Lawanda over at Lovin’ Life has a great post about her family’s new schedule. Her hubby got on the ‘puter and drew up a schedule for the whole family so everyone knows what to do and when to do it. I love it! Mr. MG hasn’t created a schedule for me, so I use software called Homeschool Tracker Plus. It is just about the only way I can stay sane. (Well, sane for me, anyhow.)

I had tried at first to figure out Excel so I could plan curriculum for the year, and now I’m glad I gave it up after, oh, about ten minutes. (Most of which was spent clicking on random grids, crying, and calling my mom.) HST+ covers just about every planning task you can think of:

• Daily schedules
• School year calculator
• Agendas
• Teacher and student journals
• Areas to keep track of reading lists, memorization work, resources, attendance, grades, and about a million other things

For me, the real reason to love HST+ is the Lesson Planner. You can enter in lessons by subject and course and sequence it according to how many days of school you have to cover it. Then you click on the lesson plans and pop them into the assignment grid. The program lays them out in order and skips any days that you have marked weekend, holiday, or whatever. All assignments can be rescheduled, which is good for us because we can never seem to get everything done. Every Sunday night, I deal out the weekly assignments and print out a report to go in the Princess’ binder so she can see for herself the goals of each day. And each lesson plan is reusable, so years down the road I can use the same plans for the Bear and Moo.

You can print out reports for assignments, achievements, grades, credit hours, and lots of others. So if you live in a state that requires a lot of accountability to the school administration, you’re thirty seconds and print time from having a hard copy of the information in your hot little hand. I’m not there yet, but I imagine it would make organizing transcripts for college admission very easy, as well.

They have a free trial version on their site that is a great way to kick the tires and rev the engine. And if you go for the full version, you can sleep easy knowing that they offer free program updates for life. They are a great company with a fabulous product. How wonderful is that?

Such a stirring, inspiring instrument.

Today, I didn’t dress him up in a new outfit.

I didn’t pack him a lunch.

I didn’t load him up with a huge backpack full of tissue boxes, notebook paper, hand sanitizer, and crayons.

I didn’t lead him to a big room full of little people and a strange grownup. I didn’t kiss him goodbye and walk away fast so he wouldn’t see me cry.

Instead, today I curled up with him on my lap and read to him. He read to me. He discovered that he likes this strange thing called math. (If only to tick off his big sister.)

Today I hugged him closer because I didn’t have to say goodbye.

1. Denial and Isolation: NO. No, no, no! Summer is not over. I’m just going to sit here in my back yard and sip lemonade in the sun. There is no possible way that school starts on Monday.

2. Anger: Arg! The school area is a total pit! I can not get organized in this mess. That’s it. It’s all going in the recycling bin. Double arg!

3. Bargaining: Please, God. Isn’t there some way I can goof off all day and still have my children understand prepositions? Please?

4. Depression: Sigh. Now it’s totally too late to paint the hallway. And I never got the back fence weeded. So many things I never got the chance to do, and it’s all over.

5. Acceptance: Gosh, I love these kids. I love it when they climb all over me and pester me with questions. And we get to study the Eastern Hemisphere this year! And physiology! Oooh, that Eric Liddel biography looks good… Man, there’s a lot of good stuff here.

It’s going to be a great year.

Girls are not supposed to get attached to cars. Maybe it’s a function of our ovaries, I don’t know.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work in this case. We put our old ‘89 Toyota Corolla up for sale and it had multiple offers and sold within a couple of days. I had been the one to push for getting rid of it (we never drove it anymore and needed the driveway space) but it was a wrench to see it go.

It was our first car together. It was the car we moved north in. Mr. MG’s mom drove the baby Princess and me home from the birthing center in it. When Mr. MG had a long, 2-hours-each-way commute, he spent some serious time driving (and cursing rotten traffic) it. So many memories packed into a little sardine can of a car.

Can you believe I cried as I signed the title over? I couldn’t even look at the buyer or his teenage daughter he was buying it for. My sweet hubby handed me the cash and asked, “That make you feel better?” Not really.

Goodbye, little car.

In the upper reaches of the Pac Northwest it never gets really hot. In fact, when it hits 85 or so, I get really whiny and headachy. This summer, though, I have been waiting impatiently for some warm weather. It was so cold and wet this season that the strawberry season was three weeks late and we wore jackets to the beach at the beginning of this month.

How wonderful it is to have warm days at last! It won’t last long says the weatherman, so we took advantage of an afternoon in the low 80’s and ran in the sprinkler. And by “we” I mean my kidlets. Me in a swimsuit is too frightening to contemplate. For me and for the neighbors.

Moo didn’t like it at all at first. I had to get her interested in a game of fetch until she would retrieve the bubble bottle out of the spray.

As for the Bigs, they didn’t need any encouraging.

Only these kidlets could make me love the heat.

There are a lot of problems in the world. There is starvation, bloodshed, hunger and greed. There are tyrannical governments building power on the backs of their starving populace. The slave trade, genocide, and AIDS running rampant in Africa are all legitimate worries.

And parenting! Even when we shrink our focus that small, there are so many challenges. It can be a battle every single day to raise sane, healthy kids in a toxic culture. And I am in awe of parents of special needs kids and how they work and thrive in the face of autism, Downs Syndrome, and other developmental obstacles.

So when I read an article about coping with having a “gifted” child, my jaw drops to knee level. I’m sorry, but if you are driven to the brink of sanity and are praying to God to help you live through having a talented child who is briming with natural ability beyond their years… Get. A. Grip. Put on your big girl pants and take a deep breath. Have a look around and figure out how blessed you really are.

Thank you, and good night.

We are book people. That’s pretty common among homeschoolers, but for us it is a sickness. And the volumes are taking over the house!

It’s not that we don’t know about libraries – we do! And we go a lot. But, see, there’s this awful thing about libraries: you have to give the books back. Just when you have fallen in love and never want it to end, PING! the due date has come and you have to hand it over to someone else. Probably someone who will never love it the way you do. I pretty much use the library as a way to preview a book I’m iffy on, and for free movie rentals. The Princess is just as bad, and has a mental list of books she has had to relinquish so she can save her allowance for them. And the Bear has about a dozen that he rotates through with a couple of new ones thrown in to try. (His heart belongs to Larry the polar bear.)

With all the books of our own, we’ve run into a few problems. Storage is a biggie. We keep buying shelves and dang if they don’t keep getting full. Books are double-shelved and stacked sideways on top of their brothers. And even when they all have proper homes, it is hard to keep track of what we have. More than once I have gotten titles at library sales and book stores that I already had at home. Oops!

Storage may always be a problem, but the job of keeping track has officially been solved thanks to a program called Collectorz. They have versions for movie collections, music, even photos, but the book cataloging software has been a godsend. I’m telling you, if you have a lot of books, this is the way to keep track.

With a cheapo modified CueCat scanner (or a fancy cordless one, if you feel spendy…I didn’t) you don’t even have to enter most ISBNs by hand. And if the book has no ISBN you can enter it in by title, author, etc. The Collectorz software looks up the book’s information online and fills in the rest. You can search your database in tons of ways, keep track of who borrowed what, and even make up a wish list.

It took me over two weeks of nap times and an occasional evening, but I got it all in the computer. I even scanned in all of next years school books, and those were still boxed up. My next move will be to get the whole list on my Palm so I can have a current list with me when I’m out and about.

And now I can ebay all those duplicate books.

We headed to National Night Out. It’s not usually my kind of thing since having to interact with other people makes my kinda snippy, but Mr. MG was working a Navy booth so we said we’d come visit him and see the sights. He called while he was setting up and said there were lots of cool things for the kids to do and yummies to eat.

When we got there, he pointed out the rappelling wall. The Princess has wanted to try the Pinnacle at REI for a long time (it’s always closed when we go) so I figured, why not?

It was free, but of course we had paperwork to fill out. (“If we drop your child 30 feet and they go splat on the ground and spend the rest of their days steering their wheelchair with a straw, we are not liable. Sign here.”) And  then head to the line to wait our turn.

Did I mention it has actually gotten to be summer this week? It was way up in the high 70’s, maybe even low 80’s, which around here is next door to unbearable. I had Moo on my back in the big honkin’ Kelty pack, and the Bear was begging to be picked up. Sorry, bud.

Just as we got up to the front spot in the line the rock wall people had to halt operations for the helicopter search and rescue demonstration. Strangely enough, they have a thing against someones toddler being blown off the wall. I would have asked if that wasn’t what those harnesses and ropes thingies were for, but I was to busy thanking God for the breeze from the helo. It was hot and miserable and sweat was starting to trickle down the small of my back. And the baby on my back was trying to strangle me with my lanyard, cutting off all attempts at further speech.

It is a miracle of engineering that a huge hunk of metal can hover motionless in the sky while highly trained professionals skim down ropes and haul each other up in stretchers and such. Up, down, hover, woo-hoo. Can I just get my kid up the wall so I can leave and get an ice cream? I’m dyin’ here.

Fourty five minutes later, the Princess is let into the staging area to get her harness on. She has to get a loaner pair of climbing shoes on and laced up tight which takes another ten minutes.

At last! she is snapped in an ready to ascend. She looked up at the top, where there is a horn to honk to let everyone know you made it. She resolutely gripped her first handhold and began.

Three feet off the ground she said, “I don’t feel safe!” and came down. They gave her another shot and she made it six inches higher before saying she was done. An hour of my life in the sun, sweating, keeping the younger ones happy, and dealing with the rest of humanity in line…so that she could get about as high as if she had climbed your average step stool.

Sometimes it is really hard to be the grown up. Man, I was ticked. I think I grimly choked out something encouraging like, “I’m proud of you for trying it twice before you stopped.” and then stumbled toward the ice cream truck. But there are not enough overpriced Choco Tacos in the world for times like these.

By this time, it was time to head home to fix some kind of supper. With a single napkin that Mr. MG was able to scrounge up, I scraped off the grass, sweat, and shocking abounts of ice cream that the hooligans had covered themselves in while I was in my corner smoldering.

“I had a pretty good time!” the Princess chirped from the back seat of the van.

The Olympics get underway on Friday, and just in time The Teaching Company has two free lectures for download. Enjoy!

Ancient Origins of the Olympic Games