A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

On Sunday we went to church, played Uno for family night, and then watched Return of the Jedi while we ate popcorn. On Monday Sir Walter Scott took the youngest 7 to the zoo while the older girls and I cleaned and shopped and prepped for our Christmas Eve that evening (Sir Walter Scott worked Christmas day, so we celebrated a day early). The zoo highlight was watching juvenile oryxes play fight with their emerging horns. We had our family Nativity reenactment, ate cookies, and put out stockings.  Sir Walter Scott and I had fun playing "The Santa Game" before falling into bed. So excited to be shepherd!  With Pixie as photobomber. Cast photo after the show--the black lump on the bottom right is Super Star as Herod. On Tuesday , our Christmas, we had a quiet day with presents, play, reading, and snacking. Waiting to be allowed into the living room . . . Nature Angel made most of her gifts to the family, and there were tears and sweet hugs all around.

It was a good week. Bedtime yoga led by Nature Angel Brother worked so hard every day to keep from having a breakdown, and he succeeded all the way to Friday afternoon.  Honestly, he's fighting his personal demons every waking moment--putting mind-numbing effort into keeping control of himself. It's exhausting to be his mother, but it must be even more exhausting to be him! We're working hard to notice his efforts and offer deserved praise and encouragement. Ladybug had a couple of wretched behavior episodes, but they were just isolated and annoying. Beowulf has begun to have increasingly violent episodes.  He's confirming the pattern we've seen in Brother and Ladybug that age 7 is a pivotal and especially challenging year.  We've had a few discouraged sighs and some significant squaring of our shoulders as we gear up for what Beowulf's development will bring to the table. We're hoping it's not quite as hard as Ladybug's and Brot

It was as close to ordinary a week as we are likely to have for quite some time. I'll call that a blessing. We had Morning Meeting every day, including a wall mural of a portion of the Revelation of John, and the finishing of the New Testament portion of The Bible for Children . We had 5 Symposiums which included working on a biographical essay, grammar, punctuation, another watercolor pencil art project, lots of North American geography, and finishing Sagebrush Surgeon . We had no Academies , but we are continuing to have lunch time read alouds.  This week we finished The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and began The Other Wise Man . Nature Angel, Little Princess, and I completed 2 more lessons (5 stories) in Greek Mythology. We watched The Nutcracker, performed by the Colorado Ballet.  It was exquisite.  I hope we can wrangle enough kids at our house to continue to qualify for this school outreach privilege.  We barely qualified this year with 10 kids at home!

Wednesday was hard, but also filled with the tender mercies of God. One of those was an impromptu visit from a precious friend who pulled her kids out of school this year in order to homeschool them. I have been filled with insecurity about our homeschooling this semester.  I'm just not certain I'm serving my kids the way they need to be served educationally.  My friend looked me in the eye and said, "They are so much better off at home.  They are so much better where they are.  Even doing less than what you're used to, you're doing more." My poor older kids had bags under their eyes and slumped shoulders from trying to corral the younger kids while I visited, but that visit buoyed my spirit more than I can describe.  I thanked my children profusely for serving me by letting me have that visit. (And I made cookies for my exhausted older kids.) We're still doing about half of the school that we're used to, and we're doing only about 10%

I truly work hard to be positive, even as I record the very hard. I couldn't do it last week. So I didn't write at all.  (If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.) But, my depression/anxiety meds have been increased; I'm starting to feel the effects; and I've had a miracle or two that I've been able to identify. I think I can say something nice. We did, in fact, share ever-so-may things to be thankful for this month. We are blessed. Very little formal schooling has been happening.  Quite simply, I ran out of the emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical reserves that I've always been able to call on to keep going in spite of the challenges around us.  Not even our beloved routines were enough in the power of the exhaustion that took me down. We did keep morning, meal, and bedtime routines intact, however. But that was almost all I could manage, and that was due to the fact that Sir Walter Scott has been home on FMLA