Some styles never go out of fashion

2004

2010

Some friends of ours moved to Indiana a few years ago and are conveniently only a couple hours away from where we have to travel for quiz regionals, and are kind enough to offer accommodations for all of us. A visit with them adds to the fun of going to the regional quiz.

Another thing that adds to the fun of making that long trip is that we swing through Shipshewana on our way to our friends' house. Clarence was looking for rutabaga seed for my brother-and found it!

Since his job transfer in November, Clarence no longer drives through Earl and Kathy's area on his commute. What to do? "Why, I'll mail them", he thought. A quick call to a friend to ask how much postage was these days, some scrounging through old stamps and his pocket, and he was in business.

Who needs last names when addressing an envelope? Who needs actual stamps? Clarence was sure that he didn't. Apparently, he was right. The seeds arrived safely at Earl's the other day.

I've informed the girls that they cannot disregard all they've been taught about properly addressing envelopes. Just because it worked for Daddy doesn't mean it's right, right?

I'm pretty sure they'll test it on their own some day.

Trying to catch up

Life's been busy. I've been spending less time online, and therefore not getting around to updating my blog.

Think back to April with me, if you will. We finished giant co-op for the year and attended the year end program. Julianne's improv class put on several demonstrations of what they'd learned throughout the semester. She participated in the "three-headed storyteller". Each girl said one word as they went in order to tell a story. It was funny to watch them react to whatever their predecessor said, then quickly add a word to keep the story going.



Now we can at least move into this month.

We attended a regional Bible quiz in Indianapolis a couple weeks back. The new teammates you see are actually old friends who used to quiz with the girls when they attended our church. Our other team member and their other teammate were unable to attend so they got to combine the teams into one. They were undefeated and took first place.

These four will be a team for Nationals as well. We're looking forward to having a lot of fun but, in the meantime, they are studying hard.

The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg was the book we did with our FIAR group for May.

We were thrilled to have a couple of men join us who are members of a Civil War group. They are history buffs who take a tour of a different battlefield each year. They had a lot to share with us and their passion for the topic made it very interesting for the kids. They brought a couple of minie bullets and shell fragments, as well as a drummer boy's walking stick, as visual aids.

This gentleman actually read the book ahead of time and was able to pull out several incidents in the story and explain them more fully. We haven't had a lot of guest speakers but he was still the first one to ever read the book before coming. We were all impressed by that!

We had ginger cookies with sugar on top (because Homer ate some in the story) and had an art lesson based on the painting The Veteran in a New Field. It had been a long time since we had done any Civil War titles and the kids had a great time learning about it again.