Mid February Update

Okay, so this week we've been rather busy! Lots of lessons being done, including adding in some supplemental work online through Discovery K12 . Which is a free online curriculum which tracks attendance and work done. It includes three extra curricular: Spanish, coding, and health ... along with the regular subjects: Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and History. The longest thing is their reading which is a half an hour required every day. Each of my children take different amounts of time to get this work finished but they seem to enjoy it and it has taken our normal school day hours and just about doubled it but without doubling the work I'm putting into it. It also includes tests in various subjects which allows Elder Cracker Jack to practice his testing skills, especially since he wants to return to public school in the fall and that means he'll be going to high school where there are tons of tests. We may or may not continue with Discovery K12 for the girls depending on how they respond to it and at this point neither one of them has any plans on returning to public school.

We're looking into a semi-local co-op as well for the campers. If we don't take advantage of the classes offered through a separate program then they still will reap the benefits of get together and field trips which I think is a wonderful thing and for the entire family to join it's only $25 for the year. This will also allow me to talk to other homeschool parents and give me people whom I can bounce ideas off of. 

We've played outside a little (BBBRRRR has it been chilly around here!) but only for about a total of four hours. We are still taking part of the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge and last year we actually made that 1000 hour goal. Of course we were in Kentucky and now with 639 hours left to get in before September and being back in Michigan I'm in for a real challenge. It means that from now until the first week in September we need to average about 25 hours outside each week! I know that once the weather heats up that with all the parks, beaches, and other outside activities we can do around our new home that we'll have some weeks with nearly double that 25 hour goal, but at this point it seems rather daunting because we're finally in the throws of winter. 

We were at Grandma and Papa's house from the end of August until the very beginning of January and so we spent Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas at their home. We had a blast but are really enjoying our new home now and are finally getting back into our own rhythm. Here are a few pictures from the time we were there:

Noni had bought me those Hello Kitty pajamas for Christmas and they are so warm and comfy!!!

I'd love to post new pictures of our house and the first home improvement project that we've already finished but I haven't uploaded those photos from my phone yet so they'll have to wait. This upcoming week we have lessons, several appointments, and hopefully tons of outside time to come! I will attempt to get a new house post up sometime during the middle of the week and a new weekly wrap up posted next Friday. I'd have had this one posted this past Friday but I was rather ill for the last couple of days and am only now feeling well enough to get back up and do things.

And for those of you who look for my crochet creations here's a pretty set I made last year but you've never seen:

So Much Has Happened!

Oh my goodness! So much has happened since my last blog entry and it all began even before that! So, get yourself a cup of coffee (or tea if you'd rather) and settle in for an update!

October of 2014 found us moving from that home we remodeled in Michigan to another home in eastern Kentucky. I posted pictures online and blogged just a little, but we spent nearly the next year just enjoying the great outdoors and working on some projects outside on the two acres of land. Well, when we went to pull permits for some work on the house this past summer we were shocked to find out that no one was even supposed to be in that house and indeed it shouldn't have been sold to us. So, we packed up and headed back to good old Michigan.

We stayed with Grandma and Papa while trying to get ourselves reestablished in Michigan. Taking care of those pesky things like transferring the insurance and house hunting. We'd thought we'd only need to stay for a month or two. We were there from August until just the beginning of January! House hunting this time around was harder than we'd thought it would be. But we did eventually find the home we wanted, waited out the couple of months it took for the paperwork to be processed on the other people's side, and then had to redo the plumbing from the floor up in almost the whole house!

We've been in our new home for just over a month now and we're really beginning to feel settled in. The campers are back to their regularly scheduled lessons again (which hadn't been so regular until we were once again in our own home) and our routines are slowly falling into place. 

I'll have pictures and more about the house at another time (I have to find that pesky link cord for my camera to upload them to the computer, I know it's around here somewhere...). 

As for Elder Cracker Jack he's been turning into a regular teenage boy. He's now fourteen and of course thinks that he's heading on forty. Us parents can't possibly understand, don't know what he's going through, as a matter of fact we really don't seem to know much most of the time as far as he's concerned. At least until a doctor or someone else verifies the information that we've just given him. He's doing wonderfully at his lessons, though he still hates writing reports or creative writing unless it's his own idea. He's decided that he'd like to go to public high school in the fall, so we're working on getting him more involved with the co-op near us and getting him ready for the transition. He's been informed that if he's going to "do high school" then he is in it for all four years. He's not coming back home simply because he doesn't like his classes, teachers, or classmates. The high school can literally be seen out of my back window as the house buts up to their field for sports so it's not like he has far to go.

Younger Cracker Jack is chugging along quite nicely. Her reading level is still behind but she is catching up more every day. She's now reading things she sees all around us on her own without prompting and has been doing her language arts assignments with very limited help from me. It takes her longer than when I sat with her and helped her through it but she is doing it on her own and doing it well and that is what matters, not how quickly she can get it done.

Peanut, well she astounds me every single day. Today during spelling, remember that we use  Spelling You See, she wrote this super cute narrative and illustrated it. The rhyme this week was I'm a little teapot and she wrote about how teapots were probably in the people's homes that were involved with the Boston Tea Party. And that it all happened because the taxes were too high. Her illustration showed a teapot, sword in hand, fighting with the king of England! Her imagination is priceless! She's popping up with words I didn't know that she knew how to read on a weekly basis and shocks me all the time with what she knows on subjects I didn't even know she knew about yet. 

I could continue to write more and more all night long, but I would never get to bed and I have a busy day tomorrow. So, I hope this helped shed some light on what's been going on with us for the past 18 months or so and I sincerely hope that I am able to get back into the flow of blogging often!