Exactly what you would expect it to look like. Go here and scroll down for the video.

Who said this?

Disapproving myself of transferring the honors and veneration for the great birthday of our republic to any individual, or of dividing them with individuals, I have declined letting my own birthday be known, and have engaged my family not to communicate it. This has been the uniform answer to every application of the kind.

Happy birthday, Thomas Jefferson. (Andrew Cline has assembled a collection of Jefferson quotes, applied to today’s political questions. Good reading.)

In our town, the tornado sirens are tested every Saturday at noon. You can set your clock by them. When I heard them today, I chanced to think: “I hope a twister never actually hits on a Saturday at noon. We would all ignore the sirens and be killed!” I wonder if that’s ever happened anywhere.

You must, must, must read News 9 hates homeschoolers, over on the homeschool blog. You must. We’ll wait here while you read it. Go read it. You must.

The children are overwhelmingly exhausting! Most of it is due to our delayed reaction to having Sean out of the house full-time. We all Miss Him Terribly, and some of us can sometimes intellectually realize that it is Probably For The Best, Right Now, but mostly we just get all irritated and mad at each other and have little patience. None of us. Not Fun.

Man.

We’re adjusting. You know, it’s a process. We’ll certainly enjoy the ability to meet our monthly expenses, I’ll tell you what! In my dreams, and perhaps it will be reality soon, Sean will only be gone from us for 20 or so hours a week and otherwise work from home, for the same salary that (or, since I’m dreaming, more!) he is making now. He tells me this could happen, so I hope for the future while I cope with the present.

It’s only since the Industrial Revolution that families are split during the day. Before that the norm was for the family as a whole to be engaged in whatever it was that the family did, be it farming, or baking, or printing, or what-have-you. By and large people lived where they worked too, so they were together, more or less, all the time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I likes me some fruits of the Industrial Revolution! (This device is quite handy, for instance.) But still, there’s gotta be a better way than wake up, get dressed, eat hurried breakfast, shove kids in carpool, take baby to daycare, dad and mom to work at separate places, kids to school then whatever extracurricular activity du jour they have, 9 or 10 hours later everyone home to eat a reheated frozen Now-With-Home-Made-Taste! thing, kids homework, then watch separate TVs and go to bed. About 30 minutes, maybe an hour of togetherness. Again, Not Fun.

Our way is a better way, but we still Miss Sean Terribly. And we’re certainly not swimming in dough (ha! I kill me!), far from it.

I’m just impossible to please! I want it all. That’ s easy, isn’t it?

Never Seldom Frequently one to whine in the face of adversity, I have been waiting for the blog to gel, as it were, before I began posting. The somewhat schizophrenic effect of different posters with no indication as to who actually authored a given post has been keeping me from posting thus far, but I decided to go ahead and blog today anyway, even though I feel like Equality 7-2521 breaking free from the World Council with my singular, yet confusing, ‘I’.

Obviously I’ve not blogged in a long enough time that my brain is all cluttered with the detritus of half-thought witticisms and formless rants. I’ll save those for a while longer; I wouldn’t want to let Eleanor Clift down this Sunday when I yell at her through the television. It’s a pity when I’m reduced to “You utter twit!”

OK, so hi, howareya, it’s Fee, didja miss me?

We got some (un)school supplies last night. Markers and paper and a fancy purple binder, for Faith, who is officially old enough to school now. Were she attending an institutional school she would be starting kindergarten this year. Here’s the Priority Academic Student Skills (PASS) for Oklahoma, which is what the inmates will be doing. I dunno what we’ll be doing. Rest assured that I’ll let you know as we do it, however. I know I’m getting The Story Of the World: History for the Classical Child; Vol. I to read aloud to the girls, and Faith (but not Abby) will be in dance once a week which she is looking forward to HUGELY. And we’re all going to be learning sign language just for fun and because Gilbert is really wanting more than, uhm, ‘more’ as far as signs go.

I’m also facilitating someone’s learning on the other end of the spectrum; my nephew T.J., aged 16, will be directing his own education and life from now on after much deliberation. You can go read what he thinks about stuff here. If I can rip him away from that new guitar in a few weeks we were talking about taking the ACT. I don’t know if he wants to stuff some geometry under his belt first or just see what’s what. His call.

So, Gentle Reader, that is all. I’ll get some categories in here soon, and other refinements I’m sure. Just keep checkin’.