travel, blogs, babies, life schooling and more...

The title kind of says it all.

Since we are in the stages of figuring out what we want to do on our upcoming trip to visit Omi and Opa for a few weeks the girls and I have been talking about the plane ride and things they want to have with them to keep them occupied. We discovered fairly early that they do not sleep when we fly, and with it being such a long flight the more easy things to carry the better, and of course this time we also have to pack the baby diaper bag stuff as well. Thankfully it's just a matter of having enough stuff on the plane diaper bag wise to last until we arrive in Amsterdam. Since we are planning on a nice long (kind of) visit the girls have also discussed trying to meet up with other homeschoolers that will be in the area or live in the area as well. So, I'm off trying to find them some international homeschool friends.

While working on that we joined a couple of international forums to talk to others who travel with children and one of the blogs we ran into was about world schooling. The girls would love to do a little more adventuring themselves, but we thought since we can't do that right now, we would at least share the blog so others could read about world schooling as well.

http://www.edventuregirl.com/10-ways-world-schooling-has-ruined-my-childhood/

We thought it was a wonderful look at living a nomadic life and how that can impact your life...for better or for worse...

As for the baby part..School got a bit behind. Dominic has been running a low grade fever and pretty fussy for the 2nd day now and well, everyone hopes he gets over this soon! Which also brings up a good point..It's amazing how often we run into people who homeschool who worry about how this would impact their other children's education if they miss some school due to illness. That's what we consider one of the great things about what we are now calling "life schooling", since we go year round (and well face it, we never really STOP learning!) it's not an issue if we miss a few days here and there because one or more kids got sick. There is nothing that says schooling must happen between Sept. 15th and June 15th or from 8 am to 4pm...YOU get to make up your own schedule! Isn't that nice! There also isn't a "we're a week behind" rule...a week behind what? or who? what's a week behind? your schedule? wait a minute..YOUR schedule..that means you can change it...it's yours to move around and adjust as needed. See wasn't that a lot easier than fretting and stressing over a couple of sick days.

Today the girls went swimming and then headed over to watch the alien invasion...otherwise know as the "Alien Parade". I was going to send the camera with Kaitlyn so she could take pictures but with the hectic morning (and screaming sick kid) I completely forgot to grab it on the way out of the house to drop them off for swimming with Daddy. Thankfully Kaitlyn was fine with it and told me "That's okay Mom. Next year I'll have my own camera, since you said I could have one before we visit Omi and Opa. Then I'll be able to take even better pictures because I'll have more practice in before hand and if Dominic is sick again next time, I'll take pictures to show him when we get home!" Guess that means I better  hurry up and find her a camera before we leave.

Friday the Usborne consultant box arrived, and the girls were so excited! They had a fun time opening the box and going through all the materials with me and then looking through the books which we are exchanging for some different books, but gave the girls enough of a peak at some of the different types of stuff available that they have already grabbed one of the magazine and are circling the stuff they want. I grabbed the other ones to keep nice looking for some friends that are wanting to view the catalogs. Now it's waiting for Daddy to come home on Monday with the "new" books that we  are exchanging the current books for...Why exchange them you might ask? We wanted some reference books for ourselves, and since the prices came to about the same amount, the person who signed me up was willing to exchange the ones that came with the packaging. So now we have some great books that the girls are looking forward to having and we even got a little book for their friend who LOVES trains!

The girls also had fun this week making bird houses for 4H and are looking forward to putting them up in the tree's this week.

This week was so nice we even went on a picnic. I told the girls to grab some books, so they grabbed these:

 and a picture of Dominic out enjoying the grass and sun...

Our first try at making samosas. We didn't get them exactly triangle shaped, but they tasted pretty good. The girls liked the taste of the wrap so we'll have to experiment a little and see what else we can do with it. They also want to try and make Puran Poli soon!

 
We are also happy to say we are now pretty much done putting in the garden and we are already seeing some of the cucumber plants starting to pop up through the ground. The girls love this part and watching how big they get over the summer.