Locks of Love

This past spring, one of the opposing softball teams had a little girl with cancer on the team.   She was bald, and spunky and a really good player who played hard!  

Olivia and Lindsey of course wanted to know why someone so young is bald.  So I explained to them about cancer and the side effects of the treatments, one of which is your hair falls out.   We also have an elderly neighbor who has recently gone through treatment and has since lost her hair, so it helped them understand.

Somehow all of that ended up with the question of wigs, and Locks of Love came up in conversation and today the girls did something drastic.  (No they didn’t sneak and cut their hair!)

For Locks of Love, hair donations must be 10 inches.  To do that the girls hair would have been too short for their ballet buns.  However, Pantene also collects hair, with a minimum of 8 inches in length, strictly for children's wigs.   So we headed to the hair salon.

Olivia’s hair is super thick (someone’s going to get a NICE wig outta that!).  The lady couldn’t use her scissors to cut through the pony tail, she had to use a straight razor and slice through in sections.

Lindsey’s hair is a lot finer and thinner, so getting her pony tail cut with the scissors wasn’t an issue at all.  Her donation ended up being longer than Olivia’s due to an unfortunate incident with Olivia and scissors a few years back…but let’s not think about THAT right now.

Anyway, they are both really happy to have donated their hair.  I’m quite proud of them as well.  Lindsey’s hair looks much better, and she looks older finally.   Olivia’s hair will take a week or so to adjust to the cut, it’s wanting to go berserk now that there isn’t so much weight on it.

Weekly Wrap Up–The End of Summer Edition

Wow, where did this week go?  For that matter where did the summer go?  We officially start back to school next week!

This was basically a catch up week for me.   I managed to get all the extra furniture/possessions in a proper location.  And, drum roll please…..I got our class room decluttered!!   So we’ll at least be able to find stuff.

We’ve ordered library books for next week and pulled worksheets and lesson plans.   I even broke out the new marker and colored pencil stash!!  Oh it’s going to be a glorious year!

Olivia read Little Women this week.  My favorite was always Jo.  Olivia’s favorite is Meg, and that surprises me for some reason.

Lindsey’s reading skyrocketed this past week.  She’s actually sitting down and reading of her own choice and reading really well.  She’s even reading well from the Bible and it’s King James!

That’s pretty much our week in a nutshell.   Next week it’s back to the grind stone for us!!   In the meantime, check out this weeks edition of the Weekly Wrap Up!

Water Balloon Wars

July is hot, humid and miserable in Virginia.  Thus, we have to find fun ways to beat the heat and still get out of the house.   Enter, the water balloons!  Aren’t they lovely??

One interesting fact (ok, annoying fact) is that if you fill the balloons completely full, you can’t tie them.  If you leave enough room to get it tied, they don’t burst on human impact.   They do however rupture the second they touch the ground after bouncing OFF of humans.

None the less, we had fun, got wet, stayed cool and that’s what July in Virginia is all about!

Homeschool Showcase #77

Homeschool Showcase #77 is now up over at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.  Lots of good things are being shared, so be sure and go by and visit!

Girls and Horses

Summer vacation was a great time to tackle a horse unit study.  The future veterinarian (Olivia) was in heaven working through all these things.  Lindsey seemed to enjoy it as well.
First I wanted all of us to get a better understanding of horses in general. So we read, A LOT!

Books we used:
Horse Breeds; by Daniel & Samantha Johnson
Arabian Horses; by Julie Murray
Pinto Horses; by Julie Murray
Ponies and Horses; by  Fiona Lock
The Essential Guide for Young Equestrians; by Libby Hamilton
Horse Crazy; by Jessie Haas
The Usborne Book of Horses and Ponies; by Lucy Smith
All About Drawing Horses and Pets; by Walter Foster
Complete Horse Care; by Judith Draper
A Field Full of Horses; by Peter Hansard, Illustrated by Kenneth Lilly
Hammond Undercover Horses; by Fran Hodgkins
Fold Our Horse and Pony; by Paul Calver

Then I went to the 4-H site and found great resources for those of us who don’t own a horse (yet).  These helped Olivia and Lindsey to really reinforce what we’ve read and learned.

4-H Publications we used:Horseless Horse Project 1
Horseless Horse Project 2
Horseless Horse Project 3
Horseless Horse Project 4

Crafts:Melissa & Doug Decorate Your Own Horse Figurine
Horse Acetate Sun catcher from Oriental Trading (discontinued I assume since I can’t find them on their site now).

Olivia loved the All About Drawing Horses and Pets book!


Olivia organized the 50 breeds of horses in order of her preference (since it was her gift).   Then Lindsey added the 1-50 stickers as she practiced her counting.


To wrap it all us we went to a horse show to get some up close info on horses.  The girls LOVED it (105 degree temperature, not so much).  We spent time identifying  equipment, different breeds, markings and gaits.  




This is one of my favorite photos of the day!  Love my tie-dye wearing cowgirl as she watches the riders through the fence.

Weekly Wrap Up–GAH! Week 2

If you are wondering about the title, then you obviously didn’t read last week’s wrap up, so read that first by clicking here.  We’ll wait for you……

Ok, now that everyone’s back and understands the title, lets head into week #2, shall we?   Have I ever mentioned that I’m a clean/neat freak?  Oh, really, I didn’t?  Well… I AM!!   So this isn’t working so well for me..

Yeah, so….yeah.

The BEST part of the week was on Tuesday.  I received an email from BookSneeze telling me I was getting 2 FREE tickets to the Women of Faith conference in August!  You can’t imagine how on time this is for me right now!  You can read more about it in this post from my other blog.

Wednesday was the Kiwanis baseball year end picnic.  Lindsey was SO excited to win the sportsmanship trophy for t-ball.  She also earned a major league team hat for selling peanuts this year (she has no clue who the Phillies are, but liked the red hat).    Such a proud moment for us all!

Thursday was a around the house trying to organize and put away kind of day.  Nothing too exciting.  Olivia finished reading Call of the Wild and Lindsey has worked her way through her pile of 50 readers for the summer.

Today IS HOT!!  Oh my goodness, it’s 104 in the shade and that’s the real temp, not including the heat index.   I managed to get the last load of things moved from the apartment to our house (too bad the air conditioning in the van doesn’t work).   So I think I’m officially done for the week!

We will be starting back to school August 1, so my posts will be getting less sporadic and more geared toward our homeschooling.  Also I’ll be doing some giveaways starting next month as well, so stay tuned.

In the mean while, have a cold glass of sweet tea and visit the Weekly Wrap Up!

Weekly Wrap Up–The GAH!!! Edition

So how’s that for a title??   Well, it pretty much sums up my week.  We have a family member (Mary) moving in with us due to health issues.  You can read more about that here.

Yeah, so this week I’ve rearranged my entire house, and life as I know it.  Mary can’t navigate stairs, so we’re giving her the master bedroom/half bath combo.  This means we’re moving our room to the family room in the basement.  Which means I had to clear out furniture…sold some stuff, donated some stuff.  Got our furniture moved in.  Our schoolroom is also in the basement.  Today it dawned on me that since my husband works night shift and sleeps late having the classroom and bedroom in the same room won’t work.  So the classroom is moving upstairs to the formal living room.  What to do with the furniture that’s there???  I’m guessing you see where the GAH!!! came from, right?

So that’s my wrap up in a nutshell.   Moving, packing, unpacking…GAH!!!

Don’t forget to visit the Weekly Wrap Up and see if anyone else has a title nearly as catchy.   (And yeah, I’ll put the linky in sometime today, because well….GAH!)

Bible in 90–Week 1

Woohoo!   The summer session of Bible in 90 is on!  Today is Day #1 and we’re well on our way.   I’m so excited to be mentoring 15 ladies this go around!

Check in day is always on Monday.  Even thought it’s the first day, be sure to check in today in your designated group.   Click to go to this week’s check in post. Once there, click on your group number or letter and leave a comment for others in your group to read. Also, comment back to the others in your group, pick a few people and pray for them.

You may also be interested in seeing what others are blogging about.   You can go to the link up site here.

Weekly Wrap Up– The Hodge-Podge Week

This has been a fun, nothing planned kind of week.  LOVE IT!

Monday of course was July 4th.  We cooked on the grill, had water balloon fights, set off fireworks and then Olivia and I went to the town’s fireworks show at 10pm.  (Lindsey fell asleep and missed it.)

Tuesday was a fun day for the girls and I.  We went kite crashing flying in the early afternoon.  

Then in the evening we went down to the city park for “Praise in the Park”.   There were two praise groups singing and it was lovely.   There was also a church holding vacation Bible school in the park, so the girls attended that while I listened to music and worked on a couple of word search puzzles.   When VBS was finished the girls (and a  little boy who was smitten with Olivia) played games and chased lightning bugs until the music ended.

Wednesday Olivia finished reading Heidi by Johanna Spyri.   Lindsey has completed 35 readers, so we headed to the library for our second round of prizes for the summer reading program.   Olivia also had piano lessons on Wednesday.  I was able to sit down and work our our upcoming year’s lessons plans. 

Thursday we worked on a couple of different crafts.   The favorite was this Crayola Color Explosion Sand Art kit…what a MESS!  But the kids had fun and the glow in the dark sand was cool.

Friday was supposed to be a day to clean the house really well and work on a couple of  ideas for group activities.   Yeah well, scratch that after spending much of the day at Emergicare with a family member, and then getting prescriptions filled, getting caught in a SEVERE storm and then helping said family member get their laundry and housework done.   Funny thing is what I was SUPPOSED to be working on was a list of community service projects….and instead the girls and I ended up DOING a service project.   Life is funny like that.

What about your week?  Any unexpected things blow your schedule out of the water, or was it smooth sailing?

Be sure to visit the Weekly Wrap Up!