Week Five, Six and maybe Seven.

I am one of those crazy people that makes a list to cross things out. So, though we have moved this month and gone on a two week trip and now have been unpacking, we are terribly behind. So I will say we are somewhere between week 5-7. I took work on our northern trip, but there was too much to do. They say these are the perks of home education.  I admit my completion, high-achievement mentality is still trying to believe this and not feel terribly behind.  We began again yesterday, Larsen’s desk set up in their new room which is working well so far. 

He is wrestling to get his mind re-focused. I am wrestling with how this child came from my womb, he who daydreams and fidgets and ponders and is slower than the turtles we see walking down our road.  The comments he would get on his report card if he were to have one would be what all of Ben’s said as a child, “Kind and respectful young man but highly prone to distraction! No concept of time or great tact!”  Benjamin, my dear ADD man, was thought to have a learning disability, oh great. Honestly, Lars is a very bright little man, but yet another reason why a classroom would leave him behind. He has a writer/painter and a woodworker/musician for parents after all…

So, I teach with great sweeping drama and voice inflection and Lars goes into it himself and all is lost. I make up rhythms with pencils and singing rhymes and he laughs himself silly.  I act like a stern school marm with glasses and a tight bun and he coils with lip quivering.  I play Charlotte Mason and he daydreams and draws about aliens leaping the Great Wall of China. I set the timer and he nonchalantly nods at it when it goes off and resumes his snail pace.  I give him a break and he spends his time telling me we must find out if ants can see underground and if there are any ruins from the tower of Babel and exactly how far up people can live in the Arctic.  I sent him to bed tonight and discovered that he had been reading for an hour with a flashlight under his covers, almost half way done with a Jack and Annie book.  So now I tumble into bed at a complete loss, gearing up to start again…