Meanness

Monkey: You are being mean to me.

Mom: You don't know what meanness is.

Monkey: Oh, but you are.

He has the intonation perfect: "OH, but you are." It's a hoot. I have this conversation all.the.time.

Frosting Class

I'm taking a cake decorating class. Not just any decorating, either: fondant. The very pretty stuff. No seams. Life-like flowers. Tons of gear. This is what it all looked like before I packed it up to take to class tonight.



This is what it looked like after I packed it. I should have put it in two bags. There is just.too.much. in that bag. Monkey was very concerned about what I was doing with "his" rolling pin. Because obviously I bought it for him!

I learned several things this evening:

1. I learned, at least in theory, how to cover a cake with fondant. I say in theory because I practiced this skill on cardboard circles, and did not "glue" the fondant down with regular icing. But I'm supposed to take a cake, already covered, to class next week, so I guess I'll be finding out how well this took.

2. I learned how to make something called a "carnation base." These are not pictured: we left them at class to dry until next week. They did look pretty cool though.

3. I learned to make a daisy. See below.

4. I learned to make a calla lily, also below. This was extremely easy and a "freebie" because it wasn't on the official Wilton syllabus.

5. I learned to make that peony-looking flower which they said was a sort of romantic made-up flower, and not really based on anything, but looks pretty much just like the peonies that I dug out of my yard and gave away.

6. I learned that fondant really does taste as bad as they say it does. Plus, it gets so hard that you can bang it on the table. Makes a good tap-tap noise when you do it. It's pretty, but it's only sort of food.

Phonics Play

Monkey and I sat down to work on his phonics the other day. He loves the white board, so that's what we were doing: practicing blending rhymed words. Then he surprised me: he started tracing over my letters on the white board! So I encouraged him to do the letters right: top to bottom, counter-clockwise, and all. I guess that I'd better get some sort of information on the proper way to write letters, just to make sure that I'm telling him correctly.


When he was done with drawing the letters, we moved on to a spur-of-the-moment math game: I drew boxes and he's put dots in them. At first, he was making circles and I'd put dots in. I'd intended to count up to 5. But he wanted to do the dots. And he only wanted one, so that was the game we played. Plenty of practice of 1. It was a good time.

Lapbook Links

Lapbooks look like so much fun, but I think that Monkey is just a bit young for this still. So I'm collecting links for later.

This one is a huge list of labbook ideas, including a number of different shapes and binding techniques, as well as some graphics and orginisation links.

Our Homeschool Style: Lapbooking. It's a blog. Looks like it's not being updated anymore, but it also looks like there are a LOT of great ideas on there already.

This one is a site full of templates.

Yoda

Bob the Builder

Sunday Scripture

From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
-Matthew 4:17

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When Jesus said “repent,” His disciples recorded that command in the Greek language with the verb metanoeo. This powerful word has great significance. In this word, the prefix meta means “change.” The suffix relates to four important Greek terms: nous, meaning “the mind”; gnosis, meaning “knowledge”; pneuma, meaning “spirit”; and pnoe, meaning “breath.”

Thus, when Jesus said “repent,” He asked us to change—to change our mind, knowledge, and spirit—even our breath. A prophet explained that such a change in one’s breath is to breathe with grateful acknowledgment of Him who grants each breath. King Benjamin said, “If ye should serve him who has created you … and is preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath … from one moment to another—I say, if ye should serve him with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants.”*

Yes, the Lord has commanded us to repent, to change our ways, to come unto Him, and be more like Him. This requires a total change. Alma so taught his son: “Learn wisdom in thy youth,” he said. “Learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. … Let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever.”*

To repent fully is to convert completely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His holy work. Alma taught that concept when he posed these questions: “I ask of you, my brethren of the church, have ye spiritually been born of God? Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?”* That change comes when we are “born again,” converted and focused upon our journey to the kingdom of God.

-Henry B. Eyring
Read more...

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A Wasted Vote?

I think that the idea that a vote for a Constitutionalist, rather than a Republican, is a "wasted vote" is flawed thinking. This idea that it's better to vote of the "lesser of two evils" is nothing more than propaganda, used to keep those in power, In Power. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter:

In the presidential election, as I began to consider my options, I quickly realized that the Republican candidate McCain was not a viable candidate for me. Mr. McCain and Mr. Feingold co-sponsored McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act," ostensibly a campaign finance reform bill. This law, among other things, forbid "issue advocacy adds" which name a federal candidate to be run by corporations or paid for by corporate or union funds within 30 days of the primary or 60 days of the election. In my view, this is a gag on free speech and unconstitutional. I will not vote for someone who has so little regard for the Constitution. Mr. Bush I had similar issues with the bill:

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However, the bill does have flaws. Certain provisions present serious constitutional concerns. In particular, H.R. 2356 goes farther than I originally proposed by preventing all individuals, not just unions and corporations, from making donations to political parties in connection with Federal elections.

I believe individual freedom to participate in elections should be expanded, not diminished; and when individual freedoms are restricted, questions arise under the First Amendment.

I also have reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising, which restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import in the months closest to an election. I expect that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law. (Full text)

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I believe that Mr. Bush, a Republican President, failed America when he signed a bill into law that he believed was unconstitutional. It was his duty to veto all unconstitutional legislation. He swore an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." He failed to do so with this bill.


After the elections were over, I found a very interesting article that debunked another "gotta vote Republican" myth: The idea that, "at least we'll get good court nominees." New American took a look at the track record of those Republican court nominees, and they had some very interesting findings.

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However, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the historical record shows that most Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices over the last century have abandoned the restraints on government power set forth in the Constitution. (Emphasis added)

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Here are some examples they found:

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Republican President Herbert Hoover appointed Charles Evans Hughes as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1930. This despite the fact that long before this appointment Justice Hughes had opined: “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.” Such relativistic language, placing no authority in the actual words of the Constitution, but only in “what the judges say it is,” is the essence of legal positivism — the legal theory that has led to the worst excesses of judicial tyranny in the last century. ... As chief justice, Hughes affirmed most of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extra-constitutional New Deal legislation.

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Chief Justice Hughes was assisted in supporting the vast expansion of federal power under FDR by two fellow GOP-appointed justices — Harlan Fiske Stone (nominated by Calvin Coolidge) and Benjamin Cardozo (nominated by Hoover).

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Republican President Dwight Eisenhower nominated a string of statist jurists to the High Court during the 1950s — including Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States in 1953. Eisenhower said at the time that he wanted a “conservative” justice and that Warren “represents the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court.” Warren, however, turned out to be one of the most activist chief justices in our history.

Under Earl Warren, the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which used federal power to eliminate discrimination in education by unconstitutionally usurping the power of the states. Brown established a great government lie out of whole cloth — that education is a compelling federal government interest, rather than a family and community interest.

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One thing that various people talk about a lot in elections is abortion. People who want Republicans in office talk about getting Roe v. Wade overturned by the "good judges" those Republicans will appoint in office might be surprised to learn that Roe was written by a Republican nominee in the first place:

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Republican President Richard Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court in 1970, who voted conservatively in his first years there. Then, in 1973, he wrote the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, which nullified all state anti-abortion laws in a single stroke and led to the unrestrained murder of tens of millions of babies.

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Even Regan appointees have served us poorly:

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Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court in 1981 and 1988 respectively. Both voted to strike down state restrictions on abortion (Planned Parenthood v. Casey) and state anti-sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas), and to uphold the McCain-Feingold campaign finance (anti-free-speech) law. Also, both have gone on record favoring the use of international law to interpret our Constitution. Recently, Kennedy wrote the opinion that ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional for a man who raped an eight-year-old child, citing “evolving standards of decency” in the United States (Kennedy v. Louisiana).

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I was quite surprised to learn how many of the Supreme Court Justices were Republican appointees:

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By 1992, at the beginning of the Clinton presidency, eight of the nine Supreme Court justices were Republican appointees. Yet, the court continued its destructive pattern of trampling on property rights, disrespecting the right to life, expanding state power, disregarding family and local autonomy, and (in general) imposing unconstitutional rulings. There was little attempt to restrain the unconstitutional excesses of the president or Congress.

Read more...

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Republicans aren't much different from Democrats. The policies coming out of Washington are and have been both Socialist and Statist. It seems to me that if We The People want to see real change, we're going to have to start with ourselves. We're going to have to move past the idea that you have to be either Republican or Democrat in order for your vote to count. We're going to have to start working a little harder than glancing at party affiliation to determine a candidate's worthiness for office. We're going to have to take a more serious look at so-called "Third Parties."

Might I suggest glancing at the platform of my own favorite party, The Constitution Party.

I ask, with the Constitution Party's national chairman,

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“How long do you think it will take to get the kind of government you believe in, so long as you keep voting for people who won’t support your views?”

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