Thursday, November 29, 2012

Update on big life stuff

A couple of months ago, I blogged about big life changes. I'm happy that I have good updates to share!

My dad had surgery for his prostate cancer 2 1/2 weeks ago. My sister Becki and I were able to go to Arizona for the surgery. He's had some complications in his recovery but is doing better and better. When they checked out the prostate after removing it, they found the cancer was more aggressive than the biopsy had shown. But because they found it very early, they were able to get it all with surgery. No radiation, no chemo. He should still live another four decades or so. (He's 61 now. I'm thinking positively here!) We are so, so, so glad that this was found early and that they handled it aggressive treatment. We had a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving!

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Not bad for one day post-surgery, eh?


I also shared in my previous post that our church decided to disband. We checked out several churches, and we found one in our area that we really like. That "in our area" caveat is an important one. Ever since moving to the metropolitan area where we've lived for 12 years, we'd had to drive a pretty good distance to church. That gets old. So to find a church close to home is fantastic. And it's a church that isn't "churchy," if that makes sense. It's casual. It's full of people with very imperfect lives. Well, every church is full of imperfection, but at this place, we're made to feel that we can be honest about that, instead of hiding it. That's pretty cool. I'm going to start working in their children's ministry, so I'm looking forward to that. We think this is the place for us.

Life is good. God is good.

Monday, November 5, 2012

Turkey life cycle minibook for Thanksgiving lapbook

I really do want to blog about homeschooling. Really, I do! But I'm so busy homeschooling that I have trouble blogging about homeschooling.

I have all sorts of fun stuff I want to get up here about the great theme weeks we've been doing. But for now, I'm just going to quickly post something that other homeschoolers might be looking for in the next couple of weeks.

We are doing Thanksgiving lapbooks this week (using many of the ideas I've linked here.) I wanted to introduce a bit of science into the lapbook, so I made this minibook about the life cycle of a turkey. This is a quick and easy project and would even work well as a standalone Thanksgiving science activity.

Uploaded from the Photobucket Android App

Turkey Life Cycle Minibook

As always, feel free to use and reproduce this for noncommercial purposes; please just don't claim it as your own.

I showed Chickie pictures of turkey eggs, baby turkeys, and adult turkeys (found through Google Images searches) so that she could draw her own. Alternatively, you could print small pictures and glue them in.

Also, I'm behind on posting character traits. I'll get caught up with that soon! But going with the Thanksgiving theme, here's our character trait this week: Gratitude.

Character Trait Gratitude