Introducing Butterscotch

Here he is! Mr. Butterscotch, our new kitty. We adopted him yesterday at Petsmart. He's probably about 5 yrs old and was rescued from the Clare County Animal Shelter, after being turned in there because some really nice person moved away from their home and left him behind to fend for himself. Isn't that just sad??? He's a really nice, soft, fuzzy kitty. Spends most of his time sleeping but he's using his litter box well and eating well and he comes out and hangs out with us sometimes too. My kind of pet...at this rate I won't be tripping over him, ROFL. He tolerates the kids dragging him around. They picked out a kitty play structure for him and put it together themselves and he pleased them by spending a good portion of the afternoon napping in it before he disappeared back to DS5's bed to sleep.

I'm So Happy...

I'm so happy...I'm so happy and...can you hum that tune? That's cuz one of my dearest friends, A Little Slice of Heaven just emailed me that they've made the decision to us Sonlight Core 5 for their boys. Wow, I'm just so excited :-) We'll be using the same curric, and the exact same materials, for our kids. How fun will that be???? Course, we're too far away to get together and combine learning, but we can sure email back and forth and chat, and our kids like to talk to one another on the phone as well so now they'll have one more thing in common. I'm jumping for joy here :-)

Birthday MeMe

From Elanajane's blog
1. Go to Wikipedia and type in your Birthday Month and day only November 24
2. List 3 Events that occurred that day
1859 - Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species
1863 - American Civil War: Battle of Lookout Mountain - Near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant
capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city led by General Braxton Bragg.
1917 - Nine police officers and one civilian are killed when the Milwaukee, WI police headquarters building explodes due to a bomb
3. List 2 important Birth days
1868 - Scott Joplin, Ragtime Composer (d. 1917) (exactly 100 years before my birth!)
1690 - Charles Theodore Pachelbel, German composer (d. 1750)
1787 - Franz Xaver Gruber, Austrian organist (d. 1863) (composed Silent Night)
4. List 1 Death
1963 - Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of John F. Kennedy (b. 1939)
5. List a Holiday or Observance. (if any)
Well of course--Thanksgiving :-) Once every 7 years or so, I'm a Turkey Baby :-)
And then, well, I just can't resist the irony--it's Teacher's Day in Turkey!
6. Tag 5 other bloggers --Consider yourself tagged if you've read this!

We're going batty!

Tuesday we had an "up close and personal" nature lesson. DS5 wanted to do his school outdoors since the sun had actually decided to appear for a change, so he and I put our chairs out under the "school tree." I went back in the house to get something, when all of a sudden, DD9 came in hollering that I needed to get out and see her chair RIGHT NOW! I went out, and there was a bat snoozing on her chair. It had crawled into the chair, inside its canvas storage bag, and when she opened the chair, she discovered our little fuzzy friend. So we had a wonderful close-up look at him, and then carefully folded the chair and carried it back to the porch so as to not disturb the bat boudoir. Oh, and we didn't tell daddy! He'd have probably come out and whacked our furry little mosquito-eating friend ;-)

I've got the proof!

I know you've wondered what happens when you kiss a frog. Well, I've got the proof--you need wonder no longer.

OK, I succumb

My children have been begging for a pet. Apparently the fish that they begged for aren't good enough. I think they are. They come when they're called. They don't make messes in the house. They love me very much, as evidenced by their wriggling frantically every time I walk past the fishtank, LOL. But that doesn't matter to children, I guess.

So we are about to embark on the adventure of pet ownership again. We are going to adopt a kitty. Or two, if the children have their way! I do like that PetSmart helps cats and dogs find new homes, so that's where we'll be doing it thru. So now we have to go there at least once a week to see if there's a cat (or cats) that we like yet. They have a pet adoption weekend the first weekend in May, and I've talked to the cat lady already, and she says she'll have lots of cats there then, including kittens. The good thing is, all of the cats are already neutered and up-to-date on their shots and stuff, and the price is definitely MUCH less than if we were to procure free kittens from my dad's friend and then have to take them to the vet to get that stuff done (YIKES!!!)

Will post feline pictures and updates when the grand adoption happens. I'm already, a little bit, getting anxious. I think it's going to be fun .

The new kindergartner on the block!

DS5 started kindergarten yesterday. Now mind you, along with pre-K he did kindy lang arts, and maths already into 1st grade...we just haven't told him of his asynchronies for fear of his getting a big head or some such awful thing ;-) Anyway, he's not "officially" a kindergartner. He has been quick to tell anyone that listens that pre-K was "boring for a 5 year old" ROFL. (If you don't know, we're using Sonlight curriculum.) So on our first day, we started with Bible stories and a new memory verse, then we read a story about Martin Luther for history, put timeline figures of Adam & Eve, and Martin Luther, into the brand new timeline book, wrote the dates into our new create-a-calendar and put a few important stickers on some days, talked about the water cycle and rainbows for science and did a worksheet related to those themes, did a page of multiplication in Miquon and explored numbers between 10 and 20 in Singapore, he read to me his first story from the I Can Read It book, he wrote a simple sentence for dictation, did the first two pages of ETC, played the "jumping capital frogs" game in his HWT book, and we read chapter 1 of The Boxcar Children. I think that was all, LOL. He says it was fun...I thought it was fun...maybe revisiting kindergarten won't be so bad after all, says the mom who sometimes dislikes doing the same thing twice in a row, hee hee.

Random musings on life and death

Personal actions that cause life to cease
The 911 system springs to action
For once, early CPR and field interventions are effective
Life once again exists
Victory, but with a hollow ring
Doctor's advice is ignored
And for what?
To go back to what caused life to cease in the first place?
Such a sting, to those who should feel triumphant over a job well-done, when such triumphs are rare
Where are the thanks?