Leftovers and looking for bugs (not related thoughts!)

Suburban Correspondent is blogging about leftovers again today. Now that I'm the cafeteria lady at our (home) school, I find we're eating a lot of leftovers during the day. That helps. It also cuts down on my corn chip budget. "Hey! Who wants noodles for lunch?!" "ME! ME!" It's a far cry from last year when The Boy didn't eat from 7am until 7pm because of the ADD meds. I'm loving it.But speaking of leftovers, I did find the "when did we last have" hot dogs in a baggie. How do you tell when they've gone bad, when they don't smell good in the first place? ;)

This morning, I was supposed to prove that a bug is an "organism" because it "develops", "reproduces", and "responds to changes in its environment". Tragically, even this far south, I was hard pressed to find one! Imagine my surprise!! Ordinarily, I'd offer 50 cents to the first child who could bring me a non-stinging, non-flying bug, but no, as is typical for our house, there are no typical chidren here. I did get The Boy to come within three feet of the small, bulbous spider that I did find, but he wasn't happy about it. Hey, I'll take progress where I can find it. (Did you know that when you put a pencil, rock, or anything else in front of a small, bulbous spider, it will try to climb? Cooool. It's responding to changes in its environment!)

I'm still trying to understand the "work in the morning, play in the afternoon" concept of homeschool. I can't get all our work done by noon. Handwriting, vocabulary, reading comprehension, arithmetic, math, and science are enough for my morning. That doesn't account for extra reading, grammar, and history. Maybe it's because my kids need individual instruction, and they trade off their goofing-around time. Maybe it's because I don't skillfully-enough combine the history and reading comprehension. Who knows? Either way, the kids aren't up to going to the "science co-op" with the other homeschool kids anyway. Everyone keeps telling me I'm going to go crazy without a support group. I don't see it yet. Maybe in time, we'll get better about getting our work done and better about hanging with other people. Time will tell.