When life happens……
Sunday -OFF
Monday – 3 miles of walk/run intervals
Tuesday – 2 miles walking
Wednesday – 3 miles walk/run intervals
Thursday – OFF baby woke up with a fever
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.
But I am STILL a runner!!!!!
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.
Language Arts
These were fantastic much more like playing games and doing fun little projects then worksheets
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.
Math
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.
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.
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.
Thinking skills
My toddler loved this!!!!!
These were fantastic just like the alphabet books by the same company. They were fun and engaging and quick.
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
Nature and science
Art
Skills
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.
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.
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
Then we played outside until daddy got off work
Overall I’d call it a pretty good day.
We took a quick overnight trip to the coast to spend some time with friends and see the kite festival. This was my first time going to the kite festival…….and will probably be my last hahahaha. The kites were cool but I found it pretty lackluster as far as a festival goes.
It will go down as a good memory and I’m glad we did it but it was absolutely not our best executed trip hahaha. We had a fair few tantrums.
We played on the beach until we had access to the AirBnB we were going to share with friends
The house was right on the beach and had a great view
We can’t go anywhere without injuries hahahaha
After an early afternoon of playing on the beach and walking around we played on the rental houses deck and ordered a pizza
Little man slept in a big boy bunk bed!!!
Sleeping was absolutely terrible. The room was facing west so we had the sunset which in Oregon is not until 9:30 with full darkness, not until about 10: 30pm and while he doesn’t sleep in a completely dark room, it’s a pretty dark room so it took him forever to fall asleep. He did not go to sleep until about 10: 15 p.m.
Then the casino about a mile and a half away had fireworks and some drunken neighbors decided to sing along to them, thankfully this did not wake either kid up. Then at 11:45 p.m. drunken people on the beach set off a huge fireworks that lit up the entire room for about 30 minutes which woke the baby up.
The next morning was a slow leisurely morning (I ordered Starbucks through door dash because I could not keep my eyes open). Little man woke us all up at 5:30am We had breakfast with the whole house then played on the very windy beach.
My friend and her family were in the house with us too. The babies played together a bit
Then it was time for us to pack up and head home!
It was an absolutely exhausting trip and I’m still exhausted today even after going to sleep an hour early, but I’m glad we did it. I’m going to try and go to sleep early again tonight
I skipped through a lot of this book. Just sort of reading some of the section headings and a few sentences here and there. I thought it was pretty dry. But that could be because a lot of the information I feel like I already read in “There’s no such thing as bad weather”.
But there was a lot of good information and some very interesting things. I found it really interesting where they talked about how many teachers now have to tell kids no to so many things on the playground that they can’t do anything during recess. There was a teacher in New Zealand who decided to get rid of all the rules for recess and just let the kids go wild like they used to and they saw a bullying go down, concentration go up, etc
Another thing that was really interesting and I saw translated to our real life is talking about how kids used to play in the early 1900s and even late 90s and how strong the kids were because they weren’t restricted to what they could do on playgrounds or at recess and they were climbing on top of things, around things, swinging, and going crazy. I actually had a mom in my son’s gymnastics class, be somewhat amazed at how strong my son is. And how his gross motor skills are so well developed for a two and a half year old. And I think that’s because we don’t restrict his play. We let him climb on things we let him run around. We let him be crazy. We try and do it as safely as possible but we do not restrict or overly helicopter parent.
I do see how in America we have become more and more restrictive on what we deem safe for our children. And as a mom, I absolutely understand that it’s a balance between raining in my own fear and keeping them safe. We’ve also become a very litigious society which makes it so difficult for caregivers to give children that freedom to be children and run around and climb and jump and bounce and be crazy.
It’s overall I found it to be a very dry book and I skipped and jumped through a lot of it. But I think it’s definitely worth parents taking a peek at it and maybe doing the same kind of skipping, jumping, and stopping and reading where you are interested and skipping the parts that you find boring or redundant.
Wednesday –
AM – 3 worksheets done and 1 book read
Then gymnastics and the library
Thursday – AM
Two worksheets and 1 spread in ‘things to spot’ as he ran around the house hahaha
Then into the stroller the kids went for a 2 mile run. Then some time to run around the backyard.
Back inside we ‘worked’ on a puzzle, which means I put the pieces in place and he stomped them down hahaha. But I do try and get him to point out 1 or 2 things to me each time and I name the continents and oceans.
We also played with the bunny boo game. It works on spacial awareness and directionality
PM – I read to them for 15 min
Friday AM – 3 worksheets
Saturday – OFF
Sunday – OFF some Sundays we will do a little bit but today we went to visit the grandparents
Monday AM
After this he had a lovely toddler meltdown compete with ear splitting screaming.
After he calmed down I loaded the kids in the stroller and went for a 3 mile run then we did some exploring and gardening in the backyard.
Tuesday – AM
And that is a wrap! That is a week of homeschooling with us. Some weeks we get more done and some less. This month we are really busy with swim lessons so each week we have 1 gymnastics class and 2 swim lessons. Since we are so busy I am pushing school a little less.
Because it is preschool level and he is only 2.5 I try and keep it light and not make him do things he isn’t feeling that day or time, I want to foster a love for learning not destroy it.
Thanks for joining us!!!
Trailing the blonde 