Ever ask yourself, as a modern busy woman (okay, or man) how many hats you wear a day? Well, I don’t wear hats. They aren’t flattering to me somehow. But ever since a good pal of mine started calling me ‘the bag lady’ a few years ago, I have taken note of how varied [...]

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(Tree art found in a secret locale of the zoo. Cool but a little Blair Witchy)
To offset my total inability to withstand monotony, and yet give a nod to our complete need to have a sense of routine, we have tried on the ‘4 weeks of schedule, 1 week of unschool’ method this year. I [...]

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(my tree climber likes to take pictures too)
This is a story about how being a homeschooler sometimes means getting out of your kids way. I’m not a perfect teacher by any means and I guess I am learning how to facilitate my kids’ learning every day just as much as they are learning stuff. Plus, [...]

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Things I never imagined my youngest would ever say to me;
“Mom, can you put on some Nine Inch Nails?”
“If I were President of the USA there would be no speedbumps and I’d make all food tastier.”
Any one liners yours have floored you with lately?

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Have been busy today doing lots of mature, responsible stuff and wondering to myself how I could be so vigilant about making sure the kids aren’t overextended this year ( as they were for the past 4 years) but forget about making sure I wasn’t overextended too. Oops. Is that the same instinct that makes [...]

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(We started a praying mantis population in our neighborhood a few years back and they keep popping up. This one was on our deck and our friend Bryan had the sort of camera that made things a wee bit closer than we could see with our own eyes!) (Isn’t it odd how his legs just [...]

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Ugh! September! The bees! The daylight hours dwindling, the dissapearance of romping children from the great outdoors! The still hot weather sometimes dipping down to jacket weather at night and we haven’t gotten around to the jackets yet. Or the Fall shoes. Do we have snow boots that fit? The “Isn’t there school today?” questions [...]

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(so pretty its trippy)
One promise I kept to myself this summer was to pepper my more easy-going fictional reads with some homeschooling book research. For about 10 to 20 minutes most days I perused books on home education, managing to explore philosophies and techniques I’d never even considered before and reviewing ones I was already [...]

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(Benefit to Chicago living. Interested in mummies? Go see mummies.)
Okay, I find it hard still to just proceed with normal everyday topics here when I have rescue instincts still going on. I am working on these matters personally so for the time being I will just include an unrelated excerpt from my personal journal. I [...]

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For first hand accounts from a blogger and citizens he interviews read the Interdictor.

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