Fabulous Friday

Happily, though this week presented some difficult moments, it's Friday and we've survived (and lived) another week of home schooling. Eager to leave today as open as possible for fun things, I ran my business errands yesterday after the Hub returned home from his work day. In any event, he was grumpy and it's best to leave him to his sulkyness when he gets into a foul mood. I feel good about the discoveries I've made this week with regard to Little One's education. There's a freedom to realizing that, on the path of home education, one does not have to follow a set way but can choose the roads down which to travel. If one direction appears to be more interesting, we can follow that route. Along the way, we might discover other avenues and dirt paths, some just barely trodden, others well worn. And we can ditch the materials that aren't working as well. I'm not very satisfied with the science book we've been using, with it's heavy handed Christian approach that sometimes seems to defy reason. While the book wasn't written with my own spiritual beliefs in mind, I'd decided to try it anyway because it does contain some fun experiments and also does read pretty well (aside from when it attempts to pursuade us that the earth isn't really more than a few hundred years old and that scientists are basically conspiring lies against God). I skip passages such as that, but I think that next year we'll take a different approach altogether. Choice is one of the factors that made home education so attractive in the first place, so why should I utilize a book that has, as it's underlying current, a belief system that doesn't work for me and doesn't represent how I'm raising our child?

This weekend we will join all the many other families attending kids' birthday parties. Such parties are like an initiation into elementary school parenthood. Always, someone seems to be celebrating a birthday! On Saturday, we'll travel to the party of a one year old, while Sunday will see us with the next door neighbors. I suspect that my husband will find a way to disappear from sight after a short while on Sunday. Either that, or he'll join the guys on the back porch for the private cigar smoking party. In any case, the friends throwing the festivities are good ones, and although I generally bemoan having to follow the child party circuit, these ones should be fun. That said, I still hold hope that some time in between now and Sunday, I'm going to have a babysitter secured for a couple of hours.

It's necessary!


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