From Florida with Love!

We are doing well here in the land of Sunshine. The kids have gotten slightly pink, even with me reapplying sunscreen often and they have had their ice cream at least once a day since arriving. My favorite is a Pineapple/Orange twist... fat free too!

We have discovered a few interesting things such as:

There is a Bald Eagle that sometimes fishes in the lake behind my grandparents house, he then takes the fish up to the roof of the condo across the way and eats it. We keep watching whenever we are over there but we haven't seen him yet.

The kids caught an interesting creature at the beach yesterday but we haven't identified it yet. We were told that it might be a trumpet fish? We haven't even looked that up yet.

We have found fossilized shark's teeth without even trying. You can just sit in your chair and use your feet and presto! Manasota beach was much fun yesterday.

Homeschool children seem to have very few prejudices, if not introduced to them by other children. They play easily with any and all children that they find, even some that would have been considered by others to be "different." I am proud of my kids... they didn't even think twice about it.

We are having a wonderful time here. We are taking a day off from the water as the pink shoulders of my daughter may need a break. We will probably visit the aquarium here instead. My kids love playing with the Rays and watching the Manatees have their lunch.

I will post pictures later... I haven't downloaded my pics onto their computer and don't want to do that without consulting them first.

Have a wonderful Friday!!! In fact, have some ice cream and think of me.

Math Guy that U See?

This last weekend I attended the St. Louis Homeschool EXPO . I took the kids with me on Friday and they attended a kids expo where they played and made crafts and sang songs and watched puppets and did all sorts of things.

The absolute highlight of the day, for my kids especially, was getting to meet Mr. Steve. Mr. Steve is actually Mr. Steve Demme, who is the founder of Math U See, the math curriculum we use. My kids LOVE Mr. Steve. The program comes with DVDs that Mr. Steve actually teaches on. The idea is that you watch the DVD and then do the book/block work, so my kids see Mr. Steve pretty regularly, and are always thrilled to see his smiling face on their TV.

Half-way through the day, The Boy decided that he was done with the mass group of kids regardless of how much fun they were having and he opted to join me in my classes. He sat in on two hours of speaking and declared it was like church. Between the classes though he did get to meet Mr. Steve. He had wanted to meet his math teacher so badly, but The Boy is my shy guy and so upon meeting Mr. Steve he didn't talk much and was keeping the conversation very short. He did answer questions and we went on to checking out some of the myriad of booths to shop at.

At the end of the day we got the Girl out of her classes and I took both of the kids with me to the sanctuary so The Girl could meet Mr. Steve. We had to wait in a short line of other adoring homeschool moms who wanted to talk to the man who "literally saved" their children, and in the meantime my children were um... embarrassing. They were running amok. They had sat still too long and now looked and acted the part of children who needed saving by Mr. Steve! We were in a church sanctuary and it was a large church sanctuary and my kids were honestly and truly running the aisles. I tried to get them to simply stop by asking them to stop. They just giggled and ran, we were so obviously beyond that simple request. I didn't want to go into a full blown run in front of the other moms who were seated and watching and waiting for the next session, which was due to start in another half hour. Finally, I did the one thing I have tried to stop doing. I counted. You know... ONE. TWO. THREE. HERE NOW! I had The Girl skid into place. The Boy mischievously grinned and followed. That had been the whole trouble, The Boy had chosen this moment to chase The Girl.

I kept the girl in line beside me by the hand, but The Boy, I merely confined to the boundaries of the nearest church pew. He continued to run from one end to the other. The other moms looked on with sympathy, I know that they had all been there at one point or another. They were all thinking, "Poor woman. I am SO glad I didn't bring my kids up here. She must have special needs children, you know, those uncontrollable ADHD kids. She should be over there in those special classes. I wonder why she is here with us normal-kids-people?"

Finally the two women in front of me stopped chit chatting with the amazing Math teacher and he looked at The Girl expectantly. Her eyes lit up and she put her hands up to her mouth. She was grinning from ear to ear. He asked her a couple of questions and she talked with him a bit then when I felt we had taken up enough of his time, I whispered to tell her to let him know how much we liked his math. She looked up at him and beamed and said, "I love Math U See!" She put all of her feeling into delivering this line. His face lit up and he called his son Ethan over, who is the director of marketing for Math U See. He asked The Girl if he could pick her up and she agreed and was overjoyed that this very tall Mr. Steve would pick her up and carry her to his booth out in the hall. There they talked and they filmed The Girl saying cute little mathisms and The Boy ran around the pillar in the hallway like The Flash. Granted he wasn't that willing to talk with Mr. Steve and he was done talking, it was time to play. Frankly, it was time for The Boy to run a good five miles in my very humble opinion.

Mr. Steve and Ethan finally scooped The Boy up and swung him side to side by his hands and feet. They threatened to toss him and finally set him down, commenting that Ethan also used to need to run a good five miles periodically as a child. They then tossed The Girl around and threatened to do a full loop with that one!

I finally gathered my children and all the paraphernalia that I was carrying around and said our goodbyes. We headed outside to walk to our car and The Girl looked up at me and said, "I didn't realize that he was a real person!" I could do nothing but laugh.

Today she drew a picture of Mr. Steve and Ethan swinging her through the air. I let her know that we would send it off to him. He will be getting fan mail from my kids, I bet he hadn't planned on that when he wrote his math curriculum.

Pass the Buck

So, apparently some people are very, well... worried about us home-schoolers. This woman in the news this last week who killed her four children, was a "home-schooler." I use that in the loosest of terms with her. In my opinion, she was not a home-schooler, she was a mom who wanted to kill her kids without having the problem of the school missing them. This was a convenient way to do that. Say that you are homeschooling and just don't turn back.

I was a teacher... I saw people home school for reasons that were less than honorable. However, I am a home-schooler. I home school my kids for very different reasons.

This article discusses how home-schoolers can be a problem because teachers aren't there to catch the signs of abuse. As THIS teacher obviously caught abuse *note the sarcasm*. The social workers had been called in on the Jacks case multiple times before, I don't know that a teacher would have helped this situation much. They already had so many venues fail them when it came to intervening in this sad path.

The point I suppose I am trying to make here is that the majority of home-schoolers are probably parents that are over concerned with their children. We are not the type of parents who are likely to abuse or kill children.

The experts feel now that they need more measures in place to track home-schoolers because of this? I know this is going to sound bad, but how many moms have killed their kids in the last year? How many were involved in the killing of their children in the last year? How many were home-school moms? Where is the best place for them to be spending government money?

I believe, very strongly that they should seek out better ways to track these types of crimes. There are situations in which these problems are more likely to occur. This woman fit into other profiles of moms in extreme duress. Why are they simply classifying her as a home-schooler? Honestly, that is the last thing she is. What she is, is a mom who was very down on her luck. A mom who had run out of food stamps benefits, and whose partner had died, who apparently struggled with mental illness.

They are trying to pawn this off on home-schoolers, when what they should be doing is spending the government's money on things much more worthwhile, like social services for families in similar situations. Situations where problems like this are more likely to occur. They need to dig deeper in files... rather than close them when they haven't been able to get the lady to open her front door.

The government is trying to pass the buck here. They are trying to say, "Oh, this isn't our fault! Oh, No! This happened because they simply don't have enough laws in place for us to monitor home-schoolers."

I wonder how many in our country will buy that sorry excuse? I hope people keep their eyes open long enough to see that this poor woman and her babies were not home-schoolers... but they did need the intervention that they never got.