Homeschooling trouble...

So on Wednesday, I was having a crazy day...Algebra tutoring for two hours and found out that Jamie had a UTI and needed to go to the doctor and boot camp...yes, I said boot camp.  Let me back up.  I signed Tim and I up for a boot camp class in our town run by a police officer.  Interestingly enough, Tim didn't tell me about it, a couple of my friends had done it and I was able to convince him to do it with me.  I can officially report that I survived the first week.  It is Mon - Thurs from 7-8pm...and it's rough!  The first night was the easiest because it was just testing us...heart rate, blood pressure, how many push ups, sit ups, etc, that you could do.  Well, I've never really done a "military" push up where you are straight and go down to the fist on the ground, so I thought I'd go down and not come back up!  But, I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to do four!!!  Then we did sit ups in one minute...I was about to do 22, which I didn't know was good until my friend told me she still couldn't do 22 after the six week class!  It's taking a lot of guts to do this class...all the people there are triathlon and exercise abnormalities...but I'm doing it!

The second night was the run...yes...the run...sigh.  We had to run 1.5 miles and he timed us as we are going to try and beat our times by the end of the six weeks.  I've never "run" before, so I was a bit worried.  I told Tim to go ahead so that he could get his best time possible.  Everyone else finished between 13 and 18 minutes...My personal goal was to finish in less than 30 minutes and to finish period.  After a while I saw Tim heading back to make sure I was OK, I was still running...slow but running...I had to walk a few times...but I ran more than half of it and finished running in 28 minutes.  Tim was so proud of me he was beaming :-).

Anyway, I'll tell you more about boot camp another time, but this is something I'm doing for myself which doesn't happen often enough.  I have scheduled a massage today to celebrate not dying during my first week!  For my gift on Wednesday, in between all my appointments and craziness my friend tells me she needs me to tutor her daughter on a writing assignment.  I really didn't have time at all to do it, really didn't, but I thought, OK, this will be my gift for the day.  It took about an hour and it really wasn't a writing assignment problem, it's a problem with her set up and pace so we worked on this for a while and she is going to come and observe me homeschooling, so this was nice.

Homeschooling books...

Another close friend of mine and I are both doing the same science curriculum for our homeschools this year...we both school year round, so our new year starts in about two weeks.  I've been really, really busy preparing centers and projects...laminating like crazy and organizing.  I've taken several Homeschool Trainings to update my skills and I know this is going to be our best homeschool year ever!  I know this because every year always gets dramatically better as I learn how to be a more effective teacher, more organized, and have more experience.

I'm using several new curricula this year that I am so excited about, I can't stand it!  The kids are seeing all these new books and activities and can't wait to get started.  For science, we are doing a program called "Christian Kids Explore Science"...I found this curriculum when looking for something that would fit my friends situation and fell in love with it too!  Anyway, the book is like a "relaxed" text book with ton's of activities and experiments.  However, there are not any consumable "workbooks"...so I bought an additional download and I created workbooks for my kids and hers...It took hours!  But, they looked so nice, I printed the covers in color and bought nice binders, I used the label maker to separate the units and I set it up so that literally all her and I have to do is open up the workbook and all the activities, etc, are right there for you!  The text for the program is complete, but you have to make copies from it, literally every lesson, so this is going to be a huge time save.  I gave it to her yesterday and she loved it!

Helping a friend at work...

So a close friend of mine was having some serious chaos at work...through no fault of her own, things had just sort of collapsed.  Due to confidentiality, that is all I can really say, but her work is in education which is where my experience is.  So, I had her come over and we worked late into the night getting things under control, then she came over first thing the next morning and we worked another few hours.  After everything was said and done, she is doing much, much better.  I am going to help her finish things up on Thursday.  I enjoyed every minute of it and she was so grateful for the help. It was completely fun to me and it felt great to see her go from stressed and panicked to back to her normal self.