A Fly On My Homeschool Wall

  . . . The rest of us played. We went swimming at a friend's pool.  (No pictures because we were swimming .) We spent a morning at the park. playing with my reading glasses These little kids aren't little anymore.  They spent almost all of their time skating, scootering, and exploring the pond and almost none of their time on the playground equipment. (I think I might be starting to have a bit of an identity crisis!) We did learn about two of the transitional elements, read half a dozen poems from A Child's Garden of Verses , read about Orpheus and Jason in D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology , and read about herons in our Conservation magazine. Then, another day, we met up with our American Rhythm friends at a spray park.  The big kids ran all over the place, chasing each other, spewing water from their mouths or their canteens.  They raced up the big "rock" for a safe zone and jumped off it to run around again. Little kids happily filled cups with water and du...

 By the middle of the week, we were hiding in the house because the air was so hot and heavy that it felt like trying to breathe bathwater outside. The blessing in the week was that I'd worked hard to clear out empty bedrooms and tidy up the living room in the basement, so we had a bunch of furniture-free space in which toddlers could run around and yell and scream and let off steam that they would usually let off outside. And, boy, did we need that space this week! While temperatures were still comfortable summer temps, we had a glorious time. Our first project was priming the picnic table that we'd sanded down the week before. Every kid got a turn or two, and in spite of my best intentions, it's still waiting for actual paint, but we'll get there. I don't know if the paint could have dried in the steamy hot weather anyway! My favorite project of the week, though, was Nature Angel's doing. I'd arranged with my teens to make this week a phone-free week for t...

We settled into survival mode.  On Monday, they had to check in at FSY in the late morning, and I thought that since it was Juneteenth, we might have a baby-free day. I packed a picnic and asked Sir Walter Scott to take the 6 younger kids along for the ride and for a date-with-Dad-outing because I was hoping to get some work done all by myself. However, first, two babies showed up (Mom was still recovering from surgery, so she needed help getting through the day), and then two more babies showed up (Mom was in the hospital, and Dad is a manager, so he had to go in to take care of stuff even on a holiday). By this time, the kids knew there was an outing offered, so I sent them happily off to see their sisters settled into their dorm rooms, and I settled in for a busy day with 4 babies ages 2-4. I did not take pictures because my hands were full every minute.  With all four kids coping with the strangeness of life with sick or missing mamas, they were very needy.  I spent a...