Happy Pretend Birthday to You!

Today is my DH's Pretend Birthday. Tomorrow is his real birthday, but he has to go out of town for work so we are celebrating today. I am making his favorite Curry Chicken Casserole for dinner and blueberry pie for desert. So, to that end, I must blog now when our day is really only half over.

This morning, I had the most wonderful surprise. Cameron and Cassia had found a book of Christmas stories, poems, and carols and I found them laying on the floor with Cameron reading the lyrics to Oh Come All Ye Faithful. My boy is reading. By choice. WooHoo!!!!!! During History he was also reading the history encyclopedia over my shoulder... literally, I was laying on the bed and he was laying on my back reading over my shoulder, lol. It's like he's just finally figured out that the words I'm saying match the words on the page. Yay!!

But Phonics was a chore. He didn't want to do it and so started our session off with some passive resistance. I responded in a manner typical of the dictatorship in which we live and told him to go to his room if he was not going to participate. Suddenly, the R-Changed Vowel Chant was not such a horrible thing to do afterall. Next was Grammar and the pronouns they, them, their, and theirs.

He was on a Math roll today. He did four workbook exercises! Of course, some of them were only one page long but he just kept going and going and going. By the end he was really remembering his two times table and not having to count by twos on his fingers. Actually what he would do was think about it, then check back on one of the previous pages to see if he was right or not. He was trying to do it all slyly, as if he were cheating or something, but I didn't care. I know I can't memorize anything without repeatedly reading and writing it, so why should I expect him to?

He did Spelling next. We're a little behind in Spelling. He hasn't been keeping up on Spelling Time very well. I mean, he does several sections of it several times a week, but he never seems to get around to the test and review until Monday of the next week. This week was even worse. He'll have to do last week's test and review on Tuesday and then we'll start the next SWO lesson on Wednesday.

We finished off the day with reading about the Ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty in our history encyclopedias. Never did get around to those crafts. I think the clay bowl craft won't even be appropriate until the Ming Dynasty anyway, so I'm not sweating that. We really should do that pictograph writing though... But I think we also need to pick up the pace a bit! Most people say you should do one to two chapters of SOTW a week and I think we're averaging one chapter every two weeks! The ancients are going to take two years at this pace! My theory was that we could move slowly since we started early and are pretty much schooling year round, but we started in June and people who started in September or October are starting to catch up to us! But I don't want to rush and get all caught up in that stress of not being "on schedule." I did write a rough schedule last year trying to figure out where we should be when. I wonder where we are in comparison to that - behind I'm sure. Better not to look in that case, lol. I can't hurry too much anyway because only about half of the Chinese library books that I requested are in. Many times those are what really bring a topic home. Many other times they are just drudgery but I'd hate to skip something that might be a winner. Like the one about the man who finally deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics - I never would have thought that they would have been as captivated by that story as they were. So anyway, I guess I'll just remember my Aesop, "Slow and steady wins the race." But I also think I had better get busy requesting our library books for the next topic!