Now that Literary Theory is officially over (THANK THE SWEET LORD), I can put my entire brain back into homeschooling. That sounds bad, doesn’t it? Like I let the boys flounder while I drank high dollar coffee and read philosophy drivel. That’s not what happened, at least, not entirely. We’re doing fine on all of the core subjects, but we’re miserably behind on electives. It’s my intention to spend the next three weeks catching up to a significant stopping point before Christmas. The boys aren’t thrilled, let me tell you. They preferred it when I passed out on Norton’s Anthology and they watched documentaries from National Geographic.
My brain is still on the novel, but I reserve that work for the evening after they’ve gone to bed and Major is sufficiently passed out for the night. I’ve already registered for next semester and, from what I can tell, there should be no philosophy or theory or anything written above my pay grade. Short Story and Performance Writing should be manageable.
I’ve not taken photos of Timmy yet, but he’s reemerged. So far he’s just hiding in different places around the house, but I’m sure he’ll start his mischief soon. We’ve also begun our Advent tradition, where the boys receive a note each morning telling them something special. They either get a small piece of chocolate or we do an activity together. Today we played Candyland. Jackson smoked us and won all four rounds.
Speaking of Jackson. For all of his simplicities, he has a fantastic imagination. I’ve been putting words on a white board each week and having the boys write stories using all of them. I purposely give them words that generally don’t go together – like feather, star, sword, garbage – just to see how they’ll weave them together. Jackson never fails to write full scenes with dialogue and sound effects (you knew it would be an action story). He’s also started setting up his stuffed animals on his bed and giving them lines to say, as if he’s directing a film. Am I raising a George Lucas? A Joss Whedon? A Christopher Nolan? Can’t wait to find out.