Sam's first joke, told today:

Sam: Knock-knock.
Me: Who's there?
Sam: Can who.
Me: Can who who?
Sam: It's a message. It's a bear and it's silly.

*

Things I am sad/amused we have had to have conversations about or establish:

"No eating poop?"

"Don't pee on dogs?"

"It's not poop? It's chicken?"

*

I'm on my iPod writing this as we wrap up breakfast but I'm going to try to post some pictures later today. I just thought I'd catch everyone up on what the hot topics are in the Simmons' household.

Curriculum so far: None, heh.

Style: Booooooooks.

Honestly, though, right now, I'm at the very beginning of homeschooling my own kids, so our curriculum is the library, plus a book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We also do a Bible study with some colorful topic flashcards and I'm getting ready to add poetry, but this will just be me reading a poem I pick from online or one of the many books of poetry we have around the house (one of my favorites is the Oxford Book of Christian Verse, but I don't think our copy is the "new" one).

I grew up with Sonlight for most of my school life and I loved it. It had lots of books and plenty of assignments, but very little "textbook" work (I mean, aside from math and science). I've thought for a long time that once my kids are old enough, we'd just start using Sonlight but I'm starting to consider other options just out of curiosity. I'm definitely looking at different options for PreK-- everything from Timberdoodle's hands-on package, which I hear is great for boys (Charli mentions this in her post, I do believe), to Before Five in a Row, which uses a lot of books.

Sonlight really worked for me but I'm willing to consider other things depending on how my kids learn. I'm researching a lot of different math curriculums-- one thing I hated when I was growing up was Saxon math. I think there are a lot more options geared toward homeschoolers now.

I think style-wise, I'd say I'm confident? Perhaps too much so? I like schedules and I don't stress about adapting pre-written schedules to fit my family (like with Sonlight), but my confidence has gotten me in trouble in the past when my response to a curriculum need is, "I'll just write this myself!" I tend to lack follow-through (sometimes because I get bored, other times because I underestimate the scope of the actual project; that said, getting books on sale is awesome, but please don't complain about $100 comprehensive instructor's guides-- that's so many hours of work right there).

Irony: Previous paragraph was about feeling confident, but started with two questions. Verbally, those would have been uptalking, ha.

Anyway, I've written curriculums for classes I've taught, for myself in high school, and helped adapt curriculum for siblings. And I've learned that while I love to write curriculum and schedules, I need to have a rule for my own kids in the future: If it's not finished by the beginning of the fall that we need it, I buy something. I'm avoiding the "starting a curriculum that's only half-finished" quicksand, because I know we'll suffer for it halfway through the year.

Also, I should note, I like the idea of arts and crafts, but I know the thing that already is hard for me and will be in the future is incorporating "messy" activities to go with our theme/subject. Legos: I'm fine. Watching a movie: Awesome! Anything with glue: ugh it will be everywhere and i will have to clean it never miiiiind.

But that sort of stuff is good for my kids, so I'll just have to get over it, even if we don't do stuff like that as often as "crafty" moms.

As for worries about sticking with schedules, here's the thing. I'm working on sticking to my cleaning schedule. Discipline is something I'm still working on. Because of that, I know I'll be tempted to just take days off for no reason or because we're busy with other stuff, but I also know that I love knowing we're doing what's best for our kids. When they were tiny, I worried I'd lack the follow-through to brush their teeth every night, but you know what? I do. I also feed them meals three times a day whether or not I feel like cooking. So I know that, by the grace of God, whether or not we feel like doing school, it will happen because it has to.

So, simple arts and craft suggestions, anyone? Pinterest overwhelms me and/or makes me just want dessert.

*For local readers:  On Saturday, April 27 from 10am-12pm, we blog hoppers will be hosting a question and answer session at Trinity Assembly of God, Fairmont, WV. Email/comment to let me know if you want more details!

Lorrie @ Life and Lessons Learned, Selena at Campbell Clan, Kathleen @ Positive Adoption,

This is the third post in a month-long Tuesday/Thursday series about homeschooling that I'm doing with a group of other moms who blog.

So, first of all, this post might be a little disorganized. It's 11:01pm at the start of writing and we've had a busy (good kind of busy!) day and I'm just now getting around to typing up some thoughts on this.

A lot of the moms in this blog hop started today's posts (privilege of late writing: I read everyone else's stuff first, ha) with something along the lines of, "I never thought I'd homeschool," or "I had no idea what it was," and followed with, "God told me to," or "God changed my heart."

I thank God for those Abrahams of a generation before me, called out of Haran and the land of the Chaldeans. That step away from the familiar into the unknown was one that paved the way for people like me, who might receive similarly crazy-sounding calls to something else at some point, built on the foundation of the steps of faith before.

I'm, I think, officially the youngest member of this particular blog hop. My kids aren't even technically old enough for "regular" preschool, but I already know we're homeschooling when they are. We already "do school" every day. And I was homeschooled.

I went to public school and then did half a year of private school and then after second grade, never went back. I've since finished college, for those of you wondering if that's still an option for homeschooled-through-high school kids.

My husband was homeschooled for all but half of a second grade year and high school. We come from a tradition of homeschooling and that makes it something more comfortable and less scary for us, I suppose. We've still seriously considered real reasons to homeschool beyond the fact that it is familiar, but I know neither of us have had to struggle through the decision to do something we never thought we'd do when it came to homeschooling our kids.

Because it's late and I'm tired and can always write more later, I will give a brief overview of reasons we are homeschooling (please remind me if you're interested in these further and I will write more/find links for you):

• To have the time to instill a Biblical foundation in our kids
• To give our kids even more opportunity to see us live our faith and learn to love each other
• The American school system is, as a whole, academically failing our nation's children
• Bullying isn't something you should "learn" to "live with"
• To help our kids spend time with what they love to do
• The 8-3 "at a desk" model of education is physically unhealthy

Hey! This is the second post in the homeschool blog hop I'm doing with six other wonderful ladies. Today's topic is about how one organizes one's day. This is an exciting subject for me because I like the idea of being organized.

I looooove new planners. Sticking to the schedules past a week or two? Not so good. Getting better!

I'm looking forward to looking into new curricula as my kids grow, but we're already pretty familiar with Sonlight. One of the reasons I enjoy it is that it uses lots of non-textbooks but it also tells you what to read from those books each day. It comes with a pretty detailed schedule already put together for you.

For now, though, my unit studies are sort of dictated by what's available at the library and what we already have on our shelves. School-wise, for preschool, I don't really write much down. I'm going to need to start keeping better track of stuff as we introduce more alphabet and number worksheets and projects, but for now we're just doing a lot of reading.

As for taking care of school, other needs that kids have, plus running a household, I've gone through several different systems. I've tried managing stuff with Google Calendar, printed pages in a binder, a spiral notebook, and what's finally ended up working for me is a nifty little Mac and iPod app called OmniFocus. We splurged on it a while ago when it was both (a) on sale and (b) helpful for my husband's graduate school work. But I've been using it too, with a separate account so we can keep our lists from being confused.

I also tried cleaning the entire house on one day, once a week, for a while, but that seemed to only work for a season. Right now, I'm cleaning one room a day (we have a small, five room apartment, so that works out well, ha). That includes straightening, dusting, vacuuming, and mopping (okay, technically, wet-swiffering). Other projects also get put on the list.

OmniFocus utilizes David Allen's GTD method from his book Getting Things Done (I haven't read this yet). One of the ideas is that you're more likely to tackle projects if you break them down into every single step and then work through that checklist rather than just having "clean out bedroom closet" on your to-do list. The "clean out bedroom closet" task would show up on your overview, but navigate to it and you'd have a sublist that might include:

• pull all boxes out of closet
• lay all hanging clothes on bed
• take shoes out of closet
• fill box with "homeless" items
• pack away past-season clothes
• fill bag with giveaway items
• throw out any clothes past salvaging
• scrub closet shelves

and so on. This system has been really helpful for me, because I tend to start projects with enough enthusiasm, but give up halfway through because they suddenly feel "too big." Writing down even the obvious stuff has given me a way to check stuff off my list and now exactly what to work on next without having to think about it or make excuses. The system is only as useful as my discipline, though, and that's a personal thing I've been working on recently.

Another thing that helps is menu-planning. I plan out even lunches and breakfasts. Even if I don't assign meals to particular days when I write it out at first, I've been making sure to decide before I go to bed at night what all three of the next day's meals will be so I'm not blindsided by: 4pm time to start dinner, last meal of week, happens to be a crockpot meal and meat is still frozen (!!!). (As a side note, if you're just getting into meal-planning, save yourself some trouble and learn from me: write down at least two easy meals. The enthusiasm of starting to menu-plan can lead to feeling super-adventurous and prepared and then you end up with seven meals that each require two hours of work and your toddler NEEDS YOU ALL THE TIME RIGHT NOW that week. Don't give up! Just go easy on yourself.)

School, right now, fits into my "to-do" list for the day because it doesn't take much time. I'm sure that things will change and shift as school requires a bit more time, but we'll deal with that when we get there.

So, that's how I'm managing stuff right now. What about you?

Don't forget to check out the other blogs posting about this today!


Lorrie @ Life and Lessons Learned, Selena at Campbell Clan, Kathleen @ Positive Adoption,

I should start this blog with a confession: I like being awake in the mornings but only once I wake up. And "waking up," for most of my life, has been a sort of drawn-out, grumpy process. There was a time in my life when I considered 9 am way too early to be thinking about waking up. And now I wake up at 5 in the morning most days. I need that time before my kids get up to get the day started right and my kids, almost without fail, wake up between 5:30 and 6:30.

So, my day starts at five in the morning and if you'd told me that in high school I would have thought you were straight-up insane. But really? It's not so bad.

Right now, my homeschooling life isn't that complicated. If you're reading this as part of the blog link-up and you don't know me, then I should tell you that I have three kids, all of them under three. My twin two-year-olds are the ones I "do school" with, and my almost-seven-month-old hangs out and listens, plays, naps, or poops (sometimes a combination of these).

We have breakfast pretty early (see: waking up time) and then a little after eight, I put the girl I babysit on the bus for school.

Preschool around here starts at 9:30 am, for no particular reason other than we happened to start at that time several days in a row and I noticed. Assigning it a time gave me something to shoot for and make sure I remembered to abandon other projects and take care of school before my kids were nearing nap time.

Wanna know what we do? Every two or three weeks, I pick a new subject -- trains, ocean, space, jungle, etc-- and we go get a bunch of books from the library. Some of the books are usually the non-fiction for kids books (about parts of a train or the planets) and then some are fiction books with the topic or only tangentially related.

So, at 9:30, I say, "Let's do school!" and we all climb onto the couch. We start with a Bible study (right now, we're doing Beginner's Bible cards, which are here and unfortunately discontinued) and a short prayer. That takes about seven or eight minutes total. Then we do our reading lesson, which is mostly just practicing letter sounds and helping with consistent letter recognition. And then we read a stack of books.

Right now, this works really well for us because my boys love the alphabet and they love when I read books to them. If they didn't enjoy it so much, I don't think I'd push it-- maybe try to get through a book or two a day. But now, they usually cry when I stop after seven or eight books and want more. We spend about forty-five minutes, total, doing "school" on the couch.

In the afternoons, we'll sometimes do activities (splashing in the sink, playing with dry rice and cars, painting) or go for a walk if the weather is nice. We'll probably be going outside a lot more as it warms up. Another confession: I need to start actually planning out my activities so I stick to the schedule because I'm not a very consistent arts & crafts person. My boys love hands-on stuff and I just don't get stuff out often enough because I don't want to deal with the mess, even though usually it's only about five minutes of clean-up.

The rest of their school right now is really behavioral and home-life stuff. They work on putting laundry away with me or hang out while I work on chores. They like to use baby wipes while I dust and help me scrub stuff off. They play a lot, with train tracks and Legos and cars.

Finally, in the evening, we all sit on the couch again (husband, too, this time) and read a story from The Beginner's Bible, a Psalm or Proverb (we read in order and we're on Psalms for the second time now), sing two or three hymns (they always, always request the "doxology," which for us is the last verse of "Awake, My Soul, and with the Sun." Then we pray.

I'm super-excited to do more with them as they grow up, but right now, that's pretty much our school day. I have two big goals right now as I teach them and that's to work on foundational stuff about our faith (Jesus loves you, Jesus died for you, this is the Gospel, this is the Word of God) and to foster and grow their innate curiosity into a love of learning. So, basically, some Bibles and a lot of crayons! Ha.

Be sure to check out these other ladies and their posts today in the Homeschool Blog Hop, every Tuesday and Thursday this April!

Lorrie @ Life and Lessons Learned, Selena at Campbell Clan, Kathleen @ Positive Adoption,

Aw, yay! An interview I did about my kids' names was featured on one of my favorite blogs! 

It's here: 

Ren's Baby Name Blog

Also, I'm getting ready to do a blog hop with some other blogging moms. We're doing a month-long series about homeschooling, starting April 2nd. We'll be posting every Tuesday and Thursday and we're covering a few different topics: 

1. A day in the life
2. How do you organize your day?
3. Why or how did you get started?
4. Homeschooling styles and/or curriculum choices
5. What didn't work for you?
6. My biggest frustration.....
7. How do I feel about socialization?
8. Blogger's choice

The perspectives the group of us will cover should vary-- some of us have preschoolers, some have teens or adult children, some have elementary or middle schoolers, and all of us have different styles and family lives and schedules. If you're thinking about homeschooling or have just always been curious about what it's like, check back here on Tuesday for my first post and links to the other six ladies and their blogs!

Finally, audreysimmons.blogspot.com now redirects to my new URL, wifeof.dadamsimmons.com . Squee! I have a subdomain of my husband's website while he decides what to do with his domain. 

So. Excited. About. Baby. Name. Blog.

Some of that might be because of other big news-- my sister is having a baby! Yay! YAAAAAY! 

:-D