Visitors...

Last night we had a very unique visitor to our house.  Never in the twelve years we've lived here have we had a visitor of this kind.  We've had opossums, wild turkeys, deer, snakes, hawks, but never this!

It was about 11:00 pm and I let our three dogs out to "do their business" before bed and they ran out started barking like crazy right beside the house.  I turned on the porch light and this terrified little face is looking up at me.

 

Poor little guy was just hungry and apparently came to our yard because of the cat food bowl on our porch.  He thought we were asleep for the night.  He got away from the dogs by climbing up the side of the house between the house and the fence.  He got himself wedged in and couldn't go up or down.  After quickly getting the dogs inside, snapping a couple of pictures, I got a broom and used the handle to give him a little boost up and in an instant he was gone.  I'm just so thankful that the dogs didn't catch him.  Is he cute, or what?

Busy days...

Well, as you may have guessed from my lack of posting, I've been super busy.  Just to catch you up on what's been happening in our lives, we've been keeping up with school work, Haley's choir class started back, we are participating in a weekly co-op using a Catholic classical style curriculum, I'm teaching science for this co-op, our church's Parish School of Religion is starting back, so I've been gearing up for that, I've been adding Friday get together and PE activities to my homeschool group's website, handling membership for that same group, running my bow business, re-signing the boy's up for Cub Scouts, becoming a leader for a brand new American Heritage Girls troop just for homeschooled girls (Haley is now a member), going on vacation to Florida for my family's annual family reunion and a quick trip to Ft. Myers Beach (I'll post pictures ASAP), oh and lets not forget my falling down the stairs the night before we left for Florida and spraining both ankles.  Thankfully only my right ankle is still giving me trouble.  I am feeling quite lucky that it didn't get broken, considering how bad it hurt and how hard I fell.

So, as you can see, we're really, really busy right now.  As I write this my kids are tearing newspaper into strips preparing to make two volcanoes that the kids in our co-op can paint on Friday.  I'm just praying that paper mache' dries really fast so that its ready for paint on Friday!  Anybody else feeling rather overwhelmed?

Making Volcanoes!

My children and I are participating in a homeschool co-op for the first time in many years.  We're using a Catholic Classical memorization program called Classically Catholic Memory.  We meet once a week on Fridays with a bunch of other Catholic families.  I'm  teaching science for the co-op and we're getting ready to study volcanoes.  So, to prepare for our lesson and activity this week, my kids and I had the fun task of making a paper mache' volcano.  I've only done paper mache' once in my life, so I wasn't sure how it would turn out.  Here are the kids having fun making a HUGE mess in my driveway.

Here are the two finished volcanoes.  This week we'll be painting them in preparation for the following week when we'll explode them!  The kids are all SO exicted!

They turned out pretty good I thought.  Now if I can just get the eruption to be impressive enough for the kids to be impressed.  I think they have visions of lava shooting up several feet.  I'll let you know how it turns out.