We homeschoolers cover every subject, from English to Art, from History to Science. We do fairly well at our house with all the subjects. Where I am really weak, my husband is not. That would be science and math, by the way. The kids and I depend on John to do the hard stuff with math. He's the only one who has the patience to figure out stuff like geometry. He's also fantastic with home projects. He finds things to work on that we didn't even know needed repairing. He has founds lots of things these past nine months since being on disability. Summer, therefore, was an interesting time around our house. Not being able to work, my husband was home nearly 24/7. He was able to focus on the projects that needed to be done, and he needed all our help doing them because of his arm being paralyzed. Everyone got a good education and learned to do things we had no idea how to do. One of the things my husband set out to complete was all the artwork for our basement. He and I started this thing where we buy a piece of artwork wherever we visit on trips. For example, we have an oil painting from Paris and a didgeridoo from Australia. A What?! For those of you who don’t know what a didgeridoo is, I shall tell you. It is a long, heavy, wooden musical instrument used by the Aborigines. They blow into it and make really cool music with an awesome tempo. Gotta have one of those, we thought. We can't make the darn thing work now that we have it home, but painted with crocs and kangas it sure is a conversation piece. On one of my husband's travels for a business trip, he was entertained by an artist who finger paints to music. The results are huge - and I mean huge - pieces of artwork. My husband saw him paint Albert Einstein and liked it so much that he located the artist's manager after the show and offered a month's worth of grocery money for it. Well, maybe not a whole month's worth, but close. Thus, Einstein came to dwell in our home in a large paper tube. This past summer also happened to be our Silver Wedding Anniversary, and we planned a party. Nothing like a party to kick people into gear on home projects. Out came Einstein. We measured and measured and measured. We took him to a local frame shop in order to have a nice, professional framing done for him. He deserved it. After all, he had eaten a whole month of groceries, for crying out loud! Anyway, we brought him home the week of the party, all 100 pounds of him, and guess what? He didn't want to fit down the basement stairs no matter how we tried to angle him. He was also too big to fit through the window. We scratched our heads hoping to come up with a workable plan. One of our sons suggested we cut a hole in the floor. Are you nuts?! So Einstein never made it downstairs for the party. He was relegated to our school room standing up against a bookcase. Tell me that sight was not a conversation piece! What in the world is a 75 X 90 Albert Einstein doing in your school room?! How much time do you have? My husband began to think that the only way to get him down there, short of taking apart the million dollar frame (just kidding!), was to peel back the carpet in our family room, cut a hole in the floor between two joists, lower him down, patch the floor and re-lay the carpet. Wish I could say I was kidding about that one! Our son with the original bright idea relishes that story. Anyway, all is well with Einstein now and no one is mad anymore. All is well with homeschooling, too, but I am thinking that maybe we could stand to spend a little more time with geometry.

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