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Well we did it! We successfully got through one whole day of homeschool! Kindergarten, day 1 was great (if I do say so myself!) We got through a LOT of material. I learned that I probably over prepared and did a little too much for one day, so I am going to scale it back a bit for tomorrow. But Laney did great and completed every thing I asked her to do. She is such a good student and really thrives on having work to do. I am one blessed mama to have such an eager learner. She is going to make this journey much easier on me! Here's a brief look at what our day looked like...
After breakfast we did some calendar work, practiced writing today's date, and did our 100 chart (from My Father's World)
Said the Pledge of Allegiance
Memory Verse Work (this week she is reviewing John 3:16 and learning Proverbs 3:13)
Then it's onto chores. She has a little chore chart that she is working off of each day. This accomplishes a few things. 1. She gets a few simple chores done and learns responsibility in doing so. 2. She is learning how to read and write on a chart
Today we worked on several lessons. We did the day 1 creation lesson and the day 1 lesson 1 from My Father's World. The theme this week is the sun and it incorporates that "Jesus is the light of the world." We read the poem "My Shadow" by Robert Louis Stevenson. She did a craft to illustrate night and day. She watched this silly little song online about the sun: http://www.learninggamesforkids.com/science_songs/educational_videos_sun_song.html. She cracked up over it and asked to watch it again. It really is hilarious! But it gets stuck in your head and you remember it! Cory enjoyed watching that one too, haha!
We did sight word flash cards and work sheets, watched a leapfrog show about opposite words, did a lesson in "Teaching your Child to Read in 100 easy lessons". She practiced writing her name and the date. She watched the first lesson of Math U See which is all about place value and we talked about it and reviewed it together. We sang the A-a-apple song (MFW) and she read books aloud to me. We had snack time, lunch time and recess time! It was a very full day, and I'm proud of us for getting through everything. Throughout the day I would do reviews to make sure she was actually learning what I was teaching. She did great! I'm looking forward to another great day tomorrow! Here are some pics from our day....
Our big girl on her first day of kindergarten!!!
Little Sis had to get in on the action too!!!
Silly Girl!!!
Our makeshift Morning Board. This will get better and look prettier in time!
Time for Recess! Our brains needed a break!
So, over all I would say Day 1 went off without a hitch. We are looking forward to another great day tomorrow!!! :)
I don't know how many times I've heard that in the last few weeks! Some know the story, some know bits and pieces, and some have no idea. So, I thought I'd take a minute and explain once and for all exactly what transpired this summer and where it has led us. It's a long story, so bear with me, I'll do my best to sum it up for you...
For several years, Cory and I talked about moving. We bought a sweet, charming little house at the start of our marriage in an up and coming area of Riverview, FL and we loved it. Our plan was to live there for 3-5 years and then sell it for a profit and buy something bigger where we would raise our family. Well, as you all know property values plummeted and the Tampa Bay area was one of the hardest hit areas in the nation. Home values in our neighborhood in particular took a huge nose dive and we found ourselves deeply underwater with our mortgage. There was no hope of selling, and because we had bought at the height of the market in 2005 we had overpaid tremendously for the house. So, we were stuck with a huge payment for our itty bitty little house. But, we did the best we could, made the most of the house, and began to raise our family there. We were happy, but as the kids got bigger we were rapidly outgrowing our 1200 square feet of living space and wanted something bigger. We continued our payments and prayed for a solution. Attempts at refinancing failed because the property value still hadn't gone up, and we were always denied for any kind of payment modifications because Cory made "too much money", bahahahaha! (That one always made us laugh!) You basically have to not be working and stop making payments to get any kind of help, and we weren't willing to do either, so we kept praying. After talking with a few friends who had done a short sale for their homes, we decided to look into it further. We learned all we could about it, found a wonderful realtor, and put our house up for sale. We were shocked at how quickly the offers came in! Within a week of listing our house we had a good offer and submitted our paperwork for the lender to approve a short sale of our home. We thought that since we were still faithfully making our house payments that it would take months and months to hear anything back from the lender. We were wrong! After only a few short months we received the official letter from the lender saying they approved our short sale free and clear, we owed them nothing and that we could close in 30 days. Whoa!! An answer to prayer and a shock at the same time, because now we had to get busy looking for a new home! We knew we'd have to rent for a few years because of the short sale, so our very patient realtors took us around to house after house, I think we looked at about 13 rental homes in all! We were getting down to the wire, and finally decided on an older home in Valrico. Cory loved the neighborhood. It was older, more established. The location was fantastic! My family was right around the corner, and Cory's was only about 6 miles away. It was close to stores, the library, restaurants, church, etc. The house was BIG! At 2100sq ft, it felt like a mansion to us compared to the 1200sq ft we were leaving. Although it was an older home, it has been updated with fresh paint, new appliances and new carpet. It had a HUGE laundry room, which was something that was high on my wish list! We weren't in love with the house, but it seemed to have more pros than cons and out of all the houses we looked at it seemed to be our best option. So we went for it. From the beginning, things were difficult and looking back we should have paid more attention to those red flags and never moved forward with renting this house! But, we pressed on and moved in. Immediately upon acquiring the keys and doing a walk through inspection of the house, things were wrong. We discovered appliances that didn't work, leaky faucets, crazy electrical wiring, loose and missing screens, and bugs. Lots of bugs. Anyone who knows me at all knows I DON'T DO BUGS!!! The Terminex guy became my new best friend, and my life became a whirl wind of appointments with handymen, plumbers, electricians, etc. Every day we discovered a new problem with the house and had to submit a new "work order" with the rental company. I think at one point we were up to 20 work orders open at once! Upon speaking with several of the neighbors we found out that the house had been a foreclosure and had sat empty for 5-7 years. Each neighbor had a different number, one even said he thought it had been empty for 8 years! Had we known that, we would have never moved in. We had one worker that came out to fix something and flooded the master bathroom and closets! There was "stuff" in the water when we first moved in, they had to come out and drain the hot water heater. There was a leak in the attic causing damage and mold in the wall beneath it. The a/c wouldn't cool the house in the hot afternoons, and even after sending their a/c guy out 3 different times they still couldn't get it to work right. That is just to name a few of the problems we had, the list goes on and on. And the bugs remained an issue, in particular, carpenter ants. (ironic, isn't it? The Carpenters had carpenter ants!) On any average morning we would find anywhere from 10-20 carpenter ants laying around the house. At night you'd see them crawling or flying around (yes, some of them have wings! So gross!!!). Our pest control guy did everything he possibly could, used everything at his disposal and it didn't make any difference. There were also little "ghost ants" in the kitchen. We had to double and triple bag any food we brought into the house or else they would come out and find it. We have thrown away so much food in the month we've been here because of ants. We even spent our own money to have the yard treated for ants, with no improvement in the situation. And on top of it all we were still finding problems with the house daily. More and more work orders to be submitted, and more and more waiting for repairmen. Things were bad.
I went into a deep depression. It was something I had never felt before in my life. It was dismay over the house we'd moved into, it was regret for leaving the old house, and feeling like I'd failed my kids and ruined their lives by moving them from their happy, clean, functional home and into this awful house. I'll admit that the depression wasn't completely rational. Nobody understood it. I couldn't stop crying. It was all I could do to get out of bed, put on clothes and get through the day. Everyone said I was "overreacting" or needed to "get over it". Oh how I wished I could! It was depression in the purest sense of the word, and I was scared. I had never in my life experienced that and didn't know how to get over it. My family and friends were huge in helping me through it. They provided meals for us, baby sat, provided encouragement, prayed for me, and sat with me while I cried, and cried, and cried. I definitely wasn't myself, and nobody knew what to do with me. I did my best to maintain during the day and to not fall apart in front of the kids, but as soon as they weren't looking or weren't around, I was a mess.
We finally decided that this couldn't go on. There were too many problems in this house and it wasn't getting any better. We couldn't live here. We contacted the rental company and they agreed to let us out of our lease and refund our money. Our realtors took us out to look for a new place. We looked at about 3 houses and several more online and there was nothing. All of the houses at that time were either just as bad if not worse than what we were in. Feeling like we really had no other option we decided to stay and try to make it work, despite all of the problems. We thought maybe we hadn't given it enough time and that the problems could be resolved. We lived in the house for 2 more weeks after that decision and nothing changed. In fact, even more problems were discovered with the house. We re-approached the rental company and they agreed again to release us from the lease and refund our money. Praise God! We began our search for a new home once again, and to our surprise the first house that popped up online was a lovely home that had belonged to friends of ours! We started talking about how it might be a good fit for us. It was in the neighborhood we wanted to be in, was bigger than our old place, had a nice backyard. We loved the idea that it had belonged to our friends, so we knew it had been lived in and cared for properly. We had actually been part of a lifegroup at the house, so it was a place we'd spent some time in, read the Bible in, and prayed in. How cool is that?! I worried that it might be a little weird for our friends who had previously owned the home, so I immediately contacted them and they were so gracious and even excited at the fact that we might move in. We contacted our realtors and got the ball rolling with the house. We were amazed at how easily things started to fall into place. It was like God hand delivered this house to us as an answer to our prayers from the weeks prior. I felt the weight lifting off my shoulders. Relief! We began packing again. Our family and friends have been such a blessing, and we are so grateful to them for their help and support along this crazy journey we've been on this summer! I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Tomorrow morning we are set to get the keys to our new place and we move in on Saturday. I'm so looking forward to settling in and having a place to call home once again. Although the last month has been very difficult, I can say that it's an experience that brought me closer to the Lord and I can see His blessing and faithfulness through it all. Even at my lowest points, He never left my side. I truly believe He allowed us to walk through this trial so that He could work in our lives and do something even bigger than we had imagined. God is FAITHFUL. He hears ours prayers. He works all things for His glory. Today I am thankful for the trial, thankful for the struggle, and thankful that God used it to bring me closer to my savior. So yes, we are moving again, and we are very happy about it!! :)
Since we are moving this weekend and because of all of the stress that goes along with that, we decided not to officially start school yet. We are however doing a little bit each day just to ease Laney (and me!) into it. Yesterday I gave Laney some coloring pages with a short story on each page. I asked her to color the pictures, to try and read the stories to herself, and to circle any words she didn't know. Once she went through them all on her own I would sit down with her and we'd read them together and talk about the words she didn't know. Well, she didn't circle ANY words and sat there and read every single page to me! She just blows me away with how well she is reading! I love it! Today I had her do a few more reading/coloring pages and then gave her a worksheet about compound words. Again, she got everything right with no help from mom! I'm thinking if I play this out right, Delaney will be able to homeschool Hadley in a few years for me! haha, just kidding. Kind of.
I'm thankful for these few weeks of taking it easy and just kind of evaluating where she is at. I can see already I'm going to have to challenge her more with the material than I thought. I am looking forward to getting settled into the new house and really starting our school days. I don't know how it's going to go, and I don't know if we'll homeschool forever, but I am so thankful and excited for the opportunity to do it this year. I'm so looking forward to watching her learn and to the memories we will make. With all we've been through this summer (that's another blog post, coming soon!) I almost threw in the towel on the idea of homeschooling. I didn't feel ready, wasn't prepared, was too distracted, and the list of reasons to quit before we even started grew longer and longer. I'm so glad that I decided to continue with our homeschooling plans. I knew in my heart it was something Cory and I both wanted for our family, at least for this year, and I'm truly thankful and excited to get to be both mommy and teacher for a little while :)
Hey There! Welcome to our little family blog. I've decided to go ahead and give blogging another chance. This isn't going to be a deeply insightful, life changing, award winning page full of incredibly witty commentary. I wish I was that writer, but sadly I am not. This is just a little blog about our daily family life, our first year of homeschooling, and any other thoughts or experiences that pop up along the way. It's been years since I've attempted a blog, so please bear with me as I get the hang of this and learn how the site works. I'm glad you're here and hope you'll follow us as we learn and grow this year!
