Extra Murals and the Like

I began a blog post that was lengthy in explaining how our daily routine is panning out around here now that we are entrenched in school, but it was full of self-pity when I really have no right to it. So, I’m going to start again☺

Let’s just say that I can’t diagram a sentence. How inadequate would you feel if your 7th grader came to you and read a sentence out of his book and then identified one of it’s parts as the predicate and asked you to confirm that he was right, and you had to look him in the eye and say, “I can’t remember what a predicate is…can you tell me?” The most pitiful thing about this interchange is that I had read in his grammar book the night before all about predicates just so I’d be able to answer his questions when he came, but in my usual poor-student mindset I could not remember (or more correctly had not understood) what I had read. I feel like I should make myself a dunce hat and sit in the corner with it during class…

Overall, let’s just say that the terror I felt over sending my “big things come in small packages” sized son into the world of hormone raging middle schoolers has been replaced with the terror that when he enters the halls of his new middle school he will not know what he must to pass, and that it is all due to the fact that as a freshman in high school I just could not figure out where to put the line in the sentence and which word to underline twice and why…pathetic.

As far as my other homeschool students are concerned, they are reluctantly plugging away. When John comes home at night and asks me how school went that day I can always site an instance of tears or yelling (so far the yelling has not been done by me, so far…) But they seem to grasp the materials well and we usually get through the school day by 1:30 or so, sometimes even earlier. I’ve over booked the kids with activities (all are taking tennis once a week, the girls are taking ballet each twice a week and the boys each take karate from our church bishop once a week as well). I’m still figuring out the piano lessons thing but I’ll have it nailed by next week. I’m not letting years of hollering for them to play the right note go to waste now over the chance to look at lions and tigers through the windows of our car. The activities are a way for the kids to be out of the house, and for their bodies to be educated along with their minds. It is sad to say, but there is no park around that is safe to go play in; no open space where they can run or kick a soccer ball save the tiny plot of land just inside our security gate. So, instead they have “extra-murals” as all the Joburg-ers call them. Sports and things inside that help their bodies have exercise and let them socialize with someone besides me!

So, we are settling. It is a bit crazy that now we are kind of finding a routine John and I are already calendaring our exit from South Africa. Pretty much decided we are leaving here February 8. The time will fly. We are already at October, and having been a mom for some years now I know how time just condenses between Halloween and Christmas. Soon after New Year’s we’ll be packing our things. Then this adventure will be through.

I hope by then I can identify the adverb in a sentence. And that there is some park in Texas (or maybe just a dang big back yard behind our new house) where my kids can run and play.