This year in our homeschool I decided to focus on an area that I had, frankly, avoided: fine motor development in relation to fine arts and crafts. Shorty loves to draw and enjoys the idea of arts and crafts, but often gets frustrated with age-appropriate because he is severely fine-motor delayed and, at age 10 and a half, cuts, glues, folds and draws at about a first grade level. For example, when we ordered Winter Promise’s Animals and their World curriculum for 2nd through 6th grade last year, I realized right away that their Draw Write Now offering was way, wayyyyyyy too advanced for Shorty and pointless. So we asked the Brooks to swap that out for their Pre-K to 2nd grade art offering, Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Animals instead, and that was a pretty good fit. It has improved his drawing a little bit.

But past drawing, it became obvious with the plethora of crafts that curriculum, as well as our newfound love of lapbooks, has that Shorty just wasn’t physically able to do a lot of them. Fine motor delays become cumulative over time. The more the child misses out on, the more longer-range skills he or she lacks. But one of the beauties of homeschooling is that you can tailor the curriculum to your child’s strengths and weaknesses, so I decided to cobble together an intensive fine motor skills curriculum that has been really helpful.

Three times a week, we do an exercise in the Little Hands I Can Fold. However, some of these are very babyish. They are intended for 2- to 5-year-olds (I cut that part out of the cover, so as not to offend Shorty with having him do BABY STUFF!!!!!!!!) and while he doesn’t mind, sometimes I do skip the activities that have him make alphabet books and things like that. We’re about one-quarter of the way through the book. When he’s done with that, we’re going to do the I Can Trace! book from the same publisher.

He also couldn’t color inside the lines very well, so I bought the Grade 2 Artpac from Rod and Staff books. It just says “ArtPac 2″ on the cover, no grade level, and the arts and crafts are very simple but also really cute and fun, and just right at Shorty’s level, enough to be able to handle them but also enough to be challenging. They also teach proper coloring and how to color inside the lines well. Here he is doing one of the projects, in which he has to color a little house, then cut it out, then glue it together.

He’s very happy with the projects. They’re a lot of fun, they’re never the same thing twice, and they often have practical uses. I’m a big believer in Charlotte Mason’s philosophy that children need to work on useful, tangible things instead of busywork that they’ll throw out later, so I appreciate the R&S direction of their ArtPacs. I haven’t bought their “Developing Motor Skills in Art” program for the same grade level, but I might this week – it’s inexpensive and it looks really good!

Hee. There you can see my makeshift trashcan hanging off one of the chairs, and the cookies on the table in a napkin. But anyway – if you saw what his coloring was like 2 monhs ago, you would be able to see how much the techniques here have helped him to learn to color inside the lines! Here’s the finished product. I did most of the gluing, but he did all the cutting and folding himself. Huge leaps of improvement.

Our homeschool park group has gotten HUGE. What started as a gathering of 4 or 5 local families with maybe 10 to 12 kids two years ago has ballooned into three times as many families and kids. The park itself is almost too small to cater to our needs. We’re literally the only park group for homeschoolers in all of Coral Gables, and much like the surrounding community, it’s a very diverse and vibrant group of people, so it’s no wonder that people have flocked to us. It’s been really lovely to see us grow and include new families and continue to share resources and support, while the kids have all forged some very inclusive bonds. It’s so nice to see a dozen children ranging from ages 3 to 14 all playing hide-and-go-seek together; it’s so rare to see that nowadays it’s almost quaint. We largely owe it all to our fearless leader, who has worked tirelessly to make the group into what it is. I know what a challenge it can be for homeschoolers to find good support groups in their area, which is especially crucial if you’re a single parent who is homeschooling, so I don’t ever take this group for granted.

I’ve been thinking it might be fun to be able to set up some fun promotional items on Gimmees.com like tote bags, mugs or t-shirts for homeschoolers, or the greater group for all of Miami, either as a fund raiser or just as promotion for the group. I’ve seen some really cute homeschooling t-shirts with funny or endearing sayings, and I’ve even thought about setting up a CafePress account to sell them at-cost (i.e. at no profit to myself) here on this web site, but their selection of items you can personalize is so limited, whereas the amount of things you can personalize on Gimmees is almost overwhelming. They have some small set-up costs, so I think it would only really be worthwhile for a large group as a fund raiser or promotion, but as I understand it, PATH is an entirely volunteer-run organization with dozens of families, as well as a web site, so this might be a cool idea to run by them. I don’t think they do much fundraising. Oh, well.

I have some ideas for my own promotional products, too, for my own project that I have in the works – essentially, my book and subsequent web site about teaching Shakespeare to homeschooled children – but I don’t want to completely spoil the surprise.

These are the things that I’m currently working on in order to make a living.  My criteria for jobs are pretty narrow, but I’ve had pretty good luck with finding things I can do on my own time that are still decently profitable. Set schedules and my lifestyle just don’t mix, and I also won’t do anything where I have to pay anyone anything, or that rely primarily on my persuading other people to join or sign up to make money (I am hardcore anti-MLM or whatever. I don’t think anyone really makes a living at that, except the people who came up with it.  Your mileage may vary!)

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far that is really working for me. I’d like to thank Tracey at MomTidings for her help in compiling these over at the WorkPlaceLikeHome forums.

• MTurk – a service of Amazon.com that matches independent contractors, mostly for data entry, to do small jobs for employers, such as upload a picture, type a description, or write short things.   You get paid right away either in Amazon.com gift certificates or via Direct Deposit. There are literally tens of thousands of little jobs to do every day, but the trick is to filter the jobs that pay 25 cents or more (or however your minimum is).  This is for whenever I have a few moments to spare somewhere that has Internet connection that is too slow for ChaCha or the environment is too noisy to blog or write (i.e., Shorty’s judo class). There are people who do this full time, but I’ll admit the work is kind of tedious sometimes. But it all adds up.
• CashCrate – I normally haaaaaaaaaaate those “Get Paid to Read Emails/ Do Surveys/ Complete Offers” kinds of sites. The surveys they ask you to take are mind-numbingly tedious, and it takes FOREVER to make the amount needed to cash out, and you can only really make any money if other people join up under you, and then you can never be sure you’ll actually get paid.  CashCrate is the polar opposite of that in every respect. They have cool surveys (I just did one about my favorite TV show, Heroes)  and their payout is once a month if you reach $20, which anyone can do regardless of whether or not you get anyone to sign up under you (though their affiliate program is very good, too). They have two daily surveys for $0.80 each, which I do over my morning coffee every day. That’s $50 a month or so – gas money for 5 minutes over morning coffee.  And they’ve paid me like clockwork. I love CashCrate and I’ll be writing up a post about how to make the most of a membership there. Seriously, join CashCrate. It’s awesome.
• ChaCha.com – ChaCha is a human powered text search engine.  I work there as a Guide, meaning that I get people’s questions that are sent in via text messages, such as stock quotes, or requests for the weather, or movie times or phone number look ups, then I use my Mad Google Skillz and look stuff up for them.  They only pay you $0.10 per query while you train for your first 1000 queries (I did that in a few days) and after that, if your accuracy is more than 95%, you get $0.20 per query. I take between 30 and 50 seconds to answer queries and it’s always back-to-back no matter what time of day or night it is, so it pays quite well.  You can work 5 minutes or 5 hours – they totally don’t care, and it’s 24/7, so this fits me very well. They can either pay you right away (they send you a debit card) or they pay you in one big chunk once a month.  If you’re interested in becoming a Guide, check out their Become a Guide page, and please do put down info(at)alrpros.com (with the @ where the (at) is) as a referral – I do get a little bonus for referrals. I’ll be writing up more about this, too.
• FastSnap – This is a service primarily for insurance agents and landscapers. They pay you to go out in your area and photograph building exteriors.  You can specify what zip codes you’re willing to work and set your own rates, but they only take 10 people per zip code, and it’s not available everywhere. I got a half dozen jobs from these guys this month; I’ve been meaning to get into stock photography more, so it’s good practice and really fun and it pays pretty well considering I usually do this while I’m out running errands and it takes me 3 minutes to do it.  It’s a growing company, so I really like working for them.
• TicketPuller.com – This is a company that purchases the best tickets to events for individuals at a small surcharge to the client.  You reserve (but do not pay for) the tickets for the client at face value, i.e., this is not scalping or anything shady – it just helps people get the best tickets available without having to go through the confusing morass of TicketMaster themselves.  I just signed up with these guys and I get a few sessions every week and they pay up to $50 per successful booking and each session only takes half an hour or so. It’s different! I have a session tomorrow.
• West At Home – I don’t work for them very much, but when I do, I take orders for the Home Shopping Network. The pay is average to great, depending on how busy it is, but the work is fun and the hours are pretty flexible. I prefer ChaCha, though – I keep this job just as a back-up; I only work a few hours a week on this, but since I work from home and homeschool, it can be pretty isolating, so sometimes it’s nice to have a job with real human contact.

In future posts, I’ll be writing in greater detail about each of these.

I also do a fair bit of freelance writing and blogging jobs for various clients.  And yes, I do realize I’m starting to sound like “Hey Mon,” the Jamaican family skit from In Living Color where everyone had 47 jobs, but it adds up to about a full-time work schedule, I never get bored, I can spend all the time I want with the kiddo, and all my bills are paid. What more could I ask for?

We’ve been very busy this week. On Monday, it was my Dad’s birthday, and we went to my parents’ house to celebrate. We took pictures but, honestly, we all came out horrible. So I’m not going to post them. My mom is a big fan of dim lighting in the dining area to create an “intimate feel” and needless to say we all came out like gargoyles. But we had a really great day there with the four generations – my parents, Shorty, my grandma and I. I also got to meet my step-aunt Anna-Elia, my Dad’s sister, who has recently moved to Miami, and she was really nice. She only moved here from Cuba a couple of years ago, so I had never met her before.

I’m a fan of giving practical, usable gifts for birthdays. I don’t like to give stuff. Maybe the years of FlyLady have sunk in because I’m kind of a minimalist. I have a lot of shelves covered in books, art supplies, etc., but I don’t have a lot of stuff. I hate knick-knacks or presents that are just intended to sit around and collect dust. Don’t get me wrong – as FlyLady likes to say, if it gives you joy to look at it, keep it. But I’m not a fan of enabling someone’s hoarding tendencies. I would rather just give them presents they can use and maybe even create a lasting, lovely memory from. I like to give people things like memberships to museums, movie tickets, or gift certificates to their favorite restaurants or stores.

So I gave my Dad some usable presents for his birthday:

• Some really, really incredible chocolate I’d ordered for him- well, hecomplaid that I had just ruined any and all attempts to diet, but the gleam in his eye told me differently Those people cater hardcore to my serious weakness for chocolate-covered fruit of any kind, and I have much love.
• A gift certificate to a great high-end Cuban restaurant from Restaurant.com which will pretty much let them have a very nice lunch for half price;
• Some movie tickets.

My parents work too hard and never do anything nice for themselves. Instead of giving them stuff that sits around getting ignored and creates even more work for them (stuff has to be cleaned, after all!) I like to give them the gift of leisure, enjoyment and free time.

Of course, it’s up to the receiver to go with the follow-through, because I gave them movie tickets last Christmas, and they used them in July. So knowing my Dad, these tickets won’t be used until February.

I’ve also been working a lot for ChaCha.com now that I’ve made Top Guide 2 weeks in a row and the pay is much better and it’s totally flexible. Y’all work-from-home types should check it out. (Put info(at)alrpros dot com as a referral if you sign up!!) It’s a human powered search engine, it’s a lot of fun, and they’re hiring in all 50 states! And I’ve been doing a little freelance writing, and Shorty and I have been working on two separate lapbooks, and we had Cub Scouts this week, and we’ve started plotting our fall garden (pictures at the link – it’s my new gardening blog!) and and and! There are just not enough hours in the day…

But it’s been a good week.

On my new blog about frugality and the quality of life, I’ve written a post explaining The Grocery Game, a web site that organizes a weekly list of all the coupons and sales in your area so that you get the best possible prices on the best possible products. I’ve even gotten tons of stuff free with their combination coupon-and-sale strategy. Their web site and the post explain a lot more; hopefully this can be helpful to some people.

My son has severe sensory integration issues with food and won’t eat many staples like rice, beans, soup, anything mashed, or foods with mixed sauces like lasagna, tuna salad and chili; I also try to eat whole grains, organic veggies and dairy products, and fresh foods, so my food bill was astronomical before the Grocery Game came along. I can honestly say it’s saved me hundreds of dollars in the last 2 months alone. Check it out – it’s only $1 to try it for a month. If you’d like to see how it works or what it’s about, check out my post.

Here’s a post cataloguing Shorty’s very first completed lapbook ever. We used HomeschoolShare’s free Kindness character trait lapbook for this, to tie in to the Bible verse Shorty was working on this week in his handwriting and copywork.

Caveat: these pictures came out horrible for some reason. I have had this camera since Christmas 2007 and I still haven’t found the time to sit and read the instruction manual, hence, I have no idea what I did wrong here with the flash settings to make them come out so grainy. But I think they get their point across. I’m only putting the first one above the cut, then you can click on the “READ MORE” link to see the rest.

Click on the pictures to embiggen.

We used as a central focus a page of copywork from A Reason for Handwriting, which had Shorty practice the Bible verse, Philippians 1:11:

“May you always be doing those good, kind things which show that you’re a child of God, for this will bring much praise and glory to the Lord.”

Here’s a picture of the front.

READ MORE: Click here to see the rest of the pictures!

In the next six months, I resolve to:

1. Apply to Thomas Edison State College for either their environmental studies program, or their accounting program, to begin in Fall ‘09;
2. Apply for Financial Aid for same.
3. Keep working on improving my credit score and cleaning up my credit report, plus paying off my credit cards;
4. Build up my list of freelance writing gigs to the point where that’s primarily what I do for a living;
5. Finish my two free eBooks;
6. Finish my Shakespeare for Homeschoolers curriculum;
7. Launch these 2 cool new web sites for homeschoolers and/or Christians that I’ve been working on FOREVER;
8. Start working on my book;
9. Learn to ride a bike.
10. Finish and improve and promote this web site everywhere I can, so that it can be a real and well-known resource for people;
11. Start exercising at least 3 times per week – not for weight loss, but just because I am way too sedentary;
12. Fix my car’s brakes;
13. Get all my teeth fixed;
14. Start saving up to move to a house.

This last one, I’m choosing to focus on a little. My neighborhood is a poor one. I live in an apartment. It is mostly a mix of retired Cuban elderly people, who are all great, and very low income family groups. Some of those folks are great, too, but ever since the motels within a 10 block radius lobbied to be allowed to rent rooms by the hour again, the neighborhood has rapidly gone down hill. I understand they did it because we are right by the Miami airport and a lot of businessmen used to rent rooms for 3 or 4 hours to nap while on a layover or whatever, but obviously they get used for more insidious purposes more often. There are also a lot of gangs, homeless people and crime. I mean, it’s not a total slum, but I don’t really feel safe here and I don’t feel safe letting Shorty play in the yard.

To top it all off, I was surfing the Net today and found this web site that a friend of mine forwarded to me that will locate Florida sex offenders in your neighborhood, and out of morbid curiosity, I did a search on my area, and let’s just say, the results were not good. I actually recognized one of the results as an old guy I see waiting for the bus a lot. Ewww. I know this can happen in even nice areas, but it’s just one more thing to add to the pile of reasons I don’t feel comfortable being here anymore.

The housing market in Miami right now is teetring on chaos. What is happening is, a lot of people bought houses a year or two ago at the height of the real estate boom, for exorbitant prices, that they now can no longer afford under the current economy. But they don’t want a foreclosure, so they are trying to be slick by renting it out. The end result is that my friend Tracy, a fellow homeschooling mom who pays $1000 a month for a great duplex in a GREAT neighborhood that she rented less than 4 years ago, went looking on her daily walks with her 2 boys to see if there were any “For Rent” signs in her area (because I lurve her and it would be awesome to live by her!) and she finally found one that was renting out the exact same building plan as hers – a duplex, 3 bedrooms instead of 2 – a mere block away, and when I called the number, the woman was asking for $2900 a month. Three times as much as Tracy is paying for virtually the same space. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I can honestly say I don’t know anyone who can afford that in today’s economy, or any of the other outrageous rent amounts I’ve heard lately ($1900 for a three-bedroom apartment 2 blocks away from where I live – yes, I’m going to pay $2K a month to live in the ghetto, sir). I think even a household of two working professionals would have a hard time paying that much rent for so little in exchange. So I think that was God’s way of telling me I have to wait. Because no one is going to rent that duplex for three thousand dollars, and people are going to have to start driving the prices down, or their houses will foreclose and be bought out by people who will rent the spaces out for reasonable amounts. So that’s my goal – in six months to a year, I’m going to start looking again, and hoping things start to look up.

Ah, city living. All you folks reading this living out in rural areas who will be like “Wow, I rent my 4 bedroom Victorian ranch with a pool and an eat-in kitchen for $650 a month!”, please spare me the pain.

I have a lot of specialized interests, including theology and spirituality, photography, debt management and personal finances, web design, homeschooling, frugal living and gardening, so I’m in the process of developing a few blogs and web sites about more narrow subjects that might still be of interest to some of my readers. I’m going to put them in a little side bar with graphics, but for now, here’s a quick list of links – they all have RSS feeds in case anyone uses them. Some of them have cross-posted posts here and there with this one, but as I update them more, that might happen less and less.

My other blogs and web sites:

• ALRPros.com – my web design and development site and portfolio;

• AwesomeTemplates – a catalogue of thousands of inexpensive but extremely high-quality professional customizable web site templates for business and personal use. Has a nice affiliate program!
• Found in Miami – a photography blog about unusual sights found exclusively in Miami, FL;
• The City Gardener – a blog about gardening in small, urban spaces;
• Frugals, Freebies and Deals – self explanatory. I find all kinds of good deals and freebies, and I’ll try to pass along the best of best here;
• The Creative Freelancer – a blog about freelancing as a professional artist, writer, designer or other creative art.

More to come soon, I’m sure. Blogging can be a little addictive!

And in other site updates, I’ve completely redesigned SPH and added a main sticky post at the top of the home page, to hopefully make it easier for people to navigate. I’m also going to be adding some major new sections slowly over this week, and have completely re-structured the forums, so keep an eye out and join in whenever you feel like it – even if you’re not a single parent or a home schooler!

As a Christian, I am somewhat ambivalent about the holiday of Halloween. I understand and want to distance myself from its more obscure and sinister Pagan beginnings, but neither do I think that things aren’t able to be re-interpreted and re-appropriated to take away the negative meaning and replace it with something positive. I don’t think a lot of what goes on nowadays during Halloween has much to do with its more insidious roots.

Shorty, for his part, LOVES dressing up in costumes for any reason. He enjoys keeping the costumes for later use, as well; sometimes he’ll keep them for several years in a row, so when his friends (who are all shorter than he is) come over, sometimes we get a whole little midget Justice League going on during playtime. My mother always takes Shorty trick-or-treating, which probably adds to his love of Halloween – what kid doesn’t love getting tons of candy and dressing up as his favorite superhero? He plots about it for weeks in advance.

I’ve tried to compromise. We don’t go to anything that celebrates death or the macabre in any way; we don’t go to haunted houses or Halloween festivals, and we don’t put up any decorations of occult things, like vampires and witches. But we do interpret it as a harvest festival. We visit pumpkin patches, put up gourds and fall-colored leaves for decorations (we are in Miami, where the leaves are always green, so this is a novelty for us!!), we participate in our park group’s Halloween party, and we go trick or treating around the neighborhood. My mother’s neighborhood; mine isn’t nice enough to go trick or treating in. We focus on it as a celebration of the fall season, wherein people get one day a year to dress up in silly clothes and no one will judge them for the whole night!

Some of the families at the park group do allow their kids to dress up as vampires or witches, but no one ever gets too gory, and Shorty understands that not everyone believes as we do and that people’s right to different beliefs are to be respected. One or two families don’t participate at all for religious reasons; it’s never really been a problem. This year, I found a GREAT Halloween lapbook to do which explores the historical roots of the holiday in a very unbiased, factual way while integrating kid-friendly activities such as decorating pumpkin faces. so we’ll be doing that the last week of October in order to inform ourselves thoroughly about the subject.

The one mundane thing I do hate about Halloween is the hassle of costume shopping. The actual act of picking out a costume is great fun, except that all the Halloween stores in our area are always staffed by apathetic teenagers and frequented by… people from Miami. LOL So it’s just a tremendous chore to have to spend hours sorting through the heaps of disorganized messes to find the Red Power Ranger or Superman costume in my kid’s size, make sure everything is in the bag where it’s supposed to, make sure the costume is the size the bag says it is, etc etc etc. Inevitably, the one my kid has his heart set on isn’t there, and then it becomes a matter of finding a costume he can live with and comes in his size, and so on. It’s such a pain!

A friend of mine recommended I buy his costume this year online, and so I think I’m going to buy it at one of those online Halloween costume stores. I’m pretty happy with that one in particularly, actually. Their prices are very impressive – those costumes are way more in the temporary specialty stores at the mall, and though they’re not as cheap as Walmart’s prices, they’re also apparently much nicer costumes, as well. I was browsing through the boys’ section and ohmygoodness, look how cute this astronaut one is! Aside from that, their shipping policy is pretty good. If I order by mid-October, they guarantee it’ll be here on time, and they’ve apparently been around since the 80s, so I feel like chances are good they’ll pull through.

I’m actually not 100% sure what Shorty wants to be this year – probably another superhero – but it doesn’t really matter because their selection of children’s costumes is almost overwhelming. And they have a pretty nice selection of costumes for grown-ups, too, so maybe I’ll cave and get one for myself, too! I’m thinking a fairy princess. What? Some of us never outgrew our love of dressing up. How else do you explain away my lifelong love of Renaissance fairs?