The Past Month

     Yeah, so I thought I'd keep up on this blog a little better than this!  But, this last month has had so much going on, I haven't had much time.
     The first thing I had going on was the twins' 8th birthday party at the end of August.  I have another post in the works detailing the party with pictures of the cakes, so hopefully, I'll feel like finishing that one sometime soon...  And then we had our annual camping trip to Noel, MO.  The details of which are in the aforementioned post.....  Oh, and before all that, Reece started back to school.  That's been, um, a disaster.  I'm afraid I'm going to have a major fight on my hands to get the school to really do what I want.  They seem to think that they don't need to take advice from a state-funded program on autism that helps small schools set up appropriate programs for their autistic students.  So, Reece only goes from 1-3 in the afternoons.  Going longer stressed him out so badly, it wasn't worth it, and besides, all they really did was babysit him, not educate him!  But, that's a rant for another time.....   So, after the Labor Day weekend camping trip, we came back and started our school.  Elisa is a 2nd grader this year, although most of what she does is on a 3rd-4th grade level.  This year I'm pulling out the big guns and using actual curriculum, instead of mostly making up my own like last year.  Some of you may be appalled that I didn't use any official curriculum last year, but, seriously, first grade isn't that hard to figure out.  She's reading well and has her math facts down pat.  We started on memorizing the multiplication table last year, which we'll finish this fall.  We also had fun doing random science experiments and we studied all 50 states.  She also read books about different people in history.  We had a blast! 
     This year, though, I decided it was time to employ my favorite books from a variety of companies.  See, even though, I've only been homeschooling Elisa for a year and a half, I've been helping my aunt homeschool her kids for the last 10 years.  Not to mention that when my mom was homeschooling my youngest brothers, she often asked my opinion on the books she was using.  So, unlike alot of newer homeschoolers, I've developed my own preferences and have no need to try out a whole bunch of different curriculum. 
     What are my favorites?  Well, we are using Saxon math (which is what Jeff did at Oxford and he loved it, too).  For English, I love the Shurley English books.  We use Apologia science (I was soooo pumped when they came out with an elementary school program.  I've been using their high school science textbooks for the last 8 years and I LOVE them!  Elisa picked Anatomy & Physiology for this year).  I decided to study world geography this year since we'd hit the US last year, so we're learning about major countries on every continent.  And, we using The Learnables Spanish.  I took Spanish for 4 years in high school and minored in it in college, but I thought, why wait until high school to begin it?  Elisa, and Lindy for that matter, would be much better off learning it at a much younger age.  This is my first year for using The Learnables, but I LOVE it!  It makes so much more sense than how we learned it in school....  And in addition to all of this, Elisa is learning cursive and I try to incorporate history into our daily lives.  For instance, we just got done reading a shortened version of Huck Finn.  We read a couple chapters every night before bed.  The kids really enjoyed it :-)
     So, that's our school, in a nut shell.  Lindy is learning her letters and numbers, and also sits in for science, geography, English, and Spanish.  I'm soooo glad Jeff has allowed me to do this!
     Besides my own kids, I also tutor my two of my cousins (who are freshmen) in English 9 and science (we are doing physical science this year).  And an acquaintance of mine is having me tutor her sophomore son in English 10 and science.  My days are very full and my scheduling is tight, but I do love teaching!
     This is probably the most scheduled my life has been since my own college days.  I'm a somewhat organized person, and I like routines, but I also enjoy having flexibility in my routines, but this year, I decided I needed to be more rigid in some areas to lessen the stress.  So, in that line of thinking, I made a weekly menu that I decorated, laminated, and hung it on the wall.  That way, I know exactly what is for dinner and supper every day and I don't have to think about it.  And, its generally the same every week, so its very predictable.  I also designed it to use up the odds and ends of meat left in our freezer, to get ready for more beef, pork and deer later in the year.  I'm trying very hard to make almost everything from scratch.  I already make our own bread all the time, but I've decided to really make an effort to make our own hamburger buns (which I've done in the past, just not consistently) and our own tortillas and refried beans.  Someday, I want to be almost 100% grocery store free......
     In other news, we've decided to experiment with pharmaceutical drugs with Reece.  If you know me very well at all, you know that I tend to be anti-drugs.  I realize they have their place, but I also think they are completely over used in our modern lives.  Reece has struggled with sleeping for years, with huge ups and downs.  We used melatonin for years with him, but over time, it didn't seem to work anymore.  This August, I tried some herbal combinations, which really seemed to work, until school started.  We think that school stresses him out so badly that he can't sleep well.  His school psychologist recommended trying Tenex with him.  Apparently, he has another client in Wichita, a 6 year old autistic boy, that started taking this for sleeping and anxiety and its made a huge difference.  Well, after talking and praying and researching it, we decided to take him to his developmental ped (who he hadn't seen in 4 years) to see what she thought.  She felt like if we could give him a good nights sleep that it would help a lot of the irritability and other autistic behaviors that we see during the day.  So, she recommended clonidine.  He's been on it for 4 nights and it hasn't made a lick of difference.  Plus, yesterday, he wouldn't eat anything!  One of the common side effects is nausea, but since Reece doesn't have the greatest communication skills, we don't know if he would really tell us how he was feeling.  Anyway, I'm really questioning using drugs on him now.....I mean, if he can't tell us anything, how are we to really know how its effecting him, other than by observation???  Its so difficult and I soooo wish there was a tried-and-true protocol for treating autism......  Or that we were Amish and Reece had never developed autism in the first place.....  Did you know the rate of autism among the Amish is zero????  That's right.... there are no documented cases of autism among the Amish.... interesting, huh?  But, we're not Amish, we're regular, normal people, and our son did become the 1 in 110 who became autistic.  So, we try our best and I'll try harder to keep things updated :-)