Ambitious April

A little debate...

...is always healthy. We went to a homeschool activity where we played some games and had a little debate session. The debate on Xbox verses Wii was pretty heated.

Christmas Spectacular

A friend had us over to organize a Christmas performance all day with the kids and then we performed later at a dinner with family and friends. The kids had a blast!

Bookshelves

Single girls...add this to your man wish list!
Love Levi bunches, but I overlooked the importance of a man with this trait.

Exercise isn't always fun, but it sure is FUNNY!

Idaho has lovely cold weather winters, complete with snow, ice, and inversions. This type of weather equals cold, miserable, windy, wet and muddy outdoor play. Our family always sinks into a sort of hibernation mode and it is harder to get the kids out to play and be active. To keep us motivated and away from the TV, I try to look for opportunities for us to get out and be active.

The community offers a few solutions for a fee. The pools at the local Recreation Center and YMCA are always a big hit. In our area we are also fortunate to have a few Bounce house places like Monkey Buisness in Boise and Jumpin Jungle in Nampa. A new place opened this year in our town, an indoor trampoline park, called JumpTime. It makes for a great indoor workout and tired kids after.

For a lower cost winter workout, we will rent different children's workout videos from the library. Some old favorites of ours are Sesame Street - Elmocize and Yoga Kids. For some more recommendations check out this article.

Other cold weather options take advantage of our lovely Idaho snow. Sledding, tubing, hiking, snow shoeing and cross county skiing are all great workouts.

What sort of winter PE activities do you do in your homeschool?

Perspectives

When you suffer from depression one of the first things you learn in treatment and therapy is altered perspectives. Not everyone views the world the same way. Our perspective is how we see the world through our own lens. These lens can be tinted, coated, and fogged up by all kinds of things like culture, up bringing, education or lack of education, experiences, tramas, stress, addiction, gender, ethnicity, etc. Depression is a HUGE lens that alters perspective. To help you cope and counteract the effects the Depression lens has on your perspective, your therapist may have you practice looking at things in your perspective and then how they really are. It can be a very challenging exercise depending on how depressed you are or how long you've been living with depression and your altered perspective. You are pretty much having to tell your brain what it thinks is crap and then you have to try to tell it how it really is. They call this cognitive therapy, but I like to call it the Twilight Zone.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this funny little comic about how people generally see the world and how it really is. The little monsters make it even cuter. You'll probably need to visit the original to read everything.

November Nature Walk

Our little Homeschool Nature Walk group went to the Star, ID River Walk just before it got too cold out. It was a great day, as we walked and warmed up the kids took off their jackets. The trees were in full blown Autumn mode. Maple, Birch, and Oak leaves covered the path crunching under our footsteps and falling on us as we strolled along.

Beautiful Fall Colors

One of the girls found a nice fat slug hanging on to the last few days of warmth. What to know more about slugs? Check out Snails and Slugs at the Backyard Nature website.

PHYLUM: mollusk

CLASS:gastropods