what's up weekly. (back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that i'm not a fool.)

Well.

This week has been a doozy.  It has seriously been so wild.

I'm just going to insert some random photos through this post to give you a feel for how school is going.  Here you can see the babies during school time.  I have long felt that the most challenging part of homeschooling is not actually schooling, it's figuring out what to do with the pre-school set.  So far what has been working with the babies is a combination of distracting them with food, letting them tootle around when they're in a nonviolent mood, and incarcerating them in the exersaucers when they're being a menace to civil society (read: as naptime approaches).  Don't worry, they're given Cheerios and milk while they're in the clink, which they mostly just throw everywhere.  It's like the Martha Stewart prison experience for babies.

On Monday, we tried to start off on the right foot and get into our school rhythm, but Penelope had another CLEP test that afternoon.  This time, I took some of the kids with me so we could get some of our read alouds done in the lobby while we waited, which kind of worked except for the fact that the kids were wildly distractible the entire time, and also it felt weird to be reading an Austrian School economics book out loud directly across from the open door of the college recruiting office on the Army base.  It was weirdly subversive without being remotely stealthy.  Like, maybe these young guys in fatigues wanted to hear more about the Federal Reserve and fiat currency? No?

Anyway, all's well that ends well.  We were probably already on some kind of watchlist before this anyway, and also Penelope scored a 90% on her test (College Algebra!) so we went to Culver's for cheese curds.  It turned out to be a pretty good afternoon after all.

Tuesday was nice because I was actually home most of the day to get school done, although I did go to the library over lunch to print some things off and pick out some books for the kids for an upcoming activity, and it took forever and set our afternoon back a bit.  

Oey has a new true love: the wooden train set.  She literally will spend hours sitting by herself, playing trains.  She really grew up a lot just over the summer months.  She is a very different kid now than she was just at the end of last school year.  Such a big little thing.

In the evening on Tuesdsay, Todd and I took the babies to do the milk run and left Atticus in charge of making dinner.  He has done that for us the last two weeks, and has done a really great job and enjoys it, so this may be something we do more often.  It was fun getting to go run an errand with "just" Todd (only having two kids in tow basically feels like having zero kids in tow, comparatively).  After dinner, Todd had an elder session meeting, so the kids and I hung out and I got everyone in bed, and then I watched Gilmore Girls, because it is getting close to Fall, and that is what you do in the fall.

You wouldn't know it from the expression on her face in the above photo, but Juni has been LOVING school.  ADORING school.  BEGGING for more school.  And she's doing so well.  She's catching on to phonics very quickly, and has literally completed six weeks' worth of math worksheets just since we started last week.  This girl is going places.

Wednesday was another weird day.  I woke up with blisters all down my throat and along the side of my tongue, and with a hormone headache.  Penelope had a surprise babysitting job come up, so I dropped her off there in the morning, and came home to find Finneas sprawled on the couch with a fever.  On Wednesdays, our school work is a lot of "together" work at the table (map drills, math drills, memory work, grammar, dictation) or on the couch (geography, Shakespeare, poetry, and family read aloud).  Since we were missing a couple of the kids, and since it hurt to talk or read out loud, we just laid low.  The healthy and at-home kids worked on some independent schoolwork but there was nothing structured about the day.  In the afternoon, after I picked up Penelope, I ran a couple of quick errands.  By bedtime, Finneas was back to himself, so it seemed to be just a quick down-and-up thing.

He's thirteen-and-a-half. SOMEONE TELL ME HOW THIS KEEPS HAPPENING.

Yesterday, we mercifully got through all of the school day without a single errand, a single interruption, a single issue.  Everyone got through their work, I got all my individual time with the kids and we're going into Friday strong.  (Fridays are like Wednesdays - the schedule is quite different from M, T, Th, and it feels like reinventing the wheel each time.  I am not yet in a rhythm for Fridays - we do lots of read alouds, but also two grades worth of lab science, and some Fridays we do Fine Arts, and some Fridays I go grocery shopping... so it's kind of a wild card of a day.)  

Today is an "extra lab science" kind of Friday, so I need to go look over my lab plans to make sure I have everything I need on hand before we get started.  Also... I just now remembered I still need to have the kids take their "first day of school" photos.  Um, oops.  There's always something I'm forgetting!