A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

I think the worst ending of the past two weeks is the ending of a friendship that I thought was solid.   It's a long and ridiculous story. Pride. Pride is a terrible thing. So is self doubt. Both of which I have in spades. (We literally just finished The Screwtape Letters this week, so we've been studying pride and self-doubt!   " . . . if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, ‘How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or show off?’" I was snubbed, not taken notice of, had an oar shoved in what I thought was my space, patronized, and shown off in front of, and I got mad. Really mad. I am trying very hard to repent. I am trying very hard to forgive. But I no longer feel safe around this person that I previously trusted with my real self. My flawed, imperfect, real self. I think I'm somewhat muddled up with the teachings of Christ and the teach...

 All I really want to write is that we're just doing the same things--school, church activities, dance, work (Nature Angel and Sir Walter Scott), chores, park days, psych appointments, grocery shopping, cooking, dentist appointments, CAP, and so on and so forth. The week that I thought was going to be so beautiful that I tentatively planned to take a week off school to enjoy it turned out to be rainy and uncomfortable, so we just did regular school things. It's why I didn't write last week.  I could have.  But I just let the time slide. But there have been moments I should have captured. Our old fridge began to die, and we got a new one at the scratch and dent store.  The new one is huge and easy to use and quiet.   The fan in the old one went from making grinding, moaning noises intermittently to often to almost constantly, and while it made me slightly insane, it made Beowulf lose it completely. As in violent rages. Once I connected the rages to the fridge no...

 In my last post, I whined about how our schedule is never-endingly being interrupted. I said I wanted to get serious about defending our school time. But I'm looking at our calendar, and there's not much end in sight.  The interruptions are already in place, and some are still arriving without my permission (via other people in the family), so I'm trying to embrace this attitude: A local homeschooling friend recently told me that she has 12 medical appointments for her family this week! That was the trigger that got me re-thinking my attitude about what is and what isn't within my sphere of control. So, I cannot change psych and dentist appointments because they depend on too many variables beyond my control. I cannot change Nature Angel's work schedule when she accidentally picked up a shift that she thought was outside of school hours but turned out to be during school hours. I cannot change when The Munchkin's bus is late. I cannot change when my kids have b...

 Brother's behaviors ramped up a notch or two. I think it's because school is putting more demands on him than the freedom of the last weeks of summer offered. One day of school was interrupted so much that it lasted until dinner.  In truth, most of the kids had lots of free time, but Brother and I had a long, hard day, and he even missed a large part of our reading because he just got up and walked out. And it was Sarah Whitcher's Story --the favorite read-aloud of the week! Another day, he refused to participate in the science experiments because he was mad at Beowulf. Nothing helps him through these times of irritation but time and space--which is not conducive to a family homeschool.  Our choices are to go on without him, in which case he misses school, or to stop and wait him out, in which case our days get sooooo loooooong. We've tried both ways this week, and neither was very satisfying.   I am reminded that no one style of homeschooling fits our family f...