Homeschooling update #2

Great news from our little corner of the world! Haha, well, it's great news for me. We have had three great days in a row of homeschooling! I don't know if we ever matched that even in public school. It turns out that I needed to provide the right motivation. Because, really, what is more fun than playing with your transformers all day or reading Harry Potter books every free second? So, to pull Matthew away and get him to accomplish his lessons in a reasonable amount of time (like before 5 pm??) this is what I did. I got out a couple of baby food jars and told the boys that for each lesson they completed/participated in, they each got to put one marble into their jar. Later, each marble can be redeemed for 15 minutes of computer time. {I got this great idea from Ericka, one of my homeschooling friends here in Del Rio}. Well, that was an immediate reward, kept them going, and didn't involved sugar. Ethan likes to try free online games. Matt likes to go to Transformers.com and watch old webisodes of the original cartoons, or just look at all the different Transformer toys that are available. Although I really can't stand to see him sitting there drooling over more Transformers, it is working. Today they both got done before lunch. We start after breakfast with a morning devotional: prayer, sometimes a song, and then I read a few verses of scripture and we discuss it's meaning and how it applies to us today. Matthew did his Reading, Math, Science, Health, and Social Studies. Ethan does all the same subjects, only modified to his level. I'm actually really enjoying it.

This afternoon, I left the kids home with Russ while I went to the dentist to supposedly get a small cavity filled. I ended up with a root canal! That was fun. My lip is only now, five and a half hours later, returned to it's normal size and feeling. Happily, I didn't have to wait for it to get really painful before I got it taken care of. The dentist was telling me how much pain it was when he was up all night with a tooth needing a root canal instead of a filling, and how I was being saved sooo much pain. I believe him, of course, but I couldn't help thinking "Oh please, I have had three babies. Pain? Bring it on." Nevertheless, I VERY glad to report a pain-free root canal, something unheard of until recent history. As we learned in Social Studies this morning, during Colonial times in America, there was only one cure for a painful tooth. Visit your local blacksmith and let him YANK it out. Fun, fun. Thank goodness for modern medicine. Well, some modern medicine anyway.