Homeschool Coffee Break: Homeschool Mother's Journal

In our homeschool... we were off to a great start at the beginning of the week, but the lesson plans were changed when the ice storm arrived midweek! The electricity went out in the middle of our reading about Costa Rica, and we did finish the reading and do a little other schoolwork that day, but without a computer or even electric lights to help us see our books, we figured it wouldn't hurt to take the rest of the day off. Thursday and Friday went somewhat better with the power back on, but we still didn't complete all that we'd planned to do.

Social Studies - we started our focus on Central America this week, learning about Costa Rica and Belize. We still have a lot of recipes from the southern part of the Caribbean and some from South America that we might like to try, so our recipe list is growing! We had pasta frola from Paraguay this week, and had baked sweet potatoes Trinidad-style at dinner one evening.

In other news... Well, I mentioned the ice storm. Yeah, that happened overnight on Tuesday. In anticipation of the bad weather, Landon's Civil Air Patrol and my choir practice were cancelled on Tuesday evening, and Kennady's choir practice was shortened. On Wednesday morning, I got up as usual when our oldest son left for work. He said the roads coming home from his radio job the night before had been very bad, but when he and then my hubby left for work, our road was generally okay, but of course the driveway was the big problem! All the snow we'd already received was covered with a layer of ice. All the trees were layered in ice as well, and not surprisingly, limbs started coming down and the power went off briefly several times in the morning. Sometime after 10am, it went off and didn't come back on. At the time, I was in the middle of doing some school with the kids, so we just carried on. Later in the day I had to try and make some phone calls to verify that our appointments and things were cancelled, and discovered that none of my landline phones work when the power is out! We were sure that at least one of them did, but apparently were mistaken. Another funny thing was that I realized there were a few phone numbers that I only had on file on the computer. In other words, useless to me when I had no electricity! Other than phone calls (thank goodness for the cellphones!) we spent the entire afternoon playing board and card games by lantern light. So it was still a good day. In the evening, we decided to just drive down to the city where the electricity was on and get ourselves dinner at a burger joint. We stopped by the Walmart to pick up a few groceries and extra batteries. Note: we had plenty of milk, bread, and toilet paper, so technically we shouldn't have had to go to the store! LOL Kennady posed with a couple of her favorite TV stars too.

It was pretty chilly in the house, even with the woodstove going, when we went to bed on Wednesday night. To my great joy, power was restored for us early Thursday morning, just in time for me to make coffee! Power was restored at our church late in the afternoon, which was also a relief because we had planned to have worship team practice in the evening. It was a cold practice, but we did it!

Trees and branches are down throughout the area. We don't have very many big trees on our property, so the damage here was minimal. But as we drove around over the last couple days and saw how many large branches and entire trees had broken under the weight of the ice, it was no surprise that the power outages were so widespread and that it took some time to do the repairs!

One of my favorite things this week... was the hours spent playing board games and card games when we didn't have computers and TV to distract us.

On my blog this week...

I recommend... re-visiting this round-up of articles at The Schoolhouse Review Crew blog: Winter Olympics Resources Round-up. Crew bloggers shared their own lists of links and resources for including the Winter Olympics as part of our learning activities. My own list is here: Winter Games and School.

On the bookshelf...

Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon
Gods and Kings - Lynn Austin
The Heiress of Winterwood - Sarah Ladd

I read the newest Deanna Raybourn novella, Whispers of Jasmine, very quickly, and now I am counting the days until the full length novel that it introduces comes out. Yes, I've already pre-ordered it!

A parting shot... At least the snow and ice put us in a great frame of mind to enjoy the Olympics! And we were glad that the power came back on so that we didn't miss any of the games!

This post is linked at SoYouCallYourselfaHomeschooler.com, at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers, and at For the Display of His Splendor - see if other homeschoolers came unplugged this week!

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