We've had a very exciting and busy summer so far. With all that is going on, I expect that the rest will fly by.
We started our summer with a trip to Houston the NCFCA Region 4 regional championship tournament. I took my 3 bigs with me while dad played with the younger set at home. Two of them were in a small junior tournament while Jennabear competed in two events in the real tournament. She didn't move on to Nationals but I was proud nonetheless.
After returning home, the real fun began. There were several different subjects with school for various children that needed to be finished. So I put away the more or less unnecessary subjects and started focusing on the primary subjects - language arts and math. They've been working on that for several weeks now.
We're doing a ton of reading aloud. I feel like I am 20 years behind in reading aloud to the kids. Last night we stayed up late to finish Charlotte's Web. I love reading that book mostly because it is interesting to see who my sensitive little ones are. Most people under the age of 8 cried. However, Mom started it and Jennabear (every bit of 14) finished it off. We're also reading Shiloh right now. We should finish that next week.
See our new summer habit? I am keeping these girls up late each night to form the habit of napping in the afternoon. Call me selfish, but I need the quiet in the afternoon to get a random array of things on my to-do list done. So I sit in their room while they fall asleep and use my iPad to catch up on email and (I just discovered) BLOG. For the summer, everyone is required to read and rest on their beds during this time. One of my goals for the summer was to better train my younger children in a daily routine so that I can have time to concentrate on teaching the older children in the afternoon when our official year begins. We started with the heavenly afternoon nap. I love quiet!!!
We will be embarking on new things this coming year. We start this summer with Apologetic Camp in July and then Debate Camp in August. I really do love and enjoy the NCFCA participation that we are doing. There are some very talented kids out there, my children included. I am jealous of them in a way. I wish I had known about speech & debate when I was in high school. I love being a parent judge and I am hoping to learn more about how to coach better this year. My younger kids are already looking forward to their junior tournament next Spring. I love the skills that both speech and debate offer my children as well. I enjoy getting to know the kids as well. Despite some of the troubles I faced as a middle school teacher, I really did enjoy it. I love teenagers. They are fascinating people. I guess our participation in NCFCA provides an opportunity to work with my own teenagers and meet a lot of other really neat kids.
We will be celebrating the 4th with my brother and 3yod niece next week. We got to visit with them last week when I drove down to infect my kids with chicken pox. My niece wasn't officially diagnosed with chicken pox but her dentist seemed to think that is what it looked like. She was supposed to have a cavity filled when she broke out everywhere. So we took a package of lollipops down and every shared with their cousin fought over, I mean loved on her. (What is it about older children fighting over 3 yods? They fight over my 3yod as well.). I am hoping that after the 4th we will be laid up at home battling the chicken pox and knocking that off our "every child should experience that" bucket list. Maybe we will even have our own chicken pox party.
We're going to try a mini-family vacation some time in August. Then its back to the grind as we start the 2013-2014 school year. Next years going to look very different than school normally looks. I'll post more on that later.
Coming soon.......I'll be introducing new writers on my blog and possibly be switching to a new family blog. Hopefully with our new habit there will be more consistency.
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