Buckling down

I was looking forward to a rather hectic month with Georgie going for surgery and Theo getting a filling and a trip to Toronto over the long weekend. But Georgie developed a nasty cold at the last minute so her surgery has been postponed until the end of June which is a HUGE relief. We still have a bit of a crazy long weekend trip coming up, but at least we don't have to take a week or more off after our 3 week absence as well.

Which is a big plus because it's going to be hard enough to stay on task with trips to the midwife in between everything else. Yep. On top of everything I am now expecting baby number 4. Which is a joy and a delight and a slight hinderance to an already busy schedule.

However, I am now into my second trimester and past the point of feeling grossed out by everything in sight, so after a long holiday, during which I did a heck of a lot of sitting around and eating myself into bigger pants, I feel fairly motivated to get moving and do as much as I can in the next two months before school ends. I have always been blessed with comparatively easy pregnancies and this one is by far the easiest, with very little nausea or change in energy levels, so I want to make the most of the next few months.

We started back this week after all the craziness of Holy and Pascha, followed by a two week road trip to Saskatchewan and back. As expected, it's been a bit of a battle but partly because there is so much I have to be doing to get the house in order so I haven't been able to supervise the school work as effectively as I might want. We have been doing our best to catch up in Story of the World and Elemental Science, as well as working on our First Language Lessons. We certainly won't be able to do everything by June, but I expect that Theo will get through all the lessons from Science even if we don't do many experiments. He is nearly finished his unit on plants and will start learning about the human body next week or the week after.

We also finished learning about the Greeks and did most of the work on Ancient Greece in his Ancient History Portfolio. He is consuming Story of the World on his own rather rapidly. This morning he has spent hours reading through it. The map work is his favourite and we do the review questions and the narrations as well as what we can in his portfolio. I think we can finish it by the end of June.

First Language Lessons are coming along, but they require uninterrupted one on one for 5 or more minutes and that's hard to come by around here with Eustace about constantly getting into trouble. We are more than halfway done them, but at this point I don't know if we will finish them by the summer. Some are quick and easy and some require a little more time and attention. Yesterday we read through a story and picked out the adjectives and adverbs so Theo could learn how to spot them. It was tricky really. But then we did some learning about articles which was quick and easy.

He has been reading the How to Train Your Dragon books at a rapid pace too and polished off two of them on our road trip for a total of five this year and he is now working on the 6th. He's obsessed.

And we are taking a break from Math until I am certain that he is fairly reasonably caught up in his other subjects, but as I have plans to make him keep it up over the summer I'm not too worried if our break is slightly extended.

Next month I plan to look into swimming lessons and/or gymnastics for summer phys ed, but as he walks everywhere I'm not too concerned about his education in that area. it will very much depend on funds and scheduling convenience. My hope for the summer is that we make regular trips to the library a few times a week and take walks through the local park at least twice a week. If anything, Mommy needs to avoid the prospect of having to buy bigger pants, so it's going to be important that we get outside and walk as frequently during the summer as we do during the rest of the year.

So it's back to business for us and I'm looking forward to having a fairly productive month ahead.