2019

Currently all five us us are wearing matching plaid pajamas and the kids are laughing and shrieking their way through a MarioKart race. They plan to stay up until midnight, but they do not like watching the Times Square countdown party. They just want to play video games until it's obscenely late and then go outside and bang pots and pans together. I'm not sure how my neighbors will feel about this, so I might have to veto that last part.

I just scrolled back to the start of this blog and read all of the year end posts. Things have changed a lot since 2006!

Spiral Jetty, UT

2019 has been a wild ride. We finally bought a road-worthy camper and spent about 12 weeks in it this year, traveling through 23 states on several different trips. We love a good road trip and this one was full of excitement like forest fires, a car break-in, unseasonably cold temperatures, and even an earthquake. Also, beautiful scenery, visits with friends, junior ranger badges, sunsets on the beach, aquarium visits, giant trees, bison, meeting campground friends, and sharing way too many jerky sticks.  This trip had some highs and lows. The hardest thing was probably balancing the work-from-road and the driving with the needs of our kids, which turned out to be...not driving so much. They like the stopping part a lot more.

We started homeschooling our kids. This has been a huge shift for everyone, but an overall positive change for our family. Everyone is getting better sleep and exercise and way more outdoor time. I'm confident that they are keeping pace academically. Marko learned to read really fluently in the last few months. Even Max is starting to read a little. Laurel just took an online class and she enjoyed the format a lot, so I think we might try some more of this style.

Marko tried kung fu for about six months, but he decided to switch to gymnastics recently. Laurel went to sleep away Girl Scout camp for the second time and she moved up to Juniors. She rides horses whenever she can get to the stables. M's grandmother died and we gathered with all of his aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time in many years. I started working with my aunt and uncle at their restaurant (as a cook!) and the kids usually go to my parents' house while I do that. I love that they have the opportunity to spend time with their grandparents and also get a taste of that running free through the backyard kind of suburban life. We met up with my friend Leah and her family for another successful Pennsylvania cabin vacation. We babysat some guinea pigs.

Photo Credit Jennifer Kamienski

M did some running this year, naturally.  (I can't even remember what he was like before he started running.) His favorite races this year were Hyner and World's End, and I would have to say these were also the most fun for our family. We also went to the Vermont 100, and M finished it and got his buckle, but the heat was brutal.  M and some of the kids ran an aid station at the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge. We have lots of friends in the running community now so going to these races has a very social feel to it. It's also so much easier to cart along three kids now that everybody is out of diapers and naps. It helps that they love going to races. Endless snacks + M is easily convinced to stop for ice cream for up to a week afterwards.

On the GAP.

I turned 40 this year and did a solo bicycle trip from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, something that has been on my bucket list forever. It was a really fun trip and my 5 day itinerary was just challenging enough for me, although I would have put fatter tires on my bike for the C&O portion of the trip. I had great weather and met some cool people on the trail. My dad biked down to meet me for the last stretch into Pittsburgh and that was pretty awesome. Traveling alone is so different, but I loved it and I am planning to do more bike trips like this. There is actually a trail in Missouri with my name on it. Literally!

So that's what I can remember from 2019. I wish I'd written about it more as it was happening. I hope my kids will remember the good parts. I am aiming for 2020 to be even better.

Homeschool Update December

We just finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, using the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer to study literary devices, vocabulary, capitalization and dialogue markers. I was happy (but not surprised) to see that Marko was able to follow the story and the activities even though the guide is for grades 3-5. I have to modify his writing to what the guide calls "Jot It Down" - which basically means he has great ideas and I should just write them for him, unless he grabs the pencil away from me and wants to write independently. This would be impossible in a classroom setting, but it works quite well at home. I'm saving these drafts in the hopes that they will look impressive next to whatever he will be able to produce on his own by June. Focus on progress. To get through this book, I borrowed an audio copy of the book from the library and we listened to it in the car. Nobody talks or fights because they want to hear the story, although Max falls asleep, more often than not. Our next book is Artemis Fowl and now that I know how these Arrow guides work, I think we'll be going a lot deeper with it.

We have still been plugging through the Spectrum math workbooks and alternating that with Khan Academy. Marko just needs to keep practice sums/differences to 100, but Laurel is going to get into geometry and is going to need a lot of instruction for that. I'm going to take a break from the workbooks and Khan until January and just play games.

I got a bunch of the Girl Scout Badges that we probably aren't going to do with our troop and Laurel is going to work through some of those to meet her social studies/civics standards.

We've been watching a lot of Crash Course World Mythology videos, singing along to holiday songs, and doing some HIIT inside because it's super cold and gloomy outside all the time. Youtube makes it so easy right now and I'm sure it's going to be either riddled with ads or require a subscription before long.