Mom & Pop Home School

So, no I did not fall off the face of the earth. I just took a bit of a burnout break there for awhile. Hey, it happens, ya know? But life at Mom and Pop’s keeps on a-keepin’ on. With a vengeance. In the interest of getting up to speed while maintaining a reasonable level of brevity, I offer this list:

• Sunshine has been diagnosed with ADHD (combined inattentive/hyperactive subtype). WHEEE! Yes, this IS my cheerful, cooperative, easygoing, laid back child—which kinda puts things into perspective in a way. The “easy” child is the one riddled with ADHD. Who knew?
• As a result of this (and several other factors), we decided to home school Sunshine as well, so now I have two students. I fully admit that this had me moderately terrified all summer, but now that we’re a few weeks in, it is really going amazingly well. Yay!
• Cricket is really becoming a mature, responsible, independent, helpful young man. I can not even believe the difference between this boy and the one I originally brought home from school. I also can not believe he’s a seventh grader!
• This summer I published a course guide for secular middle school level physical science. It gave me quite a feeling of accomplishment and made science much easier to pull off at my house too. And even though I didn’t get it online and on the market until just before time for school to start, a few people have even bought it. Yay! Hopefully it makes their lives easier too. I’m thinking I’ll do another one for next year. I have not yet begun the project, but I’m thinking in the direction of a 9th grade level biology course. If you know of fabulous resources for that, I’m all ears (but don’t make promises to use your suggestions in the course guide, sorry).
• Also over the summer we have done paperwork, training, safety inspections and so forth for our foster license to be renewed. Things being what they are around here we’ve decided to expand our “preferences” to include foster care as well as ‘adoptive only’ placements. We’ve had several close calls, but still no actual placements. We are currently in pre-placement limbo with a cute 5 year-old girl. This time it’s gone as far as actually meeting her, her foster mom, and her birth mom, and we have an appointment tomorrow to review her file. It will likely be a while yet before we know anything definite.

And that about sums up the excitement around here.