Return from our Vacation

We're back from our vacation! One of the best parts of living in Hawaii is that, once you get home, your surroundings whisper, "I'm really still on vacation." Ocean, palm trees, mountains... it's good to be back.

We had a fantastic time in Texas. We spent most of it at Ari's parents' place in Fredericksburg. They have a large property with a swimming pool, lake, large pavilion, and even a chapel. The children went swimming and fishing every day, while I enjoyed playing the piano in the chapel and helping B7 assemble 400- or 1000-piece puzzles. We saw more wildlife this time than we have before: in addition to deer and fish, which are usual, there was a tarantula in the courtyard, and in the swimming pool two dead scorpions and a dead rat one day, and a live frog and live grass snake another day. Friends from Ari's grad school days who live in Houston were able to come and spend part of a weekend with us, and all the children hit it off while the grownups enjoyed catching up. Then, Ari and I spent 6 days off by ourselves while the children stayed with their grandparents. We stayed in a bed and breakfast in San Marcos for 3 nights, exploring museums (without anyone to stop us from reading every caption) and riding in a glass-bottomed boat. Then we spent 3 nights in a cabin near Lost Maples State Park (named for maple trees that wandered into Texas during the last Ice Age and got left behind when the cold receded, adapting over the years to the conditions in one particular microclimate and giving Texans an opportunity to see fall colors). The hiking was great, and Ari enjoyed spending an hour or more taking pictures of turkey vultures so close you could see details on their wing feathers. We read Dorothy Sayers mysteries aloud to each other in the evenings as well as editing Ari's new book and even doing some recreational calculus!

Since we traveled back on Monday, and our logistics involved a 4-hour wait at the airport while Ari took the bus home to get our car, I packed many of our school things. We sat outside in the bright sunshine, trying to convince our bodies that it was still supposed to be daytime, and finished much of our school reading and other work. E11 left his reader, Mara, Daughter of the Nile, either at the airport in Texas or on the plane, and H5 left the first volume of I Can Read It at his grandparents' house, but we got through pretty much an entire school day except for math on Monday.

In addition to school, we had extra activities every day the rest of the week, too: we all attended Community Bible Study on Tuesday morning, I gave violin lessons on Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon, P13, E11, and B7 went to archery on Wednesday afternoon, and we did math club on Friday morning. What with getting our household up and running again (unpacking, groceries, catching up on laundry), school went on pretty late every day. Part of it is just that children have a hard time adjusting to "school mode" when they've so enjoyed "vacation mode". Little E3 came into the kitchen a few nights ago, looked me in the eye, and ordered, "Take me to the airport." I explained that even going to the airport wouldn't get us back to Oma and Opa's house, because we hadn't bought plane tickets. The next morning, while I was preparing breakfast, he commanded, "Mommy, buy plane tickets." We plan on flying back at Christmas for a big family reunion, but it's hard for a 3-year-old to understand the concept of 3 months!

N Minus 2 Is Easier Than N

It will probably come as no surprise that homeschooling 2 children plus a preschooler is easier and less work than homeschooling 4 children plus a preschooler. Despite doing a full school schedule with B7 and H5, I've felt like I'm on vacation this week. I suppose I'm reaping the "It Could Always Be Worse" effect (see https://www.sonlight.com/BA18.html) - if you keep adding difficulties, removing a few of them makes the remainder seem inconsequential. I remember when P13 and E11 were in 2nd grade and kindergarten - I didn't feel nearly this relaxed!

Adding in our Sonlight reading is always fun - it's our favorite part of school. I'm reading History/Bible/Literature B (https://www.sonlight.com/BC1R5.html) to B7, with H5 listening in, and this week we started Charlotte's Web and The Usborne Book of Peoples of the World. It always makes me happy when both boys clamor for another chapter! We've also enjoyed the internet links that come with The Usborne World of Animals, exploring bird calls and enjoying videos of baby animals. And after watching the science video, the boys ran off to experiment with how effectively various magnets could still pull through various materials (notebooks, the table, etc.).

I pulled out the I Can Read It series for H5, because he seemed to feel the Reading Lesson was getting a bit tedious. This series is really perfect for him. It starts out right at his level ("Nat the cat sat on Pat the rat. Nat is a bad cat!") but looks like a "big kid book": the pictures take up half the page or less, and there are several sentences per page; the stories are divided into chapters, and each book is 90 pages long. He was so excited to be able to read from the first book that, for the past two nights, he has asked to take a flashlight to bed with him so he can continue reading after lights out.

B7, after we watched The Tale of Despereaux on DVD over the weekend, checked out the book from the library and has read it twice through. Once H5 tired of doing his own after-bedtime reading last night, we heard voices from their room: B7 was reading Despereaux to H5 by flashlight. It's really neat to see B7 taking care of his little brothers like this - finding himself temporarily in the position of being the oldest shows up facets of his character I hadn't noticed before.

Yesterday (Friday) was really fun. I'm still doing math club for our homeschool group every 2 weeks, and lately we've been making our way through Camp Logic (http://naturalmath.com/camplogic/). But with P13 and E11 out of town, I decided to review some of the ideas we've explored in the past at the intersection of math and art, inspired by the artwork of B7's I posted last week. We had more people attend than ever before - 8 different families in addition to us - and most of the children were really engaged, drawing and coloring mystic roses. I challenged them to use as few colors as possible, and one girl managed it with just 2. Others used as many colors as possible, which yielded a different, interesting artistic effect. Something that I love about math club is that because we have it at a local park, when the lesson is over the kids all go off and play, leaving the adults to chat. It's actually become a de facto homeschool support group, where we share what works and what doesn't, and remind each other that there are actually a lot of us who do this crazy thing called homeschooling. And we do it in many different ways, and all our kids seem to be turning out pretty well so far.

The letters and texts we've received from P13 and E11 show that they're also learning a lot and having a great time. They started in LA, and among other things have seen Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. P13 sent a letter describing E11 climbing down to a big rock and yelling to his grandfather, "Opa, I think this is iron silicate! It's odd on such a pale rock." Thank you, Oma and Opa, for taking over homeschooling the older 2 for a few weeks - we're all gaining from it.