Day 130--We finished our math book!

I was just telling Jeff that the lists I made for Sam and Sarah were causing me a little stress, and Sarah's eyes got wide and she said, "You're not going to stop making them are you?" I told her I'm not going to stop, I just need to find a way to not feel pressure from them. Seriously. It's just written down instead of housed in my head. Where is the pressure coming from? Anyway, the idea is for them to figure out how and when to get that stuff done, so I HAVE to let them. Which takes the strain off me, right?

The weather has been nice here and the kids love to play back porch badminton. Totally cute. Here's a picture. If it's been raining any time recently, the back yard is soaked. I think there must be a two inch layer of dirt over rock, and rain never soaks in. The only problem with playing on the back porch is losing birdies into the gutter. Sam's tall enough to stand on a stool and get them out of the lower gutter, but I think there might be a few permanently up in the second story gutter. I wonder what else might be up there from people who have lived here before.

Sarah started talking about changing her research topic again! She'll never get over that disease. I don't think I want her to change it. She just needs to have it as narrow as it can be. I also need to help her understand the academic and very wordy, scientific articles I found on migraines and weather. I don't know if narrowing it to migraines and barometric pressure is too narrow though. We'll have to do some more looking around.

We finished the Math U See Pre-Algrbra book the other day! Now we're going to review all of that and use Strayer-Upton and Ray's Arithmetic books for fun and complicated real-world problems. Also, I need to go over metrics with them. We haven't really done that in an organized way. They're kind of shaky on percents too. I might use Strayer-Upton or Ray's for that. They're so straight forward. This is what Ray's says when introducing percents: "Any percent of a number is so many hundredths of it." Then it says, "One percent, 1% is 1/100 or .01" Plain and simple. Love it.

I think I finished my advertisement for MyWritingCheck.com to put in my umbrella school's yearbook. They're letting people with businesses place ads in it. So here's mine. I'll probably change it three more times before submitting it, knowing me. It's the editor in me. That's why I just type this blog fast every night, read it over once, and hit publish. No looking it over and over.

See you next week!