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Read-alouds during showers #fail

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In an effort to NOT throw formal learning out the window, I decide that today–I would make the most of our time together.  I, for one, was not going to live another day without a shower.  BigGuy had done his Biology lecture early.  I was really not feeling the love for doing ANYthing today and I cannot say that I was upset when a friend decided to go to the pool despite the fact that there was seriously no way I was cut out to be at the pool.  Leg grooming being second only to the only other thing that makes women dread going to the pool.  Yeah.

So I finally mozy myself into the shower and holler for the children to bring the character building book and the “Science in Ancient Egypt” book because BigGuy was gonna read aloud for us.

Except that I can seriously hear NOTHING in the shower.

#fail

Well, notsomuch #fail because really, it was comical.  I mean, BigGuy didn’t see the immediate humor and I wasn’t laughing; but in retrospect, it was pretty comical.

We did, in fact, do our “helpfulness” lesson for the day and we did actually learn stuff about science in ancient egypt.

Done.

The afternoon was spent at the park followed by BigGuy’s relentless nagging to do his Mod Design coursework.  And it just spiraled into a really bad night for everyone.  I was REALLY sick from something bothering my stomach.  BigGuy couldn’t handle the fact that he’d lost all access to all screens (this happened on Monday, I think) for the week and decided that my extended use of the bathroom was a good time to deliver–under the door–a sign stating that Papa and I were not allowed in his room and then a picture on the reverse side of Husbeau and I torturing BOTH kids.  Honestly, I’m kind of touched that he feels like his little sister and he are “in this together” since he never seems to see anyone being on his side.  #win

I was less than thrilled at his chosen delivery time.  I calmly brought it to his room and put it on the bed and said “Is this really what COULD NOT wait until I was done being sick?” and I walked away.  Well, in retrospect, BigGuy was crying out in pain and I was not comforting him.  So, not surprisingly, BigGuy started to “run away” from home.  Oh, and to add insult to injury: on his way out of the yard (barefoot, btw) he told his little sister that he was leaving.  That would be the little sister who is STILL reeling from the pain of being given up/left at the hospital by her birthmother.

Holy. moly.

All that to say that doing read alouds in the shower are probably not your best bet.

What day is this, anyway…?

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Again… I swear at some point this train will either get on track or we will be back to doing close to “nothing that looks like education despite it’s actual educational value”.

We started with a doctor’s appointment for Mama.  Yup.  Mama has PTSD that was acquired in early childhood, diagnosed circa 1995, and ignored until 2013.  Mama has been fortunate to function so well for so long with so few of the typical PTSD accoutrements thanks to (no doubt) 27 years of non-trauma therapy getting me through it.  But that doesn’t really fix the problem, and in late 2013 it all got to be too much to manage and Mama got APPROPRIATE help and treatment.  I’m actually still undergoing EMDR therapy which has really been nothing short of a miracle worker.

Nine a.m. appointment.  Read: derail the morning.  We DID get our snuggles in this morning and we DID read our Character Building story (“Helpfulness”–BigGuy read it to us in the car and then read us the discussion questions–but also engaged in the conversation).  We got back in time for BigGuy to listen to his Biology lecture and then proceed to (predictably now) flip out afterward.  Something about the type of screen involvement or activities of that lecture are really making life hard for the rest of us.  Although last night I made him do the remaining two quizzes plus the exam for the first module–all of which he belted out with scores of 92%, 96% and 100% with barely any effort.

He opted out of doing any other work and I bit my tongue about it.

We then went to eat lunch, hit the discount book store, return (and check out) books at the library, then proceed to listen to Girly read some of the phonics readers I checked out en route to the chiropractor.  While waiting to be adjusted, BigGuy discovered the hot (as in “for making tea”) water in the water dispenser and rather than leave it alone, he felt the need to incorporate it into his activities.  This resulted in a lot of screaming, crying and general sounds of distress and agony for no less than an hour–from the chiropractor’s office until he got home, had coconut & lavender oils applied, attempted guided visualization to relieve the pain (laugh harder–you cannot be laughing hard enough at how poorly that went), then weaseled me out of watching a show.  Their electronics time was suspended for abysmal behavior, but dude–anything to get him to stop thinking about and screaming about his “horrifying pain”.  Honestly–there was ONE barely pinkened patch of skin.  Add on to all of this that I apparently didn’t console or comfort him until he asked.  Cue the conversation about how 1) I was stifling being beyond livid that he was playing with something he shouldn’t have; and 2) can we be thankful that once he asked–I responded to comfort and console him rather than scold him about how he GOT hurt?  *sigh*

Of course, Mama was out of sorts today which means Girly is out of sorts.  And by “out of sorts” I mean “expressing her anxiety about Mama’s obvious not-so-great-mood by pushing things as far as humanly possible”.  And thanks to EMDR therapy, Mama is capable of responding in comforting ways to this rather than chastising ways… but it’s still really hard.  Especially when I realize that I helped create that little problem.

Educational points today:

BigGuy: Biology, “helpfulness”, reading aloud, thermodynamics, cause-effect, analyzing for positives in a relationship, negotiation, and breathing techniques.

Girly: “A” and “the” as sight words, “helpfulness”, active listening, whatever was on the TWO episodes of Sesame Street that slipped by me, problem-solving to latch the alternate latch in a public bathroom when the first one doesn’t work (with no assistance from Mama–we’ll count this as “fine motor skills”), and something else profound that I cannot even believe escapes me right now but at the time, I was really impressed with whatever it was.

Mama: consoling children should happen before they ask, we don’t have a pharmacy/prescription CARD to go with our plan but apparently should, I can access my Amazon shopping cart through my phone’s web browser, tongue piercing.

Solid day.  Whatever day it is.

Day 6: “Mondayyyyy, Mondayyyyyyyyy….”

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This morning, we got up and out of the house–smoothies in hand–and got to the library for the books we need for this week’s lessons.  Egypt.  Blech.  I’m seriously all Egypt’d out.  I cannot even wrap my head around the fact that my son actually CHOSE for us to start our history studies in the classical education model’s “Year 1”.  I mean, the OCD person in me is jumping for joy to start at “the beginning” but the woman who has been parenting my kids for the last several years is like “Seriously… I cannot handle another pyramid or mummy”.

I am congratulating myself that we managed to bring BigGuy’s Information Resources workbook.

I am congratulating myself that when BigGuy pushed back on doing his work, I fought the initial reaction to hold his electronics time captive until it was done.  I reminded myself that he knew everything he needed to know in life–enough math and reading to live off of–and that this rigor was his request.  So I calmly told him that he didn’t need to do this.  I DID explain WHY it was on his plate to be done and reminded him that it bothered him that his brain was lazy–but that it was his choice to do it.

He did it.  Actually, he did most of it but not all of it.  Whatever.  He also negotiated for doing his Mod Design I coursework three times per week at least for this week and next week.  He absolutely loves it.  I don’t want to restrict him any more than I have to and he doesn’t get docked electronics (fun) time when he does this.  So we’re walking a fine line.  We’ll try this for 2 weeks and see how it goes.

Getting out the door so early comPLETEly threw pretty much everything off this morning… no character building story and discussion… no snuggles.  BigGuy managed to some element of his bathroom chores, but I’ll need to go up and see what exactly did and did not get done.

Now I need to can the 30 pounds of organic green beans I bought last week.  The kids await 4pm by popping off the ends of each bean.  Off I go!

Weekend review

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In truth, I gave this whole “rigorous academic learning” thing a week and truly thought it would fail in a day or two.  My inaccuracy on this point is sobering on many levels.  First, because it means that life as I knew it will now change as I meet the challenge to provide my BigGuy (YES!!!  That works!) with the education and learning experience he wants.

Second, my BigGuy is no longer a BoyChild.

Third: Since we will be educating, I need to get on the ball with making plans and requesting books and stuff…

This weekend, we are going to finish up our Worldview lessons.  Last night, we discussed and concluded the Jedis were/are pantheists.  I’m thankful that BigGuy realizes that his brain is very lazy and wants to change it–persevering through things without having to be pushed in an effort to make his brain think.

Today, we will finish Worldview, talk about his goals for the school year, and go to a birthday party for a 4yo.  If there’s time, I’ll have him take the Biology quizzes he didn’t get to do.  Tomorrow I will try to be at the library when it opens so as not to further derail our learning.  It’s a short learning week due to playdates.  *sigh*

Day 5: “Yup… see you soon!”

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Usually we are up for whatever.  There’s no “Oh, we can’t–we have to finish math” like some of my homeschooling friends.  So this morning when my cell phone rang at 9:30am and the little voice belonging to a family that we adore asked us to come over at 10:30am (pack a lunch)… I didn’t even give it a second thought.

This schooling thing is going to take some getting used to.

But today is scheduled to be our “finish and review” day.  It’s the day where I check through all of the assignments, make sure they’re actually done (and done right), finish anything that wasn’t done and then, something new.  We’re going to recap the week and talk about how we each felt it went, and then talk about the week ahead and what’s going on.  I kind of like the idea of building in this review and planning as part of habits of mind.  Which reminds me that I have “Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind” sitting in my bedroom waiting to be read… hmmm.

But today we played.  And it was good.  And I was reminded about CLEP exams.  And suddenly my challenges around biology seemed completely resolved.

Day 3: fumbling towards direction

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See, the thing is: I was a project manager in my past life during which I taught to adults at night; and then a public school teacher (like, seriously briefly).  It’s not like I don’t know how to plan, organize and execute.

I just don’t really love it in terms of educating.

Anyway… I have learned to learn my lessons at least.  We woke up on day 3 and went back to our morning character trait stories and mandatory snuggles.  The day went relatively fine.  For my life I can’t remember what we did in the morning, I just know that there wasn’t a lot of “schooling” for Girly.  BoyChild did whatever he was assigned except that he didn’t come get me for his Worldview stuff.  He did, however, have to do his daily chore (cleaning bathrooms).  We scuttled off to a mommy meeting/playdate where the mommy’s hold an accountability session for our respective businesses while the kids play.  It works.

We also had to do a walkthrough with the renters moving out of the house we really would have rather sold… but that’s another story.

Overall, not a horrible day.

Day 2: #fail

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Oooooh… oh my.  Well, BoyChild got up at the crack of dawn.  We are crack of noon people.  But since he was up and he wanted to, he listened to the 8am lecture for his new biology course, and then stayed on for the 9am live orientation to the system they used.  Which means nobody ate breakfast until 10am.  #fail

This left Girly largely unattended and unhappy.  It means we didn’t kick off our day with our Character Building story.  It means Girly sat in front of Sesame Street and BoyChild joined her while I tried to get dressed.  That puts BoyChild at over 2 hours of screen exposure.

BoyChild had an epilepsy diagnosis as a small child.  He had one obvious seizure somewhere around 15 or 18 months old and then “absence seizures”.  A therapist caught that it was happening and showed us.  Then, we caught them on video which is how he was diagnosed–because a sleep deprived EEG and then a 72-hour EEG showed nothing.  At the time, BoyChild was under the care of multiple specialists and we were confronted with giving him: a daily inhaler for his Reactive Airway Disorder that the pulminologist promised would turn into asthma;  Wellbutrin to rewire his brain because he barely realized people existed and was profoundly delayed (a step up from the initial suspicion of cerebral palsy and profound deafness); and now a seizure medication with the threat that “the next seizure could make him a vegetable”.

He didn’t get any of them.  At 10yo, he doesn’t have asthma, he presents fairly neurotypical (odd and quirky–definitely something “off”, but nothing like he was) and we haven’t seen evidence of seizures in many years.  None-the-less, he definitely reacts to extended screen exposure–even if the screen is showing a series of still images.  :/

But I digress…

Extended screen exposure didn’t end well this morning.

BoyChild did go on (after lunch!?) to finish the rest of his assignments.  At some point, he needed me to be involved for his Worldview discussion questions and he was goofing off.  Now, hear me: I am NOT loving all this schoolwork.  So I really was not having the patience for it.  I told him that it didn’t seem like he was really interested in doing this work–so why do it?  He pleaded with me to stay and I forced him to answer me: why should we do this if he really doesn’t feel like doing it?

He insisted he wanted to do it, and made himself appear more focused and we finished.  But now I feel bad because I’m forcing him to behave the way that LOOKS like he’s paying attention to me when I know first-hand that he can manage to do all kinds of things and still take in information, process it and respond.  One of the many reasons we homeschool INCLUDES “So that BoyChild can be himself and learn the way he is comfortable.”  Ugh… #fail

BoyChild finished up his work just in time for the kids to do their 4pm electronics time.  I shouldn’t have allowed this for him, but I did.  He loves it.  We’d just deal if it was too much for him.  But then I had appointments for the evening and I was gone until about 9:30pm.  Girly was already sleeping, but BoyChild was still awake.  We said our evening “prayers” (3 things we are grateful for) and he was genuine and thoughtful in his.  We are definitely seeing much more depth of thought and introspection in this little guy in the last few months.

And in my gratitudes, I was thankful that we could start over tomorrow.

Day 1: A whole new world…?

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Oy… the first day of each “new school year” (read: the day my kids can say they’re in the next “grade”) is usually a party.  They wake up to balloons and streamers and possibly some cool pencils and/or school-ish supplies.  We take a first-day-of-school type of picture.

This year, I kind of dreaded this day.  I felt like suddenly, we had to really SCHOOL our oldest.  On one hand, I felt like it was a LOT of work to school-at-home.  In fact, schooling-at-home is what a LOT of parents envision when they think of homeschooling; and they use this to determine that it’s not for them.  But we haven’t really done that and I didn’t really WANT to do that.  I’ve spent the last month really looking at how to feed his desire for higher level learning in greater quantity without it being a school-at-home situation.  I’m not sure I’ve fully “got it”, but I have the first 2-3 weeks figured out.

This was BoyChild’s firm desire.  I feel like: okay, so we just full-on hit it hard per his request and if he pushes back–we just stop!  We do our annual family vacation in 3 weeks and surely by then, we’ll either be on this train or off.  Given that this is pretty far-fetched from how we operate, I figured day one would be rough going.  Except that it wasn’t.  And the stuff I planned took more of our day than expected.  Still, no complaints.  *dumbstruck*

We are starting the year with a foundation in “worldview”.  I landed on a curriculum that is faith-based and although our family is Bible-based, Jesus-following and often identify as Christians, we are not Christians–we are Quakers.  So I felt strongly that we needed to have an understanding of how worldview affects some of the works we use.  To that end, we are spending this first week on “A Young Historian’s Introduction to Worldview“–a four-lesson curricula by Brimwood Press.  BoyChild is doing that and then we are going through the first few pages of Usborne’s “People of the World” followed by the first few pages of Usborne’s “Encyclopedia of World Religions” and “A Faith Like Mine” by Laura Buller.  I feel very strongly about my children understanding and experiencing multiple cultures and seeing commonalities among them–not just differences.  This is a really big deal to us.  My husband and I have also been looking for opportunities to travel more and even be places long term, but BigPuppy makes a lot of that hard to figure out.

Oh, and BoyChild decided he wanted to return to calculus…after putting it down 18 months ago.  He wanted to do it for a year and finally got to a level of math prerequisite to the program I found for kids… but then (after a few months) decided it was boring.  Honestly, he was right: the content was monotonous and dry.  And dude, he was a 3rd grader.  He didn’t need calc.  But he suddenly decided to tackle it again, so I spent a lot of the morning erasing pages of “Calculus Without Tears” so that he could start from the beginning all over again.  We’ll see how THAT goes.

I’m tired.  A friend is having a Usborne book party tonight and I’m almost afraid to go because truly–we’re totally broke and I don’t really NEED anything.  And I’m starved.  And my husband just pulled up from a doctor’s appointment.  Probably a good time to sign off…

Change is in the air…

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Currently, we have a 10-year-old son (a 5th grader for 2014-15) and a 5-going-on-25-year-old daughter (a new Kindergartner).  We have homeschooled since the oldest was entering Pre-K.  The list of reasons is really, really long but physical health (for my oldest) and emotional health (for my youngest) are significant factors for my particular family.  Everything else is really secondary to these priorities.  Not that they don’t matter, just that these two things are the things that drive us to ensure the continuity of educating our kids at home.

I’m a plan-and-execute-er at heart and we have gone the full spectrum of ways to educate a kid at home.  We had finally gotten to a “follow the child” mentality that worked well as long as children were doing something that didn’t take mama out of her comfort zone.  🙂

This past year was kind of an eye-opener for us.  Long story very short: we had to do a battery of psychology testing on our son and the results were rather surprising.  Where most kids his age average about 15 responses on a Rorschach test, Gig had 90.  There were a number of tests done.  We also definitively ruled out an attention problem.

I’m a fan of this kind of testing when 1) the day-to-day activities of a child seem to be affected negatively by their behaviors; and 2) the results are being used to understand exactly what a child’s strengths and weaknesses are so that the adult can accommodate them rather than change them.  Tests are by NO means the be-all-end-all on this matter; but they’re a really good jumping off point or can at least provide you a direction to go in.  They really don’t have all the answers and sometimes, they can even be inaccurate.  For us, the results explained a lot for us, and we have been able to change some things in our home that have made our son’s life an easier experience for him.

That being said, BoyChild has shifted gears this year and is suddenly looking for “more”.  He wants a more Socratic method of learning “instead of just reading books” and he wants to do more “cool stuff with science–like building atoms”.  Girly, on the other hand, has stopped saying that she wants to learn to read and is happy to do lots of art and athletics.

Mama has very mixed feelings about all of this.  I want to follow my kids, but I’m feeling very fish out of water.  This blog is my journey from being a pretty lax semi-unschooler to changing course at the behest of (mostly my oldest) child/ren.

Today was day 1