Back to Work After Baby

While I had two weeks off of schooling after the birth of my sweet baby girl Liv, Will did some spelling lessons out of his Grade 1 Complete Curriculum book and some Explode the Code lessons.  He's on a new Explode the Code book now, he's nearly finished with spelling, nearly finished with language arts, and he finished math this week. 

I have energy returned, now that I'm no longer pregnant.  We're not planning any more children as of now.  I will concentrate on these three wonderful blessings that I have.  And I want to get the FULL joy of mothering back that I had for Will's first two years.  (Side note:  I may use Jade/Jaden and Will/William interchangeably.  I call him Jaden, usually, but I've been calling him Will when I talk about him to Nathan and others.  Nathan calls him William, regardless of whether he likes it, which I think is his right, since he's his father and decides.  Anyway, SAME fellow!  :-)  Anyway, it's just been one thing after another.  We lost our son Asher in late 2005, when Will was nearly 2.5.  I'd had a horrible third trimester of pregnancy, and then I felt great afterward until we dealt with his death a couple weeks after.  When I was finally managing to get back to normal, I became pregnant with Trusten, and I'm never 100% during pregnancy (though I usually do well in the second trimester).  Things were pretty good, though, again, for awhile...until he was born.  I had the worst postpartum period with him.  I hemorrhaged after birth and was white and weak for weeks afterward.  I was also sleep-deprived, b/c he never slept well.  He woke up numerous times each night for over a year, plus he was very difficult in many other ways.  I survived it all, though.

But, I hold my self to really high standards, and I just did not function the way I wanted for so long.  I started lacking in my mothering skills, lacking in cooking (didn't have as much time nor energy), etc.  Now, Trusten got better as he aged, and he's now fairly easy to deal with (for ME, especially compared to what I dealt with in the past with him...he may still be difficult for others).  But, I was pregnant again for nine months.  I became somewhat grouchy during this last pregnancy.  Okay...in my opinion I was just a bitch to my children many times.  That is just putting it bluntly.  That's just the way it was.  I HATE that.  I strive to be perfect in all things, but I certainly haven't felt perfect in that...just so different than what I have been like in the past.  Now maybe the world still thinks that I've been a good mother, and maybe compared to the average mother that's true, but I don't live to the world's standards; I strive to live to higher standards.  So, regardless of how I've compared to the average mother, it's still been bitchy in God's sight...and in my own.

With the birth of Liv, combined with returning energy levels and boosted confidence after so many times in prayer, I really feel like I can return to the days of extreme motherhood happiness that I had with Will during his first 2 to 2.5 years.  Of course, it doesn't just happen.  It takes effort on my part. 

As I know I've mentioned in the past, I don't deal well with rigorous scheduling.  On one hand, there are many things that I need to have a somewhat schedule for, and I even keep a planner.  BUT, in the LIFESTYLE OF LEARNING, one cannot schedule everything.  I don't wake up every morning knowing each and every thing that I will learn that day or will desire to learn.  There may be some things that I pre-planned to learn about, but there are other things that just happen to come up during the day, and I then seek out what I need or want to know.

THIS is how it is...at least in my world.  All the days of my life I've always been a person of study and observation.  I love to grow in knowledge, and the only enemy is time.  I believe a person is meant to grow in knowledge until the day he's no longer able to do so, usually at death.  I've been asked by several persons over the past few years, "How can you do everything you do?"  The truth is that there is so much more I'd like to be able to do and cannot because of time restraints or lack of knowledge or experience.  But, to all those who wonder how I do everything I do, I think it's probably because I don't spend several hours each day watching doomsday news programs and vulgar dumbing-you-down sitcoms...or I guess it's the reality tv shows that dominate tv now.  We don't have television programming in our home and haven't in several years.  We actually went w/o a television set for 2.5 years and then decided to buy a new one to watch dvds of wise choosing.  Because, you see, I often ask myself the following question:  "How do people have the time to watch that much tv?"  It's not that I have any more time than the next person.  I'm under the same curse.  It's just that my priorities are radically different.  My priority isn't to be entertained with utter stupidity but rather to be enlightened with absolute knowledge. 

Now, for the most part, as I've mentioned before and most people know, I hated the public school system.  Of course, it was probably delightful compared to now.  My early years weren't so bad, and there were parts I liked all throughout school, but overall I  hated it.  That system destroys the natural love of learning with which children have.  Thankfully, I didn't lose mine.  My time outside of school was spent studying and playing.  I had a great imagination and so engaged in a lot of imaginary play and invented several games for my sister and myself to play.  I liked to explore outside.  I also loved to read and research.  These things haven't changed.

I want my children to be able to live that kind of life ALL the time, because they do not have the enormous chunk of time stolen from them from the United States government school system.  All I really want them to be concerned about is God's appointed government over them, namely their parents.  I don't want to destroy their love of learning.  Kids naturally want to learn!  They ask what seems like a million questions every day!  So, since I'm "back with the program" so to say, I'd like to spend most of our time just following their interests from day to day and teaching them the basics like reading and researching so that they can more easily find out what they want to know themselves. 

What this means is that I'm probably about to can grade levels.  Well, perhaps I shouldn't say I'm going to can them, but what I mean is that I won't say that A, B, and C need to be finished before a specified date.  Besides, there are things that we've already done that already fall into that category.  For example, the plant binder that we started this summer is an ongoing project.  We'll keep adding to it.

Soooo...I'm glad about this.  I'm sure my kids are, too.  We've had some fun, but it's been mostly not fun the past few months, as I just wasn't in a "fun" mood during the pregnancy and just needed Jaden to sit down and do book work.

Now, to sum up what we did over the past week:

As I said, Will has finished a lot of his book work this year, and for math the remainder of this month (reckoned by the moon in this case and not Roman time, so in other words until mid-December) we'll be practicing adding and subtracting using rods, blocks, and other objects; practicing time on a play clock; practicing money and buying by playing "Store;" and practicing measuring by having him measure various objects around the house with a ruler, using both inches and centimeters. 

We've been going through lessons in his animal science book in the God's Design series.  Trusten participates in these lessons, too.  We're finished with mammals and have started on birds.  Will drew feet and beaks for several different types of birds, since God gave them different beaks and feet for different applications.  We also learned about the different kinds of feathers:  down, contour, and flight.

I  made a cover for Jaden's animal notebook that we'll be working on together.  I asked him what animal picture he wanted on front, and he said he wanted a picture of two penguins, so we found one.  He has cut out some photos of animals from two or three old Wild Animal Baby magazines that were falling apart and that Trusten helped along.  I'd collected the pages to save back for this.  Here's a picture of the front of his binder:

I have planned for just Will and I to take some nature walks through our woods on a few sabbaths this winter while Nathan stays in the house with Trust and Liv.  We'll take the camera to take pictures...including pictures of animals to add to the notebook, I hope!  I've taken some pictures of squirrels over the past couple of weeks, as we see a lot of them.  I got a couple pictures of a chipmunk yesterday.  What a joy that was! 

And check this out....

A  hornet nest!  Will spotted this and was so excited to show it to us.

We read the November issues of Wild Animal Baby and Your Big Backyard.  One of the things discussed in the latter this time was the differences in antlers and horns and identifying deer by their different antlers.  I thought this was interesting, since it was less than a month ago when I read to Jaden the differences between antlers and horns and let him play a game of matching horns and antlers to the correct animals. The game is found online here. 

We baked a pumpkin so that I could make pumpkin pies.  We even took guesses as to how many seeds were in the pumpkin, and then we counted them.  I can't even remember the exact number there were, but it was just over 500.  Will helped scrape the pulp out and put it in the food processor.

Trusten got to study the shells I keep in my kitchen while I helped Will with language arts one day.  When Will was Trusten's age he asked me all the time to get the shells down for him so that he could look at them.  When we talk about shelled animals, I'll get them down so that we can all study them closely together.  There are several different kinds that I have.

I had bought a Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game for William a few years ago.  I decided this week that it was time to get it out and play it with him.  Well, there was one part that kept messing up, and it appeared to be screwing up our computer!  I decided to just stop before we lost something important.  I told him he could try it in his computer if he wanted.  LOL!  Anyway, I told him I would try to find a download for the DOS original Carmen Sandiego game...the one I played as a child.  That was one of my favorite games.  I learned so much from that game.  I love geography, and I love playing a detective.  I was probably about eight years old when I started playing, and I taught myself.  I would use our encyclopedias to look up what I needed to know.  I found the game and was able to download it!  Yay!

It won't work on a Mac, so I unzipped it on our computer and then transferred it to a cd and burned it so that he could play it on his computer.  It works!  How fun.  I have just recently started teaching him dictionary skills, so playing this game will aid in that, b/c he needs to use dictionary skills in order to use our set of encyclopedias.  That's right.  I'm making him use the hard copy encyclopedias.  Regardless of our computer age, he needs to learn how to do it the old school way.  Now, they are out of date, so we've had to come to this computer to access the Internet a couple times.  But, I want him to use those first.  I also showed him one of the atlases that we'd bought for him; it has all the flags for the different nations in the back.  I'd used an encyclopedia for that when I was a child.  Anyway, it's a great way to learn capitals, flags, and all sorts of other things about different countries and cities around the world.  AND it's fun!

We're nearing the end of Matthew in the bible, and we're still reading a proverb each day...that doesn't change.  ;-)  Sometimes Jaden grabs his own bible and opens to where we are, and he sometimes decides to read a bit.  Awesome!  I have not yet ever made him read, but I let him when he wants to do so.  He decides to do so himself.  He does a pretty good job, too. 

Oh, there was one day I was sick over a week ago...before I started doing any school again.  I couldn't do a whole lot of anything, so the kids watched videos almost all day.  They watched some Blue Planet, some Reading Rainbow, and then got on the computer and watched some "How It's Made" videos on the Science Channel website.  Jade loves those, and he learns!

That's it for now.  This was a LOOOONG post, and I couldn't even finish it in one sitting.

I'll end it with a picture that I like of Jaden William looking at a Wheels and Wings book (planes, helicopters, monster trucks, etc.):