We planted 17 new trees at our house on Saturday. Cayatano did most of the work while I did most of the running around. He planted ten Autumn Flame Maples between the curb and the sidewalk along the two exposed side of the property, one Pussy Willow out by the services inside the sidewalk, and six Red Maples between our yard and the house of our neighbor behind us. In addition, we gave a ton of trees to four other neighbors and to Tony and Martha. Grandpa Milo supplied us the trees and we were quite thankful for them. All this was going on at the same time as our annual neighborhood garage sale. It all really went quite well. Lorena sold an old microwave oven and a turkey deep fat fryer. The kids sold a bunch of little things. A great time was had by all. I will try to put some pictures of our new “look” as soon as I have a chance to take some.
On Sunday night, we went over to a friends house for dinner and to see some pictures of Mexico. The man who showed the pictures is someone we have known for a long time. He pretty much blasted us for homeschooling our children. He mentioned another man with whom he had a discussion about homeschooling and how they thought it was such a bad thing. The thing that was truly odd was that neither of these men had children of their own, but were willing to paint the entire homeschool movement with a very broad and negative brush. It was an amazing and blatant display of bigotry. Oh, well.
We are down to the last two weeks of homeschool. The only big things we have left are finishing up the annual research reports, attending the big spring piano recital at the Baptist Church in Jefferson, and taking the standardized tests for the year in June. We will not turn in the tests this year as the law only requires that we start sending in test results after 18 months of homeschool. We hope that silly law gets changed. Why do people who cannot even teach the people for whom they are responsible need to have the tests scores of my children?