Month: February 2008

I hesitated to even write a homeschool update for this month because I have been talking about is so much over the last several weeks.  But, for the sake of posterity, the synopsis is that, after the big move and the trip to Puerto Vallarta, we are just getting caught back up on all our work.  The highlights are the following:

• We are getting close to the halfway mark in math, Kelly in Algebra II and Christian in Algebra I.
• We should be complete finished with Rosetta Stone Spanish I within a few days (Christian is already done) so we can move on to Rosetta Stone Spanish II.
• Kelly is getting close to being ready for her first CLEP test, Freshman English Composition w/Essay.
• We continue to read through Financial Peace.
• History and Literature are still great and right on schedule (Kelly-American History, Christian-Year 1of 2-World History)
• Music is going well for both of the kids.  Kelly is getting along way better than we ever would have imagined with her new teacher and Christian is enjoying his new guitar.
• We continue to work through our Logical Fallacies book.
• Jay Wile’s science programs are still amazing.

We will be starting several new things within the next month or two.  These include:

• Develop a family budget together (as opposed to just Lorena and I) and starting the kids Roth-IRA 401K investments.
• Start taking the radio theory class and start building the radio.
• Rosetta Stone Spanish II.
• A Dad and kids read-aloud of a new book on world views.

Life seems to be a little bit of a grind right now.  We have to finish a bunch of stuff we have been working on for a long time and there is never enough time to do it all.  I am looking at my list of stuff that we have to finish before we can go on to anything new as I write this post and thinking about the projects we have ahead of us and how we can make time to do them.  This weekend we emptied the living room of boxes.  We read some more in both Financial Peace and the Fallacy Detective.  We should be caught up on the homeschool work, including Kelly’s finishing of Rosetta Stone Spanish I by the end of this week.  We have not yet started on organizing the garage and finishing the cat tower.  We have two or three weeks of finishing stuff before we can start anything new.  We know that it will be much more satisfying if we can finish well the things we have started, but it will be nice to move on to some new and interesting things.

My friend Ann, from my old job in Oregon (and a great Machine Vision Engineer) has two beautiful and talented daughters (I have seen them perform!) she and her husband adopted from China.  One of them was in a Chinese New Year with a Dragon.  Ann said she was going to get a dragon for them, but I had NO idea.  I hope it is OK with her that I am posting this picture, but I was wildly impressed.  This would be a VERY cool thing to use in a parade!  Congratulations to Siri and all here dragon buddies!!!

I was talking to Christian about career choices this afternoon.  I told him I would have loved to have been one of those guys in the back if I had the talent, but I just did not have the talent.  How much better could a day job get?  Maybe he should consider that.

This is the first weekend in what seems like a long, long time that we have no planned activities.  I was sitting here trying to figure out what might be a good thing to do when it dawned on me that it might be really great not to plan anything.  We still have lots of things to clean up in the house and the garage, so we might do that–it would be really nice to be able to park the pickup in the garage, have a living room without any boxes in it, and have a place to work on our radio project.  If we feel like it, we can cook something–we never did get around to making those portobello mushroom raviolis.  We can read a little, draw a little, nap a little, listen to some good music, go to CostCo (a favorite), and just generally hang out a little.  This weekend is going to be not for planning ahead.  We can do that next weekend.