Enjoying a Day Off

It's so nice to have a day to relax.  I know the kids love it too.  We didn't do anything that resembled work, at least not in the conventional sense.  I went to my dance practice, but that was the most work I did.  It's so nice to have a lazy day now and again.  It's relaxing.

Once in a while it's great to sit back and just do nothing of importance.  Now that the kids are in bed we're sitting and watching Babylon 5.  Before that the kids and I watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.  My partner went out and did the grocery shopping, which is something that never happens.

I'd almost forgotten how nice it is to sit back and relax.  It's nice to take some time off and to be so mellow.  I hope we have a chance to have relaxing days more often.  I think this is going to have to become a regular weekly thing!

Tomorrow we go back to our new weekly tradition, game day.  I'm not sure what we're going to play, but I think we need to take some time and enjoy playing games together as a family.  It's important to us.  We really need all that time.  We need to enjoy this time as a family.

Crazy for Books

While my daughter's thing with reading has been written about constantly, I seem to have neglected to write about my older son.  The two are so incredibly opposite that it's almost hard to believe the two have anything in common!  My daughter hates anything that has to do with school.  My older son loves everything to do with school.

Just the other day I decided to sit down with my son and read only to find out that it wasn't going to be anything like I expected.  Normally he'll ask me to read book after book, but he won't actually take much interest in it.  He would listen to the story, make some comments about the pictures, and that would be about it.  Yesterday was different.  Yesterday we had a book that had numbers and the alphabet.  He enjoyed counting to ten with the book, and then, to my surprise, insisted on doing the alphabet twice!  We haven't been working much with the alphabet because he hasn't wanted to work with the letters.  We discuss some letters now and again, but he hasn't shown much interest.

Where my daughter seems uninspired to learn and do school work, my son is always asking to do school.  He always wants to be learning something.  He's very resistant on writing, but he seems eager to learn how to read, do math, and everything else.  I have to admit, I worry that I'm going to miss out on this opportunity with how busy I've been.  I also worry that, now that I have a child that wants to learn so readily that I'm just not going to be able to teach him well enough.  Seeing the way things have gone with my daughter has brought a lot of fears to my mind.

I know I'm worrying about this too much.  I know I'll be fine with this whole homeschooling thing with a child that truly does want to learn.  I know when it comes to having a kid that doesn't rebel at the first sign of something that sounds like school I'll really enjoy it.  I'm going to have a lot of fun with teaching him.  I just need to relax into it and let it happen.

She Can Read! It's a Miracle!

I got frustrated with my daughter today.  I couldn't take it anymore.  My daughter had been conning me for quite some time and I was done with letting her get away with it.  Today she would prove to me that she knew more than she was letting on, or she was going to be put in a position where it would be very favorable to learn to read.  I was going to win this battle of wills!

Today my daughter gave me everything I needed to make my move.  She declared that all she ever did was play.  She was bored of playing.  She wanted to color.  She wanted to watch a movie.  She wanted to do anything that was different than playing.  The only reason I hadn't been letting her color was a loss of crayons in the move.  I couldn't find them, so she's kind of been on hold with that in the whole unpacking process.  However, that little complaint had given me everything I needed.  I told her she wasn't allowed to do anything but play and look at books until she could prove to me she could do math and read.

Wouldn't you know it?  She picked up one of the Bobbsey Twins Level 1 Reading books and read the whole thing!  There was a little bit of resistance at first, but before long she had not only read the book, but she had gone on to do entire sets of addition and subtraction, with visual aides.  Isn't it amazing what little it takes to get a kid to prove they can do something?

At the end of it all she got to play a few games on the Wii while I was out at class.  I got home to hear all about it.  We reminded her that once she learns to read, she can play some of the harder games all by herself.  Once she learns to read and do math, she can even take the complete body tests on the Wii Fit Plus, which she's been asking about since it's the way they let her put her own stamp on.  It's been something she's asking about for a while now.

With all of this going on, it probably shouldn't be surprising that her little brother isn't too far behind on that whole reading thing!  I'll have to write about his learning journey soon!

Playing Games with Kids

I'd completely forgotten how much fun it can be to play games with kids.  I mean, we've played a lot of board games lately.  We've played a number of card games too.  It's been a while since we'd played any video games together.  I forgot how much I missed it.

Yesterday we pulled out our Wii Fit Plus again.  We used to use it all the time.  My older son's favorite game was the one with the penguins.  My daughter likes the hula hoop.  We used to play together to see who could get the highest score.  It was one of those things we used to play that was actually good for us.  While the game focuses most on balance, it certainly does make for a lot of fun.  We all laugh a lot as we watch each other play the games miserably!  I think the kids are actually better at this than we are!

After that we switched over to Sports Resort.  The two boys were asleep, so my partner played 100 pin bowling with my daughter, then they did some sword fighting.  Again, it's something active that we could all play together.  It was a nice day, so we could have spent it outside, but there was way too much to do around the house, so we opted to stay in.

I'm just glad we're having more opportunities to do something as a family.  It's nice to be able to enjoy our time with the kids.  Not enough families take the time to enjoy some time together.

In the Bed, out of the Bed

Last night was another rough night.  For the second night in a row, our youngest has decided he doesn't really want to sleep.  It's not that he's getting up and playing, which was the reason my older son eventually decided he didn't like sleeping in the bed.  Instead he's just getting fussy, like he can't get comfortable.

For our littlest one, sleeping in the bed has always been quite the challenge since he was six months old.  At first he would only sleep in his swing.  Nothing else would do.  Then when we got him back into the bed, he was handling it quite well, but he would spend about a half an hour crawling around the bed, fussing the whole time, because he couldn't get comfortable.  He just wasn't a happy baby at all!  Once he finally found his comfortable spot, he laid down and would sleep peacefully until morning.

We went through a couple weeks there where we were spoiled.  The baby would lay down for bed and he would cuddle up to me.  He had boycotted nursing, so all I had to do was put him in position to nurse and he would take his thumb and be gone to the world.  I was sad that it looked like he'd be weaning so soon, but I was thrilled that he was finally sleeping well.

That's when things changed again.  I don't know what happened, but he's become an entirely different baby again.  He only wants to nurse at bed time, so my milk supply is still pretty low.  He doesn't want to sleep.  Instead he crawls around and fusses all night.  He seems to get comfortable, then moments later he gets up and starts fussing again, sometimes just to roll over, sometimes to crawl around the bed.  He's always cold at night because he has this thing against blankets.  For a while he and blankets were good, but now he's decided they aren't any fun at all and do not belong on the bed.  He even sometimes refuses to lay on them, meaning my partner and I have to freeze on the bed!  I don't know how he can stand it!  Our room is pretty chilly at night!  At some point in the night he always fusses that he's cold and snuggles up to us, but won't tolerate the blankets.  We would just dress him warmly, but we've had to take to putting a towel down under him because he's been soaking through all his diapers recently.  I know disposables are more absorbent than cloth, but he's soaking through those like crazy too!  It's just so strange!

As a result, he's kind of been in and out of our bed the last week, making it hard for my partner and I to get any sleep.  I love my kids dearly.  I wouldn't give them up for anything, but for those of you who tell me my life with baby should be so much easier now that he's a year old, that's not at all the case!

Hopefully this is just a phase and he'll outgrow it soon, like my daughter and her hatred of reading.  I know he won't always be such a pain over where he sleeps.  As he gets older he'll probably be the kid that can sleep anywhere!  For now, we're just going to have to keep working through it.

Sunday Video Time Again!

I just thought this video was cute and wanted to share.  It was made by a woman who was "educated at home" covering the stereotypes of homeschoolers, and why people who homeschool blend in so well.  She has a point.  The only homeschooled kids you would recognize to be that way (unless you're in the know) are the ones that kind of stand out in society as weird...

School Is a Bad Word

I don't know what it is, but my daughter thinks anything that has to do with school is bad.  Computer games that are school related get old with her very quick.  I've tried a whole variety of games, like the Jump Start games.  She wants nothing to do with it.  It's all too hard and inspires lots of fighting.  It's like she knows educational things are supposed to be boring, no matter how much I try to make them fun.

Things are incredibly different with her brother.  Her brother loves school stuff.  Once I get him playing educational games I have to evict him from my chair so I can have my computer back!  He loves watching educational shows on television.  He could sit and learn about anything all day long.  We can play games, work with letters, all of that for days on end without stop, and even though he would be cranky with exhaustion, he would still beg to do more!  He loves school.  He loves books.  He loves anything that encourages him to learn!  He's all about learning!  I used to joke that he likes books more than toys, but I think it's actually true.  He does love books far more than he loves toys, though he still loves his toys.

My daughter has never been one for learning things that look like work.  She'll ask a million questions about cars.  She'll want to know absolutely everything about how babies are born.  She wants to know how things happen, but when it comes to reading and math, that's just too much effort.  I've tried everything from rewarding her for being successful to being hard on her when she's just giving me problems for the sake of giving me problems and everything in between.  It's been a constant struggle no matter what I do.

A part of me is tempted to just go on cues from my kids.  I'd be doing a lot of work with learning with my older son because he loves it.  I think I might burn out long before he does!  My daughter, however, I'm afraid she'd never want to learn anything practical.  I mean, I know she's learning how to read, but how much of that is from our frustrating lessons and how much is that from her own work?

I guess I'm still trying to figure out this whole thing.  It's so frustrating!  I've had so many people tell me that homeschooling kids learn because they love learning.  I'm seeing that with my son, but my daughter is exactly the reason why people told me homeschooling would be better, because kids who go to school develop that resistance to learning.  For years (before I met some of the awesome people I know now) I thought that this sort of thing just didn't happen with homeschooling kids unless they were in a rigid school-like environment.  I started to get down on myself because something must be wrong with me because I can't inspire my daughter to love reading and learning the way I do, the way her brother does.

Well, I guess this is just going to be part of the journey.  I need to set myself to be ready for the challenge.  We'll see where it goes from here.