• Nov. 23, 2009 - I am Thankful

Thanksgiving Week Report: This week I am thankful for a three day school week!  I did not write in the boys' lesson plan books, each has their own this time around, rather I jotted what was to be done for the next three days on a small piece of memo paper.  Thursday we will travel an hour to the home of our nearest missionary colleagues for a fun day of traditional Thanksgiving food and fellowship.  Looks like we will spend the night and make Friday a shopping day in the Big City.  The teacher needs a nice haircut and manicure/pedicure and hopes to get one that day!  Besides it's got to be a holiday - it's the teacher's birthday!  Yahoo! I am so grateful for our colleagues and for another year of life. The boys are all moving right along with their work.  We are really liking the DIVE CD's that go with our Saxon Math books.  The two oldest boys are using the CD's which gives me the time to dedicate to the youngest and move between the other two answering any needed questions.  It seems to be working very well.  I am so thankful! For the most part the boys are remembering their 30 minutes of music each day.  I have to remind them from time to time.  Greyson's keyboard came with our American guest who arrived two weeks ago.  It's not the best keyboard in the world but it will serve our purpose for the time being.  I am working along G  and we are using my old piano theory books.  I never got beyond the first books, so I'm hoping that together we will reach the stage of buying the next lessons!  It will be a while yet.  I remember more than I thought, but have yet to truly memorize the note names and places on the music staff!  I'm going to work on it and G will, too!  We are both enjoying our time together for this and for this I am happy and thankful.  W is faithful to practice on his guitar.  I hope he can play something at church soon.  D needs a little extra incentive to work with his clarinet and the instrument could use a little professional tweeking.  We hope to take it with us to the Big City and see if someone can give it a little overhaul.  It's gratifying to see them both practice and work on their music. I am so very thankful for boys who are not afraid of a little hard work.  All the boys went with their Papa and our guest to help with a roof raising of a new church congregation in a neighboring town.  All the boys came back good and dirty and stinky sweaty.  It's great to take a bath when there's really something to wash, you know!  And they all needed good baths!  Poor D fell asleep before his turn came, but he got his first thing the next morning!!! On another note:  Someone recently asked me if I needed help with homeschooling.  I said, Well, Yes, I do.  Oh, well, what would you could I do  for help?  Fix breakfast, wash the dishes, wash and hang the laundry, sweep the floors and mop them, fix lunch, sweep again, get the laundry in and put away, clean  up the kitchen from lunch and get all the dishes put away, rake the front yard and sweep around the laundry area, iron, fix supper.  I'll do the supper dishes for you, if you can get all that done before you go home.  They didn't give me a response and I haven't heard from them since!  Mmmm... what did I say wrong? Neat article about the Census of Marine Life: Marine Census finds strange creatures never before seen! This morning we read the article and checked out all the neat animals on the COML website.  There's a link for it in the Yahoo article linked above. p.s. ***Oh, FB people, this was originally posted on www.homeschoolblogger.com/athaschoolforboys , if you wish to see the post in its original form along with pictures and what nots, then go to my HSB blog!***

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• Nov. 17, 2009 - Sleeping Out Under the Stars

Tonight the boys will be sleeping out under the stars to see a meteor shower.  According to National Geographic News tonight will be a good night:  "During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you're in the right place to see Tuesday's showy peak before dawn, experts predict." This picture above is from before our recent furlough.  Tonight we will see if Papa needs to buy a longer trailer.  All the boys have grown so much over the past year.  They really enjoy crazy things like this.  Papa will tow their "bed" out into the middle of the field in front of our house and leave them there for the night.  We leave the front door unlocked in case anyone needs to come in or just decides to get in their real bed instead.  Usually they make it the whole night.  Even though we live in a nice hot tropical kind of place, often at night with the wind blowing it seems cold - hence the covers and coats.  I don't think there will be much of a problem tonight.  We've been sweating all day long! Here's a link to the above mentioned National Geographic News article about the showers: 2009 Leonid Meteor Showers/ National Geographic ***FB friends this is a post from www.homeschoolblogger.com/athaschoolforboys ***Go there to see a picture of the boys in their truck trailer bed!

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• Nov. 12, 2009 - Look What the Cat Drug In!

A 7 cm scorpion!  This is my desk chair in my bedroom.  I brushed by it on my way to my bed with a book as the boys were watching a DVD in another room.  Just as I got comfortable out of the corner of my eye I saw someone run across the top of my chair.  Wow!  When I realized what it was I was shocked.  What in the world was a scorpion doing on top of my chair!  And that big, too!  Seems it must have been on a table which was up against a wall just under a window.  The scorpion must have climbed in waltzed across the table and jumped onto the chair.  Can you imagine my thrill if I'd chosen to sit at my desk for a bit before going to bed? Yikes!  Needless to say I hollared for help!  I wasn't about to get off the bed!  Everyone came with me in my pajamas.  Everyone, husband, sons, houseguest!  They took pictures, measured it, talked about it, and took their own good time trying to decide what to do with it!  What a relief when they, all of them, and the bug were gone and I could get back to my book! Our youngest was bit or stung, I should say, by a slightly smaller scorpion about 3 years ago.  The pain was horrible on the location and his tongue went numb for about an hour.  It was rather scary, but he was fine after a while.  No, there's no where to go to do anything about it, just be happy and do what you can. What fun!  I'm paying more attention to where I step this week! p.s.  We don't have a cat!

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• Nov. 5, 2009 - Island Retreat, October 31 - November 2

Hellooooo, out there!  We have had a hard time recovering from this last retreat on the island.  Byron lost his helper fellow just prior to the retreat with no time to find another, not to mention the WHERE to find another part!  So it was the boys and me to help.  We can do a lot of the tasks involved in running a retreat, but it's hard work!  We took Tuesday off from most school activities getting by with a little handwriting and language.  Yesterday was Math Test day for all which doesn't take too long and we were able to squeeze in most of our regular work.  Today we'll have a full schedule with even a little extra so we can all go to the big city tomorrow for the arrival of our short term guy from the States. Dalton accomplished his archery class with the campers this weekend.  All of them did fair and most were able to at least hit the banana leave bale.  One or two actually hit the target paper!  Only a few shot arrows far and away.  It was a great success with many participants. Have a great weekend!

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• Oct. 26, 2009 - It's Raining!

Typical NE Cowboys They wear leather to protect them from all the cactus and thorns in the semi-arid Caatinga. In the middle of the night it started raining.  Woo Hoo!  We live in the desert Northeast of Brazil where the rain clouds are pretty but usually just that, all fluff and no stuff.  But twice recently we have gotten solid nights of steady rain.  Now all the toads are chirping their little songs.  They hibernate in the dried mud waiting for the rains.  Seems these odd rains are a little early, but we'll take them!  Sometimes our "rainy season" is mostly dry, so beggars can't be choosers. This morning when the boys got up they all proclaimed that surely no one could do school work on such a cloudy, rainy day.  We had to turn on the lights in our house this morning it was so dark.  Usually by 6:00 am it's so light outside that we just open our wooden louvered windows and don't need any artificial lighting.  I played it cool and suggested they take a few extra minutes to play after breakfast while I did the morning dishes.  Then we casually and slowly moved into our normal activities.  I did let up and allowed everyone to skip NC History today and we spent the time doing a little review of our Lyrical Life Science lessons thus far completed and got started on our newest song - Ungulates!  That's hoofed mammals for all you non-scienctifical types. And everyone was happy, well, content.  It was a nice quiet day for the most part, and cool, thanks to the rain!  Our week will be a little short as we have a retreat on the island this weekend.  The boys will be helping with some of the activities on the island:  pellet gun, archery, watching over the kayaks, supervising the zip-line, etc.  Some light school work we'll take along for the downtimes like reading our NC History textbooks and our handwriting copywork books.  In spite of our late start with our arrival from furlough in late August, we aren't too far off schedule.  We'll be using most of December and doing more work in January than usual, but I feel confident that the boys will be fine. Be back sometime next week with some pics of the retreat and reports on any fish caught!

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