Our week

Hot, dry, and a bit windy today -- with nary of drop of rain. Power outages? HA! Our drought? Very much continuing! Hurricane Ike? Spent all its energy on the coast before migrating north -- not that I blame it.

Time for the weekly review, a bit late. I'm now paranoid about writing these because a friend innocently accused me of being one of those intimidating creative homeschooling moms on her blog this week, and now I'm thinking, oh gosh, maybe I should just keep this all to myself because what if other people feel the same way? As I told her, I'm always the one thinking all these other parents are so creative! How silly we are.

Eliza was so proud this week that, in a sudden burst of industry and inspiration, she finished Box One of the Bob books (it's the oversized box from Costco, so there are about 17 books). We immediately purchased Box Two, so she launched into that. I, lazy relaxed mom that I am, been sort of waiting for her to take some of her own initiative on reading like Ian did, so maybe this is it. We'll see. In the meantime, she's become a rabid Roald Dahl fan, begging us to read any one of the eight volumes we got in another Costco boxed set. :-) (Have you ever tried to read The Twits aloud? I felt so physically ill reading the description of Mr. Twit's facial hair that I had to pass the book to Ian!)

We're reading more about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, and Ian added labels on straight pins to the salt dough map. I'm learning that although he likes being read to, he likes to do as much as possible on his own. He printed out the labels on my P-Touch, and stuck them all on. He likes just taking his math workbook or copy book and "getting it done," which works well when we have to be somewhere else (ah, the flexibility of homeschooling!).

For science, although we're still reading Pagoo, I feel a bit flummoxed about our "science experiments" time that we're supposed to be having with his friend Isaac once a week. So far, it feels a bit like pulling teeth for Isaac's mom and I to get the boys to drop their Legos and come do the experiment, and then I feel like it's kind of contrived. Here, boys, let's have a learning experience! I really want to do something with them that would be harder to do with just my own gaggle of goslings, but it doesn't really seem to be clicking yet. Maybe because our battery experiments require so much parental involvement? How can we be more hands-off while we're doing hands-on stuff? Suggestions welcome.

Oh, we started working on that fable I mentioned a while back. The one about the alien who's supposed to look before he leaps? Yeah. After a power struggle between the idealist (Ian) and the realist (me), we've compromised: his story, which is dictated to his hapless typist, will be limited to fifteen long chapters (we're two pages into Chapter One). Because he doesn't want it to be like any other fable that's already been written. Of COURSE. And Mom is so miserly that way. Other writing this week included letters of petition and "essays" to accompany his submission(s) to the Lego Company's drawing contests. A built-in lesson: how to properly address an envelope!