How homeschooling is going (a photo dump)

Hurray! We have made it successfully through three months of 'real' homeschooling. I want to just pause and say...

I am proud of that.

It is morphed into something different than perhaps I had envisioned a year ago, or even in the end of August, but in many ways it is better than those expectations of mine had been.

Having Patrick so actively involved has been a tremendous blessing.
Because seriously, I do not get how women look after babies and tots while still making any headway teaching an older child Math & Phonics.

I know it works for some families. But that wouldn't work for ours. Not without a pharmacy of anti-anxiety drugs or a maid.

What we have devised has been wonderful, however: concentrated phonics, Math and catechism lessons for an hour a day for Noah taught by Patrick, while I play with the littles and work on letters and so on with Isaiah. Then throughout the day I do art, music, readalouds, science, baking and other life skills (how to make a bed! And fold your own laundry!) -- all fancy ways of saying, "an extension of everything a stay-at-home mom already does."

I took this photo on the anniversary of our engagement. 

I occasionally have these moments where I feel like time stops and I look at my life from a bird's eye view in disbelief.

Me? Us? We have three children?!

It's amazing what the "yes" I said to Patrick that day 7 years ago has meant -- these three sweet faces.

Here they are on their first day of "library school." A wonderful weekly program for homeschooled children. It is really well done.

We have stopped going for a brief time, because it made for two hours in the car every week getting there and back. It may be just the distraction we need after Christmas when cabin-fever is known to set it, but for now, it is on the back burner.

Enjoying celebratory first-day-of-school ice cream cones

Much of our time is spent engaged in play. Isaiah made a round house out of pizza box and is enjoying using it with his Thomas trains.

He's just recently taken a real interest in colouring, tracing and cutting. I'm so proud and excited.

Here is 1/2 of my little craft class. Twice a month 9 kids (including my own) and two moms show up and I read a story, we do a little craft and the kids eat a snack while the mothers chat. The boys look forward to it so much, and it is great fun. Isaiah said of it "now you are a real teacher!"

We still reserve most of our crafting to just us, mind you.
I got the boys to make some leaf crowns because autumn is wondrous, but oh-so-fleeting.

We borrowed our local library's sock monkey. You check him out and fill out in a journal what sort of things you did with the sock monkey for a week. I wonder what fellow library patrons will think when they read our "exciting" entries like "we went to the store with Mommy! Mommy read us lots of books! Sock Monkey watched Noah take his piano lesson!"

Showing off his Miraculous Medal he made at our recent craft co-op. Word to the wise: Sharpies and tin foil are a fun combination!

He is making amazing progress in his studies. He loves Math and is flying through Kindergarten Math at a breakneck pace. He loves learning piano and we are getting positive feedback from his teacher on what an eager learner he is. After showing zero interest in phonics for a while, and us backing off, he suddenly is quite engaged with learning it now.

We're not going to rush him into reading because he has a bookworm streak in him already and it might distract him from imaginative play, or say, helping out with household tasks. BUT since he is showing interest and making headway, we'll keep it up.

One of my favourite aspects of our homeschooling life, especially with a work-from-home father, is the freedom to take off and go places. This field trip was in celebration of Patrick coming back from his second trip to Rome in six months.

We took off to Gatineau to the Museum of History which has a Children's Museum with a... wait for it... Bob the Builder exhibit.

The kids were suitably impressed by that.

(Even Anna, seen here watering Wendy's flowers. {And yes, I really am on a first-name basis with Bob and the gang.})

In actual fact, the Bob the Builder exhibit wasn't nearly as impressive as the rest of the children's museum. The whole place was set up like a tour of the world -- you could visit a market in Greece, a shipyard in France, traditional homes from Japan, Mexico and Nigeria, and even crawl through a pyramid to see a mummified cat.

I nearly fainted with teachable moment bliss over the tour of the pyramid because we had just finished a unit on Ancient Egypt. Here the boys are with their mummified teddy bear.

They built him a pyramid "to be his sarcophagus" (nothing like having your three year old use that word correctly in a sentence) and then Noah, unprompted, signed the side of the pyramid with their names in hieroglyphics.

One funny ancient Egypt moment was when we were getting ready to mummify Boo-Boo Bear, Noah said "isn't there a god of mummification?" to which I answered -- after fact-checking with of the books on Egypt that I got from the library -- "yes, it's Annubis." Isaiah responded to this by making a grand sweeping gesture across the table to get our attention, "well okay then, we need to pray to him!"

I had to give a little lesson on what "blasphemy" and "idolatry" was.

Later that day Noah made a diagram on embalming to show his friends, including a picture with an arrow pointing to the nose "because that's where they take the organs out."

 One last picture from our trip to the museum: here we are at a 3-D Imax movie! I have never shown my children a full-length film, and have definitely never taken them to the theatre, but since we got our admission to the museum for free from the library, it seemed like a worthy splurge.

The film was about Galapagos island. The kids had a great, great time laughing over the birds that had bright blue feet and it was adorable watching Isaiah stand up out of his seat, trying to touch the things that appeared to be coming off the screen.

A visit to the pumpkin patch. Be still, my autumn-loving heart.

(My hair looks weird because it had started to rain.)

I love their faces in this picture -- genuinely delighted and amazed to be riding in a covered wagon at our trip to the pumpkin patch, just like Laura and Mary did.

It's a lot of work, homeschooling, having three kids and running a house, but it is such a privilege to be by their sides.

In preparation for All Saint's Day, Noah made a pretty impressive cast of saint puppets.
From left to right, St. Clare of Assisi, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Michael who is hovering over an adoration chapel, Blessed Mother Teresa (I love her technicolour face), Blessed John Paul II and St. Louis, King of France.

There is a reason their father keeps pleading with me to ban markers from the house. Oh boy.

Okay back to blissful pictures of homeschooling: here is a science experiment we did with a Mary garden the boys wanted to create for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady.

And switch back to "real life" -- when the day lags, the snow is already falling in early November and a tiny part of me wonders "what am I doing with my life/choice of town?!" we take off somewhere. Maybe to a playdate or on an errand, often just for a walk. And on this day, lunch at Tim Horton's. Certainly it's an expensive way to distract ourselves but definitely fun.

(Doesn't Anna look so much like CRAINE now? I swear in this picture she looks like a tiny girl version of her brothers.)

This photo could be called "A Tale of Two Temperaments"

I'd like to say for the record, I think this may be the best time of all to homeschool. When they are young, the pressure is very low, and their desire to learn is so fertile.

I feel like the whole world is our playground and we have endless possibilities ahead of us. We can spend our days doing anything and everything!

I make no predictions about the outcome of this little 'social experiment' or how long we will continue to do it but I do know that it is working well now, and that we are very happy.

And it doesn't get much better than that.