So much to blog, so little time

Sorry, I've been too sleepy to blog most nights this week!! I'll try to remember what we did though...

Monday we did schoolwork nice and early so that we could get ready for a little campout with some friends. Cameron did an excellent job with phonics. Cassia did too. She's really impressing me with how she is picking it up. I think she might be more of a sight reader though because she tends to either know a word or get totally frustrated by it, so we'll see how that all works out. Math was next. Cam did some more money adding. Cassia did adding with pictures. There was one page where they had six rows of six dotted vases and you were supposed to trace some number of them and then write an accompanying addition problem. For example, if you traced one vase then you wrote 1 + 5 = 6. I remember really having to walk Cameron through that one, but she didn't even need the slightest bit of help. She can just sit down and whiz through this stuff when she wants to. Unfortunately though, that tends to mean that I expect her to do that most of the time and I can be a little short with her wanting the one-on-one attention. I've been trying to get one of them to work independently while the other gets the one-on-one but it is so hard!! And I can't really separate them either because if only one is doing schoolwork then the other is trying to play with them! For Grammar we reviewed sentence types. For History we read the Native American myth called Rabbit Shoots the Sun. It was a fun story and they seemed to enjoy it while I was reading, but the second I was done I was met with, "Are we done now?" *roll eyes* Not quite the response I was looking for. But to tell you the truth, that's pretty much the attitude I had with school for the day too. I wanted to get it over with so we could pack up our stuff for the trip!

So then we ran to the grocery store and then came home and packed up our stuff. Quite a lot of stuff actually considering that we were only going for one night and we were actually camping in a friend's backyard! They had a 12-man tent and there were going to be eleven of us in there: 4 moms, 4 girls aged 4 - 6, and 3 boys aged 2 - 6. The host girl's brother and father were out of town camping themselves so they thought it would be fun to have a girl's campout. Of course, there were some big and little brothers that had to come too but we tried to keep them from being too overwhelmed by girliness. There were a couple instances of "boys can't play this" and "stop following us!" but all in all, they behaved themselves. I'm glad that Cameron did have L4 to play with though. They kept to themselves on the Pirate Ship most of the time while the girls did crafts, played dress up and doctor, and started the Greyson Fan Club. The night ended with a flashlight hike down the wooded street and a quick dip in the hot tub. OK, it was more like a rowdy splash in the hot tub, but they were happy and clean afterward. The absolute girliest scene ever erupted just after dawn as they woke up one by one and all gravitated over to one air mattress and began a huge whispering, giggling, tickle fight. They were even tickling their stuffed animals, lol. We were all up too late and then up too early. Tuesday we had all sorts of plans for adventures, but everyone was way too tired and cranky so we just cut it short with a quick stumble down to a dry creek bed and then home around noon. We were all too tired to do anything but nap, do some laundry, and watch some tv after that, lol. Everyone slept really, really, really well in our own beds that night.

Today we all slept in. Even Greyson slept until 7:30, which is a very pleasant rarity. He didn't even have his normal 5am trip into my room to wake me up and leave me sleepless from 5 - 6 before he gets up at 6:30 or 7. He just came into my room around 1am - or was it 3am - crawled in bed and went right back to sleep. Thankfully, so did I.

We managed to get all the usual stuff done for school today. Phonics was a bit pained (funny how we seem to have every other day good and bad for phonics, but if we don't do it every day there are many more bad days than good) for Cameron and Cassia didn't even want to do it. She did do a couple pages in her "cow book" (Go For the Code) on the letter Q though. There's only one more letter left in it and then she'll be done with that whole series. She liked it but I'm not sure how truly valuable it was. A lot of it seemed to be coloring for the sake of following directions. Most of the stuff that really did seem important to me, like write the letter whose sound begins this picture, she always wanted to skip. She did like the pages where you would see a line of similar shapes and have to pick out the different ones - like find the "m"s in - n n m n m m m n m n m n n m n n n. Anyway, we did Cameron's phonics first while she did Go For the Code, and then Cameron started math (subtracting money) but then she needed some individual instruction on her phonics... it was all very back and forth and confusing. I really need to find a better way. I finally got them synchronized again for grammar/language where we reviewed the poem Monday's Child and then practiced writing dates. Wait, I take that back. They weren't synchronized at all because while I was reading FLL to them and Cassia was writing down her birthday, Cameron was busy writing math problems for me to do. LOL, he is such a nut. He kept writing down problems for me and then when I would pass them he would reward me with a higher level of problems. The final level was things like $2,000,000,000 - $100,000,000. Luckily, I passed. ;) Anyway, he would take time out of his important work of making me worksheets to do what I was asking of him. The kids also made the second pages for their Year books, drawing a picture for February and copying the second stanza of the poem, The Year. The pictures were much less involved than January's. You can barely tell what Cassia's is, but she did draw what the stanza was describing. Cameron's has nothing at all to do with February and is just a picture of him and his friend R11 playing Zelda on a big green hill. He said it just shows how lucky we are that in California February isn't rainy like it said in the poem. I think he's training to be a politician. We finished off with Science and read about ways to conserve water. We have officially finished all the reading in the MPH 4A text book. There is one or two more activities that I would like to do in the activity book and Cameron always likes to do all the stuff in the workbook, so I'm guessing we'll be done with that next week. I should really glance at the 4B book to see where that is going so maybe I can be a little prepared. LOL, as if.

Tomorrow the plan is to study the history of the 4th of July. I told them I'd find some really fun things to do for that so I had better get busy and do it. Hopefully I'll blog again tomorrow, but if not it's because I procrastinated too long, lost track of the day, and had to rush all afternoon and evening trying to finish laundry and pack for our trip out of town this weekend. So, I may "see" you tomorrow or it may not be until Monday.