Random babbling

Since it's another late night and I can't sleep, I was digging through my pictures, trying to clean up duplicates, get rid of crappy photos of nothing too important, just general housekeeping as I wait for podcasts to download. I stumbled across this picture I took of my side yard. Every once in awhile, we get the idea we want to move. Then I see pictures like this and I can't remember why. If we ever move, the view will have to be at least this good. It's so serene, relatively isolated, green. Sure, I'm allergic to almost everything that sprouts in the spring and fall, but this pretty view makes it worth it to me.

And this is a bottle I was messing with. I saw on a blog, am looking to find which one, information about altering plastic bottles. I need to fix this one. I love the colors, but it looks like the bottle has horizontal ridges. It doesn't. My darling husband asked me what exactly one would do with a bottle like this. Not sure, dearest, but I spent two weeks painting it and those were two weeks I wasn't nagging at you. I think he got the point. The texture is tissue paper, the paints are metallics. I love the pendant. I'm seriously considering taking the pendant off and pitching the bottle. I want to wear that pendant and the more I look at it, the more I want to.

As the summer winds down, both of my school-aged boys are starting to make requests for books and reading materials. Anyone who doubts the power of homeschooling, or more precisely the philosophy of unschooling, or child-led learning, needs to know what my boys asked for this year. The older boy wants geometry, physics, sign language, and has a list of novels that will set me back quite a bit. He also wants a college anatomy book. Why can't he want fluffy stuff? Fluffy stuff is cheap. All these science and math books are going to break me!! This is the child who barely opened a book 5 years ago before we pulled him from school, the kid who hated math and science. My other son has asked for Latin. He wants to learn Latin. I haven't gotten anything else from him yet, but he's been reading Dostoevsky and Dante and lots of other books I don't know if I could hope to wrap my head around. Child-led learning = letting the child determine what *he wants to learn and at what pace. I embraced this philosophy the year I pulled them out of school. And though I was skeptical, thinking all they'd want to read was comics and all they'd want to do is watch TV, they have surprised me by rediscovering their love of learning and by doing more and better than I ever could have hoped. My kids are awesome. I'm so proud of them.