Home Educa-SHE-own

Mike and I and my parents are into saying everything like Doug on King of Queens (like vaca-SHE-own, prepara-SHE-own), I'm sure many of you have no idea what I am talking about, and it is much easier to talk that way than it is to type it, but it's my blog, so I get to do what I want. Just be glad there were no blogs in our rhyming days (Jonathan the bonathan and tuna-da-boona were two of my father's favorites). But I digress...

We are learning so much everyday. At least I know I am! Who knew that Italy wasn't even a nation until about 1861? Until that time it was just a bunch of individual states mostly ruled by Austria. In 1850 for example, to be called Italian just meant that you lived on the Italian peninsula. Then there were a bunch of small revolutions (started by a couple of different guys with the first name Guiseppe), some people wanted Italy to become a republic and others wanted Italy to be ruled by the Pope, but eventually they became a kingdom and Victor Emmanuel was their first king. Do you know why most of us never learned this? I'll tell you why...this was very close to the time of the American Civil War and so anything most of us ever learned in school about that period in history was only about American History! I personally never learned anything about anywhere else from Colonial America up to modern times. I have to say I really enjoy the American History part of it more, but I'm glad to be finally learning about other places too! Not to mention part of our learning about Italy today involved making pizza...what could be better than that?

Then for science we learned some more about water, and the kids had to make paper flowers, fold them up, and float them on the water. First they would float and then start to open up and then eventually as they filled with water, they'd sink.


A good homeschool day right? Well, lest you think I have it all together, in the middle of all of this I was ranting to the kids about how they should stop taking advantage of me (ie leaving socks on the living room floor etc) and loading the dishwahser at the same time (multitasking at its best). I guess I was yelling a little too loud (or slamming a little too hard) because one of my glass 9X13 pans shattered all over in inside of the dishwasher. So there you have it the good, the bad and the ugly. And guess what the pizza was made with store flour (not freshly milled).