Swimming

Here are the boys at the Cheshire pool with one of their friends from the Greater New Haven Homeschool Group. We spent four hours there and all had a fun time. I was the only mom who swam, but still had the opportunity to connect with a mom from the Valley Central Homeschool Group who has a boy of 7. E was happy to proclaim "I just made a new friend!". We are going to try to get out with them this week.

The boys have really been missing all of their old playgroup friends. Everyone is so busy these days it's difficult to get us all together. Even just one family at a time. I'm glad I made the effort to find more friends for us, because they are turning out to be the only friends we actually get to see. R is really looking forward to his birthday so he can have all his old friends over. I hope we end up choosing a day when everyone can make it!

Snow at last...

but does it really count?
Despite the fact that R ran out in his pajamas this morning to eat some, it only really snowed for about 20 minutes. It stuck well on the grass, but never to the pavement. It was a joyous moment followed by a big let-down, for all of us.

We had playgroup today though, and had lots of fun. During the drive there E and I had a conversation about the earth's atmosphere, space, and clouds. He was disappointed to hear that clouds are not fluffy when you touch them. He was kind of young when he touched them through the window when Uncle Roberto gave us an airplane ride, but the memory of touching clouds is one I thought he'd never forget. We'll have to arrange to do it again to jog his memory.

R is very proud of the progress he is making in reading. We've been working on groups of sounds. He's covered "ay", "eigh" and many others. So I made a list of review words on our dry erase board, and he was able to sound them all out. He prefers doing it this way to reading books, because sounding out the words in books interrupts the flow of the story. So although his vocabulary is quite large, and his ability to read somewhat large words is really increasing, he still resists picking up books unless I insist. He probably won't read a book for enjoyment for himself though until he can do so without having to pause over hardly any words at all. We are getting there...

Between this page of anagrams and this page for puzzlemaking, I was able to make another crossword puzzle for him, which I'll give him tomorrow morning. What did homeschoolers ever do without the internet?

The Have Kids Will Travel book I ordered arrived yesterday. I'm kind of disappointed in it. I'll have to read it more closely, but so far it's all pretty obvious information. It does have some websites listed in it though, so we'll see how those are.

I received an email with a link for a very moving video today. Check it out if you can spare four minutes and want to see some truth...

Flippin' Families

I don't recall if I've ever blogged about Flippin' Families before. The Southington YMCA has a gymnastics center and every Tuesday they open it up for free play from 12:30 pm till 2 pm. We went quite a few times last year, but this year have not gone too often, since many of our friends are involved in a yoga class on Tuesdays now. Last time we went R said it was no fun without friends, but today he asked if we could go.

We went out for lunch first, so only had 45 minutes to play once we got there, which was really perfect, actually. It was crowded today; lots of toddlers and preschoolers. We were the only homeschoolers. But the boys had lots of fun and were glad we went. I think 45 minutes was just enough time to have fun without needing someone else involved. Plus they've been getting stir crazy at home so any outing was welcome.

We did a bunch of chores afterwards. In the car E asked me how much 10 take away 5 is, and that led to about 15 minutes of him happily working on math problems I gave him. "E, I don't know why you think you are not good at math, every time we do it together you are excellent." That prompted a BIG smile.

R was lost in an audiobook as usual. I don't know how he's not sick of Harry Potter yet.

More fun with the giant box once we got home. Today it was an amusement park ride. They took turns setting themselves up inside with the two beanbag chairs while the other pushed the box over and shook it up all over the kitchen. It made it hard to get the groceries put away, but I stayed out of the way as long as I could.

Days at home

Lots of fun things get done on the boring days at home. Here are the shields I made last week to go with the really cool swords we got at the Renaissance Festival in October. The boys had really been admiring the shields along with the swords, but I insisted they'd be easy enough to make for ourselves, and they were. Now all they need is a coat of paint. R is still deciding on a cool dragon for me to paint on his.

R and E have been having fun with the giant box my treadmill came in. It's got great windows in it now and a good-sized door. It also makes a good cave (?) for matchbox cars.

Today R was complaining about being bored. Then he found something to to do; Izzi. I was happy to see him working hard on it while listening to Harry Potter. Today he also spent some time working on a crossword puzzle. The clues were simple anagrams, and he really enjoyed them. I've got to see if I can find more, or at least try to make some with puzzlemaker and this anagram page.

Holidays 2006

I've finally uploaded all the photos from my 234MB worth of memory sticks. Lots of photos to sort through. My photo utility has somehow disappeared from my computer, so I have to upload them all manually, which is a huge drag. So far, not too happy with the Dell. Yeah, they have great customer service, but unfortunately that's because they need to. Argh.

So, where to begin? Craft night at Grandma's, I guess.

Grandma is one of eight children. Between her generation and the next one down (mine, obviously), the Gassman family managed to produce five, yes FIVE boys in the year 1997. My R is the oldest. Anyway, Grandma has hosted a winter craft night for all of her nieces over the last several years, and last year she decided the boys were getting old enough to have one too. So this is the second year we headed up to Maine two weeks before Christmas for craft night. This is only four of the six boys invited. One completely forgot and showed up an hour late when Grandma called to remind him, and one never showed up at all. No phone call, nothing. Grandma felt pretty bad, and next year plans to have everyone RSVP. The boys all had a great time and are herewith pretending to eat the snakes they all painted. They made lots of cool things to give to people as gifts.

Here is E holding his first cousin M. E fell so in love with that little boy and kept asking me why we can't have any more babies. "I want a girl baby." M would get fussy, so I'd take him from E and within a few moments I'd get "Mom if you want me to hold him again, I will". It was so much fun to watch my baby interact with my brother's.



The boys had a great time with Grandma when she arrived for Christmas. She came a few days early and arrived with lots of goodies. One of their favorites was the gingerbread Christmas tree. She also brought a house, but they all agreed the tree was easier and more enjoyable to make.


Here's the Halloween tissue box cover I made for my mother (Grandma) for Christmas. I made covers for Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Independence Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I'm not much of a seamstress, but I was pretty pleased with how each of them turned out. I actually had a cardboard tissue cover from a craft store and took it apart to make a pattern. Then I had to tape the cardboard back together because the fabric covers had to go over it to give them form. I wished I had another cardboard cover to make a set for myself. Honestly, even if I find one now, the moment has passed. It was a lot of work for someone who had only made curtains with straight lines on her sewing machine up until this point.

I have to admit I did a really bad job taking photos of Christmas this year. I remembered to charge up the video camera, but found in the morning there was no tape. And I hardly took any stills. I was just too busy being there and enjoying what was going on I guess. It was a fun day.

Nagy Papa had gone up to Maine to spend Christmas with my siblings, so we had dinner and celebrated with him a few days afterward. It was very enjoyable.

Last weekend we headed down to New York to celebrate with B's family. Here is a photo of all the nephews:
My husband B is one of three boys and each of them had two boys. My mother-in-law is not thrilled, but she is getting used to it. N is going through a long stage of not wanting to be photographed. He's not a very happy boy, unfortunately. I hope the Joy Berry books I gave his mom help him out a bit. I really do. My heart goes out to him every time he is being yelled at from across the room.

That's about it for Christmas. I'm sure all the fun stuff the boys got will show up here in the coming weeks. My resolution for this year is to blog more often. It helps me focus on the great stuff we have going on. So stay tuned!

By the way, if anyone out there is using the new blogger dashboard, please let me know what you think. I'm always so scared to fool around with what's working just fine.

Photo storage

Okay, these need to stay on a posting on a blog in order to get them stored on the blogger server, I guess. So here they are. I'm going to back date them so they hopefully get lost in the past. Use the links on the right to buy them!

Aunt Debbie

E: "Here's one dollar and four quarters. I'm going back to the hardware store to get that frog for Aunt Debbie."

Me: "But E, you already bought something for Aunt Debbie."

E: "I love her."

The Spirit of the Season

I really look forward to the day E decides to start smiling in photos. Santa could have done better himself.

The boys have to put 10% of their allowance each week into a plastic bag to save for charity. And last week we found a good way to use it. The library has a Christmas tree with cut-out paper mittens on it. Each one has the sex and age of a child, plus a gift they would like. The boys got really into it and each took two. They wondered though, why the kids don't just ask Santa. I replied that perhaps they know that Santa can't bring everything they want, so they use the mittens for the stuff they don't want to waste asking Santa for. Seemed to fly. And they each took great care in choosing the gifts they were purchasing.

The other day in the car, we started talking about our plans for the holiday season and E came out with "You know, Christmas really is all about love." And R came back with "And giving." Woo hoo - despite my total enjoyment of the commercial aspects of Christmas, the boys are really getting it. Yesterday R told me that he feels bad that no one ever really thinks of Santa, so he is going to leave him a thank you note on the mantle on Christmas eve.

Excuse me while I pat myself on the back for a moment :-)