Learning to Read ...and other "hard" things.

My homeschooling year has not gone exactly as planned. Older dd is doing fine. (mostly) Younger dd on the other hand....

First of all I know the majority of the difficulty starts with me. I am responsible for not making them go to bed earlier or waking them up before morning is half over. The problem is that I am a night owl, and so are they. Being a night owl is fine, but previous years of schooling only one left me with the luxury of starting the day at noon (ish) and being finished by 3. With one child, that is very focused, it is very easy to do a whole day's work in just a few hours.

This year has presented the challenge of adding a second child in. The beginning of the year went well. November it slid into a ditch and stayed there. I have not yet been able to pull it back out of the ditch.

I was hoping that younger dd would be well on her way toward reading by this point. Unfortunatly my instincts that she was just not ready proved correct. She is learning her letters (finally) but can't seem to remember the fact that "e" sounds like "EEEEE" or that "a" sounds like "AAAAAAA" despite having worked on these two sounds for months. (albeit...spotty).

Other hard things: Keeping my house in the order I like (this time of year). Something about this time of year makes my house seem like it has a mind of it's own. I know this is probably also my fault for not making the children quickly obey me when I tell them to pick something up. Instead I've been finding myself reminding them over and over and over again and not following through with the punishment if they don't. I am a strict disciplinarian...I thought. Maybe I just don't have it in me anymore. Maybe one of them being 11 has something to do with it. I don't know. Maybe it really is just spring fever.

The last hard thing (for today) is shaving off a coupla' twenty pounds.
Oh.
my.
word. I knew I was fat, but...wow. I got on the scale last week...It said "OUCH."