Yikes.

I know, I know. It's been way too long. To be completely honest, we haven't been doing a whole lot of homeschool-y stuff lately.

Well, that's not entirely true. We've been busy, but so much of we do is educational but isn't directed homeschooling, so sometimes I forget that I should be blogging about this stuff.

As for 'real' schoolish stuff, we really haven't done too much in the last month or so. We do the occasional page in our Singapore Math book, we write letters/draw pictures and send them to friends and family, we watch Between the Lions and Zula Patrol, and have endless discussions about what letters words start with.

We did get to take a fun tour of the Danvers police station, which I think Kristine and I may have liked better than the kids, but whatever. Doug and I also took the boys to the Beverly fire station's open house, which was really fantastic. The kids got to climb in fire trucks and ambulances several times, they got to watch firefighters slide down poles, and they got to examine CPR dummies. Colwyn got to climb in a van filled with gear for water rescues, so he got to check out the wet suits, flippers, a giant motor, flash lights, masks, and all sorts of good stuff. We also brought home bags overflowing with goodies. But the best part of all was the jaws of life demonstration. We got to watch the firefighters totally dismantle an old car, and.. wow. It was so cool. Colwyn really got that they were practicing what they would do if there was a bad car accident and someone was trapped inside, so that was good.

But, like I said.. that's about it. We've been doing playdates here and there, and we try to make it to storytime every week. We've been keeping up our every-other-week library trip and we've gotten some great books lately. I'm still keeping track of everything we check out in an Excel spreadsheet, in preparation to reporting to the school district, although that's still two years away.

Colwyn's birthday is tomorrow, so we're planning on going to Imajine That and meeting up with Mary, Charlotte, and Sam. Then on Thursday, we have a playdate scheduled with Heidi and her kids, who are also homeschoolers. Then on Friday, we're hoping to get together with Jen and her boys, which will be our first intentional playdate since her baby was born two months ago. Colwyn is psyched to see Calvin, and I'm looking forward to obsessing over homeschooling and childbirth and all the other fun stuff we haven't gotten to talk about lately. I also planned a meeting for next week for the homeschooling group I'm starting up. Dani said she's going to attend, and hopefully some others will too. I'll mention it to Heidi and Jen this week and maybe they can come too. We'll see.