Elena 
1. Life continues to be very busy and very full. I try to savor these days. I know a time is coming when there will be no cross country meets, no band practice, no studying for CLEP tests and no more homeschooling. I know that. So I am trying to savor each and every day.
2. If I could offer any bit of advice to homeschoolers it would be – don’t buy curriculum just because every one else is buying it! I have always have regrets when I do! When Calvin was little, the big phonics program was Sing, Spell, Read and Write! A lot of work and didn’t work well with my kid at all!
Sea to Shining Sea
And as it turns out Warriner’s Grammar and Composition, although highly recommended in some homeschooling circles, has been a disappointment to me. This might be the most thorough book out there on the topic, but the teacher’s guide is unavailable unless you’re willing to pay $50 or more for it. It’s also a difficult read in my opinion, for high school students.
3. Instead I stumbled upon this site and bought the grammar e-Book Short, sweet, to the point. The kids like it so much better.
4. Even though my kids don’t care for grammar or essay writing, surprisingly, they enjoy writing short stories! After reading some Edgar Allen Poe this week, they were supposed to write a story today a la Poe! I was pleased to see that the words were just flying off the tip of their pencils! Noah’s story is about a homeless man staying under a bridge watches as a mom pulls up in an old-fashioned care, pulls out a gun and kills her children and herself. Naturally distressed, the man runs to the nearest convenience store to report the murder/homicide but when he returns to the scene, there is nothing and no one there! As it turns out the police think he is a prankster because 50 years ago on that night, a mother did kill her children and herself in the family car! I thought that definitely was a plot Poe would have liked!
5. Because the Feast of the Arch Angels was on a Thursday, we celebrated on Wednesday night- which was the Eve of the Feast – so it counted. I made the angel hair pasta dish that we have learned to enjoy so much, we read parts of the book of Tobit, talked about Michael and St. Gabriel, and we celebrated as a family. This has truly become a family tradition.
6. I’ve been adding more of my high school classmates to my Facebook account. It’s so funny how some of the faces are vaguely familiar, and some I could pass on the street and not know who they are! It is also curious how many of my classmates, who graduated from our Catholic High school, are no longer practicing their Catholic Faith!
7. A little funny thing happened at a wedding I recently worked. The wedding was scheduled for 6, but the bride and her mother informed me that was a mistake – that the actual time was 5:30! After getting that cleared with Father, and notifying the organist and the altar servers, as well as moving the rehearsal for the next day’s wedding to a different time, I thought we were good to go – until 15 minutes before the wedding was supposed to start when they informed me that the marriage license was locked in a car with the keys a good distance away and then Father said he couldn’t marry them without it! Long story short – it all worked out, but we ended up splitting the time difference and the wedding started at 5:45!
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