Convention

Today I went to the Northern Virginia Home Educators Conference . It's not anywhere near as big as the HEAV one, but it's close! Things started out a bit stressfully, as I had planned to be there at 8:30 or so for the start of the used book sale, but yesterday afternoon Bob got involved in some real estate stuff with our next door neighbors (don't get too excited--nothing panned out, although it did waste a lot of time!), so he had to go into the office this morning. So 9:00 found me calling my friend Christine M., who has herself 4 boys, to see if she wouldn't mind watching my 4 while I shopped for a few hours. Even though she is also taking care of 2 other kids for 10 days (which I had forgotten about), she immediately said that it would be no problem. What a friend!! Nine boys, 9 and under, and one girl of about 11. That's a houseful!

I was so excited to find at the used book sale the core book for Classical Writing: Aesop for $10. It's such a little-known program outside of classical circles that I never dreamed I would see it at a small used book sale! So now all I need to order are the student book and instructor's guide. I also bought several books for Nathan to read. I found several good biographies, such as that of Hudson Taylor and Eric Liddell. I've been thinking that the boys would enjoy watching Chariots of Fire (in fact, I put it on our Amazon list not too long ago), so maybe we can do that after reading the book. I was pleased to find Saxon 6/5 pretty cheaply. I might skip Saxon 5/4 (which I do also have) and just start Nathan next year in 6/5. I paged through it, and I think he would be just fine with that. I found some other miscellaneous stuff, like a teacher's idea guide for ancient Greece. I already have one, but this one was different, so I picked it up too. Our group of teachers (for the Greece co-op unit) has a meeting on Monday, so maybe someone else will be able to borrow one if needed. We renewed our Home School Legal Defense Association membership at the convention too. This time, we bit the bullet and bought a lifetime membership--normally $1,000, but only $900 today! Each year costs about $100, so all we need to do is homeschool 9 more years to make that work in our favor. Since we keep producing more littles, I don't think that will be a problem!

I was very pleased to see more vendors there this year. One of the new ones was Memoria Press , from whom we buy our Latin materials. I bought Andrew Campbell's new book entitled The Latin-Centered Curriculum. I belong to a yahoo group that he co-moderates, and I have been looking forward to reading this book for awhile now. I've already started it, and it does an excellent job of arguing for why we are choosing to school in the manner that we are. I'm sure I'll blog more on that later.

Another vendor was Classical Academic Press, which publishes another very popular Latin Curriculum, Latin For Children. It is much talked about on the Well Trained Mind boards, and so I have often wondered if I was doing the right thing in sticking with Latin Christiana. However, after examining Latin For Children, I came away convinced that we are doing the right thing for our family with LC. Latin For Children has more "fun" things, like games, puzzles, Latin readers, etc., that I am sure would go over well here, but it also moves at a much quicker pace and seems to get harder a lot quicker. I think Luke would have a hard time keeping up, whereas he is doing just fine with the pace of LC. It's always nice to be reinforced on one's curriculum decisions!

I did have one rather stressful thing happen. I bought 2 more "Miller" books, which are character-building stories involving a Mennonite family. When I got home and emptied out my big rolling backpack, the books were nowhere to be found. I could hardly believe it, but it looked like I had paid by check, and then left without the books, or else I didn't immediately put them in my backpack, and then laid them down at my next stop. Oh no! I was already feeling very frazzled by the day, but I remembered that my friend Kim U. was there, so I called her cell phone and asked her to go back to the booth to see if I had left the books there after I paid. They weren't there, which didn't surprise me, so she even went around to a few more booths to see if the books were there. What a great friend! Thank you so much, Kim!! They weren't, and so I resolved to just forget about it. But my mind just wouldn't let it go, I think because I just couldn't understand how it would have happened! I'm not usually so careless! So my afternoon was pretty much wasted as I tried to remember exactly what had transpired after I paid, to see what might have distracted me or whatever. All for exactly $12.60. Anyhow, when Bob got home from the real estate office at 6:30 (he had gone back in almost as soon as we had gotten home, and he had taken the van), I decided to just check the stroller in the back of the van to see if maybe, just maybe, I had put them in the basket under the stroller, although I had absolutely no recollection of ever bending down there. Well, as soon as I lifted the stroller up to take it out, I saw the white plastic bag underneath it. And then I remembered that I thought the books wouldn't FIT into my backpack, so I just looped the bag over my wrist and held it that way until I got to my car. Evidently I put the stroller down on top of the bag and promptly forgot all about that. Good grief! What a nitwit! I guess it is reassuring to know that I haven't started acting crazy and out-of-character in public places yet--just at home, where my memory is like a sieve! LOL! I need more sleep. And I'm off to get some! Goodnight! : )