Plodding Right Along

Whew!! Time has been flying by at a blistering pace since taking G out of public school. It is hard to believe that it is almost time to send in our first attendance report. Yikes, time stands still for no man! We have been very busy getting our school organized for the past four weeks. Almost every piece of furniture in this house has been moved at least once in an attempt to find the right place for everything. On top of that the boys decided to switch rooms. G has slept in T's room every night since T left for college partly in an attempt to annoy his big brother and partly because it makes him feel close to T while he is gone. For the first few weeks T ran G out when he came home every weekend but two weeks ago T said, "Let him sleep in there. I am getting used to sleeping on a twin bed." So, since then the big bed has been G's and the twin bed has been T's but the contents of the rooms remained as they have always been. Last weekend, however, T said he really likes G's room better (don't know if he is being totally truthful or not but he said it is quieter in there which is a possibility). Anyway Sunday was spent switching everything except beds and dressers from one room to the other (this was J's project).

My major project has been the school room. I have pulled most of my books out and arranged them (somewhat) on a bookcase we moved into the den-now schoolroom/cafeteria. I didn't realize that I had so many books. I sold most of our homeschool books after moving to this house 3 years after putting T in traditional school thinking that we would never need them again. Of course soon after selling all the books which T almost had a stroke over I decided to go back to school to complete my degree. My love of books took over and I began to build a library for a future classroom. I didn't realize how many books I had accumulated from book sales in the last three years. I even bought one of my own books back at a consignment sale without realizing it until I got home and T recognized my anal retentive organizational coding on the spine. I had sold it on ebay 4 years prior to finding it at the consignment sale!!

We are happily plodding along without formal curriculum for the time being. I would have cringed to have been curriculum free this far into the school year with T but G and I are doing a unit study on apples, working on reading and phonics, fine tuning computer skills, and plunging into math at a blistering pace. T was even impressed last week when he came home to hear G skip-counting. His favorite things right now are playing sight words games online, going through a sight word powerpoint I made him and playing a virtual math manipulative game with base ten blocks. I just love the sound of his voice when he says, "I have ten, time to bundle em up." He is such a sweet and smart boy. Tonight he was asking how many years until he will be 16 and his dad said, "about 9." Without missing a beat G said, "and it is about to be 8." He is exactly right. He knew how to apply subtraction in a real life situation!!!