-
Do you know who I am?
Recently Reese Witherspoon made national headlines when, during a drunk driving arrest, she asked the police officer that question. She threatened that he would be all over the news if he arrested her and guess what? She was right. Just not in the way she had imagined. Instead of everyone rolling their eyes at the police officer and his actions, the entire country was rolling their eyes at Reese. Suddenly you’re in damage control mode. I admit that I rolled my eyes when I read Reese’s story. In the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of ‘celebrities’ and I’ve been on the receiving…
-
Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 3: Homeschooling Lessons – Curriculum!
If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll know that I’m sharing some lessons that I’ve learned while I’ve been homeschooling. (Iron Man is Swimming Part 1 and Iron Man is Swimming Part 2) Today’s topic has been one of the biggest learning curves for me and our whole family as we’ve gone through this process. Curriculum. We’ve used several different styles of curriculum during the course of our homeschooling years and with each one, we’ve learned something that we take with us to the next one. The first year we did an ‘online’ curriculum that promised us virtual classrooms with very little need for parental involvement. For this newbie…
-
Iron Man Is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 2: More Homeschooling Lessons
Yesterday I started a short series about homeschooling with “Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade.” Today I’m talking about a few more lessons learned in my homeschool journey. Calendar: Public schools are required to complete all of their curriculum standards within a 180 day window. That’s about six months give or take holidays and snow days and such. This seems like a lot of time, but really – it’s not. In our lessons, we chose to take some extra time on some subjects and topics. We found that a lot of things were glossed over or missed in fundamentals, so we spent more time there. But the biggest thing we…
-
Review: Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue
Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue Reviewed by: Lori Twichell Genre: Non-Fiction Publisher: Zondervan Publication Date: July 2010 Do you have a teenage girl? Or a tween girl? If you do, then you probably understand the frustration of entering this completely new phase of life with your daughter. I mean for me, I just felt like I could finally figure out what might come next and then hormones hit. (And honestly I believed for YEARS that the rapture was going to happen before I became the parent of a teenager. That pretty much defined my entire ‘parenting teens’ philosophy.) So I was pretty happy to…
-
Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade or: What Homeschooling Has Taught Me
Recently, while talking to a good friend about homeschooling, she told me that I should write a book about it. I admit that I laughed out loud. I’m definitely not qualified to tell anyone how they should homeschool! The first few days of working with all three kids at home were absolutely insane for me. At one point I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake when, between school lessons and conference calls for my business, my son brought me a huge decorative margarita glass. It was full of lemonade and an Iron Man action figure appeared to be doing the backstroke in it. I thought for sure at that point…
-
Review: Rescuing Hope by Susan Norris
Rescuing Hope by Susan Norris Reviewed by: Lori Twichell Genre: Fiction, YA Publisher: iUniverse Publication Date: April 2, 2013 Hope Ellis has a life that’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good for a fourteen-year-old. She and her best friend, Sydney, perform on the praise team and they stick together all the time. Except Hope is moving to a new part of town and it’s going to be hard to start at a new school. She’s not really excited about the move, but she understands that as a single mom, her mother is doing everything she can to make ends meet and this new job is important. The last thing Hope…
