Homeschooling: It's not what we do, it's how we live.

Corona-Quarantine and Graduation 2020

So… we’re still alive. I know it’s been a hot minute, but I have not been particularly motivated to write much lately – well, it’s been a while since I’ve felt ‘bloggish’, anyway. I have been writing – journals, a novel, other projects on pen and paper – but not so much blogging. Since I only started this blog as a sort-of-but-not-quite-scrapbook, and my kids are now halfway done with school – HALFWAY!! BECAUSE I HAVE A GRADUATE NOW!!! – Sorry – I was trying to hold that in, but I just had to say it – my kiddo graduated! I have so many feels about it, too. But more on that later…

Where to begin, where to begin… There’s been a lot going on, but at the same time, strangely not much? It’s been such a weird year, truly. I honestly thought that Hurricane Harvey was ‘the big thing’ for us, and that once we cleared everything stemming from that, life would resume as pretty much normal. That was super-califragi-optimistic, apparently.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, late’s back up. If you’ve read here before, then you’ll be familiar with the format I use when I catch up, which is pretty much to go back to the last time I posted and pick up from there. Just pretend that there are wavy-lines and flashback noises ‘Wayne’s World’ style here as we go back in time to when I last posted…

The date: September 2019 (I would Star Date it for you, but I don’t know the math… moving on)

At this exact moment, I have no clue what we were doing in September of last year. I’m going to have to go back and pull pictures and events, but I am pretty sure we got off to a solid start, school-wise. We did have our traditional ‘Not Back to School’ Party with our homeschool group, which signals the beginning of our school year with our local homeschool group. In ten years of homeschooling, we’ve only canceled it once, I think? I don’t remember now – I just know this was a ‘thing’ for our group that we didn’t miss. It was a promising start, with a nicely rounded group of kids from pretty much all 3 school levels (elementary/middle/high). Our group ran a middle school co-op and in the spring semester we had a literature-based high school co-op this year. Both kinda got derailed due to the pandemic, but I have kind of always used that as a scale for the group thriving, and it made me happy to see that we had such an active group this year.

I know we had some weekly events, and I took pics of the boys doing school-ish things here and there, but I can’t remember details. One of the major accomplishments we did this year was to finally get through driver’s ed. Before Harvey, I’d started LBB in driver’s ed, but then with the hurricane, that got pushed to the back burner. Once we got the house done and things settled (which took such a very long time), it had been so long since LBB had worked on it, and was also time to put PeaGreen in, so to make a long story short, they both started driver’s ed and finished the first part so they could get their driving learner’s permit around October-ish.

 

I know we had had a teen social with our homeschool group at some point through here, and also Halloween, which LBB declined to participate in this year. PeaGreen was a pretty good sport about it though, and went on an epic quest to acquire a KFC bucket to become Buckethead (it wasn’t that epic of a quest; he just went into a KFC and asked the dude behind the counter for one for his costume, but that’s not very exciting, so we say it the other way). We went to a friend’s house to hang out and the kids all went T’o’Ting. I remember hearing about teens going trick-or-treating when I was younger and how people were annoyed about it. I’m glad that seems to have dissipated in our area these days. Of all the shenanigans teens could be into, dressing up and asking for candy from their neighborhood seems pretty benign to me.

NASA/Johnson Space Center/Space Center Houston (I never know exactly what to call it; it seems like the name is always changing, and/or it’s been all one one of those at different times over the years) always hosts their homeschool day in the beginning of October. It’s changed quite a bit over the years; less ‘organized fun’ and more ‘peruse at your own pace’ these days, but that has worked out as the kids have gotten older and been more inclined to want to roam around with their friends than do classes. This was probably our last time to do this, so I wanted to enjoy the experience, and I think we did.

Our homeschool group also participated in the ShangriLa Botanical Gardens’ annual Scarecrow Festival this school year. Entries start sometime in late Sept/early Oct. The kids originally came up with a trio of witch-scarecrows, but I think we only ended up putting two of them up. They won one of the categories, but I don’t remember now which one, and I can’t find the posts for it without more in-depth research than I am willing to put into it right now…

I love that pic of PeaGreen and his friend-o. When my boys were little, they would play ‘Brick Factory’, which is a fancy way of saying ‘they like to smash up bricks by hitting them with hammers as hard as they can’. This was a total throwback to when that was a pretty regular thing and it made me smile.

Around November-ish, we went to Galveston for a Teen Social; lunch and running around on the strand, taking in some street art and beach-combing until after dark. It was a really fun day!

The Children

December is always busy with birthdays and holidays – this was the first year in a few that we were able to put up a real tree and have it ‘feel’ Christmas-y. It was a relief, and a joy, and a lot of other gross feelings. LBB’s birthday is in December; he turned 18 this year! He’s a real-live grown up person now, which came with its own paperwork challenges (like the DMV, registering to vote and all that jazz). He had a couple of friends over to celebrate and we had dinner and hung out for a bit. He’s not really into parties, so the low-key, no-pressure type celebration was perfect.

I’m getting some of this out of order; I didn’t do a very good job of record-keeping over the fall. I have quite a few pictures of events and the kids doing school work; we even started a literature-based co-op (that was eventually interrupted by coronavirus-quarantine), but I don’t really have dates on anything. PeaGreen started working around November-ish – his first job, which he was very excited about. Now that it’s June, he’s so much less-enthused about it, but is still at it, so I guess money > ‘work sucks’? He’s almost 17, so I guess that’s a good lesson to learn now, lol.

This post is already so long, and it would take forever to itemize all these pictures so I am just adding a gallery of assorted pics from the last few months.

LBB & PeaGreen – Fall 2019

Like most people, we went into almost total seclusion for a while to hopefully avoid contracting COVID-19/CoronaVirus – whatever it’s called these days. ‘The ‘Rona’, as it’s affectionately called most of the time (complete with accent) hasn’t really touched us much so far; something that I am profoundly grateful for. We were pretty well fully quarantined for around 9 weeks (mid-March through the middle of May), except for work and grocery-store runs. A couple of friends have been exposed, and one’s husband was hospitalized, but all have either not progressed into illness, didn’t spread to their families, or have made a decent recovery so far (something else I am grateful for). It’s such a strange time to live in, and I am sure there are people documenting this time for posterity, which will be interesting to read about in 20 or 30 years. In so many ways, we have been among the lucky few to have been relatively unaffected by the pandemic (so far, knock on wood). Aside from remaining mostly well-away from the effects of illness, we’ve also been fortunate to have seen few effects financially as well. Loverly Husband is an essential worker, and PeaGreen works in food service, (so also ‘essential’, I guess??), and we’ve mostly been avoiding people/the public up until the last couple of weeks when we’ve started venturing out on occasion.

We did ‘break’ quarantine to see my sister, because both LBB and my niece (affectionately called ‘Fred’ over the years here on my blog) both graduated this May. Fred was valedictorian of her school, and graduated with her associate’s degree, and was accepted to her top choice college – we’re so very proud of her accomplishments! We met up with them to take graduation pictures – something we’d planned on doing since they were in Kindergarten together.

So, much of what we’d had planned for the spring and summer has been either cancelled, rescheduled or postponed indefinitely. It’s been hard on the kids who are used to socializing in person quite a bit, but it has also forced them (and me) to find new ways to socialize, or re-prioritize that time by finding something new to do instead. Like catch up on reading, or re-watch Avatar: The Last Air Bender, or learn a new language… anything to pass the time, right?

We did host a mostly-family, small graduation party for these two (though I somehow only managed to get a single picture from it).

 

Fred & LBB – Kindergarten graduation – 2008

LBB & Fred – High School graduation – Class of 2020

We usually have 2 proms to go to; one through one of our local homeschooling groups, and one through a local independent organization that just hosts a homeschool prom. Both were originally scheduled for April/May, but were rescheduled due to coronavirus. Eventually, the homeschool group one got canceled altogether, but we were holding out hope that the other would go on as planned. Of course, Texas has been in the news recently for its total incompetence in dealing with pandemic protocols – essentially our government began pretending like there wasn’t a pandemic WAY too early in the game and ‘led the way’ (there really should be a sarcasm font) by opening Texas to commerce again. Though they ‘recommended’ wearing masks and maintaining social distance, within two weeks of that, VERY few people did; it was pretty much business as usual within a really short time. Now, of course, we’re having an ‘unexpected’ (again with the sarcasm) resurgence of coronavirus cases, and our county is under a mask order as of last week (June 24). <shock, shock!!> So, what that means for the prom that was supposed to happen on June 27th was also cancelled. Last minute, but totally not their fault. Kids are disappointed though. We ended up taking the kids to Galveston for a photo shoot in their prom finery.

 

 

So, with that, I think that’s pretty well caught-up. It occurs to me pretty regularly these days that this will be my last year homeschooling. One kiddo done and one to go!

Until next time, cheers!

 

This entry was posted on July 1, 2020 by . It was filed under Community Events, Daily Review, Day in the Life, Field Trip, Group Lesson, Rambling Thoughts, Socialization, Testing & Assesment and was tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

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