Helloooo?

*taps mic* Anyone still here?

Ok, so I pulled another one of my disappearing acts. I swear my intention is to post regularly! I just swear I see squirrels and rainbows and get distracted lol

I have started Bullet Journalling (more about that later). One of the reasons, is to be less squirrely. One of my goals for May is to get back to blogging regularly. The whole point of this blog is so people can learn about our journey and so me and the kids can have this cool diary of sorts to look back on. I also really enjoy writing!

Teeny up-to-date on us...
Joshua - as of his last speech assessment, he is up to 2.5 years old in speech. This is fantastic as a year ago he had 4 words and relied solely on sign language. He's *finally* starting his 2nd block of speech therapy next week so hopefully we can get that number even higher! We're also waiting on referrals and assessments from the Ottawa Children's Treatment Center for autism, sensory processing disorder and occupational therapy. Joshua also starts soccer this month!

Olivia - in February she joined Brianna in Time4Learning after completing Reading Eggs and Math Seeds. She has already completed Social Studies for Gr. 2 and is 3/4 done science and math in Gr. 2. So we're mostly focusing on English, which has always been her weaker spot, but she's more than half done Gr. 1 there. She loves Brownies and is excited to do her first camp with them this month. She also starts her 3rd year of soccer this month.

Brianna - finally finished all her Gr. 6 work and I swear it's like a light bulb clicked. It took her almost 3 years to finish Gr. 6 yet she's on course to finish Gr. 7 by the end of July! She is absolutely thriving in Pathfinders and graduates to Rangers for next year. She's been working her tail off to sell cookies and fundraise to pay for their trip to England in 2019. She squeezed into her final year of science camp (technically she ages out 5 days before camp but they've allowed to to take part this year). She's been encouraged by the River Institute to volunteer with them next summer (most likely helping with the younger campers group).

Isaac - graduates this year!!! How the hell did that happen! Wasn't it just like, last year, that he started Kindergarten!? He's been accepted into 2 programs at one of the city's best colleges (!!!) and currently plans to do both, double majoring. He's also working with a program there to work over the summer. He may possibly get a couple hours sleep. He has also almost completed a completely drawn by hand, D&D style game with a friend of his. We tested it out this weekend and it was pretty damn fun!

Dylan - has been working full time at the same place Lee is since the fall and has been doing great! While they work for different companies in the same building, he and Lee see each other a couple times a week. Everyone thinks they're brothers lol He had some nerve wracking trips home in the winter due to storms (he has the same anxiety that Lee does and this was his first winter doing any kind of distance driving).

Lee - after a round of (fairly low) winter blues, his anxiety appears to be doing much better. He's in his happy little world at work in wash bay without anyone breathing down his neck. There's a possibility of promotion to days wash bay late in the summer due to someone's retirement that he's really excited about, so we've all got our fingers crossed for that one!

Me - I fell into a food-happy slump over the winter and gained 9 of my hard-earned 40lb loss back. However, now that the weather is nice again, I've been getting out for multiple mile walks a few times a week. My business is slow, as it always is in spring and summer but I'm happy with that as it gives me time to selfish sew! My goal is to have 75% of the family's summer clothes be mama made this year.

So that's us for now. I hope to have a LOT more frequent postings, including a pile of the drafts I was working on last fall. How's everyone else doing in blog land?

The Possibility of Autism

Joshua was screened for autism last November when he was 2 yrs, 5 mths. At the time of the screening, we only answered "yes" to one question (his obsessiveness to lining up objects).

Now, at 3 yrs, 4 mths, we are seeing more signs of autism.

We had a speech appointment a couple weeks ago just to get a reassessment and discuss what we can do at home while we wait for another block of actual speech therapy (see my frustrations on that here). Our usual therapist, Sassy, was out of the office so we met with one of her partners. Someone who hadn't seen Joshua since we first started with speech. Halfway through our appointment, she asked if Joshua had had autism screening. Yes, but a year ago. He was still under the usual screening age and still non-verbal. We discussed calling the developmental ped again so re-screen him.

Last week I saw Joshua's family doctor for an unrelated matter and brought up what the speech therapist and I discussed. We talked and she did an informal screening. She too, agrees that we need to make a follow up appointment.

Now to wait to see the developmental pediatrician again...

Weekly Wrap Up - 10/21/16 and Tot School Weeks 6 and 7

This is a combined post because I'm in a crazy busy period of work. Still lots of learning going on, just not as much documentation! Random colds have been floating in and out of our house too, so set school work hasn't happened as normal.

The girls took part in their first Cookie Blitz. Most of Guides funds come from cookie sales. This Blitz in particular ended up sold out!

Paramedics came to Olivia's brownies to teach them some basic first aid. Olivia was thrilled to bandage her friend's "cut" arm. Even better (in Olivia's opinion) was the fact that they let her keep the gloves. She wore those things for days!

Brianna's dad is really good about me homeschooling her and has never questioned my wishes in it. Occasionally He gives her assignments. This one was of the history of the company that he works for.

Life Skills! We got new blinds this week and I had Brianna hang them. Now she knows why I hate them lol

Random pumpkin craft with LOTS of help from Joshua.

Brianna did Joshua's schoolwork with him. He loves telling everyone letters.

This one was more a lesson of sharing and taking turns. Something Joshua is completely not fond of.

Joshua woke up this week with a swollen face, complaining of pain. A doctor's visit showed nothing wrong. No ear infection, no tooth abscess, no strep, nothing. Just random swelling and pain. Now it's gone. I guess Joshua just likes to be special.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschooler, Hip Homeschool Mom and Homeschool Creations.

Tot School - Week 2

Joshua was featured in this week's 1+1+1=1 Tot School post! Exciting!!!

Joshua has a awesome speech appointment with his therapist this week. We'll be working speech work into his schoolwork next week since the intro to school has been such a big hit.

Joshua absolutely loved school this week. When I grab his preschool box he gets all excited and runs to the living room to get to work. This week we worked on mostly stuff he knows with a couple new things put in (sorting by size and dot stickers) and finally got around to seeing how many lower case letters he knows (all but 4).

Matching colors

Dot stickers! We started with J for Joshua

Still no real interest in coloring the cars, but was more interested in tracing the letters

He loves apples, so this apple puzzle was great

Sorting from biggest to smallest

He found his cement mixer that matches the one in his book!

 Linking up with 1+1+1=1 and Hip Homeschool Moms

Great Speech Appointment!

Joshua had a speech assessment this morning. He hasn't had speech therapy since April so I knew there was going to obviously be a great improvement.

He blew his therapist away with the drastic change! She was so happy to hear him actually talking!

As we knew, he is still, of course, delayed. BUT! Has shown enough improvement that from now until December, we will work on specific things at home (mostly, not dropping the consonants off of the end of words). In Dec, we will re-assess and see if at the center therapy visits are needed.

Since we were expecting to be dumped right back into therapy this month, this is a super happy improvement!

First Tot School Post in a Long Time!

Joshua turned 3 in June. Because of him being non verbal and no resources available to him, I figured it would be forever before we ever started him with school.

In July he had 5 occasionally used words. But the end of August he blew up with over 200 words, used every day. It's like a light switch flipped and suddenly he won't shut up! He's still approximately a year "behind" in speech so will be continuing with speech therapy as it's available.

In this word explosion, we discovered that he's freaking smart. Like advanced smart. Like possibly gifted smart.

Some of his first clear "words" were identifying (correctly) the letters on the fridge. 

Then he started counting everything. Ok. This isn't simply a tot school start. I need to do an assessment to see what he knows. I got a simple preschool assessment from 1+1+1=1. I knew he probably couldn't do the line tracing and cutting, but I knew he could do some of the letters.

At 3 yrs, 2 mths he can:
- recite the alphabet and identify all 26 capital letters (we haven't tried low case yet) out of order
- count objects to 13 and identify all numbers 0-10 except 8 and 9
- identifies circle, square, heart and star
- identifies blue, yellow, green and red

We are shocked. He was classed as non-verbal 2 months ago. Because of this we never bothered doing any of the beginning learning with him that we did with the other kids (we did "Shoe!" with him instead of "One, two. Two red shoes" that we did with the older kids). Yet he just assessed at a higher level than a lot of Kindergarteners. Um. Crap.

I pulled out my tot school/preschool stuff from Olivia. I pulled out a few items to introduce it to him. He is in love. He sees the bin of laminated printables on the kitchen table and begs for school. He's not really interested in any writing/coloring activities but males are typically slower to pick up that fine motor stuff than females so I'm not worried. The girls think it's awesome that he has school now too.

Anything with cars makes Joshua happy

He loves the Magic School Bus books and videos

He did this farm animal matching game several times this week

More cars! And he gets to count them! Two of his favorite things!

Linking up with 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations.

 

Current Curriculum - September 2016

This post contains NO affiliate links

Previous post from last July here.

This post coincides with iHomeschool Network's Annual Blog Hop. This week (which I'm late on!) is Curriculum Week. Check next week for School Room Week.

We school year round and don't really follow grades. Brianna started Nov 15, 2010 coming from 3rd grade in public school and will go until whenever of whatever year. Olivia started "Preschool" on Feb 6, 2012. Joshua started "Preschool" on Sept 6, 2016. We don't follow specific grades but Brianna is anywhere from Gr. 6-10, Olivia is anywhere from Gr. 1-3, Joshua is preschool/Kindy. 

So, since we don't have set grades or set school years, I figure every 6 mths-ish I'll post what we are currently working on. We use a mishmash of traditional homeschool curriculum, workbooks bought at teacher supply stores, stuff made up completely in my head and most subjects are supplemented by printed worksheets from various sites and of course, library books. In a nut shell, we're eclectic homeschoolers.

Joshua:

He's juuuust starting out so is mostly using left overs from Olivia as we see what he like/works well for him. Some of the more common printables that we're grabbing are from 1+1+1=1, Our Little Monkeys, Homeschool Creations, Confessions of a Homeschooler and Teachers Pay Teachers.

He's still working on speech with his speech therapist. At the time of this writing, he is approx 1 year "behind" in his speech for the typical 3 yr 3 mth old child. This is WAY better than his completely non verbal-ness from a few months ago, so we'll take it! We still make use of sign language. He still uses it for words he doesn't know and we'll use it when we are trying to figure out his gibberish.

Once he has a better grasp on constant language we'll start ABCMouse with him. Olivia really liked it and he loved watching her when she did her lessons so is already familiar with it.

Olivia:

English:

We're playing around in Brave Writer's "Jot it Down" program which focuses on dictation for Olivia's age group. We do dictations for Brave Writer's Friday Freewrite and to write her Brownie Journal (basically, what she did at Brownies on a given day).

We're almost done 1+1+1=1's You Can Read program. Olivia picked up a lot of the more "sight" words with that. We feel that phonetic learning is highly important over memorizing sight words so we're spending a lot of effort on letter sounds, blending sounds and sounding out short words. We have oodles of early readers that we share in reading and Olivia is reading more and more of the words in each book. 

In the spring started Reading Eggs, an online program like ABC Mouse, but instead of learning sounds, she's now using it to read. She loves it and asks to work on it even on the weekends.

Math:
Olivia is almost done Early Math on Khan Academy. Her main curriculum is Math Mammoth, in which she just started the Gr. 2 level. It worked well for her for Gr. 1, so I hope it continues to!

With our ReadingEggs subscription came a subscription to MathSeeds which is meant for 3-8 year olds. MathSeeds starts out really young (Olivia was being made to identify numbers), but she doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure (since she didn't care) if there is a test out area to start at a higher level.

Extra Curricular:
Olivia just finished her 2nd year of soccer. She has grown so much in it since last year. Last year she would pick grass and stare off into space. This year she actively took part in drills, actually went after the ball on the field and even scored 2 goals!

Olivia joined Brownies this year. I was a Brownie as a girl, so was super excited for her to start. For some reason, she's picking up on Brianna's "I can't sleep away" and is nervous about the possibility of camps. She's slept at a friend's house several times with no issue, so I don't think it'll be a problem, but she sure thinks it will be!

Brianna: 

Math: 
We really like Math Mammoth. It's almost self-teaching once a kid can read. It breaks the new concepts down into step by step instructions. However, she's been struggling so much with math that we're trying something new altogether. We've started Time4Learning. She responds really well to "computer school work" so I'm hoping this helps with her math. We're also slowly working our way through Khan Academy. Brianna really likes the videos explaining new concepts. 

Brianna struggles a lot with math so she's "behind", only doing Gr. 6. But that's the beauty of homeschooling. She can be working on Gr. 10/11 science while being years behind in math. Math is something that we spend a lot of time trying out different things for.

English: 
We're semi-using Brave Writer's "Writer's Jungle" (bits and pieces, at least) Brianna especially enjoys their Poetry Teatimes. For spelling, as always, we don't do a lot of focus on spelling because of Brianna's Dysgraphia. Her spelling HAS improved on it's own through the use of texting, social media and using spell check on her typed work. We'll be doing NaNoWriMo for the 3rd time. The first year, she struggled to hit 12,000 words. Last year she did an impressive 20,000 and wasn't even done her story! We use CNN's Student News for daily writing (we watch the clip and she picks one topic to write a summary about).

French: 
Brianna is almost done her first year of Rosetta Stone. My grandma bought the kids the full 5 year lesson set, so she'll be good through high school. Duolingo has an app for her phone for extra, on-the-go practice. One of our neighbours tests Brianna's French periodically.

Arts: 
Brianna wants to learn guitar and we have a child's guitar and a great book - The Complete Guitar Manual, hopefully we can get around to that. She also wants to get back into playing the flute (which is currently under repairs). Hopefully she can be encouraged to put in a stronger, more frequent effort this time.

She has expressed interest in learning about some Shakespeare, so we'll  learn about him and read/watch some plays. 

She wants to do some basic art lessons to improve her drawing, so I'm looking into some good lessons for that. She also wants to learn to sew. She took a crochet class in the winter and will hopefully look to improve further in that.

Phys Ed/Health: 
Brianna normally runs with the Cornwall MultiSport Club. This year I had back to back surgeries, one being major abdominal surgery, so her coach was out of commission for the summer. Brianna is very much not self-motivating, but we hope to get her back into basic training now that I'm almost 100%. She is still walking/running/biking 10k for Terry Fox this year. She does youth yoga classes a couple times a month and yoga videos at home. Because she is overly flexible, she loves it and it greatly improves her balance and fidgeting.

Civics:
We took part in our town's first Pride parade this year, so there will be a lot of diversity learning going on in the near future. 

Life Skills: 
Brianna babysits and does random jobs for neighbours. Because of the sudden influx of money, she's learning about comparing prices and smart spending. She's looking forward to being able to get a "real" job in a couple years. She's also becoming more responsible for getting her schoolwork and chores done with less interference from us. 

Extra Curriculars:
Like Olivia, Brianna is signed up for Girl Guides this year. For her age group, she will be in PathFinders. As she has anxieties about sleeping away from home, she is super nervous about camps, but we will be trying to get her to sleepover more in the coming months at various friends' so she can try to get used to it. She also joined a Teen Tuesday program through the library where she gets to hang out with kids her age and do various activities. 


Both Girls:

History/Geography: 
We're are going to start doing Country Studies again. The kids really enjoyed them. We read about the countries, find them on maps, watch videos about them and make a bunch of food from that country. I made both Brianna and Olivia's country reports on Microsoft Word because I couldn't find anything I liked that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg. If I can figure out how to share them here, I will. We'll be reading through History of the World and Geography of the World as our his/geo base outside of the Country Studies. 

Science:
We're currently finishing up on our Biology course. After that, we'll be taking a break from a set topic while I can put together a Weather unit. Since we live in Canada and winter is coming, it works lol Both girls went to science camp over the summer and had a blast. 

Arts:
I want to work on art some more. Brianna loves it but is fairly terrible lol So she wants to learn little ways to make her art better. Olivia on the other hand, has this idea that her drawings aren't good enough. No telling her otherwise changes her mind :( So for both girls, we'll be doing some basic art lessons, using a variety of mediums and styles.

Reading:
I made a post here about our reading plans for the year, with book titles and links.

Back to the Grind

Today was our first day of full schedule school after a summer of lighter schedule. We're trying a bunch of new things and re-starting a bunch of old things this year (see our Current Curriculum post, coming soon!) and the kids are pretty excited.

Another bit of excitement is that Joshua is also starting school this year! Over the summer, his speech blew up. He is still very behind for his age and will continue with speech therapy but there is actual words! I quickly discovered that a huge chunk of his words includes the whole alphabet, counting to 13 and starting to list off colors and shapes. Holy jumpin'! I guess we should start working with him!

The girls have joined Girl Guides of Canada this year. Olivia is in Brownies and Brianna is in Path Finders. Both girls are super excited to meet new friends and learn/play all sorts of new activities. I am excited because I used to be in Brownies and know how much fun they'll have!

We had loads of issues with Olivia this morning but this afternoon went off without a hitch and the first day of school is in the books! Let's hope I can get back into blogging more too!

Please Stop Over-Using Programs That You Don't Need

My son, Joshua, will be 3 in June. He is mostly non-verbal. Yet he is now without speech therapy.

"Speech Issues" seem to be the "in" thing for kids to have nowadays. When Isaac and Brianna were little, I knew of, like 2 kids that had speech issues. Since Olivia and Joshua, it seems more kids have speech issues than don't.

Sadly, this is more a matter of little Suzy only says 40 words when she should be saying 50 by x age. Or little Johnny wasn't quoting Shakespeare by 2 1/2. My friends kids were referred to speech simply because they're twins that were born 3 weeks early. They were referred FROM BIRTH. They have no speech issues. Yet they took up space (two spaces actually) in the system, simply because it was assumed that they'd have issues.

Then there's a kid like Joshua. Completely normal birth circumstances. Normal development everywhere but speech. By 12 mths, he had 2 words. By 18 mths he had zero. By 24 mths he had zero. By 2.5 yrs he had 5 words (that were few and far in between).

Joshua had a speech assessment last September. It was seen that he clearly needed help. In October, Lee and I were informed that we would have to take a multi week class (to teach us how to teach him) THEN they would assess Joshua again to see if he needed individual help. The class taught us nothing that we weren't already doing with all of our kids, let alone Joshua.

In January he had another speech assessment. Clearly, he needed individual help. The worker told us that he wasn't in the group that was due to start the following month, but in the group that was due to start in May/June. However, because he would be turning 3 in June and only had 5 noises that counted as words, she would try to push him into the Feb/March group. Thankfully she succeeded.

Between the end of Feb and the beginning of April, Joshua had 7 weekly speech therapy appointments. He loved them. Sassy, his therapist was very patient with him and we got lots of new sounds out of him. We even got 2 new words! He was clearly thriving.

April 7th was our last session. We have no services until at least August when they will book an appointment for another assessment. Since we know he'll need more therapy the assessment seems like a waste of time. After the assessment, we'll be lucky to re-start therapy in October.

Our speech therapist told us that the delay was completely due to the amount of kids in their system.

Don't get me wrong! Joshua is not the only kid with speech issues. Plenty of kids DO have real speech issues. But well more than half of the kids in my town's speech system are like little Suzy above (only 40 words when she "should" have 50).

Weekly Wrap Up - April 15th

Joshua has started asking for food occasionally with the word "eat"! It is long-sounded out as he learned in speech but it's something!!

Math: Brianna's on her break week (a couple days of Khan Academy though) while I do marking of her series of test to see where she needs the extra help. Thus far, some things have been obvious (areas I knew she needed help), others have been surprising (areas I thought she knew or swore she would need help with, it was the opposite.

Olivia worked on measuring in inches and centimeters and 3D shapes. She had fun finding 3D shapes around the house.

English: See History.

Science: We finally got to make our cell model! The girls were super impressed that playing with candy was schoolwork! After that we worked on learning about the skeleton. Olivia was amazed that we have over 200 bones in our body.

 \

History/Geography: Brianna is a wee behind on her Mystery Class so she can finish up on her Holocaust study. She is now done with her videos and is working on her essay. She has a bunch of notes and library books to back her up.

French: Olivia has been attempting to create sentences with the words she has picked up from Brianna.

Phys Ed.: Brianna biked once this week, and went for a long (2 miles) walk with Olivia.

By the end of the week yet ANOTHER bug hit my house and kids were dropping like flies. I am SO over all the colds this year!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom.

Weekly Wrap Up - Mar 18th

Joshua is progressing in his speech therapy. He's now up to 36 signs and will use the ooooo and ppp sounds unprompted to "say" open. He has also learned bbbb, eeeee, hhhhaaa and tttt.

Making the eeee sound to ask for a toy key

Math: Brianna's continuing with her math assessment. I introduced fractions to Olivia today with Lego. She thought it was fantastic to include toys with schoolwork! Brianna made a city skyline of the Pi numbers for Pi Day.

English: I've started Olivia on Reading Eggs as ABC Mouse was getting waaaay too easy for her. She needs something that will help her read/spell words instead of with sounds letters make (something she's mastered). Joshua loves watching her work on her schoolwork and it's helping him too as he sometimes attempts to make the sounds to go with the words.

Science: I am working on planning a Human Body/Biology class right now, so formal science is on hiatus. The girls did some bird watching now that our yard is starting to fill with spring birds again. They spotted a Robin too, which is traditionally the first sign of spring around here.

Geography/History: This week was a busy week for Mystery Class. Because of being sick last week we had catch up, but also, we had to figure out roughly how many degrees longitude each Mystery Class location was from Greenwich, England, on the prime meridian.

French: Still continuing with Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo.

Health/Phys Ed.: After a sick week last week, we took it slow this week.

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers and The Practical Mom

Joshua Starts Speech Therapy!

We were lucky and DID get into the early speech therapy we were hoping for!

Joshua just loves it. The speech pathologist, Sassy, is great with him. He's definitely the most non-verbal in the current pile of therapy kids but she's got loads of patience.

Right now, we're focusing on expanding his known signs and trying to get sounds (of any kind) out of him. In 2 classes of speech he has picked up 6 new signs (up, down, again, out, cut and sit) and 2 sounds ("b" and "k").

Joshua's Speech Update

The parent to child class that Lee and I have been taking haven't really done much as we were already doing majority of the "techniques" at home. Joshua HAS improve since last May when we first started this speech delay path. Of course, now, at over 2 1/2 and still not speaking, he is considered mute or non-verbal rather than simply speech delayed.

We met, again, with a speech pathologist for an assessment. She agrees that Joshua is improving and even thinks that he may start speaking real words within a few months. However, she agrees (as we've known from the beginning) that he'll need one-on-one speech therapy. Because of his more advanced age and the fact that he is still non-verbal, she's going to try to push him into the earlier sessions of therapy that begin this month or next, instead of waiting until "his" group, which wouldn't start therapy until May/June.

Joshua's current list of communication is: 4 "words" (num num, uh uh, woah and yuck) and 40 signs (24 of which he signs on his own with no prompting).

Weekly Wrap Up - Jan 29th

My first wrap up in over a year and I'm already late! My excuse, it was my mom's birthday yesterday so I was busy....

Brianna re-started working on Khan Academy after a few months. She had been getting frustrated at the topics she had been covering, so we dropped back to just her "paper math" (Math Mammoth). Over that break, I started allowing the use of a calculator for speed purposes. She knows how to do all basic math, on paper and often in her head. However, I noticed that when she was trying to rush, she might put a number one decimal point over and end up getting the question wrong. Since using the calculator her grades have improved along with her general attitude towards math.

Olivia finished up her Food Groups unit this week. It was a learning experience for both of us. Olivia is beyond an extreme picky eater. She has a very short list of acceptable foods and will honestly starve herself to illness if she doesn't want to eat something. Part of this unit was tracking servings across the food groups. While she is severely lacking in the vegetable dept (she won't eat ANY unless it's a fruit/veggie juice or rarely, spinach in a fruit smoothie), she does eat majority of her servings, most days. I found a cute little workbook that covered all the food groups. Olivia's favorite part of the unit was creating a real food food pyramid from our fridge and pantry.

Joshua had another speech assessment. He is improving in the sense of communication but he is still essentially considered mute. He has approx 30 signs and 4 kind-of words (num num, woah, uh uh and yuh (yuck)). Because he is still not speaking and will be 3 in June, he will be set up with weekly speech therapy. The speech lady that we're currently dealing with is going to try to push him into the sessions that start next month, as opposed to the ones his group of assessments is in (April/May).

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Loooong Awaited Update

So since I only blogged a whole *2* times last year, there's kinda been a lot missed. The somewhat condensed version...

Dylan: 19, lives with his mother. Dylan graduated high school. He took an intense 8 week course for heavy equipment operator. He is now working at his first full time job, which he loves!

Isaac: 16, lives with his grandmother. Isaac got his drivers license over the summer (which he is super proud of). He got Honours on his most current report card. He is still very geek/computer driven.

Brianna: 13, at home. Brianna had a slow start to the year. We did minimal core subjects and otherwise unschooled. My brain just wasn't having it. While this helped heal my brain, it didn't do much for Brianna. She does great unschooled learning for self taught or guided learning but anything that is required, but she doesn't particularly want to do, she NEEDS to be "sat on" to do it. Thus, she did poorly to failing miserably at several things. After a summer of normal summer schedule, we got back to business for school. She is doing great in all areas other than math. Don't get me wrong, she is actually good at math! She just doesn't like it, so she slacks off.

In November she again took part in NaNoWriMo. Last year she wrote nearly 10,000 words. This year she more than doubled it to 20,000+ words by the end of November and isn't even done her story! She took a couple month break from it and starting next month will be working on finishing it and editing it. She story is Minecraft fan fiction.

Brianna started working for our neighbour, being a regular babysitter and also doing random jobs around their house. She saved half her money all year and did really well with what she kept. She even took on a couple other babysitting jobs and is building herself a good reputation.

She finally started Rosetta Stone French and is excelling in it. The program doesn't "pass" you unless you have set grade (I believe 75 or 80%), but for most lessons this is easy as pie for her. She is struggling with the writing portion as she's a horrendous speller, even in English. And she has some issues with the grammar portion but French grammar is hard.

Brianna really didn't do all that well in her training or races last year. It's a goal she's working on for this year and thus far she's doing pretty good!

Brianna took part in a science fair with our homeschool group. She put together a project on Earth Sciences, focusing on various rocks. She did really well with the project and even did a presentation in front of the group! She is very stage fright and didn't want to do the presentation portion (not required anyway), so I was super proud of her when she chose to.

Brianna got an undercut and then a short bob in the battle of her amazingly thick and heavy hair. The undercut did a lot over the summer for heat control but the knots she was getting in the remaining length was still a lot to take care of. Once we chopped her hair to jaw level AND kept the undercut, she is both cool and able to take care of it better.

We've started looking into high school and college requirements for the course she wants to take (Environmental Technician). I am not looking forward to high level math. Or writing transcripts. Or high school in general *sigh*

Olivia: 6, at home. Olivia has been working hard at learning to read. She's got a list of 22 words she can fluently read and is excellent with sounding out phonetic words. She is confused over a lot of the English rules, but they ARE confusing.

Olivia took, and failed, swimming lessons last spring. I am very glad she failed as she didn't do well enough to pass. She practised hard over the summer though and I have no worries that she will easily pass this spring.

Olivia joined soccer last year and just loved it! Her favorite position is defence and even got a Player of the Game award for her defensive skills. She can't wait to join again this summer.

She is still excelling in math. She is flying through her Gr. 1 work and will easily be into Gr. 2 work before the school year is done. She loves doing Khan Academy like Brianna.

We chopped off all her hair last year from being almost to her butt. She wanted it "short like Daddy". We convinced her to get a cute bob with bangs. Not good enough, she still wanted it shorter. She now has a short pixie cut, which she loves.

Olivia has started learning French. Brianna's Rosetta Stone requires fluent reading so for now, we'll just be working on the basics. Brianna is doing a lot of the teaching. Olivia can't wait to use Rosetta Stone too!

While Brianna was doing her NaNoWriMo, Olivia decided to write a book as well. She drew pictures then dictated to me what to write. She's not quite done yet but she's done really well so far!

She also lost her first tooth (and now 2nd)! It had been wiggly for a while and the adult tooth was even growing in behind it, but she was very worried about pulling it out. Finally when it was barely hanging on by a thread, she let me pull it out.

Joshua: 2.5, at home. Joshua is not doing tot school yet (though he probably could!). He is mute. No particular reason for it. He checks out medically, has perfect hearing and is at average or is advanced for normal toddler development. Except in speech. Because of this, we are holding off potty training and schooling until we can get some better communication, which is our current focus.

He is excelling in sign language. He consistently uses 22 signs on his own and is learning many more. The girls are also using/learning sign language with him. We (Lee and I) are currently in a parent to child class and after that we'll be doing further speech therapy with Joshua.

Eventually we'll care about school for him. Right now, him being able to communicate is our number 1 priority. He's only 2, we're not worried about the rest.

Lee and I: As we're fairly open about, you may know that Lee has Generalized Anxiety Disorder. On average, it's well controlled. Sometimes he has bad days, some times he has really bad days. Last spring he had several bad months. He was actually so bad he was off work for 5 months. It was hard for everyone, most of all him. He was raised in a "man-up" generation and has always had a hard time dealing with feeling out of control or depressed. With a LOT of support, he made it through. He's back to work, though his first month was really rough, but now is going great.

Towards the end of his time off, we went on our long planned cross-Canada road trip for his best friend's wedding, in which he was the Best Man. It was so awesome to get away, just the 2 of us. We missed the kids like crazy, but thankfully Skype kept us in touch. I'll have a big blog post about this trip later.

I have been busy with my business. I've been trying out new fabrics and techniques in me sewing to try to get past that "beginner-novice" title. It's been surprisingly easy in some areas, and really tough in others.

My grandma died just before Christmas. She'd been struggling with various health problems for years and open heart surgery (which completely fixed her heart!) seems to have sped up some other issues. The girls, Olivia in particular, took it really hard. It makes me sad that Joshua will never really know her. It makes me sad that we don't get to see her any more. But I'm glad that she's not struggling with her health any more.