Thursday, September 12, 2013

Getting into the Swing of a New School Year

Do you ever look at your calendar for the upcoming week and think, "I'm gonna die"?

On Wednesday, we'll do school in the morning - prayer, memory work, morning basket, math, and a read aloud.  Then it is off to enrichment classes for the older two while I take the younger two to a midwife appointment.  Then the younger two and I will hit the grocery store, head home for lunch, and I'll put the toddler down for a nap.  At 1:30 we'll be back out again to meet with our contact at the local charter, then I'll pick up the older kids, and head home again.  Then we'll have an early dinner at 4 so I can leave with the three older kids at 4:30 to drive 45 minutes to Atrium, where I'll volunteer and the kids will be in their various Atrium levels.  And then it will be another 45 minutes back home where I will eat something and then promptly collapse.  In order to make all this happen, I need to have lunches packed for two kids, an easy early dinner planned and prepped, and paperwork already prepared for the charter.

As anyone who knows our family is probably noticing...  we have some new things this year.  We're signed up with a local public charter, the two oldest kids are in four hours of enrichment classes one day a week, I'm pregnant (oh, but you all knew that - 30 weeks next week, by the way!), and we're driving to a different parish so the three older kids can all participate in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.  (BTW, there is an awesome video about Catechesis of the Good Shepherd here - this isn't our Atrium, but it features some friends of ours)  All good things, and all things I'm glad we're doing (well, the jury is still out on the charter, but I'm trying to maintain a positive attitude.  Right now the paperwork is killing me.)  But I'm rather wishing they weren't all coming to a head on the same day!

Oh, and this is the busiest day of the week - they aren't all like that, thank goodness!  But there's also a field trip on Friday, a great opportunity for the kids to go to a local event with some family on Thursday (which includes all sorts of switching around of people and cars!) and a kid birthday on Tuesday.  Again, all great stuff, but phew - just thinking about it makes me want to take a nap!

If anyone has noticed that I've just about stopped blogging, perhaps this will help you understand why!

4 comments:

  1. Why the charter? I thought you didn't like that last time - is this a different one?

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    1. Yes, this is a different one that doesn't have a strong emphasis on putting kids in 3 or 4 day a week classes (they don't even offer that option!). Their classes are truly enrichment classes rather than writing, math, and other basic subjects. Emma is getting to the age where I think she'd benefit from the opportunity to work collaboratively with kids more her own age, and I've found it impossible to do this up here - at least on any sort of regular basis. So in the early summer I started looking into charter options and found this one - which looks like it could be a better fit. Emma will be doing Odyssey of the Mind and a class that combines geography and art (talk about right up her alley!!). Gregory will be in a wild animals class in the morning, then a Lego engineering class and a music class in the afternoon. They require a lot less in the way of work samples than the other charter too, which is nice, and they had no problem with translating my plans into bureaucratic-ese for the paperwork. Once I can get through all the enrollment paperwork (which seems almost never-ending at this point!) I think it will be a good fit for our family. They also have some great field trips lined up - something the other charter lacked and can be tough to try to put together myself.

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  2. Where do people get the idea that homeschoolers sit around all day in their pajamas and never see anything but their kitchen table or sofa? Sometimes I had to remember the word "home" in "homeschooling"!

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  3. For the protection of the innocent - that last comment (and this one) was from Sandy, not John!

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