I am so relieved.  We’ve done our lessons every day and my girl seems to be enjoying them.  I decided to simplify our schedule in that Latin is going to be a summer elective.  And my man, God bless him, has agreed to take over the mathematical instruction.  A recent change that made this “doable” occurred earlier this week.  He went back on Monday to find that beginning on Tuesday his day would run from 4:45 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.  He is home from work by 11:30 a.m.  Incredibly awesome.  Granted, he turns in for the night at 8:30 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. (at the latest).  But he was usually heading in that direction by 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. before the shift change, anyway.  And he used to get up at 5:00 a.m., now he gets up at 4:00 a.m.  So it’s really not a HUGE change in that regard — but now he has a good six or seven hours after work to do other things.  (His old schedule was 7:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m., because he had a lunch break and conference period smack dab in the middle of it all.  Now he has a 20 minute break between his two classes and then, as long as there are no staff meetings, he can leave when his second class dismisses.  Yeah, baby!)

So knowing how much I dislike math, and how crappy of a math teacher I am, he agreed to take this part of Jami’s education over.  Hallelujah!  (And I say that with the utmost sincerity . . . )  So our days go like this, now:

• Bible (5 days a week)
  
• Penmanship (5 days a week)
  
• Spelling (5 days a week)
  
• Grammar (5 days a week)
  
• History (3 days a week)
  
• Science (2 days a week)
  
• Art (1 day a week)

When my guy gets home from work, he has lunch and takes a little break while we finish a lesson and then he does her math lesson with her.  Once a week I take her to ballet and also to recorder band classes.

With his new work schedule and the math thing off my plate, I am feeling soooooo much better about all this.  I’d felt like I was drowning and now I feel like I can do it.  (Doing the dance of joy, I am!)

The other thing I did was to move the “schoolroom”.  Before we started in the fall, we fixed up the room where the computer is, but it just wasn’t working  very well.  The lighting is not so great and her desk was against one wall and my desk against another and when she needed help she had to come over to me or I had to go over to her.  And because all my business stuff is in that room, I’d try to multi-task working and teaching and neither was getting done very well.  So I moved all her schoolbooks into the dining area.  There is a cabinet with open-backed shelving separating the living and dining areas.  I displayed my Fiesta ware serving pieces on the shelves and her schoolbooks are neatly arranged on the cabinet top beneath.  Then on the opposite wall of the dining area I’ve placed her baby dresser with hutch.  Before you go, HUH?, the dresser is kind of a white pickled finish with a stained cherry top and a matching two-shelved hutch with stained cherry top — it doesn’t look babyish at all.  I have table linens and sewing stuff in the drawers.  Cookbooks are on the uppermost shelves and more school stuff is neatly arranged on the dresser top below the hutch shelves.

We hung a calendar and some posters on one wall and it looks very nice, bright, and cheery.  The lighting is better there, we can sit side-by-side at the kitchen table to do her work — it just works better all the way around.  We put our stuff away when we’re done and the table is available for meals or whatever else we may need to do there.  My guy has been teasing me about moving the schoolroom and my “office” around so many times — he said the only room I haven’t set the computer up in is the bathroom — smart aleck.  I’m feeling good about the current set-up for school.  Now I seriously do need to get the former schoolroom arranged for business and possibly crafts and then, shock of all shocks, I may actually turn the back bedroom back into a GASP!  bedroom.  But we’ll just have to see.  There’s a lot of contemplation regarding furniture arrangement, storage, etc.  This is an old house with little bitty closets (you know the kind where you open the door and, whoops!  There’s the closet . . . ALL OF IT?) so I have to really think this through.  Once I get it all organized, I don’t want to turn around in a few weeks and think, “You know, this just isn’t really working that well.”

It’s almost 11:30 p.m. and we have a vertical blind installation in the a.m., so I’d best turn in for the night.  Have a great Saturday and maybe I’ll be back before the weekend’s up.  We do have a nifty science thing we’re going to do tomorrow — we’re going to dig a hole, put a glass jar in it with a cover kind of propped over the opening so things get in, but don’t get out.  Then the next day we’ll go check the jar and see what kind of critters we may have caught!  I’m hoping for interesting without being too gross.  I don’t care for bugs much, but it’s in the name of education, so I’ll get over it.

Ciao!