Worst Week of My Life

Wow. A lot has happened since last time I wrote, and almost none of it good.

I went to Mexico with Dustin's whole business.

The trip started out magical. Kissing Dolphins magical:

But quickly things changed. I found out my brother had suddenly died.

I knew I needed to be by my mom's side ASAP. So I schedule the next flight from Mexico to Buffalo NY.

But before I left, some really bad news came in about Dustin's business. It all got resolved, and everything's fine now, but for that whole week, I thought the worst case scenario was happening.

Then dumb things happened like passport and drivers licence mixups.

Then of course it was a few days of mournful stress.

Then I said things to one of my brothers I really regret.

Then one of my sisters said things I really regret.

Then, on my drive home from the airport, I find out that I'm getting sued for a car accident that happened a year ago, and they lied about what happened.

SO yeah. Worst. Week. Of. My. Life.

And of course no school happened.

Actually my niece watched my kids, and they all got dental work while I was gone. I thought that going to the dentist would be a good thing since I hate taking the time out of school to get those kinds of things done. So they were productive while I was gone.

Before I left, we weren't getting as much school done as I would've liked. But I did get the house looking awfully perrrrrty:

Also, it was Maxwell's birthday:

And now. that we're back, it's been Valentines day. I made some pathetic Valentine pancakes:

But what was super cute was their art teacher had them create their own Valentines. This was Hyrum's:

She said he would make a good rock album artist. Haha. 

She's awesome and has started a China culture class because that's where she went on her mission (Hong Kong.) They celebrated Chinese New Year:

I'm glad they're doing something with social studies, because it's been on the back burner for us. They  have been steadily learning countries locations and where the biggest mountains and deserts etc are, but I have plans and they aren't being carried out.

In fact they have started asking for Social Studies lessons because they miss them. That's good. right?

I can and will step up. I must.

If you haven't noticed, I'm NOT in Vanuatu like my last post said I would be. After everything that happened that infamous week, both Dustin and I had no desire to go anywhere. We put our tickets on hold.

That meant I could buckle down on getting some school done.

Math has been really hard for Hyrum lately. He's been having to cover some really hard concepts like taxes added onto the cost of purchases, finding the area when the width and length are in decimals, and changing fractions into decimals and percents. 

I haven't been as patient as I could be with him going through this learning curve, and I really need to work on that.

Daniel's math has been pretty tricky lately too since he is now doing multiple digit multiplication. But we're getting it done.

Maxwell's done with his first part of Video Text. There are six parts, which means that he will be ready for the ACT in two and a half years if he goes at this pace. 

And William is doing great at Math lately. He ALMOST has his "Yellow is the Sun" memorized.

Which means he's doing addition like 5+3=8. Incidentally, he can also do 50+30=80.

And English? Well, as for Hyrum and Daniel, we continue to do daily reading, and Barton is finally part of our routine. They write journals every day and do spelling everyday, but that's usually on scraps of paper, and I don't really have proof for Westwind.

William is really getting his letter sounds down and is learning to write his lowercase letters. I've been thinking that since he's a summer birthday I might not put him in first grade next year. I think that will help in any standardized thing that he might be involved in. Remember how I said he's my most dyslexic to date? Yeah.

And Maxwell. he's been doing spelling and and typing and I have him write and I've tried a bit of Good and the Beautiful, but I know it's not enough.  I've been thinking that having him record his thoughts, write down what he said, and then we go through it until it's perfect, is a good course of action.

For instance, he got a Hardy Boys book from Westwind and read it in one day. I asked him to record a summary about the book, and He's been writing it out from his recording. I'll post it here when it's perfect. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I think I'll have him type it from his paper.

And for science. I did not do science the week I came back since I was suffering from PTSD, but this week we did.

We learned more about what made up the earth. We talked about the crust, mantle, and core. we talked about insides make up, we talked bout the rock cycle. We talked about the magnetic properties (again....I feel like we've talked a lot about that this year!) And we made our own compasses as part of this.

SO that's it! There's something reassuring about doing our school schedule. During that horrific week, it felt like the Universe was out to get me, and that things kept on being hurled at me, but when I got back home, the rhythm was good. Kind of like nothing crazy would happen because we were just doing our usual thing. That was good.