Homeschooling/Unschooling on Dr. Phil

I just wanted to take a minute to post this important link on what really goes on with the Dr. Phil show. Because he is having "The Great School Debate" episode airing sometime in the next week, I think it's good to know how these types of episodes are actually taped, and how incredibly set-up and biased the entire thing is.

Myself, I don't watch Dr. Phil. All I need to know about "The Great School Debate" is right here in front of me, my awesome, creative, intelligent, fun and wonderful kids!

A Pumpkin In Time

Things are crazy around here, with just four days until we all leave for Florida and my Ironman race. We'll miss Halloween here in the Northwest with our friends, and the kids are a bit bummed about that, but at least we got a beautiful fall day to go out to the pumpkin patch and find a few nice orange beauties to bring home and carve.

While we will all definitely enjoy the beautiful warm weather and sandy beaches of Florida, there's also something distinctly compelling about crisp fall weather, piles of dry rustling leaves, and the smell of distant rain in the air. Our region has such beautiful farms to visit, and my recent bike rides have taken me past fields full of pumpkins, corn, tomatoes, and trees so laden with apples that they appear entirely red.

With only a few days to go, and a to-do list a mile long, I'm left wondering if I have the time to put at least one or two pumpkin pies in the oven...

The Diva Turns Seven

From late August to the first week of October, it's birthday season in our family, with four family birthdays to celebrate. The last is my baby girl's, and she's just turned seven (though sometimes it feels like seventeen). Surely it can't have been seven years since she was just a roly poly baby.

At 11:55 (the time of her birth), she and I sit and look through her birth and baby photos and I read to her from the journal I've kept. Reading about her earliest moments makes me realize how much of a child's personality just comes directly with them. We're really only here as guardians of the spirit that they arrive with. When I was pregnant, my knickname for her was "jumping bean", and after she arrived, we called her "thumper" (for her habit of always thumping her little legs up and down), and "aerobics girl (because even as an infant, she never stopped moving). By three months of age, I was commenting on how much she loved animals and was drawn to watch them, and how musical she was, how she was always "singing" her "baby arias". A Diva was born.

Now, her personality is as big and creative and crazy and wonderful as ever. For her birthday, her main present requests were a chinese fan, a police uniform, and a karate punching bag. We did get her the first two, and she wore the police uniform through her entire birthday party (despite the fact that my mom tried to help her pick out a nice dress to wear, LOL). We're looking for a good punching bag to go in the garage for the whole family to use.

She still never stops moving. Or singing. Or keeping us entertained with her wacky, wonderful personality. Or driving us crazy with her diva-ness. She's got a huge heart, a deep love of all living things, a fresh perspective on the world that makes everything seem new. We love her so! Happy birthday to my big girl.