The Joys of Teaching Your Own Children...

So the kids were having "project day" and Zeke decided that they were going to do something related to Ancient Egypt, his favorite subject matter right now. They found their book on the people who built the pyramids and then they disappeared into the bathroom. Now I knew that this generally means some kind of makeup/dressup debacle, but it was so much better when they came out.

They both had green penciled around their eyes ("mom, kohl was black or green") Zeke had removed his shirt and they were both wearing towels safety pinned into kilt-style. then they proceeded to make big huge dangly earrings out of paper and taped them to their ears. :-) We ended up going to Belen's physical therapy looking like this. :-)

I love seeing history come alive for Zeke and Abish and I love watching him read until there's no more light to read with. The path we've chosen is definitely not the easiest, but I know it's right for us. I also know that any parent who wants to can do the same thing. No one knows how to make a child excited about something better than his/her parents.

Someone from our homeschool email group sent a link to a youtube video of a 20/20 clip about education in America's schools. I won't lkink to it here, because I wasn't impressed, but I'm sure you could do a search and find it if you really wanted to. It was supposed to be about how stupid America's students were and how awful our education system is. Chaos was rampant and drugs and violence were everywhere. Anyway, after I had been watching a while, it became clear it was just a thinly veiled pro-voucher piece that also had some very pointed remarks as to the harm that the National Teacher's Union is doing (which is rather surprising as the Union is a very strong lobby as I understand it and has a lot of pull with generally liberal media). I could be way off base here, but that was a blow I was not expecting to see. After it became clear that the piece had it's own way of solving the education problem, I had a hard time finishing it. Couldn't there be another way to fix the system than just using vouchers? They kept talking about the choices available to Eropean parents and all of the schools they could choose to put their children in. Forgive me, but I thought most Governments in Western Europe ran ALL of the schools, not just most of them. Giving parents a choice between s "state-run" public school and a "state-run" private school doesn't sound like a whole lot of choice to me.

Enough venting. somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I'd like to know your opinions.

So finally, We got some extra memory and I can post photos! (I hope this works.)

These are the woolen things that I turned in for the fair. Nobody knew where to put them. They stuck the longies under "handmade boy's trousers" and the other in "baby other". I laughed. They are both handspun. The longies are some waste from spinderella plied with BFL (that's Blue-faced Leicester for the unitiated) and the other is some gray from a sheep on the Notlwonk Springs that I dyed with Kool-Aid.

I didn't want to post too many photos, so this will suffice for now. Look out for photos with Saori and my newest FO: a pair of lace knitted summer socks (I love them!).

Happy Labor Day!