First day of public school, homeschool style

This year, GirlKid is in 6th grade and BoyKid is in 4th. We decided to start our school year last Monday and had an absolutely great first week. Both are actually eager to learn, and they are having fun with the subjects. As a reward/incentive, we decided to celebrate the first day of public school, homeschool style: We went fishing!

We decided to spend the morning at Mary Alice Park. This is a very well-kept park on Lake Lanier. There is a large, roped-off sandy beach area, paved walking paths with handrails, and shaded bank areas for fishing. There is an entrance fee of $4 (probably why it's so nice) and they don't allow pets. It's too bad that we can't bring Bella, but if it means no free-range goldens trying to "retrieve" my lure and corks, then I'm cool with the no-pets policy. (That's the way the last couple of fishing trips went down... and when you only get a few trips a year, it's NO FUN!!!) We didn't catch any fish other than some to use for live bait, and we didn't even find the geocache that was hidden off one of the walking paths, but we did make some even better finds.

GirlKid found an absolutely gorgeous American Indian projectile point at the water's edge. It's made from a combination of milk quartz and rose quartz. You can see the markings from where the maker chipped flutes from the edges, which are still sharp after several thousand years. This is our first Atlanta-area arrowhead find, so we are pretty excited about it. Here's a short video so that you can see all sides of the point. Tell me what you think!

The other find was something we stumbled across while unsuccessfully searching for a geocache. We found some amazing wild muscadines growing in the woods! We grabbed three smallish plants and brought them home. It seems like every time we are unsuccessful with geocaching we find something amazing for our native wildflower garden. I'll take maypops (passion flowers), queen anne's lace, trumpet vine, and muscadines over signing a log any day! (Photos not mine)

Our day was still educational *and* we did all of our normal subjects this afternoon. To make tomorrow fun, I think that we'll make milkshakes in bags.

Homemade Gatorade

Plain water is a major migraine trigger for me, apparently because it flushes too much of the good stuff from my system. Sports drinks are *full* of sugar or fake sweetener (another migraine trigger.) Poking around online, I found this recipe. It's nothing fancy, but it has kept my headaches away for weeks now. It's basically a weak, slightly salty Kool-Aid... much like real Gatorade.

Recipe:
1 packet unsweetened Kool-Aid (green and blue are my favorites)
1/2 tsp of salt
8-12 tablespoons of sugar (I use less, because I drink a lot throughout the day)
Optional: 1/2 c orange juice (for potassium & trace minerals)

Mix all of these into 1 gallon of water.

One recipe calls for a salt substitute instead of table salt, because it has more minerals. I'm hesitant to change something that works so well.

Pin Collecting: What Now???

Jerry and I always said that we were never going to collect pins.

In the beginning, we both enjoyed our individual collections of Disney books & magazines, monorail stuff, Kitchen Kabaret items, and posters/artwork used in the parks. You know... stuff that was slightly difficult to find. We also bought an occasional pin to commemorate celebrations that we attended each year... like Flower and Garden, Mickey's Not-So-Scary, Christmas, etc.

Over the next few years, we started making several trips a year. We started buying a few pins per trip because they were "good souvenirs" that were "fairly cheap" and "don't take up much room." (Yeah. Right.) More years, more trips, more pins. I'm not going to bore you with the details of our venture off the deep end of pin collecting, but now we make several weekend trips a year in addition to a big trip every September and each time we come back with several handfuls of new pins. That's in addition to the bulk pin lots that Jerry gets for us to trade with castmembers.

We've filled up a large bulletin board and just bought a eight 12x12" cork tiles to display what we have, but how the heck are we supposed to get all of these into a database so that we know what we already have? Suggestions?

This isn't even close to all of them: