Beginning of the end... of the first week

 School, day 5.
My mornings have been starting with laughter.
As soon as Sam is out the door, Aurora wants my attention. Never mind that Tom is still here, some days. She comes in and chatters at me in doggy words. I swear, she can almost say her name!
"Au rooo rah" will be part of the string of little yips, barks, and whines. She nibbles at me, paws me, and "talks". It doesn't matter if I am in bed or out. (It also doesn't matter what TIME it is. So far as I can tell, what matters is that Sam has driven away.)

We have quite a curriculum this year. Mostly Sonlight, with Saxon Math, and Pace Spelling. Grammar Ace; Duo Lingo Japanese; a basic sign language course, and on-line Mandolin lessons.  We have American Heritage Girls starting weekly in September. I had thought I could come out less expensive on Sonlight's heavily literatured History curriculum- which is the backbone of their program- by purchasing the readers second hand. This didn't work out so well for the teacher's manual! The copy I got was 20 years old. The readers I had already purchased from the current book list didn't match up. So I now have the brand new teacher's guide on its way. I also discovered that the Sonlight Language Arts course had its OWN list of readers, in addition to the History readers. Our school days look to be VERY full.

My friend Lori and I are already working on a Homeschool group. It has fallen together more by accident than design. Our first gathering will be at Lori's on Sept. 8th. We look to have a diverse age group, so hope all the personalities will mesh well. Lori and I met at our library's summer reading program about three years ago, and were both on the library's original Homeschool group planning panel.

Aside from learning I was NOT completely prepared for our first week back to school, things have gone fairly well. No outright tantrums on either part. I was having a personal meltdown yesterday when trying to deal with the USPS website to file a damage claim... and Nickole wisely decided it was a good time for her to go outside and save her questions for later. (Seriously?... you have < TWO minutes before the USPS claims page decides you are dormant and logs you off? I was scanning documents to upload to their site. It logged me off, NOT saving any of the information I had already entered! I had to start over THREE times before I found the SAVE button, which does save your work, but puts you back to the log in page every time. At least I wasn't starting from scratch every time afterwards!)

I am mixing up what subject we start with each day. We don't do every subject every day. But we will probably do SOME subjects every day.
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Still having to can tomatoes at least every other day. I began drying peppers yesterday- four full trays.
Today will be tomatoes again.
Lori and I hope to get together next week and make tamales. I have a huge pork roast that needs to be used.
This day to day dull routine of dealing with school, garden, and home are what I have been missing.