Tuesday: K starts back to school

Well, K's first day of school was Tuesday and he had been looking very much forward to having Miss F for his teacher so he was excited to see her for the first time...and to see Mrs H, his amazing teacher from last year.

His start to school is definitely a little different this year as we have to take all kinds of precautions with his head. And those of you who know a little about K know that his head is not usually very well protected as he goes into everything he does HEADFIRST!!

The reason for this is his unfortunate crash on a 4-wheeler on the 21st of July while we were up in Nebraska for wheat harvest. That ended up in a 2 day stay at the hospital that scared the daylights out of mom, dad, grandmas and grandpas and lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. Fortunately he came out alright with "just" and skull fracture and bleeding on the brain to show for the experience...and lots of warnings about not rough housing, breaking a sweat or being anywhere he might get knocked down or injured on his head at least until follow-up with the neurosurgeon on the 31st of August!


This is a picture of K from the first night in the hospital, in ICU, when they finally gave him some medicine that took away the headache and he fell asleep.

So school started with a list of rules as long as your arm but the school and teachers are all being great to help him protect his head...since he doesn't protect his own! At least he doesn't have to wear a helmet like the other kiddo in his school who had a head injury this summer!

He is off to a great start and loving 4th grade. He thinks his teacher "rocks" and he enjoys being with his friends again. Fortunately, he has been with pretty much the same group of kids since Kindergarten, almost like our little country school I grew up with, so they all know each other pretty well and have learned how to get along.

An explanation of our name

We are starting a whole new adventure in life. Several years ago we realized that traditional public school was a complete disaster as far as education our kids. At that time we had learned of a charter school in our district that was a Gifted and Talented School and fortunately both of our kids tested to get into that school. With that began an adventure that was not all negative but certainly not all positive.

C was never happy in school. It always seemed like he came home with way too much homework. The teachers would tell us he was wasting class time on monkeying around and then had to bring the work home, plus all the homework they assigned, apparently because kids were not supposed to have free time these days. This became a real sore spot for our family because every night I would have to sit down and spend 2-3 hours going through homework with C and reviewing all the concepts taught in the day etc. It was exhausting to say the least and with working full time as a medical transcriptionist as well I didn't really have time to do anything around the house with this routine. This went on for years because I didn't think I had any options since I really didn't think I was up for home schooling, especially because every time C and I tried to interact it was very emotional and frustrating.

Towards the end of last year (6th grade) as junior high was looming, I began to panic, wondering what we were going to do! C had a really great teacher last year who I found out about midway through the year was a huge conservative (we like that kind!) and a big proponent of home schooling. She suggested that maybe the reason school was such a miserable thing for C was just all the energy he had to waste on all the "difficult" kids he had to associate with at school and that we should home school him. Again, that fear of not knowing what to do came up. She put me in contact with her sister who had home schooled all of her children through high school and after some emails exchanged I started to believe we could possibly do this. Then the teacher came up with this website that she thought I should check out. It was for a charter school for Colorado students that was online with the K12 curriculum. After looking into it we realized in short order that this was made to order for us. We got C enrolled and he started to look forward to fall.

K has remained at the Charter school as he has done well with the interaction with the kids and has not run into the problems that C did.

As the start of school was approaching I started to feel more and more nervous but just decided the only thing we could do was jump right in with both feet...so we did!

School started last Monday and I am thrilled to say that I feel like I have a different kid in my house! He is pleasant, polite, happy and thoroughly enjoying school! And this kid that used to have nervous tics during school, be emotional over homework, fight me on assignments etc is prereading things before bed for the next day, working ahead of the days lessons, completely everything quickly and efficiently and is done every day before 1 o'clock! This is the kid that used to spend 7 miserable hours at school and come home and fight me on homework for 3 hours!

We are getting our family back! The time we are spending together as a family is no longer stressed with fights about home work! C wants to learn to cook so we are doing lots of projects and planning more for the year and he is so excited to have something to do that he loves, and he loves to cook. His classes this year are Pre-algebra, Literature, grammer, life science, American History, Spanish, Art, vocabulary and Cooking. This blog is going to be basically about how we get our family back and how we spend more and more time together, getting to know our kids without the stress of the school environment on C.


And yes, he will get social interaction for those of you who worry about that kind of thing, but it won't be with a bunch of unpleasant 7th graders herded like cattle into a small building and forced to interact with each other in whatever way they happen to feel like that day. Now we can pick and choose who he socializes with! Isn't that an amazing concept?