School Begins...and a Quick Trip to Urgent Care

Week 1 of school complete.  What should have been a cake walk of a first day, turned into a complaining sort of a day.  The kids all met the teacher (they were quite familiar with her), and we went over how school was going to run this year.  We have certain subjects in the morning, we take a 45 minute break outside, eat lunch, and finish off the remaining subjects in the afternoon.  They were all gung-ho for the 45 minutes outside.  Unfortunately, that first day Josiah had to take a math readiness evaluation because we were starting a new curriculum.  It was four pages long and he was not a fan.  Then we took his first spelling pretest.  I never mentioned the word, "test," it was more of a "let's see where you're at" type thing.  He wasn't keen on doing either.

But, after the first day, it got a lot better.  We've been sticking to this new schedule and it has really been working for us.  Josiah likes his new math book a lot.  He's even asked to do more work than I had scheduled, which has never even remotely happened before.  This new book is very colorful, which makes a big difference with him.  It's fun looking.  Henry's been doing well, despite not wanting to be in Kindergarten.  All summer he was upset he wasn't going into first grade.  Now he's upset that he's no longer in pre-K.  Even Caroline has been getting into it.  She sticks around when we review our CC material (using an app, which I love).  Caroline can now name the seven types of biomes with hand motions.  She's going to be hot stuff in that nursery at CC.

 We also had our first day at our new CC group.  This was the day I decided to take pictures of the kids beforehand.
Josiah, nervous, but excited.

Caroline, happy.

Henry, "I don't want to go.  I'm not going to do it. I don't want to hold this silly sign"

He said he was upset because it was a new group and he didn't know if I could stay in his room.  I didn't know either because our leader was going to assign the parents to a room for the next six weeks to have some consistency.  It didn't help him that it was up in the air.  He warmed up considerably when I was in his room.

Then after lunch, the boys were playing on the playground and Caroline was swinging.  At one point, our boys, with two others, came running up to me.  One boy, the leader, told me that he had finished training our boys and they were fully certified for their Spy Club. He then pinned imaginary badges on their shirts.  Our boys have played Spy Club at home in the past, so this was awesome to have other kids do the same.  They had a good first day.

The boys have been doing well in their karate class.  I don't always get to watch their whole class because I'm hanging out with a napping girl in the car.  She's fallen asleep every time we've gone.  But they're enjoying it.  Both boys earned their white stripes on their belts this week.  Henry's a little upset that he cannot earn his blue stripe because they ran out of blue tape and he thinks they'll never get any more blue tape ever again.


And as upset as Henry can get about some things, he's also quite entertaining and funny in others.  We've been watching two different magic shows for a couple of weeks now.  The kids love them.  Caroline always says she wants to be one of the model girls who helps the magicians.  After the shows are over, the boys will start in on trying to do tricks.  Henry likes to make things disappear, but in order for the trick to work well, he asks us, the audience, to close our eyes.  One time he had Legos assemble themselves.  We had to close our eyes and cover our ears for that one, but there was some amazement when we opened them again.

Another day, Todd left a sign on our cookies that said, "Okra and Brussel Sprout cookies" so the boys wouldn't eat them while he was at work.  Henry, after checking with me that it wasn't true, ripped the sign off and put up his own one.  "Todd loves banana cookies."  (Todd's allergic to bananas.)

Todd didn't eat banana cookies this week, but he did end up in the Urgent Care ER.  He asked us to pick him up from work because he wasn't feeling well.  On the drive home he asked that we make a detour at an Urgent Care.  He was quite pale and in a lot of pain when we got there.  They briefly checked him out before giving him a pain med, and he perked up a lot once that started doing its magic.  He ended up having a kidney stone.  The most unfortunate part of this whole event was that he spoke to a co-worker a few days later about it.  She mentioned that she had had one as well, and that it was worse than giving birth.  My next question to Todd was, "Did she have an epidural?"  I'm pretty sure he'll be bringing that up fairly often for the next 20-40 years.  (He's all better from the kidney stone.)

The kids all built the Hulk at Lowes' on Saturday.  Once we left the store, Henry discovered he lost his Hulk patch.  We walked the store twice looking for it, but never spotted it.  He was quite mature about the whole thing and didn't fall apart.  In the car Josiah even offered his to Henry, which Henry politely declined!  It was a sweet moment and it was so nice to see Josiah offer up something I know he really wanted.

The rest of our weekend was filled with building things from old boxes, attempting to wash our cars, building new Lego kits, and the always necessary, Costco trip.  We're looking forward to Homeschool Week 2.