Pictures of Aunt Julia’s visit and weekend plans

Here are the pictures I promised from Aunt Julia’s visit yesterday. We had and absolute ball and learned how to cook some excellent new (healthy) foods.

There will be no swim meet this weekend so it will be free for us. Our plan is to go to the Holly Springs Library in the morning, take Kelly and Christian swimming in the afternoon (so Mom and I can get a workout in at the YMCA), then go to meeting and just relax on Sunday. Kelly and Christian have taken to drawing cartoons with some vigor here lately. They have been developing their skills over a period of years and have decided to try to develop a story line. We are going to stop in at an office supply store to get them some India ink. I will post their efforts here when they feel like they arrived at something that is good enough for public consumption.

I hope to get started on homeschool planning for the start of the 2008-2009 school year Saturday afternoon. I was not going to buy the Sonlight curriculum this year, but after talking to Kelly, I decided to get the literature for the ninth grade program. We all just love those books and it would be a shame for her to miss any of them. This is the first year we will not be using one of the Sonlight Core programs. Kelly has done well on the CLEP tests, so we have decided to have her prepare for additional tests in place of those parts of the Sonlight program we do not feel are that helpful. She just finished U.S. History I so she will start up with U.S. History II, studying it in parallel with preparation for CLEP Spanish. The Spanish test is a HUGE test counting for up to twelve semester hours (two years) of credit if she gets a high enough score. We will have Christian start preparing for the Freshman English Composition test a couple of months into the year followed by the Spanish test. Those should really be enough for him for the year as he will still be heavily into the Sonlight Core Curriculum for seventh grade.