Why have there been no updates? I will follow a time-honored tradition and blame the kids. Cotton is mobile, Seph wants to sign up for everything under the sun, Rone wants to stay home and do Lego, and somehow we are always out of milk aside from the 30 minutes right after we've bought some. And I was out of contact lens solution for about six days (don't ask), so everything was extra bleary.

We've been plotting out fall, getting lessons decided on and signed-up for. And I've been paging the curriculum catalog, which is just dangerous. This week we've had two pool parties with the other area homeschoolers, and started up our Campfire meetings.

Rone's starting tennis, and continuing karate. Seph is continuing tennis, bookclub, and piano, and will be taking dance with Miss Joan again this year. She's going to be a helper in the class for the 3-4 year olds, which is a great opportunity for her. We're also doing swimming lessons once a week for the next few weeks, and have Science Club once a month. I'm also thinking of arranging some sort of talent show for the area kids. And I think Seph is joining a Bug Club. Our House Project for this semester is to build the chicken coop. And then Rone is doing math and reading, and Seph has Saxon math, Latin, handwriting, and science for her seatwork.

This is what I end up doing when I very sternly instruct myself not to do too much.

Things I didn't sign up for: girl's choir, fiddle lessons, German lessons, drama, Chinese lessons, gymnastics, preschool, history day, and ice skating. I'm tired just thinking of it all.

It's Raining! Rain gets a capital, because I'm just that damn happy. We've had some spits, and a light shower, but right now we're getting enough to actually register on the rain gauge. What? You don't have a rain gauge? Then how do you make charts of your rain to go with your temperature charts?

Cotton is crawling. But only when she wants. She's mostly relying on the butt-scoot method of locomotion, which is surprisingly fast. I blame Cousin Brox for this, as I think he told her to stick with the scoot while we were together in June.

Rone is still the Loophole Master. And also, as all kids are, selectively oblivious. Today, while driving, Chance mentioned that something sucked. I don't know what, it may have been another driver, the fact that it was only 92 degrees, who knows. So the backseat takes this up, "Cars suck. You suck. Suckity suck suck." Super. Chance is forced into admitting it's a bad word, he should not have used it, and neither should they. Rone says, "So, we can't suck things through straws or anything, now."

And Seph is nearly as tall as me, adds up all my grocery store purchases (but can't do math), and is frantically plotting the many things she's hoping to do at her sleepover this week. She also wrote a very short article for our Campfire council newsletter about our trip to the Botanical Gardens.

Off to take Cotton out to see the rain. If she's gonna yell, there might as well be a fun reason.

SephArt:

Semicivilized lunch:

Seph is far more dramatic than a seven year old has any right to be, and is also becoming much more responsible. We've made Tuesday her supper night--she gets to pick and cook dinner. Last week it was grilled cheese and salad. This week is breakfast for dinner, and she'll be learning to scramble eggs and make french toast. All this helpfulness is balanced by things like bursting into tears when I ask if she wants to go see a play in the park.

I'm not sure if Rone is odd, or just a boy, but he comes up with the most peculiar observations. I bought a filmstrip projector this weekend (I know! Aren't I lucky!), and when I showed it to him and asked if he like it he leaned over close to it and said, "It smells weird." Chance and I snickered, as we do with most of his oddities.

When we were at Costco he told me it was good I was wearing my Costco shirt. Why if is my Costco shirt? Because of this:

So he notices this tiny label (granted, it is pretty much on his eye-level, on my hip)on my shirt, and in his head, it's Mommy's Costco shirt.

There's more, but I opened the window to type this a full twelve hours ago. It's gotta be done by now!

We really did get married:

With a dress, tuxes, and all that. And bbq. And beer.

Seph finally succumbed to the force of Disney known as Hannah Montana. And she's bribed Rone, somehow, to say he likes it to, so my previous excuse of , "You need to watch something you both like." just isn't working anymore. I was trying hard to avoid it, and all the other tween-disney horrors, but when we got back from our trip Miley had taken over a portion of her brain. I can hope she relinquishes it soon.

Rone has refocused some of his energy from obsessive door-re-entrifying to obsessive shirt-tucking. It gets pretty funny when his pants get up to his 'nibbles' (which is his word for a body part I'm certain you can sort out). We went to a photo shoot for his karate school's new website, and he hiked his pants up so far that an instructor had to intervene and get him sorted out.

Cotton could crawl, but doesn't. She can get on all fours, but I think she'd decided to wait until she can just stand up and walk around.

Today is Beatrix Potter's birthday. Did you know that The Tale of Peter Rabbit has been in print since 1902? Me neither!

The Great Road Trip of 2008 disrupted the minor amount of routine we'd developed around our lessons, and we have just started trying to re-establish lesson time. It's going slowly, because summer in Texas makes me cranky and we're all spending too much time inside. Oddly, the amount of time we spend in quiet contemplation of our studies is very small. It's eclipsed by the amount of time I spend checking on the AC unit, willing it to continue working until November.

Yesterday was Hurricane Day, though, so we had a lot of weather talk. Between the 87 kinds of maps available to over-excited weathermen, and the wide variety of weather to consider (winds, sun, rain, tornado, flood) there was a lot to discuss.

Seph's also been doing Independent Studies. That sounds a lot better than the more descriptive, yet slightly frightening, Reading The Encyclopedia at Night and Taking Notes while also Memorizing Other Bits. Cotton is taking AP Crawling to Mastery and Eating For Dummies. Rone is still in a legal phase, with Looking for Loopholes and Personal Injury 101.

Actual conversation:

Me--Why would you wipe the baby's head with a dirty rag?
Rone--She was hot?

So now she's hot and mucky, with bleck from the rag matting the small amount of hair she does have. We did get the kids' room cleaned up, though. It was so cluttered that I couldn't stand to go in, and had stopped reading to them at night. Now it's better.

We haven't been getting out much, because it's just so hot. I'd imagine it's similar to what people in more northern latitudes feel during the winter. We go to the playplace (that's the gym) and to the pool at the Elks, and to Costco. That's about it. I'm looking forward to October, when things will cool off.