We are in fact home from our long relaxing trip to the South. We did have a grand time and after reflecting on it a bit, I have come to the conclusion that, in spite of all the fun we had on the way down with sick children and then ourselves being sick, I think this was one of the best vacations ever! We really did have a good time, a good balance of activity and rest, good visiting with friends and good alone time as a family, and great food and beds! Therefore, I deem thee: A SMASHING SUCCESS!
Now back to the real world we have gone and we promptly were on duty three days after we came back. It hasn't really been that bad. Probably the worst "get back into the groove thing" was pulling together a Sunday school lesson in about 36 hours, but it went well and the kids had a good time and I think they learned something. We talked about the Ten Commandments.
Ok, so duty week, the week that I look forward to and don't all at the same time. I enjoy interacting with the students and eating meals with them and planning a meeting for Thursday and stuff like that. I even enjoy the times I work with them in the afternoon, but I am amazed at how much emotional energy it takes me just to keep track of things and I haven't quite learned how to be "ok" with not doing everything "right" because there isn't enough time to do it right and pay attention to my family as I should. Like one day I wasted 1/2 an hour of 4 people's time because I didn't have the women's work planned out ahead of time. I HATE THAT! And yet I realize that if I had spent the time planning it, it would have taken time away from Jonathon's school time- that is required afterall, so somebody looses either way! I don't mean to complain, I'm not having a bad time with it, I'm just in a learning curve and I'm not quite on the home stretch of it yet.
Brandon did help at the beginning of the week with a couple of things- like he watched the kids so I could spent most of Sunday afternoon unpacked the entire world- which just happened to all fit in our bags in the back of our 12 passenger van. And then he gave me a pep talk on priorities. He listed about 4-5 that I had and said I could only concentrate on 2 per week for the rest of the year. Since homeschool was one of them and another was duty week, that took care of what I was suppose to think about this week. I confess, my brain still wanders to packing and house ideas occasionally, but I'm trying really hard not to let it get in the way.
So far school this week has gone pretty well. In fact, if we could have this good of a school week every week, I'd feel like I was a half way adequate teacher. Of course then I probably would give the credit to God as often, so quick- Praise the Lord for a great week of school! We've hit reading and math every day, some science and history and literature some days and most days we've gotten a good long Bible devotions in. So, things are going well. Well, we did do one experiment that flopped in science. The lesson was on elements and how when you put two things together they can create something new. Our examples were: oxygen and hydrogen= water (we just talked about this one), the old baking soda and vinegar thing, and leven and gluten= rising bread. I did some pastry dough with the kids and put baking powder in Jonathon's and none in James' and then baked them. Then I really played it up about how Jonathon's was going to be bigger just because of that one ingredient. WELL, they were the same size- in fact I think James' was actually a bit bigger. I think I just put too much crisco in and so the dough was too heavy to rise. Oh well.
The other exciting event of note is that Jonathon lost his first tooth today. He has been wiggling it for weeks and today it was pretty loose. So he came to me and asked if I could just get it out. Ah...note....this is NOT MY OFFSPRING! I never would have let my parents pull my tooth! I checked and recheck to be sure this was what he wanted and the short story is that a few minutes and a piece of dental floss later, it popped right out and "didn't hurt at all". So now he has it under his pillow and even though he knows its just a pretend game, the toothfairy has a job to do this evening. He does sleep in a loft bed and he did put it under the far side of his pillow, so I may have some interesting acrobatics to do when the time comes.
Ok, last tidbit...favorite school activities right now: Dot-to-dot for math, a reason for Handwriting letter writing sheets, memory matching game for number recognition, Little House on the Prarie.
Gotta go...
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