Our NEW Homeschool Room!

If you are here from the Not Back to School Blog Hop....welcome! My regular readers know this, but I switched the playroom and homeschool room over the summer. The playroom is now small and easy to pick up and the homeschool room is bigger and we can actually walk around a little! It used to be my younger daughter's bedroom. So, it's about the size of a bedroom in a 40 year old house.

Won't you come inside?

This is looking in from the door. I sit in the funky black and white chair. I re-covered it last year after saving it from the trash. So OK a weld was broken and it's now held together with bright green zip ties. BUT LOOK AT THE PRETTY FABRIC. The girls "new" chairs are salvaged from the back porch. They are cushier than their old chairs.

If you look to the left. you'll notice our hermit crabs aka the class pets. And beyond those is the girls' new art table. This is my attempt at keeping the homeschool room free of clutter in between school times. If they want to draw, they draw at the art table. In theory. The mirrored doors cover the closet which holds out of season clothes, more art supplies, and extra toys. And golf clubs. We'll just keep those doors closed, m'kay?

Looking at the table from another angle you can see our wonderful black shelves. They were a little neater a few weeks ago but I can guarantee you they will look worse later.

The new art center. This is something we would NEVER have had room for in our old homeschool room. The girls painted their old school chairs to use at the art table.

Our world map is again at a level where the kids can use it. And our trusty white board. The markers are kept in the cool gift bag.

Over by the window I have 2 tubs/baskets of easy readers for Little Bit. The carpet squares add a little softness, but I plan to put some pillows down here too in order to encourage reading. This might come in handy when she is waiting for me to finish with sister. Also, our DVD player is right there and they can lay on pillows while they watch their Math U See lesson.

Looking back toward the door, you can see the rest of our art table and the collection of stuffed animals under the hermit crab tank.

That's our room! We are really excited to have all this space. The sacrifice comes in the girls sharing a room but this works well for us right now. They have loft beds, so they have some space of their own as well. I really like the calming color and I think we will enjoy being in here.

Thanks for stopping by! Go check out more great rooms at Heart of the Matter Online!

Today's the Day and Some Thoughts on Sleeping

This is it. No more swimming. Today is all about getting ready for school. After breakfast, I am cleaning up the school room once and for all and taking pictures. I'll share them soon. THEN, with my ultra organized area around me, finishing up the planning will be easy, right? Well, it will be prettier, that's for sure.

Our old school room ready to go one year. So pretty!

Then, after lunch, I am going to Carrie's house and we are going to plan. She has good ideas and also is farther along in her planning so I'm going to go suck her ideas. Why should I have to do all the work? No, what works for one family won't work for all families...but I want to get some good ideas and have someone to bounce ideas off of.

Since we are kind of busy Friday and are going to dinner on Saturday....I really need today to PRODUCTIVE. VERY.

Now. I want to talk about sleeping. I have several teen friends on Facebook and I am just amazed that in the summer they have turned into bats. They are nocturnal, I'm telling you. I asked sweetheart's friend yesterday what time she had gone to bed the night before (her teen sisters are on FB so I had a good idea). She told me: 2am. THEN, of course, they sleep all day the next day. And eat breakfast at 4:00 in the afternoon. She's only 10 so I suppose she went to bed "early." Her sisters stay up all night. Like every night is a lock-in.

Little Bit and Sweetheart ready for bed at a hotel last Spring Break.

They are not the only ones. I have a lot of friends whose kids sleep until 10 or noon in the summer. Ug. Can I just say that I HATED the day after lock-ins when I was in high school? That is the grossest feeling. I hated how I felt after sleepovers too. The last (and one of the only) sleepovers that Sweetheart ever went to was when she was 7. It was a birthday party and I naively assumed the mom would call "bedtime" at some point. I figured it would be late but....oh dear. At 1:00am we got a call from Sweetheart/the mom. Something was hurting. Do you want me to come get you? No. Put a cold rag on it. Are you sure you want to stay? Yes. From what we can tell, we guess it was like 3:30am before she fell asleep. And needless to say, church was the next day. Those girls (15 or so of them) dragged into church and the mom fed them donuts before church started. Half of them fell asleep in church, Sweetheart (of course) got a big headache but I refused to let her sleep all day. We just let her have a nap and then be miserable. We put her to bed early, but I wanted her to remember the miserable feeling so she would better understand why she was NEVER doing it again. She told me, through tears, "But Mommy, nobody put me to bed!" It was sad, I'm telling ya.

My kids have been sleeping until 8 or 8:30 these last 2 weeks. Most of the summer Sweetheart was up at 7. Little Bit usually gets up by 8 and that is when they have both gone to bed at 9. Anyway, I mentioned something about how my kids have been sleeping too late and then I said 8:30 and several people looked shocked at me. But at church last night several parents agreed with me--8:30 was too late and their kids had been sleeping that late too.

So what do you think? Do your kids bounce out of bed at sunrise no matter what or do you all turn into bats in the summer or somewhere in the middle?

Because I Have So Much to Do

We are going swimming today naturally. Of course that's what you do when school starts on Monday and you aren't ready.

Also it's sewing lesson day.

So yeah, my day is pretty well shot as far as productivity goes.

On the other hand, I will be visiting with 2 good homeschool mama friends. Surely we can hash out some details of the upcoming year while the kids play. While the 9 collective children play. Surely.

I will tell you one thing of importance. I just could. not. get. going on the school planning and THEN my free copy of Home Educating Magazine arrived in the mail. I won a subscription last year.

There was an article on "Sabbath School." The author told about the pattern of 6 days of work/ 1 day of rest being a wise pattern the Lord set up for us. She took it a step further and schools 6 weeks and then takes 1 week off. Sounded very wise to me. Avoids burn-out. Spreads the year over 12 months instead of cramming it into 9.

So I did that. I got a calendar from here. I counted and figured and there might have been a bit of smoke coming out of my ears at one point but the bottom line is:

We have 36 weeks of instruction broken into 6 week segments. We have a month off at Christmas. We have 6 weeks for summer break.

I think I like it. We'll see how it goes.

But first I must swim.

Let the Wakefullness Begin

I can't ever sleep well right before back to school time. When I was a teacher, this was the time of year I was in my classroom for a few hours each day getting stuff ready. Only, when it was time to leave, nothing was done. I maybe had put bulletin board paper up, and possibly even border, but none of the bulletin boards were finished. I had pulled stuff out of everywhere and laid it all over the desks but couldn't put it away yet because I wasn't finished with it. There was a roll of laminated items to be cut out, and punched out die cut letters laying everywhere and copies that needed to be made and even though I worked every day.....it would remain unfinished for about 2 weeks.

And that made me not sleep well. And have nightmares. I shared about some of them a few years ago.

I'm in the middle of planning and thinking and dreaming about our upcoming year and so I have a kajillion things on my mind. I realized at 5:00 this morning, while lying in bed wide awake, that I have a conflict on Wednesdays. So first thing this morning I was up e-mailing someone about switching times or dates. And really, I haven't actually sat down and done ANYTHING about our new year. Not much at all. This has all been mental while I'm washing dishes or cleaning up from the break-in.

Today I'm off to Half-Price books to see if I can get some cash. I already have a healthy stack of books to sell but I'm going to have the girls go through their bookshelves too. I feel sure we can get rid of some more. Oh and last night at Target, I found chapter books for $1!!!! The titles Sweetheart picked out were "The Wizard of Oz", "The Story of Doctor Dolittle", and "A Little Princess." They are "Junior Classics for Young Readers" so I assume they are condensed in some way. I don't know if your Target Dollar Spot has them but goodness sake what a great deal.

When we get back from our book selling (I can't imagine how much money we'll make. $2? $5? I really have no idea.) I have to actually walk into the school room and DO something. Instead of clicking all the links on the Not Back to School Bloghop although I did get some great ideas yesterday. It is time for action.

And perhaps action today will help me sleep tonight?

Honesty

The kitchen is clean. That's because I maybe whined a bit and S helped me last night before bed. I could not have handled walking into a mess this morning.

The bed is made. I think I'm through with positives.

The laundry in our bathroom floor is very high. We had no clean towels yesterday and I think S wet his hair this morning and dried if off with a hand towel.

There are pieces of clutter from the front door all the way through the living room. No surface remains clear. It's kind of amazing actually. Like someone broke in our house and all they did was scatter crap everywhere.

The bills need to be paid. Today.

I cannot see any speck of the surface of our homeschool table. I cannot get motivated in that area.

There are toys in the hallway.

The playroom is a mess.

Some of the bags of stuff I had sacked up to get rid of busted open and they are lying all over the garage floor.

BUT....

I am thankful that I am not on my way to work and will face coming home to this mess tonight. I am so thankful that I will be home all day to tend to all this mess.

I am blessed that my children will be in my care today, even if I will be only vaguely aware of what they are doing during some portions of the day (bill paying).

I am blessed by a hard-working husband whom God has blessed with the ability to work and with a job(s) to work at.

So I shall pick up my broom, tie on my apron, and get busy around here.