The beginning of Easter at home

Usually we go up to Maine for Easter with my mother's family. I looked in the archives, but it seems I've never blogged about it. Oh well, I do have the photos to show for it.

Anyway we decided to stay home for Easter this year. The boys were disappointed, but after discovering that it was the activities they were going to miss, and not their cousins, we decided to recreate the activities here at home with friends.

So Easter began today with an Easter Party at our house; an attempt to recreate part of what we would experience at Uncle Larry's house on Easter afternoon. If we had realized kids had off from school today, we may have invited more people, but we decided we were happy having just our "core" playgroup friends over.

We started with making a craft. All the kids seemed to enjoy making their egg sun catchers. They are made out of tissue paper stuck to clear contact paper, with a hole punched into the top and hung on suction cup hooks. They all came out great. The craft is something we had never done at Uncle Larry's, but all the kids had fun, and the moms seemed to appreciate having the art to bring home.

One tradition at Uncle Larry's has been to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. So we did that. Our friend J guessed 353, and there were 361, so she got to bring the jar home.

I attempted to get some real food into the kids with a selection of fruit and vegetables and some pizza rolls, which everyone actually ate and seemed to enjoy, before heading outside for the point of the whole thing.

The main tradition we needed to recreate, was of course, the egg hunt. So I hid 72 plastic eggs filled to the brims with candy, all around our backyard. And of course, there had to be one large, special egg. So we had a "golden egg" (large, yellow) well hidden with $5 in it. Oh boy, that really inspired the kids! I hid it well though, and had to give them an obscene amount of hints until one of them found it. Another J was thrilled to find that.

After we determined we'd never find the four missing eggs, we decided to come in and enjoy the cupcakes R had made and E and I had frosted.

I do have a photo of all the kids together, but I decided that this time around I'd post a photo of the moms, since my blog readers rarely get to see photos of my friends.

We had a really nice afternoon. For a few hours work (yes, I have a clean house, for a few days anyway) and less money than the trip to Maine would have been, the boys had a fun time running around looking for eggs and we all had fun being with friends.

Tomorrow night we will color our eggs...the next tradition I have to "match".

He wants to donate his organs!

While driving past a cemetery this evening...

R: Mom and Dad, you both want to be burned when you die, right?

Me: Yes, I want to be cremated.

B: Well I haven't really decided yet.

E: I want to know if there is a way to give my heart to someone else who needs it when I die. You know, if there is someone whose heart doesn't work good, can I give them mine? Can we find out about that?

Wordless Wednesday

"Green Eggs and Ham (Happy St. Patrick's Day)"

Learn more about Wordless Wednesday, and find the blogroll of others who are participating here.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Carnival of Homeschooling #115, the Oh, The Things That You'll Do! Edition has been published.

I have an entry posted in this carnival. Check it out.

What is a blog carnival?

"A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every Monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

"There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers."

Here is more information on blog carnivals.
Here is information on how to make a submission to the Carnival of Homeschooling.

Wordless Wednesday

"How Unschoolers Learn to Tell Time"

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About Us

Welcome to the party!



I go by the name of Love 2B Homeschoolers; welcome to my digital scrapbook of sorts. There's a glimpse of me on the sidebar to your right, and a post which elaborates about me on my other blog, but this blog is about my family, so here I thought I'd elaborate about them. Then if you find that we are people you can relate to, you can stop by again.

My husband B is a Computer Analyst for Cigna Healthcare. He likes his job well enough. His office is 45 minutes away by car, which makes for a long day. He leaves the house around 7:00 am, and usually returns around 6 or 6:30 pm. He is a dedicated, hard worker. And of course, they don't appreciate him nearly enough. He gets four weeks vacation a year.

B is all about his family. I sometimes lose myself in the love I see in his eyes. He is a great dad, but like most dads, often forgets to be a dad, and tries too hard to be a friend. He's working on that though. At least in front of me ;-)

R is my 11-year-old. He is very much a first child: intelligent and logical. He is warm and empathetic and kind. He is a gentle soul and incredibly sensitive.

He loves Lego Bionicals, YuGiOh, building anything, and is thrilled to have just gotten his own email address. He wants to be an architectural engineer when he grows up.

If he were in school, he'd be in the 5th grade, although he may have been left back at some point; he pushed off learning to read until very recently. It's true what they say; that homeschoolers can learn something in a few months that takes schools years to teach. R is a builder though, so he never cared for reading, loving instead, math.

E is seven. He is a Gemini. Big time. He is incredibly energetic and always on the go. He is witty and incredibly charming. Also very silly; he'd do almost anything for a laugh.

He loves jumping on his trampoline, playing with action figures and Matchbox cars, dressing up and acting out different characters, and calling his dad on the phone several times a day. What does he want to be when he grows up? Something different every day. I think he'll be an actor.

If he were in school, he'd be in the 2nd grade. They would try to have him on Ritalin despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing wrong with him, other than his enormous amounts of energy. He is pretty much on "grade level" for reading. He hates math.

As a family we love to travel, go on outings, play games, watch movies, and snuggle in bed. Often.

Wordless Wednesday

"Melting Ice"

Learn more about Wordless Wednesday, and find the blogroll of others who are participating here.

Evidence of Learning

A few photos from the past week...

E and I read a book about magnifying glasses. It contained lots of "try this" things, and we had lots of fun seeing things up close, including our fingerprints, salt, the dots on newsprint and money. We also enjoyed learning how water is convex, and therefore makes things appear larger. Good stuff.

I sometimes get bummed when the boys get presents which find their way onto a top shelf, or inside a closet. We've gotten lots of things which I feel would be great if the boys would only do them. However the gifts do belong to them, so I don't complain when I open a closet and find tons of unused fun things to do. I was happy that one of these things made its way out this week. R made a robot out of coins. First he had me bring him to the bank to get four rolls of pennies and some other change (for a total of $5.26 he keeps telling me), and then he spent time locked away in his room putting it together. Click on it to check it out large; it's really cool.

We went to Brooksvale Park on Wednesday. The Ranger there is the dad of a friend, so it was that much more fun. He does the program for school kids every year and since his mom is part of our homeschooling group she asked him to do one for us.

We had seen a demonstration of making maple syrup at Old Sturbridge Village a couple of years ago, but it's been several years since we've seen a demonstration of more modern methods. The Ranger talked inside for a while, giving a lively history of how it may have been discovered by local Indians, then talked about the different collection methods today, the different grades, and the difference between maple syrup and pancake syrup.

Then we headed outside, where the kids all got to make a tap out of birch wood. The Ranger then passed us on to the woman who is running the sugar shack this year. She brought us out and showed us a functioning tap, and taught us how to tell the difference between Sugar Maples and other maples. (It was really cold out!)

Then she brought us down to the sugar shack, where she showed us how they boil down the sap and make it into syrup. It smelled really good!

Finally, they brought us back up to the building where we started, and we all got to sample some vanilla ice-cream with their hand-made maple syrup on it. Yum! The boys had a good time watching this demonstration. I can always tell something is enjoyable because it gets repeated, in detail, to Dad when he gets home in the evening.