The Things We Want to Do

As I've been plugging away at putting our Sonlight Core into Homeschool Tracker, I am struck by the feeling that summer is passing very quickly, and will soon be gone.  Lesson planning takes hours and hours of work.  But it also saves hours and hours of work during the school year, when I can simply plug the day's assignments into the plan for the day without having to enter books or type everything out.  When one is trying to school, keep up with meals, and do the laundry--in addition to all the other mundane (or not so mundane) details of daily life--it has been a sanity saver for me to have everything planned out.  But as I look at my two remaining weeks of summer, I also note that I have nine weeks of Read-Alouds to plan, and twelve weeks of History.  There is a fair amount of work left to be done.

We are hoping to start our year at around August 19.  So far I think the busiest part of this week is over (at least one can hope), so I should be able to get done with the Read-Alouds at least.  That leaves History, and Dad is coming up next week for a visit.  I know that I won't want to be spending all my time lesson-planning.  What I am going to do about that remains to be seen.

But one cannot spend all of the remaining summer break lesson planning.  So I thought I should make a list of things we still want to do.

First on the list, but not necessarily first in the matter of importance is to finish weeding the driveway.  Actually it is a job that is never really finished.  The gravel on the driveway is mostly gone, washed away by the combined effect of rain, snow-blowing, and the slightly downward slope of the driveway.  But if we can get enough done that it looks better until the snow starts, I will be happy.

Secondly, I would like to weed around the dining room window.  That is at the back of the house, and isn't really seen, but I've been gradually working around the deck and the garage this year, trying to pull out the maple trees before the forest grows.

That's the yardwork.  Another thing on my bucket list for the summer is to visit the cemetery about 25 minutes away where some of my ancestors are buried.  When considering that I grew up in five countries on two continents, and never really had a place to call home--except where we were living at the time,  I think that it is really cool that we have now lived for nearly ten years in the area in which my great great grandparents lived.  I have never been to this cemetery, although some of my siblings have.  I am sort of hoping that this is something we can do with Dad next week.

Another thing on the list is to go on at least one more bike ride with the children.  We went in the spring, but haven't even had the bikes out this summer.  It has either been simply too hot, or too wet.  And I'm not one to ride a bike down to the park, or to the grocery store.  I want to ride for fun.  This is one thing that we still may be able to do on nice evenings after we start lessons.

It would be fun to take a day to do something "touristy" in one of the nearby towns too, but I don't know if we will have time for that.  I was chatting with my daughter last night, and we had to laugh about the fact that though we travel a lot, we tend to be real homebodies when we aren't travelling.  We haven't seen a lot of our own area!  I would like to change that, but that may have to be a longer term project.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  We have had more times when we played games together or made beads together this summer.  That has been really fun.

What is left on your bucket list for summer?

Yard Work

The weather has been beautiful this week, not too hot, and perfect for working on the jungle that has been our yard this spring.  In fact, the kids and I even did some of our lessons outside, soaking up some of the rays.

We've had our garden in for a while.  It is a very small garden.  We just have tomatoes, onions, leeks, and some herbs planted in there.  Then  my husband has planted an herb garden in the big farm bucket that is covered with blue tarp and sits on the remains of our big tree.  It is the perfect height for him to work in.  My little patch is the flower garden in the side yard.  It has bulbs that come up in the spring, and then I like to plant petunias in it for summer colour.  It looks a wee bit messy at the moment, as the tulips are still partly green and brown, and the petunias haven't spread yet.  I also have a couple of carnation plants in there, and they are full of buds.

At the back of the yard, by the fence, the gout weed had taken over.  While it was a mass of not an ugly colour of green, it was taking over everything.  I haven't been able to completely get rid of it, but we pull lots out every year.  The kids and I pulled three yard debris bags of the stuff the other day.  We uncovered the compost bin (we had still been able to get to the lid),  and eight plant pots that had completely disappeared under the green.  We also found two tennis balls (Boo bats and throws them around instead of baseballs--LOTS easier on the windows).

Belle took all the pots and dumped the dirt into the wheelbarrow, where she worked it over and took out all the weeds.  Then she mixed in compost and refilled the pots.  Off we went to the store to get more flowers.  The pots are now planted  with petunias in a mix of different colours.  I am hoping to eventually put them by the back fence so I can see the colour from the house, but they may go out in front of the house for a little while.

Yesterday we all started work on the patch at the front of the house.  There used to be three rose bushes and two shrubs in there.  But the grass got in and the rose bushes were no longer doing well.   One of them had a tree (we think maybe it is some kind of sumac) growing just behind it and overwhelming it ( I had thought it was the plant the rose was grafted into).  Also an invasive vine was growing over everything.  The shrubs were overgrown and getting increasingly difficult to handle.  It has been a source of frustration for me for the past two years.  And I always thought the front looked like a rental property...don't ask me why because I couldn't tell you.  It was just something about the look--or lack of care.  At any rate, we cut and chopped for hours yesterday.  My dear husband did most of the hard work.  I worked at bagging all the debris, and the kids helped where they were needed.  The shrubs are gone now, and two of the three rose bushes.  We ran out of steam before we got to the third one.  Now we want to clean out the dirt and plant something else in there.  We are not sure what yet.  The front of the house faces south so gets a lot of sun in the summer.

The other big project is the weeds in the driveway.  Dear husband is working on those.  Belle had already worked to pull the weeds out of the gaps in our walkway.  And with the grass mowed, the yard is looking improved.  There is still lots of work to do though.

Sorry, no pictures.  I never even thought of getting the camera out--I was just too busy working.  But when it is done, I'll post photos of the new look.