It's Monday!

Hello lovelies! It's Monday again, and since I feel like last week never happened, this week seems especially promising. It is also a great time for me and the girls to start our temporary homeschooling adventure. As I mentioned last week we are structuring the last weeks of summer a little differently around our house. 

The first six weeks were filled with fly by the seat of our pants playing and adventuring. We lived at parks and splash pads, played outside our house, visited friends, cottaged, went on a boat, and ate s'mores. Last week the girlies had an amazing time at a nature camp hosted by Matty's university. 

But they are bored. Scratch that, they just miss school, and after the year Alyce had at school, we're grateful she's so excited to go back. They already have their new backpacks packed for the first day, I kid you not. Since I'm almost done teaching (grades are due tomorrow!) I will have more time this month and thought we'd try something new. To be clear: we have no idea what we're doing. I'm not claiming to know anything about homeschooling, but we're doing it in our own style and are quite happy with that.

We're picking a theme each week and this week is the human body. Today we started with drawing our favourite part of our bodies (Alyce picked her kidneys, bless her) and then moved on to colouring pages about internal organs. As they coloured in each organ we talked about its job. Naturally, the kids found it hilarious that kidneys make pee. Then I traced each kid's body on big sheets of paper and I asked them to draw all their organs! All of Shira's organs had smiley faces on them, even the gallbladder. 

It was lovely. So many conversations took off as we were going about our business. Alyce asked a lot of questions about how doctors do surgery, since I had my gallbladder removed last summer. Both of them asked a lot of questions about smoking when we talked about lungs, and we even talked a bit about brain injuries and how to look after people who suffer them. So it was a success in my books! The rest of the week will include some more research on lungs (at Alyce's request) and a trip to the Ontario Science Centre.

(Lest you think everything went smoothly in our idyllic homeschool home, I tried to take them to the park for a break and they complained and whined so much on the way that we actually had to turn around and come home. Because how mean I am to suggest that we go play and make castles in the sandbox.)

I think next week we are going to study food and cooking. I'll arm myself with some cookbooks from the library, we'll head to a kitchen store for a field trip (probably Good Egg in Kensington Market (though not to actually buy something because holy cow is that place expensive), spending some time poking around produce stands to discover some new fruits and vegetables.

But enough about next week. I want to enjoy this week first. Here's what's on my list:

• On Tuesday the girlies and are packing up and heading to Peterborough to visit some dear friends, the kind you only see once a year but it feels like you saw them yesterday. I am super excited for the great conversation I will be having this time tomorrow.
• Deal with some student loan repayment business. Sigh.
• Pack up some lunch and spend Thursday at the park.
• Dig around for some good gluten-free muffin recipes (more on that soon).
• Register the girlies for some activities this fall. We haven't really done extra-curricular activities before since life has just been too busy to shuttle kids back and forth between places after school, but this year, with me at home more, it seems the right time to start.  Alyce would like gymnastics and Shira has her eye on dance.

What's on your list this week? 

Be well!

xo