Wordless Wednesday

It's Ninja Elf! Or is it Ninja Link? (if you do not know who Link is..you do not likely have boys!)

Our annual Walnut Festival Event

I am simply not in a blogging mood lately. This is my first official year of homeschooling 3 children. I am just super busy with that aspect of my life..that fitting in blogging is a bit of stretch. I am still reading lots of blogs and thoroughly enjoy sitting and sipping a hot cup of tea and catching up on my bloggy world of friends. So just cause I am not saying much...doesn't mean I am not listening to all of you!

I do have one fun thing to share. Every year we participate in the Black Walnut Festival. You can see my post from winning last year here It has become quite the family event to participate in the Kiddie Parade. This year we built a float with a circus theme. We built a Barnum and Baily type circus cage. Timmy was a lion, Nate was a monkey, Justin was the Ring master, Chrsitian was a clown. I was a clown and so was my sister-in-law Amy. We made two cages..the lion cage and the monkey cage. However, for some reason Nate would not go in his cage??? So I had to climb in the cage with him and he sat happily on my lap. We were not much into the parade when a bee stung Timmy on the finger. I am so happy to report that he was quite brave about it. He has never been stung before. Luckily my brother-in-law (a paramedic) was close by with his ambulance and he ran and got some sting kill for his finger. I was so proud of him for putting on a happy face despite his pain.

Despite forgetting our circus music, Timmy gettin stung, and me having to sit in the monkey cage...we did win 1st place! So enjoy the pics of our event :)










A big thank you goes out to all those who helped make this possible! Mama, Uncle Danny, and Aunt Amy! Thanks for all you do!

Sonlight lovers..don't miss out on this giveaway!

This is a cool giveaway by Karla. I just started following her blog and she is offering some free cute bookmarks for your kids and the chance to win a cool sonlight bag. Head over to her blog...Roads to Learning and check it out!

I love this woman's ideas

I especially like the idea of offering to people catastrophic insurance. Allow them to pay for their check-ups and standard appointments and then pay only a smaller payment for the huge and unexpected event that may arise. There is no doubt that would help with lowering wasteful spending.

Mmmm Roasted Corn

A dear friend recently gave us some corn from her garden. We were grilling hamburgers and it made me think of one of our favorite foods....Roasted Corn. If you have never tried it ....you should!

It is a super lazy way of serving up a veggie with your grilled dinner. You take your corn, stalks and all! You place them in a container of water. For this we just used our cooler. I filled it with water, put the stalks in, and carried it out to our fire pit. You let them soak for about 20 minutes then you simply place them on your grill or wire rack over a fire pit.


As they cook on the grill you will will rotate them every now and then and even sprinkle water on them. Basically you are steaming your corn in the stalks. After about 15-20 minutes when the stalks are starting to turn a little brown you remove them from your grill. Let them cool for a minute or so and then peel the stalks off. Voila..you have freshly grilled steamed corn. It is surprisingly yummy. The taste is very different from simply steamed or boiled corn.

My husband new about this from his days of boy scouting, but I had never seen it done. We had this at my mom's house recently. You should have seen her face. She was really not sure she liked the idea of place corn in their stalks on a grill. But when it was all done she was like..."Wow, this is really good." It really gives the corn a grilled smoky sort of taste. Hard to describe, but you really should try it! My boys love it and so do two sets of grandparents that have tried it. I meant to get pictures of the grilling part, however, my husband finished up while I was in the house getting other parts of our dinner prepared. Maybe next time!

Morningside Academy

I have begun a new blog! I hope you will come and visit it. I plan to post more there and less here. I have found that I am posting way too many school related things and not many homemaking tips or posts. I guess my passion for homeschooling is overflowing too much into this blog. I have decided to devote a blog to our homeschool adventures at our school Morningside Academy. There is not much posted at this point, but much more is soon to come! I hope you will check it out!

What we have planned for this week!

I wish I could say we were a family that schooled all year long, but we are not :( My kids are to use to summer vacations..it is not worth the battle to get that out of their system. Besides, I think by summer...I need the break too! Public school starts this coming week so it will be back to the books for my boys as well. As for Timmy, he does school through out the year...school is all fun and games to him...I hope it is always that way!

Here is what we have planned out! I am looking forward to diving into schooling the sonlight way :) We have sort of already started in some books, but I am planning to stick to the IG as much as possible. So here is a snippet of what we have planned.

The whole family will be working together on these books, Story of the World, The Usborne Encyclopedia of History, Old and New Poems, and The Field Guide to the Bible.


The older boys reader and read alouds are The Golden Goblet (Justin is already on Chapter 5) and Mara, Daughter of the Nile.


Timmy and I are still rowing The Bee Tree and we will continue that through the week. We will end the week by attending The Honey Bee Festival. I am looking forward to him seeing some bee keepers. It will be the perfect ending to the rowing.

However, I wouldn't dare keep him from learning about Egyptian Mummies! So he will be joining in with these fun books over the next few weeks: Pharaoh's Boat, You wouldn't want to be an Egyptian Mummy, Tut's Mummy Lost and Found, Usborne Beginner Egyptians, and a Magic Tree House book...Mummies in the Morning.


I will also begin reading The Real Mother Goose and The Best of Aesop's fables to Timmy.


The boys will also begin their studies in their Apologia books, Teaching Textbooks, and Math-u-see. I feel really set. My planner is all set for 6 weeks worth of work and fun! We hope to attend and Egyptian School day event at the Charleston Clay Center in early September to complete the studies. I have noticed quite a few other bloggers are jumping into the Egyptian thing...I am hoping to gleam many ideas and activities from you all :)