A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

This was a week of many highs and lows. I'm going to leave out the lows . . . which will make this a rather lopsided view of our family . . . but the highs are more fun . . . and I've already written ever so many sad posts. Most places are still closed, and the ones that are open require face masks.  I'm not willing to put face masks on my young ones who find them frightening, so we had a school day on Memorial Day . It was productive. Brother started this little Bible storybook spending a week on each story;  I would read it to him 3 times, and then he would work on reading it.  Part way through we switched to taking turns reading pages.  By the end, he was reading whole stories by himself.  He finished it on Monday. The teens and tweens wanted to catch the 50% sale at the thrift store, so they quickly made some face masks that wouldn't meet any safety standards anywhere but at least made them look compliant. The store required it. (I've studied t

4:04 pm I'm sitting on the floor of Brother's room as he cries. I thought I could prevent a disaster by calling him outside near me. I was wrong. Disaster came anyway. And now I'm waiting near him. I wonder about this waiting. It's all I can do right now. Wait. Wait. Wait. And hope. And pray. Being present. For when he is ready.

It was a hard week. Not as hard as it could have been. Not as hard as weeks in our past have been. But it was hard enough. How grateful I am that the sunshine (literally, the sun began to shine) appeared very late Friday afternoon, so that I could breathe a bit and remember how to be grateful. I am grateful for the freedom to count our own hours, define our own curriculm goals, and make changes as needed. Reading Plutarch's Lives has been more of a duty than a joy.  Duty is important, but this one began to suck away our lifeblood and define our days.  During one desperate afternoon, I did a bit of arithmetic and realized that even without finishing it, the teens had completed 145 hours of Ancient History Through Literature (part A) , and that is enough to call it a credit hour. I forgot to put a Bible on the top of the stack--a significant portion of our studies included several books of the Old Testament. So we finished up Marcus Cato's life, explored the c