A good day.

This was a good Sunday.  I was feeling good because I'm on medicine and and I took advantage of it and did some baking and made a pot of chili.  It was my oldest son's (pictured above at the age of 2) 23rd birthday.  It makes us all feel old, and he's miles and miles away, but we chatted throughout the day and posted this pic of him on Facebook.  We baked a cake and ate it here in honor of his birthday.  It was the least we could do and it was delicious. His girlfriend's family had been cooking for him and fixing him all kinds of sweet treats, so he didn't miss out.

We finished the first month of the art class I am teaching at church and here are the results.  I think they look awesome.  Everyone put their own twist on it.  Also, at church, my youngest son came to the front and asked to be baptized.  

On the way home from church I had to take a picture of these fall flowers.  I love this time of year.  We live on the kind of road, where if you see flowers, you can just stop and take a picture of them.  :-) 

  Later last night, we realized that we couldn't really see the lunar eclipse from our house, so we took a little trip to go look at it, driving a couple of miles to a place where we could get a better view.  It was very fun.  We stopped a couple of places and looked at it for a while.  The night was beautiful and quiet and the lightning bugs were sitting on the ground glowing and outlining the road and it was very cool and kind of magical.  

Good day.

A fun outing.

The largest of the 3 homeschool groups that we are a part of has a big email loop and occasionally, someone posts a chance to participate in a study or survey for cash.  I always look at them, but none of them have really fit us until this week.  I signed my youngest up for one that was looking for high school students with learning disabilities who were pretty confident in their math abilities to evaluate and give their opinions about a new type of math software with adaptations for reading and writing.  Well, we were all over that.   I took him yesterday and he had a lovely time evaluating the software and giving his opinion and at the end of the hour long session, they gave him a 150 dollar gift card.  How cool is that?  While he was doing his thing, I shopped for bargains at Target, then came back to get him and had a great discussion with the people there about entering college with learning disabilities.  I learned a lot.  On the way home, just for the heck of it, I bought him a 5 dollar pizza. He is so good about half his family being gluten free and rarely getting to get pizza, that he deserved it.

This has all got me thinking about what he needs to learn this year.  Originally, we said we'd work the last year on his literacy, then he said he wanted to work on German and various other things and we built him a curriculum around what he wanted to learn this year, but we may need to reconsider and work on the spelling, at least some more.  I still have Sequential Spelling .... :-P

Cosmo has been helping me art journal this week by laying his face on my right arm.  Kind of a counterweight.  :-0 

Taking it easy.

I had a minor surgery on Wednesday and I am on day 5 of taking it very easy.  Last time I had something like this done, I tried to do too much and I think it prolonged the recovery.  This time, I was doing well, resting well and then decided (hard-headedly) that I wanted to lie on my belly to sleep, because I am a stomach sleeper.  I buy the special stomach sleeper pillows at Ikea.  I slept on my stomach during all 3 of my pregnancies and even after the C-sections, but this surgery, because of where it is on my belly, I guess, makes it impossible.  By even trying, I think I set my recovery back a few days.  So yesterday, I took it very, very easy which is kind of hard for me.  I like to get things done and check them off.  On the bright side, I got a lot of art done.   I did get out yesterday to teach the art class I'm teaching at church. It's 5 minutes away and lasts 40 minutes and my daughter drove me, carried my stuff and helped me, so it wasn't too strenuous.  I am finding it interesting to see everyone's different interpretations of the very basic directions I have given them and how much they are enjoying it.  I'm enjoying it a lot too.

Busy week.

Monday, we got up and drove to Ikea which is about 150 miles from here.  It's a once a year-ish trip that my daughter and I love to take.  It's like Disney World to us.  Then Tuesday, I tried to get a bunch of things caught up around here and my husband traveled to Indianapolis, about a 3 hour drive.  Then Wednesday, I had surgery, just a minor one, but it's always a major disruption in life to have surgery.  I'm still feeling pretty weak and tired.   Yesterday consisted of working 2 hours and then mostly lying around the rest of the day.  I don't get a lot of paid time off at this current job that I have, unfortunately.  During all of this, youngest son stayed home and did his school work.  He's doing quite well with it.  There was a time when he was little when I worried that this would ever happen.  He was so hyper when he was little.  I still haven't gotten him into any music lessons, but I did order his consumer math books and got him started on that.  The girl bought a new work chair to sit in when she's working on her book, at Ikea and she's been in her room working ever since.

Our tomato crop this year, basically 2 out of the 7 plants produced tomatoes, but those 2 did very well.  

As part of consumer math, my son had to predict his lifelong salary.  He predicts that he won't make too much money until he becomes president of the United States (top of graph, 4 years), then he will make money from speaking engagements.  He plans to run on a platform of education reform in 2036.  :-)  

Easing in.

We are easing into our fall routine, I think.  We did get an offer on Mom's house and we accepted it and now if the financing goes through, it will be sold and we will be able to keep Mom where she is.  I am so hopeful that it does sell and also a bit sad about it.  It was my childhood home and I love it.   I can't help it.  But, we're going on with life, starting our last year of homeschooling.  The math books came today and we may do piano lessons instead of violin lessons because they are available and inexpensive and we may also join the choir at church for some music.  We will start 4H classes in a couple of weeks and we may do some volunteering.  I'm sad about the house, but also it makes me feel more free than I have felt in a long time.  I told my daughter that I feel lighter.  Sometimes I felt like I was carrying that house around on my back and I feel the weight of it maybe being lifted.  This morning I started teaching an art journaling class at church and that is taking up some of my thoughts.
With the dissolution of our beloved old homeschool group, everything is different this year, but I am starting to feel like we may be okay.

My son's library list remains rigorous.

This is book research and washed off.  :-)

An afghan my daughter is working on.  

A post by the side of the road.  I remember learning about it in school and what the letters mean, but I can't remember and I can't figure it out.  Anyone?  

The super moon from a couple of weeks ago.  We were on a yarn procurement mission for the above afghan and stopped by the side of the road to get some pictures.  

Finally.

We finally started school yesterday.  It was only a week late, but I like doing things when I plan to do them.  Oh well.  That's life.  What it looked like was the boy adding writing to his day of studying German, which he continued all summer.  Today, he'll add his DVD engineering course.  This is a method that we tend to use every year, because we have other things going on and we procrastinate.  I feel like I only get the top of my to-do list done every day, just skimming the surface of it.  I'll have 10 things and maybe on a really, really good day, I'll get 7 of them done, and the last 3 will carry over, but then 3 or 4 things will come up and on the next day, those 3 things still won't get done as I am dealing with issues 1, 2, 3 and 4, which just happened today, etc.  You see how it goes.  I've been trying to get the people who publish the math book I want to let me have it in exchange for reviewing it for them, but so far, no luck, so I will probably order it today.  I am still looking for a violin teacher for him and will probably get more serious about looking/calling about that later this week.  The point of this jumbled paragraph is that I have a lot to do and when we start homeschooling at the beginning of the year, we start slowly and build up to a full day.

What can new homeschoolers learn from this post?  In Kentucky, you need to do 1062 hours of homeschooling a year, equivalent to 177 six hour days.  In the public school (and why should the homeschool be any different in this manner?)  this includes lunch and recess, art and music (hopefully), library time, going to the bathroom, and school assemblies.  So if you are starting a first grader in homeschool and 6 hours a day seems daunting, keep these things in mind, that your recess and lunch are included, art is included, a school assembly to discuss things or do a read-aloud for 5 or 10 minutes could be included and also, you could go to the library in the afternoon, then do art after dinner or on the weekend, take some music lessons and slowly add things in so that you are getting in your 1062 hours and also you can do as we do and ramp it up at the beginning, just doing a couple of subjects each day and adding on as you go and as you and your child get used to it.  Don't expect your child to sit at the kitchen table and do worksheets for 6 hours a day.  It's too much for the young ones.  With my high school senior, I assign the books and he decides his schedule.  He knows when he needs to be done and he does it.

My response to new homeschoolers is always  the same word -Relax. It will be okay.  If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would have started formal education until the age of 12.  There's a large body of research to back this up.

In other news around here, we may have an offer on Mom's house (pray!) and I'm trying to work out a deal with Freckles so that she does medical transcription and I lie on the bed and watch her (and sometimes snore).  So far, she's not going for it as you can tell by her facial expression here, but I will keep trying.