$5

I bought this from a local thrift store and G lifted it in and out of the car for me and set it up.  My new end table has no scratches, dents or bad smells.  The doors work perfectly. Yay!  It doesn't quite match the other wooden furniture stain-wise, and it's probably from the late 1970's, and D says that stuff like this winds up in thrift stores because their previous owners got old and died, but that's all ok.  I am going to keep some homeschool materials in there and D says... this stuff is taking over the house.  How is it that now that we are homeschooling only one child, that we have twice as much stuff?  I dunno.

Y2K Disaster!

January 1, 2000 will surely bring an apocolypse like you've never seen!  The end of the world will be complete with a clonky computer, big circular floppy disk, a chunky square disk (high-tech!) and floating zeroes and ones.  It's a shakeable mayhem, folks!  Happy New Year!  I sure hope I didn't scare you too much! Feel free to hide your cash money at my house in case the ATMs don't work on the big day.  :)

Better Than Mr. Potato Head!

Buy an orange or small clementine and a couple small containers of "whole cloves."  You'll find them in the spice aisle and ours were 99 cents for a small package.  Pop the cloves stem-in into your orange during craft time.  They're actually easy for little hands to pop in once they're shown how.

And after your craft is done, it makes the kitchen smell lovely.   Here are Woodjie and Rose's creations sitting on my windowsill.

Shopping!

Now that Christmas break is here, Elf and Emperor and I are sorta homeschooling together.  I told Elf that I need him to do something besides sit around all break.  I know he will be a crabby apple if he doesn't have some sort of schedule.  But I'll be generous.  Not only would I give him EVERY WEEKEND off, but also Christmas Day AND Christmas Eve!  An incredible amount of time off.

They both felt a bit gypped, though, when they figured out that Christmas Eve and Day are over the weekend.  Oh, well.  :)

The three of us went shopping out of town today just because.  I just took Emperor on the escalator and he literally fell all over the place.  He doesn't understand this concept of the stairs opening up, and I've explained and explained about holding the rail and the yellow lines being on the end of each step... to no avail.  He still wobbles a bit when the stairs pop out and about flies off the escalator as they are retracting... I want to say that he does it exactly as Steve gains his balance after a "skidoo" on the Blue's Clues show.  Exactly.  I'd like to take real stairs when I'm with him, but some places, they're just not available.

Poor Emperor is very smart, but he also can't seem to figure out that random people don't want to discuss what the writing on their shirts mean when they are on line with him.  "Why would they be wearing it in such big letters if they didn't want to discuss it?" he wants to know.  I told him it was supposed to be a one-sided conversation.  Emperor doesn't get how you can even *have* a one-sided conversation.  Where do I get these ideas from?

Bah.  Okayy, nevermind.

On the way out, he asked the cashier about whether it would be ok under the store's "no weapons" policy for him to bring his shield in.  Because technically it could be considered a weapon but see mostly? it is a defensive piece of equipment.  So what do you think?

"What?"  The cashier was clueless and had that "did I just hear that correctly" look on her face. Well... she thinks it would be ok for him to bring the shield in.  She guesses.  Emperor told her that if she's going to work there, she really ought to know the rules of her own store.

Times like this, I am glad we were shopping out of town.  But that went off better than his telling someone at the end of a boring paperwork meeting awhile back that honestly he doesn't know howcome you even need to get paid because you really did no work but just sat around and said nothing.

*cringe*

D hates these particular paperpushers and thought that was the best zinger ever when he heard that one.  Emperor though?  Just was trying to chat and isn't quite sure why he is laughed at all the time, or people get upset with him.

Yay, Elfie!

Elf won the USCF Christmas Scholastic Tournament in Olathe, Kansas, today! He won two games and drew one.  "I worked pretty hard and my mom helped me a lot, although this day wasn't the best day of my life because my mom made me clean my room and throw away stuff I wasn't using and I cried over it," Elf said.  "Mom told me to throw away a humongous dust ball and I did not want to throw it away so I hid it and Mom will never find out where it went."

Seashells

Post-It Homeschooling

I love Post-It notes.  I use them as bookmarks because they don't fall out.  I also use them for assigning work in our homeschool.  Everything that needs to be done will be written on a Post-It and Emperor can mentally go through his checklist each day. 

For some assignments, I have cut Post-Its into strips and written the words "START" and "STOP" near the top.  Emperor can use these as tabs in his book.  In our science book, this is especially useful as the assignments often begin and end midway on a page.  I can tuck the sticky note out sideways and he knows right where to begin and end.

I also keep a stack of Post-Its by my computer.  If there is a particularly blinky- or boobie-type ad on the sides of the article I'm viewing, I just pop the note on the screen and viola! It's gone.

Yes, I wrote "viola!" to be funny.  "Wahh-lah" is also a favourite.  "Your" welcome.  :p