musings of an angry mind

I know it's the depression, but I decided to put away the homeschool stuff, and I have one question: what the hell was I thinking, believing I could do that? Make a difference for my kids? WHo was I trying to fool??????

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, there was a princess who met a man she thought was a prince. They got married and had a baby princess. Their marriage was a bad one, filled with lies, bad feelings, mistrust, abandonment, and infidelity. But the princess believed that they had a fresh start and together they moved to a new kingdom. But alas it was not meant to be. For our princess soon discovered that the prince was having an affair with the princess' most trusted friend. The prince and the best friend left the kingdom and shattered the princess. Then they tried to take the baby princess away. Thankfully our heroine found out the plot. After a year long battle, an agreement was reached and peace began to descend once more. The princess found a new prince, one with a little prince if his own, and together they had 3 more princesses. But the princess never really was able to put aside what had happened. The former prince and the wicked witch married and continued to make things hard for the princess and the baby princess. The princess could never make a decision for the baby or do what needed to be done for her, medically, financially, emotionally. But the former prince did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. The princess to this day knows that karma is true, but thinks it missed these two. The baby princess is such a stew of low confidence, confusion, and anger and her mom can't do anything but tell her it will be ok. Even though she doesn't really believe it.

How does this fairy tale end?

Who the fuck knows.

Felt Boards

So one of the things I ordered from Amazon was a book on felt boards, with patterns and ideas for different themes. I remember felt boards from my child development class days. I will update with pictures when I finish making the set for the farm theme! I am having so much fun doing this, even though I found out the hard way someone's been using my fabric scissors on paper!

I'm Backkkkk.....

We had a lovely break last week-we spent time in North Carolina with Alan's sister and our 4 nieces. It was so nice to get away from everything that's been going on.

We started back up with Bella's preschool today. This week's theme is kittens. She didn't seem too impressed with today's story LOL. Oh, well, tomorrow is a new day...and a new story!

Today was also "box day". All the fun things I ordered before we left arrived while we were gone. We all had so much fun opening all our cool stuff. Bella likes her toddler tweezers and Kate and Alan are desperately trying to figure out the correct way to make slides with human blood. SMH

Kate started the new elementary school today. She was nervous, but so excited to see her old friends. She went to this school from K-3, so there were a lot of familiar faces. She is in the same class as her old BFF, so all is good. I hope she does well!

Tomorrow is my court date for the contempt hearing. Keeping my fingers crossed all is dismissed, but I don't feel all that worried-vacation did me good, and cleared out my head and my heart.

ok, on to happy things....

It's time to start thinking positive again. No, I can't give my oldest daughter the fun, exciting education I want. But, I DO have 3 other daughters, who share a perfectly reasonable daddy ;)

We are getting ready to wrap up Week 2 of the Letter of the Week curriculum with Bella. This week, we covered Jungles, number 2, letter B, and the color green. I gave her a shallow plate with some dry rice in it, to give her a way to make her numbers and letters. She is great at recognition, but at 33 months old, not so great at making them lol. She does enjoy dragging her finger through the rice in circles and squiggles. I am putting together an Amazon.com order of things mostly for her-math and science primarily.  Melissa and Doug Beginner Pattern Blocks, Unifix cubes and Early Pattern cards, Lace and Trace Pets Lacing cards, Learning Resources Baby Bear Balance Set, Preschool Science book, toddler-sized tweezers, and some other odds and ends. I'm thinking I also want to get this puzzle rack to hold all the great puzzles my mom has gotten for her over the last year or so. Alan wants me to get a microscope as well, so he and Kate can still have some fun, after school! Anyways, today Bella, Kate and Alan had some fun with finger painting. All 3 made some great rainbow pictures to hang on the fridge! Oh, I almost forgot to share our funny for the week-On Monday, Alan was going over the Jungle theme with Bella. Her vocabulary word this week is "vine". Alan asked her if she knew what a vine was, and her reply was "That's what Diego swings on!" Smart girl <3

I am debating the wisdom of starting a "curriculum" with the twins. Keep in mind they are almost 15 months actual, but when you go by their adjusted age, they are almost 12 months. Both girls receive services through Birth to 3, our state's early intervention program. Lana gets 1 hour a month developmental therapy with our awesome Miss Carolyn, while Brie is twice a month. Brie also receives 1 hour a month PT from our wonderful Miss Darlene. Not a lot (especially when you realize last summer both girls were getting both services weekly!), but I don't want to start something they aren't ready for. I'll have to ask Carolyn what she thinks the next time she is here. The program I am looking at for them would take maybe 15-30 minutes a day, if that. It entails a 2 week per "theme" lesson plan, where there's a nursery rhyme, song, story, sign, exercise, and later on Arts and Craft. This program goes from the ages of 1 year to 2 years, then they move to the one Bella's doing. Take a look: Letter of the Week Oh, and we might have to add OT for Brie and possibly speech down the road. Hmmmmm, something (else) to think about....

Preparing for Kate's last day

On the advice of my lawyer, I have re-enrolled Kate in PS. Her last day being homeschooled is tomorrow. Easter vacation starts the next day, and she has her first day at the new school on the 9th. I'm trying to do my usual afterschool routine-printing out her daily grades, entering them on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of them all, writing out tomorrow's lesson plan. I had her do dome extra Language Arts today in both courses so she could finish out the chapters she was doing, so I'm not planning anything for those tomorrow. Unfortunately, we are smack in the middle of Math, Social Studies, and Science chapters, and there is no way I can have her finish those tomorrows, but I decided to have her do 2-3 lessons in those chapters for continuity. Since I never received the information from her previous teacher on what had been covered, we started at the beginning, but we made serious progress over the last month. If we had been able to continue, she would have been finished with 4th grade, I'd say, by the third week of April. At least at the rate we were going.

I hate this. I think I'm going to ask Alan to take all the kids with him to drop off Kate tomorrow so I can have the house to myself tomorrow afternoon. We're going to keep her enrolled in Time4Learning so she can have fun with it and get some extra practice. That, and she gets to add their Art program on the 1st which she was really looking forward to. However, I want to spend tomorrow afternoon putting away or rearranging all of the stuff. Our schoolroom is in our bedroom, centering around the computer desk. I don't know what I'll do with her desk and Bella's desk, but I think for me, it needs to go. I really don't want to have to wake up every morning and look at it all. She'll still be able to use the computer for the site, but I don't think she'll need a desk set up to work at.

Rage is building up, and God help whoever it spews on. It won't be my husband or my kids, but stupid people need to back the hell off for a bit.

What to do

I guess that's a bad title, because I know what to do. I have to re-enrol Kate in public school. She'll go back to the one she started at in Kindergarten, so at least she'll be back with friends. She cried when I told her. My heart is just breaking. I'm sitting here at the computer desk, surrounded by all the homeschooling stuff, and I just want to pack it all away and never look at it again. Her boards, her desk we got her, all the notebooks and folders and supplies. We have decided we are definitely going to home school the other 3 girls, and we have already started with Bella, but God I just don't want to see all of this stuff. I'm putting all of my faith in a system that will just fail her, all to *POSSIBLY* prevent problems in court. All for a man who won't care anyways. To be honest, I am seriously considering giving her the next couple of days off-next week she's at her sperm donor's for Easter vacation, and she'd probably be starting back at PS after she comes back. So why not let her have some fun? I dunno, we'll see...