Today.

We followed the schedule my daughter made up. It went okay. She didn't change the afternoon schedule much and she didn't have a list for me, just the kids, so I got off easy. Tomorrow, we will do my oldest son's schedule if he has it ready and Friday we'll do my younger son's schedule. (That should be interesting!) Then, we'll have a meeting and see what we want to do and what we need to change. I don't know if I mentioned, but we've finished American History finally and we're working on a unit study on the eastern hemisphere, starting with the middle east. It feels a little odd to be following a curriculum after just using a textbook the last few months. Hopefully, we'll get back into the groove.

Okay, I wrote the perfect schedule.

Mom's Schedule
Mom gets up at 7:00 am, eats breakfast and cleans the house.
Starts work at 8:30 and finishes by 12:00.
Eat lunch (which she prepared in the crock pot earlier).
All exercise together/long walk/biking in the sunshine.
Unit study.
Nap.

Kids Schedule.
Get up at least by 9:00
Eat breakfast
Brush teeth
Clean house (it always needs more cleaning).
Do math with Dad. (Oldest works on algebra 1 on his own. If he needs help, he can ask Dad.)
Work on grammar, spelling writing worksheets, working independently. (Oldest does computer and studies American History for CLEP test and practices guitar.) They do all of this with no whining.
Read.
Eat lunch.
Long walk/bike ride.
Unit study.

The main thing about this schedule is that Mom has no exposure to math (Yay!) and the kids work independently on some subjects, something that the younger 2 never do. Trouble is, I can write them, but I can't follow them. I'd be making excuses and not getting my work done. It's also quite possible that I'd be one of the ones whining.

Sigh.

Changing things around.

We do this every little while in our school. We change things around, add things in, do things at a different time of day, etc. Normally, I do it, but this time, the kids want to get involved. Each child is going to come up with a school schedule for us to follow. We'll do my oldest son's schedule tomorrow, my daughter's plan on Thursday and my youngest son's on Friday. I might even revise my schedule plan and present it on Monday. Then, we'll vote for our favorite. I'm not sure if we'll actualy adopt one and use it or not, but it's interesting. I'm toying with the idea of block scheduling. I liked doing a large amount of history on each day and wonder about scheduling our unit study 2 afternoons a week, math on 2 other days and science on the fifth day. I don't know. We've been on our quest for the perfect schedule for how many years now? 3 1/2 I think. Yes, of course I know there's no perfection, but that shouldn't keep us from striving for doing better should it? I don't know. I waver between striving and just giving up. ;-)

One reason why.

Today was a beautiful day, 75 degrees and sunny. The kids could not wait to get outside after breakfast. I let them go. I told them we might finally finish American History later and out they went. They stayed outside most of the day. I read an article the other day about how just plain, old fashioned play is so good for kids and helps develop their brains in very vital ways, so I just let them go and play. About 6:00 p.m., after it started raining, we finally finished American History. The flexibility is one of the main reasons we love homeschooling.

Field Trip Rescheduled.

That's a relief. We started calling and emailing yesterday and realized that fully half of our small homeschool group was also sick, so I called and rescheduled our trip today. Our family gets to have another day trying to recover without traipsing all over the state. We might even do school today. At this point we have 108 days of school in and I would estimate us getting done with school the second week of June based on that. However, I personally have no objection to taking some time off in the spring when the weather is wonderful and doing school when it is 100 degrees outside so we may just plan to do school all through June. We'll see. We've done 7 field trips so far. I've also got no objection to a Saturday or Sunday field trip. When I get over this horrible flu-like illness, that is.

Word verification.

I hate the word verification thing. I'm just about the word's worst at typing those things in. Sometimes I have to try 3 or 4 times. Sadly though, my blog is being targeted by automated posts in the comments and I guess I'm going to have to put it back on. Sorry about any inconvenience to all my human readers. ;-) Hopefully, you all are not as bad at it as I am.

Still sneezing and coughing.

Darn it. I was hoping we'd all feel much better today. I personally feel worse. We're supposed to have a really cool field trip tomorrow the the Museum of Art and Craft. We've been looking forward to it for a couple of months. It's not looking too good for us to go at this point. Oh I hate having to make a descision like this. I'm going to search the internet and see if I can find out if we're still contagious.

I hate this.

Sneezing and coughing.

We're all still in the midst of this whatever it is. None of us feel all that bad today. It's mainly just an annoyance. We are keeping tissues in every room. We have tons of cough drops, Cold Eeze and Fruit Breezers. My youngest son has been doing these funny sneeze/cough things which means that he somehow sneezes and coughs at exactly the same time. They sound funny. He calls them Snoughs.