Mommy Moment – Buried!

I’m at that place where I seem to find myself about every six weeks or so. My blog reader is beyond overflowing with things to read. My own posts have been sparse and I’m feeling way behind in real life. Once I finally got healthy, Tornado Boy was sick for a few days. Between the two of us, we really sent productivity into a massive lurch.

Tornado Boy seems none the worse for wear. Besides missing out on a few days of camp, he’s as happy as a clam. His birthday is coming up and he is beyond excited. This is the first year that we’re doing a “friend” party for him – we’ve always done family parties in the past. He is beside himself with excitement and I think he wants to invite everyone that he might ever have spoken with. It’s really fun to watch him be so excited and checking out the “countdown” that I made for him with great excitement each day. It’ll be birthday central here for a few weeks as Tornado Dad, myself, TB’s Great Grandmother and my brother all have birthdays in the next six weeks.

I’m also working behind the scenes on my first two reviews for the TOS Homeschool Crew. The first one is on a travel e-book and will be published next week. The second is on a handwriting program. I’ve just gotten the software and am trying to formulate a plan for using it over the next six weeks. I’m rather excited about it because it’s a much more physical approach to handwriting than we’ve used in the past. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out for us.

I sent my Notice of Intent to Homeschool in a couple of weeks ago and I received my return receipt in the mail. I’m not sure how long it will be before we get an actual response from the county; but it is rather nice to feel somewhat “official”. I am really struggling with trying to figure out how structured I want our time to be in the fall. I’m trying to formulate some goals for us and most of the ones that are rolling around in my head aren’t very academic in nature. When I think about the things that I really want to work on with Tornado Boy, I keep coming back to things like:

• Living the Golden Rule – treat others the way that you want to be treated.
• Developing good listening skills – the first time!
• Developing better fine motor skills – working on cutting, pasting, creating, writing.
• Getting more involved in the local homeschool community.
• Developing more stamina for working on tasks and projects.

Honestly, not much of that stuff falls into the curriculum realm. Tornado Boy is entering Kindergarten doing work in most areas at about a 1st to 2nd grade level. I figure that I’ll never have a better opportunity to work on the “soft skills” than I do now. I just can’t quite figure out what I want to make our priority or exactly how to implement it. LOL It’d be so much easier to just say that we’re going to do reading / writing / arithmetic / art / Spanish / science / gym time and call it a day.

If anyone has any thoughts on character education that isn’t overly religious in nature, I’d sure like to hear them.

If it’s quiet over here, I’m just buried in party planning and pondering our upcoming year. Tornado Boy will be close-by and surrounded by Legos – thank goodness for eBay!