Dress update and the first day of school

I mentioned that I was going to post pictures of the completed dresses I made for the girls. The matching summer dresses were completed at the end of May. Here's a picture:


I think they turned out well.

The fancy dresses are still in progress. I am in the middle of constructing The Pillowfight Fairy's fancy dress. If I worked on it faithfully every night it would be done by now. But, I am not up to working on it every night.

We also just had our first day of school for the new school year. What? Early you say? What better time to be indoors than during a Sacramento summer. I'm pleased to say that it went well. The lessons went quickly. The kids were happy to be doing school again. They had structure and purpose in their lives again. As a reminder this is the first year that I am doing two kids in a structured format, with the toddler as the wild card. The Fairy is starting second grade and the Adrenaline Junkie is starting Kindergarten. The lessons were mostly review for the Fairy today. They were more challenging for the Junkie, but not too difficult of a stretch. The Junkie got plenty of play time (often with her little brother) to get out her wiggles. The Happy Boy managed OK too. He did try to get me to turn on the computer for a video or a game, but could be convinced to play with other things instead. He and his sister spent a good thirty to forty-five minutes going back and forth between the kitchen and dining room while opening and closing the sliding door in between while pretending they were characters from Bugs Life. They did make a tremendous mess of play food on the kitchen floor supplemented by a dozen board books and a toy alligator. But they also were able to clean up the mess without help. About an hour later I did discover a half-eaten nectarine on the floor of the kitchen. But these days, that is a blessedly small mess compared to what the Happy Boy is capable of. He is getting tall enough to reach things on the counter tops and has snacking tendencies. On the whole I am pleased with the day and hope we have many more that go as well.

For those wondering about when my husband is going to update his blog, I have no idea. He just got a new shipment of rings and has started making a chain maille outfit for the Adrenaline Junkie. He loves his new hobby. So your guess is as good as mine.

We seem to be in a crafty mood lately. He makes chain maille. I make dresses and am planning some crocheted shawls to go with said dresses. The Pillowfight Fairy has been knitting a scarf (hopefully the first of many) which she hopes to sell close to Christmas for extra money. No special craft for the Junkie yet (though I am contemplating fulfilling a promise to make a toy "church mouse" and getting her to help). The Happy Boy has obsessions too. He likes to put foam letter stickers on paper in mostly straight even lines. He can easily do this for an hour a day (or until his two year old body has to wiggle out of his seat and go running around the house in circles).

With all of our idiosyncrasies I think I am losing track of whether our daily life is amazingly dull and boring or odd and exciting. Or maybe we are oddly boring or dully exciting. I can't actually say that I've ever been normal, but I think our family is continuing to be different but in many ways that are different for us. Does that make any sense? Well, at any rate, we are managing to maintain routine life while adding in a little variety. And yes chaos is still alive and well in our household and I am still working on finding order in the midst of it.

When should the school year start?

If you didn't have any outside influences making up your mind for you, when would you start the school year? Now we all have some outside influences that help us make this decision, but since we homeschool, we don't necessarily have to follow the public school schedule. For instance, we finished up most of our school-work back in May. Right now we are very casually finishing up a few things that were left undone, but could be considered busy work, since they are not vital to her schooling. So how do we answer this question?

Well, one way to find an answer is to ask if our child is ready to start her new year of school. The answer to that one would be "yes." She has seen the new books. She has seen Mommy making plans and shopping for supplies. Oh yes! she is ready! She has on occasion asked to look at her new text books for the fun of it.

Another way to find an answer is to ask if the teacher (that would be me) is ready to start teaching. The answer to that one is "not yet but soon." I have always loved the start of school, but I also see the need for a little bit of a break before diving in to a new year (especially since we have a lot more planned for this year than last year). I also have to consider how to plan around other summertime activities. Last week was day camp week. This week and next are swim lessons. Both of these things had us completely shift our family schedule to accommodate them. After swim lessons are over, we are free to start a new year whenever we please.

Are there any other influences that might determine when we start? Well, yes. The society around us does influence us some, even though we are relatively out of sync from it. As far as I'm concerned the labels "Kindergarten," "First grade" and so on are artificial constructs and we are teaching our kids where they are. But, our children do interact with other kids (yes, homeschoolers do know other people) who are in public school and to whom such labels matter. Therefore these things matter to our kids. Our oldest has already started telling people that she is a first grader even though we haven't actually started her studies yet. The summer always was an awkward time where you always have to clarify whether you are finishing a grade, in it currently, or about to start it. I generally have liked the idea of year round school, but you still need to have some kind of starting and stopping point to be able to easily talk to others (especially non-homeschoolers). In our life, those other people we spend the most time with are at our church. Our kids are in classes divided by age or grade level as appropriate. This is where they get their "classroom" experience. So when does our church start the new year? July 6th of all things. I think this is actually because it allows the year to be divided up into relatively neat quarters for planning of classes. As a result most of the kids start their new grade long before they start school for fall. So we could start about the same time and be in sync with the church classes or we could do our own thing (whatever that is).

Another consideration is convenience. I had hoped to be pregnant by now so that the early months of pregnancy (when I generally am in a sleep-deprived fog) would be out of the way before starting the school year. Sometimes, that which is convenient doesn't happen and you have to make do with a more inconvenient alternative. Having no idea when said pregnancy might happen, it wouldn't do to delay our kid's education for it.

There is also the fact that this is the first year that we have to satisfy bureaucratic rules. Since we live in California, we will have to file our affidavit as a private school to exempt our daughter from compulsory attendance in public school. But that doesn't need to be done until October. Still, we have to figure out if we are going to join a homeschool support group (probably), decide on legal representation (since you never know), and watch what is going on in the court case that might change everything (probably no news until September).

So, have we come up with an idea of when we will start our new year?

We probably will start in early July. I don't want our break to be too long or our daughter will start forgetting last year's stuff and may decide that she doesn't want to go back to her school work. We will be in sync with her church friends. And we can do all the bureaucratic stuff as needed along the way. Though I may wait until after my birthday. :-)