The Death of our Beloved Fish

Our fish is currently at this very moment dying a slow death. This is truly terrible as she has been sick for the last couple of days and our big vicious algae eater has sensed this weakness and is actually eating her alive as I type. My kids are horrified, I'm horrified, I'm sure the other fish in the tank is horrified but we have searched high and low and cannot find our fish net anywhere in this silly house. Now I would like to claim that I am some sort of wonderwoman supermom but in reality I'm a basket case when it comes to these things, definitely a little green in the face, so my brave, darling, animal loving, McKayla is using an old plastic tub to scoop 'Orangey' out and provide her  with a more fitting death via the good ol' porcelain sink (aka 'the toilet'). I still have not yet ascertained what plans she has for our nasty, cannibalistic, scum sucking algae eater named 'Tiger'.

Good Fish

Bad Fish

The Busyness

In this day and age everyone is just so busy. Some days it feels like you wake, fly through the day and count down the time until you get to go back to bed. Well at least that's what it has felt like in this house lately. The girls and I have been super busy getting back into the swing of things and finding a good pattern to our days. We haven't got it mastered yet, it still needs a little tweaking here and there, but overall I would say it's pretty consistent.

The Schoolroom - 3 weeks in!

7:00am - 8:00am - the girls wake up, climb into my bed and pester me until I finally get up...this usually takes at least an hour

8:00am - 9:00am - we scrounge around for breakfast, usually ending up with a bowl of cereal, although for the past three days we have been on a pancake binge and I have made regular pancakes, buttermilk pancakes and blueberry pancakes to the delight of the whole family (even the dog)

9:00am - 10:30am - now depending on what day of the week it is we either start our school day at home or at Grandma's while mom heads off to work for an hour

10:30am - 12:00 - by this time, one of us has had at least one meltdown (I wish I could say that it was only the children and never me) and we are in desperate need of lunch. Thankfully though by this time of the day we have usually managed to cover most of our core subjects: math, grammar, reading, spelling and Bible work.

The girls 'LOVE' toad in hole for lunch

12:00pm - 1:00pm - lunch, dishes, a good cry, laundry, sweeping, a bit of tidying up and then comes my favourite part of the day..............







1:00pm - 2:00pm - QUIET TIME! Except for Wednesdays when I work again for an hour in the afternoon, everyone in the house has an hour of quiet time in their rooms. I took this idea from 'The Well-Trained Mind' by Susan Wise Bauer and it has truly been amazing. The girls usually end up in one room listening to an audiobook, (currently they are working their way through the Chronicles of Narnia) while quietly playing lego or dolls. I usually start dinner, sit on Facebook catch up on some reading, or do some much needed chores, like washing the floor or giving the basement a good vacuum after the kids have been in the sensory bin.

2:00pm - 3:00pm - The girls come out of quiet time really revitalized and we are usually able to hit 2 more subjects. We cycle through science, geography, history and memory work or more intensive reading.

The makings of a volcano

Our volcano erupting!

Emerson proudly showing off the necklace she made

None of this is perfect...my schoolroom currently has more acrylic paint on the floor from a lapse in supervision (also known as a bathroom break), yellow peas (current sensory bin) are everywhere, as well as thousands of beads since the girls have been making bracelets and necklaces like crazy.

More acrylic paint on my carpet!

Just Another Manic Monday...except it's Tuesday

Based on last nights sick and crying children, today our 'schooling' looked like this:

'Watching' books on a Read-Along DVD

Looking through this old book of birds and writing down our favourite ones

We also baked this delicious dessert!



Plus we somehow managed to fit in a Bible story, do our devotions and each girl had a math lesson. Some days are better than others...not quite sure where this one falls.

The blueberry crumb cake recipe can be found at:

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2010/07/blueberry-crumb-cake/

Camping

The girls and I went camping on Friday night with some other lovely families from the homeschooling group we belong to. What a wonderful, crazy, difficult thing it is to camp with three young children for one night. Josh was quite busy working and umping a baseball tournament and despite my better judgement I decided to go ahead and camp without him.

One night worth of camping gear: minus the fishing rods and tackle box

We were sooo loaded up the girls could hardly move!

I really love the idea of camping. Setting up the tent, roasting hot dogs and marshmellows, singing campfire songs and visiting with friends. The reality is that I don't know anything about camping so I was very thankful for a dear friend helping me set up the tent, another friend who lent me the sticks for roasting, another friend who brought a much needed coffee on Saturday morning etc., etc....the list could go on and on of all the ways that I was thankful. However, even with all these fabulous people I have decided that camping really isn't for me. At all. Ever. Never again. End of Story.......I might change my mind in a year from now and only if Josh is available but I hope no one is holding their breath. (Because I'm not)

On a side note the girls had a GREAT time catching all sorts of critters; frogs, toads and snakes. In the end that made it worth all the effort...heartache...back pain...sleepless night...ok I'm done complaining (as McKayla reminds me of Phil. 2:14-15)

Back to School

So it's back to school again here in the Wall house. If you didn't already know, we are one of those 'weird' homeschooling families...okay so I don't really think we're 'weird' but for a lot of people homeschooling is a little out of the ordinary. On Monday Josh and I managed to clean up and reorganize the schoolroom/basement and get everything pretty much in order for the week.

School area - still have to empty the basket of books

 
Our first couple days getting back to the grindstone have been surprisingly fantastic. The two older girls have been working really hard and have been quite enthusiastic about getting back into a routine. Em, has proven to be a little bit of a challenge (no real surprise there) since she is very interested in doing exactly what the other girls are doing. However, we have come up with some fun ideas to keep her entertained and busy while we work on our core subjects. 




This salt sensory box has been a real lifesaver. Em has loved to mix and pour and generally make a gigantic mess all over the floor! We used coarse salt to fill it which has made it really easy to vacuum up at the end of the day.

Selling our Rooster!

Who knew...one of our 'laying hens' is actually a rooster. He is up for sale on kijiji.com....someone please buy him! Seriously best/fastest offer!

http://ontario.kijiji.ca/c-pets-livestock-for-sale-Rooster-W0QQAdIdZ309115310

...and then there were two...

We are down to two beloved chickens. We had to take the other four to the butcher so we would not have a repeat of 'dead chicken in backyard' scenario. All the children did really well with this although I was the one who got a little weepy, quite unexpectedly after Josh had left with them. The remaining chickens starting clucking and carrying on so loudly and in the end I had to put them back in their coop because it was only 7am and I really didn't want my neighbours complaining about our illegal chickens after I had promised up and down that they would never even know they were there! After about an hour they were fine and I could let them back out again but it was definitely a sad moment to think that they missed their sisters.

Also of note, the chickens have really grown and since we let them roam around most of the yard they have mastered jumping up onto the deck where they are able to have a free for all at eating my veggie planters, so I then moved the veggies up onto the patio table. Of course the ladies have now managed to find a way to jump from the patio chairs up to the table where they now freely poop on the table and finished eating all my green bean sprouts. Tomorrow morning will involve scrubbing of said table, chairs, and deck and we will have to work out a system to block off the deck. 

Oh and did I mention that they escaped yesterday??? Since it has finally dried up a bit in my backyard and the flood line has receded along the back fence I can now see that we missed placing a board in the far back corner where the fence doesn't quite meet the ground. The ladies decided that the grass looked greener on the other side and decided to go for a visit to Peter, my neighbour's, backyard. This resulted in McKayla and I chasing them around his backyard (after guiltily creeping in since he wasn't home) and trying to catch them. We succeeded and have since made the necessary adjustments to our ever evolving, changing, and slightly diminishing backyard.