Homeschool

School days

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We started homeschooling last year with the preschool curriculum from Horizons. It wasn’t a bad curriculum — in fact, Poppy really enjoyed it — but it was very structured and worksheet-driven, and I wanted to try out something a little different this year.

We started our second year of prehomeschool (homepreschool?) this week, and so far I really like the program. The general concept of “Five in a Row” is that you read the same storybook five days in a row, each day focusing on a different subject. This week, using “The Story About Ping,” we did a little bit of geography, we discussed and wrote a bit of fiction and — P’s favorite part — we did a couple of science experiments. For which she insisted on wearing safety glasses. She is her daddy’s girl.

blessings

Welcome, baby NotMax!

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Big congratulations to Chris and Sinead! I haven’t even gotten to meet their first little guy yet, and they go and have another one. Someday, we’ll make the trek over to Australia and give them all big ol’ hugs.*

*Highly unlikely. But maybe they’ll come to this side of the world someday soon for a visit. Fingers crossed.

Eating

A scrambled, crabby mashup

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I have a habit (good or bad — you be the judge) of browsing through people’s cookbooks when I visit. Picking up Amy’s copy of Rachael Ray’s 365 days cookbook from her bookshelf led us to a brilliant idea: We’d randomly choose one recipe from the book every week, cook it and blog the results. It would be a project! It would get us a book deal! And a movie, starring Alyson Hannigan as Amy and Scarlett Johansson as me! (And Rockford as himself, because he has a ScarJo crush!)

(To be fair to Amy, I just came up with the movie deal part. She’s less delusional than some people.)

Anyway, it was an awesome plan. But then Amy made the first recipe — page 141, a Crab Tortilla — and wasn’t entirely impressed. So we changed the rules a bit.

Our project (which I’m calling “Recipe Roulette” unless Amy tells me otherwise) isn’t going to be Rachael Ray-centered. We’ll take turns picking a recipe — sometimes it’ll be a random pick, sometimes calculated — and we’ll post about it every Monday. That’s pretty much the extent of the ground rules.

Oh, and about that Crab Tortilla.
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