Looking up

Well, after the chaos and awfulness that was Monday, the rest of the week was much improved. Jeff stayed home on Tuesday, ran a few errands, I helped our church's after school program, and we had a quiet evening. We made pilgrim crafts and decorated for Christmas for our party happening on Sunday. We had friends over on Friday and had 6 kids running around our house. It was great! We are planning a brief getaway for our family just before thanksgiving and we are looking forward to it. Getting out of the house with just our family and going out of town just to relax.  Of course it's supposed to rain and be super cold, so we won't be venturing out in the weather much, but hopefully we are able to entertain the kids and keep them occupied for 2 days.

I'm praying that all of these positive things indicate an improvement on the up and up and that after a week of Jeff not having to go to work and the holidays coming up, we are getting to a new healthy normal.

I have heard a few things or had people ask me questions and I just go, "Really?"  Questions like are you going to homeschool through 12th grade? I'm not sure what my response to them should be. Or for others who say, this is what happened to this person in a situation like yours. I'm not that person. I guess that's just a couple of the things that I heard that just bugged me a little this week.

Life's Callenges

Everyone deals with different challenges in life. For the past seven years, we have dealt with my emotional roller coaster. I have been either pregnant or breastfeeding for almost all of our married life. This has created a difficulty in my hormonal stability and makes life a bit rough at times. With some of the kids I have had some postpartum depression. Lately I have been feeling very angry and frustrated, but I don't know why. Today after a pretty calm start to our morning, (we were going to be kind of crafty and do a couple of projects) a few small kinks in my plan made me really upset and threw my whole day off kilter. I'm hoping I can stop allowing the little things to become big things or just making them big things when they don't really matter much.

In previous posts I had written about being lonely and not being able to talk to many people about struggling. In the homeschooling world I feel as if I'm not cut out for the job of teaching my kids because I am a perfectionist and I'm trying to be more creative and letting things go. Now this doesn't mean we stop disciplining. Through all of this I had forgotten about a good friend of mine that had dealt with postpartum depression and I haven't been doing a good job of keeping in touch with her. I think I have found someone who might take my calls that understands what I'm going through. I don't know why I didn't think of it before.  Maybe I will also start to make friends locally that we can get to know better that will encourage us in our walk that we can do life with. I'm off to get some sleep, because I think lack of sleep might be part of the problem. Night, night.

Learning never stops

In the natural flow of life learning never stops. You can be walking along the road or driving down the road, or just be working at home and a learning opportunity will come along.  Either for you from hearing news or random facts on the radio to having a lively discussion with a friend or special someone, or for your kids who still have lots of knowledge to gain as they go through life. 

Today while digging up a bush in the flower bed and then again when attempting to dig out a tree from the back yard, we found worms and other bugs and learned why they are good or bad for the soil/ground. At dinner we discussed that soy sauce was salty. Earlier in the day the girls were fighting over their blankets and they were explaining to Julia (2) that hers said J-U-L-I-A and she said no, "A-B-C-D". It was quite cute. She is almost able to count to 10, but she doesn't like to. She starts with 1,2,3,4 and skips 6 or 7 and says 9,10,11,12,13. The big girls try to get her to count to 20 with them, but she only recites 14 when prompted.  Last weekend while we were painting a room in our house, the girls were reading books (actually reading books) and doing math on the computer, all on their own accord. 

This is why I love homeschooling. Even if we don't get all of our lessons in during our "school day", we can still teach and learn at other times during the day, like when Jeff is home, or on the weekend. Life is continuous, so I'm not sure why we have to tell kids that they need to be able to learn between 8&3 or something close to that. I'm sure it's a schedule that works well for the teachers, but not every student is the same. When you homeschool and you have to take a test, you can take it any time during the day that you want. Now, as they get older and start taking the SAT or ACTs you don't just get to pick a random start time, but in general, tests can be given whenever you feel I like it. 

We also don't have to worry about getting some of the illnesses kids get from being around so many people at once. Don't worry, there's still plenty of social time. Of course as I say that I am reminded of a few cancelled play date because of sick kids by one of us, so we're still waiting for the right moment to come along so that we can get together. Of course I could use a quiet weekend away, completely BY MYSELF! 

Lump Sum

Things in life aren't fair. Do you remember telling your kids that life isn't fair for the first time? I don't. I'm sure I've said it before, but it probably didn't have anything to do with an injustice happening outside of our home. Over the past year my husband has been under attack. It doesn't seem fair, and it isn't, but change happens and new people come in to replace them. This part of life that isn't fair involves politicking with his bosses who seem to not like him and his former boss that hired him is no longer working for the school, so now there is no one to stick up for him but me. I've decided that since one of his bosses was new, I was going to send him an email. It is still sitting in my mailbox so that it can be sent at the appropriate time to coincide with other events involved in this process. My husband loves his job and respects his bosses appropriately. He even loves teaching. He comes home at least once or twice a week and tells me about the interactions between him and his students or the experiments he's been practicing and doing with them. Because of events that happened during the last school year, my husband is teaching the lower performing students. In his 5 class period, he is technically teaching 8 classes, and last week they added 2 more, but he never sees those students. They are now his responsibility, but he doesn't teach them or give them any kind of assignments. Sorry for getting sidetracked, on with my story. He is enjoying teaching, and he has his typical students that give him fits, or want to purposely fail his class, or just plain don't like school and it doesn't matter how interesting you make the class. There are also students who won't like him. I remember having a few teachers I didn't like that other students did. I think he's doing a great job and I just pray that his bosses have/get an accurate view of who he is. I also want anyone who reads this blog to be in prayer for him.