school stuff

In the midst of the horror that has consumed my thinking these past few days, life has continued as normal in many respects.  One of these is school.  Today’s school time gave me something to lighten the burdensome feeling that has been weighing down on my heart and catapulting my prayer life. 

As you can imagine, schooling in our house isn’t exactly picture perfect.  I have an adventurous 19 month old boy who wants my attention all the time – and will shimmy up onto the dining table and draw all over with our school pens if I so much as blink; a whiny almost 4-year old who still gets up to mischief – doubly so when her brother is involved … and a sometimes grumpy 5-year old who oftentimes throws her hands up in exasperation and exclaims, "I hate school!  This is too difficult!"  (And you thought we had the whole happy homeschooling family playing out here!).  Thankfully we have Johanna, who, on the days she is here, will take Sam with her while she cleans in another room – and he helps sort washing etc.  But, still, the school mornings are usually interrupted numerous times and, for this "I like to have everything ordered and boxed" mom, it’s quite stressful.  Thankfully, this all leads me to pray more!

Today’s silver lining was a (mostly) beautiful morning.  All the kids joined us at the table this morning.  Kiera attacked her school work with enthusiasm, joy and perseverance, despite facing some challenging bits.  Sam was content to sit in his booster chair and scribble for a lot longer than normal and Katie was happy to help him.  Mostly I was overjoyed to realise that in the last couple of weeks, Kiera’s complaints have become less and her enthusiasm has increased 10-fold.  She is now wanting to read ahead in her readers (and read them by herself, instead of me helping her out with alternating sentences).  She is enjoying writing and spelling and is even tackling her copywork (drudgery work, but necessary for a hundred reasons) with enthusiasm.  Sonlight’s language arts curriculum exposes kids to figurative language in grade R (K) already and so Kiera has been learning about alliteration this last week.  Today she was required to come up with her own made up sentence of alliteration.  She’s cottoned onto my control-freak nature, so refuses to tell me what she is going to write until she writes it.  Today she wrote,

My mom mix’s mad milk shakes.

(Her spelling was all that needed correcting and she quickly changed it to, ‘My mom mixes mad milkshakes.")  I was so impressed with her skill – most especially after only 2 mentions of what alliteration is and being specifically exposed to it for the first time last week. 

Thank you Lord for that sweet, and encouraging, interlude today.