Just When I Start Thinking

Just when I start thinking "what the hell am I doing" in regards to homeschooling, and I get a huge reminder that what we are doing is right for our family and that the children are learning.

We started school August 1st of this past year because I knew that we would need to take some time off once the baby came.  We were thorough.  We had a checklist that seemed to work well in regards to things I thought we should learn.

After our son was born, I took 2 weeks off and then felt like we could get back to it.  My husband was home on baby leave, and well the baby slept a lot.  We really took advantage of the quietness within the house.

Needless to say, the past couple of months have been hit or miss in regards to any "formal" schooling. My children love to be read to, and my daughter reads a lot on her own, and is adept at looking up information and interests on the internet.  But, the interest in our general day to day learning has waned, and so we've just been doing other things.  We've been to a week long - half day oceanography camp, traveled for Spring Break visiting OMSI, the Evergreen Air and Space Museum, the Oregon Coast Aquarium, and Hatfields Marine Science Homeschool day.  We've hung out with our book clubs, and since the weather is starting to be almost summer like, we've been out adventuring in the local woodlands.

Every so often though, the worry creeps in.  Are they learning what they are supposed to be learning right now.  I hear about what folks in public school are doing, and what other homeschooling families are doing.  Right now...and I tried to do some formal schooling today...cursive, some easy multiplication etc.  All these subjects are things my daughter has said she is interested in, and I got the dreaded wall and shut down brain.

I get really frustrated by this at times, and then try to remind myself that she is just 7.

Before we left for an afternoon at our local trampoline park and the playground, we were playing around with alka seltzer, water, and film containers.  The little explosions were quite fun, and brought lots of giggles.  The children also got into some garble balls..a type of polymer that expands in water.  I watched as the two older children experimented for a good couple of hours.  They dissected these balls, left them to dry, put one in a bottle with more water to see if it would expand, added just a little water to one in a bowl.  They even put some in sea salt to see what would happen.  All of these were labeled, and they were having so much fun!  It was neat to see!  I asked our daughter if she would be interested in looking through all of our experiment books, and picking some out.  The response was "are you serious?  I would love too!!"

There was excitement, and so much energy coming from these two young minds.  It just made me smile to see it all unfolding.  Maybe this is where we need to be right now.    Why do I worry and not just have some faith?