Weekly Report: Days 18-27

The last few weeks have been busy and eventful for us.  First, Daddy was out of town for the whole month except two days for Ellie's birthday.  He was doing a rotation for school three hours away and had to work every day. While he was gone, I had full reign of the girls, including an ER trip for Adelaide for nursemaid's elbow.  She decided to throw a little tantrum and make her legs to limp while I was holding her hand at the Botanical Garden and her little arm bone got dislocated.  I've never had to take all three girls to the ER by myself, and it isn't really an experience I hope to repeat anytime soon.  Luckily it wasn't a super pressing emergency, so I didn't have to deal with panic or too much worry.

Also, I've been crazy busy with medical residency interviews for Tyler.  The application opened up 2 weeks ago and he has already received enough interviews that we are culling them.  But I'm busy researching each program in depth, figuring out when I should schedule them, and trying to figure out traveling arrangements. It is a busy, stressful time and taking way more effort than I eventually thought it would require

On the bright side, while Daddy was out of town, we got a lot of schoolwork done. A few weeks ago I mentioned that we were already a ways behind where I wanted to be, but now we are only 1 day behind!  We've been working hard and things have been coming along quite nicely.

Reading:
Lydia continues to do wonderfully with reading.  She finished Lesson 94 today of OPGTR (out of  231 which is a 4th grade reading level).  She is about at a 2nd. grade reading level at this point, although it is hard to say for sure because most of the graded readers use a lot of sight words and Lydia's reading program is pretty strict phonics. We had a major breakthrough this week though.  I signed Lydia up for Pizza Hut's Book-It program, which started this month.  I had been giving her goals a lot of thought and decided that I would make her read a Little Bear story ("Birthday Soup"), which was 13 pages long.  She loves Little Bear, but I estimated this would take her a week or two.  Well, she sat down and read the entire story with me in one sitting because she didn't want to stop, and did a wonderful job of it!  She stayed up past bedtime because she was doing so well and then we went and got her pizza that night.  She was so proud of herself and so incredibly focused.  I guess I'll have to make a more ambitious goal for next month.  Maybe three Little Bear stories.

Math Time

Math:
Lydia is about 30 pages into Math Mammoth and is doing well.  She's also finished several pages of Miquon.  She really enjoys math, but there's not much to say about it at this point.  Oh, Eleanor has been joining us for math time and playing with the c-rods.  Lydia was about three years old when she started getting familiar with the rods, and Eleanor really likes them.  The difference in how they play with them cracks me up.  Lydia made trains out of them.  Eleanor makes them be a family or princesses and a castle.  Funny kiddos.

Spelling/Handwriting:
We just keep doing the next thing with these and there isn't much to report at the moment.

Memorization:
Lydia finished "Knight-in-Armour" followed by "Dora Diller" and has just started the 5th Article of Faith.  We are also up to 30 items on our timeline.  The girls love the timeline and try to get me to add a new one every day.  They are both keeping up and love telling me all the ones they've learned during mealtimes.  The girls also continue to make connections because of it too.  This week, Daddy read them Gilgamesh the King and the story started by saying he was king of Mesopotamia and both girls got very excited because they recognize Mesopotamia.  They now can tell you that Gilgamesh was king of Mesopotamia. That fact would have gone right over them if they weren't already familiar with Mesopotamia.  Yay, for mental pegs!