Ryan & Erinn's Family: Lasts, Firsts, and Lots of Randomness

We'll start with the "last" thing. At the end of February, my kids went to their last Celebration of Learning at the charter school. I'd been looking for a solution to our over-scheduled life, and decided that doing two school programs was too much. We didn't have time for any fun family activities, which were supposedly the reason we were homeschooling in the first place! Since Connor and Elise were gone two days a week, our together time was just me trying to cram in academics. We decided to keep the private school because it requires a lot less volunteer and paperwork time, and because it is more academic, and covers stuff I'd have a hard time doing at home.

One thing I will really miss, though, are the Passion Projects the kids display at Celebration of Learning. They've been a great vehicle for my kids to explore stuff they're interested in, and then teach it to others. We're going to keep this a part of our kids' educations by getting together with our friends for presentations every few months.

This semester Connor decided to study Crystals and Gems. We visited the display at the Natural History Museum, read books, and went digging for Tourmaline in Orange County.

Elise wanted to learn about the body. We got her a cool squishy visible man, also read a lot of books, and went to see the Bodies exhibit in Vegas.

I hand-drew all those internal organs. It took every speck of artistic ability I have.

Elise's "Do One Thing" (D.O.T.) to make her community better. She was too shy to say it, though.

On March second, we gave Corinne her first solid food. I decided to go with sweet potatoes since my other kids all loved them, and it was a good choice. She meekly let me put a little on her tongue, tasted it for a minute, then lunged forward for more. It was the fastest I ever saw a baby latch on to a new food!

After about a month of vegetables, I tried her on oatmeal with disastrous results. She screamed for half the night (while our friends were babysitting her, of course,) then had an upset stomach the next day. I tried a couple weeks later - same thing. The third time I tried oatmeal was in mid-April, and it made her puke like crazy. I guess she doesn't do oats, poor girl!

On a related note, Elise has been breaking out in these horrible itchy rashes every couple of weeks. We took her for allergy testing, but she came back negative on everything, including the most common food allergies (milk, eggs, wheat, peanuts..) A visit to a fourth doctor suggested that it might be an allergy to a less common food, and we suspect strawberries, since she had a bowl of these right before the most recent flare-up. Three weeks without strawberries saw no rashes, but when I gave her a berry yesterday she had no reaction. I guess we'll just have to watch and wait, and keep track of what she eats. Or maybe try lots of strawberries . . .

Allergy Test. Surprisingly, the red dots are still considered negative results.

So now to Evan's food issues: I came outside one day to see him eating this. I started racking my brain to figure out where he had gotten such a huge cheese stick (his favorite snack.) Then I realized it wasn't cheese. He threw up in the car later that afternoon.

Mmmm, buttery.

In January of last year (2012), Connor set a goal to read the Book of Mormon by the time he turned eight. A couple of kids he knew had done it, and (with encouragement from Ryan and I,) he decided to give it a try. For over a year, off and on, he worked at it, coloring each page he read in a little chart-book I found online. The day before his birthday, he read the last page. We were pretty proud of him. I'm actually amazed at what a fast reader he is. He kind of gulps pages (just like Ryan does), so I don't think his retention is that good, but he absorbed enough to mention things he had read to me. I'm still jealous, though. I'm the slowest reader ever.