Our School at Home

Our backyard wildlife-identifying adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Sun, 19 May 2013 02:06:00 +0000

One of the coolest parts about our family's experience with 4-H, especially being part of our local Wildlife Watchers club, has been learning how to landscape to attract birds and butterflies.

Our "garden," such as it is, is a work in progress, but it's getting there. And we've got proof - a bunch of spring wildlife has arrived in recent weeks.

We've got a bunch of bunnies... squirrels... chipmunks... slugs... and plenty of robins. We do occasionally get hummingbirds, though we haven't seen any so far this year, but we did spot this beautiful fellow for the first time in our yard last week.

He's an American Goldfinch. Sarah was pretty sure that's what type of bird it was - "some kind of goldfinch," she said - but we pulled our our trustiest bird book (a 1970s copy of Birds of North America, almost a family heirloom!) to double-check, and then found she was very right!

Interestingly, one thing we watched this tiny bird do was jump on our dandelion stems, pushing them so that the puff at the top of the now-withering dandelion was more at his level before eating the dandelions.

Sarah said, "I wonder what he normally eats!" Well, enter the bird book, which tells us...

Dandelions are one of their favorite snacks! Reason #100 why I'm glad we, unlike most of our neighbors, haven't hired a lawn service to get rid of them!

Our other visitor was a bit more uncommon - and a little more tragic. We came home from the state alpaca owners' show (another 4-H involvement!) and I said, "Wait, what's on our window?!"

A closer look showed THIS:

Which, as it turns out (and after we investigated from inside as well and got a good close-up of the antennae)... is a luna moth!

This identification, too, came from one of our many wildlife books, this time an Eyewitness Books guide to butterflies and moths. We actually have better "ID guides" for moths and butterflies, but Sarah found this one and I said, "Well, we can page through and see..." and lo and behold, here it was!

The one in the book is an Indian moon moth, but there are many variants of the moon moth or luna moth, Actias selene.

After doing some extra reading online (thanks to a gentleman who breeds these from his home in Canada!), we realized that our moth was looking for a mate. She (we think) fought the good fight, but we may have caught her on the post-mating downcycle, which is pretty short.

It turns out that adult luna moths don't even have a proboscis or mouth - no way to eat. They only live as adults for about a week, and they do so entirely subsisting on food from their caterpillar stage.

This moth held on to our window for quite a while, but it was a SUPER windy day, so eventually it fell to the ground, whereupon Chris and I, ridiculous nature-lovers, carefully scooped it up along with the mulch it was clinging to and helped it to a nearby lilac tree, where again it hung on through some ridiculous weather. We thought it flew away, and maybe it had - but later, Chris found it on the ground under the tree, bedraggled, wings torn, but still kicking!

So back on the tree we helped it get, and the next day, it appeared to be totally gone. We're going to say it flew away, because... yeah. I got emotionally invested in a moth. (Moreso than Sarah, actually, though she certainly kept close tabs on it!)

I love having a home where we attract beautiful wild things! (Of the animal and human kind...)

10 "toys" that have lasted into Sarah's teenage years

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

One of the most fun things I did last year was to sum up some cool parts of our family's life as part of the iHomeschool Network's 10 * in * 10 series, where we shared some top-10 lists each week in the spring.

I'm thrilled to be taking part again this year with some new topics and some changes in my own mindset and experiences to share!

This week, a bunch of us are talking about 10 toys that have withstood the test of time in our homes.

Sarah's now a teenager - so anything that's lasted this long MUST be a winner!

1. Melissa & Doug 60-piece wood "blocks in a box" set

These blocks. Oh my word.

Disclosure: This post has some affiliate links, which will make me a little bit of money if you choose to purchase any of the products I've mentioned through them. I only link to things we legitimately use and recommend, so if you see such a link, it's because we really do believe in the value of that toy!

We bought them maybe 8 or 9 years ago because Sarah loves the feel of natural wood, and because she needed some larger blocks to build big structures.

She's still loving them! She and Chris have built castles even in the last year with them.

This was definitely a case of knowing what we wanted before we purchased - something that was real wood and not cheap plastic or another imitation, something durable, something that was easy to store.

One of our friends actually suggested this Melissa & Doug 60-block set, and while I don't remember who it was, I know I'm eternally grateful.

Super added bonus? One time, when Sarah was quite young, she drew all over them with pen. They're natural wood - so I just sanded them and they were back to new! WIN.

2. LEGO bricks

Lovely people from the LEGO company, if you are reading this, I would give just about anything to be part of your blogging team.

See, as it is, I write about Sarah's LEGO collection, oh, I don't know, all the time? So I'm clearly a big promoter!

OK, enough groveling. These probably made 90 percent of the lists in today's linkup, but I can't leave them out. Sarah has had LEGO sets since she was born, literally, since she inherited many of mine, and in turn, I'd inherited some of mine from my (8-years-older-than-me) nephew!

And, in cool both-sides-of-the-family history, she also gets to play with some of the LEGOs from Chris's childhood every time we go visit his mom, who saved them in a shoebox for the grandkids to play with!

Minifigures are probably our biggest specific LEGO love. This is just a small sampling of Sarah's collection; there are tons and tons more out where she's playing with them!

They've worked out great, because we can act out almost anything. Reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians' The Lightning Thief? Need a Minotaur? WE HAVE A MINOTAUR. Suddenly need to replicate Godzilla's takeover of Japan? WE HAVE GODZILLA. It's pretty cool. And maybe just a little scary.

3. Imaginarium 200-piece wood block set

Yes, two sets of blocks on the list of a 13-year-old's "toys."

This Imaginarium 200-piece set is our smaller-sized companion to the set above, great for adding color and details - and building "homes" for smaller things! Right now, I don't think Imaginarium, the maker, sells the 200-piece set we have, but there is a 150-piece one that's close to the same size.

We love these for many of the same reasons we love the set above. They're real wood, they spark a ton of creativity, and they've lasted for ages and ages; I think we bought this set maybe for Sarah's 7th birthday! If you have even younger kids, the lid to their tub is a shape-sorter, so they can start to tell squares from triangles and so on.

Full disclosure: We STILL sometimes put them away through the shape sorter. So there.

4. Webkinz

Ah, Webkinz. Sarah has something like 40 of these combination stuffed-animal-meets-online-game friends.

She knows all of their names, plays with them, sorts them (this bin is all dogs, cats and "regular" house pets; another is zoo animals; another is mythical creatures...) and generally has a great time with them in real life, but she also plays with them online, giving them fancy bedrooms and clothes thanks to the codes that come included with each stuffed animal.

I have to admit, I didn't think these would be such a lingering interest, but Sarah was just scoping out a new addition in the grocery store last week!

5. Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars

Sarah has a rather awe-inspiring collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars that she plays with all the time.

In fact, this photo is from a display set up in our basement rec room right now - complete with handmade parking garage in the background. Sarah has "stories" made up for each of the cars, like how they're in car school, how some like ice cream, how some are good leaders and more. And that's not counting the fact that she knows what make and model each is "for real," as well.

She has a VERY specific set of favorites. Her biggest joy comes from lining up the cars in the "right" order, with her favorites leading the line. (I'm also supposed to tell you that she likes Hot Wheels better than Matchbox, because there are "more options," but she's got plenty of both.)

Sarah even has two car-collector's history guides - Matchbox Cars: The First 50 Years, and Hot Wheels Forty Years. She's been through both cover-to-cover, and knows which of her cars appear where in each book.

While I didn't put today's list in any particular order, these might be the No. 1 favorite. It's close between them and LEGOs!

6. American Girl dolls

This probably marks Sarah's "oldest" toy in a way - because one of her American Girl dolls is actually mine from when I was about 12 or 13 years old!

The best thing about these dolls has been their versatility. They're keepsakes - so they're "nice" material - but they're also durable enough to be actually played with, not just sat on a shelf.

We also love the book series featuring each of the dolls - that's been a neat springboard into history for Sarah. The neatest example was the one pictured above. That was from Sarah's 11th birthday in 2011, when my mom, who grew up in the late 1930s and early 1940s and remembers World War II well, bought Sarah "Molly," the American Girl doll who grows up during the same time.

Talk about bringing the stories home for Sarah!

7. Build-a-Bear, Build-A-Leopard, Build-a-Whatever

These are just a handful of Sarah's Build-a-Bear collection. She's been making these things for at least a decade; I think she got her first one right around when she turned 3.

We've done Build-a-Monkey, Build-a-Leopard, Build-a-Cat and Build-About-8-Dozen-Bears-Or-So-It-Seems. And they've all got outfits... and skateboards, or sunglasses, or hats...

But Sarah loves them! She still enjoys the experience of creating them, too; she just built Percy, at the far left, who's an Amur Leopard, earlier this year! (If you care, also pictured are, from left after Percy, Nicky, Sammy, Lucky and Stripes.)

8. Dollhouses and miniatures

Sarah is the proud owner of two fairly large dollhouses.

The first, the one you see at left, was handmade for her by an "honorary grandma" - the mother of one of our longtime family friends who was Sarah's babysitter through much of her early childhood.

It is truly one-of-a-kind - and it's fascinating, from its tiny birds' nests to its real-rock flagstone path to its tiny handmade curtains. This is something I hope Sarah will pass down to her own children one day!

The dollhouse at right is the "expansion home." It's from the Calico Critters series (it's their "townhome"), and Sarah has not only the house, but several of the little Calico Critters animal families that live between the two homes.

I have to admit, I thought the Calico Critters stuff was a bit pricey when Sarah first asked for it - but it has been well worth the cost, as it's really lasting-quality, plus lasting-interest-value!

9. Razor scooters

Sarah got her first Razor scooter in 2009 - which is when these photos are from.

She used that scooter hard! I mean, this became a major mode of transportation, probably much moreso than it was ever intended.

And this past Christmas, when Sarah was 12, she actually asked for a replacement for her much-loved but kind of beat-up Razor.

So now she owns a blue one ("for good") and this red one as a spare, or for when friends come to visit.

10. Footballs, soccer balls, baseballs and more

I can't finish off this list without including some of the approximately half-ton of sporting equipment that's a fixture in our home.

We almost always have a football, a soccer ball, a tennis racket and a baseball bat, among many others. Lately, the soccer ball has been a big win, as has Sarah's new basketball.

Her current "wish list" requests are a multi-purpose net, and a basketball hoop, both of which we're diligently saving for but are a little out of reach right now.

That said, I FULLY expect both of those to be long-lasting favorites once we can finally spring for them!

We're also linking up today to Top Ten Tuesday at Many Little Blessings. Whether you're sharing your Top 10 questions people ask you, or a Top Ten list on any other topic, I'd love for you to link up and to check out the other blogs that have, too!

And don't forget to check out my previous Top Ten Tuesday posts, if you've missed them.

What do you do when you're a VERY behind scrapbooker?

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Disclosure: In exchange for the honest review of our experience which appears in this post, our family received discount coupons for Shutterfly's digital scrapbooking service. I have been a Shutterfly customer for more than 5 years with no prior compensation, and all comments and views are my own!

I've mentioned before, I think, that I love to scrapbook.

Very specifically, I love the feeling of taking printed-out photos, arranging them on pretty paper, adding some notes and embellishments, and seeing them turn into a stack of finished pages and, finally, a nice scrapbook.

There's a huge sense of accomplishment to having a shelf of finished scrapbooks and fewer and fewer boxes of photos.

However.

That all sounds good in theory, but what actually happens is more like this.

My scrapbooking nightmare

Normally, here's what precedes that wonderful scrapbooking experience.

Freak out about tons of photos piling up on phones and camera.
Sit down and have marathon "dump," getting photos off devices and onto computer.
Drop photos in big ol' folder inside other folder marked "To Do" and leave them to languish.
Get freaked out again, sort photos from big ol' folder into subfolders.
Upload photos into Shutterfly or onto a local site to order prints.
Receive prints in the mail; freak out again at HOW MANY I ordered.
Desperately attempt to sort them in storage boxes.
Attend a scrapbooking event, with boxes of photos in tow. Freak out when I see 300 of them from one event, and spend most of event doing here-and-there photos but ignoring big events.
Freak out at how behind I am when I see big chunks of photos from the past few years (and earlier) not yet touched.

Do you see a theme here?

I am a perpetually behind and freaked-out scrapbooker!

Completed traditional scrapbooking projects

The good news is, the freaking out does kind of work. I've completed what I feel like is a great number of traditional (meaning, not done on the computer) projects, including:

An album of my high-school years (1995-1999)
Sarah's baby album from birth to about age 3 (2000-2003)
Our wedding album (2005)
An album for my tae kwon do progress, which is not "finished" but is up to date (2010-present)
Albums for Christmas 2007, Christmas 2008, Christmas 2009 and Christmas 2010
Full family albums (sometimes two volumes!) for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011
Bunches of mini-books from trips, holidays and so on as gifts and for ourselves
Two homeschool portfolios (yes, I count these!)

Sarah, meanwhile, has completed a 2008 album of "Sarah's favorite things" and a 4-H club album that won her an "outstanding historian" award in 2011. She's also got a two-volume wildlife journal for 4-H in progress, and is working on an album of our pet photos.

In-progress and not-yet-started scrapbooking projects

I've got several projects that are in various stages of ideas or completion. Works in progress include:

An album I'm working on with my mom for her side of our family (her parents, brothers and her early life).
A 2012 family album (and possibly a separate Christmas album).
A 2013 family album.

And the not-yet-started projects include:

A "beach album" of family trips to various shore points from 2005 until present, starting with our 2005 honeymoon to Mexico.
A family album of my dad's side of our family, including his early life.
A HUGE HEAP OF EVERYTHING from when I was born in 1982 until Sarah was born in 2000. (This. Is. Huge.)
Everything from after Sarah was born in 2000 that's not somewhere else.
An album of favorite family recipes, again something that I'm working on with my mom.

That's a lot. And we don't show any signs of taking fewer photos, so... stuff is going to keep piling up. And that's where I turn to methods outside my traditional scrapbooking to help document our lives and keep the "main albums" manageable.

Easy digital scrapbooking with Shutterfly

When I started scrapbooking, I had the idea in mind that I would do ALL traditional albums, and I'd include ALL our photos from the year (after editing, of course). That mindset was driving me crazy - and costing me a LOT of time and money. Especially when we'd take large family trips, I would end up with enough photos from each trip to create a full separate album, and that might cost me anywhere from $80 to $100 at minimum, plus at least 8 to 12 hours of my time!

That's when I turned to digital scrapbooks to help me stay afloat.

Essentially, these digital scrapbooks are a great way take my photos from a trip or holiday and preserve them in a way that's just as long-lasting and durable as my traditional scrapbooks, but with a lot less time and money spent!

I've used a variety of digital scrapbooking programs, but since 2007, our family has relied most heavily on the photobook service from Shutterfly. (Actually, my husband, Chris, is an even bigger Shutterfly photobook user than I am; he's made several albums as gifts!)

Our completed Shutterfly books include:

Family road trip to Wyoming in 2007
Fourth anniversary trip to Pa. Grand Canyon in 2009
My sister Carol's wedding in 2009
Sarah and Chris' day at the local street rod show in 2009
Fifth anniversary trip to Erie, Pa., in 2010
Sarah and Chris' day exploring New Oxford, Pa., in 2010

And as of this week, I can check another huge project off the list. All our photos are off the camera and in Shutterfly for print-ordering purposes (just that would be a win!) and I've taken a HUGE piece of finishing 2012's photos off my plate.

I decided to use the promotional codes Shutterfly sent me for $20 off and free shipping, combine them with a recent 30% off photobook sale, and get our pictures from last summer's trip to Washington, D.C., taken care of!

Creating our Shutterfly hardcover photobook

While I've done some detailed customizations on past Shutterfly books, this D.C. trip was one that I wanted to get done fast.

I decided to use Shutterfly's Simple Path service, in which you choose the pictures (either from your Shutterfly account, your computer or your Facebook account) and Shutterfly arranges them in a nice selection with 1 to 4 photos per page, in chronological order.

You can then easily tweak, add captions and titles, and rearrange, but the idea is that most of the work is done for you!

To start my book, I quickly browsed through about 1,000 photos I'd uploaded from the three-day trip, chose 220, and told Simple Path to get started. By default, it made a 99-page book for about $76, and that's before any customizations.

From the page backgrounds available (of which there are dozens and dozens), I chose an "Americana" theme - perfect for a trip to our nation's capital, I thought!

I spent about a half-hour pruning the book down to 85 pages, deleting photos that seemed too similar on closer inspection, and grouping more onto certain pages.

I then went back page-by-page and tweaked photo arrangements and positions, added captions and more, for about another half-hour.

My finished product was a total of 81 pages for a price of about $64.

This would EASILY have been an 8-hour day of scrapbooking if I'd have tackled it traditionally, and might have cost $80 or more. And while I'll still do some of our favorite photos for a couple of "highlight" pages in our annual scrapbook, it's a huge relief to know that what was looking like a major part of that project is now only a small piece.

As I mentioned, Shutterfly kindly provided me with a "free shipping" coupon code and a $20 off coupon code as a thanks for creating a product and sharing my experience. The funniest thing is, I'd do that anyway - we use our Shutterfly "Share" site as our family photo-sharing service, and we publish our finished photobooks to that as well. You can check out our Shutterfly Share site here (for even more family fun photos!)

Specifically, one thing I especially love about Shutterfly is that you can stack sales and coupon codes as I did in this order; I can almost always catch a sale on the products I'm looking to make, then score free shipping and sometimes a bonus discount!)

In all, I paid $46.32 out of pocket for my photobook, and I saved at least 7 hours of my time! And, as a surprise I wasn't expecting, when my book arrived, inside was a coupon code for 20% off my NEXT order!

Our finished Shutterfly photo book

Click here to view this photo book larger

Turn your favorite photos into a photo book at Shutterfly.com.

I have to admit, seeing this book got me motivated to get even more of my scrapbooking done. And blogging about it is a good incentive to make SURE I'm making progress. So I think you can count on future "Joan's projects" installments!

How about you - any unfinished craft or hobby projects you need to get motivated to finish? Would love to hear what everyone else is working on!

The days that are anything but picture-perfect: When our unschooling is a hot mess

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Sometimes, homeschool blogging can make it look like our family - or any family - has it "all together."

Pssh. Not so much.

So when I heard that my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers were joining together today to share stories of our imperfect homeschool, I was definitely in!

This is a post that looks at the many days full of pajamas, arguments, glazed eyeballs and too much cat hair.

Welcome to our hot mess.

Here it is, unedited, unfiltered, unpretty - a collection of some of the head-smacking moments of our past couple years.

I'm sharing this in the hope that you'll read it and see your own family in the way we see ours - NOT as a picture-perfect unattainable snapshot, but as a collection of imperfection all bound together with the grace of God and each other into something more than the sum of its parts!

When the homeschooling isn't so hot

Ah, here's one for you. In Pennsylvania, we are required to have a year-end meeting with an evaluator who decides if Sarah has made "sustained progress" throughout the year.

Sarah hates talking to people about herself, hates answering direct questions, and basically hates "weird" situations.

So for both of our evaluations, she has been almost silent the entire time (though blessedly speaking up JUST enough to get a "pass"), and at the recent one, she literally hid her whole body inside her hoodie and would not speak or show her face. She did manage to basically gnaw the zipper of her hoodie into oblivion, though.

Then there's the part where Sarah (who is literal) tells the evaluator that she doesn't know the last book she read because she doesn't read books.

At which point I have to jump in and explain that we read as a family through read-alouds, and we all take turns reading (including Sarah), but that means that in her very literal sense, she did not read the book, WE did. ::headsmack::

The sad part is that since I feel like, as the legal supervisor of our home-education program, I'm the one on the spot if Sarah doesn't reflect continued progress, these sorts of things tend to embarrass me, which leads to me getting grouchy, which makes things worse, until we're ALL going home almost in tears or with stress headaches!

Guess you know we don't have pictures of THOSE homeschool moments!

When the house and its people are a wreck

What, you work from home, homeschool, and keep a great house? You're either sleep-deprived or lying. :)

There are days almost every single week where I ask myself, "When was the last time Sarah took a shower? For that matter, when did I?"

There are PLENTY of days where I stay in my pajamas all day, no makeup, hair unbrushed. Sarah actually does a better job of getting dressed daily than I do.

And then there's the natural casualty of living in a home with a large dog, five cats and a hamster.

Yes, I'm referring to our disgusting floors.

When I show photos of our home in posts, they often look like this:

What you CAN'T see in these photos are the corners, the tucked-away places, the hidden hairball zones. THOSE don't look like the photo above. They look more like this:

Then there's my general forgetful nature. That means we have scenes like this:

Yes, that banana should have left before it started drawing gnats. Yes, those are the antibiotics we were supposed to give the dog after his tooth-cleaning two weeks ago, which we remembered for about four days before slacking off. (And yet, there they still sit.)

My house, like my homeschool experience, is far from from perfect!

When the family is disconnected

Sometimes, the problem is really one of disconnection. These are the times when Sarah is SUPER-interested in learning something and we basically fall short as facilitators or coaches.

We went through a phase where Sarah was super-into everything space-related. Chris had ideas for dozens of things to watch and places to visit in keeping with that theme, and every evening, around 11 p.m., Sarah would ask if we could watch one of the movies we'd talked about, and that she was interested in.

By that point, we were tired. We didn't feel like sitting through two hours of astronaut documentaries, so we'd put her off. And put her off. And put her off again.

She wanted to do a science experiment at 2 a.m. We put her off.

She wanted to go tour a local factory. I had to work on the tour's only open day.

All of these things are bound to happen. But our worst days and weeks are the ones where we have more "misses" than connections. We're roommates, but not a family. We ignore each other.

But there is so much good here!

We're nothing close to perfect. But we're trying. And I humbly submit that pajamas, hairballs and moldy food in the fridge, while certainly not super-wonderful, are not what we're most concerned with.

We love each other. And that happens even when the bananas are rotten and we're arguing and Sarah doesn't know what 25 times 2 is.

Thank goodness! :)

10 things I've learned about myself in the past year and a half

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

One of the most fun things I did last year was to sum up some cool parts of our family's life as part of the iHomeschool Network's 10 * in * 10 series, where we shared some top-10 lists each week in the spring.

I'm thrilled to be taking part again this year with some new topics and some changes in my own mindset and experiences to share!

This week, a bunch of us are talking about 10 things we've learned about ourselves through homeschooling.

What, you mean moms learn, too? ;-)

1. I'm not as much of a plan-aheader as I thought I was.

In my "former life" as a full-time office employee, I was the person who knew the plan for six weeks down the road. That's pretty funny, in a newspaper office. I was definitely that way in my personal life, too; organized and fairly sure of what was coming.

God has a good sense of humor. He said, "OK, Joan, that's cute and all, but let's look at who's really in control here, shall we?" Our homeschooling journey has been a huge exercise in me letting go of the need to plan; even our decision to pull Sarah out of public school midyear, which I talked about here, was essentially a decision made with a lot of talking and prayer over the course of only a day or two.

And then, when we realized almost immediately that we weren't going to be the "buy the big box o' learnin' books" family, complete with matching lesson planner, but rather we were going to do this unschool thing, I got to have another minor freakout. And again, God showed up and made things even better than they'd have been if I planned them.

2. I LIKE learning.

Something funny had happened to me before we started homeschooling. I was so tied up with the mess that was our life - the 50- to 60-hour workweeks, the four hours of homework we were helping Sarah with, the occupational therapy appointments, the counseling, the fighting - that I wasn't really being me. I was just being that person who did those things.

I know that probably doesn't make a ton of sense, but it comes down to this: There are things about me that make me who I am. And one of the biggest, the fact that I've always loved to learn (anything, for any reason) had gotten lost in the shuffle.

As part of my quest to be interested and be interesting, I want to model for Sarah that Mom learns, too. And I'm having a TON of fun rediscovering that passion of mine.

3. I'm a gregarious introvert.

Throughout my entire life, I've been one of the rare people who has no problem with public speaking in the slightest. Give me an audience and I'll give you a good time. (Does that sound wrong, or what?) I don't need to prepare, I don't use notes, I'm not nervous.

Just for fun, here's a look at my new summer hair color!

But I hate calling people on the phone. I get sick to my stomach when I'm stuck in a crowded room with a bunch of people I don't know. When I'm tired, or sick, or unhappy, I just want to be left alone.

This never made sense to me. I loved being around people! (Except when I didn't.) I loved talking and noise! (Except when I didn't.)

But as I was talking to some friends, I realized that there is a valid personality type called the gregarious introvert - the person who is outgoing and comfortable with people, but who recharges best alone.

This isn't so much directly related to homeschooling as it is to working from home, which I started at almost the same time we began homeschooling.

In a work sense, I definitely do better with some short, focused groupwork sessions, but then going it on my own for the rest of my time.

4. Working at home is hard work.

Ah, speaking of working from home: It's hard. REALLY hard. There are a ton of distractions, and finding a balance between giving into the distractions and getting stuff done is a continual struggle. (Because, after all, if I wanted to lock myself in a private room all day, I could have stayed working in an office!)

And then there's the fact that sometimes, people assume you're not working. It's taken Chris and I some time to get into a routine that doesn't have me doing all the housework - because, after all, I'm home with it, so it tends to fall to me almost by proximity (more by my doing than his, too, I have to say in the spirit of honesty). We're getting there, but it's taken some time.

That said, I wouldn't go back. For every time I throw my hands up at a loud movie in the background while I'm trying to take a call, there are five moments that I'd have missed if I wasn't here. And I wouldn't trade them.

5. I am not my job.

Ah. See, I was always that person who, when asked, "Tell me about yourself," led with my career. Not because I loved it so much, but because it was what I spent the majority of my time and effort on.

That's a priority problem, in my world. In my case, I truly believe that God has called me to be a wife and mother. Doing stuff to make money is great - and can be a huge blessing to my family. But I'm not led to career-mindedness in the way that I always assumed I was, and in fact, I'm a lot more entrepreneurial and multi-skilled than any particular career would allow for!

That's been a relief in a lot of ways - I always thought I was "doing it wrong" because I didn't feel more dedicated or passionate about my job. Now I know that I'm passionate about what I should be, and good at lots of things that financially help the family out without taking away attention from what's most important.

6. Massage therapy is a gift from heaven.

OK, this is kind of a silly one, but in the past year and a half, I've started getting regular massages, first to deal with some chronic pain issues and then simply to relax.

It has made a difference in my life that is hard to describe. I find I am more relaxed and pain-free, for sure, but I have become surprisingly more in tune with my own body. I know when something's wrong - like the kidney infection I spent much of the winter battling - because I have a higher awareness of my physical state.

It's also a great time to be quiet, to pray, to doze, to shut off my mind - a time that's just for me to be (almost) alone with my thoughts. Remember that introversion thing above? In a house with four people, five cats, a dog, a hamster and often various friends, it's rare for me to be alone in a room with peaceful music playing. But for an hour every few weeks, I am! WELL worth the price.

7. "If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" is more than just a saying.

My mood definitely has the power to affect my whole family. I'm the person that comes into the most contact with each other person, and I'm also pretty much the strongest or most assertive personality in our family.

And that means that when I'm in a bad mood, it is awfully contagious. And if I'm in a good mood, and practicing patience and grace, that is contagious too.

I know which I'd prefer!

8. I am DEFINITELY a night person.

Remember me saying we're night-owl homeschoolers? Well, I'd pretty much always thought I wasn't a morning person, but in the couple of years before we began homeschooling and I began working at home, I had almost convinced myself I could manage as one.

I have quickly learned that I'm at my best between about 7 and 11 p.m. If I have something that has to be done, that's when I should do it. Even while working at home, I've tried juggling different schedules to accommodate freelance clients across the country and around the world, and no matter how hard I try, I'm not nearly as effective until later in the day!

9. I can accomplish a lot in a day.

This was one of my biggest concerns about making my income primarily from freelancing - the number of balls I'd have to juggle over a short period of time. (Though I have to admit, working at a daily newspaper certainly did prepare me for that to a large extent!)

I'm a big fan of list-making, and I find that I get a big sense of accomplishment at how much I can check off my list in a day.

From working on six or seven different websites to getting the dishes and laundry done to practicing tae kwon do to juggling orthodontist appointments, I occasionally feel like Superwoman, and it feels pretty cool. (Most of the time!)

10. It's OK when I accomplish "nothing," too.

The very best days in our family usually aren't the ones with the list. They're the days where we're all together, free to do whatever, whenever. And I'm learning, every day, to stop worrying about the things I "should get done" and to think about the people I love and how I can be in the moment with them!

We're also linking up today to Top Ten Tuesday at Many Little Blessings. Whether you're sharing your Top 10 questions people ask you, or a Top Ten list on any other topic, I'd love for you to link up and to check out the other blogs that have, too! And don't forget to check out my previous Top Ten Tuesday posts, if you've missed them.

Learning (and having some serious fun) with MythBusters

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Sat, 04 May 2013 02:00:00 +0000

If you haven't figured it out by now, our "learning lifestyle" (and really, our overall lifestyle) is based around a variety of specific, passionate interests.

In the past year or so, Sarah has been fascinated by, to name a few things, robots, the Titanic, the Phantom of the Opera, cowboys and Indians, space travel, ancient history and mythology, alchemy, Minecraft and James Bond.

Her personality is such that she pursues these interests passionately. She doesn't play a little bit of Minecraft or read a few things about mythology. She wants to spend ALL her time on it. And as I've said before, the best part about homeschooling for us has been working with these interests rather than fighting against them.

Such is the case with Sarah's latest passion.

MythBusters.

We've picked up a free trial of Netflix streaming, and one thing I added to our queue, thinking Sarah might be interested in it (and I knew I certainly would be) was MythBusters.

I actually can't believe how much Sarah has gotten into this show. She's watched more than two dozen episodes in the past two weeks, and shows no signs of slowing down. (And I just told her tonight that the new season started this week; you'd have thought she won the lottery!)

Not only is Sarah having a great time watching Adam and Jamie, the show's stars, blow stuff up - and come on, that's a huge draw for me, too - she has learned an amazing amount. I think her physics knowledge now surpasses mine, though that's not hard to do!

So far, she's found out:

... about the famous Diet Coke and Mentos explosions, and the chemistry behind how they actually work.
... that spy cars that spill oil slicks or tacks behind them probably wouldn't really stop their pursuers.
... that you can swim in syrup almost as fast as you can in water (and why!)
... how an escape from Alcatraz (made famous in a Clint Eastwood movie) could feasibly have happened.
... about 8,000 ways to escape - or not escape - from prisons in general, a piece of knowledge I actually hope will NEVER come in handy!
... how driving tired and driving while tipsy are similar - and how dangerous both are.
... that you might be able to escape a car flipped over underwater.
... that yawning really is contagious!
... and a whole bunch more.

I love it that we're not afraid of "too much TV" in our house. We'd never have had this much fun or discovered this much (and that includes me, as I'm often watching with Sarah!) if we were working in opposition to her passion.

She's not a TV junkie by any means, but I love that we can have marathons of the things she's into!

What have you been watching - and learning from - lately?

iBlog: Or, all the things I wish I'd known when I started blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Thu, 02 May 2013 04:00:00 +0000

Starting this blog to document our family's homeschooling journey was as natural to me as breathing. I've blogged since about 2001, and I kept a "computer journal" even before that, back in the mid-1990s.

I've used more systems than I can name (remember Angelfire? Geocities? Lycos? You know, those things we had before WordPress and Blogger and Tumblr?)... and I've worked on sites that didn't even have a system, just a bunch of pages in Notepad that I'd edit HTML in by hand.

Disclosure: I was not paid as a contributor to iBlog, but I do receive a percentage of the $7.99 purchase price when anyone buys a copy using my trackable link. I am SUPER proud of the work everyone has done, though, so if you purchase using my link and you aren't satisfied with iBlog, let me know personally and I'll be glad to refund your FULL purchase price myself! I'm simply that sure you'll love it.

The great part about learning over time has been just that - I've learned so much! In fact, much of my work is now helped greatly by the fact that I know HTML, CSS and Javascript, which came entirely through trial and error.

Lots of trial. Lots of error.

Lots and lots and LOTS of error.

In the world of blogging, there are now more resources available than ever before. Blogger, WordPress, and dozens of smaller platforms. Sites with legitimate stock image resources beyond that sad guy with the jackhammer that announced "under construction" on every 1990s website.

Then there are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest... all great promotional tools, but all requiring their own set of best practices.

And don't get me started on - gasp - making money online!

With all these resources, it's hard to know where to start - or where to go next.

That's why I'm super-thrilled to have teamed up with 29 fellow longtime bloggers to create a practical, easy-to-understand way to get started with your blog and/or take it to the next level. It's all the things I wish I'd known when I started blogging!

iBlog: everything you need to know about blogging from 30 top bloggers

Our team has been hard at work on this guide for the past 3 or 4 months.

Our finished product, "iBlog: everything you need to know about blogging from 30 top bloggers," is a 391-page, 38-chapter eBook that will walk you through envisioning, creating, growing, marketing and monetizing your blog, step by step.

We just released it for purchase at iBlogTheBook.com, and I'm hoping that you'll consider $7.99 a more than worthwhile investment for what we've done!

What's included in iBlog

All you need to create a strong vision and mindset

Building a Vision for Your Blog
Finding Your Niche
Using Your Blog as a Ministry

Practical ways to fit your blog into your life

Blog Planning and Organization
Streamlining Your Research
Marriage and Blogging
Balancing Motherhood and Blogging
Balancing Homeschooling and Blogging
Time Saving Blog Tips

Nuts-and-bolts guides anyone can understand

Designing and Starting Your Blog on Wordpress
Designing and Starting Your Blog on Blogger
Disclosure and Privacy Policies
Basic SEO

Design and style help

Blog Design 101
Stock Image Tips (that's my chapter!!)
Blog Photography 101

Best practices for social media

Using Facebook to Grow Your Blog
Facebook Parties
Facebook Hops
Using Twitter to Grow Your Blog
Using Pinterest to Grow Your Blog

Practical ways to grow and market your blog

Writing and Using an Elevator Pitch
Getting Your Blog Off the Ground
Building Your Brand
Building Community Through Your Blog
How to Get Subscribers
Guest Posting
Link‐ups, Hops, and Other Events
How to Create Your Own Printables
How to Write a Media Kit
Running a Group Blog
The Power of Attending a Blogging Conference

Revenue-producing tips that really work

Selling Your Own Products
Using Affiliate Marketing
How to Write a Product Review
Working as a Virtual Assistant

I admit, I'm pretty proud of this book - and I've learned several things myself while reading it! I'd love to know what you most struggle with about blogging in the comments below!

See the full iBlog table of contents and get your copy at iBlogTheBook.com!

A birthday celebration: Fleming. Ian Fleming.

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Wed, 01 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

Bond. James Bond.
Otto. Sarah Otto.

That's been our house for the past few months, as Sarah has pursued a new interest in James Bond, as evidenced by the growing collection of books and movies you see here.

But of even more interest to me (because, you know, I'm a words person) is the life of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, whose birthday would have been this month. I'm joining some of the other iHomeschool Network bloggers for a celebration of some noted May birthdays, and Fleming was my top pick!

All about Ian Fleming

If you ask Sarah about Ian Fleming, she can tell you what she considers the coolest fact about him: His middle name is Lancaster.

That's probably only going to make sense to you when you realize that our neighboring county to the east is... Lancaster County. We'd not to this point known anyone with that as a first or middle name, though, so that's what stood out!

Fleming was born May 28, 1908, in London, England, and died Aug. 12, 1964. He was as much a renaissance man as his famous character, dabbling in all SORTS of things.

In college, Fleming was an excellent track-and-field athlete.
After quitting school while pursuing higher education, Fleming became a journalist for the Reuters news service.
He was known to be good at languages, including Russian.
He dabbled in banking and stockbrokering at the insistence of his family.
Fleming served in the British Naval Intelligence during World War II.
He worked for the London Times newspaper for many years.
And, like his character, Fleming was known as quite a ladies' man (and a rather heavy drinker and smoker).

Another interesting tidbit: Fleming's vacation home in Jamaica, where he wrote many of the the Bond novels? He had named it Goldeneye, which although iconic in the Bond film collection, was not ever a Bond book title!

All about James Bond

Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, was completed in 1952 and published the next year. Between that time and Fleming's death in 1964, he wrote 14 James Bond books, two of which were published posthumously.

So, why Bond? This video shows Ian Fleming on camera, talking about how the name for his hero came to be.

When Fleming died, he was only 56 years old and had only been able to see a handful of the movies made from his character and his stories. In fact, the latest James Bond actor, Daniel Craig, wasn't even born until 1968!

Beyond Bond

I certainly didn't know that Ian Fleming had done much of lingering renown beyond the James Bond series. Even my movie- and book-loving husband couldn't come up with anything else.

But guess what I found out?

Fleming was also the creator of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which he wrote as a children's story for his son, Casper, shortly before his death! You can read more about that story on the official Ian Fleming website here.

Ideas for discussion

If you think your kids would probably love the action of James Bond but you're concerned about the more adult themes, like violence, sex and drinking, definitely consider pre-screening the movies (and the books!) in advance.

But don't write them off - there are a ton of great topics for discussion from both Ian Fleming's novels and the Bond movies.

We've had great conversations on many of the following:

Geographic locations. James Bond is a world traveler! With either the books or the movies or both, keeping a travel log and finding the places he visits on a globe or map, then learning more about them, is a great way to explore the world.
Time-period culture. Sarah has watched both some of the oldest Bond films, like Goldfinger, as well as the newest, Skyfall, and it's fascinating to see how some things have become more acceptable, but others less. (And the clothes, cars and furniture make for interesting side conversations, too!)
Moral issues. Sarah gets that "real-life" good guys don't go around doing certain things with a girl in every town. She's also bright enough to pick up on the plot device that the girls provide - and we've even talked about the evolution of women in film! We've also talked about Bond's drinking, and again, how that becomes a plot point in the stories.
Governmental regulation. In Skyfall especially, but as we've dug deeper, we've seen this in other movies and books too - the question of "What is the government's role in our lives?" We've also been watching the Mission Impossible franchise, and the same question arises: Do we want the government to keep us safe? What is it OK - and not OK - for them to do? These have been some fascinating conversations!

Join the birthday party

If you're interested, there are many more cool "May birthday" lessons from my fellow iHomeschool Network bloggers. Click the image below to check them out!

And thanks for stopping by to help me wish Ian Fleming a (posthumous) happy birthday in thanks for all the fun times he's brought our family!

In which we become the owners of a VERY large map and an elephant

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:45:00 +0000

You know, when most people go to used book sales, they buy books. Books, which even en masse, are fairly small in size.

We seem to have... other ideas.

You might remember that last year, we went to our homeschool association's curriculum fair and came home with a gigantic blank timeline.

Or, at the time I thought it was gigantic.

I've since changed my perspective after going to the "we're closing the library" sale at our church and having Sarah, who wasn't super-interested in most of the books or CDs there, spot something fairly ginormous leaning in a corner.

"Is THAT for sale?" she asked Emily, the woman from the church office helping organize the sale. Emily wasn't sure, but she said she'd put our name on it as interested, and someone would let us know.

The "that" in question?

Yes, that's a six-foot by four-foot National Geographic map of the world mounted on foamboard.

And yes, that's Sarah sitting with it in the church lobby, where, after finding out yesterday that it was ours for the taking, we waited for a bit after the service until our friend Dustin could come by in his pickup truck to haul it home. (After, of course, we tried several unsuccessful ways to get it into our car!)

This thing is HUGE.

So when we got it home, we couldn't even begin to figure out where to go with it. We didn't have a place that was both big enough to fit AND prominent enough to suit Sarah.

That is, until I said, "Uh, Sarah, what if I try to put it on the wall along your bed?"

That was a huge undertaking, especially since it's pretty hard to hang ANYTHING on our not-super-well-built walls, but we made it work, and here it is in all its glory! (Some of you have seen a snapshot of this on our Facebook page already; now you know "the rest of the story.")

I should do a post in the future on Sarah's entire room. It's small, and tucked into the eaves of the house, so we get very creative with space. (As you'll see in some of the pictures, there's a table at the foot of the bed with Legos, and you can just glimpse a painting of Sarah's hung on the eave at an angle over her head; let's hope I attached it well enough!)

Meanwhile, Sarah also received her birthday gift from good friends of ours who had been carrying it around for a while. Meet her new elephant (not life-sized, but still pretty big!)

Best part? When we went up to bed last night, Sarah and I spent easily 45 minutes sitting on her bed, examining the map, the countries, the capitals, the time zones and more. We found places where movies were set, places we wanted to visit, places whose capitals we'd heard of, places with funny names, places where our virtual friends are living, places where some of our favorite books and historical events took place, and more.

And that's when Sarah found the perfect name for her new elephant.

He's Cairo.

And we're glad he's found a home in the shadow of the Great Map.

Living-room yoga at midnight

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Ah, the perks of being a night owl... and of using video games as a big way to get our exercise!

Yes, I'm talking about last night, when I decided to get out the Wii Fit after a stunning hiatus from it. (In fact, it TELLS you how long it's been since you last let the virtual scale tell you your not-so-great weight, and I was in the 400-some days range!)

I was going for a half-hour of activity, which I did by doing some step aerobics, some balance exercises and a few other things. One of the last games I chose was "Island Cycling," in which, essentially, you move your feet up and down alternatingly and use the remote in your hands to "steer" your bicycle. This is not only harder than it sounds, it's terribly silly-looking to anyone watching you, but it's fun anyway.

Well, Island Cycling is one of Sarah's favorite of the Wii Fit games. She hasn't played it for probably several months, but all it took was me doing it for her to say, "Hey, when you're done with that, maybe can I do it?"

And she did. I'd only cycled for about 10 minutes as a mini-game, but she did it for a half-hour... and then decided she wanted to do 45 minutes total, so she tried meditation, ski-jumping, and yoga to make up the rest of the time.

She is GOOD at yoga - really good! (She's very flexible and thin, and her balance is pretty great.) I'd love to see her do it with a real trainer, but I don't think she's at a point where she'd enjoy that, so for now, Wii yoga is awesome!

Yes, these pictures are of some of our stretching and yoga at midnight.

For those of you who are real practitioners, first let me say that we DO have a real yoga mat, though Sarah wasn't interested in stopping to go get it. And while the pictures don't show it, she can do the leg-raise straight up, but I was taking the pictures as she was moving, and my camera isn't very precise!

Mostly, I just wanted to share this slice of our day with you. But I also want to point out that this is a great example of a concept that's a huge part of our unschooling life, called strewing.

My friend Aadel has a great series called The Art of Strewing that I'd love for you to check out for more info. The thing I want to get across is that I didn't ever say to Sarah, "Hey, we've all been a bit inactive lately, we should do some exercise." Blech! If my husband said that to me, I'd hit him; I wouldn't want to say it to anyone else.

Instead, I did something interesting, and Sarah got interested. I wouldn't have been disappointed if she didn't, but it sure was cool when she did!

Let's go back to the past, when the dinosaurs lived

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:47:00 +0000

One of Sarah's good friends, Nathan, gave her a Books-A-Million gift card for her birthday. She'd gotten PLENTY of books, and she had her eye on something else she really wanted: A Lego T-rex!

Tonight, she sat down and put him together, complete with claws and teeth. Then she said, "Mom, why don't you blog my T-rex?"

So... er... here we are! She says this guy's name is Tyran (pronounced "Tran"), a fairly obvious nickname.

She also found us some fun links if you're interested in learning more.

(We learned that the T-rex has about the same number of bones as a human, though it's MUCH bigger.)

Finally, just for fun, I dug up (see what I did there?) some photos from our trip last summer to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

We actually went there specifically because Sarah wanted to go see "Rexy" from the Night at the Museum movies, as well as lots of his prehistoric friends!

Doesn't everyone take their self-portrait in front of a stegosaurus?

Bonus tip from Sarah: "If you were ever to run into a T-rex, never, ever make it mad, and never, ever catch it during feeding time or when it's hungry." Rawr!

Our scrapbook: In which we become a family of vampire-pirates (sort of?)

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:28:00 +0000

I've been way too quiet here in recent weeks. Things are a little hectic on the home front - we just wrapped up Sarah's seventh-grade year with portfolio and evaluation; I'm dealing with some long-term health issues (nothing new, just annoyingly recurrent); and I'm also making some changes to my freelance work.

On top of all that, things are incredibly busy at Chris's full-time job (which is also my part-time job), and we're ALSO trying to build up our antique-mall bookstore.

Oh, and I finally built an official portfolio website for my freelance work, tied into the schedule changes coming up. So while we've been quiet, things haven't, you know, been quiet.

One thing that had been falling by the wayside a little bit was family fun. The just-being-silly, goofing-off-together, not-a-planned-event kind of fun.

So the other night, when Sarah decided she wanted to make pirate treasure...

We all jumped at the change to blow off some steam and just have some creative fun.

Some of us got in touch with our inner pirate.

Sometimes we were piratey with a dinosaur.

And some of us are just weird. With our crazy glasses and our jelly-bean-vampire look. Not naming names or anything.

The same weird person or people decided to create a "Wanted" poster for our wall, complete with slightly creepy-looking pirate.

And finally, we decided to use some of our Egyptian papyrus to make an authentic-looking pirate treasure map!

We ran around the house like crazy, "hiding" our treasure, searching for it, giving each other clues, trying NOT to give each other clues... and we had fun.

What fun stuff have you been up to lately?

Happy Easter: This month's snippets from unschooling

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 00:19:00 +0000

Yes!! Snippets from Unschooling is back as a linkup on ChristianUnschooling.com!

That's a great excuse to share some odds and ends of our past few weeks.

***

1. In our biggest news, we've officially finished documenting Sarah's seventh-grade year by state standards. Our portfolio is done, our 180-day requirement has been met and our meeting with the evaluator is scheduled for April 15!

I shared this news on the Our School at Home Facebook page last week, and mentioned that I'm hoping to write a post series in the coming weeks about Pennsylvania portfolios, including what the law says you have to include and how to make a portfolio work for unschoolers, living-books learners, unit study-ers and anyone else not dealing with a traditional curriculum. If that'd be helpful to you, please leave me a comment with any questions or suggestions you have!

***

2. Sarah's 4-H alpaca club completed their mandatory training on quality control in livestock food and medication. Our Extension educator, Linda, made it amazingly fun by drawing ridiculously bad pictures of alpacas on the whiteboard and also by showing us how to do subcutaneous and intramuscular shots by injecting blue-dyed water into a banana. It was both hilarious and amazingly informative!

***

3. We finished reading the longest and most complicated fiction book Sarah's ever read: The Alchemyst by Michael Scott, which I mentioned in our recent reading roundup.

Sarah had never been much into fiction, but these are actually so fact-packed that she loves them. In "fact," we've had to start discussing which parts of the story aren't true, because so many of the details are, which has led to some neat research quests.

***

4. Last fall, when I went to Colorado for work, I brought home a little kit of Japanese paper-roll art for Sarah. We finally put them together and made these guys:

These are from a line called Piperoid and they're all done without gluing or anything else messy - just paper! It was neat to see them go together, because when you see the pieces in tubes, they don't look at all like this.

***

5. Sarah's still Minecrafting up a storm, and in doing so, she's made friends across the country. It's amazing to me that we have dinner-table conversations about these friends and I can actually forget that they haven't met. They're definitely close. It's really cool (says the mom who has really found her own "tribe" online.)

She also tied for third place in a building competition on one of the servers she plays on. Pretty good for a fairly new player!

***

6. Some local homeschoolers invited us to join a behind-the-scenes tour of the new Dairy Queen in town.

It was pretty cool - and even more fun was when Sarah and four of her friends got to hang out and snack afterward, including one she hadn't seen in a couple years!

***

7. We're also doing a lot of Lego-ing. (Which is normal.) Sarah got the Ninjago golden dragon from my sister Carol and the Lego Minecraft set from my mom for her birthday, so those have been fun to build, and Chris and I took her to the huge Lego store at a mall about 2 hours from home as part of her birthday gift. There, she made 3 custom minifigures of her own!

The first two are part of a "James Bond" theme (matching another interest of Sarah's), and the last one is samurai-like! Our big goal is to make Sarah significantly more room to display her Lego collection here in the next couple months; we're looking to get some built-in shelving done in her room, and when we do, I'll be sure to share before-and-afters!

***

So that's a look at seven snippets from our unschooling life lately. What's going on in your world?

I'm also linking up today to the Weekly Wrap-Up and Look What We Did.

What we're reading: Birthday books and works in progress edition

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 02:58:00 +0000

Sarah's 13th birthday present from Chris and me consisted of two main parts - two days of travel experiences (some of which you can see here, and all of which I'll be writing about in future posts) - plus a shelf of books!

So what better time to do a What We're Reading post?

Here's a look at the books Sarah received:

The 2013 Guinness Book of World Records, which she's reading above (this was the "first pick" off the shelf!)
Guide to Tolkein's World: A Bestiary
The Secret History of Hobgoblins
The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology
The Name of This Book is Secret (the start of the Pseudonymous Bosch series)
National Geographic Tales of the Weird: Unbelievable True Stories
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever (from Sarah's grandma!)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel
The Lightning Thief (the start of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series)
The Fairy Tale Detectives (the first book in the Sisters Grimm series)
The Alchemyst (the first book in "The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel" series, which we'd actually been reading from the library for almost a month)
The Magician (the second book in the Flamel series, from Sarah's grandma as well!)

We arranged these on a shelf in her room, and hung a towel with pushpins to "veil" it. She had the grand opening, and was thrilled!

So here's the slightly itchy part (for me):

We currently have a HUGE number of books-in-progress. I'm not a many-books-at-a-time person. Maybe two; three if you're counting, say, something for a Bible study or online course or something. And since we normally read together, it's not like Sarah alone has a bunch of unfinished books; we all do!

Itchy.

Some of the others we're working through:

Life of Fred: Ice Cream (lest you think we've fallen off the Fred wagon, we actually got SO FAR with Fred that we kinda took a break; I couldn't afford to keep buying them at the rate of a Fred a month!)
Who Was King Tut?
Abraham Lincoln: From Pioneer to President
Chasing Lincoln's Killer
The World Almanac for Kids 2013 (at least this is meant to be a "browsing book," as Chris calls them, and not a read-through book!
About a dozen American Girl books - the Cecile and Marie-Grace series, the Addy series, the Kit series...
And still, our Alchemy: The Great Secret book picked up in Jim Thorpe last fall

So those are the "what we're reading primarily for Sarah" books. Then there are the "what I'm reading that Sarah is kind of auditing" books. Those include:

The Microbiology Coloring Book
The Healing Path (this is for a women's study group I'm part of at church, but I've ended up talking out a lot of the concepts with Sarah!)

And finally, on my own, I just finished a great book called Nobody Nowhere: The Remarkable Autobiography of an Autistic Girl, an amazing work by Donna Williams that was hugely eye-opening.

Chris is reading At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, which was a Christmas gift I'd gotten him. He's also working through Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is interesting because he thought of it after hearing much of the Nicholas Flamel fictionalized series by Michael Scott that we're reading with Sarah; they share many themes!

What a list... I feel like I need to declare "Book Completion Week" in the Otto household! (I really wouldn't do that. But I might think it!)

Especially since Sarah has some bookstore gift cards and cash to spend...

Happy 13th birthday, Sarah!

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 03:26:00 +0000

Last year at this time, I was celebrating Sarah's 12th birthday.

Now, we have a teenager.

Happy 13th birthday to our beautiful, special, awesome, "swag-having," amazing, kind, everything-there-is-that's-good daughter. I love you, Sarah Bear!!

These are just a few scenes from our recent adventures... and I have much more to share in the coming weeks on all of them. I know I've been quiet for a while, and it's been for good reason, but good stuff is coming.

(Also, you should clearly follow me on Instagram as MsSillyOtto to see lovely square photos more frequently.)

I'm linking up today to Collage Friday at Homegrown Learners.

We found a bird's nest!

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:01:00 +0000

Amid some really icky weather here in Pennsylvania, Sarah took advantage of a rare slightly warmer moment to go outside and ride her scooter.

While doing it, she discovered a bird's nest laying in our side yard. My husband says it's been there for at least six weeks, probably knocked or blown out of a tree during one of many winter storms.

Sarah thought it was neat to see all the different materials the birds used to make their home, and Chris took her picture with her "find!"

Today, it snowed. Ick! I remember that for one of Sarah's birthdays, we sat outside and had a magician's show on our lawn. I somehow doubt that THIS March 24, her 13th birthday, will be even close to warm enough for that, but here's to hoping!

Knowledge 'beautifies and adorns the soul'

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:30:00 +0000

Welcome to my next installment as part of the iHomeschool Network's new series called Quotable Wisdom.

Each Tuesday, we're all posting thoughts from topics or authors of interest. I'm sharing quotes from famous mathematicians and scientists for your pinning and Facebooking pleasure, but my biggest goal is that I hope something will spark you or your family to dig deeper into a particular area or a particular person's life.

Sarah picked our quotable person this week as the "part two" of last week's quote. Like Nicholas Flamel last week, today's author - Queen Elizabeth's personal mathematician, physician, astronomer and spy (and even the original "007") - is the subject of some factual reading we've been doing - as well as our new favorite fiction series by Michael Scott.

There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart) which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences.
~ Dr. John Dee

Learn more about Dee

John Dee on Wikipedia
Britannica's entry on Dr. John Dee
Check out Random House's fictionalized young-adult series casting Dee as the villain (complete with a surprisingly high number of factual references to early chemists and alchemists and to the documented mythologies of several cultures)

More awesome quotes

Things that kids and parents should know about 'Skyfall'

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:37:00 +0000

We've been watching a LOT of movies this year. It's been a great way to visualize some of the things we've been interested in studying, and it's also been a jumping-off point into new interests.

Sarah's latest fascination?

Bond. James Bond.

Specifically, we've watched two Bond films so far, with more to come. First, we watched Goldfinger, and more recently, we gave in and rented Skyfall. We talked to Sarah in advance and said, "You know, these aren't exactly designed for almost-13-year-olds. They're kind of grown-up movies." And she gets that.

In fact, she gets it so well that she sat down the other night and decided to write out Things that kids and parents should know about 'Skyfall', along with some other related notes. I do have to give a spoiler warning, but I think it's worth the spoilers to see her (pretty intuitive) take!

Here's what Sarah says:

1. There are bad words. They do swear. It brings the meaning to the movie, I understand that, but they do it a little more than necessary, I think. I would say that the movie is for mature 12-year-olds, and teenagers and adults. If you are younger than 12, do not watch the movie.

2. There is a lot of romance in it. I mean A LOT of romance in it, because James Bond is a ladies’ guy, so there’s a lot of Bond girls in it. And also sometimes the girls die.

3. I would also say that there is a lot of killing and a lot of guns, and the use of alcohol. I don’t think he [Bond] has that much, though. Sometimes just a glass, sometimes it’s just that he orders a glass and he doesn’t drink.

4. At the beginning of Skyfall, when he gets shot and lives his happy, so-called “Dead Life,” he has a drink because he had a bad day. I can understand that. Because it starts out where his teammate is trying to help him, but she has to take a risk.

5. Q almost got James in trouble, because they were doing something they were not supposed to, to lure the bad guy to them.

6. In the one part of Skyfall, the bad guy, Silva, when he’s sitting in the cage, he pulls out his teeth, because he burned the inside of his mouth earlier in his life. You don’t see it coming and then all the sudden you see him putting his hand in his mouth and you’re like, “What on earth?” (I wonder how they did that part. He couldn’t have worn fake teeth like you can get at the store with other fake teeth over that.) [Note from Dad: I think it was special computer effects.]

7. My favorite part in the movie (this part was also shown in the trailer) is when he [Bond] uses the machine to make the hole in the train, and then he jumps over it and then he lands in the train. Because the bad guy was trying to disconnect the parts.

8. Kids might be sad when the bad guy shoots innocent people when he escapes. That part is really sad, because I don’t think that guy did anything wrong.

9. James Bond’s job for MI6 is to be a spy, but he has a so-called license to kill. To me, I think the more violence gives it [the movie] more action, and for people to see the point of James Bond’s job, as a British secret service agent. I think it would be nicer if there wasn’t so much violence in the movies, but with James Bond you kind of have to understand that the whole point of James Bond is action.

10. To me, Goldfinger, yes, it was a good James Bond movie. But I didn't think I really saw the purpose of James Bond's job in that one as well. I saw that purpose that he was going after Goldfinger, but not all the action in between that, like in Skyfall. I didn't see that in Goldfinger. All I saw was music and then it went right onto the movie. There was action in it [Goldfinger], but Skyfall was a longer movie and it had the part in the beginning, and then it went on to the actual movie. Talking is important, but I think to me the movie [Goldfinger] was mostly talking.

11. There is kind of a plot twist in Skyfall - the part where he has to train again to be an agent. And his “Mom” (M) lies to him and says he passes when he didn't, because he wasn't ready. The part that M lied to him was actually funny, a little bit. But it was also kind of sad, too, because she lied to him and she also made him mad by telling his teammate to take a shot at him.

12. Skyfall blows up, but James Bond says, “I didn’t really like this place anyway.” I think that part has the most action, because, yes, it is very scary, because there is a lot of TNT going on in there, like dynamite they throw in the windows and all. That part is scary because Silva is throwing the dynamite into the windows. James Bond is trying to kill him at the same time without dying. That part can get a little bit confusing, if you’re not completely paying attention.

13. James Bond movies have a lot more action than Indiana Jones. I would say Skywall is tied with the Crystal Skull for most action. I think James Bond movies have more girls for James Bond to love than Indiana Jones. I like Harrison Ford. I like how he does Indiana Jones, and he’s a really good actor and he’s the right one for it. I think Daniel Craig is the best James Bond I’ve seen, since I’ve only seen two movies.

14. This is my ranking of some action movies that I have seen.

Skyfall
The Avengers
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Goldfinger
Raiders of the Lost Ark
(tie) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, AND Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

So there you have Sarah's thoughts on James Bond, and his appropriateness (or not) for kids!

At the bookstore the other day, Sarah picked up something else to add to her Bond fascination: a copy of James Bond FAQ - All That's Left to Know About Everyone's Favorite Superspy, by Tom Demichael. It's not a kids' book - but she's gamely working her way through the background about Ian Fleming and the origin of Bond. (Did you know, by the way, that Fleming's middle name was Lancaster - the name of our neighboring county? Now we do!)

Any recommendations for us on which Bond film to watch next?

Nicholas Flamel's timeless advice: Wait, look, observe

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:30:00 +0000

Sarah picked our quotable person again this week. This scrivener, scientist and manuscript-seller who was born in the 1300s is the subject of some factual reading we've been doing - as well as our new favorite fiction series by Michael Scott.

Today's quote is especially pertinent given the mixed histories that surround its author - some true, some completely an invention of later writers. Some sources label him an alchemist in the early-chemistry tradition, some as more of an occult magician, and others as an almost immortal demigod. In truth, he was a married, devoutly Catholic man who committed the heresy in his time of knowing how to read and write! (Yikes.) Our readings have been a great way for Sarah to learn how to separate literary fiction from historical fact!

You must learn to question everything. To wait before moving, to look before stepping, and to observe everything.
~ Nicholas Flamel

Learn more about Flamel

Nicolas (Nicholas) Flamel on Wikipedia
Think you've heard of Flamel in another context? From the National Library of Medicine, read more about some of the reality behind Harry Potter, including Flamel
Check out Random House's fictionalized young-adult series based on Flamel (complete with a surprisingly high number of factual references to early chemists and alchemists and to the documented mythologies of several cultures)

More awesome quotes

Mom learns, too: Done with astrobiology, on to microbiology

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:57:00 +0000

Remember last month when I said unschooling really isn't about what Sarah is learning?

Since then, I've finished my astrobiology course through free online learning provider Coursera. (I even finished "with honors!") I've also signed up for several coming Coursera classes, but the next one - Gamification - doesn't start until April.

So I wanted to have something to work on in the meantime. Now that I'm rolling with the idea of devoting some of my time each week to tackling a learning project, I wanted to keep up the momentum.

Enter The Microbiology Coloring Book. Yes, I bought this for myself using some Amazon credit I'd earned through Swagbucks. Yes, I'm a dork.

But I'm a dork who likes to color and who's using that to learn about how anthrax got its name, what the first bacterium to be isolated was, how the earliest microscopes worked, and more.

And, in an awesome learning "coincidence," I got to learn more about the experiments that disproved the idea of spontaneous generation, which was a common but erroneous belief in the 1700s and earlier. This was cool, because it was actually something we talked heavily about in the astrobiology class!

I've set a goal for myself to do about five "plates," or coloring/reading sets, a week. If I did that consistently, it'd take me 21 weeks to finish the book. I may take a break during my other Coursera courses, depending on my schedule, but it's nice to have this to fill my time in a way that's a little more productive than playing Level 33 of Candy Crush Saga for the 873rd time.

By doing things like this book and the online courses, my goal isn't to become a master in these subjects. In fact, most of this microbiology work should be a review of my high-school-level biology course. But it's interesting; it'll refresh my memory before the epidemiology courses I signed up for this fall; and it's given me a chance already to talk to Sarah about some neat concepts.

What are you learning this week?

Many thanks to Flickr user John Williams for the base photo that's part of our the "Mom learns, too" logo, and to Karen Lee of A Radical Path for sharing the brilliant reminder to be interested and be interesting!

Nicolaus Copernicus offers wisdom about wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:36:00 +0000

I'm back (belatedly, today - LONG office day!) with the next installment as part of the iHomeschool Network's new series called Quotable Wisdom.

Each Tuesday, we're all posting thoughts from topics or authors of interest. I'm sharing quotes from famous mathematicians and scientists for your pinning and Facebooking pleasure, but my biggest goal is that I hope something will spark you or your family to dig deeper into a particular area or a particular person's life.

This week, our quotable person comes at Sarah's request. It was actually this famous astronomer, jurist and physician's 540th birthday LAST week on quote day, but since I'd planned in advance, I wasn't able to adapt on the fly! And, of course, she found out about this via the Google Doodle in his honor.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
~ Nicolaus Copernicus

Learn more about Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus on Wikipedia
Read about the Copernicus Google Doodle
The Nicolaus Copernicus Thorunensis project (a project organized by Copernicus' childhood town of Torun, Poland)

More awesome quotes

What's it like to homeschool as a night owl?

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:25:00 +0000

So... it's 10:24 p.m. and I'm sitting down to write this blog post. In fact, I'm sitting down to do a bunch of tasks, of which this post is an early entry on the list.

I have always been a night person. In high school, it wasn't uncommon for me to be up until 2 or 3 a.m., watching movies with friends in my living room, then rolling out half-functional at 7:30 a.m. in my neighbor's truck, headed for school and downing enough iced tea to get me coherent along the way.

During my worst semesters of college, I worked a full-time job from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. or later. I'd come home, wake up Sarah, who was an infant, and hang out with her for a few hours before dozing off around 3 a.m., and heading back to school around 8:30 a.m. I was tired, but I got to see my girl!

I met my husband working on the night desk at our local newspaper. We were often the last pair standing - heading out the door around 2 or 3 a.m.

Sarah has always needed a lot of sleep. When she needed to be up for school at 7:30 a.m., she'd go to bed around 8 p.m. - and when middle school started and she needed to be up at 6:30 a.m., she was crashing at 8:30 p.m., barely having time to do more than cram in her homework and wolf down dinner after getting home. And let's not mention how Chris and I looked, walking her to the bus after (still) getting done work overnight.

So among all the other reasons that homeschooling sounded like the right fit for us, getting out of that cycle was a great bonus!

It's definitely been a huge relief for us to be able to adapt much more to our "night owl" schedule. At the same time, we've come face-to-face with a lot of misconceptions. Most are the same misconceptions I faced when I worked night shifts. And most come from people who know us, and know our schedule.

I can tell you that I've never been upset when someone we don't know calls us at 9 a.m. Yep, it wakes me up, but if you don't know otherwise, I accept that. Those are "business hours," and I'm fine with that.

I can also tell you that when people who KNOW us get upset when I don't answer my phone at 8:30 a.m., that's frustrating. When someone asks us what time is convenient to get together, and we say "any time between 1 p.m. and midnight," and they laugh and suggest an 11 a.m. lunch, that kind of hurts.

Sometimes, it's easy to want to be snappish. To want the world to operate on our schedule. That'd be awesome. (Museums open at midnight? YEAH!) But that's not actually my goal.

Really, what I'd love is simply to have "night-owldom" recognized as a legitimate and viable personality trait, the same as a preference for lima beans or hot weather - maybe not common, but totally OK.

We're not lazy when we're in bed at 10 a.m., just like you're not lazy when you go to bed at 9 p.m.
We're not antisocial when we opt out of 9 a.m. group trips, just like you're not antisocial if you don't join us for an 11:30 p.m. movie.
We don't find midnight science experiments at all unusual, just like you don't find 8 a.m. art projects at the breakfast table uncommon.
We're not hurting our daughter's chances at getting a "real job" someday. (This was probably the most hurtful comment I've received.) If Sarah wants to, she can and will get up. If she prefers, which she probably will, she'll get a job that has her starting at 5 or 10 p.m. Hey, it worked for me and for her dad! By the same token, we know that not everyone can work second or third shift, so if your kids are getting up at 7 a.m., that's fine too - just please, trust them to know their bodies and know the times they're most productive.

Most of all, please know that our night-owl family isn't judging your early-bird one. Maybe we're even a little jealous, because you get to go to museums fully conscious! (If we do that, we're only there 2 hours before they close!)

In return, though, let it be OK that we love nighttime. There's plenty of daylight - or starlight - for all of us.

And if you're a fellow night-owl homeschooler, feel free to share our nocturnal friend above. I'd love to start a tribe of "night-schoolers!"

Many thanks to Flickr user Michelle Wright for the base night-owl image!

Kicking off a fun new series: Quotes by great mathematicians and scientists

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

OK, the internet is good for a lot of things - more than cat videos and, yes, even more than having anything in the whole world shipped to my door via Amazon.

One of my favorite things? My Pinterest boards and Facebook page attest to it all the time - I love quotes. I especially love quotes formatted all pretty-like for sharing.

Starting this week, I'm joining with the ladies of the iHomeschool Network as part of a new series called Quotable Wisdom.

Each Tuesday, from now until whenever we run out of fun quotes, we're all posting thoughts from topics or authors of interest. I've decided to share quotes from famous mathematicians and scientists for your pinning and Facebooking pleasure, but my biggest goal is that I hope something will spark you or your family to dig deeper into a particular area or a particular person's life.

This week, I thought, where better to start than with a quote from one of my heroes about beginnings? This man was Christian, homeschooled, and a great mathematician, scientist and philosopher.

Things are always at their best in their beginning.
~ Blaise Pascal

Learn more about Pascal

More awesome quotes

We've got a family business!

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 02:55:00 +0000

Last week on Christian Unschooling, I shared a post called How We Fund Our Unschooling Life, where I talked about homeschooling as a working mom and specifically how Sarah fits into the work I do from home.

Well, since last week, we've done something crazy and cool. We've added a new family business to the mix!

We're now the proud owners of a space at a local antique mall. There, we'll be taking our formerly digital-only business into the bricks-and-mortar world, selling used books, ephemera, postcards and more under the name of Papergreat.

We've had, for several years, an online bookstore through Amazon where we've sold used books. And for the past two and a half years, my husband, Chris, has blogged about ephemera and old books at Papergreat. This is our chance to bring those efforts together - and get our feet wet in the realm of local selling, which we've only done intermittently until this point.

And it's our chance to truly have a family business, one that Sarah can be as involved in as the rest of us. Tonight, we started pricing and labeling our books. Sarah's job was to look up the book in our Amazon listings and tell us what we had it listed for; mine was to label it accordingly in pencil and update it in our inventory spreadsheet; and Chris's was to carry all the books and be the final price arbiter. We got about 100 of them done as a team! (And, as you can see in the photo with today's post, even Mitts the Cat helped. Less willingly.)

Tomorrow, we're hopefully going to start filling our space, and I'll be able to share photos. We officially open for business on March 1, so we'll have a busy couple of weeks ahead! Wish us luck...

Mom learns, too: How I've gone back to college (sort of) to study astrobiology

noreply@blogger.com (Joan Concilio Otto) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:56:00 +0000

Unschooling isn't just about what Sarah is learning.

One of my friends, Karen Lee of A Radical Path, was recently talking in an online group of radical unschoolers I'm part of, and she described the role of the parent in unschooling like this.

"Be interested (in her and what she is doing and loves and in bringing new, fresh opportunities to her but without expectation, and be interestING. Be someone who is interested in life and learning yourself, pursue your hobbies, look stuff up yourself because *you* want to know something, and just naturally share it with her as you would with someone else."

Can I just say what a HUGE impact Karen's message made on me? I've been kind of "blah" lately. I don't feel like doing anything, I'm not particularly energetic, and... yeah, I'm not particularly interestED or interestING.

So I'm kind of not shocked, when I think about it, that Sarah has also been kind of in an "uninterested" phase lately. It happens - and we're fine with that. But at the same time, I started thinking that I certainly wasn't doing anything to get myself out of my funk, and that one, I could certainly address!

So, meet Dr. Cockell.

Dr. Cockell, or Professor Charles, as I call him in my head, is an instructor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I signed up for a free five-week online course he's teaching through Coursera called Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.

And for the past three weekends, I've spend about two and a half hours split between Friday and Saturday nights watching his video lectures and taking quizzes.

I love it! I have often said that if perennial college student was a job option, I might take it. Not because I'm much into degrees (and boy am I NOT into student loans), but I love learning. What I don't love is learning what someone else tells me I need to learn, or being forced to pay ridiculous sums of money in the interest of supporting an institution, not the acquisition of information.

So for me, Coursera is great - its courses are free, but rigorous. You get a certificate of completion - but ONLY if you do well enough on any in-course quizzes, exams, or assignments, and only if they're done on time.

The interesting thing is, there are about 139,000 people taking this class with me. The discussion forums and Facebook group are actually too much to keep up with most of the time, and my fellow students range from gifted 12-year-olds to 70-year-old Ph.D.s and everyone in between, which makes it a MUCH more diverse experience than traditional college was for me.

So far, it's been great. I've actually decided to take some other courses via Coursera in the coming months - like Modern European Mysticism and Psychological Thought, and Fundamentals of Pharmacology - so I'm sure I'll be writing more about them.

The thing is, I really want to re-invigorate my own joy in learning. I truly believe that the best way to be a good learning role model for Sarah is to love it myself. That's the great thing my parents did for me, and I want to be able to do half as good of a job for my own daughter.

So I'm hoping to make this an occasional series - Mom learns, too. I hope you'll comment and share what YOU are interested in right now, and maybe we can spark some ideas for each other!

Many thanks to Flickr user John Williams for the base photo that's part of our the "Mom learns, too" logo, and again to Karen Lee of A Radical Path for sharing the brilliant reminder to be interested and be interesting!

Our School at Home

Our backyard wildlife-identifying adventures

10 "toys" that have lasted into Sarah's teenage years

1. Melissa & Doug 60-piece wood "blocks in a box" set

2. LEGO bricks

3. Imaginarium 200-piece wood block set

4. Webkinz

5. Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars

6. American Girl dolls

7. Build-a-Bear, Build-A-Leopard, Build-a-Whatever

8. Dollhouses and miniatures

9. Razor scooters

10. Footballs, soccer balls, baseballs and more

What do you do when you're a VERY behind scrapbooker?

My scrapbooking nightmare

Completed traditional scrapbooking projects

In-progress and not-yet-started scrapbooking projects

Easy digital scrapbooking with Shutterfly

Creating our Shutterfly hardcover photobook

Our finished Shutterfly photo book

The days that are anything but picture-perfect: When our unschooling is a hot mess

When the homeschooling isn't so hot

When the house and its people are a wreck

When the family is disconnected

But there is so much good here!

10 things I've learned about myself in the past year and a half

1. I'm not as much of a plan-aheader as I thought I was.

2. I LIKE learning.

3. I'm a gregarious introvert.

4. Working at home is hard work.

5. I am not my job.

6. Massage therapy is a gift from heaven.

7. "If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" is more than just a saying.

8. I am DEFINITELY a night person.

9. I can accomplish a lot in a day.

10. It's OK when I accomplish "nothing," too.

Learning (and having some serious fun) with MythBusters

MythBusters.

iBlog: Or, all the things I wish I'd known when I started blogging

iBlog: everything you need to know about blogging from 30 top bloggers

What's included in iBlog

A birthday celebration: Fleming. Ian Fleming.

All about Ian Fleming

All about James Bond

Beyond Bond

Read more about Ian Fleming (and James Bond)

Ideas for discussion

Join the birthday party

In which we become the owners of a VERY large map and an elephant

Living-room yoga at midnight

Let's go back to the past, when the dinosaurs lived

Our scrapbook: In which we become a family of vampire-pirates (sort of?)

Happy Easter: This month's snippets from unschooling

What we're reading: Birthday books and works in progress edition

Happy 13th birthday, Sarah!

We found a bird's nest!

Knowledge 'beautifies and adorns the soul'

Learn more about Dee

More awesome quotes

Things that kids and parents should know about 'Skyfall'

Bond. James Bond.

Nicholas Flamel's timeless advice: Wait, look, observe

Learn more about Flamel

More awesome quotes

Mom learns, too: Done with astrobiology, on to microbiology

Nicolaus Copernicus offers wisdom about wisdom

Learn more about Copernicus

More awesome quotes

What's it like to homeschool as a night owl?

Kicking off a fun new series: Quotes by great mathematicians and scientists

Learn more about Pascal

More awesome quotes

We've got a family business!

Mom learns, too: How I've gone back to college (sort of) to study astrobiology