Wordless Weekend (a little late)

Happy Birthday Mad Libs

Today Mad Libs turned 50!

Our family has always had great fun with Mad Libs. We have ones that are based on vacations, movies, Halloween, and even Scooby Doo just to name a few themes. At times we have even made up our own. It's a great way to teach the parts of speech.

This article tells the history behind these fun sentences/stories. It includes a Mad Lib to complete. And here's a link to be able to purchase the original Mad Libs book.

So have some fun today with Mad Libs.

Early Morning Acts of Kindness

You're never really sure how the day will go when it starts off without your morning coffee because there is no creamer for said coffee. You don't? Well I do and did this morning.

To the rescue... my husband who graciously went to the store before heading to work and came back with the liquid gold to add to my much needed morning coffee.
Along with the liquid gold he brought back this surprise for me...

Three golden sunflowers, my favorite! To fill up the vase, he also went out back to clip a few branches from our bushes.

Such simple acts of kindness, yet acts that have put a new and more pleasurable spin to the start of my day for which I am very grateful!

Wind, Soup and a Good Book

With winds at 20-35 mph and gusts reaching 50, needless to say, it is just a might bit windy here today. Ah, spring here in the desert of Las Vegas. At least it is only 80 degrees out. A relief from yesterday's 92!

Taking an easy day today, we headed out to the library after working on some Math. Josh finds it just so amusing that I am always on the lookout for new picture books in the kids section. I love picture books! He had to laugh when I spotted a new one titled, What to Do About Alice? by Barbara Kerly.
Teddy Roosevelt is a hero of Josh's and he often shares his favorite TR quote about Alice, "I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly DO BOTH." This picture book of TR's daughter is a little gem. I love reading about historical figures in this format. It makes the stories of our nation and its people accessible to those young and old alike! I shared a few things with Josh that were in the book and even he learned a new thing or two.

Lunch was a bowl of leftover 15 bean soup made using the ham bone from the Easter ham which I had frozen ... yummmm....



good food, a good book.... life is good!

Wordless Weekend

This is the life!

Knowledge is being soaked up here. Learning is taking place because he wants to learn. He is listening to a college course lecture from The Teaching Company for FUN!

Joshua is 14 and and passionate about History and Literature. We have listened to the American History lecture from this company that I had ordered years ago for his oldest sister and he really enjoyed it. We get their catalogs periodically and Josh browses through them each time they come in the mail. Recently he found one of special interest, The Italian Renaissance, and asked for it for his birthday.... INSTEAD of an upgrade on his hand-me-down cell phone. Hey, mom was good with that. Older sister who works at Abercrombie & Fitch, she figured she'd better keep him too far out of nerd-dom with a few things from their store.


He has been listening to the lectures, one or two a day, since they arrived and then shares with me all of the things he is learning.... not because I require him to but because he wants to. I had suggested that we use the lecture for our World History studies but he asked to be able to just listen to them for his own personal enjoyment. Not something this mom could say no to.

I can't say enough good things about these lectures. They are well-delivered by professors of various colleges and contain a tremendous wealth of knowledge. Josh already has his eye on a few other lectures on different topics.

The lectures can be pricey depending on which lecture you are interested in but they always have some great sales they offer. Joshua's lecture was on sale and I was even able to use a $10 off coupon that had come with my catalog when I purchased it. They have a great satisfaction guaranteed policy too.

Now I just need to try and get the headphones off his head so I can listen to some of the great things he is hearing all about in this lecture!

Knitting Dishclothes

Earlier in my youth I taught myself the basics of knitting but then got married, had kids and the knitting was left in the basket.

A few years ago, I started knitting again when I came across some hand knit dishclothes. I love the idea of using something I make in basic ways such as in doing dishes with these clothes. The dishclothes themselves are small enough that they knit up in a small amount of time. This menopausal brain sometimes has a hard time concentrating on any one thing for long periods of time right now unfortunately.

I like to try and learn new stitches also and this is a great way to practice them. To get ideas for stitches I have enjoyed using Barbara G. Walker's, Treasury of Knitting books. She has four of them in print but the two I seem to keep going back to are the first Treasury of Knitting Patterns and also her Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

Here you can see just a few of the dishclothes I have knitted.

Someone once shared a great tip for which I will be forever grateful. As small as they are, I rarely get the time to sit down and knit a complete cloth in one sitting. I work on each one just a bit at a time. The tip was to use a post it note to keep your line place in the knitting pattern you are using. This works wonderfully for me.

The dishcloth in the pictures is the one I am currently working on and is made using the stitch Banded Crescent Pattern on page 110 of Walker's Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

Change in career path

There has been evidence around the house lately that Josh's choice of careers may be changing... again.

When he was young he wanted to be a marine biologist.

Then he decided he wanted to be an historian or college history professor or both.

Next he thought he might like to try his hand at being an architect.

Back to the historian/history college professor.... and now he has left a path of these books around....

I'm thinking he may be on the path of the architect again!

A visitor

Josh spied this little lady (a female black-chinned hummingbird) in our front yard tree this afternoon.

A first post... again

A time for new beginnings.

I have been absent from my old blog because of so much of life happening...sometimes good, sometimes not so good.... unfortunately, lately, more of the not so good. I was also having a hard time trying to arrange and rearrange my old blog as I wanted to. The set up was just a bit too complicated for this non-savy computer gal and when the kids, who are the savy ones, aren't around, which hey that happens a lot nowadays .... well, just suffice to say that it is not a pretty sight.... the computer and me that is.

Hence, a new start back here in a new blog. They have added a few new things and have made it easier to have a little fun too since I was last here.

Hopefully I can get on here fairly regularly and share just a bit of the goin' ons of the chaos that is daily life here in our house "on the avenue". When I was setting up the blog, I had a heck of a time coming up with a blog title. I really am not good at the clever and quirky title/username/password thing. I knew that I wanted it to reflect what goes on here in our lives. In every house I have ever lived in, those houses resided on avenues, not streets or boulevards or even roads, just good ole' avenue. The dictionary defines avenue as .... "any roadway of approach, passageway or means of access." Aha! Yes, exactly! That's what I envisioned for this blog. It would be a means of access into our lives for friends, family, and hopefully for an occassional visitor or two. Our lives include homeschooling, public schooling, college, work, and living and loving as a family.

The door is always open....