A Day In The Life - July 2008

Well, life goes on here! I thought I'd give an update with a few pics.

Here is why I couldn't get rid of the lab mix:



He is actually behaving better now that the collie is gone - he has stopped trying to run away and hasn't bothered any chickens in the week and a half since she's been gone. I think we may have had a situation where a "bad" dog was influencing a good dog to do wrong things... I'm hopeful he's going to work out now that she has gone back to her Rescue [where she is doing very well according to the Rescue Lady].

All the kids are happy that the dog is staying.

The Boy 6yo is doing great too! He is a little mechanical Genius [Georgia Tech is written all over his forehead I think....], constantly building and designing new things with legos and anything else he gets his hands on.

He tried to convince me this week that he NEEDS me to still brush his teeth [yeah, I know, the kid is going to be 7 in a few weeks...]. We had it out and he tried to convince me that he just wasn't *capable* of flipping open the Tom's of Maine toothpaste and actually brushing his *own* teeth.

Yeah... this from the kid who a few months back decided to replace all the batteries in ALL the baby's toys [ahem... we have a secret policy of "once the batteries run down and the thing shuts up, no batteries are EVER put in there again" LOL!]. He decided it would "make her happy" if he did this, so he went to his father's tool box, retrieved the correct screw drivers for each different task, and spent the whole day unscrewing battery packs and replacing batteries until our house sounded, once again, like an electronic zoo... LOL! And it DID make the baby happy - and the 3yo too actually.

So, I'm not buying this "I can't manage the tooth brush" thing... LOL!

Here is my cutie patootie Monkey4 3yo pretending to be a Mama Kangaroo [see the joey in her "pouch"?!] and jumping all over the living room:



Here is Monkey1 doing what she always does:



She's been doing so well lately - she's finally gotten through that difficult "stage" she went into when her dad left and she's being quite the wonder child of late. Very enjoyable young lady, that's for sure!

Below is Monkey3 5yo during her reading lesson today. She is doing *extremely* well with reading - I think she might be my first ever "on time" reader [we are late readers around here - me included LOL!]. In fact, I have just about decided that I screwed up ordering a Kindergarten curriculum for her, because it is SO easy for her that it is ridiculous. I probably should have started her with first grade level work, but I didn't know... we will just breeze through the K stuff I think [she's doing the equivalent of 3 days of work every day because it is so easy and she considers it "fun"]. I'll get her the first grade stuff as soon as she's done and let her move on.

If you look closely in the pic below, you can see Monkey4 is doing her hair for her while she reads. LOL! Nobody EVER does your hair for you while you do your schoolwork in public school. ;)



And now, the current Bane of My Existence, The Dreaded Shmoo:




See, that's our homeschool work she's crawling all over - I can't keep the crazy toddler off the table. It is a good thing she's so cute or she'd never make it. [God knew what He was doing with this one... LOL!]

I have been spoiled rotten by all my previous toddlers. ALL of them have been content to sit at the school table with us and write in their own little coloring books, play with their blocks, do puzzles, and scribble on paper while the big kids did their work. All of them have - and they've all been willing to do this for an hour or so and then toddle off to play with something else when they are bored.

But not The Dreaded Shmoo. This child is not happy unless she's flinging everyone's books everywhere, stealing their pencils, snatching their bookmarks out of the books [right before she flings them across the room], crawling over them while they are trying to write, writing over their work on their page while they are trying to do it, BITING them randomly when she's mysteriously annoyed, ripping pages out of books and ripping up assignments....

ARGH! I don't know how I will survive this next school year trying to school with this toddler and an infant on the way! I'm terrified [really - see me Tremble! LOL!]. She's putting off her naps later and later [I think she's going to be an early nap-giver-upper like a couple of her other sibs have been] and we can't even do school while she naps...

By the end of the morning today I was a bundle of nerves from trying to teach the Kindergartener and the Second Grader while wrangling The Dreaded Shmoo. I was ready to toss her out a window, seriously. Thank Goodness Monkey1 is a pretty independent learner now with her 4th grade stuff - she doesn't require much help from me these days....

Guess that's what we get for naming a baby after Feisty Mother Angelica, huh?! This baby has ALL of her spunk and fire, let's just all pray to God that we can instill her holiness in there too, or the world is TRULY in trouble! ;)

One other note - as far as Sonlight, I have decided to keep both the Cores I bought [1/2 and 3/4]. I've been reasonably happy with Core 1/2. Not so much Core 3/4. I have been spending quite a many hours reading through the lesson plans in great detail [now that I've gotten them together right LOL!], and I think the program will work for us.

I still feel unhappy with Sonlight in general - I think the lesson plans are a nightmare. They are all mixed up, referencing the wrong page numbers to the study guides and just not carefully edited. In addition, in the study guides themselves, there are lots of careless mistakes - like using the wrong character name for a character in a discussion, and also including answers that are wrong and weren't what was in the book [the study guides are supposed to be the mother's "cheat sheet" so she doesn't have to read the books the kids have to read but can still ask them questions and make them answer... but some of the answers are wrong...].

And, I wouldn't trust Sonlight AT ALL to pick age appropriate content at this point - I WILL be reading all the books in Core 3/4 before I allow my daughter to read them, and some of them will not be read - at least until she is quite a bit older.

Core 1/2 seems great though, and I've decided to just use that for all 3 older kids this year and do Core 3/4 [my edited version anyway] with all of them for next year. That is going to work fine for us I think.

I think, having "lived and learned" at this point, I wouldn't recommend Sonlight to anyone who is looking for an "easy" way to do literature based education - which I love. I think it would be cheaper and easier to use the book lists from Mother of Divine Grace and Angelicum and just come up with your own curriculum - plus, those book list are all *safe* from what I have learned - meaning they don't include stuff like rape scenes for 9 year olds to read.

I guess I'm saying, I like the *idea* behind Sonlight, but their execution stinks IMO. LOL!

Have a great week!