Memory Maker

Some days homeschooling just cracks me up, some days I love it, and some days it's just plain hard and I feel ready to quit. Today happened to be a great day that put a big deposit in the "I love it" category.

Emma started out by going to an American Girl's Class held through a home school co-op in Newton. She had a Victorian tea party today based on the Samantha books. She and I made Victorian Tea Cake (sponge layer cake with strawberry jam filling) for her to take along. She brought an antique floral tea cup, and came back with a big, satin hair bow that they made.

Well, after lunch with the beautiful hair bow donned, she and Abby proceeded to head out back to dissect two cow eyeballs. Really. We're studying anatomy and physiology this year in science and had recently studied the eye. Our book suggested getting cow eyeballs from a meat packer and we happen to have a great meat packer just a few blocks away. Although Greg enthusiastically secured the eyeballs from the meat packer and brought them home to our fridge (where I picked up the bag, mistaking them for bacon - just a bit of a shocker), he wanted nothing to do with the dissection. Maybe his own eye surgery is a little too recent.

As I was getting Gracie down for some rest time, I heard delighted exclamations: "WOW, Mom you have to get out here and see this lens I got out, it's hard! Here's where the optic nerve connected, COOL! Ew, the aqueous humor is really sticky! HEY, here's the retina with the capillaries, LOOK!"

After this bit of excitement, a wonderful woman from our church, Naomi, took us all out to a nature trail in Newton that we had never visited. She had told us at the beginning of the week that she would like to do this with us for Pastor Appreciation month. Today was absolutely beautiful here!

Naomi came over with little booklets she had made for each of the girls with their names written in them and a little poem that had been written about the Sand Creek Nature Trail attached on the front page. She is a nature lover and made sure the girls had backpacks to gather their treasures in along the way. She collected different leaves for them to have a variety of leaf rubbings to do in their books. She brought along a book to read to the girls that is also one of our favorites called God's Quiet Things.

We came home and filled my glass pumpkin with their treasures. Definitely a memory-making day!