Tomorrow is week two – already! Last week we started school so we would be able to take time off when the baby gets here, plus when my Mom visits and if anything else comes up. When the kids woke up last Monday Alice was excited about school while Jake looked like he wanted to go back to bed. Once I assured him noone was leaving the house, Alice was upset! Turns out they wanted to go to the place that had “white crayons” – and once they said you used them to write on the black cardboard, I realized they were talking about a chalkboard. But no chalkboard here, though we do have a white board and plenty of wipe-able markers.

We are using the first couple of weeks as a review just to see where we are. So far, so great! Alice is breezing through some things and makes me realize what we are doing is working, how we are doing it is working and this is the best for us. Jake is sometimes wanting to be involved in the school work but sometimes not. During one of the days he instead decided building a toilet paper tower was a lot more fun. Good thing we shop at Costco!

Blanket blocker at the top of the stairs:

Under the blanket was all of this!

The toilet paper was also used to block the doorway to my bedroom, to Jake’s room and to the hallway leading to their rooms. He had a great time over two days of playing with all of it. Of course it isn’t neatly stacked back in the hall/linen closet, but that’s okay.

I’ve found so many (more!) great resources out there – more homeschool books, curriculum, more great websites for us to try. Here is a great free clipart site, a spelling site and I found great pages on about.com for teaching telling time. I had to stop myself from buying the math curriculum I found – we have so many things here that we are using and that we will use this year.

Alice also learned how to hand sew a seam. She was so excited to see the outcome even though she didn’t really understand what we were doing at the beginning.

All in all a great start! Alice still thinks that school work is doing worksheets or sitting at a table and doing something – I’m not sure what will break her out of that but I’m not worried about it either.

My friend Nell has a great contest going on over at her blog Casual Friday Everyday. Check out her meal planning made easy contest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – groceries and cooking are the biggest things that hold me up in what I do around the house. I try hard to plan what we are eating each week and I am great at grocery shopping with a list.

But we typically eat the same ten to twelve meals over and over again. I might find a recipe here or there but rarely incorporate it into our regular meals (we have eaten the skillet goulash twice!). And I usually am making our meals from scratch! I know there are a lot of people out there who use prepackaged meals they got on sale and just add their own spices and such, but I haven’t mastered the ability to do that just yet.

Head on over to Nell’s and enter to win a year’s subscription to Menu Planning Central!