November 11, 2019
Figment's health continues to decline. This morning, he was completely unable to breathe from his nose and was mouth breathing only (not a good sign for a cat). We're still giving him antihistamine pills to try and keep any nasal swelling down, and when he develops too much mucus, we're using an infant aspirator to try and make it so he can breathe. At this point, there's not much we can do except make him comfortable. Right now he's curled up in an Ikea bin where he's been all day, just resting.
To start the transition process, we've been looking to adopt another four-feet into the family. Our original thought was a dog, because Lily's top concern is having an animal that's a bit more playful than a senior kitty and a middle-aged and lazy kitty. So far we haven't had much luck finding a dog that is under 30 pounds (so it can be picked up and carried when needed into the bathtub or whatever) that is good with cats, and safe around children. In fact, it seems that it's very unusual to find a rescue organization that has smaller dogs that are okay with kids. We aren't really interested in going with a breeder because we don't want to contribute to puppy mill culture (which is likely given that we're searching for a smaller dog). The search still continues, but we'll see what happens.
In the meantime, we're considering getting a kitten (not too young, but in the will play like a crazed kitty until it falls asleep totally exhausted). That would still mean getting a dog would be an option if the right one appears, but also means that we wouldn't be a single-pet house when Figment passes on. We're also hoping that Pixie might enjoy being "big cat" for a change. So.... that's where things are at. Looking at some changes this winter to the family.
November 7, 2019
Long life update:
Been petitioning my day job to either let me go part-time with them or resign and possibly sign up at a freelancer. Haven't had much movement on that, but I have so much personal leave left, I'm basically working part-time for the rest of the calendar year. Meanwhile, building some other marketable skills for freelancing work in case I need to leave the job completely.
I figure I'll let Erwin update his life stuff as desired, but mostly because there's not a lot to report, aside from him just about being done with his certification class through UCF.
Almost done with the Girl Scout Fall Product coordinator stuff -- now it's just about time to get ready for cookies.
Homeschool has been going great--got everything planned out through December, and starting on planning for January-May as soon as fall product sales are done. Much of what she's doing will be similar to what she's done this fall.
At Lighthouse, she'll be taking Math Olympics, Magical Artifacts, Color Theory in Art, and Passport to Adventure 2. At home, she'll be doing:
* Saxon for math
* Khan Academy for ELA (and then shift into writing and editing skills.
*Reading a series of books (The Phantom Tollbooth, The One and Only Ivan, Hidden Figures, a poetry unit on the works of Shel Silverstein, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Girl Who Drew Butterflies)
* Finish up the Florida state curriculum on FL history and geography, and then move into money management
*Move from earth science into space science and meteorology
*Work on bike riding for PE
*Finish up her unit on health and move to online health and safety (as in how to be healthy and safe when online)
*Continue with spelling, typing, Spanish through Duolingo, and reading comprehension and writing practice
*Keep active with Bricks 4 Kidz, Girl Scouts, and VR, and start up swim lessons when it gets warm again
Already started planning 2020-2021 stuff. Doing Saxon for math again, moving to Lumos for ELA (plus sentence diagraming), Reading (Ben and Me, Primates: The Fearless Science of Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas, I am Malala, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Riding Freedom, The US Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation, Warriors: Into the Wild, The Tapper Twins Go to War With Each Other, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, The City of Ember, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden), Science (trying out a new-to-us curriculum, the Building Blocks of Science to cover the five domains of science each year in increasing complexity), Khan Academy for American History, and spelling and vocabulary. Instead of health and typing, she'll be doing Home Ec next year.
Figment's health is steady at this point -- we're pretty sure he has a tumor of some kind in his nasal passages and so he sneezes a lot. Although he sounds horrible from it, he seems to be feeling okay most days. At 11 years old, it's not a surprise that he's running into some challenges. To make his life more interesting, Lily has mentioned she wants a dog for Christmas. We likely won't do it *for* Christmas, but we may add that new member to the family in early 2020.
No major house projects at this point. May find someone to seal the pavers for the driveway, and at some point we'd like to resurface the area around the pool. No rush on any of that, though.
And so, that's life down here -- we're now in the beautiful weather time of year, 70s and sunshine.
How's life going where you are?
October 25, 2019: Earned my Social Marketing Certification
October 11, 2019
Yesterday, Lily realized that if she really powered through her lessons, she could have a four-day weekend...and so she did. Ended up that she did lessons from 8:30 AM until 5:15 PM (with about an hour break for swimming and an hour break for lunch), but she said it was worth it. I was concerned that by going through so much so quickly that she might not retain it all, but she spent most of dinner talking all about the history of Deborah Sampson (who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Revolutionary War) and pointing out places in books where em dashes were used instead of parenthesis as a style choice of the author to improve the flow of the writing. I guess it all stuck.
September 23, 2019
This week will wrap up our first month of homeschool. Here's what we've covered in the month.
Reading -- mostly free read this month, as she did The Wizard of OZ over the summer.
Math -- Saxon Math lessons grade 4, lessons 1-13 and investigation 1 (with video lessons by Nicole the Math Lady). Mostly a recap of 3rd grade math, but also starting to work with negative numbers and math terminology that gets skimmed over in classrooms
Language Arts -- parts of speech. Nouns, verbs, and pronouns were a review. Adverbs and adjectives were things she had learned, but not really mastered. This week we're doing conjunctions, articles, interjections, and prepositions. For prepositions today, she asked if she could do Tuesday's work because she was totally fascinated by them. They had taught prepositions in school at one point, but just to memorize lists of them (not what they are or what they are used for, or how to identify ones that aren't on the list).
Social Studies -- spent the past month studying the tribes of Florida before and around the time of the arrival of the Spanish (the Calusa, Timucua, Tocobaga, Tequesta, and Apalachee, plus the artwork of Jacques LeMoyne as he recorded historical images of these tribes). She'll be putting together an informational booklet about these tribes as her final project this week.
Science -- introduction to science (scientific inquiry, how to design an experiment, how to draw charts and graphs, parts of a lab report, and SI units and measurements) plus some independent study on squid and octopus. This week is mostly experiment week for her.
Passport to Adventure (co-op) -- fun activities and ELA programs around the first Magic Treehouse book
Chorus (co-op) -- learning how to sing
Team Building (co-op) -- many exercises to learn how to work as a team and how to handle both success and failure
Art (co-op and after school) -- many art projects made to study different styles of art and artists
PE -- swimming lessons (continuing to work on her arm form for crawl, distance underwater, and side stroke)
Reading comprehension sheets, creative writing sheets, and personal journaling each week
Spelling -- 20 words/week assessed and then working on spelling of items missed (3-4 items/week)
Typing -- 10 minutes per day
Spanish -- 5 minutes of DuoLingo per day
Health -- how vitamins work, MyPlate nutrition
Technology -- VR coding class weekly (building a virtual reality escape room)
Girl Scouts -- Social Butterfly badge
Field trips:
1. Lake Meadows to learn how eggs are processed from the hen to the store
2. Legoland with two model builder classes
3. Disney University to see Amazon's program about how machine learning works to help "train" cars to drive on a road that they haven't seen before
Whew. What a month!
