Another Rainy Day

I don't know how many Pacific Northwesterners are out there reading (hi, neighbors!), but I - for one - find February about the worst month of the year.  It's cold, dark, and wet.  And it's been cold, dark, and wet since October. 

Back in October we didn't mind so much.  We lit our pumpkin spice candles and enjoyed the warm, cozy glow.  We decorated our Christmas trees and celebrated.  But now, with the holidays behind us, six months into the cold-dark-wet with more to come, there's just a whole lot of blah. 

If I had the money, this is when I'd fly the family off to Hawaii every year.  Anywhere warm, friendly, and bright.  But since that's not in the cards, we find other ways to lift our spirits.  Like our annual LOTR marathon.  Tate built himself a pillow palace for comfortable viewing.

Wyatt and Tate have CAP each Tuesday and they're loving it.  In fact, Tate is on another computer right now doing another level of online testing, in hopes of promoting again next month.  (He passed!)  They have PT and inspections tonight, which means they've both been busy.  And if the sight of teenage boys voluntarily doing their own ironing isn't a happy one, I don't know what is ;D

And Gunnar has cause to celebrate too.  He just finished his fourth grade math!  (He IS a fourth grader, btw.)

He's my only one who has been exclusively homeschooled, since we began as he hit Kindergarten. 

I wish I could remember what we actually did each day, back in the beginning, but I only have a handle on some things.  I know we started Story of the World, and went through the whole four-year cycle with all the boys together.  I know we studied Biology together.  And I know I launched the boys into Saxon math. 

Wyatt and Tate were easy, in that I just started them at their grade level.  (Which doesn't exactly translate, btw, as Saxon was WAY ahead of the public school, but it worked out for us and they got caught up.)  But Gunnar... I think we just played around a lot.  Saxon Kindergarten and first grade math both looked way too easy to invest in.  I think I ended up buying the first grade worksheets.  We started cherry-picking through them midway through his Kindergarten year, and he's been 'off-cycle' ever since.  Which is why he's already finishing his math for this year, with another fifteen weeks of school yet to go.

He had a brief moment of delirious joy, imagining that he didn't have to do math for the rest of the year, which is kind of ironic, since he's so good at it.  But his unreasonable teacher (aka Mom) is cruelly forcing him to start his fifth grade math tomorrow.  Which, actually, he's pretty glad to do.  There are a couple nice things about being off-cycle like this.  One, it's like having extra time in the bank if we need to slow down and take more time to master a difficult concept.  Also, we can whiz through the first five or ten (or twenty) lessons, which are intended to bring kids back up to speed after a summer break and are mostly review. 

Sweet :D

Hey, you've gotta find things to celebrate in the blah days of winter.