I have fallen in love.  Can that really be possible?  Yes.  I have fallen for french macarons.  They are these beautiful little melt in your mouth crunchy yet chewy cookies.  Yes they are all that and more.  They take a day to really grab a hold of your taste buds.  Another cool little fact about them is that they are totally gluten free.  As soon as I perfect these little beauties, I'm going to make them for my gluten-free friends.  Although making them and trying them is fun.  They are the reason I have to up my running.  I really wish that I would have known about them when we were in Paris 6 years ago and purchased some from Laduree themselves.  Hopefully the next I go to visit my grandparents, I can get a hold of one of these.  In the mean time I'm going to practice and practice making these wonderful little treats.  I'm sure my family will get tired of them before I do.  They are just so much fun to photograph and I feel culinary to boot.  I've made a coffee flavored one that turned out better and a white chocolate candy cane one.  The flavors and colors that macarons come in run the gamut of the baker's imagination.  There are so many different approaches to making them as well.  I've only tried one method but am looking forward to trying different ways.  From what I understand, the reasons they have little hats is that I didn't turn them enough when mixing the almond flour with the egg whites.  It takes practice and experience to know when the batter is mixed just enough before it becomes over mixed.  Something I am willing to practice over and over again.  I also need to work on making butter cream frosting and ganache for the filling part.  Of course they can be filled with so much such as nutella and jams.

I think that I need a little adventure every once in a while with a group of girls.  My friends Marie and Nicole and I headed out to La Conner.  I've lived here for about 13 years and have never been to La Conner.  It's a cute little town that isn't so sleepy.  It's full of people doing the same things that we were doing - getting away for the day or weekend.  In fact we had been in La Conner for all of 30 minutes before we ran into someone we knew.   Small world isn't it.  I took some cute shots of tug boats, trees, and birds.  We went to a little restaurant for lunch and I rolled around the rest of the day.  Probably my favorite store was Refeather your Nest next to the restaurant.  I could have bought so much there. It is has an American version of European country style boutiques. Very cute.  We wandered and talked and wandered and ate chocolates.  What could make the day better?

 Another shift has happened in our schooling. At the beginning of the year we signed up to do Language Arts and Science through the WAVA K12 program.  We received the curriculum and signed up on the website.  Then school started and since both Isaac and Job needed to get up around 6am I figured Lona could as well.  She could start her day at 7 and hopefully be done at noon.  Well it ended up that with those two classes she had almost 5 hours of work to do.  She had an hour of science but the problem with science was that she had a daily assessment to take and it usually consisted of 3 problems.  If she didn't score 80% on any assessment she had to do it over.  With science that meant if she missed even one problem she had to do it over.  Well no problem except that about half the time the questions dealt with material that would be presented the next day,  it asked questions on a footnote, it dealt with materials a few lessons previous or it required Lona to infer something that was only hinted at.  Since this was happening science ended up taking 2 or 2 1/2 hours.  Then there was Language Arts.  That was divided up into Grammar Usage, Literature, Vocabulary and Writing, which is all and good.  However with grammar it went too fast.  She covered linking verbs, helping verbs and regular verbs in one day.  Literature was the same way, Tom Sawyer was read in two weeks or less with daily assessments and projects.  Then there was writing.  She needed to write a research paper, but she was given one day to find sources on the Internet and another day to do all her library research.  The vocabulary had words that I don't use or have ever used.  Antebellum just isn't in my daily usage.  Then there was the required work on study island to study for the maps tests.  She had to have so many hours for language arts logged on study island.  I thought that if the regular curriculum didn't cover it then why should we use that curriculum.  Or if the test was so poorly designed then why were we using that test.  The curriculum and the tests should work together instead of making more work for her.  It would have been great had we been able to slow down but we had required percentage of her total work to complete each month.  We would work sometimes until 5:00 at night with a half hour break for lunch just to get the stuff done.  It was frustrating for both of us.  Then there were required weekly meetings whose only purpose was to check in and it seemed to waste time. We had required days to attend and if something came up we were marked absent.  Sometimes we had problems connecting to the site and were marked absent.  Sometimes the site kicked us off and so she failed her assessments because she was in the middle of taking them.  It didn't end up being a good fit for us.  The school calendar had December 23 through January 4th as "winter holiday"  so we took that off and it felt good, really good.  I just couldn't see doing that anymore.  I couldn't bring myself to work through that.  I looked at different curriculum for science and language arts.  I settle with using the same grammar book because she really liked it.  We now set a timer for grammar and she spends 15 minutes on it. Then we correct it together.  It seems more manageable for her.  With writing we are trying the Write Source book.  She again sets her timer for 15 minutes and reads that much in her book and does an activity when she comes to it.  With Literature I have a list of books that I want Lona to read.  Some of the books correspond to her history.  Right now she is reading "The Witch of Blackbird Pond." and she's loving it.  She frequently asks if she can read more than one chapter.  I have chapter questions for her to answer and she's doing that on the computer since she can type faster.  For science she is going through Basic Science Mysteries by Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum.  The year is divided up into 5 chapters.  Each chapter is divided up into three 5 lesson sections.  At the end of each section she is tested on that section with up to 65 questions.  If she scores 85% or above she doesn't have to take the chapter test.  We have figured out that if she works on one lesson a day she will have finished the whole year by the middle of May.  It's great since she doesn't have to spend over an hour working on it.  This schedule has allowed us to do more things such as photographing eagles.  I figure that is science, writing, and art all rolled up into one activity.  She is happy about school again and is excited about learning.  I really think that the K12 program can work for some people.  I think that the concept of it is great.  If it could be tailored to individual learners it would work fantastic.  It just was too rigid for us.  She did learn a ton but it was too fast and too much.  So another shift has happened in our educational journey and it's for the best at this time.

It seems as though Job's personality is evolving and shifting.  Oh, he still doesn't care what others think of him.  Well he does.  He cares deeply how Isaac thinks of him but his classmates not so much.  He is picky about his friends.  The last few weeks at school, he has sat at a different lunch table every day and made his rounds of the lunch room before returning to his normal table.  He listens to what the kids are saying.  Some kids call him the Math Ninja, others call him a Ninja.  I have no idea why.  He goes to his first period class and sits in his desk waiting for school to start. He doesn't say anything to the kids that are there until he really has something to say and I think it startles them when he does.  He happens to be the only 7th grader in that class of 8th graders.  His teacher says that he doesn't seem intimidated at all and all the kids just seem to accept him.  His favorite hairstyle for the last few years has been a Spock hair cut, complete with very straight bangs and pointed sideburns, but no one teases him.  He even has one eyebrow that points up.  His face is slender and his ears lay flat against his head and are just a tad pointed.  He loves math, very logical.  He has his own way of thinking.  He still loves Legos and does something with them on a daily basis.  He also loves to create gadgets.  He is in the process of making a wrist-mounted Nerf gun with parts from broken Nerf guns.  So in a nutshell he's his own person and then he does something that John thinks is out of character.  This is just an example but really it is totally in character because when he wants to do something it doesn't matter what others think. At 4:45 pm, he decided that he wanted his hair shaved with the Seahawks logo.  John was trying to talk him out of it.  I think because he would never have done something like this.  However, Job is only young once and childhood maybe the only time he could do something like this.  So I called around the different places and found a barber shop that could do it and do it that night.  We walked in around 5pm and came home about 7:30!  It took a long time but the guy did a stellar job.

We decided to try it again at the Mosquito Lake Road bridge for viewing eagles.  I had researched some more about eagles.  Sunny days they fly high on the thermals, rainy days they don't go out, and cloudy days they feed. Also they tend to be out in the mornings until noon or so and late afternoons.  I checked out the Skagit Eagle Watchers and saw some amazing photos!  Apparently on January 11th there were many eagles right where we had been a few days before.  Go figure. We drove out to the same spot and on the way saw two huge eagles in a tree.  Then when we arrived at the little park, we saw on in a tree down river.  But that was it.  We waited in the car for a while and then wandered over across the road.  Three eagles sitting in a tree and one right above us.  We watched for a while, taking photos and then a car pulls up.  Out gets a man and a lady with their binoculars and little cameras.  The man walks over to me and has a photo album in his hand.  We start talking and he shows me the photos of the eagles that he's taken.  Wow, amazing.  I'm looking at his camera.  We talk some more and he told that on Saturday he was out at the same place and he had counted over 200!  I couldn't take it anymore I asked him if he was Don Knutsen?  Yep, that was him.  I had just looked at his photos before we left.  All shot with his little point and shoot with a 24x digital zoom lens.  He did say that the eagles were right next to the bridge fighting over fish.  He was disappointed with the amount of eagles out this day.  I thought it was amazing.  The lady told me that she is from Canada and the time to see eagles there was October through November.  The place to go is the Harris River.  They had over 7000 eagles along a small stretch of that river.  Next year I'm going back.  I guess we are in the tail end of the eagle viewing season.

Sunday evening we went over to some friends' house for dinner. Their little boy arrived home and wanted to show everyone his video of the eagles that took with his iPod.  It was impressive. Apparently now is the time to see them along the river bank.  I had something planned for Monday morning so we decided Tuesday would be our day.  Unfortunately eagles are not out when it rains. Supposedly the best time would be early morning and late afternoon.  We were there early morning but it rained and rained and rained.  We saw one, and found a huge nest but that was it.  We stopped at two places the Mosquito Lake Road bridge and the Demming Eagle Park.  We'll try it again when it is sunnier, hopefully.

We usually go up to Mount Baker the day after Christmas however this year we postponed it because we were going with our Youth Group.  It ended up being mostly middle school girls and mostly high school guys.  The guys were in one bus the girls in the other.  I had the privilege of riding a little bit in each bus, and I would have to say that I liked the guys bus better.  They were quiet.  Isaac was even a little anti-social.  He put his ear buds in.  Why?  The girls on the otherhand talked constantly and sang "99 Bottles of Milk on the Wall".  I was so ready to get out!  We got up there around noon and had a blast sledding.  The area we were at had some pretty steep hills and then some not so steep parts but lots of jumps.  The best part of it was the day.  The sun was out, and it was beautiful.  I don't mind it being cold as long as the sun is out.  Isaac and two other boys had decided that they were too cool to sled there and went looking for another sledding place.  They told Job where they were going but it really wasn't where we thought they were.  Apparently over there means a different direction to them than it does to  us. We never did find them, but they had a phone so we called.  The rest of us hung out and had a ton of fun.  When Isaac returned I tackled him and took him down the hill on his stomach.  One of the young leaders dug out a hole and then filmed another kid sledding over top.  It is an amazing video!