slight announcement and more thoughts on homeschooling

ANNOUNCEMENT:  Cameron likes salad!  Ok, to those of you out of the loop you may be wondering why this is a big deal to me.  The thing is I am a mom with a childhood history of eating bread and cheese in their various forms and very little of anything else.  My mom struggled to get me to eat a variety of foods let alone swallow a vegetable!  So I am very sympathetic to my kids' resistance to new foods, almost to a fault.  This week I've been eating salads every day for lunch to try to boost my veggie intake and decrease my need for bread for this baby.  Cameron will pretty much try anything that Darren and I are eating but only if it comes off of our plates.  So yesterday and today Cameron has been sharing my salads.  Now, I'll be honest, these are cheater salads.  While I use red leaf lettuce I also use turkey, ham, cheese and ranch dressing to help me get the "good for you" stuff down the pipe.  So my chef's salad isn't exactly the healthiest salad in the world.... but Cameron is eating lettuce!  And meat!  

     Ok, now to more thoughts on homeschooling.  We just completed week 4.  Crazy, right?  This has been very enjoyable for me and Jason but we have encountered a few glitches along the way:

1.  Crying.  Last year in kindergarten there was no way Jason would have cried about anything.  In fact, one day he got a pretty nasty scrape at recess and on the way home that day he told me "I toughened up, mom and I didn't cry!"  Well, if I had gotten that scrape I might have shed a tear or two.  But Jason was so affected by his environment and being brave in front of his classmates that he didn't go there.  But yesterday, he turned on the waterworks for 3 separate occasions.  The first time was because he didn't want to write a sentence.  He is required to do a copywork sentence every week so that he can copy proper punctuation and capitalization.  Well, apparently this sentence was just too much for him.  I can't imagine that he would ever pull that on Mrs. Ricks, so why me?  I'm mom, you can cry in front of your mom, right?

2.  Hair.  Just because we could do school work in our pajamas doesn't justify doing it in my mind.  I require that we are all fed and dressed before we start our school day.  That includes Cameron.  We start at 9am, it's not hard to get those goals accomplished.  But somehow, every day Jason's hair seems to allude us.  He has got this tuft of hair at the back of his head that refuses to sit down.  I'm so used to seeing his constant state of bedhead that I don't usually notice until Darren comes home for lunch and makes a remark about forgetting Jason's hair again.  Or we go out to do errands and I look over and see what a ragamuffin kid I've got tagging along behind me.  I would  teach Jason to take care of it himself, but I struggle with getting that hair down!  It would be very simple to just shave it all off, but then we're back to point #1 above.

3.  Science experiments.  The last few weeks we've been doing our science experiments on Fridays.  Every Friday I set up our things that we'll need and get confused because my kit does not include the things that the instructor's guide says it should include.  Today I took the time to solve this mystery and discovered that there was an additional kit that I should have included in our order.  Oh well, it should arrive before our next experiment... lesson learned: pay attention when ordering!

4.  Handwriting.  Should I require Jason to complete a handwriting program or will his language arts creative writing, spelling words and copywork be enough?  He struggles to write sentences because he is so slow to form each letter.  I've read opinions for both sides but I feel like I need to decide for him.  He can form his letters correctly and recognizes whenever he writes one backwards, but he frequently writes numbers backwards and doesn't realize it.  Next week I'll have him do the numbers section in his handwriting book and then try to make a decision.

5.  P.E.  I feel like we ought to do something more formal for P.E.  I take the kids to the playground or pool everyday but I'm sure we should try to incorporate some sports skills or something.  Another thing I'll have to work out.

So that's all for now, we're trying to get another announcement out this week (baby name) but we're still kicking that one around.  Stay tuned!