end of season!

It's officially the end of the Christmas season in our home!

The tree and decorations are taken down and stowed away for next year.

We attended Zoo Lights Saturday night -- which is a tradition we always try to do the weekend after New Year's, since that usually coincides with Epiphany and the end of the season.

The boys and I wrote all our thank you notes and I got them in the mail.

I finally mailed our holiday cards! (one advantage was that I could include our thank you notes with the cards, which had family pictures! It saved a little bit of postage. LOL)

We're ready to start back to schooling after a nice break, and head into a unit about deserts, among other things.

Yesterday we attended a free gem & mineral show at a local college. There were tons of vendors, and many were giving away free rocks to the kids. Each boy took $3 of their own money and came away with quite the haul! They either purchased or were given tons of fossils, pyrite, calcite, quartz, obsidian and more. It was very informative, and I think we'll do a unit on minerals after we finish deserts.