This week was a remarkably social one -- seeing friends on Monday, hosting Fairy Scouts on Tuesday, volunteering at GSE on Wednesday, hanging out with a couple homeschool friends on Thursday while their mom recovers from surgery.

At Fairy Scouts we finally finished reading A Wrinkle In Time together, and spent some time decorating tshirts and bags.

We're still working our way through the book on Goddesses -- today was the story of Oshun, a Goddess of the Yoruba, so we read about Africa in our other book on myths (Gods, Goddesses, and Monsters, I think it's called), and pulled out our two student atlases, learning a little about the geography, climate, and political history of Africa (and about the idea of Pangaea and the possibility that the Great Rift Valley will become a new sea in a couple million years). We couldn't find our copy of Children Like Me but I'm hoping we'll come across it as we tidy up, this weekend, to take a look and see if they've got an entry for Nigeria -- or, failing that, another West African country. The narration is going pretty well, when we remember to do it -- she's alternating between oral narration (usually telling Joe about our day as soon as he walks in the door) and an art approach -- sketching out a few drawing that she'd use to illustrate it if we wrote a book about what we learned that day. So far she's pretty uninterested in the idea of written narration.

We've been working our way through the Daria DVDs and, when we'd finished watching the last movie, Sarah was pretty frustrated that there wasn't any more. She suggested we tell them they should make more episodes and I agreed, but I also told her that some people, when they wish their favorite shows would make more, or different kinds of, episodes, make up their own episodes -- either in their own heads, or written down in story form. I asked her what kind of episode she'd like to see and we plotted it out together.

The story won't actually work out feeling like an episode, I don't think. It'll be more like a follow-up movie, set over the course of the first semester of Daria's freshman year. And we've gotta make some changes, I think, to keep it from feeling too Gilmore Girls-ish. But the outline is really solid. It's a story I would really enjoy reading, I think. It's a story I *will* really enjoy reading, once we're done writing it. I really like my life. :)

Last weekend we went to a family party, where a couple folks asked me what my plans were for next year, and whether we're considering putting Sarah in a conventional school. I said no, that we're going to continue doing more or less what we've been doing, and added that Sarah and I are having a lot of fun the way things are. One of my cousins commented how rare it is to hear parents say that, that they're having fun with their kids. I'm feeling really lucky, that I'm able to say that.