This is a wonderful time of year! I love the rain, the new growth, the busy birds and our new school books! Just when things are 'slugging' along and you think you are not going to make it out of winter, spring arrives along with the new books for next school year. It gives me renewed energy and I get all revved up again.
Even the girls love looking through their new books and seeing what they are going to be doing.
In Jane's case, she has to finish what she is doing this year; all her stuff is for next year. Ruth, however, has finished her geography, math, and history so she'll begin new books right away. I bought a wonderful book on Greek history that she'll start reading, taking notes, and then writing a summary at the end of each section. Ruth loves Greek history, so that will be a fun book for her to use. It includes a section on Greek foods (I smell gyros). Following the sections on Greek art, furniture, and currency we will go on a field trip to the Art Museum. We LOVE the Art Museum!
Ruth is also starting her Saxon 6/5 Math and I've looked through it and am wondering if it is too easy for her. I'll decide once our summer break gets here in July; I may just bump her up.
Jane is happy we've found a history book she likes. It's world history and it's a very readable book. In other words, it's not written like a text book but rather like a novel. She will be reading, taking notes, answering review questions (given in the book) and creating a timeline. Now I just have to find somewhere in the house where I can put the thing!!
And, by the way, the conference went well and I think I did fine with my talk on intro to homeschooling; it was fun. I really enjoyed the people and there was a happy atmosphere throughout the whole conference. One of our vendors gave me a bottle of holy water that I took around both Friday and Saturday and asked God to bless our efforts and to send His Holy Spirit to fill the hearts of His faithful. That will be tradition from now on!
I just found out that Leo will be home for Easter this year and I'm very excited about that. We haven't had him home for Easter the last two years. I'm going to put out my hummingbird feeder in May and this year I'm going to plant a lilac bush. I feel like our house needs one and I'm looking forward to going to pick one out. I never love our house more than I do in the springtime! Happy Easter!!
Musings on the daily trials and triumphs of a homeschool family.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Busy, busy, busy...
I haven't posted for a while. It's been so busy, I can't even decide what to write about. I've started a few drafts and then days go by and they are obsolete. One of the things that has taken up a lot of my time is the Catholic Homeschool Conference. I am the vendor coordinator and am going to give the Intro to Home Schooling talk. I'm not a person who gets nervous about talking in front of people, but I've had so little time to prepare that I'm wondering how this is going to go. I really want to do a good job. I keep trying to zone in on that one special message I want to get across. You know, the one most important thing to take away....but it seems to change daily. Mostly, I want to speak from the Spirit and not from myself. I love the conference, but it is time consuming!
Jane has been injured since Nutcracker. Turns out that her pointe shoes weren't right and she danced for months in them and did 4 shows with two pointe pieces per show (one 4 minute and one 7 minute). She kept telling me that she had this spot on her foot that was hurting. Being the sympathetic mom that I am, I said, "Well Jane, you're dancing 16 hours a week. Your feet are going to hurt. Soak them, massage them, take some ibuprofen and get used to it." Yup, that's the kind of mom I am! Seriously, though, I don't know much about dancing and I just figured it was normal pain that you here dancers suffer. Turns out she has deep bone bruises on both feet affecting mostly her last three toes. It's been NINE WEEKS of not dancing! That's a long time and we are all paying for it! What really got her back on the dance floor were the bio freeze treatments that speed healing of bruises. She's dancing again, limitedly. We are all relieved...Jane is not fun to live with when she can't dance!
My baby, Ruth, also came up with a neat little medical condition called Refractive Amblyopia. Basically, she is legally blind in her right eye. Yup. She's been telling me for years that her vision is blurry out of her right eye, but again, the mom I am said, "Well, look out of your left." There...problem solved. No, I did NOT say that, but I did discount what she was telling me. All evidence pointed to her being able to see. She had some rudimentary exams at the pediatricians - they never indicated a problem. My sister finally took her (Marty and I were out of town and I asked her if she would) to Sam's for one of their free health screenings and they said she had a big discrepancy between her two eyes. Well, an eye exam, a specialist visit, and voila! glasses! The good news is that her eyeball works fine, but her vision is SO bad out of that eye that her brain has stopped interpreting signals from that optic nerve. The specialist will be giving us exercises to try to retrain the connection. She was apparently born with this condition and her left eye compensates (20/20 vision out of that eye). So, my life has been vendors, doctors, dance, school, doctors, speakers, floor plans, doctors, etc. But these are the days to treasure. One day life will slow down and, God willing, I'll sit and smile and look back and enjoy the memories of these busy days.
Jane has been injured since Nutcracker. Turns out that her pointe shoes weren't right and she danced for months in them and did 4 shows with two pointe pieces per show (one 4 minute and one 7 minute). She kept telling me that she had this spot on her foot that was hurting. Being the sympathetic mom that I am, I said, "Well Jane, you're dancing 16 hours a week. Your feet are going to hurt. Soak them, massage them, take some ibuprofen and get used to it." Yup, that's the kind of mom I am! Seriously, though, I don't know much about dancing and I just figured it was normal pain that you here dancers suffer. Turns out she has deep bone bruises on both feet affecting mostly her last three toes. It's been NINE WEEKS of not dancing! That's a long time and we are all paying for it! What really got her back on the dance floor were the bio freeze treatments that speed healing of bruises. She's dancing again, limitedly. We are all relieved...Jane is not fun to live with when she can't dance!
My baby, Ruth, also came up with a neat little medical condition called Refractive Amblyopia. Basically, she is legally blind in her right eye. Yup. She's been telling me for years that her vision is blurry out of her right eye, but again, the mom I am said, "Well, look out of your left." There...problem solved. No, I did NOT say that, but I did discount what she was telling me. All evidence pointed to her being able to see. She had some rudimentary exams at the pediatricians - they never indicated a problem. My sister finally took her (Marty and I were out of town and I asked her if she would) to Sam's for one of their free health screenings and they said she had a big discrepancy between her two eyes. Well, an eye exam, a specialist visit, and voila! glasses! The good news is that her eyeball works fine, but her vision is SO bad out of that eye that her brain has stopped interpreting signals from that optic nerve. The specialist will be giving us exercises to try to retrain the connection. She was apparently born with this condition and her left eye compensates (20/20 vision out of that eye). So, my life has been vendors, doctors, dance, school, doctors, speakers, floor plans, doctors, etc. But these are the days to treasure. One day life will slow down and, God willing, I'll sit and smile and look back and enjoy the memories of these busy days.
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