Thankful Thursdays....

This is my first, and likely last, foray into the Thankful Thursdays blog thing. Mainly because I am never going to remember to do this every Thursday, but hey I might and it might happen again, but don't hold your breath, I would hate to be responsible for you fainting and causing undue stress on your family and friends. (I don't always like to use periods you might notice (I also don't like to have periods but that my friends is a different post))

I am thankful for my friends. I don't have many IRL and I like it that way. I occasionally wish I had friends that lived here in my neighborhood so I could hang out with them, but I'm such an odd duck (every time I scan those two words I read "dork", still works) the times I've tried to make friends near me I've messed it up so I stick with my old friends and happily they stick with me.

My Dad is retiring after nearly 50 years in the printing industry and as part of getting ready for the party we are going to throw him we have been going through family pictures, I found the pictures of my 16th birthday party. We are all in the basement and my BFF is in them. We had met the first day of 10th grade, and by that afternoon were forced to sit on opposite sides of the Ancient History classroom for being disruptive. Most people at the school thought we had know each other forever, and I admit it felt like we did. Now 29.5 years later it still does, the difference now is we have know each other forever and not just since 1st period.

Here is one of the pictures, that would be me in the purple top. I liked rainbows, a lot and what else can you see, a Unicorn.

Now you can know who is who and where the unicorn is. I leave it up to you to find the rainbow.

Oh yeah, this is why I homeschool...

Homeschool has its ups and downs, when it is down I question every moment, why I'm doing this, am I going to fail in a huge, huge way on this 'project', this project that happens to be a human, a human I love more than any other in the universe. Shouldn't I just trust the local school district to teach my child so I can have a life other than this one I'm living? (I get kind of pessimistic when we are having a bad day)

Most days are not that down, most days are just kind of chugging along we get through the lessons, we don't really have discussions but we do the work that has to be done and we move on.

Then we have the up days, the days were I am reminded, this, THIS right here is why we homeschool. A day where he hits the ground running and all I can do is try to keep up. Where everything he touches becomes new insights into the world. Where he can't get enough of the new information. Where learning is a fun game and can we just do a bit more. Where learning to read is understood to be the gateway to more information. Oh, those days make my heart soar. They fill my psyche with happiness and joy and allow me to face the down days with some resilience.

We had such a day recently. One where he woke up and was ready to take on the world, and he did. It started with him playing with the dog and me. Some freeish information came in on the Lunar New Year celebration (freeish as in it was from Panda Express and so it ended up costing me lunch at Panda) and he dove right in, found the DVD, watched it while I finished making breakfast and my coffee. We talked about it, we talked about the Chinese zodiac and what the meaning of the different animals was. We moved on to computer programming and worked on that for a bit. We went searching for fortune cookies at World Market (they didn't disappoint) We came home and worked on the reading and he is just getting so much more fluent in his reading, the halting and struggle over every single word is gone. The beating himself up over reading a word is, while not gone, diminished. He jumped into the new math program and we had discussions about why the designers of the program would choose certain settings for the lessons. We talked, we discussed, we learned. It was wonderful and chaotic and exhausting. What it wasn't was draining. While I was ready for bed I did not feel the overwhelming need to have a beer or mental down

I'm back again...

So how many blog posts are out in the world that say that same thing? How many have I personally put up?

What has happened in the month that I've been ignoring my blog? Let's see shall we?..

• The holidays happened and were lovely (I got a new coffee maker and a new coffee mug) 
• We had a very quiet week between Christmas & New Year. DH took off much time from work then we all had to adjust to him leaving the house 5 days a week rather than the 3 it had been for most of December. 
• We went to Behind the Myths to watch Adam Savage & Jamie Hyneman explain science and why they do what they do. It was the best science class we've had yet.  
• The boy built his pinewood derby car for this years race
• DH got the track ready for said race.
• The boy & I have gotten back into the swing of the school thing. (He is starting to read on his own!)
• We found a new math program that he loves and I think helps me get the ideas across better. We had kind of out grown Singapore math. So for now it is Elevated Math (it will get its own blog post soon)
• I've drank lots of coffee, I ate lots of food, and decided to try to get in better shape (again).
• I did not make any resolutions at the new year.

So yeah, there you have it. Life happened and I didn't stop to blog about it. I did take some pictures and maybe I'll post some of them.