A New Year, A New School Term Begins ...

Today was the start of our Winter Term. Since we homeschool year round, I have scheduled three 12-week terms, with one week off each month, and plenty of days available for ... whatever. I finally decided to use Tapestry of Grace, Year 1 with my 10 yo and SL Core 1 with my 5 & 7 yo, and allow my 9 yo to sort of glide between the two as the assignments fit. TOG is the challenge my 10 yo needs and wants, and I did not want to deprive my little ones of SL. The years I spent doing SL Cores 1 & 2 with my now 10 & 9 yo were the happiest, smoothest days of our homeschooling journey. Combining the two programs was not that difficult, and was just the intellectual exercise my brain had been craving.

It may be hard to imagine it - five kids, a house to keep up, piles of laundry, extra-curricular activities, complete and total responsibility for their education resting on your shoulders - and yet, you are bored. There are days when I look around and wonder, Isn't there anything I could be doing right now? But it really isn't just anything that I am searching for - it is something to challenge me intellectually, that requires a bit of creativity, that will cause me to feel a sense of physical exhaustion afterwards. Tweaking our schedules, finding creative approaches to our studies helps to keep things interesting around here. But there needs to be more than academics to make our lives interesting. My challenge in the new year is to find affordable, interesting things we can do with some sort of regularity to spice things up. My tendency is to become complacent in my home life, satisfying the introvert in me. And when the weather is so cold my fingers refuse to dance for the keyboard, it is even harder to motivate me to venture beyond these walls.

Speaking of cold, does anyone else have a desire to seek out Al Gore in his McMansion, with his "borrowed" carbon footprint, and strip him of his Nobel Peace Prize? Just wondering ...