Accomplishment! And Loneliness..

Wow, have we had a productive day. Colwyn was really in a mood to do schoolish stuff, so he did about five or six workbook pages. In addition to the usual matching ones and mazes, he also did a few that involved circling the face with the appropriate emotion for a situation pictured, and one where he looked at a picture, then chose between two other pictures which one led to the original picture happening. If that makes sense. So, anyway, instead of the usual fine motor and math skills, he also worked on cause and effect, prediction, and social/emotional skills.

He also asked to play Reader Rabbit.. something I should let him do more often, but neither of us ever really think of it. He has so much fun with that game. Aside from the hand-eye coordination needed for using the mouse, he also worked on matching shapes and letters, and a few other miscellaneous games.

Then we worked on a few projects for Grandma's birthday coming up (sorry, can't mention them until after her birthday!). When the kids woke up from their naps, we took them out to Barnes & Noble, since the library was closed. I found a bunch of great books in the bargain section, including Mo Willem's Leonardo The Terrible Monster. We also picked up one of Laura Numeroff's books, and a dinosaur book from the "Let's Read and Find Out" series. What else.. oh! We got a new Kumon book of mazes and also a book of 1000 French Words or somesuch.

I'm hoping to introduce Colwyn to French sometime in the next few days, depending on when I have time to sit down and concentrate with him. He already knows a good number of signs, so he has the concept of multiple ways to communicate an idea. Hopefully that'll help when we start talking about French.

I know Spanish would be a lot more useful, but I remember quite a lot of French from the 7+ years I took in public school and college. A good part of teaching kids a foreign language is using it with them, and I don't really feel up to learning a new language along with them. At least I know that if I stumble across a word I don't know, I should at least know how to pronounce it.

The downside to today was that I spent a good portion of the kids' naptime looking for prospective homeschooling groups online. It sure is lonely being a mom of a homeschooled preschooler. It seems like either everyone else is sending their kids to preschool, or if they're not, they will be in the future. Those few people who say that they're planning on homeschooling are typically not very committed to it, which means that there really aren't any co-ops for kids Colwyn's age. I'm sure there are preschoolers in families where older children are being homeschooled, but those kids probably just get dragged along to the big kids' stuff, and their parents don't really feel the need for them to have their own activities. Which I totally get, but in the meantime, it sucks for us.

I started researching homeschooling over a year and a half ago, and I've gone through my phases of being overwhelmed and backing out of it. But now I'm pretty damn confident in our decision. While I still get overwhelmed sometimes and wonder how we'll handle some things, I know that it'll work out in the end, and that our family will be better for homeschooling. I guess that's kind of atypical.