Our First Two Weeks.

When planning for our school days, my planner is usually filled only for 2 weeks in advance....and in pencil. I do this for so many reasons. Kids get sick, lessons don't sink in, we get unexpected visitors, doctor's appointments arise, and so on and so on. I will admit that when I planned our first week of school, I did none of the "easing into it" thing. I just scheduled a full day. Of course, our first day of school did have lots of fun incorporated into it, but there was still a bit of every subject on our schedule.

It is now the official end of our first 2 weeks of school!! How did it go? Well, I can honestly say that our first week was chaos. There were more doctor's appointments than I had planned for, more babysitting issues, and just unexpected events. But we got it all done. This week was a little more of the same. False labor, plumbing issues, and more appointments led to another week where schedules had to be tweaked.

So the key to our success was our flexibility to clump lessons together, switch schedules, work late, etc. I refused to fall behind so early in our school year!! The upside was that I realized how flexible the kids are and how resilient they can be. It's nice to look at our planners and see that everything was checked as "done!"

But I will be making adjustments to our schedule. Mainly, I'll be moving things around and clumping kids together a little more. I found that I didn't need to separate the kids as much as I thought. They worked together wonderfully! For example, I had their phonics scheduled separately because I thought they would require more one on one. It turned out that they like to work together. While I do the phonics lesson with Isabella, Marco works on his workbook pages and then reads. Then I switch over to Marco and Isabella starts on her workbook and readers.

Christian also proved to be quite the little learner. He is loving doodling alongside the kids and was able to hold a good attention span of about 15 minutes. Amazing for an almost 2 year old!!

The great thing I have discovered so far is that I have plenty of time to add in nature study and art on Fridays. I was worried about adding anything extra, but so far so good!

My only concern now is will we be able to sustain this when the baby arrives? I certainly pray so!