Ordinary Time

[Cue music] Duh, Duh, Duh-duh, Duh, Duh, Duh-duh... Your mission, should you choose to accept it includes, 1. Declutter, clean, and stage a very large house with 12 occupants and 3 pets in approximately two months. 2. Teach five young children to read while doing #1. 3. Begin to develop new household habits in those 12 occupants so that the old habits of leaving personal items strewn about the house are changed to more organized behaviors. 4. Once pristine, keep the very large house with 12 occupants and 3 pets pristine. 5. Do this without sending the 10 year old human tornado to another residence. 6. Also do this while continuing to teach young children to read. 7. Do not lose your mind or your patience along the way. This message will self-destruct in 10 seconds.... leaving behind a pile of ash which will then need to be cleaned up. [Cue music] Duh, Duh, Duh-duh, Duh, Duh, Duh-duh.... (Yes, I know we can only do what can do. But we would really like the house, once o...

The news is depressing and distressing, and not good for one's mental health to fixate on, so I'm going to take a break and remember all the things around me to be thankful for. So on this Saturday, I'm thankful for.... Big dogs with big barks. J. and D. were camping last night with the Boy Scouts. I happily stayed home in my warm house and my comfortable bed. When J. is gone, I leave Kenzie's crate door open. He loves his crate and we usually close it, but it just seems better to have him loose when I'm home alone. Of course it is unnerving when the dog wakes you up at 2:30 in the morning, using his scary, 'there's a predator at the door' bark. (This is different from his, 'ooh, ooh, there's squirrels outside and I must chase them' bark.) When he didn't stop, I went downstairs and cautiously peered out the back door window. No one was there, but he was definitely alert to something. The rest of the night passed uneventfully, though i...

It's Friday and I can't decide if the week went quickly or dragged heavily. A little bit of both. Everyone, myself included, has been a bit discombobulated about the changes that are ahead of us. It's so distracting to think about your life being so upturned that it can make it difficult to focus on much of anything. Difficult to focus probably pretty much sums up the entire week. K. now has a shiny new expander inside his mouth and I'm getting a chance to use my mad expander turning skills. (This is the fifth one in various children's mouths.) He was not happy about it (understandably) and was uncomfortable, but he's been a trooper and the discomfort is a lot less today. In other mouth news, G. FINALLY pulled out the front baby tooth that has been pointing forward from above her adult teeth. Hooray! Hooray! I can cross off 'call oral surgeon' from my to-do list, because I was becoming increasingly convinced that the tooth was never going to come o...

[Other posts about homeschooling can be found on my homeschooling page .] The fact that I read a lot of books is a known fact around the blog, but in all of the many and varied book lists I have posted over the years, I realize that I have never posted a reading list for the homeschooler. It's actually probably going to veer more into an educational theory reading list, but I find it difficult to draw a line between the two. The other thing that some of you might find interesting (unusual? odd? surprising?) is that the vast majority of these books are not written from a Christian perspective. We have never homeschooled for strictly religious reasons. While our beliefs are extremely important to us (I would even go so far as to say essential), neither J. nor I have ever felt frightened of opposing viewpoints. We also feel secure enough in our theology that we are able to sort and sift through these opposing viewpoints to find what is good and valuable in them. And there is informati...

When I find myself writing the same things to different people more than a few times, I realize it's time to write a blog post. Not only will it save me repeating myself, but the topic must be of a more general interest, and could be useful to a wider audience. I believe I wrote on a similar topic before , but I now have a few more years of experience to add. It is a very common occurrence that among older children who are adopted academic learning when first home is not easy. This is true for a wide range of children, both for those who have delays of one kind or another and for those children who considered intellectually and developmentally on track. Here are a few of the behaviors that parents have observed in their children: slow to grasp new concepts; extreme jaggedness in functioning; emotionally young; working memory issues; and working below the academic level expected. I've had children on all different levels of functioning, from severely intellectually delayed all...

We've had emotions all over the board around here today. (Wrote this on Saturday, but had to wait to tell family before posting it, hence the delay.) It's been like living on a roller coaster, and I think we're all feeling a bit woozy from the effects. Do you remember earlier in the week when I alluded to some things that were going on around here? Well, now I feel as though we are at a place where I can tell all of you. Last week, J. was offered a job at a different university, one that is about 1 1/2 hours west of where we currently are. It is a very good job offer and a terrific job opportunity. I am so happy for him and can't think of anyone who deserves something like this more than he does. It does make life a little more complicated around here for a while, though. He will be starting in mid-March. Because of various commitments of family members through the school year, he will be making a fairly horrendous commute for several months. Knowing that this isn...

It's Friday and my to-do list seems to have suddenly grown exceedingly long. This is probably because I have been studiously ignoring more than a few items and have now realized I cannot ignore them any longer. Anyway, I'm getting a jump on things and getting the day's post out of the way, and will then start whipping around the house like a crazy woman. R. continues to make progress! It seems the one year mark being home has been a huge turning point for her. (I know it was for me.) We are suddenly hearing a lot more English, and more complex English. Intellectual functioning is also markedly improved. I took a photo to share with you. This is a pattern block card that has the colored shapes on the left side that the child matches and then a space for the child to copy the same picture on their own. First, R. asked to do this box. It was the first time she had ever shown any interest in any of the activity boxes in the schoolroom. That was the first win. (Of cour...