Day 77

Okay, no official school today, but we did some craft stuff, and we plan to do more tomorrow including some thank you notes to family.  The main reason I'm posting today is that I was prompted by my husband who e-mailed me a list of the books we have out of the library:

Belles on their Toes / Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

The Elements : A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe / Theodore Gray

Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold / Michael Benanav

Lost Empire / Clive Cussler with Grant Blackwood

Higher Education?  How colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids, and What We Can Do About It / Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus

How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior / Laura Kipnis

The Return of Meteor Boy? / William Boniface

Binky the Space Cat / Ashley Spires

Binky to the Rescue / Ashley Spires

Sticky Burr: The Prickly Peril / John Lechner

Road to Revolution / Stan Mack and Susan Champlin

The Chaos King / Laura Ruby

A Froggy Fable / John Lechner

Cool Stuff and How it Works / Chris Woodford

Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies / Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly

The Last of the Mohicans / James Fenimore Cooper

Dreadful Acts: Book Two of the Eddie Dickens Trilogy / Philip Ardagh

Tales from the House of Bunnicula. Books 1-4 [sound recording] / James Howe

Dinosaur Hour! Volume 1 / Hitoshi Shioya [translation by Katherine Schilling]

Whales on Stilts / M.T. Anderson

Lost / Sarah Prineas

The Last Invisible Boy / Evan Kuhlman

Scat / Carl Hiaasen

The Underneath / Kathi Appelt

Life / Keith Richards

Tunnels / Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams

Rat / Matthew Rayner

There Was a Man Who loved a Rat and Other Vile Little Poems / Gerda Rovetch

The Haunted Monastery and The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels / Robert Van Gulik

Gulliver's Travels / Jonathan Swift

The Art of the North American Indian / Shirley Glubok

David Balfour, Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad / Robert Louis Stevenson

USKids history. Book of the American Civil War / Howard Egger-Bovet and Marlene Smith-Baranzini

Welcome to Felicity's World, 1774 / Catherine Gourley

The Dreadful, Smelly Colonies: The Disgusting Details about Life During Colonial America / Elizabeth Raum

The Capture / Kathryn Lasky

Mystery at Meadowbrook / Laura Lee Hope

Inkheart / Cornelia Funke

Molly Moon Stops the World / Georgia Byng

Stanley in Space / Jeff Brown

The Lemming Condition/ Alan Arkin

Eric the Red: The Viking Adventurer / Neil Grant

Betrayal / Patricia Finney [writing as Grace Cavendish]

Conspiracy / Patricia Finney [writing as Grace Cavendish]

Lizards / David R. Moenich

Now, obviously not all the books are for the kids.  Not only that, not all the books are going to be read (or have been read would be more accurate.  Most of them will be going back tomorrow).  I think that the main point of the library books is that they are in the house.  It's sort of a Montessori approach, and it works fairly well.  There are some books that I read to them or with them that are not optional, but a lot are.  It always surprises me what gets read, and sometimes what doesn't.  I tried reading Gulliver's Travels out loud, and it was a spectacular failure.  Not for the kids; they said they were enjoying it!  I just couldn't do it.  It's Full of Random Capitallization and rather Archaic Language.  It makes it Hard to Read out loud.  Ugh. 

Anyway, I guess the point is that this may seem like a crazy number of books to have out of the library, but it's fairly typical for us.  We have a shelf specifically designated for library books.  With the number we have out, we need to!  Honestly, it surprises me that there has only been ONE book we couldn't find and had to pay for.  This in the 8 or so years of going to the library with the kids.  All I can say is I LOVE the LIBRARY!!

Day school's-out-for-Christmas-and-sickness

While we haven't made any progress as far as the kids' academic careers, we did have a nice Christmas with Emily on the mend, and Luke just getting it the day after Christmas.  As of now, he has a fever, but he was relatively ok during the day.  The poor kid doesn't react well to being sick.  Emily tries to be a trooper, but her cough is very bad at night.  Luke has been through 2 boxes of tissues today alone.  I can't complain about him in that way, though.  I was always miserable when I had colds as a kid.  I think they hit some kids worse than others.
Anyway, tomorrow will be a day of activity.  We're going to try making thank you cards, and maybe doing some of the crafts they got for Christmas.  I'm looking forward to a low key day.  Orchestra was cancelled due to the 14 inches of snow we got along with the blasing winds.  Today was spent shovelling while the kids stayed indoors.  Sigh...Looking forward to tomorrow!

Days 73, 74, 75, 76

After we had a fairly decent week last week, we started going downhill.  This is to be expected, of course, when we are approaching Christmas and all the trappings thereof.  We did go to Orchestra on Monday, but DH and I took off for a little time to ourselves for an overnight, which meant that Luke and Em went to Nana and Grandpa's for their own overnight. 

I'm sure it was good.  They decorated Nana and Grandpa's house for Christmas and went to a small party with Nana.  Nana is a breast cancer survivor and it was a party for her radiation group.  It's a small group, but one of the members has had a tracheotomy.  This was explained beforehand to them, so I'm reasonably sure they responded ok.  What more reason would they need to not smoke?  They also remember all too well the picture of a diseased lung they were shown in a Human Body class they took, and that was almost 5 years ago!  As far as Nana's radiation, they should remember that pretty well, also, as we took Nana 3 days out of 5 for 8 weeks three years ago.  Quite an experience.

Anyway, when they returned home after their overnight, we had some of the usual attitude.  They always take a while to get back to normal.  This time, though, right in time for the holiday, Emily got sick.  At present she has a fever.  Earlier today it was about 104 degrees.  Thankfully she can take tylenol pretty well.  We'll medicate her so she can sleep, give her plenty of tea with honey and toast. and hope she feels better in 2 days...and hope the rest of us don't get it! 

We'll have orchestra on Monday, so that should set the tone for the few days between Christmas and New Year's.  We'll be going to DC for New Year's, so we won't be getting much done as far as book work then either.  Well, I've already made it clear that if we can't keep up with our work during the year, we'll have to keep working in the summer. 

On the other hand, when I mentioned that we will be covering Geology in January, I got "yay"s, so we'll go with that.

Days 70. 71, 72

Ok, I'm back again.  It's getting harder to post every day (obviously), but we can get the overview.

Day 70 was Tuesday.  That was to be our stay at home day, but turned into our go-bowling-with-our-friend day.  We did get schoolwork done, but bowling was more fun.

Day 71 was Wednesday.  Usually this is a dance-then-co-op day, but this Wednesday we had a special outing with our co-op to go to the Rhinebeck Center for Performing Arts to see A Christmas Carol.  I have wanted to see this show for a couple of years, but we could never work it out.  Either funding was tight, or we missed the deadline or they were already sold out.  I felt fortunate to not only make it in, but to make it on a day that was really quite light in attendance.  I know that's not what the performers want, but it makes it so much more pleasant for me!  It was a wonderful performance.  There was a lot more singing than I had thought there would be, but it added a lot to the story.  I really liked the way they added actual Christmas songs so that it felt like it was more than just a story about a man who decided he didn't want to die hated or see Tiny Tim pass away.  It was also about Christmas.  The woman who played the ghosts really made the play for me.  It was a good performance anyway, but she is such a character she really seemed to steal the show.  When, instead of flying as the first ghost, she started skipping and singing "Over the River and Through the Woods," well, it was really funny.
We also had the cousins over in the evening.  They are a good crew of 3, ranging in age from 10 to 5.  We had quite a time reading the second Sticky Burr book and eating cupcakes in honor of Stormy's birthday (Stormy is Emily's rat.  He's 2.  He's an old rat.) 

Day 72 was Thursday.  Today.  The I'm-so-busy-I-don't-know-what-to-do-first day.  How does this happen?  One minute I have history class in the morning.  That's all.  The next, I have to take the car in, go to the bank, go to the store for a coat, go to the library, go to the food store, and go to campus to register for the history class I'm taking in the spring, as well as get mail in.  Yikes!  We tried to have a go at school, but it just didn't take.  I understand it.  We're going to try having Saturday as a make-up day.  It seemed to work last week, so what the heck, we'll try it again. 
One good thing (other than all those errands getting accomplished) was that Luke made dinner.  He did quite well, too.  Tuesday, Emily made spaghetti for dinner, so I made some rolls to accompany them.  So, for today, Luke decided to make Dad's favorite, hamburgers.  He decided on the spices to add, set up the pan for the french fries, set the oven, put them in, cut the cukes for the salad and flipped the burgers.  He even got the fries out, which I didn't think he would.  He did draw the line at forming the patties, but I expected that.  Poor kid!  He hates getting his hands dirty, and burger meat is about the last thing he wants to touch.

All in all, it's hard for me to say how these past few days have been going.  Have they been good?  Have they been hard?  Are they learning?  Yes, yes, yes.

Days 67, 68, 69

Wow, what a week last week.  It's a good thing they don't happen all the time, or I'd be locked away somewhere singing some children's song and rocking.

Anyway, that's all behind us now, and hopefully we are moving on.  Homeschooling is so funny, because just when you think you are doing a bad job, and maybe this isn't what you should be doing, there is all sorts of evidence placed in front of you that there is nothing better, and that this is really best.  Of course, DH helps by posting Why We Homeschool. 

What happened was we were getting nowhere with Math lessons.  At the beginning of the school year, Emily was giving me grief over math.  Now she acts the angel I know she can be, and Luke has dug in his heels.  When we finally had to take his Legos away (and anyone with boys knows how well THAT went over) we had a short tornado on our hands.  After two days, however, we got more into the pattern, and now he knows that if he does his work, he can bring his Legos out into the living room in the evening while I read to the family.  I really like it better because now he shares a lot of his creations with us, where before he was pretty isolated in his room. 

The kicker was when I told him Friday evening at his cousin's house that, yes, he could wait to do part of his math lesson on Saturday morning if he promised to do it in the actual morning (He had already had to do the first part of it AT the cousin's house).  He stood up and offered his hand.  We shook on it, and the next day, he got to it right away and without complaint. 

Now, I knew better than to expect this sort of behavior to last, even for the rest of the day, but it was like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.  Boy, it was nice to see that light.

Days 64, 65, 66

AAAUUGH!!!!  It shouldn't be this difficult, but there it is.  Everyone is digging their heels in when it comes to their schoolwork.  It's like trying to get a dog to the vets.  I'll post more soon, but right now I'm so frustrated that I need to not post for today.  Maybe later if things look up.

Days 62, 63

Yesterday was spent mostly at home.  We did spend some time doing some crafting, and history, and typing, and spelling, and music practice (which was great!) and then we got to math.  There's where we stalled out, but I'm thinking I must have used up their good graces or something, but Luke was having none of this math stuff.  He ended up by being told he would have to do it with Dad later in the evening.

It's rare for us to have a whole day at home, so when it came time to go to Numeracy Club, no one complained.  That was fine, until we got there.  I signed them in, and Luke suddenly said, "But I'm not staying!"  I guess having let him not stay the time before had stuck in his mind, and he wanted french fries.  I told him, apologetically, that I had already signed him in, so, you see, there wasn't anything I could do, and whisked out of the room.  Poor boy.  But he had a reasonable time, so I don't feel too badly about it, and I got to spend some time with DH, which is always good.

I, luck person, got to spend an evening out, and Steve had the kids. 

The next day, today, Emily and I had dance, which she must really love, because she got dressed and ate breakfast in about 15 minutes so we could get there.  We then spent some time at Nana's helping make some cards.  We also ran around in the pouring rain getting the garbage cans back from the end of the driveway, so we were soaked and had hot chocolate when we got in.  I figured the stage was set for some schoolwork.  Luke thought otherwise, but I nearly sat on him and got him to finish yesterday's undone math and do the day's lesson as well.  Beyond that, there was no hope, but we have History tomorrow in the am, then nothing since there is no library anymore, so we'll have time to work on some new projects assuming we can finish the regular business. 

Sometimes, I surprise myself with my optimism.