Juno is better. It wasn’t cancer or poison… it was immune-mediated hemolytic anemia. She’s destroying her own blood cells for no discernible reason. So she’s been on a bunch of medications and on a pretty tight schedule of vet visits, and her red blood cell count is back up to normal. Which means she’s back to obsessively whining and barking at other dogs when we go on walks, stealing chicken nuggets when she thinks no one is looking, and chasing squirrels. Which means we have to get back to pushing plates to the middle of the table when we walk away. (She’s been barking at other dogs her whole 11 years, in spite of many, varied attempts at training the behavior away… so we just accept it.)
I got a spinning wheel for Mother’s day and have been making a bunch of yarn. I’ve also been working on developing new knitting skills and my friend who crochets has been re-teaching and encouraging me to crochet. That has all been a much needed distraction from summer homeschooling.
We’re doing “homeschool lite” for the summer. Which, in simplified terms, means we’re mostly making the kids do stuff they really hate doing!
Really, we’re having them do work in each of the usual subjects only once per week, except each kid has a personalized plan which includes one subject they need to visit twice. We chose the double subject based on what they’re struggling with most. So… everyone gets to do the thing they dislike the most… the most.
Upon reflection, this was clearly a plan that was bound to result in anger and frustration for everyone involved.
We did also take a short break from school all together. That should have felt refreshing, but I think it might have just made it harder to get back into the swing of the summer plan.
We spent a weekend camping on the Cache le Poudre with the kids. It’s so beautiful and scenic, and we only had to hike in a mile or two. I love hiking, but I’m pretty out of practice. Besides, some of us have pretty short legs and even shorter patience. We also had to take Juno with us so we could keep up with her medications, and I don’t know how much hiking she would have been able to do.
I still don’t really know what going back to school for my masters is going to look like. One of the classes I’m signed up for is online, and the other is in-person but only once per week. It’s looking like the two elementary-aged kids will be doing a hybrid or fully-online model for the coming school year. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the middle schoolers. I’m still leaning toward homeschooling them, but I think I need to find a good curriculum this time. I don’t feel fully comfortable with figuring out what they need to learn at this age.
All of them are showing definite signs of having fallen behind at school this year. That’s not surprising considering they missed out on the last couple of months of classes, while we struggled with online learning and staring at screens all day. However, I’m especially concerned about the twins (the middle schoolers). I’m not really convinced they learned anything in 7th grade until they were doing their learning at home. So, we’re playing catch-up and wondering if it’s worth sending them back next year.
We’re also having a bunch of work done on and around our house this summer. So far, we’ve had an old, poorly-planned garden with a terrible, plastic fence pulled out and a cement slab and electrical conduit installed in part of that area. Soon, we’ll be having a shed installed and finished out to be an office for my partner. He’s working from home indefinitely, and right now he’s taking over our bedroom to do so.
Once that’s done, we’re having the twins’ room (a garage finished into a huge bedroom), split into two, smaller rooms so they don’t have to share. Then, we’re addressing a mold problem that developed in the wall between our bedroom and the attached bathroom when the shower leaked. That’ll involve replacing the carpet, the wall, and the shower liner at least.
We also plan to build our own, raised-bed gardening set-up so we can start growing lots of produce next year. I’m hoping that we realize it’s easy and we love it, and start building edible gardening beds all over so we can say, “goodbye” to the high-maintenance, water-intensive, foreign mono-culture that is lawn grass. We’ll see.
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