Girly isn’t doing much.  #fail

BigGuy is doing too much.

Here’s the rundown…

Mama is struggling with adjusting.  Are we sensing a trend?  “Follow the child” doesn’t always mean you are skipping gleefully behind them… sometimes they’re all like, “Come on, Mom!” as you behave like a curious 2yo that wants to sit in the pathway because you’re tired and bored and want to drink this delightful coffee.

Thankfully, BigGuy’s schedule phased in rather than started all at once, but wow… just… wow…  In the meantime, Girly is just riding shotgun and I’m starting to really freak about it.  Not because I feel like she needs to be learning anything specific, but because I’m not horribly engaged with her as I try to transition BigGuy into managing his own load.

FOR. THE. LOVE. people.

I finally cracked open the The Nature Connection: An Outdoor Workbook for Kids, Families, and Classrooms and am starting to piece together an “outdoor adventure kit”.  It contains some stuff we have and some stuff I was already slated to get.  I’m also starting to get a flow down so I can put library dates on the calendar for us.  BigGuy is going to do part of that time as research and part just fun.

Service projects?  Field trips?  Pfffft…  For one, BigGuy’s daily public school class makes a lot of that hard through the end of October.  It is SMACK. DAB. in the middle of the day.

I’m still struggling to figure out how to work with Girly.  She’s currently surviving on Magna-Tiles, doodle books, Post-it notes, lots of pretend figures/cars and WordWorld.  She’s still in soccer and has practice Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights plus games on Saturday and Sunday between her two teams.  Now we’ve just added choir and she’s ecstatic.  But these are evening things for the most and that leaves her with the day.  Today she’s annoyed because she’s trying to number pages of a blank book and is having a hard time when she’s transitioning up to a new 10 number (like 29 to 30, etc.).  I should have offered her up some practice on that because she’d have eaten it up, but… ummm… I’m blogging.  See?

I am going to crack open her bird curriculum this week–I swear I am.  We got blindsided with having to do some repair and updating work at a rental property that our tenants just left (on the heels of finishing 6 credits during the college condensed summer semester… 4.0 GPA, btw  #winning).  So this week I need to lay that out along with our outdoor kit.

BigGuy… oof… So I think I told you about his class at the public school.  He loves it.  I hate that it makes me feel like I’m grounded (as in the “punishment” definition, not the “rooted and solid” definition).  Unfortunately, I didn’t look at my own blog entry from early July that laid out what I wanted to actually do.  As a result, I got us involved in history by way of a virtual co-op that I paid to participate in so that I wouldn’t have to be responsible for teaching.  I thought it would give him the dialectic discussion part of his studies that he was looking for, but I’m not sure it’s really filling that void.  It’s definitely keeping him on track, though.  That being said, I’m kind of annoyed that I did that.  I had much better plans that I think he’d have liked more.  😦  Maybe if we can get our workload down to a rhythm, we can add the geography.

We didn’t manage to work with the school district about home instruction because they booted us on a technicality.  I didn’t enroll him for math because I knew he couldn’t do the full year in the school.  But apparently they only do home instruction for classes the kids are enrolled in.  This wasn’t discovered into almost 3 weeks into the start of school.  Their contention was that two medical doctors have filled out forms saying that he should not be in a classroom during 2nd and 3rd marking periods so he should have done the 1st marking period in the brick & mortar school.  I enrolled him in the virtual school and was just done with it.  Suffice it to say that I’m not exactly thrilled with the district and am privileged to have other options.  I know it’s privilege.  I’m using it.  And I’m appreciating it.  But it makes me kind of sad at the same time because I remember not having quite this much privilege and how my life was very, very different and I know a lot of families are in THAT position.  It’s a weird place to be for me right now because I don’t know what to do with all of those feelings.  But they’re growing, so it’s going to explode into something (hopefully productive) at some point in the (probably near) future.

Science–we decided to do Physical Science instead of Physics.  We could’ve done Conceptual Physics but Physical Science covers some cool stuff and he was really interested in it.  That gives him time to catch up the math he’d need for full-on Physics rather than take it at conceptual level, then math level and then for-credit level.  Science Olympiad is not just “on” but I was handed coaching (to be fair–I offered to do it).  We had enough kids to do a varsity AND a JV level.  I’m really excited.  We also got sponsorship that made this year pretty affordable (half of what we paid last year) which is good because we are experiencing the pains of learning to manage such massive growth.

Writing co-op is going alright so far.  Our virtual co-op for history also includes participation in a separate session for literature.  Seems okay.  He also has an actual language arts class online.  I have no idea how that’s going but I need to check on it.  As we were phasing into the schedule, I had him working on some workbooks from Critical Thinking Company for word roots and reading comprehension but there’s really no more time for that now.

Then there’s choir and swim classes.  All of this has us pretty much swamped.  Seriously.

My goal this semester is really just to make sure BigGuy learns how to manage his workload, make sure Girly is not bored and neglected, and to ensure we maintain the relationships with the people most important to us.  I think so far we are managing that.

But I can’t say that the idea of turning inward after Thanksgiving isn’t very inviting right now.  I’m longing for the closeness and the slowing down that come with the month of December.  And this year, I’m hoping it comes with a really clean house devoid of anything that doesn’t give us joy.

Working on it….