We are coming up on our fourth week of homeschooling, and I’m pleased (and maybe a little surprised) to report that things are still going well. Some days are definitely better than others in terms of everyone’s interest level and how much we actually manage to get done, but overall it’s been . . . well, fun. I’m learning what things work well (activities that involve him physically doing something) and what don’t (me blathering about a subject while he sits and fidgets/half-listens), and I’m slowly finding a sort of groove in terms of our daily schedule.

We’re still using weekly themes, but if I run out of related ideas, I don’t sweat it. Last week he picked rain as our learning topic, and by Wednesday everyone was bored of rain-focused activities (“CLOUDS: OUR CUMULUS FRIENDS!”) so we just did other stuff. No big deal.

A few of our recent projects:

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Fishing for paper fish, counting his “catch”, sorting by color, practicing addition and subtraction (“A giant shark ate two of your fish, so now how many do you have left?”). Plus, both kids hitting each other with wooden dowels, getting tangled up in string, etc.

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Making guesses as to whether an object (toy, Lego, spoon, whatever) would sink or float, then testing it out by dropping it into a tupperware filled with water.

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Creating short words with individual letters.

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Making patterns, guessing what shape needs to go next, etc.

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For dinosaur week, I buried some paper dinosaur bones in a bowl filled with dry beans, which he excavated (“I AM A DINOSAUR SCIENTIST!”), then re-assembled.

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Also for dinosaur week, we cut sponges into the shapes of dinosaur feet, stamped them on paper, then he made up a story about the footprints which I wrote on the whiteboard. We decided to make the story into a play and acted it out out for JB, with Riley playing the part of Triceratops. You’ll have to excuse the costume department for the superdorky hat.

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The whiteboard’s been really handy for doing all kinds of things. Here we were discussing the relative characteristics of meat eating vs. plant eating dinosaurs. Scientific illustrations courtesy of someone who can’t draw worth a damn so shut up.

A couple of books I’ve been using quite a bit are this one for reading lessons, and this workbook which Riley mostly does on his own. I try and mix in some educational outings here and there, like last week when we talked about rain water in streams and rivers and ended up visiting a salmon hatchery.

Some of you have asked if I plan to homeschool long term, and the answer at the moment is no. Really, we’re only homeschooling because we decided not to start him in kindergarten this year and I didn’t want to just pull him from preschool without having some kind of plan for learning at home. I did a lot of fretting over his age, you know, trying to decide whether to hold him back (he turned 5 on the cutoff date), and I now feel pretty confident that what we’re doing is a fantastic alternative. He gets the extra year to mature a bit emotionally, and in the meantime, we have this opportunity to spend time together and make school into something enjoyable.

I feel so lucky to have the chance to do this. And wow, I just can’t get over how strange it is to say that. Me: homeschooling. Man.

Lastly, for no real reason other than to share a little piece of a child’s pure over-the-top joy with you, here’s a video JB took of he and Riley setting off a rocket together.

Rocket Launch Sept2010 from J_Bravo on Vimeo.

A while ago I wrote elsewhere about my efforts to cut back on household expenses, and subsequently choosing drugstore shampoos over the good stuff. In the comments on that article someone told me I was being “penny wise and pound foolish”, which kind of pissed me off because how does that make me pound foolish, exactly? It’s not like I stopped buying salon products, switched to Pantene, then started dunking my head in a vat of truffle oil after my showers.

At any rate, I think I’ve learned that decent shampoo is, in fact, worth the money. Mind you, I don’t think it actually makes much of a difference in my hair. My hair is what it is: a hot mess, for the most part, primarily because I have an annoying high-maintenance haircut which I am doing zero maintenance on. It’s just that using a soap that feels good and smells good is one of those human niceties that somehow seems to make a palpable difference in my day.

Same with skincare crap. Yes, I could use the Cetaphil, or I could pony up for something that doesn’t look like jizz. It’s the little things, you know?

I have followed through on some other budget reductions, though, including finally stopping the cleaning service I have used and loved with all my heart for years. I hated saying goodbye to the ladies who continually managed to make my toaster look like something that should be hanging in the Louvre, but I could no longer justify the cost. Especially since I’m cleaning all the fucking time these days for those ever-entertaining surprise realtor visits.

(I thought I was doing a decent job of keeping the place cleaning-service-clean, too, and then I peeked under the bed today when a rather large mound of Unidentifiable Whitish Fluff emerged. I don’t really want to discuss what I saw, but I will say I spent the next 20 minutes scurrying around like the kids’ Zhu Zhu hamster trying to get under there with the vacuum because my GOD. MY GOD WHO LIVES LIKE THAT. Hoarders, that’s who.)

Oh, and I cancelled our CSA share, finally being honest with myself that I wasn’t really making 100% good use of the entire box of healthful, planet-friendly produce. If only the local farms would offer a box half full of green leafy vegetables, half full of pretzel crisps, but alas.

Then I turned around and bought a CrossFit gym membership, which negates a good chunk of my cutting back. So far I believe it to be worth every penny, but I suppose some might call it pound foolish.

I keep circling our spending like a math-stupid wolf, peering and trying to decide what I can ditch, what I want to keep. I’ve started dividing purchases into my freelance salary, which is a depressing but maybe-useful exercise. Should I buy the giant select-a-size pack of Bounty paper napkins that will take me an article on goddamned Lindsay Lohan to pay for? Or should I maybe . . . use a dishtowel? The entire endeavor reminds me of trying to lose weight, where the process of trying to get to a place where you don’t think as much about your weight, ironically, makes you think about your fucking weight all the time.

I know these are vague sorts of questions and kind of overly personal to boot, but how would you describe your relationship with money? Do you focus on budget issues all the time, or only during certain times of the month, or what? Is one of the larger stressors in your life, or way down the list? Has it changed one way or the other in the last few years?

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