Thankfulness for Life!

In the last five weeks, I've been caught up in specific blog challenges, fests, hops, and a wonderful guest post by Karen Lange. I'm thankful for all the wonderful hosts of those challenges, fests, and hops, and I'm thankful for Karen's gracious wisdom about blogging.

Meanwhile in the non-cyber world, life is barrelling along at a breakneck pace, and I feel like I'm bursting with thankfulness for life!

So I thought I would share a few bits of that with all of you with some pictures.

In our homeschooling life, my oldest daughter and my husband have been joyfully creating different experiments for her homeschool co-op Backyard Ballistics class. Their most recent creation for that class was a carbide cannon, but I have pictures of one that they made earlier: the potato gun.

This photo was taken in the last week of March, when my daughter had just undergone minor foot surgery (see note at bottom), so that's why she has a sock over one foot (it's actually over a big bandage) and a crutch on the ground next to her.

My youngest daughter has been building all our own science experiments with very little help (she doesn't want it). This last week, she built her own balance. We have one but she wanted to build her own from her science kit.

With a small group of homeschool friends we went out this last Tuesday and celebrated a particularly low tide in our area. These were just a few of our discoveries:

Plus, five girls, one boy, and three moms managed to bring home a few buckets of sand in our shoes.

And in our dance life, my youngest got her first full pointe shoes (slightly different than demi-pointe)

My oldest is up for her first pair of full pointe shoes, but her feet have this tendency to grow in May, so we are going to wait through the month and see if her feet get a size bigger in the next thirty days. We inevitably buy her new shoes the week before the June recital. Soft shoes like ballet slippers, and jazz shoes just stretch. Tap shoes and pointe shoes don't.  Their ballet teacher simply said to move from demi-pointe to pointe when they needed new shoes . . .so she has to wait.

*Her foot surgery involved removing what the foot doctor thought was a wart, but turned out to be a small bit of metal or glass cocooned in protective skin tissue. She recovered enought to ski in one week, and recovered enough to dance in two weeks, although her foot doctor just said last week that she is fully recovered.

Day 11 of 100 Days of Revision Update

Aagh. I'm about 1,000 words behind my goal today. And the last bit of revision still left me with an extremely awkward conversation . . .need to fix it, but I need to move on and fix the rest of the mess too. There is only so much rewriting a scene can take before it just shatters into meaningless bits.