Tuesday, November 24, 2009

We're reading!!

Today was an amazing breakthrough, my daughter, who recently turned six is learning to read. We're homeschooling of course and technically she would have been in kindergarten this year. We've been working on writing and letter sounds and such for a while now and being a beginning homeschooler I have had my worries about how we were doing in general (made worse my certain members of the husbands family's lack of support) and I haven't been pushing too hard because I figured it would all click when she was ready. I've found that when we start to have a hard time with something it's helpful to switch to another method and with her reluctance to try to sound out words in books (she seemed really intimidated by the thought) I decided to let her work through it on the computer. We started playing the games on starfall and today she started doing the little reading "books" on there and she totally got it! So after computer time was over she still wanted to practice so I got out one of the I can read books (level 1) that I had gotten a few months ago and she just started sounding out the words and putting the sentances together and it was magic! We've done it, we've learned to read, all on our own with no excessive amounts of homework or "boyfriends" or early morning hour long bus rides! I am thrilled and so is she, I just can't wait to show the husband when he gets home from work!
AND that's not the only breakthrough that we've had today! My son phinneas (who will be two Jan. 23rd) went on the potty! We've been trying for a few weeks and he wanted nothing to do with it, absolutly refusing to even go near the potty and I was getting really fustrated so we decided to switch back to cloth diapers since I got a bunch of nice pocket diapers at cotton babies a while back and they are still to big for little Cassius and I just got some really wonderful diaper inserts from Purple ducks on etsy. So anyway I put him in the cloth diapers and then he decided to take it off and I asked him if he needed to go potty and first he shook his head no but then he nodded so we ran in there and I put him on it and he went!
What a day, I will admit, sometimes having four kids this young and the business and everything else going on it's hard. The bad days are really bad, but then there are the really good days like this when everything is working and I'm getting the house clean and fleeces washed and kids taught and it all comes together and it's like, wow, what a sense of accomplishment!
Now here's hoping that tomorrow goes smoothly, we will be making pies and anything else that we can make ahead for thanksgiving since the husband will be at work all day and I will be cooking and handling the kids all day by myself. I can't remember a thanksgiving that I didn't have some sort of meltdown and that's even with the husband helping But I love being able to have his mom and whoever else shows up over and serving this giant meal that I made from scratch and all that.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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