Happy Reformation Day & Halloween

Is it proper to hand out gospel tracts on Halloween? Yes. I’d say it is a precedent started way back in 1517 by Luther himself.
Today, the 31 of October, marks the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 Thesis on the door of a church in Germany. His goal was to spark scholarly debate within the [...]

Learning to Read 3 month update

We finished lesson 17 of Christian Light Education’s Learning to Read today. We’re taking it pretty slow since she isn’t 5 yet. Still, she’s made wonderful progress and is reading already! Simple short words like pat, cap, and pot. They have some more advanced “sight words” like brown, some, and many but we haven’t been [...]

Sticker chart

A couple of weeks ago, someone left a soccer table (fooseball?) at the freecycle area. Wow! It was in good condition, so I brought it home. Richard had been having trouble getting his schoolwork done in a reasonable amount of time without tons of frustration and pestering by me and my husband. He’s also been [...]

Winter Fun

Yesterday was the last day of our nice weather. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. We took advantage of it. Since there was still no snow on the ground, we went sliding on a couple of ponds. The ice was 4-6 inches thick. This was Karen’s first time. She was pretty unsure of the idea [...]

Our fertilizer grows on trees

The last few days we’ve been taking advantage of our unseasonable Indian Summer. Last year there was 8 inches of snow by this time, but none is on the ground now. We had some a few weeks ago that melted.
Our garden is low in organics which is part of the reason it didn’t do very [...]

Cleaning the microwave

This is a subject I don’t post about very often, basic household cleaning. However, I do come across a tip from time to time that works so well I just have to share. Today is such an occasion. This tip relates to cleaning the microwave.
I don’t like harsh cleaners. I use them to clean apartments [...]

Save 8 cents

I realize some companies are offering more discounts than others, but this sale was a real puzzler.
We were in Office Max tonight when we saw a paper shredder on sale. It was out in the aisle with a large sale sign. It listed the sale price then the amount of savings, 8 cents. Hmmm. Sure, [...]

Halloween whitewash

In 2 weeks, many in this country, especially children and young adults, will celebrate Halloween. It’s on a Saturday this year so there are even more parties planned. Some may truly be for evil, but many are “harmless fun”.
I want to discuss the whitewash that Halloween is “harmless fun”. Whitewash is used to cover over [...]

Our weekly schedule

I have finally settled into a weekly school schedule. We do 3 subjects everyday: language arts, reading and handwriting. The others we do 1 or 2 days each week. That way we can cover them in more detail at once without making our days too long, usually about 3-4 hours not including breaks. So [...]

Fitness update 2009 #15, A full pantry

This weekend we went grocery shopping. No big deal you say? Wrong! We haven’t been grocery shopping since August except quick trips now and then as we fancied something we wanted to eat. As a result, our pantry was pretty bare. Also, we wanted to get enough food to last until December. Like many other [...]