Cause to Celebrate!

I know, I know.  I've been neglecting the blog again.  I had every intention of trying to keep up with it better this year.  But, I've been plagued with fatigue and headaches and honestly, I feel like I'm just trying to keep my head above water a lot of the time.  Two doctors appointments and lots of blood tests have rendered no concrete answers to my situation.  I'll spare you the details of all my attempts at helping the problems, but I'm hopeful some super supplements recommended by my sister-in-law will be the right thing.  They should arrive in three weeks when my parents and little brother come!

In the meantime, school continues with Kyle.  We are enjoying first grade together and he's a sweet and clever little student.  Our school routine is still pretty low key, but we're continuing through the basic necessities.  He is reading wonderfully and last week he finished the 108th lesson of Reading Made Easy, completing the book!  That's a pretty big accomplishment for a 6 year old, so a cookie cake was in order.  Really, any reason to celebrate is a good excuse for a cookie cake.  We also really enjoy our read aloud time; currently we are working through Charlotte's Web.

The tie though....

This month there is a World Race team here in Mokhotlong.  While we don't have any official connection to World Race, we always enjoy having the teams through here.  Visiting with other Americans isn't something we get to do often.  This month the team consists of 20 ~20 year olds.  My kids love walking through the neighbors' yard and up the hill to the mission house to annoy visit with the team in the afternoons.  Because we just can't accommodate all 20 of them in our house for more than a movie night, we are doing a dinner rotation over the course of a couple weeks.  So far we have enjoyed some Cracker Barrel and pizza.  Coming up this week is taco night, Chick-Fil-A night, and spaghetti night.  Some familiar cuisine is a welcome change for them after a month in Swaziland and nearly two weeks here in Lesotho.  From here they will continue on to Asia and then to South America before returning back to the US next year.  I am trying to pump them full of chocolate chip cookies, brownies and cakes to last them for the months to come.  It's the least I can do, really.

Will try not to be so quiet in the coming weeks and months!

~Abby

One Down, Lots to Go!

Yesterday Kyle completed his kindergarten year!  We are so proud of all the skills he has learned this year.  It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, but overall we’ve had tons of fun!

Last day of school

First day of school

Started at the table, ended by the fire because it is cold!

We started each school day by praying for an African Unreached People Group.  AIM has created cards, much like playing cards, which represent African UPG’s and give a small description for each.  Then we did a daily devotion, practiced a weekly memory verse, and read a Bible story.  Throughout this school year, Kyle learned 25 Bible verses and we completed one and a half children’s Bible story books.

We then did math, practiced handwriting, and did reading.  We finished math with about 15 lessons remaining in his book.  They were all review anyway, and I am content having done 145 lessons.  He completed almost the entire Reading Made Easy book which I anticipated taking us two years to complete.  He really has this reading thing down.  He also completed one and a half of his “early readers”.  I started the year with one goal: teach the boy to read.  I believe I accomplished my goal!  After reading, he would copy two or three sentences from the story in Reading Made Easy.  

Sometimes Kyle stays up too late Sunday Night Sleepovering with Dad and Monday morning is a drag.

I had hoped to do a lot of reading aloud and it just didn’t happen.  We did read aloud a number of children’s chapter books and we managed to read through a book and a half of the Uncle Arthur’s stories.  I hope to find more really good read alouds for next school year.  We started quite a few which were recommended, but the vocabulary was way more advanced than I thought he was understanding and he seemed totally uninterested.  The ones we did find which were on his comprehension level, he loved. 

Copy work from early in the year

We baked plenty of cookies, colored plenty of pictures, and took plenty of walks.  We played plenty of games!  Over all, I am very pleased with how his first year went.  I have some work to do, getting my girls to play quietly without interrupting us.  But I believe we can find a decent routine after a couple months' break.

So proud of my boy!  In celebration of all his work, we had a little party with a few neighbor boys last night and, of course, baked a cookie cake to share!

~Abby

It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas.....

..... Except it's the beginning of May!  Winter is moving into Mokhotlong and I feel something like a bear preparing for hibernation.  It is funny how quickly one can forget how cold cold feels.  Sometimes it feels cold in my bones.  And we are only just beginning.  I’ve brought out my scarves, puffy vests and long socks.  My trusty sheep skin slippers are my long lost best friends.  We’re getting reacquainted.  The warm drink stash is dwindling and we need to restock.  I’ve baked lots of goodies full of ginger and cinnamon in the past few weeks.  A pot of apple butter simmered on my stove for hours and I discovered apple butter pancakes this weekend.  I’m never looking back!  Chili was on the menu for supper last night.  And a running headband/ear cover is on my buy-when-down list because…. brrrrr.

 

It’s been cool at night for the past month or more.  We began layering up the baby in early April.  The evolution of heat sources here is comical to me.  Typically when it starts cooling off back home, we just bump the thermostat up a bit and continue with life.  When it starts feeling cold during the day, we switch out our closets to winter clothes and continue on with life.  But here, without central heat, it is a much more detailed process which, after a few years of practice, we have down to a science.  

We first begin by warming rice socks.  Our bedroom is the coldest room in the house, so for weeks I’ve been bringing hot rice socks to bed at night to help warm up the sheets.  The kids rooms are notably warmer, so they just bundle up and snuggle in no problem.  The baby doesn’t stay under covers very well, so we dress her up like the Michelin man before bed.  She is currently wearing either one heavy sleeper and a sweatshirt or a lightweight sleeper under a heavy sleeper at night.  Then we slip her into a sleep sack before bed.  We did mittens for a cold, wet week.  For right now, she’s been sleeping mitten-free, which is obviously her preference.  

A couple weeks ago, when it started getting below freezing nearly every night, we broke out the hot water bottles.  These things rock!  We own three but need more.  For right now, the kids get them for sleeping.  I boil water in the electric kettle and then pour it into the hot water bottles, leaving space to press air out before screwing on the lid.  Then we tuck the bottles into their cute little covers and stick them into the kids’ beds before bedtime.  They retain heat so well, the bottles are still warm in the morning.

This weekend, I brought out the electric bed heaters which go beneath our sheets.  They aren’t expensive to run, really, but electricity isn’t cheap so we try to hold off on using them as long as we can.  But enough is enough.  I have one on Kyle’s bed and one on our bed.  I’m too nervous to have one on the girls’ beds because I don’t really love the idea of electricity running under their sheets.  So the girlies can have the extra water bottle and rice socks now that the big people are finished with them.  

When we return after our trip this week, we’ll start running the wall heaters, which really help to heat Kyle’s and Ellee’s rooms, and the anthracite stove.  We need to get some more coal and fix our chimney before we can start the stove.  Those things are on our short-term to-do list.  Jonathan and our neighbor guys are burying the new pipes to the tank in our yard as I write.  We also have to reinsulate some other pipes which needed replacing.  I think you could call this “winterizing” the house.

I have winter goals of working on my hand embroidery and reading good read-aloud books to the kids.  We are looking forward to a school break after a fun first year for Kyle!  And we are expecting a brutally cold, possibly snowy winter.  There was heavy snow last year while we were in America.  Although I would love to see some good snow, I’m hoping this year it doesn’t knock the electricity out for a month!  Nevertheless, we’re armed and ready with candles and lamps, our coal stove and gas oven so we should be able to manage with or without electricity if necessary.  

~Abby

Kyle Starts Kindergarten (And Thoughts From a Former Homeschooler)

This poor, long forgotten blog.  I haven't totally forgotten about it.  Thus, I am going to attempt to revive it now that we are back home in Mokhotlong.

This week we started school with Kyle.  He is so excited about it!  He says he didn't think he was going to like school but now he does!  I'm taking it easy for kindergarten.  I still firmly believe that children learn most from playing, living and exploring their little worlds.  Kyle has been trying to read for months now.  I've been putting him off because I wanted to wait until we got home from America before we started anything structured.  He also loves math like his mama.  He walks around trying to make up math problems for himself.  Weirdo.  I used to do the exact same thing.  He is following me around during the day asking if he can do more school. 

For K-5, we are doing Reading Made Easy, some handwriting and simple math, Uncle Arthur's Story time for character building, Bible memory, read aloud books and lots of games!  He's soaking it up.  I feel like I'm working with a blank slate or a pile of soft clay.  His little heart and mind are so malleable and it touches my soul.  I feel so grateful to be the one who gets to invest in his life everyday!

Reading the Uncle Arthur stories bring me to tears.  I grew up listening to them.  They are great life lessons for children and such sweet and moving depictions of biblical principles.  Kyle listens with his eyes open wide, waiting to learn how the story ends.

I hope Kyle (and his sisters) will grow up loving to learn, loving to be home with us, loving having the people who love him the most as his teachers.  It took me quite a few years to discover how blessed I was that I had the opportunity to experience all those things.  

I grew up homeschooled.  For many years I both loved and hated it. I loved being with my mom and I enjoyed learning what she taught me.  But I desperately wanted to be normal, to fit in and to be accepted by my peers.  I had been teased for much of my life about the fact that I didn't go to real school and thus somehow wasn't a valid learner.  When I finally did attempt school in a classroom setting during high school, it took very little time for me to discover that "real school" wasn't all it was cracked up to be. While I learned a lot through my various teachers, I also learned more than I ever wished to know about the social structure in school.  If you weren't exactly like the mold your peers wanted you to fit into, you would still be teased and ridiculed.  I couldn't shake my desire to not follow, to talk to whomever I wished, and to interact with people of all ages.  Thus I didn't fit into the "normal" mold and was picked on because of it.  

That year I realized how unimportant those things were, popularity and normalcy.  Why did I care so much about fitting in?  I finally realized how much I was gaining from being home, watching my mom, interacting with my siblings, helping around the house and the flexibility that homeschool allowed.  I discovered that my real friends were the ones who liked me because I was me, and popularity wasn't all that important after all.  In the end, I only had a couple close friends.  I still do.  But they were the right friends and for that I am so thankful.  

Oftentimes socialization is the first thing people mention when you say you are homeschooled.  I realize homeschooling isn't for everyone.  But just because you are homeschooled does not mean you are unable to interact with others.  By being homeschooled, I realized that I loved to converse with adults; I could trust them to be more level headed and genuinely kind than my own peers.  I learned to appreciate and not look down on children who were younger than I was.  It didn't matter to me if someone was a year or two (or five) younger or older, if I liked them, I wanted to be their friend.  That didn't fit well into the social structure I saw at school and it caused me plenty of problems.  But now in my adult life, I can appreciate that I enjoy the company of folks much older than I am, because I almost always find myself as the youngest in the group even now!  

Being homeschooled molded my future.  It taught me to be different, to not hold back if I wanted to achieve something - even if it was unusual and not necessarily the "normal" thing to do.  It taught me to respect people of all ages and to go out of my way to include those who were ostracized for one reason or another.  It taught me to be sensitive to other people's feelings because I know how it feels to be teased for being different.  And it taught me that I wanted to homeschool my kids, because I want to invest in their lives and try to show them what being homeschooled taught me.  Plus, I want the satisfaction of knowing I taught them all to read!

Homeschooling has been my plan for my entire adult life and I am thankful I have the opportunity to do it now with my boy.  Here's to hoping it will be as smooth sailing as this first week has been!

~Abby