This is my crew last summer--the day we said goodbye to Pixie as she headed off to college. I actually have all 12 of my children home right now. Rose Red is nearly 20, graduated from our homeschool a year and a half ago, lives at home, and is working as a server at Applebee's as she tries to understand what it means to be an adult. Pixie is newly 18, graduated from our homeschool almost a year ago, is a dance major at BYUI, and is spending her off-track semester working full-time in the 1-year-old room at a daycare. These two still are part of our family days, and their schedules directly impact the rest of us, but I am no longer responsible for their day-to-day educational needs. The remaining 10 are still under my educational supervision. Among these 10 children we are schooling while we cope with anxiety, depression, FASD, ADHD, DMDD, ODD, ASD, PTSD, and Intellectual Disability. Here is a February Wednesday in our lives. 5:04 am : Sir Walter Scott's a...
Last August I was not ready for school to start, but I did it anyway because I thought I should. And in September I had mental health crisis of the most serious kind. This August I am not ready for school to start. And I'm honoring that. However, I am ready to document brief moments of the beautiful learning that my kids engage in when I'm not running school. This week Rose Red is in Florida at a surfing camp. She's with a sweet friend. I could not be happier for her to have this experience away from home, at the beach, out-of-doors, physically active, and just plain cool. As far as I'm concerned, this is a quarter of a credit of P.E. The rest of us are at home. My teens are reveling in their last days of bizarre teen sleeping schedules before early morning seminary begins next week. Pixie has been working on memorizing the dances she's choreographed for our dance team. She'll be teaching the 10-12 year olds and dancing with the 12-17 year o...
I'm not sure why I'm so full of self-doubt and complaints as I am right now, but it's a reality. I'm healthy again. Just left with the sniffles and occasional congestion that will probably follow me until spring. But no fatigue or weepiness anymore. I got the Christmas books ready. I suppose we need a prettier basket, but I'm quite pleased with how many fabric gift bags I've sewed this month . . . and how pretty they are. (That baby gift bag on the left is how Lola chose to package one of her gifts to a sibling. 😆 ) On Monday afternoon, I sat with the kids and read all of the books we'd missed from the first to the 9th. It was a lovely time with so many expressions of joy and remembrance as favorite books appeared. With the fire burning and the Christmas tree lights glowing, it felt like Christmas! Their assignment that day was to choose one illustration from one of the books--each child had his/her choice--and reproduce it as well as possible. I d...
Love that. Very self aware.
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