My present

Dave's birthday present to me this year.

It's my birthday

And Emily will cry if she wants to.


How do people take those perfect & wonderful pictures of their entire families? No one crying, screaming, or in motion? Maybe my kids just cry a lot.

Have I ever mentioned that I love books?

The new curriculum has arrived!

My excitement is tempered by the awareness that I only have a couple of weeks to pour over the mound of books and figure out how to use them to actually teach my family in some rational manner. Bummer.

Who has time to blog.....?

I admire all those people out there who maintain a blog - as in really maintain a blog. It's hard work. You have to manage to live a mildly interesting life in between posting about your mildly interesting life in such a way as to make it all sound wildly interesting. I've accepted the fact that I really can't do either all that well -- let alone do both at the same time. And to think - there are people out there who maintain more than one well-written (and subsequently) well-read blog. I'm in awe.

With that said, however, I've decided to revive the ol' ThomerSchool blog. It should be necessary then for this first revival post to be quite lengthy - considering that the preceding post was actually an introduction for the 2007 ThomerSchool year.... Let's begin with a summer of the year then:

• We survived.
• The boys were educated.
• No one moved out.

That's it in a nutshell.

Our first year of parent-designed curriculum and scheduling out-of-a-hat (literally almost -- it was actually a coffee can) was thrilling and exhausting and terrifying. I was working way too hard. The boys didn't seem to be working enough. I have no idea what we were doing other than not driving to and from a school building every day.

And so it was indeed a combination of exhaustion and paranoia that let us to our second year curriculum selection. We used a pre-packaged program from Our Lady of Victory Catholic Homeschool. It was a beautiful program... thoroughly Catholic and thoroughly traditional. The books themselves will be gorgeous additions to our home library. However, in many ways, I now feel the selection of this program was nothing but a knee-jerk reaction to the mistakes we made during our first year of flitting through the ether of abstract education.... OLVS is most definitely a classroom curriculum. Literally the stuff of the 1940s/1950s classroom. I understand that was the appeal initially. I had dreams of giving my kids the experience I had in a Catholic elementary school (multiplied by 50 considering by the time I attended school in the 70s the curriculum was already somewhat liberalized and secularized).

I believe that I did make that dream come true. But I have no intention of doing it again this year... or ever again for that matter. You see - this may come as a surprise - but I am not, in fact, an entire staff of teaching nuns. Instead, I am the extremely high-strung mother of five living in the ongoing aftermath of a major disaster. Last year, specifically, I was also a thirty-six year old mother of four expecting our fifth child -- and then the thirty-six year old mother of five kids including a newborn. Point: I don't have time to devote to two traditional full-time school days every day while also keeping everyone alive.

The boys accomplished a lot last year. The amount of work they actually finished takes up a good portion of our kitchen storage space at the moment. I'm very proud of what we did...

It is now our third year of the homeschool experience and I believe we are all beginning to feel like pros. The fear has subsided... (I've said that before - but this time I mean it...) No one is going to forget to learn how to read or manage to leave the house in young adulthood without knowing where the U.S. capitol is located or how to make change. Considering the fact that such things are a standard which even the public educational system cannot take for granted with their own graduates -- I'd say we're doing okay.

We'll be trying out a new curriculum for 2008. Our order from Catholic Heritage Curricula is on its way as I type this. What we're hoping to find in this new curriculum is a little more freedom. We want our curriculum to be full of tools that we can use as we work together each day... Rather than a program which forces us to plug our lives into its schedule. I want to spend more time discussing things as a family... praying together as a family.. working on projects as a family...

And less time begging bored and exhausted kids to finish their busy work so we can all go to bed on time so we're rested enough to wake up early and start all over again in the morning.