June 10 update

Life is good, but busy.

For a week or more, I have been falling into bed at the first possible moment after dinner, only to roll out again "15 minutes" later to the sound of bird song. (That 15 minutes is 7, 8, or 9 hours, but doesn't feel like it.)

I'm not sure what else I've been doing, because I spend the days sleepy and disoriented. I don't feel sick, so for the moment, I'm blaming the weather. Then again, it could also be that I have had low level allergen poisoning (probably corn, because that's very hard to control for any time I leave the house.

In the good news department, things are actually going pretty well here!

Jack has been at karate for seven weeks now and it making great strides. He's decided to study for many years, and so far I get the impression that he very probably will. He takes regular classes every week, and then has bonus practice sessions at the dojo that we make it to every other week.

He is adding piano lessons to his curriculum in the next few weeks, too. It was down to piano or voice, and the choir meets on the same evening as his karate class. In Jack's mind, there was no contest.

But he has also wanted to study piano for several years now and is making progress on learning to read music, so when Rod stumbled across a teacher who both parents and kids like and recommend, it was abvious what we should do.

I hope he doesn't find it overwhelming when his art classes start up again in the autumn. From one class at a time to three over te course of his seventh summer seems like a lot to me, but he loves every one of them, so maybe it won't be too bad.

Homeschooling is also going well. The tide is coming in and and Mr Jack has been eager to hit the books lately. We have managed to finish another book just about any time we sit down to study.

I had to laugh wen he pulled out his next math book and demanded to know why that hadn't been added to the stack on the current studies table. Unlike his Mamma, Jack would rather study arithmetic than just about anything else. We explained that when everything from the current unit is done, we can start on some new books...though I do think it may be time to consider quitting some books in the middle and just adding some new courses while making those old books available "in the wild".

He does read constantly, and he would probably pick up the books we didn't finish, and his enthusiasm is better for the books we have started using more recently. That would make it all go faster...as would finding a way to stay home more. But we have found that we can cover a little between finishing dinner and clearing the table, which is all te time we have most weekday evenings.

Oh, I can't remember whether I mentioned it -- the earth has shifted a bit on the homeschooling front. Rod had been the primary teacher. That was the plan anyway.

But Jack lapped up the math, music, and science with Dad and resisted and refused and claimed to hate homeschooling if Rod mentioned any other subject. But if I picked up one of the oter subjects to browse, I instantly had an enthusiastic boy in my lap.

Hmmm.

So I am now the main teacher for history, literature, social studies, geography, herbal studies, astrology, character development, and magickal studies. Needless to say, those classes are going more slowly than math and science, but now that Jack is enthusiastic again, and brings me the books on his own initiative it's actually going faster than it was when Dad was struggling against the tide.

My current theory is that Rod has a greater enthusiasm for math, music, and science and had a subtle "dutiful" approach to other subjects. I, on the other hand, love the other subjects and enjoy them for myself, quite aside from sharing them with Jack.

Dunno. It's my theory, anyway.