It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween

Yesterday Tristan and I spent the day corpsing a skeleton. Nothing is more satisfying than turning a cheap plastic skeleton into a gnarly, oozing mass of decaying flesh and bone. ;o) It was messy, it was time consuming, and now the house has a lingering odor of wood stain -- but we are very happy with the results! If all goes as planned, he'll be hanging by a rough hemp noose on our front porch. LOL

In the beginning he was the basic discount store skeleton...

Then a bit of cheesecloth and latex was applied....

And then he was doused liberally with stain...

And the finished product is a corpse any mummy would be proud of! ;o)

Try finding this in your garden variety school art class...if the school district hasn't already canceled the art program in lieu of more test preparation!

After a long leave of absence....

Well, I never have been diligent about keeping a journal, but after a year we're back to blogging! I wish I could say the lengthy absence was due to being so busy that I just didn't have time to log all our activities, but, well, that just wouldn't be true. We've been busy, to be sure, but much of our time has been spent in readjustment -- to our new home/neighborhood, to Jody returning from Iraq after 16 months (getting all of us adjusted, especially since Jody was new to RUing, was a bit harder than I think we all realized), and now the reality that we will be leaving the military in 5 months (HUZZAH!!!). We are all really excited to be finally rid of the military life, but it brings up all sorts of new concerns and uncertainties -- starting out on a new career path, moving, etc.

Speaking of moving, one of the biggest issues I'm looking at are the state homeschooling laws, and it's dauting to say the least. It is so incredibly easy to homeschool here in Alaska. There are no hoops to jump through, no required testing, no evaluations, etc. Heck, we don't even have to notify the school district! Now we're looking at the very real possibility of having to do all those things I've dreaded. Although for a while I kept a log of what Tristan did during our days of unschooling, I've never translated it into "educationese." And while I'm very comfortable with our unschooling lifestyle, I'm not so good at explaining what we do under pressure - say if a superintendent or evaluator questioned me or Tristan. I'm really hoping that, depending on where we move, I'll have the option to enroll under an umbrella school or find an incredibly unschooler-friendly evaluator.