Creation to the Greeks Week 16, Dec. 13-17, 2010

This week we had snow!  Even though we have a very consistent routine here at home, we were thrown off of it this week! We had our niece and nephew here on Monday morning and they did schoolwork with us for part of the time.  The 7 yr old girls were really excited to do "school" together; it was cute!  We had school everyday this week, but all of the other schools had two days of cancellations and two days of delays because of the weather.  I didn't think it would affect my children so much, but it did! With the snow, my daughter's birthday on Friday and Christmas coming quickly - they were finding it more difficult to concentrate on schoolwork. So I tried to lighten our loads, make time for sledding, kept reading our Advent devotional book, and prayed for patience!  The other schools are still in session on Monday and Tuesday of next week, another town nearby has school on Wednesday, Dec. 23! I am so thankful that we did plow through our work this week so that we have completed 16 weeks of our curriculum and are now TAKING A BREAK! Yay!

For this week, we read about the Israelite spies going into Canaan and most of them giving an unfavorable report, the consequences of that, and the transition from Moses to Joshua.  We also learned about ancient cultures that migrated from that part of the world into the Americas and the types of earliest civilizations that began to develop.

We could not do all of the science experiments right now in the very cold weather and not a lot of sun when it was snowing this week, so we read about the solar system and watched a video from the library called "Meet the Planets".  It was really informative and actually kept the attention of my most easily distracted student!

We are still reading through our Advent devotional book, Tabitha's Treasures and it is so neat how the author ties in this story with the story of Jotham's Journey and the stories of Christ's birth! The kids look forward to it every night.

My daughter is in the local Nutcracker performances this weekend so we are all excited to see the results of several months of hard work for all of the dancers and their teachers.  She had a long dress rehearsal on the night of her birthday, but she didn't complain one bit! It was so fun for her, the only thing she didn't like was having to wait until 9pm to open her gifts!  But we did get to have a nice lunch with Daddy in the middle of busy day!

This week, there were times when thoughts started to creep into my head like, "wouldn't it be easy to get all the Christmas shopping and birthday gifts ready if the kids were gone at another kind of school?"  Other parents on facebook were complaining about having so many snow days before Christmas when they were needing to go shopping.  But then I thought about how I was available to help my sister and watch her kids on Monday when she had to be at work, how I was able to break from school earlier than usual on Thursday and go sledding with the kids, and how we had time to go to a special restaurant and celebrate our daughter's birthday in the middle of the day with our whole little family - when all the other kids were at school!  I also started remembering how crazy it was when I was a teacher in a brick-and-mortar school building around this time of year. I talked to my good friend who is filling in for a maternity leave and she said the kids were definitely thrown off at school by these snow days, Christmas, etc.  Now, because we worked through the snow days last week, we are done with lessons until after Christmas! I just had to remind myself of the blessings when my son was bouncing off the walls a little more than usual!

My husband told me two things this week, to not wait until I can't take it anymore and then yell at the kids - oops, sorry honey!  And that yes, there are sacrifices for our homeschooling, but he said, "In the long run, you get back what you have invested." I think he is right! I am sowing - and it's hard work - but I am already reaping more time with my family, time to do special things or to learn from the Word of God, time to build our relationships with each other. Every day isn't easy, but the future benefits will be worth all of the hard work!