Otherwise, the children are trucking along in their academic year. One thing I really appreciate about homeschooling is the ability to move at the learning pace of the child. Fulton is almost done with 1st grade math and he’s a super whiz. Adam says he has my brains but I don’t think I could do what he’s doing at his age. He’s starting 4 digit addition this week and not even tripped up! He can add two 2-digit numbers in his head, no problem. Therese is also moving on to 3rd grade math next month. The RightStart Math curriculum has a very long Level C which is supposed to be 2nd grade; it took us a little over a year working through part of the summer. But I’m not concerned at all because Therese is doing great and she’s far more confident and happy with math than she was before we started RightStart. I think Baby G is going to be a math person. It seems that s/he is always kicking and moving around when I’m teaching those lessons.

Botany has been a lot of fun. I really enjoy the Apologia Science series. Today was the first day that we ran into a project that didn’t work. But we just move on. Going on walks has been so much more fun as we identify the flowers and now the leaves we’ve learned about. Therese is a superstar in science. Fulton is 5 and I have to remember that. The material is pretty dense and I have to remember that most kindergarten age kids, aren’t doing much more with plants than planting seeds or measuring the growth of seeds with non-standardized measuring tools. At least he remembers what cotyledons are. He’ll revisit it with Gianna and Cecilia later.

History and Catholic history have also been interesting. Between Therese’s history lessons and EPIC:  A Journey Through Church History, I must say that having a broader picture and the Catholic perspective on events has really given me much to think about. Learning about the context that the Saints became Saints and martyrs have died for Christ and His Church, have giving me a deeper respect for the holy men and women that have come before us. We’re one episode from the end of EPIC, but I’ll need to go back for some lessons with Therese. I hope we can do Fr. Robert Barron’s Catholicism next, but we shall see what the Holy Spirit guides us to do.

Oh and did I mention the recent fascination with Chess? All the kids except Cecilia are playing it. Fulton ran downstairs one day after his bath saying, “C-H-E-S-S, here I come!” It was so funny. He’s certainly better than me. I JUST learned how to play. It boggles my mind that he can just see all different kinds of plays. Thankfully Adam plays with him too.

Gianna is just itching to start school, but I can’t yet. I will probably start her reading in January when we start back up. She’s certainly ready. She knows all her letters and sounds and numbers.

Cecilia’s speech is coming along. She was recently re-evaluated because she met all her goals from July. She has been saying many more words and now we need her to say them legibly–like “Jesus” should sounds like “Jesus” and not like “tito” or “umbrelalala” just needs one ‘la’ at the end.It’s been a little rough having two speech appointments  during the week, but it’s worth the progress she has made. She LOVES the iPad. We put a couple of flashcard apps and a puzzle app called Tozzle. Speaking of which it is now time to tear her away from it and undergo the torture of the two year old tantrum.

Wednesday, the Bob Bullock Museum had its homeschool day and Thursday we went to UT to see the Heliostat, which is a special telescope they have for viewing the sun and its awesome activity in real time.

Both were great but  I realize my kids are still not ready for movies like the Star of Destiny at Bob Bullock. Things are still scary for their little eyes. Muffin sat in her chair with her hands over her ears and Cecilia kept signing “all done.” That was actually kind of cute. Otherwise, Therese found the early history with the Spanish explorers interesting because we JUST started learning about that in history.

Before going to UT we reviewed what we learned last year in astronomy about the sun and it was neat actually seeing a lot of it in real time. We saw sun spots and solar flares. Oh how I love home schooling!

We had another great year at Sea World Homeschool Day. The kids’ favorite part of course was feeding the dolphins and the beluga whale and pacific dolphin show. I invested in “field trip” sketch books for all the kids and they loved drawing and writing about their favorite things at each exhibit. We also enjoyed looking at some of the plants and identifying them in the phylum we’ve studied in botany. (You’ll see Therese examining the spores on a ferm which is a sporangia and of the phylum pterophyta.) We met another family there with 5 kids (which will be us in 3 years), and saw a few of our homeschool friends from Austin.

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Adam is now three weeks into his chocolate making class. It’s been a lot of fun and very educational for us both. I have thoroughly enjoyed all the chocolate tasting sessions we’ve had. We just finished a session on tasting chocolate made with beans from the different growing regions. Adam did better than I on placing the region in a blind taste test–which I totally attribute to his beer tasting palate. But I did better on the first session in determining the percentage of cocoa in the bar. I never realized chocolate can be so complex. It has been exciting learning the nuances of the flavors and I will never taste chocolate the same way again.

The kids are winding down with school. We are not starting anything new until we have had a thorough restful, fun break. Hopefully the kids will start swim lessons soon. And this summer I hope we can sit back and enjoy reading and learning about art. I have some great art books that I recently purchased and one on loan that I’m very excited to start reading with the kids. And on these hot summer days it will be refreshing to go to a cool art museum and bask in beauty. Therese and Fulton have a couple choir concerts this week and next. And Therese’s religious ed classes are over with her first communion coming up in TWO DAYS!!! I have most of curriculum purchase for next school year. It’s so exciting to get the new stuff.

Cecilia is still not communicating with words. However she is a master at communicating non-verbally without signs. So we will be starting to get some intervention with the Early Childhood Intervention program. She had her official speech evaluation this morning. She’s on par or above where she should be in everything except her verbal skills. Hopefully this summer with less school on the schedule, we can focus more on getting her some verbal tools.

The garden has been a nice side hobby. It has been wonderful to just go outside and grab some lettuce for my sandwich or a salad. We’ve been enjoying some yummy beets, beet greens, swiss chard and spinach too. Thanks to the Politos, I learned the difference between beet greens and swiss chard.  Every year, I learn something new about gardening. Our compost pile is doing well too…I have a squash plant and probably a potato growing in there. Now if we can just control the ants in our yard, we’d be good.

I spoke to my sister today and she is doing well. Her bone marrow transplant was 2 weeks ago and she hit rock bottom last week with her immune system wiped out. Her stems cells have graffed and her white blood cell count is on the rise. Praise be God! She’s losing hair but she shaved most of it off before her last round of chemo. She has a great sense of humor and enjoys posting a “hat of the day” on facebook. Her light and strong heart is inspiring to me.

I’ve had my own health concerns that I’ve been working on getting answers to these last couple of months. It’s difficult sometimes to take the time to focus on myself and my health when I have 5 other people I need to look after. And before we can consider growing our family anymore, I need the peace mind, body, and soul that I can take care of these precious gifts that God has blessed us with. For over a year, I’ve had a chronic pain in my shoulder and chest. After seeing my GP a month ago and ruling out a heart condition for the second time, I had some x-rays taken of my chest. He didn’t see anything wrong with me. A friend of ours recommended I see a chiropractor that our parish priest and a couple of other people recommended. He immediately noticed an asymmetry in my back and pointed out the rib in my back which wraps around to the front part of my chest where I have been feeling this pain. Today I went in for my 3rd adjustment and took him the x-rays that I had from a month ago. And my spine is completely out of whack. He said with some more adjustments and massage therapy, he should be able to help me! I could cry…It’s refreshing to know that the pain was not all in my head and that there is something legitimately wrong with me.

At the same time I went to my GP, I went to the new NaProTechnology doctor in town, at the Vitae Clinic. My Creighton Model charts have been weird and I had some concerns about how I feel on a monthly basis. I haven’t felt myself for sometime and I have chalked it up to the changes in my life and vocation. At the same time, I want to be the mom and wife God created me to be, and I didn’t feel I was doing that. Dr. Kalamarides is an amazing doctor and a gift to our city and women’s health. He reviewed my charts and recommended I do a hormone evaluation post-peak (post-ovulation). I did and we discovered my progesterone is low all post-peak! Wow! This completely explains my two miscarriages in the past 7 years and my need for progesterone treatment during my pregnancies. What a great blessing to know that I’m not going crazy! I start treatment this month and hopefully things will get better. And if God is so great to bless us with another baby soon, then my body will be in a place to sustain the pregnancy early on.

And finally at the same time that I started seeing these physical doctors, I also knew I needed a soul doctor. So I’ve started seeing one of our associate pastors for spiritual direction. It’s been so helpful. My great desire is to live out my vocation to the fullest as a daughter of God. I fall short many times every day. I can say my prayer life has been better than it has been in years. My Lenten practices have carried over into Easter. In fact our family prayer life has continued to blossom this Easter. We have been enjoying our Garden of the Good Shepherd readings and family prayer/rosary time at night.

It was fun class and the kids learned why some of the myths about animals were busted–the porcupine shooting its quills, ostrich burying its head in the ground, possums hanging from their tails, etc. They also saw and were able to pet an armadillo. They saw a scorpion (didn’t pet it) and saw how it glows in black light.

I love NASA! Now we just need to make it to Houston to visit the Johnson Space Center!

Note of thanks to Mr. Anderson who graciously stayed with the Gianna and Cecilia so that I could take the big kids. Gianna woke up with a fever this morning, and it was Cecilia’s naptime when we left. This might also be the end of our field trip run unfortunately if a bug has hit the household.

There were discovery rooms with animals and insects; physical science; earth science (with a really cool tornado); the mammoth excavations; anatomy; sound; optics; simple machines; play cars; bubbles (which I would recommend bringing a change of clothes). It was a great time. It was hard to leave.