Arts Week - Ending with a whimper

The whimper is mine because I think I scratched my cornea with glitter. My left eye is seriously hurting. I tried calling my optometrist, but he might be on vacation for the holidays. Grrrr. I have to wear my glasses now and my glasses, while sufficient for seeing in a "big picture" sort of a way, really lack the finesse of my contacts when it comes to fine vision. For example:
Without glasses or contacts - I can see a large grey object hurtling towards me. Is that an elephant or a car?
With glasses - I can see a large grey quadruped running towards me. Is that an elephant or a rhino?
With contacts - Who the hell put the roofie in my drink? There are no elephants or rhinos loose in the city!

So I think that it snowed last night. I mean, the ground is white. I'm not sure if it's still snowing. Damn glasses, but I will find out soon, because it is swimming lessons today, and while George unusually takes the kids, I volunteered because a) I don't work today, and b) he will be with them the rest of the day at the Christmas Pageant rehearsal. Update later. Gotta see if the rhino wants to drive today.

11:15pm
Kids are in bed, and I am back on the computer. I should be jogging, or knitting. There are always other things that I should be doing, but I noticed something this morning, and I just had to share. I now have 2 followers. Becky is #2!!! Two apostles, acolytes, disciples, minions...I need to turn off the thesaurus now. I'm planning a blowout for #100, so don't hesitate to sign up to follow!! (what, too ambitious?)

I am also getting a kick out of checking this blog and seeing what ads Google believes are appropriate to put in between things and in the margins. I did this thing where I signed up to have ads put on and they will send me some percentage of a penny for every time someone clicks on an ad.  I thought it would be funny to see what they came up with, and if I didn't like it, I'd just cancel the service. There are a few conditions to this "service" they provide. One condition is that I can't click on ads that appear on my own blog. I can't make money for myself, in other words. There is one problem. I WANT TO CLICK. I was talking about food the other day, and an ad showed up for a breakfast casserole. I LOVE BREAKFAST CASSEROLES. I could eat the Breakfast Pizza Mom used to make for three meals a day. I love quiche and strata, and all kinds of breakfasty goodness. AND I CAN'T CLICK! It's teasing me, I swear.

Ah well, back to dreaming of food and trying to make three more pairs of mittens and a scarf before next Saturday.

I GLITTER!

I am glittering like a Twilight Vampire!
Apparently Mod-Podge with sparkles really gets into your pores. It's a bit embarrassing. I don't even like Twilight after all.

"I blue myself."

Arts Week Day 4-Pancake Supper-1 Follower

 These are the ornaments that we have spent the past few days making. We have done other things like math, spelling, science and history, but I think that these ornaments will be remembered by all of us as way too much work tons of fun! I mean, they took TWO DAYS, and they are still not quite done. Most of the finish work will be mine, however, so we can do something that Mommy all of us consider fun tomorrow. I hope we can get out to the Art Institute, but that all depends on how I sleep. I've had some really awful insomnia lately and by the time I actually get to sleep, it's late. Or early. It kind of depends on which side of the clock you are used to waking up on.

I cooked pancakes for supper. It's kind of funny, but a friend of mine said "Oh, Breakfast for dinner," when I told her this, but that's not quite it. Breakfast for dinner in our house means "Pick a cereal, kid. I'm too tired to cook." Pancakes are actually me cooking. See--I stand in front of a stove, I cook. That makes this dinner. Not that I don't know how to cook. I can do almost anything except bake a good cake (they always stick.) I cook wonderful dinners with vegetables from the garden, marinated meats, homemade bread, pies for dessert (homemade too--I make a great crust.) But I don't always enjoy it. I'd rather spend my time knitting, or making ornaments, or something that I think is fun. Occasionally I feel obligated to cook, and then I'm grumpy for the rest of the day. George has learned to feed me wine with dinners I cook and he cleans up afterwards. Am I lucky or what? Someday I will cook an elaborate dinner just so that I can sit at the table afterwards with a glass of wine and watch him wash up. (I do this on Thanksgiving. It's one more thing for me to be thankful for...and George is so obliging.) Someday he will discover this blog and my fun will be over.

But pancakes...pancakes are a homemade dinner, and don't let anyone tell you differently! It's a bit more prep work than hot-dogs, but the payoff is so much sweeter.

And I have one "follower"!!! Thank you Gretchen. Eleven more to go and I'll draw even with Jesus. (No, wait, that was apostles. Want to be my apostle, Gretchen?)

Arts week day 3--or not

I don't know if I overslept or underslept today.
I'd say "overslept" because I didn't get up until after 1pm. (I try to be up by 11or so.) However, due to extenuating circumstances, I will say underslept because after I got home I had visitors...two visitors who kept me up. Cay likes to cuddle. I'm used to it but he was wound up and wanted to chat. I finally sent him back into his bed, but by that time I was wound up too. Then Hannah came in hunting kittens.  It was 6am! It's funny, but they don't understand why I'm cranky.

Thankfully George can run things without me most of the time. The kids had their spelling done and Hannah had done history (which is great as world history covers a lot of ground. Luckily, she likes the book.) Caleb is still doing carrying, but I don't think we'll start on borrowing until next week anyhow. Get the addition down, then confuse the issue with subtraction!

So arts today started late and didn't get far. We're painting ornaments. They might be done before Christmas...or not. Everything will be fine though, because I had nothing really planned for tomorrow. I thought we might bake cookies, but that won't be happening now...unless I get off early tonight, and I doubt that I will. I have riot training at the academy. Oh, they aren't calling it riot training. No. It's G8/NATO preparation training. And anyone who lives in a cave knows that having G8/NATO in any major city has always led to an excess of fun and dancing, and hand-holding. PDAs go WAAAAYYYY up because everyone is so happy and chillin'. . . .No wait. That's a rave. My mistake.

And I discovered that Hannah had an orthodontist appointment we forgot yesterday...grrrr.

Arts Week - Day 2

On the Banks of Plum Creek--Nellie gets suckered

The Mouse and the Motorcycle-Ralph Saves the Day

Esperanza Rising-The cabin & occupants

Runaway Ralph-Ralph on the road

  So today we had spelling, math and history. After that the kids decided to make dioramas of their favorite scenes from the books they recently read. The top two dioramas are from earlier this year (On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder made by Hannah, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary made by Caleb) Today they made new dioramas of the books we just finished. Caleb read Runaway Ralph (second in his series) and Hannah read Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz. There weren't the books that we were sent by the homeschool company, but I didn't feel like teaching the ones they sent. What's the use of a MA in Reading Education if you can't improvise? I'm glad we changed the books. Esperanza takes place in California during the depression and since we traveled to California, we had a lot to compare and talk about. Caleb loves the Ralph books, and I like them better than the basal reader we were sent. Nothing against the basal, but Caleb doesn't get much out of it.

We also had a great discussion comparing the books. Hannah decided upon reflection that Esperanza's life was tougher than Laura's simply because she didn't have a father and wasn't used to being poor. Caleb let me know that if he had to choose friends from the two books he read that he would rather have Keith than Garf. Garf was always making deals, and he didn't seem to be much of a friend if there was nothing in it for him.

Not bad for an art day. And the dioramas were great. Hannah's isn't quite finished. She wants to put some pictures on the wall like Isabelle did in Esperanza Rising. I'm glad she remembered, because I sure didn't.

Arts week- Day 1

The pleased artists

snowflakes

Stars

So, the creative well has been a bit dry lately...I have been tired like crap for one thing. I decided that this week would be arts week at school since one of the reasons I wanted to homeschool was the lack of arts. Well, today our little crafty beavers have been busy at work making stars and snowflakes. The stars were so easy that I just cut up the paper and let them go to town. The snowflakes required a bit more supervision. I'm going to try to attach some photos. I should be able to do this from my phone, but it's not quite working out yet. How can a smart phone be so dumb?! (maybe an uneducated user....nah.)

I guess that this is step one in pulling myself together: staying busy! (or maybe that's step one in avoidance of thinking of anything too deep.)

Becky stopped by today. We have to do lunch.

Sooo far behind

It's true. I am. I keep getting distracted. I want to make cookies! Decorate the house! Put up a tree! Light the lights!
I'm lucky that I can make dinner, clean the house, keep the garden from looking like crap and pay the electric bill. Oh well. Reach for the stars, I suppose.