Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Ups and Downs

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It’s Friday, Friday, Friday!  {said in my best monster truck announcer guy voice}  I have laundry overflowing the hampers, dirty dishes piled in the sink, and dusty bunnies lurking in the corners.  How’s that for being real?  I guess I know what I’ll be doing the weekend – in addition to writing lesson plans since I only got one week’s worth done last weekend – but I’m still glad it’s Friday.  How about you?

This week started off on an exciting note: I hit one of my big weight-loss milestones.  I’m no longer obese!  Based on weight and body fat percentage, I’m only overweight now for the first time in probably about 16 years.  I’m so excited!  Now, to get the next 27 or so pounds off and not be overweight anymore.

Monday was a crazy day with Spanish class and a homeschool support group leaders’ meeting for my husband and I that evening.  Brianna survived Spanish class – she thought she was going to have to get up in front of the class and speak, but she wound up not having to.  We were rushing home to finish school before the dinner and got caught by a train at a railroad crossing near our house.  We wound up sitting there for about 20 minutes.  So frustrating.  It could have been worse.  At least nobody had to go to the bathroom.

We did finally make it home, though, and got schoolwork finished in plenty of time to get ready for the dinner, which was nice.  There was a scrumptious chocolate cake with chocolate chips on the top that I hope doesn’t completely derail my weight-loss goals for this week.  It was totally worth the calories, though!  Yum!

I thought World War III might break out Monday afternoon, but it turned out to be only a little skirmish.  We’ve been using IEW this school year.  Since pretty early on, I’ve been having Josh and Megan dictate their sentences to me so that I could write them on the white board from them to copy.  It just made the beginning stages of learning to write papers much less frustrating for all of us.

However, now that they’ve gotten the hang of IEW, I was ready for them to start writing the sentences themselves.  They’re still narrating them to me and making sure they’re complete sentences capturing all the necessary information, but once we’d done that, I wanted them to get used to writing their thoughts on paper.

As expected, Josh balked royally.  It was less intense than I expected, though, and he quickly realized that what I was asking him to do wasn’t much more difficult than what he’d already been doing.  As I explained to both he and Megan, I wasn’t worried about spelling on their rough drafts; that was something we’d clear up when we did edits. All in all, I was very pleased with how well they did with that aspect of writing this week.

The rest of the week has been pretty much a blur of “same old, same old” just getting the general education stuff covered.  We (Josh, Megan and I) have been reading The Journal of Jasper Jonathan Pierce and doing History Pockets as we study colonial America.

We’ve moved through science pretty quick since we’ve come across some creatures in the animal kingdom not conducive to studying via science lab – starfish and such.  We passed that section quickly and got to insects where we were supposed to do a lab in which we ordered caterpillars and watched their metamorphosis into butterflies – not a good science lab for winter, so we watched a DVD instead.  Funny thing was, Brianna came upstairs toward the beginning of it and she got interested in it, too.  I love that part of homeschooling.

Brianna is plodding her way through history and science without much enthusiasm.  She was supposed to have read Tom Sawyer, but was really struggling with it, so we found it on CD and she’s been listening to it instead.  She seems to like that better.  And, for science, we were supposed to be growing several types of mold to study under the microscope.  Why is it, when you plan to eat something, it has no trouble growing moldy, but when you want to study mold, you can’t get these same foods to mold?  I even tried some homemade bread with no preservatives, but I guess because it had been frozen, it just dried out instead of molding.  Fine!  We’ll just skip that lab.  So, there.

So, it’s basically just been your pretty average, ordinary homeschool weeks with it’s good, its bad, and its ordinary.  Not so much fun to write about, but about par for the course for this time of year.

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Kris Bales is a newly-retired homeschool mom and the quirky, Christ-following, painfully honest founder (and former owner) of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. She has a pretty serious addiction to sweet tea and Words with Friends. Kris and her husband of over 30 years are parents to three amazing homeschool grads. They share their home with three dogs, two cats, a ball python, a bearded dragon, and seven birds.

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21 Comments

  1. Huge congrats on reaching your goal!! Blessings and prayers for reaching your next one as well!

    We are trying to grow some mold here in the next week or two for the microscope–hopefully we'll succeed. My mom suggested today I just look through my refrigerator to find plenty–wonder what she is implying:-)?!

    Hope your upcoming week is a wonderful one!

  2. We had trouble getting mold too but we found if you take a piece of bread and roll it around in your hands making some balls and then adding just a touch of water and then place it in your laundry area….you have mold in no time. The trick is humidity I think.

    Have a great weekend and don't work too hard!

    Thanks for hosting.

  3. Yay! Yay! Yay!! Congrats on reaching such a milestone!

    I've got piles and piles of laundry and lesson plans to be done too, so I'll commiserate with you!

  4. Congrats on such a major milestone!! I need to work on that one myself. I'm sure you'll reach your next goal soon. 🙂

  5. CONGRATULATIONS on the milestone!!!!

    We haven't purposely tried to grow mold here yet, so I wonder if I'll run into the same problem when we do!

  6. Congrats on the weight loss ! That's awesome!
    I was looking at your picture at the top of your blog and thinking that, my time has flown! I've only been following your blog for maybe a year and it's amazing how your kids have grown! And changed!
    And those weeks were there is just more of the same 'ol, same 'ol are good weeks! Much better than those with extremes, eh?
    Have a great weekend!

  7. Kris,

    I kept thinking the same thing when I was trying to grow mold for biology earlier in the year!

    Amber and I read Tom Sawyer earlier this year as well. While we were both glad we read the book, neither one of us enjoyed it that much. I'm not sure it would have been better for me listening to it either! We both loved The Scarlet Letter though and Jane Eyre.

    Samantha

  8. 20 minutes for a train? Is that normal in your neck of the woods? I will no longer complain about the 4 minute wait that we usually run into.

    Hooray for weight loss goals and chocolate cake!

    IEW… *sigh* Need to get back on that bandwagon too. Mine balk at the physical task of writing. I let them use the computer to type, but sometimes I wonder if that just feeds the hate-writing-by-hand monster.

  9. CONGRATULATIONS on the weight loss goal! I am close to that same goal myself and it is such a huge milestone! Awesome!!

  10. Good job on your goal! 🙂 So true about mold. . . annoying stuff and just will NOT do what you want it to do! 🙂

  11. So sorry you had to ditch the science experiment. Next time, let me know. I usually have at least two Glad containers of questionable foodstuffs languishing in the back of my fridge. Congrats on your continued weight loss success! Yay, you!

  12. We just finished reading Tom Sawyer as a family and it takes a while to get into. I'm pretty sure that everyone could have left it and not finished it through the first half, but the second half really caught their attention and they ended up loving it.

  13. Wow, congrats on reaching that weight loss milestone! As my metabolism is getting slower and slower, it keeps getting harder and harder to maintain and/or lose weight. We live in Seattle and have never had trouble getting mold to grow for science experiments, we have the opposite problem of trying to control it in the house with dehumidifiers,

  14. Congratulations on reaching your goal! Losing weight is a tough battle. So easy to gain, so challenging to lose! This past year I have lost 40lbs and I have 3 more lbs to go to be within a "normal weight" rate zone.

  15. Congrats on the weight loss and milestone! What a wonderful feeling!

    LOL about the mold. We'll have to try growing it just for science.

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