I am currently pretending to work, while suffering from an acute case of WWHUA (working with head up ass).

Today has not been a day for effective service delivery.

Watching ANTM and eating butterscotch pudding.

Sipping coffee w/Jack Daniels hoping to kill a tooth-ache & wishing I had a cigar. My daddy always said whiskey & cigar will cure a tooth-ache.

Mine always said that having someone heavy stomp on your foot would cure a toothache.

I think I would prefer your dad’s cure at this point.

I should be pulling together the material for my son’s Thursday home school assignments but I’m reading EV instead, which I must say is much more entertaining! Now, if I could just get ahold of Terry’s pudding…is there any chocolate in the fridge?

Mmmmm. Pudding! Ya want a side of worms with that?

Sorry, I’ve got worms on the brain. We’re reading “How to Eat Fried Worms” in homeschool this week (and next week, too). So we’re digging up worms in the backyard (with all the rain that’s easy) and then, for science, we’ll be labeling the parts of a worm, learning about their ideal habitat and making a “worm hotel“. This ties in well with the natural science lessons I’ve been teaching him lately, since we’ll also be turning over our compost pile tomorrow (and no doubt spotting more worms in the process).

Then we’re exploring Yucky Worm World.

For crafts we’re putting together a worm from an old egg carton, and for writing we’ll be sending a letter — along with our egg-carton worm — to Gramma to tell her everything we learned about worms.

And, yes, I’ll be teaching him that old campfire song about worms, too.

So, hey, borrow my Thursday lesson plans and go enjoy that pudding!

To piggyback on my earlier comment, which was written from work in a fit of irritation (nothing worse than working with a requirement that your work product be reviewed by someone who has NO idea what they’re doing and can’t read above a 6th grade level)…

Last night, I tucked the 9 yr old in and was somewhat suprised when her request for bedtime reading turned out to be Blake’s Tyger Tyger, followed in short order by Whitman’s O Captain, my Captain and a number of Emily Dickinson’s lighter works. She really wanted to read Poe’s The Raven to me until she realized how long it is.

Tonight, I think bedtime reading will be the story of Cu Chullain or Tam Lin if I can get her to lie still long enough for it. The other two kids aren’t readers quite like my 9 yr old, so they don’t have the interest for it, but I do like sharing the classics with one of them. (And I have to admit, I think the 13 yr old was listening to some of it from around the corner. )

Playing with Jaiku. And waiting for “LOST.”

I never knew homeschooling could be so interesting and varied. Makes me wish I could go back in time, have another kid, and go that route.

Hey, going to school in your PJs is one of the greatest joys of homeschooling! (Well, it’s right up there with knowing my son is getting a high-quality one-on-one education and realizing that hugs and kisses are the best educational motivators for a kid his age.)

Thanks for all things worm! I will be using your lesson next week! My son is all about anything that involves getting dirty (ah, the joys of being 7) so those activities will be right up his alley. We just finished a unit about plants, their parts and what they need to grow (which culminated in the creation of a flip book illustrating the life cycle of a flower using the collage technique) so the worm lesson will be a great follow up. We were going to observe and record data on actual flowers we planted-until they all froze a few days ago. Happy Homeschooling!

Aha! The Big-Eyed Boy is 7, too, as of last month. He, too, adores dirt… so much so that I’ve had to teach him to turn out his pockets before coming in the house because he keeps trying to “save some dirt” to make mud pies in the bathtub at night. Ugh.

We’re doing plants, too. Luckily, my laziness paid off this spring since we hadn’t yet planted anything out. I picked up an “indoor greenhouse” (plastic covered shelves, really) at a garage sale a couple of years ago, and rigged them with florescent shop lights from my husband’s work room. So we’ve started planting seeds — radishes, green beans, zucchini, tomatoes, some lettuces and Popeye spinach.

I’m hoping that if he grows them he will eat them.

At work but retiring in two months so I have no new projects to work on and I’m turning all old projects over to my replacements (it took two, YES!). Listening to Train Alive at Last and surfing blogs.

Going through your blog!

Did you know that your RSS feed is officially blocked by the Great Firewall of China? You should feel proud.

I had no idea. Proud? I suppose so, although that still doesn’t get me any good Kung Bao.