curing the FEBRUARY blues

February is dull.  we made an effort to spice it up a bit.

So some February things:

Faith decided to be a reader and turns out, she loves it.  Which I knew she would once she got past the stage where it takes So. Much. Effort.

For Logan's birthday we arranged a snowboarding trip with Uncle Brian. SO grateful for Brian for making this happen and being willing to take Logan up the mountain for three days.  Logan's not super verbal about things but he absolutely loved it.

Prior to that, we helped Grandpa Honey celebrate 90 years - Covid style with a drop-off birthday party.

Heather had brought Grandma a balloon in October and they loved watching it waft it's way around their house, so I thought some fresh ones were in order.  I think hers was higher quality....

we hosted a very small Valentine's party.  The older kids were in charge and they planned fun games for the littles.

Spring is starting to show up every once in awhile.  We did a hike!

And enjoy sunsets!

The following photos are just more of what is above, but stupid blogger doesn't let me rearrange as easily as they used to.  They kept getting deleted!  So.

I have been resetting our homeschool life.  Honestly unschooling is the way to go.  Work, read, repeat.  I mean, we do other things, but I decided that school was becoming more of a drain on our energy and I needed to back off and get to the part where our days are enjoyable.   I used to read aloud to my kids all of the time.  I haven't done it in months and months.  So really, it was just time for a major retrenchment.  Start over and focus back on the most important things.  In order to do that I have to just cut back until we're at the one or two things that I would consider priorities.  And we just do that for a couple weeks and develop those into a habit.  Then I can maybe add a little more if I need to.  But we have all been so much happier.  Because here's the truth - we're tired and done with learning by lunch time.  So I was trying to pack in all the learning we could possibly do before noon.  That entails a lot of me nagging and it means we don't have time for the fun things.  That's backwards!  I don't want to be known solely as the nag!

Time to flip things around a little bit.  We clean, we read, I do a little "mom school" which is where we might do some memorization or talk about something I really love to talk about (American history??!!) and then I ask them what they want to work on for the rest of the day.  They almost always choose at least some of the things I would have required anyway.  Somehow it works out that the important stuff gets done.  They know what they need to do.

So that's what we've been doing lately and it's made March a much nicer month.