Update, Jan26

All is well! We're just keeping busy. We all survived the flu in December, recovering in time to enjoy the holidays.

Big Sister continues to read voraciously. She's struggling with rote memorization of math facts, so we continue to plug away in the math book while doing daily times table review. This makes her scowl, but she admits it's needed at this point. She's also doing daily journal writing, which is off-limits to teacher mom - I just wanted to see her getting comfortable with daily writing, without the pressure of spelling things perfectly. Seems to be working. Retention of spelling words is a struggle - she aces the tests, but can't seem to remember them in her writing. Not sure how to make that connection.

Little Brother is happily homeschooling. He's my eager learner right now, waking with a smile, and running downstairs to start his day. He's progressing nicely, and isn't being held back by a lot of the perfectionism that was paralyzing him when he came out of school in October. He's really into building k'nex and LEGO models right now - builds them, takes them apart, builds them again. He likes following the instruction manuals. Brother also just started an Aikido class last week. He tried it out last Tuesday, and while he did enjoy the class, he initially told me he didn't want to do it again "because they do stuff in there that I don't know how to do". See? The whole perfectionism thing. We talked about how that's kind of the point of taking a class - to learn how to do something you don't know how to do from someone who can share their knowledge with you, or to enjoy doing something with other people, even if you're "not that good" yet. He must have thought about it for a couple of days and decided that it was fun enough to take the risk. His next class is this afternoon - I'll be sure to take a picture in his new uniform!