Florida Mini-Vacation

This past weekend the family took a drive down to Jacksonville Beach, Florida.  Sadly, my husband was there for a funeral, but we also had time in the weekend to qualify our time there as a mini vacation.  A much deserved vacation!  We haven't really had a good family vacation in quite some time.  Me and the hubby are LONG overdue for our own vacation getaway!

This is as close to the Corona ad as I could get. :-)

 Lovely to see even at 12 sandcastles are still OK.

This was a happy photo accident, but cool right!?

 I'm glistening!

My baby girl is just gorgeous!

View from the hotel balcony.  Loved having an oceanfront room.

Ken, poolside, drink, oh and some guy.  ;-)

This is what I was doing most of the day, relaxing poolside with the Tiki bar just to my right!

We all got up to watch the sunrise.  Awesome.

Breakfast of champions!

Oh my gosh, there is nothing like the greatness of the ocean to put things in perspective.  Life and death and appreciation for our time on this earth.  So grateful.

Back to Homeschool Update

We are in week 2 and all things considered, it's been going well.  I have successfully implemented the classical approach to our homeschool curriculum and I'm quite proud of myself.  I invested months in researching the best approach to learning for each of my two sweeties.  I was nervous and concerned at first that I may have made a mistake or something equally cataclysmic, but the kids have actually expressed to me that they love how we do things now.  My heart swelled at that.

Some changes did occur however.  Rodney isn't going to work on Latin, at least in our current format.  We'll come back to it next month.  Arianna is excelling in our current Latin program.  Neither of the kids have started using Rosetta Stone for Japanese (Ari) and Spanish (Rodney) yet.  Mostly because 300 dollars wasn't an option for foreign language software.  I had some pressing issues (aka bills) that topped the list.  I can happily report that the kids will still use Rosetta Stone, just not until next month.  I am sort of grateful we didn't start it yet.  I think they needed time to get the flow of handling their core courses first.  They're doing a lot more reading than they did last year.  So far no complaints from them, which I'm also grateful for. 

I just have one final thought I wanted to express, and that is my utter gratefulness to be in the position to homeschool my children.  My husband was and sometimes still is worried that the kids education will somehow be short changed because of our decision to opt of public school.  I have found that giving him updates and reminding the kids to keep him in the loop on what they're learning helps a lot with calming his worries.  As time moves on, he has seen the changes we were hoping to make within our children by homeschooling.  They actually want to learn new things and will study on their own to get answers.  Again, I'm grateful and I truly feel this is what is best for our family.