Happy Easter!

I hope you have a wonderful day with family and friends!

Launching the graduates.

The hardest thing to do when your kids are becoming young adults and are trying to launch themselves out of the nest is letting them decide on their own what they want to do and not pushing them into anything.  (Or, it may be letting them launch when you wanted them to stay little!)  My oldest son graduated, didn't know what he wanted to do, hung around the house, finally found a pretty terrible job and within 4 days of finding it, came and told me he wanted to go to college.  Then began a search for scholarships which led us to scholarships.com which led him to a school in Mississippi, 9 hours away, which has been really hard on his homebody parents, but I think it's the best thing that ever happened to him, so I can't begrudge him that.  I'd rather he be where he is, working 3 jobs and finishing college with a beautiful girlfriend, happy as can be, than here working that job he hated, though I miss him terribly.

My daughter is still working on her book, kind of casually looking for a job and working on crocheting and knitting for the small business we are doing together.  She does not want to go to college and though I would like her to have a backup plan and some kind of training to earn money in case she has to some day (if the novel doesn't sell, God forbid!) it's her life and I need to keep out of it.  (I did hear of a job lead today that I will discuss with her.  They are specifically asking for homeschooled graduates at this job.  You don't hear of that too often.)

My youngest son is going to be graduating this spring and he wants to go to college and get out and see the world and I want him to stay close to home but when it comes right down to it, I will have to help him launch in his own way.  If he doesn't snag a scholarship like his brother did, it's probably going to be community college for him.  He's going to retake the ACT to try to get a slightly higher score and hopefully get offered the scholarship that he wants.

As to what I want to do, now, having lost my job, I am in one of those crisis opportunity states that you hear about.  What will I do?  How will I reinvent/restructure my life?!!  Stay tuned, because right now I have no idea. :-)

I painted this picture last night.  

Yes, I'm glad.

I did not let my kids argue much when they were growing up.  I could not tolerate constant bickering. I did a few things to help eliminate it.  The first was that we did "Kid of the Day".  I had 3 kids so each one had 2 days a week and the extra day was mine.  Kid of the day got to choose afternoon TV programs and got to sit in the favored seat in the minivan, etc.  This worked well for some things but for most disputes, I just taught them to negotiate from a young age.  They'd get in an argument and I would discuss with them ways they could solve it, (each kid gets the toy for 5 minutes or something like that), then I'd leave them to discuss it, and then if they hadn't worked it out pretty quickly, I'd step in and solve the problem.  My way of solving the problem was always the worst.  For example, if they were fighting over a toy, I would always take it away so no one could play with it.  If they were fighting over the TV, then the TV would go off for the day.  After a while, they caught on to me (it didn't take long) and when they'd come to me with a dispute, I'd say "Do you really want me to come in there and solve this or do you want to negotiate?"  They decided that they always wanted to negotiate and they never wanted to involve me.  So they almost never fought.

The other day, the 2 who live here were trying to get the sofa slipcover on.  It is very difficult and they were bickering slightly during the process.  I let it go on for a few minutes, then said for them to stop it.  They looked at me and my daughter said "We weren't really fighting.  We almost never argue."   and my son said "Yeah, be thankful we're not normal kids."

Yeah.

I am.

We had an Easter egg hunt yesterday at church with an accompanying party which I planned and the kids helped with.  After a while, the big kids started playing with the blocks and this happened.  :-)

Identity Crisis.

It's here.  The time when I am going to have to reinvent myself.  For years I've been a "work at home, school at home, mom of 3."  I'm still a mom of 3 although they're pretty much grown up but I will be finished being a school at home mom in a couple of months and I lost my job on Friday, so I likely will not be a work at home person anymore.  I am not sure about anything.  I don't know what type of job or career I want and I don't know if I'll be able to get anything.  I have been looking for something different ever since I started that hated, horrible job that I had.  The only advantage of it was working at home, which I gotta admit, I do prefer.

I do have some things going on to keep me busy, going to see Mom, taking care of the house and yard, trying to get a job, trying to get in shape, organizing some things for church and doing some art.  Some of my art has sold at the place my daughter and I are displaying it, so I am happy about that and also I did some art for a wedding shower, so that's a trickle of income.  Thankfully my husband still has a good job.

Pray for me to find a direction for my life.  Meanwhile, here's some art from this week.

Art supplies I use include this sketchbook, watercolor markers, watercolors, sharpies and a white or silver painters marker.  

Unschooling the rest.

In our family, the style of our homeschooling has changed a lot over the past 12 years.  We started out with a 6th grader, a 3rd grader and a 1st grader.  When we started out, I got math and some kind of language arts for everyone individually, and we did unit studies for the rest of the subjects.  I practiced a lot of strewing, where I would go to the library and get a ton of nonfiction children's books on whatever subject we were studying and then would just put them someplace, on a table, but not require the kids to read them.  Pretty soon, here they would come, with a book open, to show me something cool.  Youngest son, our last homeschooler, still does this but he checks his own books out of the library, tons and tons of them and then comes to show me or read to me the coolest/best parts.  Recently, he's read Catcher in the Rye, listened to one of Shakespeare's plays on an audio book and right now he's reading an obscure book of poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien that I had not heard of and keeps coming to read me snippets of it while I work.  He's now the kind of person who will always be learning, interested in everything.   It's fun just to talk to him.  What we do now is very similar to how we started out, hitting the basics with curriculum sources and instead of doing mom-led unit studies and strewing for the rest of it, letting him unschool himself and he does this pretty much every waking moment.  We joke that he is like that robot on that old movie (Short Circuit) that needed more input all the time.

 Unrelated, to the above, but do you see the resemblance between Cosmo and Sam Sheepdog?

Reading,reading.

I have gotten into reading lately.  My brother gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas and that got me started.  I got some of my old favorites that the library no longer has, by some of my favorite authors
.
Katie Fforde

Mary Stewart

Sophie Kinsella

I had read Divergent some time back, but at some point, I decided to watch the movie and that got me started with dystopian young adult fiction.

I read the rest of Divergent, then Ashes, Ashes (which I think has the coolest name of all of them) and then I started the Razorland Saga.  I just finished it last night and it was really good, my favorite of all of the young adult dystopia ones so far, including Hunger Games.

I am not sure if I have the energy to start another one, but I have got The Darkest Minds and Unwind here from the library right now.  :-)