7 Quick Takes: Volume 25: The Link Love Edition

Hello Friday, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again...

Welcome to this week's 7 Quick Takes! Today, I'm sharing links to sites and resources that have helped me this week to think, laugh, eat, pray and/or waste time I could have otherwise used to fold laundry or fill my childrens' minds with knowledge.

Please visit Jen at Conversion Diary, our host and author of the original 7 Quick Takes; check out the links to other people participating this week.

~ 1 ~

I am always searching for new ways to make math interesting...okay, palatable, to my boys. My girls seem to be fine so far, but my boys think math should be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Somewhere in my searching, I found The Math Mom, and signed up for her newsletter. She is awesome. The latest gems I found via her are: (a) that wonderful video clip of Donald Duck learning a little Pythagorean math (I remember this from some former life) and (b) an amazing series of videos called Mathematical Doodling. I hope to use The Math Mom's site and ideas more and more in the future, and I love her tagline: Life is a puzzle. Solve it with numbers.

~ 2 ~

Here is another homeschooling resource my 6 year old enjoyed this week: For Crown or Colony? It's an interactive site that takes the user through history about the Revolutionary War through the eyes of a young boy in Massachusetts. I had intended to have my older kids use the site -- and probably still will -- but Lady E was at my side when I was looking at it for the first time, and she kind of took over and did most of it on her own. From what I've seen so far, it looks like a pretty cool way to introduce kids to the history of the late 1700's and to show them what life was like for a family during that time. My kids always respond to history "lessons" that uses kids to tell a story: go figure!

I learned about For Crown or Colony? from the Clickschooling daily email I receive. Clickschooling is offered by the same person who sends out the History on the Go email I've written about in a previous 7 Quick Takes (take #2). You could do a lot worse than using these two resources for your entire homeschooling curriculum!

~ 3 ~

OK. This next one made me laugh so hard I could hardly breath. A Facebook friend posted Damn You Autocorrect! to her page, and I clicked. I was supposed to be making dinner, so I was alternating between stirring my Mushroom Barley Soup and surfing this site. It is absolutely 100% not appropriate for children. I'm not sure my kids have ever seen me laugh that hard; they've never seen tears streaming down my face from laughing. Suffice to say they were really curious. This is one instance when their curiosity was not satisfied. While not all of it is...salacious, if you are easily offended or uncomfortable with sexual innuendo, you may want to skip it.

~ 4 ~

And here is a link to my Mushroom Barley Soup recipe. And here is a link to purchase the cookbook it came from, the Frog Commissary Cookbook. Both are excellent.

~ 5 ~

My husband and I use our computers a lot. Too much. Bordering on excessive. We are slightly addicted to email. We've talked about what we can do to control the situation. The most obvious of which -- having a computer free time of day -- has been surprisingly difficult for us. So we decided that one very tiny thing we could do was to change our home pages. Because we fire up that screen first thing in the morning, we are often bombarded immediately by the news of the day. This doesn't make for a peaceful beginning.

So we changed our home pages to the daily readings on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

This is a simple, easy way to use our computer obsession for the power of good and to remind us to pay attention to what really matters.

~ 6 ~

I cannot imagine there are very many parents out there who have not read 11 Step Program for Those Thinking of Having Kids. I first saw it several years ago. But as a public service, I will link it here today, since not only is it funny, but it just might save you from thinking that you are all alone in the vast minefield of parenting. We're all in this thing together, and if you didn't bring your flak jacket, chances are someone will share. I found it today at a site called Downstream Parenting, but if you do a google search, you'll see that it's everywhere. Is Amy Lawrence the original author? I'd sure love to know!

~ 7 ~

Lastly, I'll just put in a plug for my favorite Saturday morning radio show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. Not, technically, a website link, since to fully appreciate it, you'll use your ears and not your eyes, but a gem nonetheless. Plus, I noticed from their Facebook feed today that one of their guests tomorrow is Lucinda Williams; she'll be playing Not My Job. I love Lucinda Williams' music, and she plays a starring role in a little anecdote I shared in this post.

I love Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, even if they have never responded to my queries to be a guest on their show. I bet I'll finally hear from them one week when all the kids have been barfing, I've been working on my taxes, painting a bedroom, and getting the garden ready for a tour, and will have had no time to listen to NPR that week, and then I'll be on the show, and I'll completely suck, and Carl Kassel won't record my voice mail outgoing message, and I will slink away in shame and misery, and will probably start listening to commercial radio out of spite. Peter Sagal, would you sleep at night, knowing you had driven away a devoted listener?

It could happen.

* * *

Because a child softly creeping,
Left her bed while I was sleeping,
And the body that was planted next to mine
Still remains
On a Friday morning.

* * *