One More Thing...

(I wrote this April 2nd-Thursday early morning at 4:40...after a sleepless night that lead to finishing a sweet little book...)

Every now and then you have to stay up late, past your bedtime...or almost all night to read, study, (Oxford coma and yes I still use them) and write. At least I have to and haven't for quite some time so I am overdo. It makes me feel slightly more alive to feel tired from staying up too late reading, studying, and writing.

You see I should feel exhausted, and I will by about 3:00 in the afternoon, but before that I feel more alive from stretching my brain. Very awake...like I am right now...

I haven't been reading, studying, or writing much of anything lately. I have managed to start the habit of reading the scriptures before I even get out of bed in the morning. I can automatically check something off my to list and it feel magnificent. But (there is always a but) some mornings it is through such blurry eyes that not much is accomplished except the prolonging of a newly formed (or in this case rekindled) habit in which case it is a good thing.

I have done a horrible job of keeping up with Jake's school reading. I still have yet to finish Walden, although his final paper has been written, graded, and filed away (and I let him write an opinion paper because that is all I had enough of about the book to grade). But I am excited for the next book (a beloved book I have already read by one of my literary hero's C.S. Lewis. We are getting ready to start Till We Have Faces on Monday---We are actually starting it this coming Monday) and we since we abandoned the last on (Ivanhoe. I have it on good authority-the author of our Literature curriculum, Janice Campbell-that it was okay. I told her of Jake's love of reading and she said by all means move on if it wasn't catching his attention. We read almost half of it and watched the movie...and called it good!) we have got to do an extra amazing job on the next one. Funny how I am saying "we". I am the editor really. We both read (with some exceptions) the book and he writes the papers and I edit and wish he loved to write as much as I do but his mind is mathematical and scientific and as long as he knows the mechanics of what he is doing and (doesn't use as many "and"s as I am right now...) adds in the right amount of strong verbs, quality adjectives, who-which clauses, etc.; (don't judge my punctuation right now...it is too late...or early...) I will live with the fact that he has come so far. He is a boy, young man now, but when we started this whole process he was a boy. And for most boys writing is torture. Not all boys but a great majority. But we have come so far! In fact Jake had 30 minutes before bedtime that he could read and instead he choose to use half that time to write in his journal (that he found in a Rubbermaid container in the back of his closet that is full of random things that need to be sorted). That is progress! But back to what I am doing. I laid in bed for over an hour (after taking a Melatonin and going to bed at 12 something because this is Aaron's basketball night and I am a night owl so I don't go to bed if he isn't home because that is a perfect time to fill my brain with things that will keep me up at night because I can't turn my brain off!) and gave up to come out to the living room and read a book I started yesterday...well Tuesday now-two yesterdays ago...It is called Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen (book #10 for 2015! Double digits finally!). It was given to Jake by Aunt Gloria (have you read it? If not you really should because it is wonderful) and we both loved the cover and couldn't wait to read it and then life happened and we just haven't. From my spot at the dinner table I have the view of the book shelf and that book was right at eye level and has been for some time now. So, on Tuesday I finally took it off the shelf and while Jake was reading The Swiss Family Robinson (he is reading it for a classics book club a homeschooling teenage girl started at the library that meets the first Tuesday of every month...which is much more information on that topic than I needed to include), I started reading it. It is one of those books where you immediately become the main character and it makes you feel happy inside to live another life every time you open to the page you left off on to find out what you are going to do next. Well needless to say I finished it...a couple of hours ago. It is a quick read and I loved it! And after I finished it I picked up another book from the pile I had been working on this evening while both my guys were at church. You see I am preparing to be a Literature teacher...for more than just Jake. We can stumble and fumble along together at home and figure it out...but I am teaching American Literature and Composition at co-op next year so I am in study mode because I can screw up my child but I can't screw up other peoples!...(and i kind of adore it...picture me whispering this...that is why the i is lower case) and I have come up with a solution to our society's failing educational system. I have thought of this before and maybe even typed about it but it is 5:02 am so humor me...I think high schoolers should go to work-you know labor intensive jobs. The adults should go to school. I would do marvelously if I could go back to high school right now and then on to college! I would even enjoy it! Some people could go back to school quicker than others. It took me until I was 34 or 35 to really be ready to study (I am a little slow). Others would be ready much sooner. They would be the doctor, lawyer, engineer types. So basically this is a work until you are really ready to educate yourself kind of theory... But that isn't really what I am talking about here...and since I have officially lost my train of thought (if I ever had one) I will stop here for now (at 5:11am) and see if I can get a couple of hours of sleep that will inevitable just make me feel worse than if I stay up because at this point that will just be a tease...So I may read a little more and take a nap this afternoon...but I will definitely stop rambling right....nnnnnow.

Okay....so now it is days later and I think my point was that I am excited, yet nervous to be teaching
literature and comp class next year. I just started reading the books that we will be reading next year to prepare. I have my binder all set up and...a lot of work to do! We are going to be reading 5 of the 9 books from this particular curriculum and then adding a biography over Christmas break (which

for co-op starts the week of Thanksgiving and we don't go back until after New Years). This curriculum is technically for 10th graders but when you homeschool it is hard to box in to a specific grade. We are modifying it to be for 8th-10th graders. The 8th graders will just read the 6 books. But Jake (and other 9th/10th graders) will be reading all the books (except we aren't reading Moby Dick. We read the children's abridged classic version the first year we homeschooled and we aren't reading the looooonnnnngggg original. There are too many other books to read!) on their own time. We have co-op for 28 weeks so we will fit the other books in before and after co-op begins and ends. With each book we will be writing 3 papers and this curriculum has done all the hard work of gathering all the context resources. I am also going to read and study the Handbook For Writers that Excellence In Literature has created.

It is a lot of information....

And how funny is it that while I was taking pictures I flipped right too something I over use and use incorrectly just because I can (since this is my blog and I like to throw in comma's whenever I pause in my brain)!..Comma placement. Not a coincidence...

I am sure I will have more on this later...And maybe it won't be me randomly typing in the middle of the night. Which means the odds that it make sense will go up!

We spent Saturday (March 28th....I thought I posted this but I guess I just saved it!) morning cleaning out the laundry room, which had become the catch all storage area. It is off the carport (not in the house) so I have been nervous that I would walk in and finding a critter in there. Especially since we junked it up and gave them lots of places to hid. I have been jamming a towel under the door so that it made it harder for anything to get in...

We moved the washer and dryer and found tons of mouse poop. We also found a stash of acorn shells (just the shell-they had been eaten) under the dryer. When we moved in there was a gross rug that for some reason we never took out-but it is gone now and it is pretty obvious that mice have been residing there for years.

I don't like mice. They are gross and dirty and for some reason they scare me. I also don't like mice because snakes eat mice. So if mice are residing in my laundry room a snake may decide to visit...Well the chance of that happening now has increased substantially because Aaron is awesome. After we emptied it and swept and cleaned it I went to the movies with my mom and Aunt Sheila to see Cinderella (which is very good by the way) and Aaron dropped Jake off at his friend Ethan's birthday party (they went to CiCi's pizza, the movie to see Home and then back to Ethan's house where I picked Jake up at almost 10 that evening. It was another sleepover). While we were gone he built a threshold.