Saturday, March 01, 2014

A new beginning

Things have been pretty crazy around here the last couple months.  I'm finally in third trimester of pregnancy (will be 29 weeks the day after tomorrow) and the two girls have missed a decent amount of school due to weather.  It has been one heck of a winter here in central Ohio, that's for sure.  Currently the state is discussing if they are going to approve an additional 4 days that schools are allowed to close since the majority of districts have at least 1 or 2 days to make up now.  There is another storm coming in this weekend that will likely close the local schools another day or two in fact, and they already have done one make-up day by turning a teacher development day into a student day.  Yes, it has been busy times here.

However, we are entering a new stage now.  Remember that please while I ramble a moment about several things.

January brought a good amount of snow, ice, and frigid arctic cold.  That led to most of the snow days the kids had.  It also brought me into a season of illness, as my own asthma decided that it did not agree with the frigid cold weather and I began a fight with bronchitis at the tail end of the month.  I also started experiencing the first stages of the bile reflux that I always develop in third trimester, which has me now on prescription reflux medication and back on nausea medication. *sigh*  Yes, I take a lot of pills along with having to modify my diet to work with it.

February brought its own set of fun things.  I entered third trimester, which really helped to bring home that this is pregnancy is winding down.  I'm now at the stage where I am growing a little bigger each day, and it is not funny.  It also begins the stage that my husband enjoys most, that time when I start waddling and he gets a cheap thrill out of copying my waddle as it gets worse.  Not funny, dude.  It also brought us the tax refund, which is ALWAYS a welcome thing.  It was deposited in our account just 3 days after we celebrated my 32nd birthday.  Scott got me a new laptop as my gift, I'm totally loving it.  We also got to celebrate Preston's second birthday.  Yes, the little boy has managed to survive for a whole 2 years without any major injuries or killing himself or anyone else.  I also got to experience the joys of the one hour gestational diabetes test, which I managed to fail by 8 points.

I took the 3 hour diabetes test the following weekend and passed it with great numbers.  I figured I would, as I am hypoglycemic.

That brings us up to this past week.  Our district has had some interesting things hit the news this past week, involving a teacher who is now in jail after a little inappropriate extra credit he gave some of the girls in the band (he WAS the assistant band director for the high school).  As this case exploded through the week, Scott decided that it was no longer in the best interest of the two girls for them to remain in the local public school so they were withdrawn.  Their last day was Friday (that's yesterday) and we will pick up with homeschooling on Monday unless the school calls a snow day.  I'm going to honor the snow days and breaks of the district the rest of this year I think, just to keep up the schedule and routine that we've gotten used to this year.

Of course, withdrawing them was slightly interesting.  Thursday I was the responsible mom and I personally delivered my notification and curriculum outline to the district administration office.  The lady who handles homeschooling and attendance for the district was out that day for meetings, so the receptionist put the paperwork in her inbox to get it first thing the next morning.  Friday, which is the next morning, I got an e-mail from this lovely lady who handles attendance and homeschooling.  I had sent a note with the girls stating that it was their last day and thanking the teachers for a good year, and providing my e-mail address if they had any questions for me.  My cell phone had decided to malfunction on me and not work all day, so I was down to just having internet communication for everything.  No big deal really, and my phone is working properly again now.  Anyway, the attendance lady hadn't gotten my notification and was informing me that I needed to either have them enrolled in a school or have notification to her before I could withdraw them.  I replied with a simple, "I delivered notification yesterday to the administration office, it should be in your inbox there waiting for you."  Yup, the receptionist forgot to put it in the inbox and it was still sitting on her desk.  Got it tracked down, everything is in order now and she is sending out my excuse letters.

Hopefully there is nothing else interesting that happens with this.  I don't know that I have the strength to keep going with any sort of real drama.  I may just snap and tell people where to stick it and then let HSLDA loose on the district if anything else comes up.

So what is the plan?  Well I have some math stuff that I'm going to be looking through tonight and tomorrow to find the specific spot each girl belongs at, and they will start it Monday.  History, right now I'm going to just read daily from a history book I have here already and see if we can finish up the year that way.  Science, I'm going to do the same with an elementary biology book I have.  With both subjects, we'll also add in library books as desired, and I may add in some units from KONOS as I feel a need and desire to.  All other subjects that are required by law (language arts, music, art, etc) will be incorporated into science and history by having them do research, projects, crafts, etc. related to what we're learning about.

Hopefully March and April go smoothly with this plan.  I'll let you know on Friday how this week goes.

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