A Day in the Life: September 24, 2021

I was browsing through some very old blog posts a couple of days back and found a "Day in the Life" diary from 2015 written right around this time of year.

A great deal has changed in the last 6 years. 

The most obvious, of course, is that the kids are now 8, 10, and 12 years old! We're deep into homeschooling, dance lessons, computer games, and taekwondo. All three are largely independent in terms of quotidian tasks: they can read, do a load of laundry, prepare a sandwich, and log into a laptop.  That said, it's surprising how many of the big things look similar. So I thought I would go ahead and chronicle last Friday just for fun. 

Grace (10) has a lot of trouble sleeping, and she can be a terrible morning person. On the plus side she loves long walks, and is willing to take them in the "early" morning (say, around 8 to 8:30!) This makes her much more ready for school around 9:30 or 10. Today I was up around 7:45 when David's alarm went off. I did my CBS Bible Study for the day (we're in Joshua), enjoyed a mug of MUD\WTR, and then woke Grace up for our walk. It was a beautiful morning. The colors are just starting, but we've had very little rain yet. It's cool without being cold. We did our standard route starting at Autumn Ridge park and proceeding through the neighborhoods to the Apollo Ridge mixed-use path across 173rd.
Just this week we explored a branch of this path we hadn't before and found that it terminates near 158th and Cornell. It's roughly 1.5 miles one way, and there's a gas station convenience store at the end of it. I don't know how or when I became the mom that always gets a drink at the convenience store, but it happened.

There are multiple patches of woods, a lot of (slippery) boardwalk, and streams on this route and I'm a little embarrassed it took us this long to find it. Tuesday of this week we witnessed a neighborhood cat 12 feet up a hollow tree stump trying (unsuccessfully) to catch a squirrel on this walk. Today we saw the same (?) squirrel in his little apartment in that tree, but the cat wasn't back for a second try!  

Grace often chatters at length about her latest book series, the characters she is designing for art class or some other project, dance, friends, and etc. Sometimes on the return half of the walk she'll be ready do a little math or practice her Bible memory passage. In fact, that was true as recently as Tuesday. Today, not so much. We got as far as 5x7 and she absolutely melted down. Math is not an easy subject for Grace. Although we actually introduced the times tables 3 years ago via "Times Tales" videos, she has never become truly comfortable with them, or really any other aspect of math we've explored in the last couple of years. Tears are the norm, and I am frequently at my wit's end, more with attitude than aptitude really. I gave her the standard lecture about how not having natural talent in math is no more "her fault" than *having* natural talent in dance, and how her sister is willing to work hard on dance despite having less aptitude and Grace should do the same in math. As usual it fell on deaf ears. 

So, I left her on the porch to calm down. 

It was now after 9:30  (maybe closer to 10... class technically starts at 9:30 but that's mostly to get them out of bed by 9.) James and Lucy had gotten up in the interim and eaten breakfast. David is working from home in the front room, a situation that sometimes causes conflict but is Mostly tolerable. I reminded everyone to get their school things out and put their breakfast things away. You'd think this would be second nature by now, but it rarely is - at least for Lucy. James had actually made good use of his unsupervised time by knocking out Vocab and possibly Math, both of which are at least semi-independent. 

Eventually we were ready to try group time. For this season Group Time consists of reviewing our Bible memory passage (we're on our last week in Matthew Chapter 6) and reading a devotional. Yesterday I belatedly realized that our current book ("God's Mighty Acts of Salvation" by Starr Meade) is based entirely around Galatians, but the passages from Galatians are not specifically assigned reading. So I assigned them. Everyone has a Bible they can read through on their own, although all of them find Paul's writing dense and difficult to interpret at times, especially when asked to read it aloud. About 1/3 of the time I remember to open or close this group time with prayer.  Anyway, James and Lucy are definitely ready to recite their verses today. Grace has been excused from this exercise for the last few months as public recitation before she's even close to word perfect seems to be a major trigger to her anxiety and melt-downs. She's using a few different methods to learn the passages, and next week we will learn if she's been able to keep up or at least cram for the final whole-chapter recitation.

Other things we sometimes do during group time include a Mad Lib or two (excuse: they teach parts of speech. Sort of), read-alouds in the literature, history, or geography realm, and a Logic book that we haven't picked up yet this term. We've done several History / Geography mini units using Holling C Holling books, but we're taking a break from those right now and using a new social studies curriculum from a friend. James was supposed to nail down a route from Minnesota to both Dakotas on our map, along with stopping places and points of interest. Grace is reading some historical fiction set in the area. Lucy is along for the ride mostly, but did listen to an audio book version of "Little House in the Big Woods" last week. She gave me a fairly decent review of it over the weekend. 

Anyway, the day gets a bit blurry at this point even from a vantage point of a mere 72 hours, because so many of our school tasks are currently in the independent to semi-independent category. James completed his "Life of Fred: Pre Algebra 1" lessons for the week, his grammar exercises, and got a head start on next week's vocabulary lesson. He also did a typing exercise (he thinks he is done learning to type, but I disagree) and wrote a short book report of "Farmer Boy." (I've been requiring one mini report per week of a book from a list I created. He hates it, because he wants to read a steady diet of current YA sci-fi and deeply resents the historical fiction and other classics I am trying to slip in. Except when he ends up enjoying them instead. Which is usually. But I digress.) Finally, I looked over the write-ups James did for the most recent episodes of "Mythbusters" we've been doing in lieu of more formal science. (In my defense, his science textbook is back-ordered!) I'm actually really pleased with these write-ups as a tool for teaching writing as much as anything else. He's been terribly reluctant to take on any sort of writing assignments in general. These near-daily ones are short enough they don't trigger his resistance as badly, especially since they're typed. This is a double-win for me as they're easy to correct, and I am insisting that he use full sentences and accurate grammar. We're using Google Docs as our writing tool here: he does his write-ups in a template I designed, and shares the doc with me. I write basic editing notes and then follow up to be sure he actually did it. It's taking a while for him to get the idea that I Really mean it, but he's improving.

Lucy needs a lot more checking in and refocusing, but she did her own grammar lesson, handwriting, and multiplication math worksheet. She probably did a typing lesson as well. She Loves the extra screen time, perhaps especially when she is grounded from video games as she is this week. She doesn't particularly struggle in any school subject, although she doesn't love math and she deeply resents handwriting. I'm not giving her formal history, science, or even writing this year. That will come later. She fills up her free time with spontaneous and often rather messy arts and crafts projects as well as reading - mostly "graphic novels" by choice, but she is branching out when pressed.

Grace and I had a long talk on the porch about how to move forward in math and ended up with me agreeing to drop the times-tables recitation that she hates with such a fiery passion. Instead she will use a look-up table whenever she needs a multiplication fact during her math lessons.  (This is a tried and true technique from other homeschool moms. It's not that I've been against it per-say, but it feels like cheating to Grace and I've gotten stuck in my own thinking that she Ought to have those stupid things memorized. I just hope that she manages the darn piece of paper better than she manages most.) After lunch or what passed for it (I think it was PB sandwiches with apple butter from the batch I made with Gary and Phyllis' apples) we put the look-up table to the test with a Life of Fred: Ice Cream chapter. We did this one at the top of the play structure because we needed someplace quiet and alone, and most likely David was on the phone with someone from work on the front room. I'm rating it a moderate success.  Grace also finished up grammar work and answered some questions for the book she's reading for social studies. She might have done some typing, and we definitely finished up spelling and vocab for the week by combining them. 

Long story short, everyone was as done as they intended to be by about 2 pm. Usually on Fridays we go to the Library about then, but today we had no real need. There's a box full of unread books still in the front room. Instead they got to do a project they'd been looking forward to: decorating the family room for fall! 

In direct contrast to 6 years ago, today the kids were given free reign over the entire project. They hunted down the boxes in the attic, took down the summer display and repacked it, and then replaced it with fall colors. They spent maybe an hour on it, plus dribs and drabs of extra time when I prompted them to finish cleaning up! I mostly stood back and stayed out.
And no, it's not exactly how I would do it. But I've learned that I don't deeply enjoy the process of decorating right now, and while I might re-arrange a few things here and there over the month or two that we leave this set of decor up, I'm mostly entirely happy that they are in charge.

After this task, I allowed computer time for James and Grace for what was supposed to be 30 mn each, but probably ended up nearly double that. They play a mix of Roblox and Minecraft, the former of which I am not a big fan of but they dearly love. Minecraft is more my speed and "feels" more valuable as an activity. In any case they are experts at ignoring their timers as long as possible and I let them get away with it far too easily. 

David wrapped up work early so that we could eat out . 

AND that's where this day-in-the-life ends, because I didn't have time to finish and now it's January.