Well, it hasn’t ALL been yelling and tears.
I took M and K to the park first thing after breakfast to get my fresh air and exercise and make sure they did too – plus we passed a Dunkin Doughnuts and that let me pick up some coffee to brew at home.
Dan took off the week of Labor Day because he has lots of use them or loose them days off. Mostly he worked around the house catching up on projects. As a deacon, he’s handling the devotions for Prayer meeting for the next year or so, or until we hire an interim pastor. He’s also teaching the boys (and a friend) a technology class, and leading M’s FLL club (though there he’s got two assistant coaches who are also engineers, so that one is not too onerous.)
So I thought I’d put up beach pictures and let that leaven this week.
Ben’s band, Brit Lit and Spanish 2 class all started that week, in time for him to pick up a mostly fever-less but drippy cold, and pass it to the rest of us.
The band has already had a football game and fund raising car-wash, somehow it comforts me that his bandmates are also grumpy – it seems to be as much a symptom of this as needing so many boxes of tissues a day.
K has been given a scholarship to take the other hour of ballet at her tutoring company – I think mostly because the president of the non-profit drives her to class, and can’t watch her during the second hour – but we are very thankful however funny we find the gift. Tuesdays are not my car day.
We started Formal Logic with M, but have not achieved “goodness of fit.” I’m trying to think if we should replace the short answer questions with narrations, or draw cartoons of the vocabulary together instead. But so many courses will eventually require him to find and copy the highlighted text from a textbook…I hate those torture him now so he gets used to if for later situations. Anyway, despite the video, this is not a from the box course that is working for us conveniently.
Now that I remember it, it didn’t work well for Ben either, but I had an infant and wasn’t paying attention too well that year. Ben suffered quieter.
One thing that has been a hit this year is assigning literature. I’m just going off the lists in the Well Trained Mind of classics in various re-tellings for different ages. K LOVED the short version of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and so has M for his age.
Since M running out of books to read (or be read to) is a biweekly emergency – having some books you have to read without the angst of learning if you want to read them or not (most stressful unless Ben can vouch for them) has been really nice.
K wanted to know who else Beowulf fought, so I looked for another children’s retelling that included more monsters. The ending may disturb her though.
The computer has also been tricky. Ben’s two courses require internet use, and when the computer is on during lessons, somehow, everyone thinks they should be able to play Minecraft, or watch someone else play Minecraft.
The day we went to the beach, we saw this bush. Pretty sure it wasn’t blueberries,
anyone know what it is?
just as we were taking it’s picture, a seagull dropped a clam onto the parking lot to break the shell – K ran over to see what it was, delaying the meal a little in the process. We also saw some plovers, but of course gave them space.
Back to adjusting and modifying curriculum – and trying to not become part of the interpersonal frustrations while I’m at it. Maybe they all need tea with lemon and honey for their throats? That should count for something, right?