The Road Trip! ~ Part 1

Last week, The Kids, Nani K, and I took a road trip aaaallllll the way up to Columbus, OH to visit my aunt. It's quite a long drive, but we broke it in half by stopping in St. Louis to visit my brother, Uncle E. He had to work on the evening that we got there, but the rest of us went up into the arch. The Kids and I have been to St. Louis three times and this was the first time we had gotten to do that, so it was pretty neat. They seemed to like the view.

This picture is somewhat like a Sasquatch sighting because it PROVES that my mom, who doesn't like heights, has indeed been up in the arch!


On Monday we met with Uncle E. for breakfast and a trip to the Turtle Park before we had to hit the second leg of our trip. Luckily, nobody got maimed, but I had a close call!












We got to Ohio on Monday evening and my Aunt Linda had dinner waiting for us. Let me tell you, food has never tasted so good before!!
Gosh, we did SOOOO much stuff in Ohio! We went and ate at the first Wendy's and to visit several parks, as well as the State House. The weather was fantastic and fall-ish, something I've been craving and the trees were all decked out in bee-yoo-ti-ful fall foliage!

One thing that we got to do was go on a tour of a replica of the Santa Maria, which was really interesting. I'm amazed at how small the ship was! There were 40 guys on there and I'll bet they felt like sardines. And this picture? Anyone want to guess what it is?

It's Christopher Columbus toilet paper! They'd step onto a ledge on the outside of the ship, hang onto a rope, let fly, finish up with THIS, and then drop it back into the water to clean it up. (Obviously it was attached to a rope!) Now, they say that women weren't allowed on a ship because it was considered bad luck, but I think it was because they couldn't find a woman to sign up for the rope TP!!

The center picture gives you a pretty good perspective of the size of the ship. You can see the right side of the ship behind my aunt and the left side of the ship was maybe 5 feet behind Deco. The picture on the right is of The Kids sitting on Christopher Columbus's bed! (OK, it wasn't really his actual bed! But it looks like his bed would have looked!)

I'll have to make some other entries for our trip to Amish country up in Berlin, OH and for our apple picking excursion. We had such a fantastic time the whole week! My aunt has such a gift for hospitality and made wonderful food for us and carted us around and made us feel sooo welcomed! It was a great vacation!

My Baby's Growing Up!!

She's losing her teeth!! I was just thinking today, "I should write a blog entry, documenting the fact that Bear has a loost tooth" and had said to Bear, "I bet that if it doesn't fall out before we go on our trip, it'll fall out while we're gone!" Then, while she was having F.O.F*, she comes running out of her room and says "MY TOOTH FELL OUT!!!!"

So I immediately took this picture:

because, really, who can resist all that blood?

She's so proud she can hardly stand it! Tonight the Tooth Momma will come. We don't really "do" the tooth fairy as a real person, but we wanted her to reap the benefit of getting money for her lost teeth! She knows it's us! Hmmm, I'd better check and see what the going rate for a First Lost Tooth is!

Wait a minute...I thought it was finally fall?

I had to laugh when I looked at the title of my previous post because as I sit here and type, it is a whopping 91 degrees outside and I'm left wondering where in the heck fall went! I mean, I've heard of "Indian Summer" but I always thought that having one of those meant that the days got a little warmer (cresting in the high 70's or something) after a short period of actual cool weather....not days that leave you panting for a swimming pool and a nice cool glass of lemonade! I mean, it's like we're back in the middle of summer!!

But, enough griping about the weather...I've done that on my other blog already (just yesterday, in fact!)...this is a homeschooling blog, so that's what I should talk about here, right?

Well, we didn't have school this past Friday because I was getting ready for The Camping Extravaganza - which was fun and perfect and everything! I had intended to have school, but it took so much time to get everything together that I just couldn't do it. I just figured that I'd use my lesson that I had planned for Friday on Monday, but then we didn't end up having school on Monday either! We got home at about 7:30 on Sunday I had forgotten that it takes so much time to get a house back in order after a vacation. So, we took Monday off and I got everything put away and began the laundry and things like that.

So we officially came back to school TODAY, using the lessons from last Friday as well as some of the worksheets that didn't get finished from last Thursday. I've begun to add in some grammar lessons from the Total Reading First Grade book that we use so we've talked recently about "telling sentences" that end in a period and we've from nouns to verbs. Nothing really exciting. I decided to use our spelling list from last week for this week since we didn't have a spelling test on Friday. Bear had fun this morning because I printed out some sentences that I made up with blanks for putting in the spelling words. For example "Do not ________ the door when you go out!" (slam) I think she really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the game, trying to figure out which words went in the blanks.




Last week (or maybe the week before, I can't remember!) Deco actually wanted to do his very own worksheet! So I picked one out of the Total Preschool book that I had bought for him and he got to work. One sheet was counting to one and the other was finding and coloring all the circles in the picture and, while neither was very hard for him, he seemed to enjoy having his own work to do. He LOVED getting to put it in the Papa Folder and show it to Ched when he got home!