I enjoyed this book. There were some dry moments and I skimmed the parts that didn’t really pertain to me right now…like busy school mornings and homework battles.
It is a lot about how you react to the issues that come up, the attitude you have and setting yourself up for success.
I am by no means perfect so I did learn a lot from this book hahaha. I still have days that are a struggle, I still lose my cool quicker than I want but I am trying and also trying to implement some strategies from this book and I think it’s helpful.
Friday – OFF baby had diarrhea all day with some blood, ended up in the ER with her
Saturday – baby sick and wanted mommy all day. No long run.
Thank goodness she seems to be on the mend. I was starting to get a little worried. Hopefully the upward trend continues and everything can get back to normal this coming week.
After so many years of not consistently running; moving in with my now husband, getting engaged, getting married, enjoying being married then kids. I find myself having to remind myself that I AM A RUNNER.
Even if I run slow, even if I have runs where I walk more than I run, even if I have bad training months, whether I finish first or last in a race (I have finished last lol) whether I run a marathon in 3 hours or 7 hours….I ran it…..I am a Runner.
For some reason now, I don’t know if it’s tackling the marathon or maybe having had kids, but I seem to be much harder on myself than I was 5 years ago when I was running. If I have a bad run or a run where I’m really tired or even a bad month of runs suddenly I think I’m not a good enough runner. I don’t remember ever feeling like that when I was training for half marathons before kids.
I think it might be because this has been such a bad month with my kids sleep and my stomach issues that I feel like I’ve backslid in my training a little. But I don’t ever want to be a perfectionist. So I have to continually remind myself that there will be seasons in life where it just doesn’t go the way I want it to.
My kids sleep has been HORRIBLE the past 2 weeks and it is catching up with me. Almost every night I have been up between 2-4 hours with one or both my kids. We have had teething and sleep regressions and who knows what. And for half that time my husband was out of town. I stayed with my in-laws then my mom came to town to help but in the middle of the night it was all me. I am so tired and so frustrated. One day we will get back to normal…….I hope…….please.
Our first year of homeschooling is coming to an end. I loved almost every minute of it lol. Overall, my toddler did amazing with the curriculum. With a year under my belt now I kind of know how he learns and how he does things. So I will review the curriculum that we used for preschool and in a couple weeks I’ll post what we’re going to do for Pre-K.
We started this about 2/3rds of the way through the year and will be continuing it through pre-K. These are much more lesson like so we tend to break them up into smaller sections but I have become a big fan of the Good and the Beautiful.
I didn’t like this at all and neither did my toddler. We found it to be very dry and boring. I wasn’t going to make either of us suffer through it after I decided we didn’t like it. We got about halfway through it then I chucked it in the recycling bin.
Farm land math from Timberdoodle
My son loved this in the beginning and even asked for it regularly to play it. However once his new little sister was big enough to start taking pieces it started turning into a battle so we set this aside as well. But, it did lay a great foundation for us.
Also from Timberdoodle
This was fantastic. Timberdoodle actually added this in their 2023-2024 preschool curriculum kit so I only ordered it about 2 months ago but we are almost done with it. If you do it weekly it is not a full year’s worth of curriculum but it has added a little bit of math back into our study.
Another one that my toddler and I thought was really boring and dry. Just like the math we got about halfway through the book and I chucked it.
History and social studies
Love this puzzle, it is super adorable. For a long time my toddler had little to no interest in doing anything except jumping on the pieces to get them together when I set them in the correct place. But in the last 6 weeks that has started to change, with me helping him identify which pieces go where he is assembling it entirely himself. I thought this book was super cool and interesting, my toddler generally just tolerated it lol. We did not finish it. I might throw it in here and there in our pre-K unit and see if he likes it better.
Nature and science
Love, love, love this. This curriculum is meant to be used year after year after year layering in more information and learning each year. Right now we keep it very basic but I look forward to using it for years to come with the kids. This is really great for kids that aren’t ready for a full curriculum. We started with this entire program which is made of units. Now we use it mainly for it’s great book lists as well as a science project here and there.
Art
Eh, super cute idea but my toddler was just kind of meh about it. Maybe he’ll become more artistic in the future (though I’m not sooooo….I wish I was but was not blessed in that area)
Skills
This was great in the beginning of the year to get my son interested in learning to use scissors but we didn’t finish it because once he semi knew what he was doing he wanted to do his own cutting lol.
Overall, it was a great year. I loved watching my son grow in leaps and bounds. Which is exactly how it came. He would not get something and suddenly it would click. He was really did go in leaps and bounds and stops and starts.
The great thing about homeschooling his preschool is I was really able to follow his rhythm and our rhythm as a family. There were weeks where we didn’t do anything. We kind of fell out of our rhythm and then we’d pick it back up and have a couple of great weeks, couple great months and then kind of fall off again which worked out great for us. We’re still finishing on time and I just love the entire experience.
We started a little before he returned 2 years old. So it was by no means always easy sunshine but it was rewarding and wonderful. Occasionally I did resort to a little bit of bribery or coercion sort of to get him to come over and start. Once he started. He usually loved everything. But it would occasionally be oh. Can you help Mommy do this? Or do you want to come eat a chip with me while we look at this picture and talk about it? Lol.
Monday – 1 mile……I have been having some stomach issues the last 4 days so even this was a slog.
Tuesday – 2 miles. Ran this after I put the baby to bed. It was actually pretty nice outside but I ate way too much dinner so I was really bloated and uncomfortable on this one.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – OFF still having stomach issues and feeling a bit run down from it.
Saturday – 12 miles!!!! Got it done! I slept in the tiniest bit so it got a bit hot. I stopped halfway and the farmers market and refilled my water bottle with strawberry lemonade hahahaha and ate extra energy gels to combat the sweat loss and a system that was probably already a little out of wack from all the stomach stuff. It is VERY slowly improving.
This book was so fantastic. It gave so many options and ideas to add creativity to your homeschooling. Take away some of the pressure and add confidence in yourself.
It talks about a lot of different versions of homeschooling, a lot of different options. It gives lots of encouragement and really just is an amazing resource. I checked this out of the library but I fully intend to buy it. Actually. I asked my best friend to give it to me for Christmas lol.
But it’s not just for homeschooling parents. In my opinion. I think it’s really just any family or parents who want to enhance their child’s learning and life. This book will really give you ideas and ways to embrace the spontaneous love of learning kids have.
Ok not nothing, I did a 1.5-2 mile walk with the kids in the stroller pretty much every day but I was feeling really tired and a smidge burned out after almost 3 months of building back up after pregnancy and then starting marathon training so I took a week off and enjoyed my sleep in day on Saturday. I slept for 12 hours! I needed it. Now it’s time to get back to it.
I put on some Nat Geo in the morning while we all relaxed and woke up
I read them a book from the construction unit we are doing from playing preschool
We talked about the date, weather, season, the months of the year and the days of the week
We did some stickers in our math sticker book
And of course we couldn’t leave my 15 month old out of it lol. They played a little in the sink Daddy came out for lunch to play Then he had a meltdown and rage colored lolI actually did my hair (don’t look at the post partum flyaways lol) and put some mascara onWe hit the library and I got way too many books for me hahahaNap walk. This is how I get them both to take a nap currently Did some worksheet pagesAttempted our first teatime……..ummmmm id call it a half success. He had a huge tantrum (he had a hard toddler day) but we did get 3 short sections and 1 longer section read in the preschooler bookGot a Good and the Beautiful lesson done.
Trailing the blonde 