Christmas time Meditations

I've been snuggled up to my sleeping daughter for a couple hours now this morning.  L's such a bundle of energy and life when she's awake that she always seems to shrink while asleep.  I'm giving her some time to sleep in on this frigid morning... the wind chills are well below zero, but her school is running its normal schedule.  Since she's so sleepy, I'm giving her her own delay!

  My baby will soon be 5yo, Christmas is only ten days away, and I'm carving out a few moments of peace.  I'm so delighted to see my children grow and mature, but it's so bittersweet as they grow away from me.  Yes, my 13yo and 11yo still need me, just not as much as they once did.  R took his first Challenge A blue book exams last week.  He did well, especially considering the two weeks that he missed early this fall to pneumonia! Challenge has been a great learning experience.  Seeing a whole hemisphere with countries, hand-drawn by my son, is amazing!  He's not struggling in the strands that I worried about; geography and Latin have been great.  Surprisingly, the writing strand has been the source of the greatest trouble for him.  Affirmative-Negative-Interesting charts are the issue.  Dad has a logical creative thinking methodology that he's introducing to R, so hopefully that will help! We love homeschooling!  We have our moments, but the togetherness has been wonderful.  Rewards like a long snow break are just icing on the cake!

  My peaceful moment has passed, and L is awake now.  It's time to move, get her to school, clean the house, bake, and dot all my Christmas i's/cross all the t's.  The coming weeks will hold lots of excitement.  I also wait on my referral about possible Ehlers-Danlos hypermobility syndrome.  Will that be good news?  I don't know, but knowing a name for my physical struggles would be nice.

May God bless you this Christmas!

 

Summertime

Finally sharing again, and this time more than a year later! Let me catch up: We've continued to homeschool using Classical Conversations as our spine, now with 3 years at home.  R begins Challenge A in the fall, A continues Foundations and Essentials, and my baby, S, begins Foundations.  L, my special needs kiddo, also has a big change coming, as she begins kindergarten.  I've got a LOT of anxiety about this step, but know that God's got this!! After 3 years at home, I think our homeschool has really come together.  Other homeschool mamas have said the same; 3 years seems to be the learning curve to know just how to organize this whole homeschool adventure.  Some WONDERFUL books that have helped me figure out what I wanted our homeschool to be are: The Well-Trained Mind, The Core, and Teaching From Rest.

 I also love Simply Classical to guide me how to help my special one learn, even though I'm not home educating her.  In addition to CC, we use Saxon math, the Story of the World Series as a read-aloud, as well as living books.  This summer, while we have our CC break, we're practicing Latin declensions, exploring Latin roots to English words with Vocabulary Bridges, studying Ohio history with Along the Ohio Trail resource from the state auditor's office, learning to type with typing.com, and studying foreign languages with Duolingo (R-Spanish and A-French... I'm supposed to keep up with both, but that hasn't happened!). We're also reviewing previous cycles' memory work, drawing maps with a new resource to us: ArtK12's Draw series, daily cursive practice, math for A since she hasn't finished her book yet, and weekly nature study and book discussions. We've read the books that R will be assigned in Challenge A, and now are discussing them one at a time. Yes, he's ahead on that, but I'm simply making sure that the book reading doesn't stop his papers this year!

We also LOVE summer reading clubs! This year we are signed up for our local library, Exodus Books' Outside of a Dog program, Half-Price Books, and Barnes & Noble for A (R is too old... 🙁). I'm going to Give Your Child the World too; such a great new book to connect kids to this amazing world!

As you can see, I'm delighted with our homeschool! I wish that my health was as solid, but this doesn't seem to be the time for that, yet. Over the last 2 years, I've seen 6 different specialists. What I'm left with as a diagnosis is chronic fatigue syndrome with systemic exertion intolerance disease (CFS-SEID).

Unfortunately, there's not much that I can do to improve, but I'm working on it: graded exercise, good nutrition, and lots of rest. This is a hard diagnosis with young kids, especially one with special needs. My older children are super help, though! A big regret of mine is that I can't be as useful to my husband, however, as I'm nearly always utterly exhausted by the time he's home. I thought about this dilemma for a few months, and have hit upon a partial answer. I prepare crockpot freezer meals so we can have good food without lots of late-day irk from me (or hubby)! We have some favorite recipes so far, and I've got a list to try in the future.