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...

Mediation

Today sucked. Big time. At this point I don't remember all the nasty things that went back and forth. I do know he implied two people I love and trust have been feeding him info about me, like I'm some secret super spy or something. Nothing got accomplished. It was never assumed I would get to homeschool her, which pisses me off to no end. He brought up that she needed to come live with him and go to school out there. I finally let loose with all the crap I could; how I saw him smack Quentin across the face, how Kate hates it there, how I know he doesn't supervise them which is why Kate is always getting hurt. He fired right back about how many unexcused absences she had this year (I KNEW I should have taken her to the doctor's everytime she had the stomach bug or a fever, so that one is my own damn fault), how Kate and "other people" tell him I let her stay up all night (WTF? really?). It just progressed downhill so fast. The mediator was excellent at her job, managed to get us on track, hammer out some points neither of us were happy with....and he refused to sign. So now we have to put the issue before the judge. I asked him why he would put the decision in someone else's hands. He wouldn't answer in front of the mediator, but after she left the room, he tried making snarky comments about it. I LOUDLY told him that he was not going to wait until it was just us before saying anything-he could say it in front of her or shut up. And that was that.


I feel like a supreme failure. I feel like no matter what I do, I can never protect her or do what is right for her. I'm always wrong. I know I can't give up, but God I want to. what's the point in trying to raise her? I am not allowed to make any decisions-he always shoots them down just to be a dick. But he does whatever he wants. Cuts her hair when I say no, doesn't consult me before enrolling her in activities. What the heck is the point?

Mediation tomorrow!

I have to be down in Buckhannon at 9am. If anyone sees this before then, please send up some happy thoughts and prayers that we can remain calm and come to some type of resolution in this matter for our daughter. Thank you!

So, later the same night....

I can't settle. I'm too depressed to do the lesson plans for next week (still), and I don't even feel tired. Just...blech.

So tomorrow Alan is taking Bella with him when he takes Kate to meet up with her Step Monster. They are leaving early so they can have a field trip-he plans on stopping by Seneca Rocks with them for a lesson on rocks and rock formations. later, they will be stopping at the playground on the county line between Hardy and Grant counties. So a good day ahead of them for that :) Twins and I will be staying home for some Mama/Babies time :D

Starting to panic.....

I have mediation with Dmitriy on Monday morning to work out the Kate homeschooling mess. What if he can't he convinced? What if I forget something important to show him or point out to him? What if I mess up my facts or get so stressed I cannot communicate coherently? This is going to he a long weekend. I'm so worried that I cant sit down and write out next week's lesson plans-what if I come home Monday and have to throw it away because she has to go back to ps? She is enjoying herself and she's doing better than she was in ps...why can't this just be easy? Why should my baby girl have to deal with the shit ps system, just because it is "normal" and expected. I don't want her to go through her school years miserable and scared. Why should her dad have to be convinced to try this? Just once I want to hear "sure, Jen, let's give it a shot"

Okay rant over.

Art Day went well. We made 3 more planets with papier mache, and she did her mixed media/science collage. It turned out very nice!

Long days

For some reason, Kate is having a rough trimester of it today. She started at 9, and it is now after 4 and she us still working on her journal! She had her usual hour for lunch and recess, and a couple of short breaks throughout, but jeez! I sat down with her and talked. She said the excitement of hsing is wearing off. I asked her if she wanted to go back to ps and she said no, so okay. I finally took away her swivel chair. ADHD + swivel chair= BAD IDEA!!!! Oh well...live and learn LOL.

Amazing awesome day....NOT!

Day was actually going pretty good. School went well. Bella had a doctor's appointment at 2:45 and we were in and out by 3:05-excellent. She is starting to get an ear infection, so he prescribed an antibiotic. Instead if going to our usual Walgreens, I figured hey, need to pick some things up from Walmart, so I'll just go there. Bad idea. I hit someone's car trying to pull into the parking space! I scrated their car up a bit, but my bumper has a huge dent in it. Being a good citizen, called Walmart and asked them to page the driver. Manager comes out and says oh we called the state troopers. No big deal, I was at fault, and I was going to call anyways. Driver cones out, she calls her mom, who shows up and tries to convince Driver I dented the rim. Driver was like that was already there. Grrrrr. So insurance company already notified, and Alan says he can pop the dent out. But boooo! Not a stellar ending to my afternoon. :(

Our name

I actually put some thought into our school's name. What brought this on was the perplexing problem of filling out catalog requests, some discount clubs, and other things like that. I kept coming across a space for "school or homeschool name". Okayyyyy, I thought to myself. But when I started thinking about it, it started making sense...why not give us a bit of "legitimacy" and come up with a proper name. So I've spent the last 4 or 5 days thinking about it. I didn't know if I wanted to use a last name because not all our "students" have the same last name. But then what would I use? So I decided to use mine and Alan's last name, because we are the instructors. Plus I like it ;) Then all of the sudden, I had this image of that Molly Shannon movie Superstar pop in my head, but "superstar" was replaced by "CHA". So that is how we have our awesome school name of Chamberlain Home Academy...thanks to Molly Shannon!!!!!!

Our classroom area

Katie doing her work

Getting Started

It has been a busy month for us Chamberlains! As of March 1 2012, Katie is a homeschool kid! We really knew so little about the process, especially the first week. 3 weeks out, I know we don't know everything of course, but I feel better about things. Kate is doing so well. She's excited to start every day, which to me says so much. Her dad is fighting me over it, but I am trying to balance being realistic with being optimistic. We have even gotten started with Bella. Today we started her "classes", which really means we spend 20-30 minutes a day at this point. I found a great website, thanks to Chelita, that pretty much lays it all out for her. http://www.letteroftheweek.com We are doing the Brightly Beaming Steps to Reading Program Step One with her. Today we started Week 1: Cows. Kate is using www.time4learning.com I really think she could do two years in one year next year, but first I have to get through the legal battle with her dad. I guess that's all for today!