Boo at the Zoo

Before I write about our week, I have to say a little about how I've been feeling the past few weeks.....I read a few blogs, some of other hs'ing moms whom I have never met and 1 mom that I know (they all seem to agree)....I am so blessed to be able to home school my kids...I can't express enough how different our life is since we started hs'ing 1 yr ago, my outlook on my life and the lives of my children has also changed. I look at my son who is 7 and think wow, he is still so little yet so big and I get to see him every minute of every day, see his moods, his views on things, his reactions to the things we do, his interactions with friends and other adults. I get to have this time with all of my children before they get to be too big and leave home.
Now on to our week :)
Last Sunday I took the kids to the zoo for their annual Boo at the Zoo event, before we went in all the kids went on the carousel, the girls were a little scared but I stood in between both of their horses so they were fine. F went by himself on the dragon, such a big boy huh? :)

Then they ran around on the Lefferts homestead grounds again for a few minutes until we met up with another hs'ing mom and her son, M and L who is the same age as F. the girls got to play in the Lenape Indian tent, look at a real Revolutionary war cannon, and run around for a little bit. (Freddy did all of the same on Friday and Sunday)

The kids love the zoo and Sunday was even better because of the Halloween set up they had inside. They got to go through the haunted barn with all sorts of scary things inside, the workers dressed up as monsters, Dracula, mummies etc and scared the kids while they walked through he pitch dark barn. I picked A up and held her so she wouldn't get too scared, J LOVED IT! she was the only 4yo that was laughing and shrieking through it all it was great. F and L fed the animals and ran around the zoo together.

After the barn we went inside the discovery center and played with all sorts of educational things while me and M talked about how it is so much better to home school, this is her first yr so she's new at this and needed some more reaffirmed to the wonders of it all, lol. We all had a nice time, and took the bus home, it was so easy to get there by ourselves I was upset that I didn't do it sooner.

Monday F played Carmen Sandiego on the comp, did a few math plms, read a little, the usual stuff around here. Then Monday night he got sick and so we missed the Music writing class on Tuesday, we stayed home and rested. I cleaned the house from top to bottom just in case it was something contagious ...but every one is fine..I got a little sick on Wed. night but was better by Thursday, still we took it easy Thursday and did not go to the library for chess. F did some work pages and mostly played with his puzzles and armies. Friday was J's dance class, Saturday we went to Home Depot for their wood shop classes, all the kids made a Pirate ship, then went food shopping. We were running around for 5 hours.....

Sunday we went to my mom's house to take care of her, she ran the NYC marathon and needed taking care of afterwards :)

On Monday we all went out for Chinese with my mom and had a really nice time. F did some language work pages and played a lot on the computer, and with his legos.

Today was another good hs'ing day. I bought some flash cards on Monday for $1.00 each and F was so excited to play a game with them today..I was so surprised because they are math cards and he really doesn't like math. He wanted to see how many cards he could get right in 5 minutes...he did really well..he got all 36 subtraction questions, all 26 multiplication ones right. He liked the game so much that he was upset that I didn't buy the addition cards..... :) We also did some other math plms using marshmallows.....We also covered nouns and pronouns the past few days and went over spelling and punctuation marks. J is learning the sounds that letters make and she wants to know what everything starts with....she is very much into learning new things.