New furniture

We live on a little half-acre plot that's just OOZING with estrogen. There's me, the two girls, a female dog, and 5 hens. In the midst of all this female-ness, my poor hubby does his best to maintain his sanity and assert the importance of y chromosomes in our world. So, after a hard night of ironing seams for me while I sew, letting Sierra put bows in his hair and studying up on his disney princesses, he retires to the backroom to be all manly and do wood working projects. I kindly ignore the sawdust in the carpet (most of the time) and have just turned the room over. In return, he asks what I want. Last night, he finished the bookshelf I requested for the girls. YAY! He put up pictures on his blog. It is all done except for final painting touches. We can't decide whether to let the girls paint what they want on it, or have them just do handprints on it. The girls are very excited and already have it stuffed to the gills with books (ummm....honey? maybe we need two...)

He asked me what the next project was on his list. I went with compost bins out back because we have scrap wood and can do that for free. The longer term project though, is to build this built in bed for our room. The under the bed drawers would be sized to hold books (like a book shelf laying down...pull out a drawer, select your book, then close the drawer). Our plan is to put this in the corner of the master bedroom so that the foot-board wall will be a new bathroom wall (and add space to our teeny tiny bathroom). The head-board wall will hold more books and be the beginning of my quest to cover the house in built-in bookshelves. swoon Obviously, that's a much more involved (and expensive) project and we might as well save up the money for the bathroom remodel we were planning before we get too far into it.

We haven't done anything in the garden this weekend (aside from taking care of seedlings) because the weather went and got all crazy again. We got down to 31 last night and forecast for 31 again tonight. Should be back in the high 70's by Tuesday.

I have been doing lots of homeschooling reading. Ever since I was pregnant with Sierra, Josh and I have discussed homeschooling. We both like the idea, but it was overwhelming and scary. Then Sierra (and her amazing, never-ending supply of energy) came along and it seemed even more overwhelming and scary. Currently, she does pre-school at a local Montessori school that goes through Kindergarten. It became clear very quickly that this is the IDEAL situation for her. Unfortunately, no Montessori for big kids around here. The idea of trying to replicate Montessori at home was even more overwhelming to me and I was starting to chicken out on this whole homeschool plan. Then, I went to a little meet 'n' greet with a local homeschool association this week and learned about the Charlotte Mason theory of teaching. I've been reading through the Ambleside Online website and falling more and more in love with this teaching method. It sounds GREAT for Sierra and sounds like something I can do without freaking out over creating a curriculum from scratch. There are things I don't like about it (testing is the biggest thing I'd change), but the beauty of homeschool is you can change things up where you want. In addition to this, I've learned that the local homeschool community is even bigger than I initially thought. There are TONS of resources here---everything from co-ops, to sports teams, to "school" dances, to a specific section of the local library with curriculum and text book resources for younger kids. We've done a LOT of talking about local schooling options this week and it looks like we will be leaving her where she is through kindergarten (and starting Sedona at that same school when she's ready), then homeschooling starting with 1st grade. Speaking of homeschooling resources...whether you're doing school at home or elsewhere, one fun resource I've discovered is Homeschool Freebies. They offer one free download each day. Especially lately, there have been a lot of GREAT things on there. You can just go to their website each day to get the freebie, but it's nice to sign up for their email list because they send out an email on Sunday to let you know what will be coming up on what days throughout the week. Lately, there has also been one extra freebie each week for email list subscribers.