Week 24, day 1

Monday: Language Arts. This morning, we spent a good half hour outside before breakfast. For Easter, the kids were given, among other things, wire mesh boxes for capturing bugs (with several chocolate bugs inside, which were removed and eaten). So once everyone was clothed, we headed outside to collect pill bugs and earwigs from the decaying wood chip pile left over from Hurricane Ike. I actually pulled about 200 weeds (literally, I counted them) from my square foot garden, which is designed to be weed free unless you stupidly place it directly under a reproductively precocious bush in the springtime before moving it to a new state. I made a bit of a dent in the number of weeds, maybe getting 40% of them.

We started school at a decent time, reviewing our hymn ("Up From the Grave He Arose") which the kids both sang with enthusiasm. We went over our memory verse and catechism question from last week, updated our calendar, and P did her math worksheet. This was a review week for language arts, so P did a few review worksheets before getting tired of that amount of seatwork. She read her new reader with hardly any difficulty, and did all of the copywork for the week. She mostly did it upside-down under the table, but her handwriting was as tidy as when she was sitting properly, so I'm categorizing this habit as "reason #x to homeschool". By the time she'd finished that, both P and E were super restless, B was waking up from his nap, and I decided that we'd done enough school for the day. However, P and E were given Peter Rabbit chocolate bunnies and post-it notes by my parents (thanks, Mom!) and we read the stories of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck from our Beatrix Potter treasury. I need to make more of an effort to read stories like that to them, because we all enjoy it.

Also, The Onion makes me laugh. It made me think of this post on outsourcing parenthood.