"Lost" Time

It seems it's been a month since I've posted here! It's probably a small loss - for, as my daughter said matter-of-factly, "Aunt Erica's blog is much more interesting than yours, Mom" - but still, I feel an obligation at least to myself. Once upon a time I kept a journal, then replaced it with blogging, and I've done neither very often lately.

I'm often tired, for one thing (no great bursts of energy here), and for another, I've been trying to put back together everything that fell into complete chaos while I was floundering around in the first trimester. That includes school, which we began again in January, with the hopes of recovering ground we lost toward the end of last semester.

It's debatable, however, whether we really lost any. There are undeniably some things my kids missed out on while I was struggling through those fall months, such as a reliable routine. More than once I wished I could have sent them to school, where someone else could make sure they were doing all the things they were supposed to be doing. We certainly fell behind in many of our books, too, and I just made mental notes to catch up on things like grammar and spelling later. But when I took stock of what they were doing instead of "real" school days. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that children naturally learn how to learn, and they are, more often than not, steeped in an atmosphere of learning of which they probably aren't even conscious. So even when there is a lull in formal schooling ( lull is probably a nice word for it, granted) they may not actually be suffering a loss. Back to taking stock, then - sometime in November, in the worst of my sickness, Aimee picked up and read the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. In December, she followed with the first two books of C.S Lewis' space trilogy. ("Are these kids' books?" "Um, no, not exactly..." "I thought there were some pretty long words in there. Oh well, it's interesting!")
Altogether, this was like a shot of Language Arts directly to the brain - who needs a grammar lesson when you are tackling Tolkien and Lewis in fourth grade? I didn't, therefore, feel too worried about Aimee's education. And Drew didn't concern me, either, as he made it through a stack of Kate DiCamillo's books, and then began On the Banks of Plum Creek (he was growing impatient with my slow progress reading aloud Little House on the Prairie and wanted to get on with things himself). It wasn't only Language Arts that took care of itself - every once in awhile, Aimee and Drew played each other at chess and even attempted to teach Ryan how to play. And speaking of Ryan, he is almost five and has been, according the academic standards I set with Aimee at that age, most woefully neglected. But in the midst of that "neglect" he set out to teach himself, in the manner of many middle children ("If you won't teach me, I'll just figure it out myself"). Our jaws dropped one Sunday when we brought home the bulletins and church papers he had scribbled on during the service, and we discovered he had painstakingly and neatly copied whole words. I've taught him some letters here and there, but certainly not all of those. And not to be left out during math, he insisted on a math page each time his siblings had to do theirs, so the little munchkin has been working his way, mostly by himself, through the Saxon 1 math book.

"It counts, it counts!" my brain happily chanted each time I walked by and saw them reading or doing or learning in some other way. Now it's true, they also watched more TV and played more Wii than I would care to admit. It was necessary to reinstate a reasonable routine at the start of this month, and we struggled at once against those feelings of entitlement that creep up and entrench themselves when there is lapse of said routine. But other than that, I was pleased to discover that they didn't really fall behind, and instead, they kept on going, without even knowing it. The time will come when we have to be vigilant about credits and finising projects; for now, I'm so happy that we can still just revel in learning for learning's sake - and that they can do it even without me!