Embracing Summer

It's been a long year, lots of change, lots of growth, lots of good. Its also been a year or many ups and downs.

Challenges to our faith from the politics of our local church. Politics that dropped the Word in favor of many words. That put individual agendas on top of God's agenda, but politics that forced us to dig deeper into God, learning growing and trusting.

Challenges at my husbands workplace with difficult co-workers, and seeing a world or options in the wider organization. Alongside it good busyness developing an out-door recreation program for PE, us teaching ballroom dancing, finishing off the second year of a creation based, hands on, web based learning science curriculum for his students all this and teaching a full courseload.


Overcoming the challenges and frustrations of the ways we don't work well together as a homeschool and working towards a more positive home-school attitude. Along the way working through the issues that leave us feeling stressed and doubtful.

A string of financial hiccups - not the painful problem of job loss, but a year of niggles, and unexpected bills that have left us stretched and unsure.

Yesterday was the day to call summer school. Optimistically to say that for the next month or two we'll work on some school, rest, play , love laugh. Hubby has another 7 days before he is free to join us.

I'm looking forward to changing gears, tidying up the garden from the rain of the last two weeks of early summer, enjoying nature and focusing on God. Hopefully along the way we can see a complete change in how we school from the structure we have needed on the past to a freer, more encouraging focus of enjoying what we do. If so our early end to the school year will be well rewarded.

Independance revisited.

For now hubby is encouraging me to try and split up the kids and let them work separately from each other. Since I have been going back and forward over the advantages and disadvantages all term - ie for the last 6-8 weeks its nice to have the stress of decision over-ruled. To him the meed to let her be extended exceeds the need for togetherness in studies and discussion. But as he states we can build the discussion into our day elsewhere.

So for now I'm hoping to get plans for each child's afternoon studies posted this evening so that we have some order next week.

Clearing Stickies and finding order or just MIA

This has been an eventful week - On Saturday my husband gave the kids a challenge to clear all their stickies (corrections) and get on top of school. No small feat when some of those corrections had been avoided for months.

OK not something I wanted to admit to but its nice to be on top of them. To be free of the battles - well almost. Having cleared the stickies we found ourselves with the classic tired day. One child stressing over birthday gifts and the other just not rested.

At the end of the year everyone is feeling the tiredness and exhaustion. for me having had my plan overturned by well life its been an interesting term.

My starting attempts at being more teaching oriented were interesting. Enough togetherness to blow school out of the water. Three weeks of crawling through new programs for Latin, and maybe Greek, struggles to get quiet. Big struggles. Eventually we pulled it all apart and are currently back to independent learning.

I'm not really happy. Can I do a better job of marrying the two. I would like to think so, but at the moment I'm to exhausted to try. So for now we stay apart. I miss the fun but I'm to exhausted to try and sort it out.