Time for a REAL update!
Hello everyone! Well, today I finally have a good 40-minute chunk of time here to blog, and I'm so thankful for this time, because I have been longing to catch up with you all! But looking back, I didn't really take many pictures this week, so... it will be mostly words I guess. Usually I use my camera roll to jog my memory about the things I want to write down, so hopefully I won't leave anything out.
The end of last week was a time of decision making. Having taken a few days to recover and sleep off Holy Week, M and I finally felt that by Thursday night we had enough brain cells to discuss and decide on the things we needed to.
(I was just searching back through my posts and I think I shared with you all that M has a new job... I know I definitely shared that we were house hunting and now close to closing on our new house out closer to where he works. My brain is keeping track of too much these days, so if I left out any of those larger life events, now you're filled in.)
So, given that our closing date of May 3 was approaching (less than a month away now!) we had to decide when our actual move would take place. We have our rental through the end of May, so there wasn't a huge rush to move in right away after the closing date (always nice to have extra time to move), but obviously the less M has to commute the better, so we decided that we would move on the weekend of May 8/9. Mother's Day, I know... this won't be the year for breakfast in bed and pampering, I'm afraid... more like the year for waking up early, sucking down some coffee and loading a truck all day. It's okay-- my beautiful new house will be my reward!
So based on that decision we could then figure out whether we wanted to put the girls in school in the new district right away, or just finish our homeschool year and begin at the new school in the fall. This necessitated me taking a close look at how much school we actually have left, so I spent some time doing that. On our current trajectory I figured out that most subjects would be finished by mid-May, so there was no reason, academically speaking, for them to need to go to school after that. We considered the social aspect of getting established with new friends and teachers, but then decided that we could wait until the fall for that. So... homeschool for the rest of the year, it is.
{P.S. If there are any homeschool parents reading this, you may be feeling that this choice should have been obvious, but let me just say that this year has been a lot for me to handle as a Mama, and a lot of the same feelings I mentioned in this post have been surfacing lately. The burnout is real for me, teaching a studio of 17 private students, doing some limited gigging, plus homeschool. I do feel a certain relaxation about keeping them "caught up" with grade level work, especially since I know their peers in public school have not had a normal year either, but I constantly balance that relaxation with feeling a duty to at least touch on all the material they need so they won't be so completely behind when they return to public school. I know that feeling hopelessly behind can be really discouraging for a child, and I don't want that for my kiddos, know what I'm sayin'? It does take some of the joy out of learning for all of us when we have a big to-do list, though. So that's what's been hard about it. Anyway, I could write a whole post on that topic, comparing homeschool to public school and who has it harder and what's wrong with education in general. But for now I'm working within the system and mostly trying to follow the rules.}
{P.P.S. Is anyone else out there feeling really, really, really, really, really, really tired? Both M and I are feeling it. I don't know if it's Zoom fatigue, or the crushing weight of all the bad news in the world, or the "doing less" while staying home, but actually having to try to figure out how to do all the things we do, but remotely. Or, for M, the returning to full-time in-person work (but still with lots of restrictions and precautions in place) and adjusting to that. We have been talking a lot lately about how we feel we could both use about two weeks in a tropical location, the first week of which we would actually just spend in bed. Is it just us?}
So there's the big school decision made.
Next we had a smaller decision of sketching out our packing plan to see if we would have enough time to spare a few days for a visit to our new baby cousin, who we haven't met yet (we were supposed to meet her at Christmas right after she was born, but alas we didn't!). And because we don't have that much homeschool left, I figured we could take a couple of weeks off right now, and I could recruit the girls to help with packing during the week, which would free up a weekend so that we could travel. With both M and I now vaccinated we are feeling much better about making trips, so this weekend we're off to D.C. area to meet our precious baby cousin!!!! Yay!!!!! It’s April vacation so M is free to travel with us, which makes things just so much easier for me than doing it by myself, so we’re taking advantage of the opportunity.
And soooo.... that brings you up to date to this week, which has been packing packing packing!!!
The girls have been immensely helpful so far, although I’m sensing today that their zeal and energy for packing may have a time limit. There was a wee bit of dawdling and procrastinating going on today (understandably so... these girls are probably tired from packing roughly twenty boxes of stuff for me in the past two days!). We will keep chipping away at it. Even if we each do only one box per day I think we will be in pretty good shape come moving time. It is a little hard for me to get much done while I’m still teaching 2-3 hours per day, so I’ll try to maximize the April vacation days we have at home. All while dreaming of that tropical location, right? ;-}
Lastly, some pictures....
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