Home school is new

Homeschool week one

We've managed to complete our first full week of home school with a minimal amount of whining from both the children and Joyce. Everyone has quickly discovered that it is more fun, and we feel a better sense of accomplishment, when we set the order and objectives at the start of the day rather than deciding as we go along. It was Joyce's idea, but Benjamin and Oliver also agreed to give ourselves a name. Hence, we call ourselves the Besch Brassil Academy for Traveling Students (B-BATS) and we managed to make a school banner together.

We also had the perfect temperatures for lots of fun snow hiking...cold enough that the smaller creeks stayed frozen and the paths were not sloppy, but not so cold that we didn't want to be out.

Speaking of being too cold to be out, we also had our first weekend field trip to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We drove up on Friday night and woke up to -4 F with a crazy windchill on Saturday. We spent most of Saturday indoors, but we still had to walk to get to Parliament, which hurt our faces! Before touring Parliament in the afternoon, we spent over three hours in the War Museum, learning about war from Canada's perspective from the early First Nations settlement until today.

Freezing outside after our tour of Canada's Parliament building

Sunday was a much nicer day to be out. We spent the afternoon ice skating on the Rideau Canal. All the kids spent a lot of time skating, but we had also rented a sled so that we could cover some distance when they started to get tired of being slow or falling down.

The other big news from the week was that Chad, after trying to weasel his way into Cornell twenty years ago, finally managed to get a Cornell ID card. Take that, Cornell!