Somehow, it's not the relaxing tropical vacation it was when we were renting next door, and I'm not too sad to be going back to the cold windy prairie of Alberta soon. But of course I will miss Vanuatu, but we will come back.
We will be able to finish the construction with fresh eyes and in the meantime, it will be JUST my little family, and hopefully we will quickly move into a house in the town of Cardston, and be two seconds from the grocery store and a dollar store.
But we will be leaving many great things. Like climbing pohpoh trees
And making tropical gardens:
And ziplining:
And going to places like Chocolate factories:
And SWIMMING WITH HUGE SEA TURTLES!
And going to colour festivals held by white sandy beaches:
I'm not sharing this on Facebook, but just so you know, the day of the color festival, was the day Dustin sold his business. It was quite the momentous occasion of his life: Like-next to marriage, kids, and baptism, this was the next big thing-type of big.
I'm very proud of him, and I had to shout it out SOMEWHERE that we've reached the goals we've been shooting for!
But reaching humongous goals is kind of crazy, isn't it? There's all this stress and hype leading up to it, and then when you're there, it's like "Okay, well, have we arrived? What's changed?"
It will be good to go back to Cardston and be in the same city as his business partner (sold the child but kept the marriage I guess you can say.)
As for school, I feel so accomplished if I actually get to everything on my kids' progress charts, and that only covers reading writing and arithmetic. I SWEAR I'M NOT LAZING AROUND! It's just really is a mad house here.
Hyrum LOVES his chart and is constantly looking at it and has BREEZED his way to his first prize while his brothers aren't even close. He is reading a ton and writing a ton. I'm not sure if people out there will apreciate this video, but my ten year old with severe dyslexia, ADHD, language processing disorder, and a few other conditions, has gotten over the hump in reading. He can read smoothly.
It's a true breakthrough. (although, noticed how he keeps saying "the" for "he?" a new glitch. I know he'll be okay now. It's been YEARS of consistent tutoring, baby steps that take hundreds of hours, and his mother's (my) tears to get to this point.
Thankfully, because of homeschool, he has no idea that he's behind and is confident and has a high self-esteem.
Maxwell's basics have been going a bit slow because of slow internet. That is one thing I won't miss about this place.
But on the days it works, this math program has proven to be dry but good. They have focused on the "Mathematical Language" which, in my mind, is one of the most important things that can be learned in math.
William is making progress. Have I mentioned yet that although he doesn't have all of issues Hyrum has, William certainly has ADHD and is probably my most severe Dyslexic boy yet? Yep. Those DNA codes are strong with us. I have to admit that I haven't told Dustin that I want to put him in public kindergarten yet. (Dustin never reads my blog LOL!)
Maybe they have some secret sauce to help William. But he's learning with me anyway:
william
That was William typing his name. He's sitting at my side right now because he got a bonk on his head and refuses to go to bed.
I've also been teaching other people besides my kids. I've been going to the tutoring sessions our church holds after school here. In the past, the LDS church has held english lessons for locals, but now they are trying out tutoring in a hope to get kids ready for a GED equivalency.
It's a pilot program, and I've discovered that I'm a true homeschooler. I was way annoyed at a few things that happened while volunteering, but everyone was super nice, and we all made peace quickly, but hey, if I can't even deal with this, I would have never made it as a public school mom. Or at least I wouldn't make it NOW.
Eventually, I found my nitch of playing math games from Rightstart with the kids.
We also have been volunteering in the relief efforts for the Ambae Vanuatu Volcano refugees. It's almost calmed down now, but their volcano dropped acid ash on all their crops and ruined all their water as well. They all had to leave. So we helped them with some supplies:
Volcanic activity really went well with our Geography year. (ummm....not that I'm cashing in at other's expense.) Along with the earthquakes that we've been feeling from the volcanic activity! And the other things we've done to study Geography so far is to study map terms like longitude, latitude, legends etc. We talked about how no map is perfect, especially a flat map of the world.
I had them make their own worlds on mandarins and had them try to make a flat map of the world with it to illustrate this point.
I also taught land formations such as archipelago, delta, and isthmus.
We've done this studying our island of Efate:
Then I had them make their own worlds where they had bays and channels etc.
We also are made 3-d relief maps that have these landforms, and we're going to paint them----sometime between now and wednesday when we fly away?
We've also memorized a few of my geography songs:
And science you ask? No science. I've been meaning to do some Southern Hemisphere Constellation stargazing, but I can hardly find the North star, and I've seen it my whole life, so how can I find NEW ones? I haven't been on the ball. We'll wait for Canada. But we haven't forgotten Canada, and to prove it, we had Canadian thanksgiving:
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