A Very Nearly Tea

Here at Simple Pleasures, I don't write much about homeschooling. At least not directly. Part scrapbook, part musings, it is more a collection of small moments dedicated to the little things in life which otherwise may go unnoticed. It serves to remind me to:


This carnival was supposed to be hosted over at my homeschooling blog, Principled Discovery but the server hosting it has been having difficulties, resulting in a sort of jack-in-the-box blog that is sometimes up and sometimes not for the past couple of days. Technical difficulties do NOT belong to the simple pleasures in life, but the Carnival must go on, even if it is a day late and hosted on the wrong blog. So, without further ado:




Learning at His Feet shares their treasure from a recent lesson on Columbus.

Why Homeschool takes some time to look at the sea of information available and sort through what is really important.

The HomeSpun Life finds that a little concentration on scripture helps in many other ways.



NerdMom offers some free election resources for the frugal homeschooler.

Ms. Julie's Place teaches you how to draw a hummingbird for fine art friday.

Site4Teachers links to an offer for a one year subscription to Yes! magazine.

Save Money Homeschooling shows how we save taxpayers money by homeschooling.

Destroy Debt discusses college for free.



Day by Day Homeschooling is working on a little pet shop math.

Word of Truth Boys' Academy offers some hands on phonics.

A Day in the Life constructs a model of the tabernacle.

Adventures in Daily Living shares the first day of school.

Giggles, Grins and Grades takes a look inside the ear.

Home Educate in the Sunshine State journeys to Hawaii...sort of.

The Daily Planet shares her Consitution Week activities.



Little Sanctuary is homeschooling with preschoolers.

Gist Academy for Gifted Youngsters shares some pictures from Tot School.

Homelife shares the first day of school for her three musketeers.

Seaside Tales focuses on the economy.


Works in Progress rejoices in a reading program that worked.

The ApplePeel shares a joy of lapbooking.

Homeschool Buzz reviews a biography of Marie Curie.

Biblical Parenting gives an idea for making timelines.

Homeschool Software reviews some grading software.

In Our Write Minds shows how to use diaries to write about history.

The Reluctant Homeschooler shares a new discipline she is introducing into her homeschool.

SharpBrains provides some brain teasers to strengthen your brain.

Happy@Home shares some worksheets she made for troublesome letters.

Let's Play Math gives us 20 things to do with a hundred chart.

The Narrow Path shares a wonderful project to do with the Impressionists.


Percival Blakeney Academy looks back at hoards of undone projects.

Homespun Juggling is trying to homeschool with pets.

Marybeth Whalen looks forward to her fall plans.

Sprittibee shares her weekly routine.


Bruggie Tales invites us to take a peek at how homeschoolers party.

At Hayes Happenings, an intended consequence turned into a new family tradition. (Yes, the "intended consequence" was to involve corporal punishment.)

Small World collects some resources for Punctuation Day.

Alasandra is celebrating Banned Book Week.

My children and I spent a morning walking in the Waterloo Harvest Days Parade to help campaign for a homeschool graduate running for legislature.

Semicolon shares some thoughts about what her children are missing out on as homeschoolers...or then again maybe not.

SpunkyHomeschool shares her greatest challenge.

Barbara Frank reassures us that a lack of formal training is not the same not being qualified to teach.

Tami's Blog reminds us to take time for mom.



Cyberschool Kids are Cool asks what you think about skippin g grades in the homeschool.

Corn and Oil notes that Christopher Paoline, author of Eragon had a unique life which aided him in his current success.

Kristina's Soapbox is taking a look at religion and homeschooling.

The Thinking Mother has collected links related to eye tracking problems.

Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers discusses the learning differences of her daughter.

The Homeschooling Experiment shares her reflections on her son's achievements after a year of homeschooling.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of the Carnival of Homeschooling, owned by Why Homeschool. Next Week's carnival will be hosted at Corn and Oil. To submit, you can use the handy submission form over at BlogCarnival. And remember to enjoy the simple pleasures of homeschooling!

Wow. Having a life sure takes up more time than I remember. It isn't the time so much, as the end of the day tiredness and satisfaction of having done something that lends itself well to sleep over the somewhat listless activity of surfing the internet.

Some of you may remember that we have been looking at properties here and there. We may have found one. A lot of work, but we'll see. We made an offer, but ran into another interested couple today while on our daily patrol attempting to discourage the vandals who have been stripping the place of anything of any remote value from the heat system to the copper wiring.

Anyway, I'm hosting the Carnival of Homeschooling on Tuesday, and for all you homeschoolers out there, I would love for you to participate! You even have a handy dandy submission form to make your job easier. And if you already submitted and haven't heard back from me, yet, I'm terribly sorry. I should be getting to that shortly.

My boy has a deep and undying love for frogs.

Mom, I'm just curious about frogs.

He says in a most forlorn manner when asked about his fixation. Enough frogs were beginning to go through our house, subjected to baths with the Bear and dying at the end of a day of over-handling that I began to worry about the local population. I'd hate my son and his fascination to be responsible for the extinction of native fauna.

So when he and his sister ended up with a gray tree frog each, I decided enough was enough. I wasn't going to be responsible for any more frog deaths if I could help it.

I had them drop the frogs into our little observation chamber, called my parents and went shopping. We bought some tropical house plants, some soil and had my parents bring along an old ten gallon aquarium and some driftwood for their visit. Soon, we had a "habitat" as Bear calls it. You can actually make out Bear's frog, Catch, in the top right hand corner on top of the driftwood if you look carefully. That is where he sits all day, everyday. You'd think he was a lazy bum, unless you saw him go after a cricket. That little guy can move! I can see Heidi, Bug's frog but only because I know where she is...Near the top, just left of the driftwood near the center of the tank and all the way in the back. She is more active, but spends most of her time in the pothos.


Now Bug has a place to keep all her crickets, too. I wasn't sure how she would take her beloved crickets being fed to the frogs, but they are so much happier in the terrarium. They sing now, something they never did in the assortment of jars she kept them in before.

I couldn't think of anything to demonstrate my children's approval of the new frog habitat better than this:


They dragged their sleeping bags into the front room and made a tent so they could camp out next to the frogs, listen to the crickets and pretend they were "in the wild."

Remember that cute little mis-speak of my son's regarding John 3:16? That bit about God forgiving his only forgotten son? Well, today he had us all laughing so hard we could hardly keep down are Orange Juliuses my daughter had just made.

See, he learned to say the verse correctly over the week. So Christ is now the only begotten son. But my dad couldn't help asking,

So what happened to the forgotten son?

Making a point about the pronunciation. Bear answered,

Oh. He died.

Maybe you had to be there, but it was hard to keep a straight face even after he asked us to stop laughing.

According to Bear, anyway:

For God so loved the world, he forgave his only forgotten son...

The really amazing thing in all of it, though, is that while Christ cried out, "Why have you forsaken me?" He did not forsake us. And through Him, we are forgiven.

Even if we sometimes forget Him.

I recently received an update from BlogHer regarding upcoming ad campaigns, most specifically dealing with political ads. Ho hum. I don't pay a lot of attention to these campaigns other than to smile that I'm included. I like my monthly little check. I don't like to think of the hours that went into them, because when I think in those terms...well, let's just say that I make a lot less than minimum wage.

Do I want political campaigns? Do I want to reject only certain candidates? Or, more fundamentally, when an advertiser places an ad on my site, am I supporting them or are they supporting me?

I don't really care all that much what gets advertised on my site, but something which is poorly targeted really is a waste of the advertiser's money. I hold my readers in pretty high regard, however, and I've never worried that an ad which runs in my sidebar is going to lead y'all down the path to wickedness and despair. Or, worse, cause you to vote for the wrong candidate.

So I don't know. I don't find campaign ads as morally reprehensible as the few things I have turned down. But if you stop by here and see an ad for Obama, just smile and know that I never got around to making up my mind whether or not to reject the political ads.

Now if Beau McCoy or Tony Fulton drop me a line, they can have some ad space for free. Maybe I'll put up a button for them later, just in case any Nebraskans from either district 39 or 29 stops by and happens to be the kind who blindly votes for anyone advertised in my sidebar. See, I'm not in either of their districts, so my vote doesn't count.

Today on the way to Omaha, an amazing thing happened. So amazing, you won't quite believe it.

It was pouring down rain such that my wipers could barely keep up and I was straining to see the tail lights of the car in front of me since that was essentially all I could see. I did, however, know that my exit was coming up quickly and I needed to get over. But there was a blue car traveling in my blind spot. I turned on my turn signal and...get this...the car behind me slowed down.

Can you believe it? He must have broken a dozen rules of the road. At least from what I have observed, when someone turns on their turn signal, you do any and everything in your power to close off any opening they may have perceived in traffic. The closer they are to an exit, the more important it is to speed up and block any attempt at getting over.

Maybe he can be forgiven, however. It is conceivable that he was behind me only half a mile earlier and witnessed some erratic driving which would be enough to make any driver thankful for a turn signal to give warning.

That little "incident" also made me rethink a common statistic out there. One of the most common causes of death in young children is the infamous automobile accident when they are improperly strapped. Those little bodies make rather unfortunate projectiles in a fast moving car, and just don't have that much of a chance.

We always buckle up. But I can tell you there are few things as distracting on the road as glancing in the rear view mirror and seeing your three year old standing in her car seat because she just learned to unstrap herself that moment as you were pulling out of the Burger King parking lot.

Now, it only took me one jerk of the wheel in an instant desire to pull over to recover my senses and remember the fact that I was in traffic. I didn't actually leave my lane, although I did weave a bit and the cars around me slowed. Because I'm sure for that instant I certainly looked like I was just going to pull off the road for no apparent reason.

But we're all ok. And I made my exit.

Have I talked about our housing issues here before? I'm not sure. To make a long story short, we are soon to be a family of seven in a 900 square foot house. I am edgy any time it rains because all I do is trip over children and their toys who have nowhere to be but under my feet. All day long. I'm not even sure what to call our rooms anymore.

None of them have a single purpose, nor even a dominant purpose.

So we have been alternately considering moving and adding on to our house. We tried moving once. The house sat on the market for six months with three whole showings and no offers. Not looking forward to a repeat of that! But somewhere in all our musings about what we would really like if we weren't confined by pesky things like reality, a sudden idea came to us.

Why not just buy the land we want? Five acres or so to build on? We can take our sweet time, and I can take the children out there to run like the wild creatures they are. If we purchased something close enough, we could even use it. Plant our orchard. A nice sized garden. Start fencing off a portion for a few goats. Plan the house of our dreams and give me something to look forward to when I feel like snapping at the children for having the audacity to play in the only space allotted to them to play. Right under my feet.

Then we started looking at land. Ha! Forgot about that pesky bit of being in the middle of where all of Lincoln's growth appears to be. Up the road, single acre plots are running over $200,000. Without the house. But not ones to give up hope, we still do an occasional search of different real estate sites, talk about "how nice it would be if" and go on about our day.

Until the other night. We came across two plots about five acres only minutes from my husband's work. Minutes! If we built a house there, we could conceivably cut our fuel costs in half. And we could afford the property without selling this one first.

So of course, my imagination has been running wild. Mind you, we looked at a summary on the internet (no photo available) and I drove by it today not-really-on-the-way to the library. But already I have my orchard planned, my first vegetable garden laid out and two areas fenced off for the goats and chickens respectively. My daughter is trying to wedge a horse somewhere into my musings, but as far as I've gotten is the egg and honey selling business which will help us save toward the horse.

Wondering if the $30 a day fee for the stall at the Farmer's Market in Lincoln would be worth it for selling our extra crops?

It is all so fresh and exciting when your dreams aren't marred by anything at all like actual reality.

I doubt it was high on your list, anyway, but in case you stumble across The Legend of Black Thunder Mountain and think about picking it up for your children, don't bother. The acting was pretty bad, but that was actually the best part of the movie.

I was surprised to find out it was produced in 1974. I'm almost positive that the writer/director was on LSD. Maybe they just never recovered from the 60's.

Once we embraced the stupidity of the whole thing, it got pretty amusing, in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 kind of way.

I'd have to agree with the reviewer from the above linked site:

Written and directed by Tom Beemer, it's no great surprise this is the only movie he ever made...

Note to kids: No matter how nice you are to animals, and even if you don't eat them, do NOT expect a grizzly bear, a wolf pack and a cougar to protect you and feed you while you run away from evil gold prospectors. Quite the opposite. They will eat you.

Bear, I don't mind you shooting your sister, but please stop poking her!

It just sounds so different out of context. They were pretending to hunt lions and taking turns being the hunter and the hunted.

Ok, so she is being interviewed by her mother. But today at 1PM CST, my nine year old "Mouse" will be joining me on my weekly talk show to talk about some positive stories we have found about homeschooling and her own homeschooled adventure. Which unfortunately hasn't always been such an adventure for her, but we'll see what she has to say about it.

You can join as live today (Labor Day) at 1PM CST here:

A Home School Talk Labor Day special!

Or listen to the archive at that link after the show. If you listen, let her know what you think! (A comment here is fine. I think you have to have an account at BlogTalkRadio to comment over there.) She is excited and nervous about her little debut.