Tempus Fugit

(more about this at the bottom)

So life has been crazy busy as usual. Yesterday I took some of my soaps (the few cured ones that remained) to the co-op to sell. We'll see how that went. (I got to just leave them there with their info sheets.) I plan to Etsy the soaps, too. But I need to make bigger batches!

I've also been surfing curriculum. O. M. G. there is SO MUCH good stuff out there. Topping my WANT list are Latin Copybooks, Song School Latin, and Cambridge Latin, as well as these classical reading and writing Early Modern History copybooks (That would be Fishy's. There are more advanced ones for the bigs, and I was able to download and print the free one for the Prawn.)

And what homeschooler's life could possibly be complete without THIS BEAUTY? Invention truly is the mother of necessity with the Bind-it-All.

I also have to order new Math-U-See books for almost everyone, but Sluggie's the only one ready for hers yet. Mollusc and Fishy still have a number of lessons to finish up in their current books, and Prawn had the old 1st through 3rd grade book and is about half-way through.

In my searches, I found this incredible lapbooking site (they also have a great notebooking section if you do that.) We're working on the Ancient Egypt lapbook right now to go along with our Ancient History class. I also printed out two different Election process lapbooks that we'll prbably begin next week.

And finally, (hsingwise) I have been using this fantastic review site. Linky-o-rama, and great reviews, too. Actually, the reviews are just one facet of the site.

In other news, I have joined 2 quilt square swaps at Amitymama. We're doing the 8 Sabbats and there was enough interest for 2 swaps. I got Lughnassadh in one (Fall harvest holiday) and Yule in the other. Whee! :) Each of us will do 8 identical squares representing what the holiday means to us, and then send them to the co-ordinater, who will make 8 sets of everything and mail them back. I'll get 2 quilt's worth, since I'm in both. :-)

I'm still cooking up my own Wheel of the Year quilt, but each holiday is so inspiring that I was having trouble confining it to just one wedge of my wheel, so I decided to also do individual hangings for each Sabbat. I started with Samhain (Hallowe'en) because that's what I was inspired to do. I never used to be a great fan of Hallowe'en until I learned more about the real origins and meanings. Things sure do change over time. :-P I didn't even think about measuring when I was whacking off the extra at the edges to bind this (I guess I was in kind of a fog by then), so it's actually a bit lopsided. Mollusc has been making some great symbols of Samhain from Sculpey, though, and I'm going to hang them from the lower left corner on varying lengths of ribbons to help balance things out. I love how it turned out, and my fave part is the printing. If you iron fabric to the shiny side of freezer paper, you can run it through your printer! :-) I'm in love with the Celtic Knot font I found.

Oh Frabjous Joy!

Yes, we made it through the test. :) It was 5.5 hours long and I'm still sore, though doing class last night helped that a bit. The bottoms of my feet are still sore from all the turning, too. Even the muscles inside my feet were sore on Saturday night. For breaking, we only got to do a pulling-step axe kick, which felt very anti-climactic and lame. :-P J, who was testing for 1st degree, got to jump over 3 people (Mollusc and Sluggie were 2 of them) and flying-side-kick his board. There are a couple of vids on my Facebook page of that. I think I was dehydrated, because in retrospect, I realised I'd stopped sweating at some point, and then when we went to put on our sparring gear at the end, my inner thighs and quads started cramping up. This led to my scooting around oddly on my bum with my legs stuck out in a V while trying to get my helmet and subsequently being accused of doing a Zamboni impression. ^_^

So it's great to be alive after all that. :)

Better still, today is my favourite sister's birthday. OK, also she's my only sister, but let's not split heirs. (boo, hiss) She has reached the age of the answer to The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Happy birthday, She-Ra!! I love you. :-)

Girding My Loins

Blackbelt testing tomorrow, 10am, be there.

This is a sucky time for us, since carb loading should be finished 2 hours before start time, which means 8am, which means we have to start eating before that, which means we have to get up and make the food before that. . .

/whining

We are cautiously optimistic that it may go until only 3 or 4 pm. We shall see. We have one guy testing for 1st degree, and the rest of us are "check" testing toward 2nd degree. One guy is only 6 mos away if all goes well tomorrow, but the rest of us are 2 yrs out and more. It will be exhausting, but the camaraderie is good.

My brain doesn't have room for anything else right now.

Write On

I am still alive, but I've become unblocked in my novel, so I've been hammering away at that. Hooray!

Gogofishy turned NINE yesterday! We did balloonorama again, went swimming at the Milford pool with BG and her kids and then came home for a curry lunch (Fishy's favourite food in the world - he's definitely his Mama's boy!) Some dear friends came over for dinner, cake and presents later on. We've known this family since CA, and fate brought us together again here in MI. Fate rocks. They have celebrated birthdays with us for about the last 7 yrs or so.

Prawn's scuba suit is the bomb. I think everyone wants one now. It's great to be able to go to the deep pool, which is on the other side of the wall from the fun pool, and swim and dive and use the diving board. (The deep pool is colder.) Prawn is getting pretty good at diving off the side, and Fishy figured it out yesterday, too. I've showed them how to do a "watermelon" but no one's brave enough to try that, yet. I got a huge reaction from a bunch of day camp kids that were there yesterday, though. ^_^ It occurs to me that everyone I have ever talked to about the "watermelon" trick has no idea what it is, so I'll explain that it's basically a headfirst cannonball. You jump as high as you can (preferably off the diving board) and tip so that you'll enter headfirst in a tight tuck, arms wrapped around your knees. If you do it just right, it makes a BIG splash. I suppose I am the only mom at the pool who is insane enough to do this (or perhaps the only one with so little dignity.) Come to think of it, I'm sure I make a spectacle of myself at the lake, too. Tough rocks; I'll play if I feel like it. ^_^

On a completely unrelated tangent, I found this fascinating. It's so hard for me not to think of Big Dog as having a mind of its own. I'm especially impressed by how it rights itself after being shoved, and when slipping on the ice:

Flesh, Blood and Fire

Not necessarily in that order.

The other day I wanted the kids to make notebooks for the Ancient History class we're doing. Sluggie, having other plans was less than enthused, so like any mom, I tried to come up with a way to make it fun. As we all know, fire makes EVERYTHING more interesting, so we did this.

(Fishy used one of the Blems to make a scroll)


I heart how they came out.


For those of you with kids old enough to shed teeth, you will be able to share in my delight at Prawnie's loss of a dangler. You know, one of those teeth that's gotten to the point where it's horribly askew, but it just won't let go. Sluggie and Prawn were playing the in the basement yesterday and all of a sudden I heard raucous laughter. Then Prawn came up, looking like this: (squeamish people should scroll past quickly)


Sluggie had accidentally smashed the tooth out of Prawn's face with her hand. I say "accidentally" but I know how much that dangler was bugging Sluggie, because I heard her trying all kinds of ways to cajole Prawn into yanking it out or letting her do so herself. So I kind of wonder. Anyway, it's out, so hallelujah for that! I found this next pic on the camera just this morning. I'm assuming Sluggie took it. You can see the new tooth already. (No that's not blood on Prawn's fingernails. :-) )

And finally, after 6 yrs I went to the doctor for a complete physical. The good news is that my pulse and blood pressure and pap smear and all that junk were great. The bad news is that I have high cholesterol. (genetic, I guess) The urf news is that I have to get my first mammogram. I thought I got to wait until I was 40, but I guess they recommend them earlier now. At least it should be blogworthy.

So in the week that I've known about my cholesterol, I've been making dietary changes. The big bonus is that the extra pounds I've been wanting to shed have been falling off, so hooray for that!

I totally forgot to ask about this random dark patch, though. I noticed it a month or so ago. One of my friends has some a lot like it on her cheeks and says hers are "age spots." Is that what this is? It's not a spot I missed with sunscreen because it's been there too long. I completely forgot to ask the doctor about it. It's not scary or anything, I'm just curious. I guess it's kinda hard to see in the pic, but it's kinda hard to see in real life, too. Oh, and please ignore my racing stripes. If you look closely, you can see part of my pussy in this picture. (the orange one >^_^<)

"Scuba, Scuba, Scooby-Dooby-Dooba. . .

Here we go, scuba, come on!" Is it any wonder I have the Veggie Tales "Stuff Mart Rap" stuck in my head?

I am now hoping to keep my impossibly skinny Prawn from freezing to death and wanting to exit the water after 15 minutes of swimming. :-) I wish I'd thought of this for the other kids when they were wee like this. Actually, I didn't think of this at all BG did. She even sent me a link to scuba.com where I was able to get this for $29.95 and no shipping. Yay!!

The Prawn insisted I take an action shot, too:

There have been many forces at work intent on keeping me from the blogsphere. Sewing is one of those things. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to make a layered sleeve T without sewing the bottoms of both sleeves into the same seam, but the Sewing Mamas came to my rescue and voila!

Since I can never follow directions or do things as they're intended to be done, this is a rather modified mix of 2 different patterns. The 2 sleeves are completely independent of each other. Wait, the 4 sleeves? Because of course the 2 would be. . . Anyway, the long and short sleeves are attached to each other only where they join the body. The fabrics are SUUUUUUPER soft thermal and jersey from the $1 table at Walmart that just happen to match each other perfectly. I now have orders for 2 more shirts just like this. I hope I have enough fabric since I got all they had (which wasn't much.) I'm seriously considering swiping Sluggie's shirt from time to time. ^_^

I also did some more paper piecing. Now sure what I'm going to do with these squares I've been making, but it's fun.

This next one is made mostly (all but the border) from vintage fabrics from MIL and I hope to make her a table runner or hotpads or something from various Christmas-themed squares.

And I think that's all I have time for today since I have to: phone in kitty med Rxs, get gas, pick up Sluggie and friend from sleepover, get cash to pay library membership, pick up meds, take the kids to the library teen summer reading party and pay membership, take everyone to the Milford pool (the snake slide should be open today, huzzah!) and get everyone home in time for red belt classes! Somewhere in there I should probably remember to feed everyone a couple of times, too.

Maybe I can sneak in a trip to Stuff Mart to look for more fabric. Nah. Not today!

". . . and if you need an air compressor to blow fruit flies off your dresser. . ."