Getting Ready for a New Phase in Homeschooling

So, I've decided we're not going to finish out the semester at Connections Academy. It's just too much stress for the both of us and we're really really behind on lessons with being sick just before winter break. And, to be honest, I'm just not into it anymore. So, I've been doing more and more research on units and things for homeschooling and different options I have and I'm looking into more of an unschooling style with various units. The plan now is to withdraw her when school resumes in just a couple of days. Natalie is going to miss her teacher, that's the part that makes her sad about leaving but she's excited about some of the units we're going to be doing. She wants to continue with plants, especially learning more about the coffee plant I have.

And so my plan is to start up around mid-January (maybe a week sooner since we really haven't been doing any schooling at all of late), have school Monday through Thursday, and I have different breaks set aside for the rest of the year. The year won't be done until July and then we start up again in August so she won't have too much of a summer vacation but at the same time, I'm hoping that we won't be doing too much she finds boring.

I am also planning for her to get involved with the YMCA, 4-H, different activities from our local parenting center and more so I think she'll come to like doing this better than what we've been doing and hopefully it will give me more time to do more around the house and more with Isabelle since one of my major complains about the program we've been with is that it takes up SO much of our time, we can't do anything else and then we burn out (VERY quickly too, I might add!).

I'm actually getting excited though. I'm finding LOTS of stuff on Pinterest and getting ideas for units. I'm going to put some of these ideas here so I can kind of keep track of what I want to do, at least for the next month or so.

Some ideas I'm thinking of:
Plants
Feeding of Winter Birds
Habitats (especially of arctic animals)
Groundhog's Day
Presidents' Day
Valentine's Day stuff
Weather
Winter
Space (might be later on in the next year)
Spring
Time
Money

So, that's a start, hoping to think of other units as the year continues.

This has not been a very productive month thus far...

Started December with a severe case of vertigo. Had a couple of days of that. Then I ended up feeling emotionally overwhelmed the second weekend of December, just bogged down by everything and frustrated with not getting things caught up. And now, I'm sick again. Was hit this past Thursday with vertigo, sick all day on Friday, and Saturday the cold hits and I've been fighting that. I finally took all three of us to the doctor's on Tuesday after an awful night with Isabelle waking up and crying several times. Plus, we had to be out of the apartment for at least two hours for spraying (still trying to get rid of those bugs). Verdict: I have a sinus infection; Isabelle has an ear infection; and Natalie has a cold. Isabelle and I are both on antibiotics (joy). So HOPEFULLY soon we'll all be on the mend because seriously, I cannot stand being sick anymore. Of course, the way it stands I'll get better only to be housebound by the monster blizzard we're expecting to start tonight. *sigh* It's probably a good thing I don't seriously celebrate Christmas because this is shaping up to be a pretty crappy holiday.

Still plowing through this online schooling thing...for now.

It's been a real struggle though. There are days I can't get Natalie to do any work at all and I just get tired of fighting with her. Other days, there's so much to do in the house that I just can't deal with that AND trying to get Natalie to do her lessons. There are times where it ends up being a one or the other thing and I get tired of my apartment looking trashed and not being able to find things.

We ended up WAY behind by Tuesday. She was supposed to be down to 10 overdue lessons and she was up to 29. The breakdown on Sunday told me that I really need to start picking my battles as far as what I need to be focusing on. I took a much needed three days off and have talked to Natalie's teacher. A new plan is in place and I'm hoping that I can keep Natalie on track from now to the end of the semester. I don't know if I'm going to continue after the semester though. The pace may just be too much to meet the needs of our family at this time. It is a good program and it's a good compromise between homeschooling and public schooling but at the same time, a lot of the benefits that come from strictly homeschooling are lost (though there are benefits that are gained like not having to buy a curriculum--good if you don't have much money for one). So, I'm trying to get it all figured out and it's very possible that we will have to withdraw her and continue on our own for the second semester. At least, I will know where she's at and have an idea what to focus on and form a curriculum based on that.

I can't do it all anymore.

I've been trying to though and it's really starting to get to me. Natalie started her online classes back in the beginning of September and from the beginning, she's been fighting me. She's very intelligent, does very well with her work, WHEN she does it, but most of the time, she doesn't want to do it. She's hungry or she has to use the bathroom or she wants to go play with her friend, or she wants to play with her ponies or she wants to look up ponies online or insert any of several dozen excuses. She fell behind and we have been trying to catch up since. Part of the reason I went with to the feast was because I was hoping to get some of Natalie's lessons caught up and hopefully keep her from falling more behind. Nope, didn't work. She just kept fighting me. It's been more than THREE months of this. It's been more of three months of basically having to spend the ENTIRE day working on her with her lessons and trying to get a schedule figured out so that she's not falling even more behind but it doesn't seem to matter what I do, she just keeps falling behind because she will not do all of her lessons.

In the meantime, the apartment has been neglected. Laundry is always several weeks behind. I'm constantly running out of clean clothes. We've had the exterminator here a couple of times to deal with the bug problem we have in the complex and because of that, we still have a bunch of boxes in the living room packed up with stuff. I've been working in a non-fully stocked kitchen which drives me NUTS!

My office is a disaster. I keep trying to find time to clean it and there just isn't any. Anything that's mine ends up in here because if it's anywhere else in the apartment it gets lost or thrown out. And I'm constantly losing things in the office because it's not organized and I'm trying to homeschool Natalie in my office as well.

Because of the bugs, we no longer have a couch or a TV or a VCR. The girls broke the coffee table. The chairs that went with our dining room table are almost all broken so we have plastic deck chairs instead. We have ONE recliner in the living room, that's it. My husband's computer is on the dining room table. We almost never eat at the table all together.

Fridays and Saturdays are my husband's days off. Saturday is the sabbath so he does nothing and is gone at church with the girls all day. Friday I either try to get lessons done or I try and get errands done. I can't do both. If the one is done, the other is not. I'm the person who does pretty much ALL of the laundry and I do ALL of the shopping.

I...AM...BURNING...OUT. I ended up in psych last year for four days because I finally lost it. I went on meds and did a lot better than I was doing before but medication cannot do everything. There's too much going on, too little time for me to get things done, and I live with a man who makes MORE work for me instead of helping me. He can be as bad as a child sometimes. And yet, even though I'm doing all of the work, I have VERY little control over the finances. HE makes the large financial decisions and does it without even talking to me! He took out a pay day loan that we absolutely could not afford, he didn't even attempt to figure out a budget to see if we could afford it. He just took it out because he could and he needed to fund his trip to the feast. And yet, if I spend even $5 on the girls for Christmas, I'm a horrible and rebellious person because I'm celebrating that evil pagan holiday. And forget putting up a tree. Just forget it.

I walked out today. Just put socks and boots on, threw on my coat and walked out. Before that I was screaming at the girls, screaming at my husband on the phone, and just in general having a massive breakdown. Nineteen lessons overdue with the thread of a truancy violation if I don't get her down to ten lessons overdue by Tuesday. NOTHING got done on Friday because I went out to pay the RENT (which we're almost a month behind on) and get DIAPERS which we were almost out of, two things I cannot depend on my husband to do because he gets so distracted it takes him HOURS to get out the door to do ANYTHING. Which is why half the time Natalie's phy ed lessons don't get done because he doesn't have the time to do it before he leaves for work. So I walked out, walked out of the apartment where my two year old was screaming her head off, walked out and left them both alone while I went for a walk. And I think I even left the oven on. I walked to calm down because I just couldn't take it anymore. I walked in that white, snowy, winter wonderland that was forming (because we got our first snowstorm today) and wished that I wasn't in the middle of a town but back on the farm where I grew up, back where it would have been still and silent and white and peaceful.

I walked back home though. And fortunately my neighbor was there when I got back. My daughter went next door and got him. And my husband came home from work shortly after that (about three hours early). I went and took a nap and now, I just feel numb.

I don't how much more of this I can take though. I want out of my marriage; I want out of what I see as a prison sentence. And no, I don't see my children as part of that but it's SO hard to do EVERYTHING and not have ANY help or ANY say. I can't talk to my husband without him getting defensive and saying I'm attacking him. And then when he does the same thing, he gets mad when I get upset and says I'm being overly sensitive and taking it personally. I can't win. I can't get through to him. I'm getting to where I don't even want to try anymore. It's just not worth it.

So yeah, today I feel like a massive failure as a parent but that's nothing new. I always feel like I'm failing.

My Little Pony is starting to become Mommy's Little NIGHTMARE!

It began innocently enough. I had had a decent collection of My Little Pony ponies when I was a child. I had a few favorites including the rare and hard to find Mint Dreams and Boysenberry Pie ponies. My younger sister had a beautiful pony by the name of Dancing Butterflies (a fancy pony that was yellow with butterflies everywhere, probably an ancestor to the current Fluttershy pony of generation 4). We had other ponies as well but like I said, it was a decent collection for that time, probably no more than 20 ponies. Then My Little Pony kind of disappeared and we grew out of them and slowly they just sort of disappeared. When Natalie was a baby, I happened to see that my older sister had a couple of ponies on hand and convinced her to give me one to give Natalie later on. She was around two when she got it and we found one at a garage sale and got her a few fakies (ponies that are not the brand labeled My Little Pony ponies). Before going to Korea, I had found a few more but then left all the actual My Little Pony ponies and took only the fake ones with to Korea. The other ponies were put away though, set in our locker and taken out over a year later and given to Natalie then. Her fifth birthday was fairly pony free. She had her small pony collection and that was that. However, not long after, we got cable which included The Hub, which aired a show called My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic. An obsession was born. It still didn't really take off when she got a number of ponies for her sixth birthday. It was when her friend next door started collecting them that the trouble started. Then it became a full-on pony war. Now it's a battle to see who will have the most ponies and pony accessories. Current generation is the big draw with the crowning achievement being the wedding set that includes ponies Princess Cadence and Shining Armor. This is generation 4 or the ponies you see on the show that's featured on The Hub. Third generation ponies are another big draw as are generation 1 ponies (the ponies I grew up with back in the 1980's and early 1990's). Generation 2 ponies are hard to find and not exactly the most attractive as far as I'm concerned and to be honest, outside of the ones I had as a kid, it's generation 3 that draws my interest the most. Generation 4 ponies are pretty generic compared with past generations and the ones available are usually the same six ponies with some extra ones thrown in for variety. There's a limit to how many Rarities, Twilight Sparkles, Pinkie Pies, Rainbow Dashes, Apple Jacks, and Fluttershies one can have. Of course, try to tell that to my daughter and she'll just give you this look because um, NO, that's just not possible! Never mind that there's probably over 100 other ponies out there made in the previous generations. And then you have the little bitty ponies. These are about an inch or so long and made entirely of plastic and come in a non-see through bag (AKA blind bag). This naturally is a HUGE draw to a 6 year old, especially when said ponies are only $2 each (easy to afford for little girls dropping teeth everywhere for tooth fairy money). Sometimes, they're even put into see through packages and sold in stores for slightly less than the $2/each price. And with the holiday season going strong, there are few places you can go where you will NOT run into a My Little Pony (current or old!). Now, being the reasonable mother I am, I try not to go overboard when it comes to ponies and have done pretty well. Usually I find some good deals on them and get them that way (eBay is pretty dangerous when it comes to finding ponies, especially old ones and will likely trigger major toy nostalgia so be careful if you go that route!). Her aunt, my one older sister, on the other hand, has gone absolutely insane as far as finding pony paraphernalia. She has totally outdone me on the ponies this year and probably last year too since she not only has bought my daughter several ponies but even other pony items. The post Christmas Day (and birthday, since her birthday is two days after Christmas) comparison between two little neighbor girls will be BRUTAL! Every time my daughter or her friend gets a new pony, she has to show the other what she got before she even gets inside her apartment (they live literally next door to each other in the same building). It can get ugly! Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes there's stomping! The drama surrounding these ponies is INSANE!!! Which is why after this birthday, I'm DONE! No more ponies for Natalie! She'll have to get her pony fix from her aunt. Any ponies I buy will be for the younger daughter who is already going around and saying in the cutest little voice, "My Little Po-NY!" Will the nightmare ever end?!