Lemons to Lemonade

 When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. I love that saying as I especially love lemons (with salt) and lemonade. Jennifer at My Two Happy Homeschoolers, thought of me with a blogger "award,"Lemons to Lemonade, an award for showing great attitude or gratitude.  Well, I am especially grateful that she thought of me, because it couldn't have come at a better time! 
This past week or so my "new" digital camera (Nikon Coolpix) turned out to be a lemon.  I thought, "how can I do school without a camera?!" I am a scrapbooker, and my philosophy tends to be that "if I didn't photograph it, it didn't happen." I carried my camera everywhere I went. I have gone through phases where I simply stop photographing and start living, but thankfully, those times have been short lived!  This was my first digital camera ( I am slow to go digital because it was my dream to have my own darkroom someday and I love my camera).  So, I dusted off the case of my Canon Rebel G2 and started shooting. I took far less pictures of course, and it will take much longer to go through a roll of film. . . but here is the lemonade part: my cannon photo printer has a negative scanner and a photo scanner, so I will get to learn to use it now! I have never taken this long to learn how to use a new product (I really did not want a new one), but it was an arduous process just to get it "hooked up" to print wirelessly to my macbook.  After I managed that, I thought I would be happy with that for awhile. 
The digital camera is on its way to Nikon Factory Service, and I am grateful that it is still covered under warranty (it was only 4 months old).  If they fix it, I will use that as my travel camera (road trips, bike rides, etc) and keep the one I bought yesterday for use at home. 
Blogging is so much more fun with a digital camera! And guess what? Homeschool is so much more fun with a digital camera, too! I love photographing our journey. It gives us something to look back on and see what we did, that otherwise may not have been recorded. 
So, what did we do all last week?  We started our study on Antarctica (which I will blog about in more detail later), learned about the physical geography of Antarctica, and listened to the unabridged version of  The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, by Caroline Alexander.  We will learn more about other explorers to Antarctica, do some hands on activities, and complete a lapbook on Antarctica this week and next.   We also began our next Prepare and Pray lesson, read the next chapter in Swiss Family Robinson, started a lapbook on fishing - we wrote a bible verse that had fish or fishing in it on a piece of paper and folded it to look like a fish, and started reading our next lesson in Zoology 2, which is also about fish! We were excited that they related, and found lots of great resources for a fishing lapbook. We also started a book called Homonyms, Synonyms & Antonyms, that I got from Barker Creek. I am having Nathan and Dylan work on this together and I think it will be fun. I will share more about that in another post. 
I also took some time to research The Workbox System, by Sue Patrick. Carissa's post here led me to several blogs and it was great to see how this system works for families with several children.  At first, I thought there would be no way I could make it work for 5 children, but I think it just may be what we need.  I will share more about that later, including the blog that really inspired me.  I stopped at Target on our way home yesterday to pick up supplies (Target is 125+ miles away, otherwise I would have been there sooner!) and I can't wait to get started! And I really hope it works for us!
I love my new camera, btw!  And thanks again, Jennifer for thinking of me.  I think God used that to prepare me for what was about to happen and it was a good reminder that when life give you lemons, make lemonade! 

3 comments

  1. With my computer broken it's been a while since I have visited here. I love the new look, though I miss your lists of delightful books on the side bar. I can't believe all the rainbow activities you did. I'm doing rainbows here in a few weeks, I will have to borrow some ideas!

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  2. I liked the delightful book widgets because I am such a visual person, and know that others are as well. I just didn't realize how slow the page loads until I got on my old computer. . . so I removed them so the page would load quicker. I think I will bring back a few and then rotate them. I have some new books I would love to share!

    I hope you can use some of the ideas from my rainbow post - it was a lot of fun. :-)

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  3. Sorry about the camera. I don't know what I would do if ours broke!! :)

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