Everyone knows about new car smell. You know--that smell that hits you as you slide your bottom into the generous, plush driver's seat of a car that's sporting less than oh, 100 miles on it? A car that has never once felt the insane crush of a well-installed child's car seat on its rear bench. A car that bears no tell-tale coffee stains on the carpet. A car that has never called anyone else master.
I had one of those cars once. It was a 1996 Saturn SL2. Dh and I were newly married, flush with the income of two jobs and more than eager to start living the adult life everyone told us we were entitled to. That car was more than just a way to get from point A to point B. It was a symbol--a symbol of all the good things to come in our new life together.
I loved that car.
Of course, a year later I was unable to drive that car. It was a manual transmission ... and I was hugely pregnant with the 10 lb., 2 oz whopper that was our firstborn. But I digress ...
For the first time ever, I have sitting in front of me a complete, brand-new Sonlight Core. Core 5 to be exact. The books have intact bindings. The pages are not marred by other people's lunches. The pieces are all there.
It is a giddy feeling, I tell you.
I am far too intelligent to deny that a year from now, the consumables will have been uh, consumed, and the books will have suffered the wear and tear of many a night in a bed belonging to a child who could not, would not put it down.
This is a temporary satisfaction, but a satisfaction nonetheless.
I'm excited for the new year. Blown away by the thoroughness and imagination that seems to have gone into the Eastern Hemisphere Explorer. Salivating over some of the story lines--most of which I have never before read. Eying the timeline figures and wondering who in the heck some of these folks are.
It's going to be a good year. I can smell it.
An official announcement!
Oliver--just two days shy of 19 mos.--took a grand total of TWO steps unassisted today. These were his very first attempts at walking alone. Let it also be noted that his goal was reaching Logan and joining in on the soccer ball kicking that is somehow second nature to my husband and two bio boys.
I love this age.
There's no way I'd know my children as well as I do if I sent them off to learn under someone else's wing all day.
My kitchen counters rival many libraries in terms of sheer variety of literature.
Logan will, someday, pick up a book and fall in love. Granted, it will probably be a biography of a painter.
I love looking ahead to next year.
I can't believe I only get to homeschool Jo for another six years or so.
The next Core is always the best Core.
How come it's summer and I'm trawling the internet, looking for fun day trips ... and they all have educational themes?
Am I the only one whose children take it for granted that when you plant something in the ground, you measure it and chart growth?
I tested Atticus' reading level online and even I'm impressed.
I am blessed.
My kids are fun little people with personality in spades.
Teaching is kind of like breathing. You just do it.
I present for you this unedited comment, posted in response to my rant on shopping at Whole Foods:
I haven't posted much about Oliver's bio visits lately. Yesterday, however, his Bio Mom missed her second appointment. No call, no nothing. The agreement with the previous social worker was that missing two visits would automatically bring her privileges to an end, thanks to her earlier history of hit or miss visits. No word on whether the new social worker seems inclined to enforce this.
You have no idea how long I have waited to hear Jo say this.
Today, she did.
She is just three short lessons away from finishing Math-U-See's Gamma program. Yes, she is ten. Yes, she is so painfully gifted in the areas of writing and literature as to require virtually no actual instruction in those arts. But no, she is not a math phenom.
But suddenly, she thinks she is.
Oh, she knows that she's behind most of her peers. She can feel Atticus nipping eagerly at her heels--especially since I purposefully slowed him down in MUS so that he wouldn't overtake his sister. A few well-timed rabbit trails into astro-physics kept him occupied (and educated) enough to lull him into a near-trance while Jo forged ahead, memorizing multiplication facts and learning how to work problems.
Jo is a smart enough tack to know this.
But she also doesn't care. She thinks she is good at math now. And she's enjoying it. Math-U-See has conquered her hatred and fear of math. What else matters?
There are very few things in life that I accept as-is. My husband says that this is one of his favorite quirks in my character; the desire to customize, tweak and otherwise establish ownership is as much a part of who I am as is my somewhat unsettling ability to turn my accent on and off. The fact is, I've never been too keen on anything that claims to be one-size-fits all. Just about anything, I figure, can be made better by taking into account the particulars of my own family. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to copy a recipe from me. By the time I finish my list of disclaimers ("It says 2 cups, but I use 2 and a quarter.") the whole recipe has, in essence, gone out the window.
This overarching theme fits in with my style of homeschooling just fine. While Sonlight has been our mainstay since our disastrous stint with Calvert, over the years I have taken from or added to the IG with resources gleaned from both our wonderful library system and the internet. I have combined Sonlight with WinterPromise on more than one occasion. And I've always made room for rabbit trails when the interest arose.
Even with this as my background, deciding what to do this fall was so difficult that I finally resorted to a family poll. Should we do SL Core 5 as a family ... or should the boys get their own, separate curriculum: WinterPromise's Children Around the World? The end result was all in favor of a family-wide study of the Eastern Hemisphere. Which has, of course, put me on a "Quick! Find the resources!" kick.
The fact is, Logan is way too young for this Core. The easiest thing to do would be to simply whip out SL Core K and make a decent stab at it while putting most of my effort into the bigger kids and the older Core. But--and this is a big but--Logan loves being on the same topic as his siblings. The interaction between the three of them when they are all on the same page is phenomenal. Their imaginative life, their play, their banter ... it is all so rich, and so laced with the topic that they are currently studying. Frankly, it makes me wonder how families with kids in three different public school classrooms manage to find much common ground to cling to when playtime comes around. But I digress ...
I was blessed, blessed, blessed to find a SL forum friend who gifted me with her already test-driven schedule for combining youngers in on Core 5. I'm slowly walking through that, but without the full IG in front of me, I can't make much sense of the whole thing. So I'm concentrating on locating other resources until we can place our order. Thanks to the fact that our area boasts a large population of Asian-Americans, cultural field trips are only a short ride away. My bf's mother lived in Australia for a time. I'm hoping she can impart some Aussie flavor to our study of that area. And, of course, there's the missions connection. DH travels throughout SE Asia. We know several field missionaries in that region personally.
This is how the modifying begins for me. I'm still in the gathering stage. Who knows how many potentials I'll find out there. This is the fun part. The easy part. After this, it's the winnowing down and the prioritizing. That's when it gets hard for me--seeing all of those good ideas set aside in favor of better ideas.
