Stuff We Like :: 11.4.16

Some weeks, just making it to Friday morning feels like a major accomplishment. For me, this is one of those weeks!

around the web

• First the gnomes. Then the yarn in grocery stores. And now the perfect strike. I love you, Iceland.
• Talking to our kids about racism when we see it is so hard but so important.
• It’s time for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, and you should definitely make a video for it with your kids!

at home/school/life

• The new episode of the podcast is out, and we’re talking about things we wish we’d known when we started homeschooling.
• Take a peek inside Shelli’s 1st and 4th grade curriculum.

reading list

• I’m supposed to be reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the podcast with Suzanne, but I can’t find it in my boxes, so I’m reading the collected stories of L.M. Montgomery on my Kindle. I think a Kindle full of books may be the only way to survive a protracted move.
• My friend Shelly lets me sit in on her existentialism class sometimes, so I am rereading The Myth of Sisyphus so that I can intelligently discuss it next week.
• My 9-year-old’s reading every book in the Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist series he can get his hands on right now, and my 14-year-old is reading “mostly school stuff,” according to her.

at home

• The kids were Finn and Jake (from Adventure Time) for Halloween, but the big celebration was for my daughter’s 15th birthday.
• We’re hosting Thanksgiving this year, so the kids and I are painting our hodgepodge of mismatched chairs the same color in the hopes that this will make us look like we did not accumulate all of our furniture from yard sales. (I’m using Annie Sloan chalk paint in Duck Egg Blue.)
• On a related note, I am pretty delighted that the baking soda/aluminum foil/boiling water method of silver cleaning worked brilliantly on our neglected silverware.

---