I’m back! I’m very sorry for the week my site was down – I attempted to transfer my domain name to another registrar and it apparently takes well over a week for it to transfer. In the interim, my domain name expired. Rest assured the site will be up for many years to come! Hopefully no one was inconvenienced in the meantime.:) I have a lot to blog about later this week! Of course I had a million blog post ideas the second my site went down. I’ll try to post them all this week.

We usually don’t school year-round. More accurately, I have attempted to in the past, but it didn’t work very well. This summer we are doing very lazy selections from Ambleside Online – free reading from the Year 3 selections, catching up on This Country of Ours, which is his main history spine next year (we started AO mid-year for fifth grade this year and missed this title), a little daily math workbook, a little GrammarLand, a little art, lots of hands-on activities, file folder games, a little handwriting – but we still aren’t really “doing school” per se.

This upcoming year, though, for the first time in seven years of homeschooling, I’m trying a year-round schedule based on Ambleside’s rotation: three terms of 12 weeks apiece, each followed by one week of exams, and with a month off in between each one. Factoring in birthdays and holidays, it doesn’t QUITE work out this way, but so far, my plan looks like this:

Year 4 Term 1 starts the Monday after Labor Day, September 7. We will then do the first term straight through. This will give us 11 weeks until Thanksgiving. We’ll take the week of Thanksgiving off, then resume Term 1, Week 12 the first week of December, with exam week the second week. We will then take 3 weeks off for Christmas/ New Year.

Term 2 starts January 4, and we will work uninterruptedly for 5 weeks. Both my son’s and my mother’s birthday are in the 2nd week of February, so we’ll take a week off there to go on vacation like we usually do. We’ll end the term the first week of April, with exam week the second week of April, and take the remaining 3 weeks of April off. Spring break!

Term 3 starts May 3, and we’ll work straight through the end of July, with exam week the first week of August, and the rest of August/ the first week of September off.

There will be a few days off here and there (Fourth of July weekend, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, etc.) We are required to do 180 days of school. But since the 3 exam weeks give us 15 extra days, I am not remotely concerned about this.

If all goes well, we’ll repeat this for the next six years until he graduates high school. If not, it’s back to the drawing board!

Ambleside’s term schedule was really the inspiration for this schedule for us. I am really thinking it will help avoid the usual January/ April burnout we experience every year!!

What does your schedule look like? I love hearing about how different families structure their lifestyles around education!

I know times are tough for a lot of people, so I thought I’d share my method of saving about 40-60% on my grocery bill every week. I’m not profiting from any link or piece of information in this post; I just know that a lot of people are facing job loss and other loss of income and I thought this might be helpful to people in hard situations (or anyone else, really).

First, since most people are lured by the shiny and the pretty, this is a scan of my grocery bill this week. Note that it came out to $125 total. Note that I saved around $88.

Besides milk and fresh veggies, which I buy fresh once a week, I might either shop for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. This week I shopped for 2 weeks, hence the larger bill. On average, I’m spending about $50-75/week for a family of two. Please take into account the following:

• We’re vegetarian health nuts and we like to eat organic /whole wheat/ all-natural aka $$$$$.
• We mostly DON’T buy generic things – almost all of the stuff I bought this trip were brand name things. With this method, generic stuff actually comes out more expensive than brand names.
• My son, because of his autism and sensory integration issues, does not eat the cheap staples like beans and rice.
• I live in hurricane country, so I like to “stock up” on staples – I’ve found they come in handy every year.
• I like the good stuff whenever possible – good olive oil, good spices, good brands. Again, $$$$.
• We don’t often eat that much prepackaged food, like sugary snacks or cereals or stuff in boxes that you usually think of when you think of clipping coupons.
• I live in the heart of Miami, FL, where food is VERY expensive relative to other places in the country.
• This includes food AND non-food items, like cleaning and paper products – and again, I bought nothing but the brand names.

And even still, taking all of that into account, I saved $88. I estimate that using this method, I regularly save between $250-$400 per month in groceries. That’s up to $3000-4800/year. That’s a BIG chunk of change for me (probably for you too!).

When I start to tell people about this, they marvel I must put a lot of work into it. (Okay, LOL, sometimes they kind of imply I must have no life and spend all my time obsessing over saving money on groceries.) But the truth is, it takes about an hour of my time each week. That may seem significant unless you consider that I’m making, according to my savings, $88/hour for that hour My job pays pretty well, but it doesn’t pay $88/hour! And this is just for my lousy itty bitty family of two – I know bigger families could save a lot more.

How do I do this, exactly? It’s very simple, very painless and very free.

CLICK TO THE REST.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everyone! The above part, especially the bolded part, is known as one of the most famous quotes in the English language, and has inspired tens of millions of people for centuries. I think it is still a blueprint for the best governmental ideals ever put to paper in human history. It’s raining and I am recovering from emergency oral surgery, so I will most likely be absent from the blogosphere a few days, but I hope everyone has a happy, safe and blessed holiday weekend, and for those of you who live in free democratic nations, I urge you to pray for those in areas of the world struggling to achieve the hard-won rights and liberties you enjoy, and that you, if you are anything like me, take for granted all too often.

And now I leave you with a Fourth of July message from some true American icons – The Muppets! Here’s their hilarious version of Stars and Stripes Forever.” Please take note of the awesome use of background collage.

The quote in the subject line is from the excellent musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. My family and I watch the fantastic movie version starring William Daniels almost every year together. It’s funny, family-friendly, historically accurate and extremely inspiring. I saw it performed live last year, and it made a whole house full of teenagers stand up and cheer with its good, old-fashioned, unapologetic American patriotism. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is! Rent it if you can, it’s a must-see and a wonderful musical.

Have a great weekend, y’all!