Homeschool Fiction

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of my oldest child.  Zoë is officially 13 as of 8:35AM Iowa time!

It’s true, she’s been hesitant about this birthday.  She has loved her parties over the years, but she has always been unexcited about the prospect of actually being a year older (and thirteen feels particularly significant).  [...]

Every three months, the Whipple Observatory’s visitor center hosts a “Star Party”.  Since we can see this observatory from our house, we’ve been wanting to go there for some time.  When I first looked into it, my youngest was younger than 6. Since they don’t allow those younger than 6 to go to the observatory [...]

I’ve really been enjoying the flowers this spring.  Here is a view from my dining room window (through the glass and screen) of the Santa Rita prickly pear blooming, plus a variety of photographs of other prickly pear blooms around my land.  I’ve also added a photo of my daughters with my mom and one [...]

After taking photographs of my daughters as the letters of the alphabet, they wanted to try making numbers, too.  We recently got around to doing this and here are the awesome results (they were taken in Rancho Sahuarita in December 2008).  We’ve made something really exciting with these numbers that I’ll be posting about very [...]

From the moment each of my daughters were born, you’ve seldom been able to find me without a camera close by.  A favorite thing for me to do is to take photographs of my second daughter in the same environment and clothing as her sister wore at the same size.  Here are a few photographs [...]

Lovin’ Spoonfuls is our favorite restaurant in Tucson, Arizona.  It’s currently the only pure vegetarian (vegan) restaurant in the greater Tucson area — you’d have to go all the way to Phoenix for another all vegan restaurant.  While my family has become really good at navigating “regular” restaurants as well as vegetarian restaurants (which are [...]

As I’ve recently posted about, my Always Unschooled 12 year old recently turned 12. For her birthday, we planned the whole day around her and what she wanted to do (we actually do this often, but somehow birthdays are extra special). She wanted a surprise (to the guests) Chinese New Year’s birthday party, [...]

My Girl Scout troop has been doing a lot of art related projects recently. In honor of that and in order to be inspired to try a few new types of art, we recently visited several art galleries. The overall favorite was the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun, located in northern Tucson, Arizona. [...]

My family and I recently went on a tour at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona (south of Tucson). While close to us and very interesting, we are especially thrilled that Star Trek - First Contact was partially filmed at the missile site.
Here are some photographs of our experience. We didn’t get [...]

It’s officially prickly pear fruit harvesting season here in southern Arizona. Our prickly pears, a.k.a. tuna (Yes, Tuna!), are beautifully ripe. Some are even falling off their pads. We’ve been surprised at the various colors of the fruit - we especially like the bright red ones that look almost like radishes. Today’s [...]