chilled.  I love the sound of the leaves as I walk through them or rake them.  Even though I mourn the end of garden season, I'm also glad to put it to bed and give it a rest.  I do love fall.

We're off and running on our volume 2, chapter 10 this week.  So far so good.  I got my shipment from Rainbow Resources (Yeah!) and now we can start to have some fun with the activities.  This chapter is going to take awhile.  I plan on taking our time and digging into the Reformation and Early America settlement and the start of the nation.  Rainbow Resources had lots of old documents that have been printed on parchmentlike paper to look authentic.  I got things like, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, John Smith's map of Virginia (pretty cool), Bill of Rights, Mayflower Compact, etc.  I thought these would be fun to study and read aloud and compare then to now.  Also what we've done for comparision is to compare from Exodus the laws we've read so far to whether or not they could be applicable to the U.S. today.  It is amazing to see how many still do or should.  We also saw how Jesus said the two most important commandments were to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.  The 10 commandaments fall into one of those two categories.  The first four go under the God column and the rest go under loving your neighbor.  Very interesting.

Today the boys carved a potato to simulate what it may have been like to make stamp letters before the Gutenburg press was invented.  They seemed to enjoy this and then we used mustard for ink so we could still throw the potatoes to the chickens.  Other activities planned are to build a paper model of the Mayflower, build a replica of the tabernacle, salt and flour map of the 13 colonies and I don't know what else.  I have so much planned I'm scaring myself.  I just want to make sure they understand what foundation this country was built on and be able to defend it.  It's also fun to see how God sets things up and how man ruins it all.   I'm so excited to finally be doing this chapter.

Our election lapbooks turned out great .  Wew really enjoyed doing this and I felt it was worthwhile to go as deep as I did.  Sometimes I had to bang my head against the wall, like trying to explain the difference between primary adn general elections.  Whew! that was a tough one for them to wrap around.  We also went into the suffrages.  I thought we might get to the branches of government, but we might be able to do this toward the end of the current chapter we're in.

Tomorrow we will be sitting in on another Colonial Williamburg computer field trip.  Tomorrow's theme is Yorktown.  How perfect is that?  God is gracious and good and gives the perfect gifts.  These are really good field trips.  Homeschoolbuyers co-op has this available to purchase at a very good price.  Check it out.

Farm News:

Nothing to report new really.  The animals are growing each day.  It's pretty cold and yucky lately but they don't seem to mind.  Still waiting for the eggs to come!  A friend brought over some venison for us to try so I made venison stew tonight.  It was great.  I've also got some venison stock going on the stove.  I guess you can use this in place of beef stock if you want.  I still have tons of apples to put away and I want to can pumpkin butter and apple pie filling.  I'm already dreaming what to plant next season.  I'm kinda glad to be in the house now.  I plan on organizing things that I've put off from moving (winter inside projects)  I also want to find curtains for my kitchen, which is almost finished with new cabinets and appliances.  I will post pictures when it's done.  The floor and walls won't get done till next year.

I'm so glad to be here.  God has indeed blessed us.