A West Coast Friday

A, my 10 yo dd, is sick with a stomach virus. She's limp on the couch listening to an unabridged recording of The Rats of NIMH. The almost 7 yo ds is not sick at all which, in a way, is a bummer. I just can't believe that he'll escape this virus, which A got from a friend on Tuesday. And since he's not sick now, it just means that the kids will be consecutively ill instead of concurrently. He's also listening to the Rats and playing with a set of magnets.

I've been having an attack of curriculitis. Symptoms of curriculitis come on suddenly and consist primarily of an irrational belief that more curriculum, or a different curriculum, would solve all the problems one currently faces. The sufferer spends way too much time on the web following up on recommendations listed on various e-mail lists and homeschooling boards. In extreme cases, the sufferer actually makes haphazard, poorly thought-out online purchases on products which cannot be returned.

I think my case is not too extreme (though I do have a headache from all this screen time). My purchase wasn't completely impulsive: I have been thinking for some time of trying My World Science. It's not that I think we don't do enough science; this is a science-rich home. It just seems so ... disorganized. I tried using Nebel's Elementary Education to somehow cinch it all together but it just didn't work for us. So I got the Weather/Astronomy/Coral Reefs package with the idea that this would be a fun thing to do over the summer. Ahem. Well, I'll let you know how that goes.

I snapped out of curriculitis before buying Mapping the World by Heart. A kind soul recommended the Geography Coloring Book which I'm going to think about.

I also spent an hour writing out the kids' ages, and what grades they're in, and projecting into the future and trying to line it all up with the 4 year history rotation which we've totally botched. We're finished with Vol. 2 of SOTW & have been doing a bit of a detour in Canadian history and the voyages of exploration. It seems a bit superficial and I'm not sure whether to do the explorers & Canada's roots again, in more depth, or whether to start in on Vol. 3. The appeal of moving on to Vol. 3 is that it's all there & laid out. I'm planning to get the audio book & break down and buy the extra student pages from PeaceHill Press. Half the time I'm just not organized enough to get things photocopied for the kids ahead of time, never mind putting a unit study together myself (which is why it seems like what we've done on Canada and the explorers has been a bit weak....)

Then I found out Vol. 4 will be out soon. For a while I actually considered galloping through Renaissance over the summer, then starting on the Moderns in the fall.
Oh yeah, it's not supposed to be a race. Right. OK. I feel better now.

And it's raining. But I like living in a temperate rainforest and I'm going for a walk when R gets home.