Home alone

This fall on Friday mornings I am home alone. Well, usually dh will be here (working in his office above the garage) too, but this morning I am truly alone since he is still in SB until this eve. All three young persons are at their weekly tutorials. Blessedly, a friend who has to be there all morning anyway (thanks ML!) takes them and I just go at noon to pick them up. Then we head to ds's weekly guitar lesson which is close by.

The idea is for me to use the time for homeschool/life planning and paperwork catchup so that I don't have to do that on Saturday (when we prefer to work on indoor/outdoor projects and sometimes have shopping and other things to do). So, it's 8:55 and I need to get to work in a few minutes.

Ds is taking two classes: Speech and Government. Both are one semester classes that continue differently after the New Year, but he'll miss the second part (Drama and Economics, respectively) due to our planned temporary relocation to SB. Too bad he'll miss the Drama part. Can't do everything.

Older dd is taking Speech also (the "middle school" version) and Introduction to Literature. She'll also miss Drama. Hopefully she'll be able to complete the Lit course while in SB.

For the "middle" and "high" school courses there is 1.5-2 hours of work at home each week. Both kids have been incredibly responsible about planning and getting their work done with almost no involvement from me! I'm so proud of them.

Younger dd's classes take place entirely on Friday mornings, i.e. she has no outside or home work to do. The morning is divided into three parts: Science (they are studying ocean creatures), Literature (they are going around-the-world reading stories and learning geography as they go), and Art (last week it was clay which was a big hit!). She's enjoying it and having these classes enables us to spend lots of time together on the other four days of the week with the mechanics of Language Arts, her history course, and math.

Last spring, older dd's expressed interest in having some classroom experience is what got us to look into the possibility of them taking these classes. It turned out that what was being offered for them was just exactly (like scary how just exactly) what I was wanting to include in their homeschooling for this year, so we decided to go for it. The older two were especially open to the idea due to the fact that they already know several of the kids in their classes and at least one of the teachers (Speech). I'm grateful for how it's all worked out.