I wish I knew what she was thinking!

This morning, the first thing Miss M said when she woke up was, "Mommy, what room is this?" We were in the bedroom, same as we are every morning, so I said, 'The bedroom." "Oh. I thought it was a treehouse."

I have no idea what she meant by that. Maybe she'd been dreaming?

A Hawk

Not thirty feet from the bedroom window. I'm afraid its catch was a robin (which it flew off with a few minutes after getting its picture taken).

Lunar Eclipse

Taken at about 7:10 EST. The moon will leave the umbral shadow at about 8:10 and the penumbral shadow around 9:30 (02:24 UTC) (Wikipedia and NASA have more information). If you miss this one, there's going to be another August 28th.

What I'm Reading

Everyone else is marking which books they've read on the latest most popular 100 Books list. I just haven't read enough books to make that kind of project very interesting. Here's what I've been reading: Fish in my Hair. Don't miss Feb 2's entry about the romantic poems.

My Latest Exercise DVD's

I've still been doing the Bar Method that I got before Christmas, but only a couple times a week. Mostly, I still use the treadmill. It's easy to do while watching a video - which, lately, has been some kind of ballet, since that's what Miss M is stuck on right now. A person can only watch so much ballet before starting to want to dance. So . . . I got two new DVD's, something fun for a change.

Ballet Boot Camp - this is like a ballet class. They do floor stretches, bends, plies, etc. for an hour, which is a really good workout. Then they go through 6 dance "phases," and, when they put all the phases together, you're actually dancing the Paquita Waltz from a real ballet! The steps aren't coming easily for me, but I know who to ask for help ("Sis!") and I figure, if I do it faithfully a few times a week, I might have it down in 6-8 months, although it won't be pretty. Did I mention that I'm not a natural dancer?

Cardio Hula - I know just enough hula not to be totally lost, I'm picking up the steps easier with this one, although I'm frustrated that my hula looks nothing like the girls on the DVD. Did I mention that I'm not a natural dancer? Still, it's fun, and it feels good to be moving for a change instead of just pacing the treadmill. This DVD combines hula steps with knee lifts and hops to get your heart rate up, so it's kind of a cross between hula and low-impact aerobics. Very fun. I think I could enjoy doing both of these for quite awhile before getting bored.

The Myth of the Socialization Myth

Looking for evidence that homeschooling hinders socialization . . . I can't find anything out there!

I found one real study that was done in 1994, but that study failed to find all the socialization problems that were expected with homeschoolers. The article ends with, "At this point, more research on home schooling is necessary--what we have is inconclusive . . ." They didn't find what they were looking for, so they'll keep trying until they find it, I guess.

I see all kinds of articles from homeschoolers debunking the socialization myth, and posts and message board entries saying that socialization isn't the big problem they say it is . . . so, who are these homeschoolers talking to? What articles are they debunking? Who is the "they" who claim that socialization is an issue with homeschooling?

Dinner

I have trivial, petty things on my mind today. So I'll post about one of them - what we had for dinner.

The kids had a big salad (I chop the lettuce as small as corn, so I can fit a pretty big salad into a normal-sized bowl) and tuna fish sandwiches. For myself, I made a huge salad with lots of minced lettuce and exactly 2 Tablespoons of Annie's Goddess dressing, and mixed it up very well. I added some pinto beans, tuna fish and a slice of soy cheese broken up into tiny pieces. I've been feeling pretty good the last couple of days - good enough that I cleaned out the fridge today.

After our day of snow, we've had two days of mild weather. We even had our windows open!

Snow at last!

And we made good use of it...

You Know You've Had Too Much Physics When...

You dream of math.

The first thing on your mind when you wake up is, What sorts of friction apply to situations of rotational motion? (Answer: the same as apply to translational motion. But I think actually working things out with the numbers would take far more physics than I have right now.)

You think it would be fun if someone wrote a story about a character named Zero, who was just an insignificant figure in the big equation...

You engage in an hour-and-a-half struggle with the physics textbook, emerge with a shaky victory, and turn to writing a blog post about...physics.

Bits and Pieces

I've had lots on my mind lately, but nothing blog-worthy. I've been thinking about a couple of topics that came up on a message board within the last couple of days, trying to sort and clarify my own opinion. Was Rudyard Kipling a white supremist? (No, not in the sense that it means today, although pretty much everyone in his time assumed that white men had a Christian duty to share their knowledge with the uneducated world, and that unfortunately usually got mixed up with their own cultural perspective of civilization.) Is Sunday School a bad thing? (I think I agree with Charlotte Mason that Sunday School should be there for unchurched children, but that children from Christian homes will generally get more out of sitting with their family listening to the pastor.)

We saw Andrew Lloyd Weber's Phantom of the Opera three or four times, we love some of the songs and the story is fascinating. For perspective, we also saw the old silent film version with Lon Chaney. In that one, Christine Daia seemed more of a mindless prop, easily swayed and awed by the Phantom. I couldn't understand why Raiul bothered to save her or what he saw in her.

We also saw Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, the old version with Julie Andrews, and the first of the All Creatures Great and Small set that I got for Christmas. What a great series! It's got it all - fascinating characters, great British/Scottish/Irish accents, beautiful scenery, humor, and educational footage of animals.

Miss M woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Her first words weren't 'Good morning!' but 'My hair is in my way!' Before she even got out of bed. And then she was upset because her nose was stuffy. She was grouchy all morning. I finally put on a ballet movie for her, and it was peaceful for an hour! Maybe she's coming down with something - just in time to be sick when Mr. B and I hope to go out for dinner, just the three of us, for Valentine's Day (she'd be going with us.)

The diet is going fine, I'm enjoying some foods I haven't had in awhile while I was on the raw diet - peanuts, cereal, potatoes, beans, even salmon. I made up a two-week menu so I can do this mindlessly. My shopping lists are prepared, meals laid out, so I have no excuse. There's not really even any cooking required, the most complicated item planned is cubing and microwaving a potato. The basic line-up is fruit before breakfast, granola for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and some kind of properly-combined easy meal with a salad for dinner. It's mostly going okay. I'm starting to realize and accept that a lot of my tiredness is probably due to MVP (mitral valve prolapse) and that no diet is going to "cure" that.

Miss M has expanded her movie favorites. She has a small collection of ballet movies now - Don Quixote, Le Corsair, which is about pirates, Swan Lake, and the Nutcracker with Macauley Culkin, which is her absolute favorite. She also loves our Lassie re-runs, Milo and Otis (although she gets nervous during the more suspenseful moments) and now Cinderella.