Tuesday, August 29.

I seriously can't believe it's almost September.  This summer seems to have gone quickly, but when I think back to my son's graduation in May, that kind of seems like a long time ago.  Its funny how we perceive the passage of time.  We're settling into the fall routine, I guess.  My son and his wife are settling into their jobs, my daughter is back to work at her job and taking a few more hours and doing fine with it and youngest son is settling into college a bit.  The 2 recent college graduates are able to give him good advice on homework and note-taking, so that's great.  They've been sharing apps that will help him and giving good advice that my husband and I, having been out of school for a long time, can't really know.

Yesterday, I rode to school with my youngest, then caught a ride with a friend, went to the salvage grocery store and then out to lunch at Olive Garden with some homeschooling friends.  Only one of us is still homeschooling, so mostly we talked about our kids weddings and college experiences.  It was a good time. ( Unfortunately, while there I got a text saying that my aunt is having an awful time at the nursing home, so please pray for her.  The whole family is upset and we don't know what to do about it, so please pray for us as well. I don't think it's bad care at the NH, but I am not sure.  :-/ )

What does this have to do with homeschooling?  I met some of the best friends of my life while homeschooling.  If you do homeschool, don't do it alone, join a couple of support groups.  Here is a way to do that.  HSLDA Local group listing

The Diet.

On Wednesday I went on the autoimmune paleo protocol diet.  It's been rough.  I've been detoxing from sugar, cheese and mashed potatoes.  This diet is to help heal autoimmune disease and I've been diagnosed this year with Sjogren's syndrome.  What this translates to is I don't eat dairy, grains, soy, nightshade vegetables (potatoes! Tomatoes!  Peppers!!!)  nuts, seeds, eggs or legumes.  What I can eat is meat, vegetables, fruit and a few other things.  I can eat coconut products like coconut sugar, coconut flour and milk and cassava flour (made from yucca).  So, I've been doing a lot of cooking and a lot of griping and whining.  Last night I found a nutritionist online who does a different type of approach with food sensitivity testing and a rotation diet, so I am hoping that she will be able to help me in a less drastic way.  For now, though, I'm sticking with it, trying not to whine too much and trying not to lose my will to live.  Yes, I'm a drama queen, but sometimes it does feel that bad.  Still, I have made it 3 days!

So, can I eat this?

or this?

or this?

College Week Two.

We had a horrible cold pass through the house this past week.  I assume my daughter brought it home from work, as she works with young children.  She had it first.  Then my son and daughter-in-law got it.  None of them had a horrible time with it, but then youngest son got it and he had a high fever and felt awful.  The fever broke on Tuesday when he was in class, doing a scavenger hunt all over the campus, out in the hot sun.  Despite this, he's had a pretty good second week, I think.  He's been keeping up with his homework.  He has to ask my daughter and me to act as scribes for some of the work.  He has explained to at least one of his professors that he can't write and has a disability and will need to use a scribe.  Another concern that he has, regarding his disabilities (ADHD, dysgraphia) is that he has a hard time showing his work in math.  He does the algebra equations in his head and gets the right answer, but sometimes is not sure how to show it.  I think he should talk to the accessibility director about this but he thinks he wants to try harder to show the math.  He will have extra time on exams and this is what he wants to use it work.  I disagree, but I will leave it up to him.
He's not going to do work study right now as he's really trying hard to keep his head above water with all the homework, trying to learn to manage his time.  I think that's probably the best decision.  He plans to start working in January if possible.

I also talked to him about his major and he's changed his mind again about that, I think.  He thinks that he'll be bored with a construction major and may go into business or real estate.  His eventual goal is to own and manage rental properties and have passive income so that he can pursue his interests, so either one of those would help him in that goal.  We'll see what he does.  Next semester is when he needs to decide something because for some of the options, he'll be done with general ed after this one semester.

Crazy week.

It's already been a crazy week around here and what is it, Tuesday?  Yesterday was the eclipse of course and my son and his wife had their puppy scheduled for his neutering surgery and had planned to have a nice day, getting groceries, doing a bit of shopping and eclipse viewing, then picking up their puppy and going home to cocoon for a few days while he recuperated before they have to go back to work.  This did not go as planned though, to say the least.  Their car broke down and they had to call us to come get them and roadside assistance to come and get their car and take it to a repair place.  My husband went and got them and took them home.  They picked up their truck and headed out again, only to call us again, saying that this time their truck had broken down.  I went to get them and got there just about the time that the eclipse reached its peak.  They called the insurance company for roadside assistance yet again.  To make a long story short, we were back and forth to the vet, to another vet to get a different cone because the first one wouldn't fit, to the car dealer, to meet one wrecker, then the other and soon the whole day was gone.

 During the middle of the eclipse, when the light was all weird, I went to explain to some of the people on the street we were on what we were doing there, tripped over a piece of loose asphalt and fell and wow am I feeling it today.  I'm very sore.  Then today, when my youngest son was going to go to school, the car was out of gas and so he came back home.  He doesn't have a means to pay for gas right now.  He's waiting for his debit card to arrive from his new bank account.  So, he had to miss his first class due to "car trouble" because his sister didn't notify anyone nor get gas yesterday when she used the car.  Fortunately, it was the aforementioned algebra in which he already knows all of the material being covered.   Today we have board games and have to pick up one of the kids in the group and also have to go get my son and his wife and take them to the car dealership again.

Whew.

None of my eclipse pictures were anything but blurs of light.

One week down.

Youngest son has one week of college under his belt.  His impression after one week is that it is hard, but he likes it.  He likes being out and about in the world.  He says that he feels like adulthood kind of hit him all at once this week.  He started college, he got a phone and opened a bank account.  In the next few weeks, he'll possibly be getting a car.  We've got a lot of car trouble going on around here and 2 of our cars are down, which leaves us with 3 cars and 4 drivers.  Since I am unemployed, most of the time this is not a problem.  I have a generous offer of the use of my oldest son's truck if I need a vehicle during the time of day that I don't have one, which is just the middle of the afternoon.   Anyway, he likes college. He finds the math class boring because he already knows what they are covering now and he pretends to take notes.  He doesn't actually take notes for 3 reasons, one is that he still doesn't write well, two is that he doesn't need to take notes to remember things and three is that he has already covered this material in his homeschool work.  I have a little worry that when he is going to take the test he will do things like write the numbers backwards but he says that since he is considered disabled because of his dysgraphia, he will have double the time of everyone else to get his test done and he says that in that time, he can check to make sure they are not backwards.  I just kind of think that if he knew reliably he wouldn't write them backwards in the first place?  He says he will be fine and hopefully if he's not he will ask for help.

Another day.

Yesterday, my son had day two of college and then we had board game night last night.  Apparently the second day went pretty well.  When we talked to him about it last night, he said that the one class he was worried about, college algebra, turned out not to be as difficult as he was expecting and that he was actually bored because the material that they covered in the first class, he has known since he was 9 years old.  He did say that according to the syllabus, by the end of the semester, they will be covering stuff that he knows, but could use a refresher on.  It crossed my mind that he should take a CLEP test for college algebra and take something else in place of it while drop/add is still open, but I don't think he's going to.  We didn't know if he'd talk in his classes.  He talks a lot at home, but has usually been pretty reserved out in public.  This has changed though and he's feeling confident and has spoken out and answered questions in all of his classes.  :-)  It makes me happy and I feel that he's really going to represent homeschooling well.

Board game meetup in our new venue didn't go as well.  It's loud and distracting and I think my son, who is kind of the board game leader, was a bit too distracted by his other friends who hang out there and so some of the kids didn't have as much fun.  I asked the venue and they are going to give us our own room from now on so we can concentrate on what we're doing and also so we can make a lot of noise when we want to, so the other group can concentrate on what they're doing.  :-)

First day down.

Youngest son came home happy and excited about school.  He had a good day even though he had a lot of tasks to do, drop and add a class, meet with the accessibility coordinator and get his photo ID made.  He remembered to do all of it and was quite pleased with himself for getting it all done.  (I was too!)   He really enjoyed his history class and the writing class wasn't too bad, at least so far.  The professors seemed to be engaging and entertaining to him.  He tried to introduce himself to all of the people in the drop/add line, to get a conversation going so that the line didn't seem so long, but he wasn't really successful; only one person said "hi" back and then the conversation pretty much ended.  Oh well, maybe next time.  The reason he was in the drop add line was so that he could move some classes around so that he could get into choir, which meets as a class on Thursdays.  He had another class at that time, but was able to switch that one and get choir.  He loves to sing and has a very nice bass voice, so he will enjoy that, I think.  

So that's the school report.  Good first day for our second homeschooler to enter college.  

He's on his way!

Youngest son started college today.  I'll let you know how it goes later.  He's taking Algebra 1, World History, The Freshman Experience and Writing 1.   It should be a relatively easy course load for him, but of course, I worry that his learning disabilities will cause him difficulty.  I do think he will ask for help though.  The learning disabilities/accessibility coordinator there at the college is very nice.  We've spoken with him several times and he says that if my son has any problem doing something he is asked to do in class, to come to him and he will help him find a way to meet the requirements of the class.  It was fun taking him to get his hair cut and buy him new clothes and a backpack.  He hasn't had a backpack since he left school in first grade.   He's going to a community college that is about 20 miles from our house and my biggest, biggest worry is his driving.  He's refused to drive much with me in the passenger seat because I am annoying ( I own that!) and therefore he has not had enough driving practice to feel really confident, so therefore I am not really confident.  Nevertheless, I let him go.  I'm still waiting, right now, on the text to let me know he's arrived.  He's not the only one being brave today!

Ch-ch-changes.

It seems to me like it's been a busy week, but really, for me, it's just in reaction to everyone else's changes.  My son and his wife started their jobs and I started dog-sitting their puppy.  My daughter is back to work.  My youngest son starts college NEXT week!   As the unemployed support person for everyone (read, mom and housewife. puppy-sitter, chief cook and bottle washer), I am cooking meals, cleaning up, buying supplies, keeping the car gassed up and various other tasks that make what they are doing go smoother for them.  It's been kind of exhausting, really, because I am not the best of housewives and not the best of cooks, but I've been doing the best that I can.  These are all good changes and I'm happy about it all, it's just, you know, change.

Have a great week!

My granddogs, Cosmo and Remus. 

Some of my art. 

Remus. 

My daughter made cinnamon rolls the other night. 

Cosmo sitting on Freckles.  

I love taking pics of the sky while I'm driving, or in this case, sitting at a redlight.