It's beginning to look a lot like.....

Christmas! No, not really; or at least not in this house. We don't deck the halls until the 3rd or 4th Sunday of Advent. Seeing this pass Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent we won't decorate the house until Dec 11-18th. It however may end up being a bit later then that seeing the kids and I will be going to TX to visit my sister at Ft. Hood.

As many of my long time readers and friends know my sister was station in Iraq and during the course of her deployment her 3 (now 4 year old) son stayed with us part time. My nephew rotated homes on a 2 month rotation for the length of the deployment. 2 months here-2 months at my mom's house. My sister's deployment ended about month early due to an serious hand injury. In short 500lb fell unto her right hand causing serious damage -- damage that will take AT LEAST 1 year (if not more) to recover from.

She's been state side for little over a month now, perhaps 2 months. She was home for several weeks before my nephew was able to be transported down to TX to stay with her. My nephew has been in TX with his mom for about a month now. The kids are excited to be able to see Auntie and Little Man.

They are excited, but at the same time not thrilled with the idea of doing school work while in TX. My sister was not able to get block leave for when I'm going down; so she'll have to "work" Mon-Friday while I'm there. Seeing we will be on base the kids and I can't really do anything without her or my nephew with us; so I told them we'll do some school work while Auntie is working and Little Man is at school.

They aren't thrilled by it, but I had to reminded them that Daddy is taking nearly 2 week off over Christmas/New Years and we'll have NO School during that time. This is a first for us. Hubby has never had so much time off around Christmas/New Years. We have always done school minus the days that Hubby is home (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day; New Years Eve; New Years Day).

If I didn't make them do school while at Auntie's then it would mean they would have the whole month of December off and I couldn't just do that! I know many homeschooler do, but I can't do that. The more days off we have the harder it is for us to get into the grove again. So I really try to limit the number of days off.

Do you take days off during the month of December? Is your house beginning to look like Christmas? Do you celebrate Advent?

Who doesn't love a good deal?

Have you heard of nomorerack? I just heard about it this week via facebook.  They basically every day have new deals that are posted (noon est) time that stays live till 11:59 (est) time the next day. Unless they sell out of the deal. Many of the products they offer are 75-90% below retail price.  In addition to that they have what they are calling their INSANE deals.

Nomorerack insane deals show up on the homepage in a purple box and will have things like Kindle for $15. You never know when those deals will show up you would have to be able to visit the site often at various times through out the day to catch an INSANE deal. I haven't been able to catch an insane deal, but have heard about them after the fact.

Besides checking out the site at various times the best way to catch an INSANE deal is to register with the site that way if you happen to visit the site and see an insane deal you want you don't have to waist time registering. Registration is free. You have to register with the site in order to buy anything including the insane deals.  Just thought you would like to know.

Yard Work!

Seeing it's fall and we are having warm weather today, warmer then what is normal for this time of year, the kids and hubby did some yard work. It's 65 outside! Hubby let the kids take control of the leaf blower and needless to say they had a little bit to much fun with it this afternoon. I don't think any real 'work' was accomplished.

Their goal was to get the leafs to the backyard near the burn pit. However the leafs really didn't get any where. At first they were just blowing the leafs with the leaf blower....towards the back yard, but seeing there is only one blower and two children they decided to come up with this lovely but not every practical way to work together.

Web-Princess blowing leaves into the wheelbarrow. 

Yep, that's right they decided to blow the leafs into the wheelbarrow. Web-princess was able to get some leafs up into the wheelbarrow.

However after getting a few in she would try to blow more and end up blowing the leafs out of the wheelbarrow. Hubby decided to let them be and after an hour of doing this and getting nowhere they put away all the tools and told hubby they were done for today! HA-HA.

Hubby in his wisdom told the kids that was fine and thanked them for their help.  While the kids were playing working I told hubby that in a few minutes you should have them do the work for real. He said no, I'll just let them be today. Sometimes it's just better to see them have fun then worrying about if it's done "correctly".  We'll get the yard later. Besides I told Superstar I would play some yu-gi-oh with him and he's already been waiting long enough today for that. I rather do that with him then worry about the yard right now.

Thank-You Vets

Last Sunday coming home from church Superstar, my son, seen a sign that said "Thank-You Vets". In response to the sign he asked us "On what day do we honor veterinarians?". That made us chuckle. We explained to him that's NOT the type of VET the sign was talking about.  We explained who the vets are and shared with him that Daddy, my husband, is a vet.

In honor of my husband we did not have school work today.  Speaking of my husband my daughter, Web-princess, has a bit of my hubby's humor. Before leaving the house my hubby always tells the DOG to be good, no parties, don't eat the garbage, no girls can be over, etc. Well he does this only if everyone is leaving.

So this week while hubby was at work the kids and I were setting off to leave. My daughter told the DOG to be good, no parties, and no girls can be over especially POODLES!! I had the biggest belly laugh when she said that. I asked her why especially poodles. Her response was that they are especially "dangerous" with their fancy hair cuts, and "poofy" ankles.  I guess they are a temptation that male dog can't resist?

Happy Veteran's Day!

Spelling Power

Spelling Power. Have you heard of it? Have you used it? Do you like it? What are your thoughts of the program?  I was able to buy the book used along with the resource CD and quick start DVD. This is our second day of using it and so far so good.

The kids seem to enjoy it. Set up hasn't been to bad. We are still trying to get into the flow of it. I think things will move much smoother then they do now once we are use to the program.

Because of using this program I realized that my daughter doesn't use lower case letter or capital letters in the correct format. For example she'll right things like SEvEnTh. I've, also, noticed that certain letters like B, D, G, E, T are always written in the capital form. She did this before when working with spelling list, but I never really correct that, nor did I really pay attention to how often she did that. Spelling Power wants you to correct those kind of mistakes. So I've been correcting her. Luckily that doesn't bother her much. Hopefully it will stay that way.

We haven't done much "traditional" writing.  I've let my kids over the last few years do writing on the computer, because I wanted to build on their computer skills. However now I'm seeing that perhaps that wasn't the wisest thing seeing their true writing and penmanship skills have suffered.

Do any of you have any suggestions for workbooks and activities to improve writing and penmanship for OLDER children?