Where Does the Time Go?

 I am an organized person.

I run our household on good, solid routines that allow for flexibility and keep us in order.

But I'm feeling slightly insane at the number of interruptions to our homeschool days lately!!

It's not the kids' behaviors that are the problem right now; it's other people (like dentists and friends) who keep demanding our time.

I'm going to have to get tough about defending our homeschool hours.

Tougher than I usually am!

Of course, we still did good stuff. 

Our Morning Meetings were particularly good this week.  Kids had solid questions and participated in discovering and discussing answers.

The teens and I read the Thoreau chapter in our American Lit. book.  There's so much to think about when reading Thoreau!!  We also continued The Last of the Mohicans.

Nature Angel was able to have an introductory class in welding via her church activity group.

She LOVED it!  

I think more welding is in her future. :)

Little Princess passed her CAP speech requirement this week.  She has a little aerospace quiz to take, and then she can schedule her huge Mitchell exam.  Once that is passed, she'll be promoted to 2nd lieutenant.  She's also in the running for cadet commander (I think that's the right staff position name) for her squadron.

This week's Mandarin class went off without a hitch.  She enjoyed it, and it looks like it will be a successful class over the next year.

I found Nature Angel's Google account open to an edX page.  Curious, I asked her about it later.  It turns out that she's studying neuroscience via one of their free courses!  

Homeschoolers are just cool people!

I told her to keep me informed about the hours she puts into the course, and I'd make sure it ends up on her transcript.

And then there's this photo I found in her account:

That's Lola with a cooking pot on her head.

A.  I love that Nature Angel caught and preserved this moment.

B.  I love that Lola's brain works in non-traditional ways (at least I love it sometimes).

The younger kids and I finished The Boy Who Fell off the Mayflower, and we didn't replace it with a new book because we're so close to the end of this unit.  The kids are loving Moby Dick and Prince Caspian.  We moved from Nikolaus Copernicus to Tycho Brahe in The Story of Science, and I never got a chance to do any magnet activities all week! :(

We did do an Art for Kids Hub drawing lesson.  It's officially a lesson on how to draw a pirate ship, but we adapted it to a whaling ship to go with Seabird.

Baymax utterly refused to go along with the majority vote to do this lesson instead of a narration and independent drawing.  I let him follow his own choice, and he wrote a good paragraph about ship-building accompanied by a solid drawing of a ship's "skeleton."

Lola got to do flower arranging in her church activity group.

She told me, "I found out today that I am very picky about flower arrangements."

She found it to be so joyful that she made another arrangement with fall flowers and leaves she found around our yard.

We're deep in dance rehearsals.  Our group is finally settling into the numbers we're going to have for the year.  This means that our routines are finally settling into the forms they're going to have for the year.

A picture of Nature Angel's class.  You can see who follows directions and who . . . follows the impulse of the moment in this picture!

Sir Walter Scott saw a sign for free wood in a neighbor's yard.  (A tree had fallen in a storm a few months ago.)  He borrowed a truck from a friend, and then he and our boys spent a couple of hours hauling wood back to our house.  

I think we have enough wood for two winters' worth of fires!

Every single boy came in the house happy from all of the heavy work and sporting one wound or another.

Baymax got the worst of it with 8 stings after he accidentally stepped in a wasps' nest.

Then the kids had a blast when Sir Walter Scott organized a wood-chopping party one afternoon.

So. Much. Sweat.

And testosterone!

Honestly, I hope we never run out of wood to chop.  It is just such perfect work for boys!

I am admitting that we now have a tradition of doing high school at the park on Friday mornings while the rest of the kids play.

But they're outgrowing playgrounds.

Even Baymax and Lola.

Baymax brought a book in case he "got bored."
Lola did get bored and came to sit and listen to me read aloud to the teens.

How is it possible that we're getting to the point where swings and jungle gyms and slides are boring?

Mister Man finished Math 7 and started Pre-Algebra.

Everyone got to practice their cooking skills by frying their own eggs for breakfast on Saturday, and then most of us headed out the door for our first day of homeschool soccer!

(I'm going to have to take some pictures in the coming weeks.)

Lola and Baymax went to a church escape room activity instead of soccer this week, but they'll attend all of the soccer practices to come.

We're learning a lot!  Even if it's in bits and pieces between appointments and outside demands.