A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

We are trying to prepare our house for sale.  All of the little fixes and repairs that would have been nice but were deemed unnecessary over the past several years while my husband was in school are absolutely necessary now.  Things like replacing the broken basement window with something other than cardboard, fixing the leaky shower drain, replacing the screens with holes in them, painting the interior walls after 10 years of kids using them as art surfaces, installing the baseboards in the little girls' room, and so forth and so on ad nauseum . At least the list makes me slightly nauseous. In January I reduced our school plan to about 2 solid hours per day.  I still did preschool with H3 and A5 and still did language arts activities with A5.  I also worked on completing our Old Testament reading/study/journals with the older kids.  On their own they had to do math, their choice of workbook subject matter (more math, reading comprehension, grammar, whateve...

My precious J9 has only one riding lesson left--the one she's paying for out of her Christmas/birthday money.  The ones that we've paid for are over. When I watch her with the horses, though, my spirit cries out that this must go on!  I cannot take this nourishment away from my small but growing girl. I cannot afford it. It cannot end. I took my worries to my Heavenly Father . . . tentatively . . . informally . . . just wishfully . . . "I wish (J9) could keep riding . . ." (That's not how I was taught to pray.) I decided that one lesson per month cost the same as a month's worth of music or dance lessons, and we'd be willing to pay for those, so if she wanted to, she could continue with one lesson per month.  It would have to do.  It would have to be enough. J9's beloved riding teacher is the owner of the barn  (What delicious understatement it is that she calls her breathtaking arena and stables and farm "the barn.").  Her daug...