Whew, made it through week two!

Yay!  With a full dose of Tylenol and Advil in me (STILL stupid neck) we made it through the last day of the second week of homeschool intact!

There was some initial resistance to morning circle this morning, but strangely enough giving him a pipe cleaner to fiddle with helped focus him and concentrate on circle time... Note to self, get more fiddlely stuff!  Also, maybe a weighed lap pillow to hold?  Anyway, made it through morning circle, and through our first project of the day, growing Lima beans... Fingers crossed, because I've had these Lima beans FOREVER, and I have no idea if they'll work or not.

Also started the flowers in our aero garden.  Max loved this one, because he got to stick his fingers in the water reservoir and watch the water trickle down inside.. More pics of this as they grow hopefully!

We had ABA after lunch, so we only had morning school today.  I am debating next week whether to do a "clocks and timekeepers" theme or "backyard birds".  We shall see!

I need a new neck!

This will be a relatively short post as I am in immense pain today.  Stupid neck.

Anyway, I think max can sense I'm not operating at full snuff because he was even harder than normal to herd around today.  So not just herding cats, more like slippery cats who got into too much catnip.  By sheer force of will and a hastily drawn visual schedule for the trip I managed to get him to the co-op to buy seeds for our garden.  We made a lovely picture shopping list though:

In retrospect it would have been wiser to limit the list to about 5 vegetables, as he lost patience with it after about that many.  I'll try and remember that next time.

We also did some flower tinting, which FYI does not work too well with roses, apparently they are too sensitive to capillary changes and stop sucking up water if you poke at them too much.  Which of course is what we did.  Much better luck with the carnations!

Delightfully literal... Also, bubble wrap!

I get such a kick out of maxs literal mind sometimes.  This morning, as we were doing our opening verse for circle time, there is a line that says "I jump to the light".  Now in true Waldorf style this opening verse is all about waking up and jumping to the light of a new day.. But I realized that when max does this he is very clearly looking at the ceiling lights in his playroom!   I find it so amusing that he doesn't even question whether or not this is what I meant.

School went pretty well today, although it is really hard to keep him focused.  He likes the songs and story time, and usually I can lead right into our morning project from there, but getting him back after any amount of free play time is difficult.  Although I did discover that if I just start setting up the morning art project he eventually gets interested and has to know what I am doing.  I think this May be the approach to take going forward.

Our seeds, plants and vegetables week is going well, we made an alfalfa seed sprouting jar and hand print tulips.

Here are pictures of both the alfalfa seeds and our tulips:

I hope tomorrow to help him set up one of our aero gardens to grow some flowers.  The only problem with this theme is the results of our projects won't be seen for a few days to a week.  I am hoping this will come through as a lesson in delayed gratification, once he realizes there are results!

In other news, I've decided that I should probably find some bubble wrap and just wrap myself up in it for the next couple of days.  In addition to my neck still being very painful from whatever the heck I did to it the other night, I managed to kneel on one of maxs metal trains this morning (ouch) and then I smacked that same knee on the kitchen table at lunch (double ouch), then a couple of minutes later stubbed my toe on the coffee table (triple ouch) and THEN as we were leaving for whole children I smacked my hand on the doorway (ouch four times!).   So, like I said, bubble wrap!

Week two!

Week two begins!

Brought max to OT this morning, and he absolutely loves it.  What's not to love... It's like little boy heaven.  Trapeze, swings, zip line into a ball pit... I wonder if they rent this place for birthday parties?    He spent the car ride home redesigning our living room for the addition of a zip line.   I felt bad having to tell him no.

After lunch we had an abbreviated "afternoon circle" and started our first project for the new weekly theme "plants, seeds and vegetables".  I am hoping that this will spark some interest in a few weeks when we start seedlings for the garden.  Max had great fun planting the spider plant baby I had put aside a couple of weeks ago.

We didn't really attempt much after that, I managed to throw my neck out while sleeping the other night and he was real beat after OT this morning.  So we played with Legos and watched some magic school bus.

Here are the books we will be using this week:

Herding Cats, an excercise in barely contained chaos...

AKA how our yoga class went this morning.

It really was ridiculous. There were about 14 of us (half kids and half moms) all trying to wrangle our kids into yoga poses when all they wanted to do was run around the room and make towers out of the yoga blocks. Everyone was constantly getting up trying to keep their kids from either 1) making a break for it out into the hallway, 2) killing themselves by stacking up and jumping off the yoga blocks, 3) running across everyone's mats to look out the giant windows to watch the cars go by, or other such typical kid antics.

 The poor teacher was trying desperately to get the kids to put on their "big Ganesha elephant listening ears" and go back to their mats, but they were having none of it.

 So I guess the good news is that Max fit right in! That being said, I'm not sure its a good environment to bring him back to. He very quickly reverted to his overwhelmed stimming behavior, which in a group of 2-3 year olds doesn't get us that wtf hairy eyeball look, but its still not a good zone for max to be in. I doubt there will be much actual yoga done by anyone in the class. I might give it a couple of weeks, everyone always seems to show up on the first day of class, but usually you can count on at least half the kids being absent for some reason after that.

 Also, max was very adorable during "rest pose" and snuggled right up to me with a blanket on top of us.

 Also also, max starts OT/sensory integration therapy next week and I am interested to see if there is any improvement in his ability to handle these types of situations.

Also also also, it gets us out of the house, right??

 In other news, my husband got me this kick ass print he found on someone's esty page... Crap... I just realized I have no idea how to upload a picture to this blog... Ummm... I'll get back to you...

And here it is!

I'm hip, I'm with it, tucka tucka tucka...

Okay, I think I finally got the hang of how much stuff to plan for today. In addition to morning circle, we read one book, had a lesson project, had some freeplay time and two art projects. The marble painting went over especially well. I basically took some squishy rubber marbles I had found at target, put some blops of paint around the edges and let max go nuts rolling them all around his finger painting tray. Fun in and of itself, but really nice as a sensory exercise too.

Our yoga practice keeps devolving into huge amounts of silliness. Boat pose becomes us riding the rapids and falling down waterfalls. Cat pose became a re-enactment of a you tube video of cats trying to run on a treadmill and max and I falling off the end of our yoga mats. Somehow tree pose became max deciding to try and chop me down with his leg...So, ahem, I'm hoping that this class on Friday knows what it's in for.

Also, according to both max and my husband, the yoga card I made for max's visual schedule looks like a giraffe pooping... I get no respect! Lol

Here is a close up of max's visual calendar (since I only just found out how to upload pictures to this blog, the schedule that's up there is obviously not for this post!  Sorry you'll just have to deal without seeing my giraffe poop card!):

I think I need that remote from the Beyond section of bed bath and beyond...

Ok, day two. I think I am finding the flaw in all of my prepping thus far... We blew threw everything I had written out in like 1 hour... Even with our late start today, I was done with everything before lunch time...

Crap.

Winnie the Pooh to the rescue. God he loves that movie and we had soooo much time to kill before his sensory class at WC today. I always feel bad sticking him in front of the TV, but I needed some time to figure out what the hell to do about this.

Also, a word of advice, probably not the best idea to tell a Winnie the Pooh obsessed child that you can knit him a pooh bear toy... Or you might end up on a website in the UK called cabbage patch treasures downloading 9 pages of out of print vintage Disney knitting patterns in pounds sterling... Just saying.

For your entertainment here is a picture of our circle time area:

So, that went well?

Captains log stardate 84321.3

Landed on planet homeschooling this morning. The single native on the planet appears to be a young boy about 5 earth years old. Attempted what I am told is the customary greeting in these parts, something called the hokey pokey, the planet native hid behind a chair and refused to come out until I stopped singing...

Ok ok, don't worry I'm not going to do the whole thing in mock captains log! If you hadn't guessed already I'm somewhat of a sci fi geek. I hope someone out there will get that from the title of my blog (all three of you who are not my husband who are probably reading this). Anyway, that was about the reaction I got to morning circle this morning. It's funny, max (that's my son)has no problem when folks sing and dance in his class at WC, but MAN mommy gets on the mic and forget it. Am I that bad a singer? The rest of circle time went pretty well and we got through half of the story time book before max decided barrel rolling across the floor was more fun than the ABCs of Yoga.

So I should probably mention my current plan is weekly themes, and our first week theme is Yoga and Meditation. I (hopefully not foolishly) signed us up for a mommy and me yoga class starting this Friday, and was hoping a whole week of prep would help ease into the class. But between my almost complete lack of flexibility and max's very short attention span, this could be a disaster. Here's hoping.

Anyway, we got through some actual poses and max even made up one he called "train pose" (which involved running circles around his train table pretending to toot our whistles, not sure if the yoga teacher on Friday will appreciate that one). Things were going swimmingly, and then I goofed, big time. I had been so careful in my prep, planning everything out in neat lines on my new organizer.
 And then I forgot it was Martin Luther king day. And took him to the library. Which was closed. On Martin Luther king day. I lured him out of the house with promises of new books and seeing the fish in the big tank and all the toys and art supplies. And the damn place was locked up tighter than a drum. Annnnd cue the epic meltdown. So I'm carrying my melting puddle of meltiness back to the car and managed to salvage the day by finding an overpriced toy store and buying a guilt present for him. Oh well, he got a new box of duplos out of the deal, so in the end he was happy.. Although for the entire rest of the day he kept telling everyone in the family how the library door was locked and I didn't have a key!

Addendum:  I've decided to start adding pictures of the projects and materials we are using, mostly so I don't forget what we did and have an easy way to look it up!  This will probably be in the form of a weeks end post.

This is a picture of our yoga mats!:

This week we worked on yoga and meditation, here is a picture of maxs meditation cushions and Tibetan singing bowl:

This week the books we used were as follows: