Planning & organizing now...

... so we can enjoy ourselves and appreciate living in the moment later.

Over the last few days, we have been gearing up to start homeschooling with Lily after Labor Day. We got the Earthschooling kindergarten curriculum and are excited to see how that goes. Today, Aevryn and I ran errands and got most of our art and organizational supplies. A few things, like modeling beeswax and block beeswax crayons, I can only find online, so I ordered those today as well. Luckily, there is a locally-owned, online children's store that has free in-town, next day pick up.

We should be all set and organized by Monday -- just in time for out-of-town relatives to arrive at grandma & grandpa's house. :) We plan to spend the next two and a half weeks enjoying the end of summer and spending time with family. We also would like to declutter and simplify the living room, which, combined with the kitchen/dining room (and really, we have an open plan upstairs, so it's all one big room anyway), will be our primary indoor space. Lily is eager to get going, so I think we might ease into things by trying to fall into our approximate daily and weekly rhythm, and reading stories from the August curriculum during our already-establish post-lunch quiet time.

I have so many ideas and so much information just swimming around in my head. Today I finally got my binder with divider tabs and my monthly + weekly calendar inserts. I plan to print what I need for the month ahead as we go, since the guide is nearly 700 pages in its entirety and I don't need every single item in a binder. I think I will feel a lot more settled and actually prepared once I have that all assembled and ready to go.

I would also like to read The Temperaments and the Adult-Child Relationship before we get started in earnest. I have a pretty good idea of what I think Lily and Dave are, but I'm struggling to find a precise fit for me. I seem to straddle two types, which is common for me in most temperament assessments. Aevryn is just too young to type yet. Being barely 3.5, she will mostly be in tag-along mode anyway.

The girls would like to each do a class this fall. Aevryn would like to try gymnastics and Lily would like to go back to dance class, specifically pre-ballet with tap. For myself, I think I would like to take a prenatal yoga class. If I can arrange it, I'd love to have the girls have a grandma or Daddy morning once a week, while I go to yoga and then do the grocery shopping (which they
universally revile).

Finally, we hope to meet up with friends every Friday morning for "all weather" hikes. Precluding truly inclement weather, of course. I feel very fortunate to live in an area with other homeschooling families who follow a similar curriculum/philosophy.

I think the key to our success will be consistency of rhythm and mentally staying a few steps ahead of ourselves. I am going to go ahead and write out which stories & accompanying crafts & verses will go with which block of days. But, I fully expect the blocks to be interchangeable. That way, I'll be organized but flexible, which is sort of my motto in life. I'm hoping that by the time baby arrives in February or March, we'll have our daily/weekly rhythms to sustain us through the gigantic changes that will rock our house. But, that's one of the beauties of homeschooling: we can take a few weeks "off" to just adjust to our new family dynamics.