The Christmas Aftermath

Well, the gifts are open, the food is eaten, the sugar highs have crashed and I've decided that we will take as little of a Christmas break as possible, lol. We need that "have to do this everyday" aspect of our lives. I tried to get some school done yesterday, but all we did was build this cool solar-powered car. We did some experiments with it, like blocking the solar panel and seeing if it works from the light of a flashlight instead. It was a lot of fun and very educational... but the school books just sat on the dining room table all day untouched.

Today, I demanded that bookwork be done before the Wii was turned on. Two days of video game frenzy are enough! It's time we got back to one hour only and only after the things that we need to get done are done. OK, maybe he'll still play more than an hour because DH is home all week and he loves to play it just as much as Cameron does, lol.

Anyway, we started the day with Phonics for Cassia. She learned the line for the letter K in "The Consonant Rhyme." It's so funny, Cameron learned that poem by us doing it every day for about a month. Cassia is learning it by us doing it several times a month, lol. It's going to take us an entire year to get through it! But she is learning so much more than he is, just by being around him so I'm not going to sweat the fact that she may not know all her consonant sounds by the time she is 4-1/2 like he did. Cameron started his day with a Grammar lesson, picking the pronouns out of a story. I don't think he gets what a pronoun is at all, lol, but maybe by the time we review it the 700th time, he will. The second half of the Grammar lesson was reviewing our initials. We decided that we really like his name being C. E. Berm. It sounds very professional. For reading, Cameron read Cassia the instructions to her math book. She was working on writing her numbers from one to ten and then from ten to one. Next Cameron did his math, a Practice section on multiplying by threes while Cassia worked on her ETC book and the letter Y. We finished off with reading a couple of stories about Anansi the Spider from Story of the World. I have some more library books on him and other African folk tales that I'll try to convince them to read later today... but it is so hard to compete with that Wii!

All in all, we've had a fabulous Christmas. We thought we would be spending the holiday alone, but it turned out that my dad was able to join us for dinner. It was fabulous having him and his girlfriend/fiancé over. We don't see them nearly enough. In fact, we see them exactly twice a year: at the kids' birthday party and at Christmas. And yet they only live a couple of hours away. Oh well, it's not perfect but it's our family dynamic and I really do enjoy the time that we are able to spend together. I hope everyone else had a Merry time and was able to spend time with their loved ones.

Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards Men.

(Oh, and to explain the last two pictures on the slideshow... in Cameron's excitement to grab his Wii controller from the charger and play, he knocked over an entire glass of red wine onto my wireless keyboard! Ugh. So after hours of tedious cleaning and mopping... it still doesn't work and we have to buy a new one. I am currently typing on a hot pink and purple Princess keyboard with keys that are MUCH too small and causing my hands to cramp, lol. Ah, Christmas.)