Silver Springs, Adventure Island, and CoolToday Park

This weekend we went to Ocala to see our Grammy (Valarie) and Gramps (Greg), and meet up with dad who had driven down from North Carolina where he was working this week. On Saturday we went to Silver Springs...

There we went Kayaking on a river. It was a lot of fun (it was also hard and tiring😉) Here are some pictures of us on the river...

I think Hannah might have tried to photo bomb Grammy and Gramps😉

It was a lot of fun hanging out at Silver Springs. After we ate lunch, we found an open grassed area with a few trees and Dad, Nathan, and Gramps all played Frisbee for... a long time.

Mom found some pathways where she, Grammy, Hannah, and I walked around for a little while.

On Sunday, on our way back home from Ocala, we stopped by Adventure Island for the day. I don't have a whole lot of pictures of that, but it was fun! We ended up leaving early because it started to rain and thunder. We tried to wait it out but it just got worse so we left. But it was fun nonetheless. 

Hannah, Nathan and Dad have their eyes open super wide here, because of what Nathan did in the last picture...

(I feel like I need to add that I was holding Nathan up in these photos because you could barely see him if I wasn't)

 Dad is just smiling for the picture and Nathan is pretending that he was really on the ride.

I'm squished and just smiling for mom (who is taking the pic) while Hannah is going nuts in the back. I think she was trying to make it look like she was going to drop the rock on my head. 🙄😂

After we left, Me and my siblings eventually got the impression that the day of excitement wasn't over. We all kept trying to guess what it was but mom and dad wouldn't say. 😖😄. Once we started getting super close we started to figure it out. Mom and Dad were taking us to CoolToday Park The Atlanta Braves spring training stadium!!! They were going to show the game at the field. So we went and watched the first half of the Braves game! (We didn't know that they closed the Park at 8:30. That's the only reason we didn't stay for the whole game). But the Braves ended up beating the New York Mets 14 to 1!

 This was at a practice facility for the Braves. There were a bunch of tournament games going on so we stopped to watch for a while.

We got to sit in the stands and watch the game.

So that is how our fun weekend ended.

Nathan At Brookes Burgers

Dad was out of town this week, so last night we went to Brookes Burgers for dinner. We all got a hamburger, but Nathan was funny (he's 10 now). He ordered a donut burger, which is pretty much a regular burger but instead of the bread buns, they're glazed donuts. But I think Nathan confused everyone at the table including our waiter...

"I'd like to get the kids donut burger," he said. "But could I have, like, an extra bun? Like another one I can put my burger on?" He was so confusing! The waiter tried to figure out what he meant, and mom tried to translate what he said, but neither one could figure it out quite right. So then we got our order and started eating, and Nathan got his donut burger. Then he said "Aw I didn't get the extra bun".

Sooo... when the waiter came to check on us Nathan said again "Could I have another bun?" By now mom knew that he wanted just a bread bun. He wanted to take the meat off the donut, eat the donut, then eat the burger with a regular bun. Once mom told the waiter what he meant Nathan got his extra bun. But it was still really funny to watch and listen too. 

A Few Things That Happened Between February and July

Hi Everyone! This is Nicole! I'm 14 years old now, and am going into Challenge 1!

Soooo... It is July, 2020. 2020 was supposed to be an awesome year. But then COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease - 2019) happened. It's a virus that originated in Wuhan city, China. I've heard a few different theories on how it actually became infectious to humans. At first it was just a virus that China had and was making a big deal over... until it got to America. Then people started "taking it more seriously". It's hard to remember how it started off here, because it only got more exaggerated. The CDC said that if you got the virus, any other sickness, or if you just don't feel well then you had to self-quarantine for 14 days to keep from spreading it to others. Oh! And America invented this new term called "Social distancing", which means you have to stay 6 feet away from everyone around you. Plus, you should wear a mask! And Gloves. And have plexiglass between cashiers and the people who are checking out. Things just got worse. AND, all the doctors and scientists are trying to scare the country with COVID! They say "The death cases are rising! 142,755 people have already died of COVID-19, and there have been almost 4 million confirmed COVID cases". Wow! Scary! But when you do the math... only 0.04% of people with COVID die. 0.04%!!! Gosh, quit exaggerating! Anyways it's only going to get worse. I keep saying that when me and my siblings have kids we're going to tell them about what life was like before 2020. How no one had to wear masks... in fact that it was illegal to cover your face in a public area. So that's what's been going on with COVID-19. (BTW me and Dad think that the family has already had it, and that we were just asymptomatic.)



 Here Are Just a Few Exciting Things That Happened Between February And July:

Literally 1 1/2 weeks before Corona invaded America... Hannah almost broke her face on a softball. She was playing around on the field after one of my games with another teammate. Our dad and another dad where throwing softballs from the outfield into the infield and Hannah and her friend would run up to them and try to hit them on the run, with their bat, back to the outfield. Well it was supposed to be Hannah's turn to run up and hit it but the friend ran in front of her and tipped the ball off the bat. It flew back and hit Hannah right under the eye. We left about an hour later and took her to the hospital. She got a CAT scan which showed that she had no broken bones. So she was fine, it just hurt. But... The next day mom and dad were going to leave for Las Vegas. They still left since Hannah was fine. But she had some bad bruising on her face. This is a picture of her a few days after the incident...
She was OK though.













My whole Challenge B class wrote a short story the last semester. It was basically a book or story that was up to ten pages long. Well mine ended up being like 16 pages long, but my teacher (Mom) said it was OK. I pretty much just made an extended version of the Nancy Drew book called The Mystery of the Lilac Inn. I used the same criminal and had her come back for revenge on Nancy. Then I created my own detective who actually solves the mystery. I've started making more books so maybe I'll have a type of series of short stories.

← This is the book of short stories that my whole class did

This is my short story in it's own hardcover case. (mom and dad did that for me for my birthday) →










I fell like I have to show you this picture. This is Molly but we like to call her a "pathetic loser" when she tries to claim our beds as hers...

There is so much more I could tell you about... birthdays, and road trips, and hanging out with friends...but this post is already pretty long so that's it for now!😁

Science Fair 2019

This year, Nicole participated in a full fledged Science Fair.  After 10 weeks of working through all stages of the scientific method, converting her research plan into a research paper, and creating a display, she and her classmates had one night to present their experiment to two groups of judges.  This is their big project for Challenge A, and one they were all prepared for.

In all honesty, there wasn't much inspiration for an experiment, so she picked something from sciencebuddies.com .  She thought it would be neat to learn about spherification. 

Spherifi- what? haha.  I'm a few months into this, and I'm still not 100% sure what it is exactly.  Basically, spherefication is taking a liquid or watery food item and adding sodium citrate to it to make the food alkaline.  Then you drop it into a bath of sodium...something, I forget...and it stays in little balls.  Maybe I should have had her write this blog! haha!  She was suppose to be testing how the pH affects the food's ability to become spheres.  Chefs use this technique quite often. 

Spherified Coca-Cola

Measuring the width of the spheres

Spherified Gatorade

Nicole shines at public presentations, and Friday was no different.  She loves this.

Giving her presentation to the first set of judges.

They were bold enough to taste her gatorade spheres.

Nathan & Hannah participated in the community's Geo/Science Fair.  Hannah studied sugar in food and learned how to measure out how much sugar is in some of her favorite foods. 

Nathan decided to learn about volcanoes.  Let's me honest....who can say they have graudated school without making a homemade volcano ?!? 

Mere Motherhood

Mere Motherhood: Morning times, nursery rhymes, and my journey toward sanctification by Cindy Rollins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been homeschooling for 10 years now. When a friend recommended that I read this book, I kind of rolled my eyes and said no. I didn't want another book to remind me of all the things I have done wrong, missed, forgotten, or expose even more of my failures than I already know about. My children aren't musical, we don't live on a farm (even though we considered it at one point), we don't make our own food, and..we 'only' have three children. Despite my shortcoming, I feel fairly confident in the path we have taken and the choices we have made along our journey. I've come to understand that I don't have to look or act like the typical homeschool family.

However, I decided to crack this book open, written by a mother of 9, and push past the guilt I already felt at having stopped at three. That guilt was my own doing though, not Cindy's. In fact, I never felt one ounce of guilt while reading her story chronicling her journey as a homeschooling mother. She shared her joys and victories, but also her low points too. I laughed my way through her chapter about the old farm house, envisioning myself in that same situation, in which I would have had quite similar reactions. Is it bad that I was even a little happy that it wasn't picture perfect for her? I don't think so, it simply made her relatable to me, even though I only had 1/3 the amount of children.

I enjoyed the fun stories with her boys, the sweetness of a daughter entering their lives, and appreciated the struggles that she shared in her marriage. Nothing specific is shared, but just enough to know that "I am not alone". Cindy and I still lead very different lives, but we could spend hours chatting because of our common bond of being a homeschooling mother.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. It's not a how to book, but more of a 'how I was". I closed the book inspired to try some ideas during the read aloud time I do with my own children. I may quit my failing rotating chore chart and just stick with assigned tasks. I'm going to read Shakespeare to my children, and try out Plutarch too. We will read more poetry, and I want to look into the skill of narration. Like Cindy, I will never own chickens, and I am quite certain that a 200 year old farm house is the wrong home for me, even though it's what I dream and romanticize about. Also, like Cindy, we are a baseball family. It's in our blood, even if we did the fight the schedule at first.

Mere Motherhood is a sweet story that any homeschooling mother would enjoy. It's an "easy read" that I enjoyed while my children were at baseball and softball practice, something Cindy could relate to :)


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