Year: 2009

Teaching Textbooks vs.  Singapore Math

YEARS LATER NOTE: Since using these programs, the kids described here graduated Magna Cum Laude in Statistics (Kelly) and Summa Cum Laude with Honors in Applied Mathematics (Christian) from a large state university. At the writing of this note (June 30, 2016), they are both midway through PhD programs at national research universities here in the United States. You can read more about that here.

Audrey asked why we switched from Singapore Math to Teaching Textbooks when we went from sixth grade. First, I have to give the standard homeschool caveat that this was our experience.  Different students learn and think differently.  In other words, “Mileage may vary.”  We did not switch immediately. We absolutely loved Singapore math for the years we used it. We had tried Saxon and found it too repetitive and boring. I think it is a very good program, but it took some of the joy out of math for our kids. We found Singapore Math when Christian was in the third grade and Kelly was in the Fifth. It worked perfectly for us. There were a lot of reasons:

• It kept the kids moving along.

• It had fun stuff like mental math.

• It was repetitive enough that the kids repeated the material enough to learn it without getting bored.

• It had a great history of success in Singapore and with homeschoolers we have known.

We went through the sixth grade with Kelly, then started the seventh grade with Singapore Math, too.  It seemed like I had to spend a lot more time explaining things when we got to the seventh grade than we did in the sixth.  Kelly got bored and frustrated.  She began to get a distaste for math.  It might well have been because we used the system wrongly.  It seemed like not everything was available for the kids to really understand math at this level with the materials that were provided. I got the sense that this material would have played a lot better with a stand-up teacher than for a typical homeschool learning environment.

We had heard from other homeschoolers that Teaching Textbooks was good.  I read some reviews on Teaching Textbooks.  Most, but not all of them were good.  We decided to try it, so I bought the Pre-Algebra material. We loved it.  Kelly was fired up about math again.  The program required less work on my part for correction and administration at the same time I felt I could better track whether or not she grasped the material.  Here are the reasons the system worked for us:

• Each day’s material is covered redundantly in the textbook and with a lecture on a “chalkboard” via computer disk.  Sometimes when one of the kids does not really understand a given subject, I can ask them whether they read the textbook or listened to the lecture.  Most of the time, if they just revisit the material in the other method, that will be sufficient for them to get the understanding the need to complete the problems successfully.

• There seems to be just the amount of repetitiveness that my kids require to “own” the material.  Subject matter taught in previous lessons appears in subsequent lesson problem sets for several weeks.  The way the problem sets are arranged to reinforce understanding over time is one of the great strengths of this program.

• There is a set of five practice problems that go with each lesson.  The student is asked to do those problems on the completion of the lecture (or reading).  If the student cannot answer the practice problems correctly, it shows he needs to go back and listen to the lecture or reread the material before tackling the full daily 20-24 problem homework assignment.

• The answers to all the problems are worked in minute detail using the effective lecture/chalkboard system on the computer disk.  The answers are very, very clearly explained.  One of the problems with some other systems is the lack of specificity in the explanation of how to perform the homework problems.  This is another great strength of Teaching Textbooks.

• The material is broken up into 12-15 units.  There is a test after each unit.  This helps the parent keep track of how the student performs throughout the year.

There are a couple of items about which parents should take note.  First, it has been very important and helpful that I correct all the math problems for the student every night.  Second, on some of the boards, a concern was expressed that the material is covered in a different order in Teaching Textbooks than in other programs.  That includes both the fact that Algebra II comes before Geometry and several of the smaller subject areas are covered during different specific years for some programs than for other programs.  An example of that might be that some programs introduce the sine and cosine laws in Geometry and others introduce it in Pre-Calculus.  This was not a problem with us because we planned to use the Teaching Textbooks program all the way through to Pre-Calculus.

I hope that helps!

Links:

• Teaching Textbooks
• Singapore Math
• Saxon Math

Thanks to everyone who dropped Lorena a note on her birthday.  We had a good discussion about how great it is to be enjoy the age you are as opposed to pining for a different age.  We are going to celebrate a little more this weekend when we go to Tennessee.  I love this picture of Lorena that we took last night with her tulips.  I was quite excited to find the find a special prize from Bryan.  Special for Lorena anyway.  That he did it on an Apple product has to do with the fact that he wants people to think he knows something about computers, but cannot really handle a real one.  Click on the YouTube link below to see his brilliant performance. Take special notice of how skinny he looks. Good job Bryan! And thanks for the great video.

Kelly’s Pre-Calculus text books arrived in the mail yesterday.  She will not start in on them until sometime in February.  Still it is hard to imagine we have come so far.  Math can be a struggle sometimes, but we have enjoyed it very much.  We got off to a great start with the wonderful Singapore Math program developed by the Singapore Ministry of Education.  We moved on to Teaching Textbooks when the kids started Algebra I.  Pre-Calculus is the last course currently available from Teaching Textbooks, so we will have to move on to something else next year when Kelly gets to Calculus.  I have decided that I will not try to teach the kids beyond Differential and Integral Calculus.  After that I will send them to the community college for Multivariate Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Equations.  Those will be good solid classes for them to take in a college setting and will provide them with enough math to get through just about any undergraduate degree they chose with the exception of stuff like math and physics.  I will write some posts here about our efforts to identify a good homeschool Calculus program.

Here is Lorena’s special birthday video from Bryan:

Something interesting for Christian: Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds

On Saturday night we went ice skating, on Sunday night I did a bunch of push ups and ran around with a  group of kids, on Monday afternoon I ran a mile more than I usually do, and on Tuesday morning I ran a bit more than the day before.  Seriously!! It’s like all I do is work out!  Not really. My legs and feet are really sore and I sort of needed a reason to complain. 🙂

Yesterday I wrote my fourth ACT essay. It was about taking a year off in between high school and college. I wasn’t able to fully express my opinions about that subject, but I don’t think it came out too bad! I’m trying not to get my hopes up though.  Whenever I think something that I do is going to be good it turns out to be bad and vice versa.  😉 There’s probably a name for that in my psychology book. They have a name for everything in there!

On a totally different subject…  we had two of our new neighbor friends over yesterday night. We made a quadruple batch of these scrumptious and healthy whole-wheat carrot muffins together. It occurred to me today that we should have made some triple chocolate fudge brownies instead. I’m hoping they’ll still come visit me. Ah well. Not all friendships have to start with marvelous first impressions, right? 😀

I will post up the ACT essay on Friday, just like last week.  I’m getting on a little schedule now!

Today is Lorena’s birthday.  Grandma Sarah’s birthday is on the 18th.  I am truly amazed at how much Lorena and Grandma Sarah have in common personality-wise.  That is a compliment!  Lorena is now as old as I was when we got married.  The big difference is that she still has her hair.  It was one of the very best decisions of my life to ask her to marry me.

I have been thinking about business and entrepreneurship over the last little while and it made me want to study it some more.  My buddy Bryan called last night.  He is one of those serial entrepreneur guys.  He had a great idea (again) that he told me about.  Why does my mind not work like that?  I am surrounded by entrepreneurs.  I work for a venture capital start-up.  My dad started businesses at the drop of a hat his entire life–never running out of ideas.  Troy, a big fan of Warren Buffett’s ideas about value trading, is currently reading a Buffett biography.  In his blog post about the subject he brought up a book Youngin is reading called Outliers by the same author as the guy who wrote The Tipping Point.  Both those books talk about time, circumstance, personal characteristics, and all the things that contribute to exceptional achievement.  I have decided to put off starting on our The Electronics of Radio book so I can read a business book titled The Knack by Norm Brodsky and some other guy.  It is about practical entrepreneurship and I am going to read it aloud to the kids.  When I am finished, Troy and I are going to trade, so I can read the Buffett book and he can read the Brodsky book.

In all this, I think a person has to decide what they want out of life.  I do not think I would be willing to trade lifestyles with the bulk of the entrepreneurs I have known.  At the same time, during my growing up years treated entrepreneurship like sports.  I enjoyed hearing about the efforts to make a sale, a purchase, a new business idea, or a machine to make stuff than I enjoyed talking about Oregon State Beaver sports.  And, at that time, I LOVED the Beavers.  While I currently own part of a small business, I still have it in my mind to start another one.  When I am ready, maybe after the kids are in college, I will look for an idea, weigh the chances of success, decide whether I can stomach the required lifestyle changes, and then, maybe, I will jump into it.

Update:  Something huge just happened in the world of open source software!  QT’s license just got changed from GPL to LGPL.  That was the biggest impediment to it being the GUI library of choice in the Linux world.  It is a cross platform library that will make KDE the desktop of choice in the future.  Christian, that means I want you to install KDevelop (and possibly KDE) on your computer and start using that as your IDE for working through C++ Primer Plus.  Woo-hoo!

I spent a lot of time last night catching up on math correction with both Kelly and Christian.  They kept moving along while I fooled around with blogs, reading, radio construction and the like.  Through no fault of their own, they are now both stuck with a bunch of correction to do in addition to their regular homework.  The plan was to go over some of the non-obvious elements of the trig they work on to prepare for the ACT, but we did not even get to that.  Still, even though we made good progress, we did not complete everything, so we will have another fairly arduous set of tasks to complete tonight.

One thing I have found that helps a lot with big projects like building a radio or reading a book is to try to accomplish something every night even if it is only something little.  We only read about a third of a chapter in our intelligent design book last night, but it was a very interesting passage on the fossil record.  We only assembled one part onto the radio, it was a very cool looking toroid.  We hand wrapped it, burned the insulation from the leads with a match, sanded the leads to get rid of any residual insulation, and soldered the toroid onto the board in a vertical orientation.  It looked so cool we took a picture of it.  It is the vertical, doughnut-shaped thing in the middle of the image with green wire wrapped around it.

The homeschool kids from the family that moved into the house next door came over for awhile yesterday.  I felt kind of bad because we pretty much ran them off after only about an hour because we had so much work to accomplish.  They seem to be very good kids.  They are very polite and seem to be excited about life.  They have never homeschooled before, but will start tomorrow.  We are excited to hear how it goes for them.  I am sure we will see a lot of them.

We have backed off a little bit on Christian’s programming instruction.  After writing the second paragraph above, I was inspired to call Christian and tell him to start back to work on his C++ programming.  The reality is that it requires a lot of effort to learn how to program well.  It is like learning math or a new language.  The only way to do it is by investing a good amount of effort every day for quite a long time.  The book he uses is C++ Primer Plus.  It is possible to work through the examples in the book with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), but it is better to do it with just a text editor for writing the code and a terminal window for compiling, linking, and testing the programs.  An IDE tends to obscure the workings of the compiler and linker.  Christian has a pretty good handle on object orient programming after having studied some C# and C++, but now is the time to jump into it in a lot more depth.

The kids, in no uncertain terms, let me know that I was making a big mistake by changing the website colors. It seems that I am diluting my “brand” as was manifested by Bryan’s comment. So now that I have the colors back to their original state, now I need to get the sidebar over on the left-hand side of the page. I have not quite figured out how to do that yet, but I am working on it. I certainly do not want to dilute the brand. While I was at it, I had Christian GIMP me up an image of the family to use as a logo and revamped the Betty Blonde site, too.

On Saturday, while I worked on the web sites, Christian soldered the crystals into the ham radio kit. He then disassembled, cleaned, lubed, and reassembled the elliptical machine because it had a loud squeak. We all plan to use it more now. There is still just a little bit of a squeak, but the machine runs as smoothly now as when we first purchased it. Kelly drew me up some comic strips to scan in and started thinking about a new logo for the top of the Betty Blonde page that features all the main characters. We decided we want to design a t-shirt to give away to one person per month for anyone who subscribes to the daily emails. So she is thinking about that now, too.

On Sunday morning, we got a call from our friends Albert and Roxanne to invite us over for dinner to their house Sunday evening. We had already made arrangements to have lunch with Troy and Youngin after meeting. I think I took major advantage of the poor newlyweds. They bought lunch, so I had one of those super maximum über burritos. Then we went home, I did the kids weekly work assignment sheets and we all piled in the car to go to Wendell. We had a GREAT time. Leonard and Lisa and their family of four homeschoolers were their for a grand total of seven kids not including the baby. We had AWESOME barbecue ribs and chicken, an amazing salad, dessert–the WORKS! Albert and Roxanne are a well oiled machine when it comes to entertaining people.

Of course, none of this weekend was particularly good for the diet. The kids tell me I write that I have fallen off the wagon on my diet every weekend, so I won’t write that. The fact of the the matter is, though, that I did fall off the wagon on the diet. I hopped back on this morning, all fat and happy.

Here it is. After looking at it again, the writing really seems pretentious to me, and if there is one thing that I STRONGLY dislike, it’s pretentious writing.  And I wasn’t sure if I should mention ‘meeting’ because the judges probably wouldn’t know what that meant, but I decided to put it in there anyway because it’s in context and they’ll probably understand.

The subject was something like “Will you keep the beliefs and values that you kept and were taught when you were younger?”

Every single Sunday morning in my life I have gone to meeting. There is hardly a Sunday I can remember where I haven’t been sitting quietly on a metal folding chair, awaiting the first hymn.  My mother and father have brought me up to have a firm belief in God adn to follow his direction. The’ve taken me to meeting every Sunday. They’ve given me their advice. They’ve modeled their faith to me for fourteen years. So naturally I hae beliefs and values almost identical to theirs.  They’ve been there for me when I’ve succumbed to doubht. Doubt in the existence of  caring Father or a designed world. But with their help and with God’s help I have overcome that doubt, and I plan and believe that my faith will grow and become continually stronger. I believe that what my parents have taught me and the beliefs and values that I have held since I was very small are unquestionably right, and will always remain so.

Some may call me foolish or say that I am a sheep, blindly following a path already marked for me, with no tolerance for other ideas. I know better. My parents have ensured that I know both sides of an argument well. My Dad sits down with my brother and I on most nights and we read books about different worldviews and arguments for and against intelligent design. Dad explains it all, and we learn and ask questions so I know what I believe and why I blieve it. I know that my beliefs, my faith and my values wills tay with me for the rest of my life.

***

Weak ending, bad grammar, no fluidity, wandering off into other topics, pretentious… I am not happy about (and rather embarrassed of) this essay. But practice makes perfect, they say. Onward!

Here they are.  Bookmark them.

Kelly’s Betty Blonde:   http://bettyblonde.net
Christian’s Nerd How:  http://nerdhow.com

We are on a big healthy eating kick in our household right now.  Lorena has always cooked really great and healthy food, but now the rest of us are trying to get in on the action.  Last night, Lorena made the healthy potato wedges we saw on Lynn’s blog.  We liked them so much, we decided to take a picture of them for today.  After all the pain and anguish from eleven months of dieting last year, it is hard for me to believe that it is possible to lose weight and not feel hungry at the same time.  It is all about the mono-unsaturated, fatty acids.  MUFAS work!  Kelly picked a raspberry-vinegarette salad dressing kind of thing to put on the grilled chicken that seemed a little odd to me until I tried it.  It was great.

We are pretty much swamped with homeschool and expect to be that way for another two or three weeks.  In the next two weeks, we need to finish ten days of homeschool in nine days with a big three day weekend at the end of it that will be fun and educational, but will include little or no formal work.  In addition to that we want to make some progress on Kiwi and Rubix’s Twin Cat Sister Tower.  We did a bunch of math yesterday, but we have a bunch more tonight and tomorrow.  Christian is in the middle of learning how to find the vertex of parabolas and Kelly is getting to the end of her Geometry stuides.  They are both doing basic Trigonometry on the side to get ready for the ACT in early February.

We keep reading aloud, though.  That really helps me keep sane.  If I can sit down for a half an hour and read to the kids while they knit, it has a certain calming effect on me, diminishing what the kids derisively call my “get it done” mode.  We are reading William Dembski and Sean MacDowell’s new book Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language.  We love it.  We are going to read one of our Sonlight novels on the trip to the homeschool get-together in Tennessee.  We have been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, so it will be great to get into an interesting story.  As for the knitting, Kelly continues to work on a beautiful striped scarf.  Christian has taken on a challenging project:  a scarf with the Ubuntu Linux logo knitted into it. In addition to all that, Christian and I continue to make progress on our Ham Radio.

Special note to JoAnn: Even though the ground paper sounded delightful, we decided to substitute ground pepper because that is all we could get to go through our grinder!

We have made a concerted effort to not add new projects until we finish old ones, but that is kind of hard when we find something interesting.  I thought, since the holidays are now over and we back into a more normal routine, that it would be good to describe the state of some of our projects.  Some of them are a little bit pathetic, but, unless I am forgetting something, we have not completely given up on any of them yet.  Here is a list:

• Video podcasting – Two of the three books we ordered came in.  The the ones we have, Broadcast Voice Handbook and Sound and Look Professional on TV and the Internet have arrived and well be plenty good enough for us to get started.  We have decided to put this off until this summer because it looks like it might take a bigger effort, at least to get started, than we have available now with all our other commitments.
• Volcano camera computer – This is still in the works.  I talked to my buddy at the USGS a couple of days ago and he does not have an immediate need for the computer as Mt. St. Helens is currently very quiet and there will be too much snow in the volcano to install the thing until spring.  He said he planned to talk to the people at Yellowstone with all the recent volcanic activity there and mention what we are doing.
• Cat tower – This is just one or two Saturdays from completion.  We are going to bump this back up higher on our list and try to get it done within the next month or so.  Christian and I love working on stuff like this together.  We have a plan for completion.  Now, we just need to take the time to do it.
• BleAx – The Betty Blonde Aggregator of Comix is working very, very well for both accumulating the comic strip and uploading it to our webpage.  I have had some great ideas about how to make it better by adding the ability to print pages with a specific format that the program can scan automatically with a scanner or a webcam.  I want to GPL this program someday, but it is a program on which I work only when I am in the mood and have a some spare time.  Above all though, it has saved enough time for us already in terms of how long it takes us to prepare the Betty Blonde comic for publication that it was well worth the development time.
• Ham radio construction project – Christian and I are working on this for an hour or two every week.  We should have the radio completed by the end of February at our current rate.
• Radio licensing – We have evaluated the read aloud books we have on our plate for homeschool and realized that we have about a month or so more of reading to do before we can move on to read The Electronics of Radio aloud to help prepare us to take the Technician Class Amatuer Radio lisence test.  I figure we sould be able to start in on that at about the same time we finish the construction of the radio.  We have both the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual and a CD titled Your Introduction to Morse Code that we plan to complete as part of our radio licensing plan.  Of course, the long-term plan is to try to get a General Radio Operators License for commercial radio stations, but first things first.

Special Note:  As an antidote to the truly sinful German pancakes Troy and Youngin made last Saturday, I would like to point out a point to a post that describes a recipe that looks very similar to something in our Flat Belly Diet book.  While Lorena is making pancakes this Saturday, I am going to try to talk my diet partner, Kelly into making these olive oil, paprika, and ground paper sprinkled delights.  It probably will not help my lack of discipline, but it is good to at least have a plan with an alternative.

Note to Eric: I am starting in on Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition lent to me by my buddy, Andrew, recently from work and originally from Kentucky.  You recommended a non-fiction book next.  I hope this one fills the bill.

I started this book today. It is very well written and witty, but the important part is that it made me think. Devils are very real and powerful beings, and if we had no stronger God to help us, then that would be a frightening thing indeed. But on the bright side, I remembered something I read in the Bible a couple of weeks ago about everyone having their own angel. Now there’s a happy thought. While I’m on a spiritual subject I might as well mention that Bible study starts today! We had Monday evening Gospel meetings for a while, but now we are back to the weekly home Bible studies. I think (or I hope… heh, heh) we are studying Exodus 3 and 4 today. About Moses and the burning bush and such.

I wrote my 3rd ACT essay today. It’s more ‘human’ and ‘warm’ than before, but I was really running out of time at the end so the whole thing is a little lopsided in the quality area. I’ll post it up on Friday. I thought the book only had three prompts, but it has a list of 10 more in the back, which is a great relief. Kelly won’t be running out of homework material anytime soon.

So I heard on the radio this morning that they are looking for a new ‘Sherri’ to replace the recently retired one on my favorite morning talk show, Bill and Sherri in the morning. Apparently they are taking applications. I would apply, but you have to be experienced (read: older than 25, have been in the radio business before) know a lot about pop culture (read: get People magazine or the National Enquirer in the mail every week and be able name every hit single of the 70’s and 80’s), and be able to relate to moms (read: actual mom). I’m also thinking they don’t want anyone who will blurt out whatever pops into her head. So it looks like I’m out of a job for now… does anyone know if there are any radio openings for too talkative 14 year old cartoonists?

There are a lot of things happening in the world right now that seem to be of great consequence.  Israel is at war with Hamas in Gaza.  We are in the trough of what looks to be a world wide economic recession.  There are ominous changes occurring in Russia and much of Eastern Europe, China, and the entire middle east.  Technological advancements in energy, electronics, aerospace, medicine, materials science, agriculture, and communications continue to accelerate in a way that will very likely change they way our children and grandchildren live and for which we are ill equipped to prepare them.  I am getting to the end of Jeremiah in my read through the Bible.  It is interesting that the changes described there appear to be as monumental as what we see in the world today.  World powers fought.  Cultures were required to conform to the demands of conquerors.  There was economic ruin with rampant famine, disease, crime and moral depravity.

It is not hard to imagine something even bigger than 9-11 or Pearl Harbor that plays havoc with the unprecedentedly privileged lifestyles we live today.  Reading through the devastation described in Jeremiah has evoked a desire to enjoy the small, but very, very good pleasures with which I am blessed today.  Lorena and I love to talk on the telephone during the day and over the counter top when I get home from work.  Kelly, Christian, and I love to read together on the sofa in front of the fireplace, knit, discuss what should be in the next Betty Blonde, and figure out how to make Christian’s latest graphic artistry just a little better.  Christian and I enjoy our Ham Radio construction project.  We all love to go to McDonalds and the Holly Springs Public library on Saturday.  Those are the things we will remember and cherish.

I want to work hard and plan for the future.  That is not incompatible with living in the present and enjoying the small pleasures that God has so kindly given to us.

I talked to a lady (Stacy) at work yesterday about the Flat Belly Diet. She asked for a link to their website, then told me about the about.com calorie count website. It is an amazing site. The purpose of the site is host a location where people can track the quality and quantity of their caloric intake. The thing I like the most about it, is that it is so amazingly easy to use. I will use yesterday as an example. For breakfast, I had a packet of Quaker Oatmeal with a 4 oz. container of blueberry yogurt and 1/4 cup of shelled walnuts. Many of the brand names and their available servings are in the system. When I entered that information into the system, the following information was recorded:

When I signed up for an account, I entered a bunch of information about my body type, goals, age, etc. The system provides a mechanism to track just about any kind of exercise you can imagine along with how many calories they consume. Each day, as food, weight, and exercise are entered into the system, a grade is given (A-F) for the quality of nutrition, a graph is created to show both actual weight and the trend of the weight loss, and a complete record of all the food and exercise are kept. Kelly and I are doing the Flat Belly Diet that puts emphasis on mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFA’s). The system allows us to track our MUFA’s by tagging those foods that contain them. The system is very new to us right now, but it is making us think about what we are eating. It seems to be especially good at identifying problem areas that need work and opportunities for improvement. In my case, I need to back off a bunch in my evening eating (my problem area) and take two walks a day instead of one (my opportunity for improvement).

At any rate, this web site is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in losing or managing weight.

Update:  A special note to Troy and Youngin.  Lorena saw this post and decided she was going to try to make them on Saturday.  To say the least, it has NOT been helpful to the successful of my diet.  Also, “Baby in the Oven” was a wildly misleading title.

It’s back to work for Christian and I!  Yesterday night I scheduled my entire day out. It was perfect. I had everything so neat and orderly. Every homework assignment and meal plan in it’s place. And then I woke up this morning and blew it. I underestimated the time it would take me to finish my math assignment, I read the wrong science lesson, and I only got half of my CLEP practice test done with not very good results. But that is all to be expected! After all, it’s only the first day back on the job. And I can’t fool myself into thinking that this was a bad start to the new year. I did lots of good things today. I learned some very interesting things about genetics, I mastered a couple of really hard math problems, I didn’t get frustrated about my CLEP score (that one’s a biggie), and I ate the right amount at the right times and wrote it all down in my food journal. Christmas break was fantastic, but it really is nice to be ‘working hard’ instead of ‘hardly working’.

Speaking of the food journal, I really like this new ‘diet’. All my friends freaked out when I told them that I’d be doing this, but it seems more like a healthy way of eating than a diet. And I’m not trying to lose a bunch of weight. Mom usually cooks meals like the ones in the book that we got, and I usually eat the right portions. My problem is snacking a lot in between meals, snacking while I’m reading, and snacking when I’m bored. So basically I’m just regulating when I eat and making sure that what I do eat has all the right things.

Lately I’ve been knitting a scarf. It’s loooong with chunky bright green and bright blue stripes. I’m very proud of her. As soon as I’m done I will take a picture and post it on the blog!

Here’s a big shout out to my cousin Kylee, who went through my entire Betty Blonde archive in one sitting, poor thing. And she left 7 whole comments for me to relish! 😀

One more shout out to Mrs. G… I loved your idea for my blog, and I will use it as soon as I have the time. Hopefully I’ll write about it tonight.

We had a great Christmas break.  Here is some of what we did:

• Started the Flat Belly Diet
• Soldered a bunch of parts onto our NorCal 40A radio kit printed circuit board (finally)
• Finished reading Explore Evolution
• Got reinvigorated on Betty Blonde
• Assembled a great jigsaw puzzle
• Tried new recipes and ate some great dinners with very good friends
• Reworked the look and feel of the blog (not yet complete)
• Started work on adding scanner functionality for BleAx (BettyBlonde Accumulator of Comix)
• Started reading The Electronics of Radio aloud to Kelly and Christian
• Started reading Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success to myself
• Hung out and talked about life with each other at home, the library, book stores, the car,  the YMCA, and McDonalds.

The kids start school again today.  Our main efforts for the next couple of months will be to get ready for and take the ACT and several CLEP tests.  In addition, Kelly will try to finish up Geometry so she can go on to pre-calculus by the end of February.  Christian will try to finish up Algebra II so he can move on to Geometry in that same time frame.  As for me, I have my work cut out for me in my efforts to add functionality to our product so we can expand our customer base by the end of March.  It is a very difficult problem, but that is good.  In two weeks, we will go to Tennessee to be with some of our homeschool friends over the MLK weekend.

We were pleasantly surprised yesterday when we saw that there was someone moving into the house next door.  It is a new house that has been vacant since we got here.  Kelly and I walked over to greet the new family and found that it include a seventeen year old boy, a fourteen year old girl, and an eleven year old boy.  When we first got to North Carolina there was a wonderful girl about Kelly’s age with a wonderful family who lived right next door to the house we rented.  When we found a house to buy, we were sad because there was really no one in the neighborhood Kelly and Christian’s age.

We talked to the father of the family and met the seventeen year old boy, too.  They came from South Carolina.  All the kids had gone to a Christian school in Charleston.  When they came here, they found a school they really liked, but could only get the oldest boy into it.  They have decided they will homeschool the other kids for the rest of this year, then make a decision about whether to continue homeschooling or put the kids in school next year.  They sounded very nice.  We are looking forward to meeting the rest of the family.

Business as usual is the best way to describe homeschool for December.  We shut down the homeschool on December 23rd for the holidays.  With the exception of a few minor assignments Kelly worked on yesterday and should finished up today, we have done nothing associated with homeschool for about a week and a half.  In the meantime, Christian and I have started building a ham radio (Morse code only) and I have ordered a book and a compact disk for all three of us on the subject of radio.  The book is the ARRL Ham Radio License Manual.  It covers the material required to earn a Technician Class license.  The CD is titled Your Introduction to Morse Code.  While it is no longer necessary to learn Morse code to get a ham radio license, the radio we are building only works with Morse code and it will be very cool to learn anyway.  I would really like the kids to be able to get their General Class license before the end of the school year.  We will find out whether or not that is realistic after we get the materials.

Our main emphasis for the next little while will be preparation for the ACT on February 7.  In addition, Kelly plans to take the U.S. History II CLEP test and Christian plans to take the Freshman Composition CLEP test sometime in February, too.  Kelly is on course to finish up her Geometry and Christian will finish up Intermediate Algebra by the end of February.  Kelly will then go on to Pre-calculus and Christian to Geometry.  We have just a couple more days in our Explore Evolution book, after which, we will start in on both Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language and The Electronics of Radio.  We normally would read a novel in the mix, too, but we have decided to read our novel on the way to Tennessee later this month to meet a bunch of other homeschool kids.

We had a quiet little New Year’s party at our house last night with Troy and Youngin.  We ate Lorena’s absolutely fabulous tamales and some really amazing dip Youngin put together with cream cheese and seven pepper jelly.  Wow.  I pretty much gave in to eating very badly for an evening, so my starting weight for the weight loss death match will be a little higher than I had initially planned.

The absolute highlight of the evening was the pictures Troy and Youngin showed us of their trip to Argentina.  They were amazing.  We were glued to our seats for over an hour.  The scenery was great and the descriptions of the trip were just perfect. The thing that I really liked about the pictures was the fact that, between stunning pictures of glaciers, mountains, lakes, strange trees, and all the other picturesque items that just about anyone would take on the trip because of their magnificence, Troy and Youngin took pictures of stuff that was just commonplace in Argentina. Some of it, like the little garbage stands in front of the houses to prevent dogs from tearing up the garbage was interesting because it commonplace in Argentina, but not here.

Then there was the machinery, old cars, wagons with HUGE wheels, and odd uses and modifications of cars, trucks, and equipment. I was thinking how much my dad would have enjoyed seeing that. There were also very interesting birds from very small, colorful birds sitting in trees and on the ground to huge, odd-shaped, ostrich-like birds to tufted woodpeckers to a magnificent Andean Condor soaring over open hill country with snow covered mountains in the background. There was a llama/camel like animal called a guanco and too much other stuff to mention it all.

We especially appreciated hearing about Troy’s aunt who has worked in Argentina as a missionary for decades. Much of her time is spent riding buses. The country is huge. She seemed so cheerful and happy to be there, living in very humble circumstances, doing her best to bring the gospel to people who often do not know or acknowledge they need it. I would like to meet her someday.

Finally, after Troy and Youngin went home, we called our good friends at the annual New Years party we went attended when in Oregon. We ended up getting on Skype so we could look at each other. We would have loved to be there in Oregon with them. All the Joyces (including Vernon), the Pedginskis, and a number of others were there. I was quite discouraged looking at Bryan. After he beat me like a drum in last year’s weight loss death match, I enter this year’s death match with fear and trembling after seeing his svelte new physique on Skype.