Encouragement after a long week or two...

Phew. It's been a long week and a half.

The beginning of last week had us recovering from a long weekend of stomach bug - all over the place. Buddy Boy had come down with something the Wednesday before, and I was hoping (and praying) the other kids had avoided it.

It was not to be so.

So, after a tough weekend (not a lot of sleep, because just when one would stop making trips to the bathroom, another would start), we spent a couple days recovering. Then - it was a life school end of the week. Thankfully, by Friday we got back to some school time around the house. Days like that, though, tend to discourage me - as a mother, and a homeschool mama. Those tend to seem like two different, and yet the same, jobs sometimes. 

I was trying for a better start to the week today, and got the feeling that comes all too often. You know the one - the, "I'm barely scratching the surface, and am so TOTALLY going to fail my children and I must be the worst mother ever" feeling.

Yehap - that's me. Most certainly NOT meeting my own expectations, I was sure.

Then:

Hoss discovered the pattern of the numbers (products) on the multiplication finger chart, which he was actually using just to check his work. On his own. He was playing the domino game, which is something that won't make any sense to you yet, so I will explain it in the next post. It's irrelevant here, though. While I was lamenting how little I felt I was doing, he was studying the chart and seeing something that I didn't realize he didn't see before. *Note here - he was older when we began Montessori and has had little to no experience with the number chains. If he had, he might have picked up on this sooner. That didn't matter - he found it out on his own.

Same day:

I love watching this little girl concentrate on her work :) 

Miss Priss discovered the rule of alphabetical order - on her own. I gave what was her first official presentation. Nothing fancy, and possibly nothing like what is in any manual. I can talk about that later, too. The point is, again, she found it.

Some more revelations, now that I'm thinking on it:

Recording her work in her binder, after checking to be sure she had the answer correct.

Bug is playing the aforementioned domino game *without me*. If you know anything of what I have EVER told you about her, that is a miracle  in itself. 

LM - well, she still reads like crazy. She's also enjoying her piano lessons and new-as-of-this-year choir class immensely. Oh, and she's also playing piano BY EAR. No one taught her - she has begun picking out music on the piano of songs she knows, even just today (a day after I started this post) playing part of a song we sing at church. One that she has no written music for, and that no one has shown her. She was able to show her piano teacher what she knows, and get further guidance to play both hands of that particular piece. 

This picture speaks volumes of the concentration going on while he was playing with Legos. He didn't even know I'd taken it.

Buddy - well, he's still Buddy. :) He counts pigs. Little, miniature, cute pigs. Did I mention his pigs fly? Leaves the mind to grasp the concept of "when pigs fly", doesn't it? "When pigs fly" he'll be focused. Until then, he's just having a whole lot of fun. Oh - there was that one day, a few weeks ago, when he started and stopped his own work cycle that lasted about 2 hours. Or that *one* day when he played and built with legos for 30 minutes, mindless of what was going on in the room and how much noise the rest of us were making, fully focused on what he had going on. 

Come to think of it, I guess life's not too bad here after all :)

Philippians 4:11 "Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content."

*Editor's update - it took me almost four days to finish this blog post, if that's a clue to how busy we've been!*