This is my plan for tomorrow.

[altarflame]

I almost always privatize to-do lists, because I want privacy and/or they're boring, but I feel so idyllic and pampered lately - with my AA done and GMYS, PATH and TLC having been on holiday break; with Aaron not dancing due to leg injury; with a period of no doctors appts for Isaac and no counselor for me; I'm living the life of a stay at home mom the way I remember it from when my kids were babies and toddlers...except they don't need any of the things babies and toddlers need, anymore. There's an endless barrage of requests to "watch" and to "see" from the younger ones, and a lot of cajoling necessary on my part towards the older ones, but...I am feeling all this free time, and it feels good. For most of the last two years, I didn't have time to cook really good food the way I wanted to, or to educate them AND have minutes of leisure for myself in the same day.

Wednesday, the 9th...
-up at 7; make orange breakfast muffins
-help Isaac get ready for school (include choosing science fair topic and writing first sentence to take to Ms Lopez)
-go in and sign the homeschooling-Elise-again-form when I drop him off (8:15ish)
-wake up all those dratted whatsits and offer them muffins, butter, honey and jam; I'm having leftover lentil soup for breakfast
-write the Elise homeschooling letter to the school board and put it in the mailbox; make an appt by phone with TK about evaluations at some later date
-make them do their chores
-assign everyone their schoolwork for the day
-somewhere in there, get some amount of dishes washed
-NAP for 2 hours (approximately 10-12)
-french omelettes for Me, Annie and Jake's lunch; eggs for Aaron and something (like pbj) for Elise
-checking, going over schoolwork done while I was napping; helping with things they need help with, teaching things that require lessons; assigning more (also includes making contact with Ananda's marine science teacher via phone or email)...this is also the time period I'll be preparing tea
-picking Isaac up at 3; talking with him about his day for a bit
-"High tea" out on the deck at 3:30, featuring cream cheese sandwiches (ham and cucumber, respectively) and this flourless chocolate cake I baked tonight with the girls
-get him started on his homework; get everyone else working on whatever they have undone
-bubble bath for me once they're set
-walk for everyone so Elise can run (6ish)
-roast chicken with vegetables all in the pan (Isaac and Elise bathe while it cooks, as they're least recently bathed), for dinner, which is around 7:30
-do at least a few dishes
-assign them all a brief cleaning job
-they brush their teeth
-reading to everyone one and two at a time, Isaac first since he has to wake up early and Elise second since she fell asleep before reading tonight. This takes forever, Isaac will be read to around 9:15, Elise 30 minutes (i.e., a chapter of Harry Potter) later, then Jake at 10ish, and when the littles are all sleeping I end up talking and reading long chapters to A&A until God knows when (tonight it was til 2...last night, I think more like midnight)
-make a real blog post while they're sleeping, with pictures and so on

I am taking these slower days to finalize my plans and goals for this year, and they'll wisk us away again soon enough, onto the highways and into the waiting rooms, with food bags packed in the van. Today, we sat around the dining table playing Jenga and Chinese Checkers and watching educational videos and there was a lot of jumping rope on the trampoline. I cleaned out our big dining room storage closet and they've been using all kinds of things that have been MIA for months - like the pattern blocks, and the stamping set. Annie cleaned out her own closet without any prompting and passed down so much stuff (clothes, accessories and toys) to Elise that it was like second Christmas for her.

The weather has been perfect for keeping the french doors open all over the house in the afternoons and evenings.

Thursday is a designated sewing day, where there would be naps and a bubble bath for me tomorrow; teach Annie to sew, and in the process work on her quilt, do a few little things people have been waiting on me to do (stuffed animal repair, dress alteration, et al.) - I am getting close to a point when I have to do some maintenance on my machine again but I think we can get a couple of more days like this out of it first, and they don't come often enough for that to be pressing.

Friday is a writing planning day - I have at least half a dozen emails to send, 3 different projects' notes to gather, and a schedule to settle on that may include travelling.

I also have to keep in mind that I have a personal guideline to apply to 3 universities and for financial aid before my diploma comes in the mail (which is supposed to be 6 weeks after graduating, or 3.5 weeks from now).

I feel so wildly lavish and blessed to be financially taken care of and able to live this way. I mean, my God, what rare and precious opportunities all around.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Mmm orange breakfast muffins...

Why is Elise being homeschooled again, I thought she loved school?

[altarflame.livejournal.com]

They're not much on their own, but with some butter, etc they're amazing :)

Elise loved preschool; she has not loved kindergarten (has hated it some of the time, actually, and been lukewarm the rest). Either way, regardless of what she liked, I never intended for her to stay in school forever - preschool being mornings only last year was basically her extracurricular, and I feel kinda guilty honestly because the main reason she had to stay in the first half of K despite BEGGING to stop and me seeing some possible detriments there, was because it was free, reliable babysitting while I was in college :/ I just needed to get this last semester out of the way at MDC. Leaving Ananda, Aaron and Jake alone for 5 hours twice a week was not a big deal at all. If Isaac and Elise were here, it would have been a totally sketchy disaster - they are not autonomous in the same way, but they also throw off the group dynamic big time.

Anyway, my two main problems with her being in have been:

-she's getting down on herself, more and more as time passes, because of how she was failing their sight word and spelling tests on Fridays. I couldn't possibly give a shit less about that, because she was pointing sight words gone by out as I would read to her, and writes spelling and sight words down constantly, even doing things like writing, "I see a..." and then asking how to spell "tree," etc. Elise has some borderline language delays and I suspect there might be a short term memory thing at work here with how she acquires language skills, and basically you keep drilling and she catches up in fits and spurts in amongst falling behind here and there. I'm ok with that; she's on par with where she should be for her age. But it makes for "bad grades" and a teacher all stressed about the bad grades and Elise sad that she isn't getting the rewards the good grade kids are. My opinion, as you may have ascertained, is "fuck grades, I want her to learn to read and write and to feel good about herself."

-I think it was actually hurting her speech, to be in a situation where she got in trouble for talking and was influenced by a bunch of 5 year olds talking every day. It's been 3 weeks since Christmas break started, that she's been home, and in the last two days Annie and my sister have both remarked on her amazing language leaps, which I think about and see every day - and I'm sure it's partially because NOW, she's engaged in one on one conversations with adults and older kids all day every day (whether we like it or not...)

There were also some increasingly irritating behavior issues that I totally see as "school kid" kinda things...if you've spent much time in groups of homeschoolers and then gotten back around kids that go to school, you probably know what I mean. And they were telling her a bunch of annoying hoohaw about gender roles/stereotypes, and constantly feeding her corn syrup crap snacks, treats, etc. But I would have dealt with everything in this paragraph, if not for the bullet points before it.

Isaac is really thriving in school; it's kind of amazing. I just met with a social worker there yesterday about getting him allowances on the FCAT, for his reading disorder and anxiety (like no time limits for the reading part, and having the math and science portions read to him). We're working on his science project, he's got a crush on someone and a circle of friends now, he comes home energized telling me all about his day. I love his teachers and meet/email with them regularly. It's always been like this with him, though - he wouldn't sleep until we got him out of our bed, wouldn't stop throwing fits all day long until I weaned him, wouldn't get along with his siblings in a functional way til we separated him into his own room, and didn't take off academically til I put him in school. *shrug* They're all really different.

from eBirdie

[(Anonymous)]

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what you mean by "school kid behavior issues...". I was homeschooled myself, though only for the last several years of high school, my brother from a much younger age and for most of his schooling. My own child is now in public school and sometimes I wonder if certain behaviors are just a stage that I don't remember going through myself, given that she's still very young and I don't recall every single thing from when I was six or so, or if they're things that she's picking up specifically from a school environment and a community of peers, etc. How do you know if it's Elise's school/peers doing it, or if it's just Elise, in other words? (I mean, aside from taught things like gender roles, if she's suddenly spouting beliefs different from what she's taught at home.)

Re: from eBirdie

[altarflame.livejournal.com]

Some of it is like the gender roles - it's obvious that it couldn't have come from anywhere else. Such as, particular insults and mean words we don't use, cultural references to things she wouldn't be exposed to by us, and saying things in the wrong ways that she would not have heard here (lots of double negatives, the word "ain't").

Other things are "really probably most likely" from school, though I guess they could just be Elise things - they're things I've only seen in school kids in the past, anyway, that sure do seem like she's bringing them home. Like, embarrassment at anything related to her ever having been younger, a whole gossip chain of other 5 year olds' love lives, a constant self consciousness about eating healthy or wearing different clothes or enjoying unusual things - this is different than shyness, which of course I see everywhere, and it is sometimes very subtle, but basically homeschoolers seem to have a noticeable (and to me awesome) lack of it. They just are who they are, with an ease that is kinda destroyed by being steeped in unrelated peers all day every day with just a couple of adults supervising as people get judged, teased, chosen for friends, etc. There's also an eye roll-y response to my displeasure, rather than taking me seriously, and the regular use of sarcasm, both of which usually start 3-5 years later than this in homeschooled kids I've been exposed to.

The most obvious and annoying things are the volume increase and the attention span decrease, though. I suppose they're also the most subjective to try to blame anything for, but I swear she's already quieter and less easily bored, just 3 weeks into being out of school.

Ultimately every child is different and there are, of course, spectrums of behaviors in homeschooled and in formally schooled kids, most of which have some overlap! I've often found it very difficult to spend a lot of time around large groups of homeschoolers, though, without being sort of aghast when I get around "regular kids" again for the first time in awhile.