renewed energy

This past week was the public and private school's winter break, supposedly a chance for kids to enjoy Maine's outdoor winter activities such as skiing, ice skating, ice fishing, sledding, and snowman building. Unfortunately, due to only 30 inches of snow the entire winter (average at this time of year is over 80 inches), there wasn't any snow to play in south of Aroostook County (waaaay up north) until Saturday morning. Up at the farm we got about 3 inches, enough for Maggie to build a snowman and me to do a little tromping in the woods to observe the beautiful surroundings before running 9 miles at the Sub5 donut run.

The rest of the week the kids rode their bikes, played lots of board games, practiced the piano, and wrote book reports. Yes, three of the children needed to work on Seton's dreaded book reports and Will had a huge 20 page geography project due Monday morning. I stuck to my guns and did not let the children shirk, no matter how much they protested, and St. Benedict, St. Joseph, and St. Augustine's virtues have been analyzed and typed up. I have to say that despite my own groans and moans about Seton's writing assignments I have discovered that they do teach the children to write a good solid 5 paragraph essay over time. Will can write one pretty easily now and is making straight A's at his fancy Catholic school.


Due to our break I can see the progress that each child has made over the past 5 months and am encouraged that they are learning and I am surviving another year of homeschooling.