Good-byes and Upper Level School

We had a great time with Aunt Deb last night and this morning. We took out Julia's hair last night and she lost her first tooth! She is barely 4 1/2 and is definitely the youngest child to lose a tooth in our family. This morning, Deb helped her tie a shoe; between her tooth and the shoe, she is feeling pretty full of herself.

Here we are saying good-bye to Deb and Alei; they'll be back on Monday.

Deb and Alei were kidding me about being such a mom since I was following them out with my camera. I was having a good time snapping pictures as Debra was lecturing me about no pictures on the blog since she didn't put on any make-up. (I'm being nice since you really can't tell with her finger pointing at me.)

Here's Alei asking me if I got a picture of the contents of the hatch-back. Actually, I did since it's her new birthday luggage that she begged to take in spite of her birthday not being until next month!

We had a good time, but it all turned a bit when Julia asked for her dollar for her tooth and I had to explain that she used her dollar to buy the pink gum she is carrying around. Turns out that she wanted to buy the gum and keep the dollar! Life is rough, don't we all wish we could buy things and keep our money?

Due to the money disappointment, she refused to let me get a shot of her missing tooth; I'll try again once we turn that darling 'fro into some hair-style this afternoon. What hair-do goes with a princess night-gown and mud boots?

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As for the school run down, Alei is a senior this year and is really only doing college work, other than math with Teaching Text-books. Moriah is in 8th grade and is also using pre-Algebra Teaching Textbooks. Originally I switched from Saxon to Teaching Textbooks when Gabriel hit Algebra II because I wasn't able to easily help him, and Teaching Textbooks provides a disk that works each problem that you may get stuck on. Moriah was envious enough that I ended up buying 7th and 8th grade for her as well. Alyssa was doing the 7th grade this year until the disk got mis- placed and she went back to Saxon. She decided to finish the year with Saxon even after the disk surfaced. At this point, they watch the lesson, do the problems, I check them and then we either work any missed problems together or they watch the solution disk.

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For language, they both do Easy Grammar. It is easy, but works. For literature, I had them reading through the Lit reading list from Sonlight, but it's turned more into a random cramming
in as much literature as I can get them through. They are both taking Apologia science at our co-op - Zoology for Alyssa and Physical Science for Moriah. We are supposedly doing My Father's World for history, but I admitted last post that we aren't keeping up with it to well, so they are independently reading a set of history books as well. I do hope to finish My Father's World this summer when our homeschooling load lightens.

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Moriah and Alyssa are also both taking a wonderful art class at co-op and Moriah is taking Civics and Government while Alyssa is in a groups strings class playing the violin. I spend much of my Tuesdays and Wednesdays running children to and from Co-op, but when I look at how much they are gaining from it, I think it's worth the trouble at this level. I've never thought that it seemed worth it when they are in the younger elementary years.

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Next year Moriah starts high-school. While I wish I had high-school "figured out" since Moriah is my 3rd child to hit that level, it seems seems overwhelming and a bit scary!