Week 21: The Underground Railroad

This week was a good week, but both kids had the grumpies because of runny noses. Neither of them was bad enough to get out of school work, but they were sluggish. They graciously shared their stuff with me and now I have a stuffy nose, too.

At co-op we assembled care packages to distribute to homeless people in the area. One of the young ladies in our group chose to lead us all in this service project, which piggy-backed well on the story of Florence Nightengale.

It was a good week in which we focused on the Underground Railroad. Molly and I read several good stories, such as Follow the Drinking Gourd, and Barefoot and the story of Sojourner Truth. Matty began reading Freedom Train, which is a biography of Harriet Tubman.

Molly is soaring in her reading. I am so proud of her. The subject that used to bring us the most grief now regularly brings us great delight. She is also enjoying doing exercises on www.xtramath.org . She understands addition and subtraction fine, but needs to memorize the facts and build speed now. This program seems to be helping.

Matty did well with his work, but I felt it was like pulling teeth to get things done. We all have weeks like this, I know, but it was especially annoying this week. It seemed I was nagging him constantly to get his assignments done. I know this does not benefit him but merely drives both of us crazy. I was so frustrated by Wednesday, and on Thursday he had a 2:30 p.m. play date with a friend. I told him that the play date would be cancelled unless everything was checked off that he had been assigned. Interestingly, he was able to complete all of his school work that day by 2:00 p.m. He even worked through his lunch! (insert shocked smiley icon here.) I pointed out to him that he came up with his own plan to make sure he got all of his work done. He got up and executed the plan. Ha. Now I can hold him to the fact that I KNOW he is able to do this.

The struggles we had this week over planning and performance came as answers to prayer. I have been praying that God would show me where I need to train his character and to help me appreciate the good in him when his natural immaturity is driving me crazy. This post is the result of that.

In other news, I got new glasses. Yay! I can see the computer screen really well now!