Day: October 1, 2009

Autumn is such a beautiful season. Here in North Carolina the leaves haven’t fallen yet, but they are beginning to develop just a tinge of color and brittleness. The sky is blue and the wind is blowing. It’s not cold enough for scarves, but it’s just cold enough to make soups and stews. Gala apples are more delicious now than any other time of the year (in my humble opinion). It’s definitely not summer anymore, but fall isn’t yet in full bloom. We are in between seasons and I am loving it!

I feel slightly disloyal to my birth season, spring. But please take into account that I’m from Oregon. Most of the springs that I’ve seen have been wet and gray and cold. Also, when it’s not a cold spring day, it’s a sunny spring day, and when it’s a sunny spring day that means hay fever! In Oregon Mom and I always suffered horribly from hay fever. It’s a shame, because a sunny spring in Oregon is just about the most beautiful thing since a sunny fall in North Carolina. Summer, of course, is wonderful. I don’t know why it’s not my first favorite season, but fall is just so hard to beat. Anyway, everyone likes summer. Explaining why summer is so wonderful is not at all necessary. Winter is nice, excepting January and February. There are probably 3 things I like about winter:

1. Christmas
2. Snow
3. Fireplaces ablaze and all the associated cozy feelings

But fall, fall, fall is always full of cozy feelings! October is especially nice because you are past the beginning of the school year and you have your routine down pat. Thankfully that’s the case this year because this October is going to be very busy for our family. Having a routine down pat is pretty much going to be required if we want to keep up. Like Dad said in the post below, we have a lot of scheduled interruptions, but it’s all good. Busy is good!!

We have gotten off to a fairly disorganized start this year with lots of interruptions to go places and see things. In addition to that, both of the Kelly and Christian are doing more of their own time management this year. They have been doing “within the day” time management for a couple of years, but now they are starting to do their time management for a week or even longer. It is a little bit of a tough transition, but very necessary. Our plan is for Kelly to start 3/4 time at the community college next year, so she needs to be able to manage all of her own work by then. A typical thing we have done to facilitate that is to give her materials to prepare for a CLEP test and a date when we want her to take the test. She plans out her study schedule to be ready for the test on the preassigned date. We will see how it goes.

We have so much to do and so many (planned) interruptions between now and the end of the year, that we have decided to put all non-homeschool related projects on hold until late winter or spring. So, the things on which we will continue are Betty Blonde–Kelly has been working on some very creative new directions and ideas including a little color here and there, and Christian has started scanning in his comic book and Christian’s C++ programming project to hook up a GPS and a webcam to his laptop–we will take more about that as we make progress.

As for our scheduled homeschool work, there are just a couple of interesting things happening right now. We are two-thirds of the way through our reading of A Patriot’s History of the United States. We will move on to a book on personal communications, probably sometime in November. It is a little lighter and a little shorter than the 900 page Patriot’s History next. After the first of the year, we plan to start in on Susan Wise Bauer’s adult history book The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. We have pre-ordered her next book in that series, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. Other than that, the only thing on our plate is Kelly’s PSAT on October 14, piano and guitar lessons, time at the YMCA, and our upcoming two week immersion Spanish lessons (with Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita) in Mexico at the end of November.