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It's almost Thanksgiving, which means Christmas is coming, I am so excited about the holidays this year. Last year they were a bit of a drag because we were not together for Christmas. We go to visit Eric's brother in Philadelphia every Christmas. He is handicapped and unable to travel so we go to him. It is not what I had invisioned our Christmas's would be like when we had kids. I had visions of a big tree in our Living Room, lots of toys, everyone racing to the tree Christmas morning, Roast in the oven, family on their way over sort of thing. But Christmas in Philly has become a tradition for us now & traditions are fun no matter what shape they take. So now our Christmas morning is in a hotel room. We turn on the fake fireplace, make hot cocoa, get our breakfast from the lobby, open stockings and a few little presents, get dressed for the day, go pick up the best chinese food in town (I'm not kidding, it is so good, we look forward to it all year) & head over to visit with Uncle Rob. Spend as long as the kids can stand with Uncle Rob (they LOVE Uncle Rob so this is usually most of the day!) they also love to play outside in the sometimes snow, sometimes just VERY cold weather. We open presents with Uncle Rob, usually talk to the family in CA and then we head back to the hotel to veg in front of the tube (we don't get tv at home so this is a big treat for the kids), there are usually great documentaries on the birth of Christ and some Christmas cartoons & such on. Last year, Eric just took Abby & left the rest of us at home, finances, new baby, and short on time led to this decision & I will NEVER do that again. We missed Eric & Abby so much but we also really missed our special time with Uncle Rob. Anyway, this year I have planned early, I am going to book the hotel today and the rest is taken care of. The day after Christmas we always take Rob to Anthony's, this great Italian restuarant, another treat we look forward to all year. I'm drooling on my keyboard, next topic....
I am taking the holidays to revamp our school schedule. I want to combine more of the girls schoolwork. The juggling act is getting tough. Even without that, Abby has found a few of the books on the Ambleside list just don't work for her. I think I thought this was some sort of failure on my part but after some consideration I realized that she is a child, a person, and she is not going to click with everything I set in front of her. She also started AO in Y4 and has thus not read all the material for Y1-Y3. She has read a lot of Y1 while I was working with Erin but I want to give her time to read some of the great books Erin is taking advantage of. So, we have dropped Madame how & Lady Why from Natural History and It Couldn't Just Happen from Science. I have replaced MH&LW with The Burgess Flower Book For Children as well as letting her join Erin in reading The Burgess Animal Book these are favorites in our house. I am adding in a Business Math course to our Math rotation, we found this at the Simply Charlotte Mason site, she will be starting and running her own pet store, it looks fun & she is really excited about it. For Science we are continuing with Physics Lab in the Home and letting Erin join in. We are also spending more time on the Exploring Creation through Astronomy book with both girls. We are combining history using both Y2 & Y4 (one focuses more on the history of England while the other is more American history). We are going to stick with Plutarch but keep to the Young Folks version for the next year or so, this way Erin can join in and maybe their comprehension will increase when we go back to the original. I am using literature from both Y2 & Y4 because Abby loves Kidnapped so she should finish it but I also want her to read Pilgrims' Progress with us as well as Parables from Nature and Understood Betsy. They are both deep into separate books for geography so I will leave that alone and bring them together 2 days a week to work on Elementary Geography. I am also trying to implement KISS grammar, it is free and very Charlotte Mason. I am still trying to sort through all of the information on this site to get started and hopefully will have it all figured out by the New Year (target start date). I am in the process of scheduling subjects on a daily basis and I still want our days to be under 4 hrs of "schoolwork", it seems very doable. Eric put together a very cool program for our budget this weekend so I hope he can show me how he did it so I can do something like that for our school schedule. I'm still tweaking but I think we're off to a good start, I hope this will make the days more manageable with a lot less time wasted. They can work together if I need to work with the younger ones or deal with other things.
I am off to make pies for Thanksgiving, Chocolate Pecan today, Pumpkin Swirl Cheesecake tomorrow, and Sour Cream Apple Pie on Wednesday. Jack did request the raw Apple Pie I made a while ago, I might make that just for him & eat it one night this week before Thanksgiving. He always knows how to make me smile.
Have a great Thanksgiving!
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