School on the back burner.

Yes, school is on the back burner again this week. I'm working on deep cleaning.* My husband is working on finishing the last little bits of the remodeling of the living room that we did, moving the last of the furniture back in there. We did do school yesterday, but we just did the bare minimum. We did US History and notebooking, chores, exercise and that's about it. I had plans to start a geometry math unit with the younger 2, but didn't get around to it. I'm trying to get all this stuff done this week and get my work done so that I won't be rushing around this weekend doing it and for some reason I'm having more fatigue this week than usual. I might be coming down with something? I don't know. Anyway, I keep plugging along, trying to get about a million things done.

We've been studying about the civil rights movement in our US History. The other day for his notebook page, my youngest drew a picture of a person on a bus and captioned it "Rosa sat." He's a minimalist when it comes to writing, LoL.

*I'd like to point out why cleaning is mentioned so often on this homeschool blog which is supposed to be about homeschooling. First of all, starting to homeschool means having your kids around all the time, which means that more dishes get dirty, the bathroom is used more often, etc. The house is just messier when it is lived in so much. It also means that there are a lot of homeschooling supplies around now, which means clutter. Secondly (or thirdly, whatever), is that I hate to clean and I want a clean home, so it is on my mind a lot. I think about it and blog about it way more than I actually do it!

Yeah,

Simply April was right in her comment below. The little dog has gotten into our hearts and is going to stay. She hasn't had an accident in the house since last Thursday and if that hadn't resolved, she would have had to go. Fortunately, she seems to have caught on. I'm sure that going from living with a single retired elderly woman to our family was a big shock, meeting all our dogs, cats and kids and the fact that we have a man here and she's scared of men, all led to her being kind of weird when we first got her. She's calmed down, is much less fearful in general and is even warming up to my husband now. She's a sweet little dog. She's half chihuahua and half pekingese.

The dog has actually taken over one of my most dreaded chores and does it with such joy and exuberance that it is a sight to see. She wakes up my daughter every morning. It's hilarious and wakes my daughter up in a good mood, which is a nice change. ;-)

Okay.

Today has been okay. I still haven't decided what to do about school this week, whether to take a spring break or not. I don't think we will. I just think we'll add a few extra cleaning chores to the lists, maybe change their morning lists completely to decluttering and cleaning their rooms. That will bring joy to their lives, won't it? I have promised to take them out for pizza and a movie next weekend if they help me out this week.

My goal is to get everything deep cleaned and then paint the kitchen but I don't know if I'll get that part done. Wish me luck!

The dog is doing better. She hasn't had an accident in the house for several days and she seems to be continuing to mellow out. The only thing is if my daughter goes somewhere, the dog whines continually until she gets back - no fun for those people who are left at home and have to listen to it! Last night we went to a family dinner and just took her with us. It was just easier. Things are looking pretty good for her to stay at this point. (knock on wood!) Good thing, because I've already made a mouse pad on cafepress with her picture on it!

Working on the house ...

We did do school, mostly, this week. I did let the kids have 2 snow days and during those days, I was getting a little bit of work done on the house. Yesterday, I worked on stripping the no-wax finish off of the kitchen floor and reapplying it. I had no idea you could do that, but I found that Armstrong makes products for rejunenating their floors, bought them at Lowes and used them yesterday on half of the kitchen. They work really well. Our kitchen floor certainly needed to be rejunenated. We've been in this house for 10 years and boy have we made a lot of messes on that floor. Today I hope to get the other half done.

The dog seems to be doing a little better. She hasn't had an accident in the house in days. She kind of growls and snaps at my youngest sometimes, if he tries to pick her up or if she has a chewie and thinks he is going to steal it. She also goes psycho when we leave the house. We've been putting her in the bathroom but she whines and scratches the door trying to get out. She's scratched some of the paint off of the door! We need to get her a crate, so she will be more confined and hopefully more peaceful. Our hope is that maybe we'll manage to handle her personality and she'll continue to mellow out. We got spoiled by Max being so easy to get along with. He has occasionally growled at our youngest too and also has made a few messes in the house, although it's been a long time ago. Maybe there is hope for her yet.

I'm not sure if we are going to do school this week. I'm having the homeschool group here for the first time and we've got to get our living room renovation mess cleaned up and get my husband's office moved out of the kitchen and back to its corner of the living room. I'd also like to paint the kitchen. You know how one renovation project always leads to another ... We may let this be our spring break or I may do school as usual, or, I may give them handouts and assignnments they can (hopefully) do on their own. We'll just see how much we get done this weekend.
There's nothing like having people over, especially people who keep meticulously clean, beautiful homes, to make you want to get all your projects done.

Please excuse the spelling in this post since blogger's speller is not working.

This dog is stressing me out.

I feel like everyone in the family is waiting for ME to make a decision about whether she gets to stay or not. We've said from the beginning, that she's here on a trial basis. Although, where we will take a not-totally-housetrained dog who snaps at young children and demolishes bathroom doors, I don't know. My only thought was that the original owner might take her back and try to give her to someone else? I feel bad, but she does tear things up when we leave the house, snaps at my youngest (even when he does nothing to deserve it as I witnessed tonight) and sometimes doesn't seem to be housetrained (although nothing bad in that dept has happened since yesterday, mainly due to close supervision.)

Trouble is, we've all really started to like the personality that she has MOST of the time. She's sweet when she's not going all psycho. Her name that she came with was Freckles, but I've taken to calling her Freakles.

Can dogs be bipolar?

Help.

Tonight.

I'm still having the problem of feeling tired and out of sorts and not motivated to do anything. I think maybe I've got cabin fever or something. Some kind of mid-winter blahs. I did get up and do quite a bit of cleaning today, even though I wasn't thrilled to do it, I just did it anyway. Then this evening, the kids and I watched Supernanny. I really like that show. I think it's amazing what she does for those families. Tonight there was a mom on there that had a very difficult time hugging her kids and telling them that she loved them. Supernanny emphasized family bonding and doing things together and took all their TV and game remotes and laptops and made them play together. After it went off, I was inspired and the kids and I played a hilarious game of charades for about half an hour. We all have to fight the tempation to isolate ourselves from our families in our own homes with technology.

Better today, thank goodness.

My day got better yesterday. The ice melted in time for us to go to a valentine party with the homeschool group. We declared it a snow day since the county schools were out and let the kids play in the snow. It's funny, but almost every time we cancel school, we do something that could be counted as school, like this party. I'm sure that tomorrow, schools all over the country will be having valentine parties and counting it in their attendance records.

The new dog is still here. She's been having 'accidents' every day but yesterday, after the one I blogged about, we put her on a leash and now someone (generally my daughter) is with her every minute. So far, this has worked, but it's kind of difficult. My daughter has to get a dog sitter when she goes outside, takes a shower, etc. It's kind of like one of those baby classes where they give you a baby doll or an egg or a sack of flour and you have to pretend it's a baby except this is more real. She really has to be fed and she really poops, she also snuggles and truly loves my daughter. Having this dog this week has been kind of a nightmare. My daughter is way attached and I cannot tolerate the messes. If we have to give her away we won't do this again.

My oldest son had a computer game that would not play on his computer for some reason. Yesterday, he used the knowledge that he had gotten from the day before yesterday's computer lesson and figured out how to fix it so that now it plays on his computer. He told me more technically, but I didn't understand it. Something about a hidden code. Isn't that cool? So he did a little computer application yesterday, even though we didn't officially have school.

Last night, my youngest son got on the computer, on the PBS kids site and was playing a game from the show "Fetch with Ruff Ruffman" and was doing a lot of reading and science-y kind of stuff.

You know the more I think about this, the more tempted I am to count about 1/4 of a school day for yesterday ... ;-)

A movie review: Last night I watched The Pursuit of Happyness. Good movie. I really, really felt for that guy as he tried to take care of his son. Of course, it has a bit of bad language in it, they all do for some stupid reason, but it was a good movie. At times I felt like it was just too much like real life. I could really fell his frustration so much.

My bloggy friend Lisa is in the hospital, so please everyone send her prayers and warm thoughts. Get well soon~!

Some days are like that ...

I got up this morning and the electricity was out because we had an ice storm during the night. I got up, tried to turn on the bathroom light and was unsucessful, then decided to just use the bathroom in the dark. Unfortunately, someone had left the toilet seat up, so I fell in. A few minutes after this, I had the awful realization that without electricity there is no coffee. I then found out that the chocolate donuts I had wanted for breakfast had already been eaten. A little while after this, the new dog pooped in the middle of the new laminate floor.

Things can only go up from there, right? The electricity did come back on. The kids got to have a short sledding session on the snow/ice that was rapidly melting and now I've run the dishwasher and started laundry. I was very upset this morning that I hadn't done any laundry yesterday, in case the electricity was off for several days and we didn't have clean clothes.

Anyway, I'm off to work now.