Year: 2006

I think yesterday was somewhat of a breakthrough day in terms of coming to an understanding about where we want to live and how we want to go about getting a house. Right now, we are looking at a 5.99 acre lot in McKinney, Texas that would be affordable to us to buy, even if we do not have the house sold in Oregon. Our thought is that we could buy the lot and whether we use it or not, it will be a great investment. It is close to shopping, close to a community college, and in a neighborhood. It might be completely different than we are expecting, but it seems like a good option right now. We will not know until we look at it.

Homeschool is ramping up a little bit more slowly than I really would have liked, but we are doing better. I made a morning, afternoon, and night schedule for each of the kids that will accompany their detailed daily schedules. I think I can modify it to be better, but as it sits now, things are falling through the cracks and not getting done. In addition to the fact that we are still getting used to our new place, I think the amount of work we are doing keeps increasing as we find new cool stuff to do. I need to evaluate that and make sure the load is not too great.

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This thing of living in an apartment waiting for your house to sell before buying another house is a hard thing made harder by not knowing enough about the new area to make a reasoned decision about where to live. It even works on my spirit which has not been so good over the last couple of days. At least is homeschool and work are going reasonably well.

The morning homeschool checklist worked well enough yesterday that the Christian and Kelly want me to do another one for the afternoon. Everything really went pretty well for the first day back after a long break. We forgot one thing (Spelling Power), but generally performed pretty well on everything else. I will not be able to get to the afternoon checklist until tomorrow, but I think it is a super idea.

We got a call last night from a piano and guitar teacher who we will visit on Friday afternoon to see whether we would like her to teach Kelly and Christian for the rest of the year. I found her on the Richardson Music Teachers Association website. The reason we started by calling her is that she was the only person on the list that teaches both piano and guitar. Christian will be making the big switch to guitar right now. She recommended that we wait for her to help us find a good guitar because Lorena and I know so little about music. I am excited that the kids are getting back into music.

They tell us that the winter has been unusually warm here in the Dallas area this year. We might suffer a shortness of water later on, but it surely does feel nice to have warm weather for the New Year. We had a great time. On Friday night, we went to Dale and Karen Sorenson’s house and played games with a bunch of our friends. On Saturday, we just spent the day together by going to the bookstore, eating some Chinese food, playing some games at the house and hanging out. On Sunday, we went to the Spanish language Sunday morning meeting, had lunch at Lubys with Lorena’s cousin Susana and her two children. Monday was also a day off. We used Monday to get ready to start up our homeschool again after a long haitus coupled with a long period of reduced work.

Inspite of the long break, the kids are really in pretty good shape. We have instituted a new morning schedule to accompany the daily work list. The schedule is really an anti-procrastination tool. We have a pretty good feel for how long it takes to do most of the items on the list, so I think there will only be minor adjustments if there are any at all. This morning, I got up at 6:00 AM, took a shower, and got the kids up at 6:30. We ate breakfast and read a chapter in the bible together before I went to work. Now, we will see how much they are able to get done before I go home for lunch. The morning schedule includes piano practice, bible memorization, Singapore Math, Easy Grammar, Igniting Your Writing, Wordly Wise, Flash Cards, chores, and I might be forgetting one or two other things. I will report back on how it goes.