Off to a sputtering start . . .

Today we were supposed to start school back up again, but then former President Ford had to die, and it turned out that Bob got an extra day off to remember him. So, we put school off for another day while Bob played hours of football out in the front yard with the boys (and you know, Pres. Ford was a big football player back in his youth, so I feel that was a very appropriate way to honor him, LOL). I took down all the Christmas decorations except the actual tree, because I didn't feel like hauling in the ladder. The boys turned the lights on, though, so it is twinkling merrily, if a bit nakedly.

Tomorrow we are heading over the Christine's house at 10:00, so not much will get done before that. The McC's got a new microscope, but they can't see anything through it, so they are hoping my years-old microscope expertise will save the day. We'll see. Anyhow, that will count as science, right? And the ever-important "socialization", of course.

Thursday should be our first normal day of the year, but then Friday I have an OB appointment at 10:45, smack-dab in the middle of the morning, guaranteeing that we won't get all that much done then either. So NEXT week will be our big official start. Now we're just "warming up".

I'm sure you have all been dying to know what I have decided to do about Latin this year. We finished up Latina Christiana 1 right after Thanksgiving, and we just reviewed vocab until Christmas. I have decided that we will go back through Minimus again really quickly as another kind of fun review before starting Latina Christiana 2. Frankly, LC2 is a little intimidating, even for me, and I don't want to scare Luke, especially! This will give him that many more weeks of Easy Grammar under his belt before we tackle some of the concepts in LC2.

For history, we only have 8 more chapters in Story of the World 3, so we'll try to finish those fairly quickly. Then I think we will go a little deeper into early American history. I really want to go to Philadelphia before the new baby is born, so hopefully this will inspire me to plan the trip! My parents gave us what looks like a neat little book for Christmas called The Wonder of America : Remarkable Stories Celebrating the Spirit of Our Nation. It's a book of 100 short stories about Americans, some famous and some not, and it looks so interesting. I'm planning on reading one or two a day, maybe over lunch, as just some extra fun history-type reading.

In everything else, we'll just keep plugging away. I really do want to focus a lot on Caleb and his reading before this baby comes. Jonathan has ben showing a lot of interest in reading as well--maybe even more than Caleb, LOL.