Back to Work

Well, the holidays are over. It always goes faster than I am expecting, and as usual it's nice to get back into routine after a lot of chaos. Normally we leave the tree and things up until we get back from visiting the in laws for Old Calendar Christmas (January 7th) but this year we left our Christmas visit till the following weekend and I decided that the tree had to come down before we went away for the weekend or it would become an extra chore this week and this week will be busy enough as it is.

We got some good work done, though we are by no means back to routine yet. We spent the first few days catching up on our Science experiments and written work. We have now finished all the work in the mammals section and are ready to start on birds this week. We also went through the review cards for our Story of the World and read the first bit of chapter 15.

Last Monday we spent the day not only finishing the work on the Nativity (which we didn't manage to finish before Christmas) but did all the work on Theophany in time for the feast. Theo went to the Vesperal liturgy and sang with Daddy, although the rest of us stayed home. The adjustment to school has been rather a lot to handle particularly for Georgie, who I figure was really hoping that she would never have to go to preschool again.

A visit from friends on Thursday gave us the opportunity for a playdate and a chance to break out the Scrabble Junior that Theo got for Christmas. We also had a proper cleanup day which was much needed to deal with the residual Christmas mess.

Friday was a crazy day as I had to do both grocery shopping and last minute Christmas shopping for the cousins before we drove down to Seattle for the weekend. Theo did a whole lot of walking and helping and spent a good portion of the drive to Seattle reading How to Train Your Dragon-- a novel he was given for Christmas. He is halfway through it now and enjoying it rather a lot more than he did Harry Potter last year-- or perhaps just picking up more of it. It is not very much like the movie at all.

We also had a rather uncomfortable conversation about human reproduction during which we had to get out his Human Body Encyclopaedia to look at diagrams. I won't expand much on why this subject came up. Suffice to say I was not feeling well last week and the kids got the idea that there was a baby in my tummy. I DO NOT, but I found I had a little explaining to do to ensure they didn't go around saying so. Georgie still isn't convinced.

We are starting back at Math and Language Lessons this week and picking up where we left off in History as well as getting on with our Science. We started that Science curriculum rather later than the other subjects and have fallen fairly behind but we are reasonably ahead in Math and Language so I am hoping that if we just maintain as we are going then we will have a chance to catch up on Science and finish up at the end of the year. That, or spend a week or two only on Science to ensure that our Botany unit will come along in time for getting the garden up and running.

This week we will having Granny visiting for a few days so we are going to be spending a day at the aquarium and a day on Bowen Island with relatives. So it's not back to routine exactly but we are getting on with things so it's all looking good.