Today...
Abby awoke at 6am, cutting short the quiet time I'd reserved for myself by awaking at 5:45. David was still home, so the two of them whispered and snuggled for a while longer so I'd have a few minutes alone to prepare for my day. I was so grateful. Before long, I had three hungry munchkins and breakfast underway. We continued the story of Noah in Long Story Short, a book we discovered this summer which is so well written for children and still rich with insight for adults. We followed that with "calendar time," a good review of counting, time, and weather. Because I hadn't prepared today's lunches yet, I ended up skipping the remainder of our morning routine to finish getting prepared.
Abby went to preschool and had a great first day in the Duckling class with her "best friend" Octavia Lane. I was so glad she went straight into the familiar classroom (same room as last year -- yeah!) with a hug and a kiss, no tears :) Her new teachers are warm and very kind, and she happily told us that she painted pink trees at school and sang songs in music class.
In my efforts to get us outdoors more, I made it a priority to save enough morning time to walk to school today, and then regretted every horrid moment of it. Instead of the low-key observations of the nature in our neighborhood I'd envisioned, we were literally SWARMED by mosquitoes the entire walk despite fogging our whole party in Deep Woods Off. The kids were bitten despite being doused in DEET and fogging the stroller in repellant along the way. The mosquitoes FOLLOWED us while I swatted at them and bust out the aerosol spray. We walked home in the middle of the road to escape the thick of it. However, the kids did find some unusual wild flowers springing up from some weeds, which Jonathan incorporated into his drawings by having an astronaut use the flower as a microphone for singing. No joke, they still haven't gotten over the YouTube NASA Johnson Style video. It shows up in all kinds of silly drawings from my avid artist and may very well be the inspiration behind Jonathan's complete fascination with outer space right now.
After dropping Abby off at preschool, we made a grocery run for diapers. Since our morning school opportunities would be cut short today, I capitalized on the trip to have him spell the items we were looking for, read labels on the aisles to direct our shopping, and follow-up on yesterday's math lesson on comparing numbers. Jonathan compared boxes of raisins, diapers, and snacks by price and then quantity or volume. He appropriately asked why we could get a huge box of raisins for less than the small box, so we talked about the cost of advertising and the beauty of store brands :)
Jonathan, Joshua, and I attended the moms prayer group that I co-lead at church, where they played with some friends while I enjoyed the community of other mothers and some focused time for prayer. Joshua wasn't a huge fan of hanging with Not-Mommy, but he survived. After church, we did Jonathan's phonics and reading lesson over lunch, then picked up Abby and got the kids' hair cut. While we were out and about we reviewed Jonathan's memory work for Classical Conversations, which meets tomorrow. We learned another 6 of the 200+ events in the history time line, and facts on English grammar (pronouns), Latin grammar (conjugations), math (skip counting 3's and 4's), history (William the Conqueror), and science (environmental science facts). As we learn the time line, it's becoming clear that Jonathan's memory is younger and sharper than my own! Thank goodness we're learning the majority of this with songs, and that at least most of it is familiar to me already!
On arrival home, the kids were itchy from the hair cuts, hot, and hungry! I decided to scrap the math worksheets and do our math lessons using our pretzel snack. We skip-counted by 2's and 3's, divided numbers less than 10 in half, and did addition with numbers up to 10. After we'd eaten our math lesson, we practiced handwriting numbers with a space-shuttle count-down a few times. Abby's participation in the math lesson was largely eating the pretzels and answering questions on addition of numbers up to a sum of 4, but I was so impressed when I reviewed her number handwriting sheet to see she'd done an excellent job of tracing most of the numbers I'd written out for her. Abby's schooling isn't because she needs to be able to write numbers now or add numbers up to 4 before she's 3 years old! Abby participates in our Hong School lessons when she's home up to the level of her interest and attention span so that she feels included and, to a certain degree, simply to keep her occupied. But goodness, she's learning a lot, too!
I'd also found some cut-out cards with a series of events leading up to man's first steps on the moon. Coloring, cutting those out and sequencing them covered fine motor skills with a bit of history and science for Jonathan, and Abby cut out larger, similar cards with space objects identifying two of three objects of similar size. By then everyone was (literally) falling out of their chairs at the table. I don't know why it happens, but about once a week we have a meal where everyone's falling out of their chairs, hitting their heads and their knees, and in tears within minutes. We'd reached that point.
After kisses and hugs for the myriad of gravity-induced boo-boo's, we put on a country-western CD given to me well more than 10 years ago by my sister, strapped Joshua on my back with the Ergo, and danced two-step and polka around the living room and up and down the halls, stopping to pound out rhythms on the carpet with each new song. Joshua napped happily on my back, even while I held carried Abby on my chest while dancing with her. I figure that covers music and PE -- at least for me!
I figured we'd more than covered enough school for the day by then, and took a few minutes to catch up on my own to-do. That's when the challenging part of the afternoon really sunk in, and before long I had at least two of three kids crying about something at any point in time. Abby was totally melting, and I yet again felt myself to be totally failing all three kids at once. It's amazing how having three people yell at you simultaneously about their myriad of unmet needs for which you're deemed responsible can make 8 hours of preceding success mentally melt out of sight.
Soooo, I sent the big kids to their room to collect books for reading time, which bought me about 30 more seconds of time for myself, and we plopped onto the couch to read. We turned one of Abby's board books into a Spanish lesson on farm animals, and both kids enjoyed her pick of Peter Cottontail. Jonathan's choice, Magic Schoolbus Explores the Solar System, was a new read for our Outer Space Unit (as requested by Jonathan a few weeks ago), and we found some new details to add to our large chart of unique characteristics of the different planets. Abby, however, was bored out of her mind, meaning she was going to make me lose mine, so at this point I gave up the Good-Mommy game and handed over my phone for her to play "The Froggy Game."
As the Magic School Bus returned to Earth I pulled out my phone... 5:30! We made it! Everyone enthusiastically ran to the restroom and put on shoes to join Daddy for dinner. He's moonlighting this evening, which means sleeping in a call room at the hospital with a code pager. His time is pretty wide open, so we use it for a no-cook family night. It means fast food or take out about twice a month (because no way I'm making and packing dinner for 5 on a single-parent night), but we have a great time hanging out together there. David chases the kids around games of hide-and-seek in the largely empty hallways, and I hang out with Joshua in the relative quiet for a few minutes after dinner :)
Once home, we went through the pick-up and bedtime routine as quickly as possible, and three tired munchkins melted into their beds. And soon, I'll need to start my own evening chores and preparations for tomorrow!
While I was thinking of this morning, though, the subject of our community and the diversity of our social exposures came to mind. One of my big hesitations about home schooling or private school was the risk of limiting the scope of our social circle, for ourselves and our children. When I brought it up, my sister reminded me that our current church, friendships, and work environments already provide a pretty rich cultural environment.
This morning as I picked up Jonathan and Joshua from the kids' play area at church, I was reminded that we definitely have a certain degree of diversity already built into our lives. At church this morning, there were four ethnicities of kids represented. Among the four moms who made it today: one works, two are home full time, and one is a single mom on welfare having trouble securing a job due to child care issues. Among the others in my community group of moms, we have a very wealthy backgrounds represented, a moms who have or are raising children on their own, and moms married to men with a history of incarceration, one now in full-time prison ministry. Both of my children attend Sunday School classes with children who are currently homeless and living in transitional living centers, children with learning disabilities, and children with family backgrounds more similar to their own, including other biracial children and another dual-medical family. We spend time with families of David's colleagues off and on through the year, but when we have David's whole department over to the house for Thanksgiving each year, we have each family bring a recipe from their culture or country of origin. I've discovered I'm usually one of two or three adults in the group born in this country, out of 25 or so who attend. We've never had someone from Australia or Antarctica, but every other continent is usually represented! While home school circles may not provide the diversity of social experiences afforded by a large-city public school, I've been encouraged in considering our present community that our children are already in an environment rich with children from a variety of backgrounds.
If we're going to wake up to a clean house (well, at least a picked-up house), I'll have to save the reflections on how we ended up homeschooling this year for another night. These two shots are both from our first week:
Jonathan reading his BOB Books phonetic reading lesson with David one evening. (YEP! He's wearing his Christmas PJ's year round this year! He LOVES the soft fleece :)
Since we started school weeks ahead of schedule due to the kids' eager requests, I'd planned for our reading, writing, and math plans but hadn't filled in history and science. Jonathan begged for an Outer Space Unit, so we're in the thick of astronomy, thanks to the support of the public library system! My crafty son immediately wanted to create his own space shuttle, and in the span of two days he had his own shuttle orbiting the house!
Part of the delight of teaching Jonathan is his enthusiasm for learning. While he doesn't at all want to GO to school and stay there for the day, he loves DOING school. He's participating in my scheduled activities largely without complaint, but in addition he's full of his own suggestions. He's eagerly planning unit studies, requesting books, suggesting crafts and projects, and planning our lessons. If I was of the personality to do "delight-directed" schooling, Jonathan would be the kid for it. A few days ago he told me, "How about we learn about two space things a day -- a planet, and something else. You can pick the planet, Mommy!" It took a minute before he revealed his planned "something else." "And... we can learn about one space vehicle each day! OK, I'll pick the space vehicle...." After reading quite thoroughly on Mercury and starting our chart of the characteristics of the planets, we went looking into the moon rover, his first vehicle of choice. Although we have a dozen space books at the house right now, there was very little information on the moon rover. But we actually found a 45 minute documentary on the history and creation of the rover, and Jonathan sat enthralled through every minute of it.
Tomorrow's line-up was to be Classical Conversations, nature walk, then martial arts. But the mosquitoes have won this round. I'm giving up on nature for the week. Maybe we'll craft the afternoon away in a mess of paint and glue.
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