Christmas Week & Mid-Year Plans

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.

On Wednesday Sir Walter Scott went to work.  The kids and I had Morning Meeting, did some general tidying up, and headed to my sister's house for a family dinner.

Brother had a complete meltdown in the van, but I had 3 teens to contain him, and we made it home relatively safely.

Ladybug had a meltdown when we got home.

I'd planned to gently incorporate some basic school routines into our day on Thursday to help our tired, overwhelmed children feel normal again, but we were hit with fevers and colds, so I skipped it all in favor of quiet play, stories, movies, and rest.

Brother ran away twice.  The first time I was able to convince him to come home via a shouted conversation from one end of the block to the other.  I didn't dare step toward him for fear of driving him further away.  Thankfully, our negotiations worked enough to get him home.

However, they didn't work enough to keep him home, and he ran off again--this time so quickly that I couldn't find him, and I had no car because Sir Walter Scott and the teens had them at various destinations.  I called 911 and sat tight.

Within 15 minutes, he knocked on our door.  He was poised to run again, but kept him talking while Belle slipped behind him, and we got him into the house.  Belle held him while I called 911 again to report him found, and then I took him to his room where he told me that he came home because he remembered that I love him.  For reasons I cannot identify, he got angry with me again, and he kicked, punched, and pushed me for the next hour.

He said his goal was to kill me, but he was quite ineffective, and I was not actually ever afraid.  Eventually he calmed down, apologized, and was quite careful with me for most of the rest of the day.

I feel slightly crazy trying to reconcile this sweet brother reading to his sick sister with the child that beat on me for nearly an hour!

He did intentionally flood the bathroom before bed, but I was able to restrain him and dress him while the older kids mopped up.  I sat by his bedside singing lullabies until he fell asleep.

How grateful I am that he took his meds before he got destructive again!

How grateful I am that my teens were home to take care of the rest of the kids while I was busy with Brother!

On Friday Sir Walter Scott was home, and after I saw my doctor for my depression med follow-up I shut down.  There were so many household/family/homemaking/homeschooling projects I could have worked on, but I couldn't.  My brain was off, and my body would not cooperate.  I think that attack on Thursday wiped me out.

I did manage to feed everyone and catch up on laundry, though. :)

It is Saturday morning.  We are expecting severe storms to arrive any minute, and we are hunkered down in the house with beans in the crockpot and leftover Christmas treats to finish consuming.

We completed 5 Morning Meetings this week (every day but Christmas) during which we enjoyed selected readings from A King James Christmas, continued our Book of Mormon readings, read several more stories from The Jesus Storybook Bible, and sang Christmas carols.  We also completed our study of the New Testament with Revelation 12-22.

Belle finally finished her Personal Progress, and now she can start using that driver's permit she got during the summer!

We had a few days of reading aloud at lunch time, during which we continued The Family Under the Bridge. 

Nature Angel, Little Princess, Mister Man and I finished Jane of Lantern Hill and began Mustang, Wild Spirit of the West during our bedtime reading. 

The youngest kids were quite disenchanted with Pollyanna, so they've asked me to stop reading chapter books for a while.  We've read a pile of delightful picture books in the past couple of weeks including The Velveteen Rabbit; White Snow, Bright Snow; lots of Harold and the Purple Crayon stories; and The Crippled Lamb.

As for our homeschool . . .

We'll pick up where we left off without many changes to what we were doing.  We'd finally found a rhythm that was working, and while it does not check off all of the boxes I'd like and have invested in, it checks off enough to meet state standards and allow us room to rest as needed.

Morning Meetings will focus on studying the Book of Mormon instead of the New Testament in order to follow our church's Come, Follow Me curriculum for personal and family study.  We'll sing a primary song or hymn each week and have a weekly scripture to memorize (or at least familiarize) that goes with the main lesson.  In addition, I'm deciding on whether we'll do some church history readings or Old Testament stories.

I need to decide soon!

I keep wanting to restart Academy, but I feel so exhausted when I start planning, that I'm leaning toward not starting that again until the exhaustion leaves.  We'll keep up with our lunch time read alouds instead.

Individual school will start right after breakfast with kids at the table with study carrels separating them so they can concentrate.  I'll keep my pockets full of Skittles to reward them for working quietly, asking for help politely, waiting for turns, persevering in spite of challenges, and completing work.

Brother and Beowulf began to make terrific progress in reading and math during December.  I hope very much to continue that in January and beyond. 

We're looking at starting a new med regimen for Ladybug next week that I hope will help her.  Her family life, social skills, and academic progress have been failing of late.

Mister Man will continue his abbreviated schedule of just literature and arithmetic until he finishes one.  Then we'll pick back up with science until that is done.  This year focusing on just one or two subjects at a time is better than trying to do a little bit of many subjects.

Colloquium will focus on Greek Mythology for the rest of the year.  If, for some reason, we are able to bring back history and/or science, we will.

For Symposium, the teens and I will pick back up with The Good and the Beautiful High School Language Arts 2.  We started Unit 7, completing both the dictation exercises and the insight journal before our break. We'll continue our concentrated focus on this curriculum until it is done and then pick up either the Ancient History or American Lit. studies that we dropped in the fall.  The teens will continue to work on their various Algebra and Health studies until they are done before selecting new subjects to focus on.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to give the teens high school credit for all of the emergency response work they do in our home.  Those hours are highly educational in very challenging ways, and I'm wondering if we could create an Emergency Mental Health/Crisis Management internship.

I think we could!