Summer's flyin'

For some, summer's over. Their kids have already returned to school this week (in OK at least). I have the great privilege of homeschooling, so we're in our jammies taking it easy, and still using our blow-up pool in the afternoons.

Ahhh...

I plan to blog about a couple of things in the coming days: why I'm homeschooling, and also the JDRF walk we're going to do in October. So, stay tuned. I'm sure it's hard to check often when I'm so sporadic at posting.

We actually did a little Homeschool preview today for the gals. I wanted to give them a taste of our schedule, and start warming up their brains. I'm not making their first official day for another week or so, but it was a funny reality of how it works. Norah whined because she wasn't in the middle of it all. I had this thought that she would just play in the other room, which she's content doing most of the time. But, this morning, she thought she needed to be on my lap and wanted to write and draw just like the big girls. Jossie did an excellent job at completing all of the assignments (of course several of them just seemed like games, so that was easy), but she did much better than a few months ago. She traced letters, discovered vowel sounds in words and drew lines, made up math stories with little erasers: "I have 4 flowers in the garden, and 2 trees, and 3 flamingos are hiding in it, that's 9!!" I had bought this book of mazes at a homeschool convention. I brought them to the doctor's office last week for her to work on while waiting, and I was shocked today to see she had completed over 30 mazes! She's almost finished the book, and we haven't even officially started school. Somehow I envisioned that lasting longer through the year. But she LOVES them! Then as soon as I told her she was done, and I praised her for being such a big girl, she promptly started screaming at me that she wanted a bottle....

Don't ask!

Poor Sophie struggled. She gets the concepts really quick. Her handwriting has improved a lot, but getting the poor girl to complete a task is like pulling teeth. Of course, it doesn't help when your blood sugar is going low in the middle of it all. Poor thing. We'll get there. At least she agreed that Mommy has done a better job at finding more fun things to do with school this year, so she has hopes that I'm not just going to confuse and bore her to death.

Anyway, we didn't even touch half the things I want to do in a day, mainly because I was just warming them up to the idea. But, I'm totally laughing at how chaotic and cranky the whole process was. Is this my foretaste???

That's OK. I still find joy in watching something new click and watching their confidence grow.

In other news, the TrialNet that Jossie and Norah were a part of to test their autoantibodies for Diabetes both came back negative. Hallelujah!! I choked back tears when reading the letters. We will take them back annually to re-test, but for a year I will breathe a sigh of relief and not prick their little fingers every time they have a screaming fit (not that my little angels have any of those).

Well, I've been very busy doing prep-work for homeschool, fitting in summer play dates, going to St. Louis, dealing with sickness and multiple doctor's appointments; thus the lack of blogging. Tis' life for all of us, I know.