May 2021 Homeschooling in Review

May was such a busy month that I haven’t even started writing this post until it was almost over. This of course means I have no clue what I was doing for most of the month.

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Week 1

According to the pictures, all I did this week was deal with the dog and eat a Chik Fil A.

Our local Chik Fil A has finally decided to let people inside again, so of course I had to take a picture. Princess, who I’m thinking of renaming as Artist because she really dislikes the name Princess….. I’m thinking, but she said one of her leaders found out about it while at AHG and suddenly yelled out in excitement.

I wasn’t that excited, but I was glad to add another place we can eat inside when we go grocery shopping rather than sitting in the car.

I attempted to get our dog a new baby pool to play in, but this one, she destroyed within 10 minutes of getting it. Then we stopped by the pet store and got another, much cheaper but in many ways sturdier. She destroyed that one in like five minutes.

That bottom left picture is Leezard saying, “Mom, hey Mom, did you know I’m stuck outside? Can I come in?”

As to school, we were busy finishing up the year, and so it’s all boring stuff.

Week 2

Week two started off with Mother’s Day, well more or less. The kids made me some amazing cards, and Jeff got me a new set of teacups (it looks like the tea is in a heart shape). Then we went to Dave and Busters and had a blast playing all sorts of video games.

We spent Saturday playing Shadows of Brimstone, phase 3 of the last Kickstarter finally came and now we have the Forbidden Fortress town, we had a lot of fun playing a couple of adventures and going to town.

We started reading Screwtape Letters for reading this month, deviating from my book and a movie plan, but I really wanted to read this and our month was crazy enough having a fairly light book to read was a great idea. I really love the Seven Sisters lit guide for this book. I first read this back in high school and even wrote notes all over the book, and I went up to my bookshelf to find that copy to let a kiddo use it, and it wasn’t there.

Which made me sad.

We hit the end of the school year in history, which means it was time to add everyone we studied to our timeline. This sparked the usual complaints of “How do I fit it all in there?” I realized I needed to better adjust the timeline for fitting all the big deal events we talk about in our history books.

Sigh, lesson learned.

Week 3

Woot! I’ve reached the week I just finished, so I remember this one best.

We started off the week with Artist leveling up, yep I like that change, so now she’ll be Arist (though The Artist kind of works in my head). She is now officially a Patriot in American Heritage Girls, and earned her Pioneer level award, which was super hard to earn.

Here’s what she had to do in two years:

• plan two events (one just for her troop and one bigger event that can be a service project)
• Complete at least 30 hours of service (she earned over 200 hours)
• earn at least 1 badge in each frontier (for at least 6 badges)
• participate in 2 big events for AHG
• mentor a younger group
• and probably some other stuff I don’t remember

And she did it all!

Not to mention earning over 100 hours of community service, so she earned the Gold Presidential Service Award.

The very next day we headed up to Iowa to see my new nephew, he’s super cute and we spent the week playing board games and hanging out.

List of games played: Coup, Last Night on Earth, Shadows of Brimstone, Dresden Files cooperative game, Super Fight, Smash Up (Artist now wants the World Culture expansion and she’ll be willing to play it)

I got an inflatable T-Rex costume for Christmas, and the kids decided to all get their own costumes so they could surprise their aunt and uncle with our amazing rendition of “I’m a Little T-Rex” and on our way back we got pictures at all the different welcome centers, and by all I mean Texas and Missouri. It was a blast!

May 2021 week 4

This past week has been busy. I thought the week we returned from our trip was going to be calm, but apparently I was insane to think that. I really should know better by now.

BUT, the big things I remember from this week, the Artist and I went down to the Texas State Cemetery to put out flags for Memorial Day. She humored me and let me take pictures. She went from there to her Girl Leadership meeting for AHG.

The next day we got together with the cousins and Mimi to go to Mount Playmore, then afterward they followed us over to the park and joined our homeschool co-op for Park Day. Artist and her cousin spent the time walking around and talking. The boys had a GIANT mob of kids and played lots and lots of Nerf, at one point they had around 20 kids. Including the younger sister of a family from AHG. At one point she came up to me and said, “Miss Ticia, I’m playing with your boys.”

Saturday, the Artist had friends over to introduce them to Dungeons and Dragons, and they loved it. They are all insanely excited about their new characters and had so much fun with it. I’m rather amused by their excitement.

Then I spent the night playing Dominion with the boys, which was a hilarious game that had so much money in it, we bought out every single point card you could without ending the game.

Sunday we watched Oliver Twist, actually, we started off watching Oliver, and realized it was absolutely horrible, so we switched to Oliver and Company. I thoroughly enjoyed that, since I remember watching it when it first came out.

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Monday we went down to the Texas State Cemetery for their Memorial Day Ceremony, which had some really cool parts to it, and some parts to it that were a bit boring. I had three grumbly teens, but I’m glad we went.

We ended Memorial Day with everyone playing some more Dominion and then Smash Up, which Artist has decided she actually likes in moderation.

How was your May?