Back again - hopefully to stay. I don't know why I can't seem to stick with blogging. I want to, really I do but I just seem to start and stop over and over again. I've been missing it lately so I thought I'd give it another go.
It seems like in so many ways life is much like it was a year ago when I last blogged. I'm still struggling with my weight. I get serious about it and start to lose, then I sabotage and gain some back and at the end of it all I stay about the same weight. I am wearing mostly a size 10 with some 12s so that's better than last year although I really think that some of the retailers are making their sizes a little bigger now. I'll take it!
The biggest change around here is that I've decided to homeschool my older daughter next year. Ack!! Have I lost my mind? The toddler is just about ready to go to preschool and I was so close to having a little time for myself again and I was so completely looking forward to it. The problem was that I really am not happy with her school. I really don't think that a traditional school environment is the right thing for her and I think I've known it for a long long time. I guess I just finally came to the point where I decided to pull the trigger and actually do something about it. The truth is that I am completely excited about it and so is she. The truth also is that I am completely terrified by it. I am afraid that I am going to be no good at teaching her; that I won't have enough patience; that I won't know enough and ultimately that I will fail her. I know that is my own insecurities talking and that I have to put my big girl panties on, tell my little nay sayer inner voice to shut up and do what I know is right for my daughter. I'm in the process of figuring it all out right now. I've made our school calendar and a weekly schedule. We've chosen a school name. She's working on her first assignment which is to choose a mascot and school colors and design a logo. She's decided she also wants to devise a motto and then she will write a persuasive essay to present her choices to us. Watching her work on that yesterday drove home for me that this is the right choice for her, I saw that spark in her that I haven't really seen much at all in the two years we've lived here. I've got her math placement test ready to go and I've compiled the curriculum I want to use for Social Studies. We've decided on the courses we want to do next year and have made time to add Religion, Italian, and Computer Coding to her week in addition to Music which are all things she doesn't get now at school. We've found a group that I think we will join when we actually start schooling in the fall. We are in the process of setting up a room in our house to use as a school room and I am trying to gather some materials so that I can keep Reagan busy and engaged while I am working with her sister. It's a lot to get done but I think it will be worth it. I'm hoping to do it through middle school and have her go back to main stream school for high school. By that point I think she will have gained some much needed confidence and feel more comfortable in her own skin. I also think that her time will have been better spent exploring things that interest her instead of memorizing facts so she can score high on the tests they must take in public school. I just feel like they waste so much time preparing for CRCT and other tests that in the end are of no benefit to her. The last two years she has spent over a month of school preparing for the CRCT and another week taking the test and it doesn't even test her on the curriculum that she is learning this year because she is accelerated. Time is so precious and to spend so much of it preparing for testing is a waste. I'm sure there is going to be a huge learning curve for both of us with homeschooling but we are going to give it our all.
The other big change around here is that we've had to separate our dogs. Jack is pretty old and he really has a hard time getting around. Murphy has been becoming really aggressive with him and actually attacked him one day for no reason. He has been more and more skittish around the kids and one night at dinner he bit Madison when she tried to pet him. I think she startled him but at the end of the day I can't have a dog around the kids that I can't trust not to bite them soooo Murphy has moved to the basement. The first two days he was miserable and I'm not sure if it was because he didn't like being down there or because he was upset about biting Madison. I think it was the latter because he is now happy as can be down there. There's no more going potty in the house, no more hiding in the closet or under the bed and refusing to go out. He just is so happy to see you and seems like a different dog. My husband's office is in the basement so he's not always alone. I tried bringing him back upstairs at night after the kids went to bed but he attacked Jack again so that's out but he doesn't seem to mind. There's no constant barking anymore either. It seems like something we should have done long ago. We closed in the fence so now he can go outside and run too like he did at the old house and he has a ball out there. The other dogs don't seem to miss him upstairs and neither do the kids so I think this will be our new set up.
Mama Luke
