How I spent my afternoon

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Today, while the littlest napped and the big boys played the xbox, I ignored the call of my knitting and the emails from work (sorry guys – I already put in enough hours today – I’ll be back tonight!) and reworked our local homeschool group’s webpage.  Check it out and please tell me what you think:

Woodland Area Christian Home Eductors (WACHE)

We really have two sites – this public one and a Yahoogroup site for our members.  In a couple of weeks, I’ll be getting together with some other homeschoolers to work on both of our sites, but first I wanted to migrate us from an HTML/CSS site to a WordPress site.  Doing that allows for more people to update the site as needed.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my afternoon! It felt good to make some progress on this project that has been hanging over my head for so long!

2nd 1st day of school

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Today is J2’s first day of school.  I’ll see if I can get a photo of him later today when he wakes up, but he’s definitely a teenager, so I’ll probably need to sneak up on him! LOL

When it was just the two of us homeschooling, we would go out to breakfast on our first day of homeschool.  But now that there are more of us at home, we need to alter that.  J3 chose pizza night for his first day of school.  J2 has chosen a quick trip to Sonic today for their happy hour 1/2 off drinks – I think he’s planning on a root beer float!

But first we have to get through some actual school work.  We are with a charter school this year – but at this point, we have not changed our curriculum too much.  Here is what we are planning to study this year:

  • Bible – reading through the New Testament – actually listening to it. (not sure what we’ll do after that)
  • Math – Teaching Textbooks 7
  • Science – Botany
  • History – Story of the World 3 (Elizabeth 1 – the 49ers)
  • Language Arts – All About Spelling, Beginning keyboarding, writing, reading via “Back to the Classics” stories  **plus we have a resource person coming once a week to reinforce what I’m doing with him PTL!
  • PE – Martial arts (working on his orange belt)
  • Life Skills – carpentry class (starting in September)

So, that’s it for the 2010/11 school year.  Still hoping to get some therapies going to help with his auditory processing disorders and autism diagnosis. We are having the hardest time getting these going.  It’s been frustrating for all of us!

Random Catch-up Time

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Thanks to twitters at least I can’t say I’ve completely abandoned blogging.  But I feel like it’s been close.  I’ve just been too busy to really sit and catch up like I want to every day!  But I hope a few of you are still reading – cause here’s a real live update! 🙂

  • I wrote an article for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine’s Summer 2010 issue.  It’s on pages 52-54 and it’s called “Making a plan and letting it go”.  I hope you can read it and let me know what you think!!
  • I’ve decided to paint my kitchen red and yellow….and then I changed my mind! LOL  Now it’s just going to be red and white.  The yellow would be nice, but my kitchen is too busy (some would call it messy lol) to have three colors I think.  See?
  • I went to Michael’s this week and picked up a few things to decorate my home:

A new centerpiece for the dining room table:

some flowers for the living room:

And, a simple garland for my hearth:

  • Also, we had a visit from a young man we knew while we were in Oregon.  His dad, Gregg, was Eric’s best friend.  Someone Eric could be completely comfortable and real with during our years of ministry.  Sadly, Gregg died a few years ago and we lost touch with his family as people do when their lives get busy – it’s so sad!  But last night’s visit with Allen was great! He was on leave from Ft Hood and traveling home to see his family before he leaves for Iraq.  We were so blessed to see what a great young man he has become!
  • In knitting news, I’ve been knitting socks.  I decided to create my own sock club with the sock yarn I’ve been stashing (HT: YarnHarlot)  Here are my socks so far:
  • June:
  • July(ish)
  • August

Well, it’s time (past really) to feed the kids and I’m trying to scrapbook our trip to IL & Mo so I’d better close!  Only 2 more weeks left to my summer!! Yikes!!

I did it again….

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I need to get myself back under control.

It started small.  It always does.

I’ve started comparing myself to others and, surprise, I come up short.

It’s been something I’ve been plagued with since our Seminary days.  I find a group of like-minded individuals and I love to spend time with them.  But then it starts.  I start to compare my abilities/gifts/priorities with my friends.  And, then I start to get down on myself.  No matter that I can’t play the piano, don’t have a size 2 body or the resources to spend every weekend in ministry to the homeless.  Bye-bye goes my contentment with who I am and what I do.

And, I’ve done this over and over again.

But nothing compares to the way I get down on myself about homeschooling.  Maybe because it’s such a big part of our life.  Or maybe it’s because what I do each day affects the boys and their futures!   I don’t really know.  But I’ve worked and worked on keeping a good attitude about what I do and how I do it.

I’ve found that for me to maintain a good attitude, I need consider the limits of my children, myself and our resources.

But still I find myself looking at others and wishing my life was different.  My children were different.  And even more, that I was different.

I hope to write more about this – and I pray I’m not the only one who struggles with this!!