Regardless of how different our lives are, we all have ups and downs with life! Having taken a large break from homeschooling in December, it was daunting to start back up again.
Monday was our first day back. Nothing special, just back to school on a really rainy, gray day. Tuesday we got to go see a full production of the musical, Peter Pan. It was wonderful, and Ruby enjoyed it.
Wednesday was a good day. We were at my mom's, who went to the play with us, and we planning to race home for Alice's piano class, but she had ear pain and didn't want to go. We wound up spending the day with my mom. Since we weren't prepared with lessons, I printed off a lapbook from homeschoolshare.com. I'd been wanting to do a project with "About Me" as the theme to compare to last year's, and here was a day to do it.
We worked away on the various parts of her lapbook until it was completed. I can't say it was that fun some of the time, because she wanted to do other things the whole time, but there were times she took personal interest, and we had fun brainstorming her favorite things, making a list of what she wants to do when she grows up, calendaring her weekly schedule, making a little address book with loved one's addresses in it, researching trivia about our home town, etc.
Alice starts with us, I usually print her one page or so. She lasts longer when we are home and it's just us, but my mom decided to make some "Oma Cookies" (oats, flax seeds, honey, cranberries and natural peanut butter...I'll post the recipe another time, they are good and healthy), so Alice got distracted by that project.
Eventually, Ruby and I were done, Alice finished her cookies and we had lunch. I took a nap and the girls watched TV. After that, the girls decided to run around on my mom's couches and Ruby knocked a shelf off the wall and broke something. She felt really bad, apologized to my mom and decided she wanted to decorate her patio table with a "centerpiece" of leaves (no flowers around) to apologize. She ran around the yard happily collecting random ferns and leaves and arranged them on the outdoor table really nicely.
It was a silly thing, my mom played up her excitement and Ruby announced that we'd have to eat dinner out there to enjoy her hard work. Ummmmmm...it's the dead of winter.
I got out a bunch of fabric and started cutting my quilt and sewing. The girls spent like an hour using the little cast off scraps to make jewelry. They were taking orders from my mom and I, but eventually we all had fabric rings, fabric necklaces and fabric bracelets. It was fun to just hang out with my mom and the girls in the kitchen, make some headway on my sewing project and get some pretty jewelry out of it.
We did bundle up to eat a dinner at the chilly, but beautiful table outside on the deck. Ruby was thrilled and very proud of her hard work.
I'm so grateful that my folks live close and that we have periods of time when our scheduled homeschool activities take a break and we can enjoy more days like this.
The funny thing is that the next day, Ruby talked to her advisory teacher who oversees our homeschool efforts and when the teacher asked, "what have you learned in school lately?", Ruby responded, "nothing." Awesome. That was followed by our annual standardized testing where she proved what we've been doing!
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