What We Are Learning This Week

Okay, so it is Thursday instead of Wednesday. I hope Grateful for Grace will forgive the one day delay.

We have been busy this week with all types of learning! What fun it is!

1. Wild horses really go up for auction and they are awesome to spend time watching. Even if we can't buy any.

2. Baby miniature horse are absolutely adorable!!! And twice as awesome when the momma actually lets you pet the baby.


3. Pericles, Frankenstein, geodes, how algebra is actually used to solve coin problems, the Greek word for soul and how to make it plural and possessive, centrifugal force is not a real force, and blogging is still fun and educational even after 5 months. Here are Creator's Son and A Kid's Life working on today's blogs.



4. Birthdays are fun, even if they belong to a good friend and not just in your house. A full day of birthday is fun to share! However, the next day it is sometimes hard to get back to the business of school.

5. Planting tomatoes from seeds is fun, but trying to "harden them off" so they can be planted outside is hard work. This picture makes them look a lot more healthy than I think they are. They are suppose to stand up tall instead of being brushy like this.


6. Blogspot has changed a lot of the way things are done from the time I set up my account to when the kids set up theirs. My girl couldn't help me with captions because mine doesn't do that, but she can't just move her pics around. Interesting.

7. Babysitting is interesting. Even if it is Nana's cat. Everyone's house is run SO differently. It is actually kinda cool to think about.

I wonder what fun things will we get to enjoy next week.

Where I Got My Name

I have been wanting to share with you about where I got the name "Rockcastle Blessings". Let's see how well I can explain.

As long as I have known my husband, he has always wanted to build a spectacular house, an unusual house. So, after we moved to the Hill Country, 13 years ago, he thought one of his building materials would be rock. Even though we haven't gotten that far, we continue to dream.

He came up with the name of Rockcastle, which I love, and we have used it for several things. Our homeschool is even called Rockcastle Academy.

The Blessings part started some years back. We heard a sermon in which the sentences, "Blessed people bless people. Cursed people curse people." Wow!

I have always wanted to be a person who blesses others, but first the Lord had to take me through years to teach me how blessed I am. It has been a wonderful journey. I don't even know what all the steps look like since some of them were so gradual.

Then six years ago we were introduced to Dave Ramsey. He changed our lives. We had just lived the American dream of stuff and debt. We took the Financial Peace University together and changed our dreams.

It took us five years to be completely debt free, but now we have been for 8 months. I look forward to the day I can say it had been 8 years and we are still debt free. :-D

Anyway, I love Dave's carefree, heart-felt way of telling people that he is doing "better than (he) deserves." I was at a stage where I was tired of people at church and other caring places just casually asking, "How have you been?" each week as they come in, but don't really want to hear it all. So I began looking for a phrase for me. I finally settled on answering, "I'm blessed!" (Cuz I couldn't steal Dave's.)

Now I have had to learn to say it with conviction. Sometimes I have to say it to remind myself.

I do still hesitate to always give that answer because I don't want it to sound so trite, and yet I LOVE the reminder of how blessed I am. It always, without fail, causes me to pause and remember how blessed I really am. I also love the pause it tends to give the asker. It is kind of fun!

On our recent 6 day vacation, we stopped in a Christian bookstore. I had so much fun pouring over all the homeschool curriculum and shopping for a t-shirt with my son. I had no intentions of purchasing anything. It is just fun to look. Suddenly, I found the one thing that made my heart swoon and brought a tear to my eye. Something put there just for me.

Now I have another gentle reminder that I truly am blessed.

My Father loves me!

What We Are Learning This Week

My friend, Grateful for Grace, challenged her readers to post about what they are learning each week on Wednesdays. Here is my observation.

• HOME schooling has seasons of being a misnomer. One must be home to HOME school. Some schooling travels well, but sometimes life is the school without books.
• Five and half inches of rain accompanied by hail, thunder, and lightning is incredible in many ways. Awe-inspiring during the storm, sleep-depriving (if it keeps up all night), and way cool when you get to visit the rivers and creeks then next day.
• When you have a span of time for no blogging, the ideas pile up and you have to choose just one.
• All those weird named books in the Old Testament were real people, written during a real time in history, and have real significance.
• Pluto helped open better categorization of our solar system. Planets and dwarf planets (like Pluto) now have a more clear definition.
• Beyblade tournaments are just as much fun as My Boy had hoped, and swollen creeks are even more fun than My Girl had hoped.
• Even after all these years of home schooling, we continue to get confirmation on how blessed we are to be allowed to spend these years together. Drawing close to one another and living as a example of chasing after the Father's heart.

Now I just need to make sure I learned how to link it to Grateful for Grace. :-D