Saturday. Yay! (a wrap up of our week)

We just wrapped up a Matt-less week and boy is it good to have him home!  Matt brought home a portable vpu (for work - not for our family) and we're enjoying it tonight before he takes it in to his office. 

We pulled out pillows and blankets and he set it up to project Mary Poppins onto the living room wall for a super fun movie night.  [Luke is already in bed and John Paul is half watching, half playing near the siblings.  I hear him now, clomping up and down the hall in my house shoes.  Neither of my little two will watch a movie for more than about 8 minutes.  They'll grow into it one day.]

Other than missing Matt, I'm grateful for a normal week.  Finally (thankfully) I feel like we are in a good routine with the girls in local school.  The homework load is still heavier than we prefer, and the amount of memory work is just incredible!  One (or more) poems to memorize every night!  Plus they memorize  the reading lesson introduced that day.  We talked to the teachers about reducing the memory work quantity for our Chinese-second-language speakers and they seem open to the idea.  As it now stands, if you get the girls started on recitation they will go and go and go and go.

Normally Matt and the girls would team up for an intense homework session after dinner but with Matt gone (and the after dinner hour plenty busy for a single-momma) I moved the homework to afternoons, our typical home school time.  It worked okay.  

That's Julianna working in one of her language books.  Precision is not a natural bent for her.  Precision is demanded by the Chinese educational system.  She's drawing lines connecting different characters that often appear together.  The lines must be {ahem} STRAIGHT! 

To me, this is one of the gifts of a combined home school plus local school education.  If I had asked for lines that straight?  Nope.  I wouldn't have thought to ask, and she would have probably resisted. 

But for her teachers at school?  Julianna knows that she has to perform at the top of her game.  And I've been pleasantly surprised by how she'll embrace challenges from them that I'm almost sure she'd resist if they came from me.

But it's not all sunshine and roses.  Sometimes I revel in our current set up.... two kinds of schooling seems like a WIN-WIN situation.  Other times it feels like a LOSE-LOSE situation.  Sometimes I feel like I get the best of both worlds.  Sometimes I feel like I get the worst of both worlds.  For now, I'm choosing to embrace the good and accept the hard. 

And I'm also wondering if what now seems like hard will (in hindsight) actually be good.  You know how that tends to happen?

[new topic]

These boys.  Love it!  Isaac and John Paul are officially VERY good friends.  John Paul came home at 19 months old and he seemed so much younger than Isaac.  In reality, they are only 21 months apart.  And, crazy as it sounds, that's actually the largest age gap between any two sibs in our little family chain.  So Isaac seemed so old and John Paul so young but now, well now they just seem like perfect buddies. 

Earlier this week Isaac told me a long story that involved recounting lots of conversation between him and John Paul.  The crazy thing is, from an outsiders perspective you wouldn't think he and John Paul really have conversations. 

John Paul's expressive language is delayed (thanks to his cleft).  For a little boy who had virtually zero words pre-surgery (9 months ago) he's doing great, but he does not speak in sentences.  Usually just a few words strung together.  And his pronunciation is terrible.  It really is.  I know that moms of toddlers always understand their little one's language better than anyone else but John Paul and I really take this to a new level. 

So Isaac's story of "then John Paul said .... and I said ..... so he said ....... and then we both...... until he said ....."  I loved to hear it.  Because in reality John Paul didn't say all that stuff.  But it is what Isaac heard.  They are close enough that his language delay doesn't affect their play.  Isaac takes the words John Paul uses and ascribes (correctly) the entire thought behind it and their play continues undisturbed and just perfect for the two of them.  More and more I hear Isaac calling for John Paul to play and John Paul's "coming. Isaac."  answer. 

Of course little Luke is never far from the action.  Whew.  They keep me running in circles.  Happy happy circles.

And the running seems easier when Matt's home and I'm so very glad he is.  {He and John Paul have been 'working together' while I write, unpacking Matt's bag and doing all sorts of odds and ends.  I can hear the movie finishing up so bedtime is just around the corner.  Something tells me the big three will be asking to watch another movie sometime soon!}