End of August Progress Report.

Okay, so here's the status report for August. Surprisingly, our total school days for this year so far ... 18. Can you believe that? I looked back at June and July. There were 2 days of June I counted as field trip days (we can count 10 field trips) and there were enough hours of read alouds in July that I counted all of that as 2 days of school. I remember doing read-alouds in school, even into high school, so that counts. These were Newberry award winning authors, not that I put a lot of store in that, but anyway, I'm counting them. We're 1/10 of the way done with school. I'm very happy with that number. This has been a team effort with all 5 of us contributing to that, the kids doing their work, my husband helping and taking over when I've had to be gone.

We're also making progress on the whining. There's been a lot less of that since I imposed a fine of 1/2 hour screen time for each whine. Screen time is a precious thing now that I've cut their time back a little each day (also with no complaining, at least to me. Weird.) I think having the computers and TV only on at certain times is much easier to keep up with. It got crazy before I did this. They'd claim that they hadn't watched anything the day before and had saved up and so today they could play video games all day and frankly, I'm way too scatterbrained to keep up with 3 kids and all of that. This works much better for those of us like Winnie the Poo with very little brain.

We are still enjoying the various curriculum items I picked out this year. We really like Learning English through Art and Learning to Write the Novel way, so I can say we're enjoying English, which I don't think I've ever been able to say before. We're going through the elementary science book very quickly and look to finish it in a couple of weeks. Then we'll do the Microscopic Explorations

On the garden front (which is an interest of mine), we've done pretty well with the tomatoes but everything else is kind of small and pitiful. The morning glories (pictured above) have not yet completely taken over the yard, although they're getting closer. They are very pretty, but so agressive. I'm thinking of digging them up and carrying them down to the garbage bin at the bottom of the driveway. They could grow all over that and make it prettier and no one would care. I think I may have to burn my garden area to get rid of them and keep them from attacking my vegetables!

All in all, I'm very satisfied with our progress this month. The dish experiment seems to be going well too, except that I couldn't find my assigned coffee cup this morning and used a different one, so I guess I owe 50 cents to the penalty box!