Six Months

We've been homeschooling now (officially) for 6 months. Time goes by in such a totally different way for me now. It's like when you go camping for a few days and you stop looking at your watch and wondering what time it is. The days blend into each other. Life moves in the rhythm of the sun and the seasons. We wake up when we are rested and sleep when we are tired. We eat when we are hungry. The boys turn on the hose or the sprinkler when they are hot while the girls splash in the kiddie pool or in buckets. Every day there is something new to see in our garden. We have time to plan big events like a barbecue for some friends in a couple of weeks, Caleb's birthday party in the beginning of July, and our trip to the Texas hill country for our family reunion in the middle of July.

We have created a haven here at home away from the fast-paced, over-scheduled, hustly-bustly world outside. It is good especially while the kids are so young. I imagine we will be venturing out into the world more and more as they get older. Zane is taking swimming lessons at a city park right now. Caleb's lessons start next week. Zane always surprises me how outgoing he is in a crowd of people -- strangers even. He stayed after class one day and talked to his teacher about some ideas he has. He wanted to have a race. I'm not sure what all he proposed but she listened to him. I am amazed at how much he has learned in this 2 week class. He can swim. He is no longer afraid to go under water. He'll even jump in from the side -- the diving board is still too scarey.

Zane is reading really well now -- I don't know at which grade level he reads. The only reason I would want to know would be to brag to other people about it. He was a beginning reader (reading at a 1st grade level) while he was in first grade last fall. Now he is way beyond that. He has taught himself to read -- at least improved his reading by playing video games and playing on the computer. I read to him every night and he has an extensive vocabulary. His teacher said he was an excellent guesser. He could guess a lot of words by how they start and by the context of the sentence. But he wasn't "reading" the word. Even now he doesn't like to read out loud. But he'll understand what he has read, so I know he can read. If I'm writing or reading something, he'll occasionally look over my shoulder and ask what something means. He doesn't like to make a mistake. He rarely asks what a word is. But he can read some big complicated words and understand their meaning. Reading or guessing doesn't matter if he gets it right. He doesn't like to write and rarely does it. But he has finally started drawing again. He stopped drawing when we pulled him out of school last December. He didn't draw for months. Drawing is something he loves to do and has done every day for a couple of years now. I was hoping he would come back around. I kept telling myself that he was de-schooling. He needed time to process the huge changes we had made. Then one day, about a month ago, he picked up his pencil and his sketch book and now he draws every day again. I feel like we have reached a turning point. Several people have commented about changes they have seen in Zane. He seems calmer, more content, sweeter.