Category: Moments

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Coronavirus Quarantine 2020 Moments School Day

Day of 3 of Quarantine | Art and Academics

It’s day 3 of quarantine and we’re missing our extracurricular activities already.  Monday was supposed to be co-op. Tuesday, we had a field trip we had been looking forward to get cancelled.  And the weather has been nice but the parks are even closed.

So, we’re trying to adjust to this new normal.  We listened to some podcasts over breakfast this morning.

We did more academics today that we have the last two days.  Lots of math – G is almost finished with 6th grade on Khan Academy.  In fact, he will probably be finished this week. And science.  Also, his U.S. Geography class at co-op sent out homework to keep from getting behind during the closure.  So he has a report on Alaska to start on.

He’s been inspired to create a comic book character so he’s been working on his comic strip featuring Bob the Germ.  I’ve let that count as writing this week because it is, in essence, creative writing, and he’s working on dialogue and narration.  But I’m glad he’s got a report to start working on for co-op class.

And despite doing more academics today, we still squeezed in some fun.  We did puffy paint Picasso paintings with Make Paducah via their FB page. It was messy but I’m glad we did it. It reminded me of those early days of homeschooling.  And he loved it so much more than I thought he would.  He made puffy paint pictures until he ran out of puffy paint.

And we’re still keeping up with Lunch Doodles with Mo!

How was your quarantine day?

If you need a pick-me-up, this video of the Penguins at the St. Louis Zoo getting to get out of their habitat and take a “field trip” around the zoo is really just the best.  And don’t forget to “like” on Facebook!

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3rd Moments Pictures

May 18, 2017 – Last Day of School!

We did it!  We made it to our last day of school!  There were so many setbacks during the month of April – I had a car wreck that caused us to lose 2 weeks of school between recovery time and car shopping and G got a nasty stomach virus – that I wasn’t sure we were going to make it to the end of the year.  But we did!  Hooray!

Also, on this day, May 18th, I graduated from high school….16 years ago.  WOW.

And, holy growth spurts, Batman!  Did anyone else’s kiddos GROW LIKE WEEDS this year?

Look at this comparison picture!

We definitely went from little boy to all grown up this year!

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Mom Thoughts Moments

“Thanks for teaching me, Mom!”

thanksforteachingme

I shared with you back in the spring about what was hands down our absolute worst homeschool day in the history of ever.

That was a hard day.  There are lots of hard days.  I wish I could say it was sunshine and rainbows all the time.

But it’s not.

Homeschooling is a very beautiful thing when viewed in hindsight or from a distance.  But often, while you’re in the middle of it, it’s a very messy thing.

The hardest thing we’ve hit so far is that BigG has pretty much up to this point had such an easy time learning everything that he doesn’t know how to handle when something doesn’t click right away.  And it’s very frustrating and upsetting to him.  We’ve gone through a slew of emotional issues in the last few years. That’s another post of another day.  But just suffice it to say that handling frustration calmly is something we must work on.  Most of the time he KNOWS the answer or solution but he gets so frustrated that he has to think for a moment about it that he becomes totally incapable of thinking.  WHEW.  Just writing that exhausted me.

Flash forward to week 2 of basic multiplication and division (2s and 3s times tables). I decided today we will just talk through the problems over lunch (he can’t have too much of a meltdown if he’s eating, right?)

So I was giving example after example about how if 4×3=12 then 12 divided by 3 equals 4 and he says, “Wow, I get it. It’s starting to make sense.”   It was wonderful.  It was one of those beautiful moments that looking back will outshine the mess.

Then when we were done eating and discussing math he hugged me and said, “Thanks for teaching me!”

Oh my heart!  Don’t we all long for those words?  “Thanks for teaching me, Mom!”

Thanks, Mom!

Sometimes the thank yous are few and far between.

Even if we raise our children with good manners to say please and thank you, how many of us expect to hear “thanks for teaching me?”  Sure, “Thanks for taking me to the movies, Mom!”  “Thanks for washing my smelly soccer uniform.”  “Thanks for making my favorite dinner!”

Thanks for teaching me, Mom.

In that moment, it wasn’t that he was glad I was teaching him multiplication and division.  He was glad that I was there.  That I was his teacher.  That I was his safe place when he was frustrated and that I was there for the “light bulb” moment.

So let me tell you something, Moms out there.  Thank you for teaching your kids.

It may be a LONG time before they say those words.

They may never say the words.

They may thank you in deed or action one day.

But no matter if, when, or how long it takes for you to your “Thanks for teaching me, Mom!”  just know that you are appreciated.

YOU are teaching your children.

And you should be applauded.

 

 

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Moments Recaps

Wrap-Up: The Week with the Worst Day Ever & the Beauty of Homeschooling

Do you school on Fridays?  We do.   But this particular day we are getting a late start.  We both slept in (it was fabulous!)

One thing I love about homeschooling is that I can say “yes” to staying up late the night before Hubs has to go back to work.  He works an “on 4, off 2” schedule.  With a 45-55 minute drive depending on traffic, even on his earliest shift days he’s not home until 7pm.  So G gets precious little time with him those 4 days he’s at work.  So I don’t mind saying “yes” to an extra hour.

Because we don’t have to be up early in the morning to catch the bus or make it to car line.

Sleep is a beautiful thing.

I’m convinced after my years in the Early Childhood Education field and just observing my own child these past 7 years, that children are sleep deprived.  G slept 12 hours last night.  And I actually woke him up this morning – he might have slept longer if I had let him.  Even on a normal night with a normal bedtime after a normal day he’ll sleep a solid 10, maybe 11 hours.  If I had to get him up for school every morning he would have to go to bed at 7:00 to get enough sleep!  As it stands, bedtime is 8. And it works for us.  He has karate and training times can vary from 5-6pm, 6-7pm or 7-8pm.  We rarely go to the latest class because we have a 20 minute drive to get back home and class usually runs a few minutes over so we’re not getting home until after 8:30.  But there are kids his age that do the 6-7pm classes and the 7-8pm classes!  And they have to go home, get ready for bed and be up early the next morning!  I know they have to be tired!

When I was teaching preschool I had a class where 4 of the boys in my class were on the same baseball team.  They were all 4-5 years old and there were days they looked like zombies!  If I mentioned how tired the seemed in class to the parent, I would hear, “Oh the ballgame before theirs ran late so they didn’t take the field until almost 8:00.”   WHAT?!?!  What business do 4 and 5 year olds have being on the ball field at 8pm???  I get that the game before them ran over – but even if the game had started on time it was still too late for 4 & 5 year olds to be on a baseball field!  They should’ve been at home in their jammies having a bedtime story read to them!

I feel like we (as a society in general) are programming our children to be sleep-deprived.  For the non-homeschooled child though, it seems that the only way to get adequate sleep is to be un-involved.  If you participate in a team sport or take some sort of lessons/training as a group (karate, dance) then you are subject to these later times if you want to participate.  Why?  Because they have to set times around parent work schedules.  You can’t have a 4 or 5pm practice because there is no parent to get the child there at that time.  So the only other option is to cut into the time the child should be resting.

Ok, I really chased a rabbit there.  I said all that to say that I’m glad G can get the sleep he needs.   I don’t think a 7 year old is going to sleep in just for the heck of it or out of laziness.  If he sleeps until 9am it’s because that’s what his growing little body needed to rest and recover and be ready for the day ahead.

But this week, I learned and even more important lesson than how great sleep is.

GRACE. 

I learned the lesson of grace in homeschooling.

grace

You see, we had our worst day of homeschool EVER this week.  And you can read all about it here.

But I learned this week that homeschooling is all about grace.

The Grace God gives us, the grace I allow myself and the grace I give my son.

I screwed up this week.  God’s Grace was there.

At 2:30 in the afternoon I threw my hands up and said “We’re done!”  Not in a bad way but in a “the world won’t end if these last two assignments don’t get done” way.  That’s the grace I allow myself.

And I extended that to my son – calling it a day took a burden off his shoulders.  He was done.  There was nothing else productive going to come out of him that day.  Forcing him to finish would have been purely a power play on my part and the lessons would not have stuck.  So I gave my son grace.

So that was our week and my take-away from it.  Thank God for Grace!

Thanks to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for having a weekly wrap-up every week!

Weekly Wrap-Up

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Mom Thoughts Moments School Day

Our Worst Homeschool Day EVER and How We Got Through It

worsthomeschoolday

Here I am, 48 hours on the other side of what was, hands down, bar none, the WORST day we’ve had in one and two-thirds year and 4 days of official homeschooling.  It was the WORST.

Bug is a smart kid and a sweet boy.  And homeschooling so far has been pretty great.  But I’m not going to lie, some of his coursework is getting harder.  He can DO it but it takes a little more effort that he’s used to.  Things until now have come so easily too him – I was afraid of what would happen when they don’t.

Math – he’s really good at.  I swear that boy sees the world in numbers.  He’s always figuring up this and that in his head.  Like the weather app on the phone says it’s 62 degrees right now and the low tonight will be 48.  He will figure up how much the temperature is going to go down and tell you.  He’s 7 and does this math in his head.  We have recently switched to Singapore math which I think is perfect for him.  But he’s having to think a little harder.  And he has a bad habit of shutting down if the answer doesn’t immediately come to him.  So now we’re working problems like 104+65+11 and he has to write it down and work it out and he hates that.  And word problems, heaven help us if he has to read a word problem.

Spelling – he’s a decent speller.  But again, if the answer doesn’t immediately come to him he shuts down.  And he’ll just start spitting out random letters.  And it makes me mad when he does this.

Writing/Language – Sweet baby Moses, this is his weak point.  He hates to write.  So I allow him to do a lot of diction.  But sometimes he doesn’t even want to think.  Make up a sentence about a cat using an adjective.  *crickets*    Now if we were driving down the road he’d be telling me fantastical stories he just made up in his head.  But if it’s for school…I can’t get a single sentence about a cat out of him.

Everything else he’s fine with.  He loves to read, to be read too, he loves history and he loves science.  But lately, he’s been throwing a little attitude in with his normal frustrations over the subjects he doesn’t like.  Which reallllllly gets under my skin.  I’ve been getting a lot of “I don’t LIKE school” and “I’m NOT going to do school today”.  In these moments I (try to) calmly go over the facts –

You have to do school – either here are home or in a “real” school.  It’s the law and Momma would get in trouble if you didn’t do school.

We are blessed that Momma can stay home and homeschool you.  We have a lot of fun and you get more free time.  Which he knows.  He knows that we get started waaay later than the kids in school and he always points out when the bus is rolling past the house and that he’s already finished with school and having fun with his toys.

He knows how good he has it.  But the ‘tude pops up more than I like it too.

So flashback to Tuesday.  It was 2:30 and we still had two more assignments to get through.   I was tired and things were piling up that needed to be done that I couldn’t get too because I was having to “hold his hand” through every lesson.  Things he SHOULD have been able to do on his own but wouldn’t.  And I wasn’t able to step away for a minute to make lunch, put clothes in the wash, go to the bathroom…

Everything that day had been a fight.  Math was a fight because I wanted HIM to copy the information from the word problems so I could make sure he could line them up correctly.  Spelling was fight because the new words were hard.  Even read aloud time (which is usually ok!) was a fight because he’s not fond of the book we’re currently reading.  Language was a fight because, well, I don’t know, because there were words I guess. I had painstakingly transferred all the assignments for language to dry erase lapboards so we could do our underlining, editing, and fill-in-the-blanks on dry erase boards with fun markers.  And he wasn’t having it.

And I had had it.  We both yelled, we both cried, we both took a timeout.  We tried again.  We yelled and cried some more.  And took another time out.

And here is how we got through it….

I did a lot of yelling.  I am not proud.  I yelled.  I was mad.  So he was sitting in his room where I had banished him too for his own good.  Because I was mad.

Did I mention I was mad?

I grabbed a book and asked him to meet me in my room.  Our favorite place to read during the school day is in the bed with extra pillows, blankets and stuffed animals.

So here he comes with his two favorite stuffed animals dragging his well loved blanket behind him.  And he climbs in the bed with me and falls against my chest, sobbing.

He was sorry.  “I am sorry for my bad attitude.”

Now I’m crying.  I apologize for yelling.

I ask him to take a deep breath for me.  And try to stop crying.  I want to read him a story and then we can talk when we’re both feeling better.

I can’t even remember what we read.  Seriously.  It was only two days ago and the book is probably still on my bedside table.  But I can’t remember it.

I do remember him cradled against my side studying each picture on every page as I read.

I do remember his deep, jagged breaths as he tried to calm himself so he can listen to the story.

I do remember breathing him in.  Oh, how many times we’ve snuggled and read a story in these past 7 years but this time I just wanted to soak him in.

I do remember squeezing him just a little tighter because I wanted him to know, to feel that Momma was sorry.

After the story, I asked him what we are supposed to do when we mess up, when we need help or when things are going badly.

“Pray.”

So I told him I was going to pray and if he wanted to add anything to our prayer I would let him.  I started by thanking God for loving us and blessing us.  I asked for peace in our hearts and to remove the ill feelings and bad attitudes.  I asked for forgiveness for our mistakes today.  And G chimed in with “I’m sorry for my bad attitude” before erupting in sobs again.  I closed the prayer and hugged him until he felt better.

And then I suggested that we end our school day and start fresh the next day.

I think that last bit made ALL the difference.  He knew we still had work today.  We had abandoned language in the midst of our bad moment.  Books still splayed open on the desk.  I can’t be sure, but I feel like he knew we were going to have to go back to that and it was upsetting him.  He wanted to be done.  He needed to be done.  And he was dreading not being done.

Oh, but grace.  I decided we needed grace.  I was in no mood to talk about nouns and adjectives.  And I knew there was no way he was going to absorb anything from the lesson in the state he was in.  No good was going to come from trying to do it.  Or even science which we hadn’t got to yet – even though he enjoys science – there are just times that you can’t even enjoy your most favorite thing.

So what do you do when you’re faced with the WORST homeschool day ever?

Or rather, what should you do to stop a really bad day from turning into the worst day ever?

1.  Take a time out.  Everyone.  

Send the kids to their rooms.  If you have tiny ones, secure them in a crib, bouncer or somewhere where you can step away for a moment and retreat to your quiet place.  Even if it’s the bathroom.  Cry.  Pray.  Breathe.  Take a few minutes to get it together.

2.  Come back together but not back to the situation.  

Bond over something.  Snuggle on the couch and read a book.  Or watch a cartoon.  Just be close for a few minutes.

DON’T go back to the school books.

3.  Pray together.

Now you might be saying, “Well, you should do this first!”  But I have to disagree.  Prior to the time out I was in no mood to pray.  And you say, “Well, that’s not how it works.”  Well, maybe it doesn’t.  But for the benefit of my 7 year old and using this moment to teach him about prayer I need to be in a better frame of mind.  I can angry pray by myself when I have my timeout.  Then I’ll be in the right frame of mind to lead prayer.

Also, allow your child to pray to if they feel comfortable with it.  Modeling prayer is something I’ve tried to do all along with G.  He says his bedtime prayers but in moments like this he prefers that I pray because he “doesn’t know what to say”.  I keep reminding him that he can say whatever he wants to God or whatever he feels like he needs to say. But I don’t push.  So his words he contributed to the prayer on this day were a welcome surprise.  It made my heart swell.

4. Call it a day.

Seriously, if it’s that bad, just let it go.  That’s the beauty of homeschooling.  There is so much grace in homeschooling.  Now, if you’re having a hard time on a regular basis, then I’m not advocating calling it quits after 2 subjects every day. At some point you’re going to have to do steps 1-3 and then go back to the books and power through it.

But if it’s occasional, sometimes you just need to reset.  We ended up having a wonderful afternoon together – just being together.   And later that evening while he was playing with LEGOs I grabbed our read aloud book, missionary stories and Bible story book and did the next days reading.  He was attentive and it was enjoyable and it got us ahead in those subjects,  which was helpful because I knew we had a little catching up to do the next day on the subjects we abandoned.

5.  Start Fresh the Next Day

We started our morning the next day with a prayer that our hearts and attitudes would be better and that our day would be blessed.

We had a better day.  🙂

What do you do when your homeschool day has been bad?   I would love to hear how you reset!

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Moments

The Christmas Story as read by my 7 year old

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbVBA5CPAtY]

Hope everyone had a very merry Christmas and a happy and blessed new year!

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Mom Thoughts Moments

The Tragedy in Paris and the Conversation it Sparked with my 7 Year Old

tragedyinparis

The Tragedy in Paris and the conversation is sparked with my 7 year old son about religion, safety and fear.

I would like to preface this article with two things.  I am pro-gun (I own one, I know how to use it and I carry it – legally) and I love Jesus.  If either of these things bother you, you might not want to read this post.

BigG just turned 7.  Some days he acts like a silly 5 year old and some days his maturity amazes me.  We’ve talked about “stranger danger” and “tricky people“, fire safety, tornado safety and things like that.  But a while back I was reading an article online about schools having “active shooter” drills.  And I thought, “Thank you, Jesus, that we homeschool and my kindergartner doesn’t have to sit through an active shooter drill in school!”

But the article I was reading was talking about how an “active shooter” situation can happen anywhere – the park, the grocery store – and that’s just the world we live in now.  And I thought, you know, we need to have a conversation about this.  But I put it off.  Because BigG can be sensitive sometimes…and worry himself to death over the worse case scenario (like the time he cried for an hour after we talked about fire safety and he was afraid the house was going to catch on fire and he wouldn’t be able to save his favorite stuffed dog.)

So last night I’m reading about Paris.  And I thought, you know, we NEED to have this conversation.  Part of me wanted to just go about our day today and not say anything to BigG about it and let him live in his oblivious little bubble.  I was almost twice his age when my oblivious bubble burst – I was unaware of this level of evil in the world until the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.  I was 11.  Of course I knew of wars in the past….but that was past.  I thought the world was sunshine and rainbows now.  Until Oklahoma City.  Then there was Columbine.  And 9/11.  And then, in BigG’s lifetime, there have been so many of these “events” that I can’t even keep up with them anymore.  More in the last 1/4th of my life than in the first 3/4ths.

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