Screen Free Time

Screen Free Time is something most people are familiar with.  (and I know I should not end that sentence with a preposition.)  Here in our house SFT usually comes when I just can't take the screens anymore.

Many of you know that we homeschool - if you didn't, now you know - we homeschool.  (Which by the way is one word even though spell check is constantly trying to correct me. click here)  There are so many reasons a family chooses to homeschool, and ours, like many families is a combination of reasons.  I won't go into them right now, but I just wanted to throw that out there.  This post is actually about Screen Free Time.

It seems when we start out the school year I'm usually "super-mom".  I am on top of school.  I am on top of the house.  I am on top of everything.  We follow our schedules.  I prepare things the week before and then the night before, and I feel great!  And then about two weeks in I start to stumble, we let a couple of things slide.  Then three weeks in some more things slide, and by week six - we're in a bad spot.

Well, week six was last week for us and let me tell you, by the end of the week I was about to sign my daughter up for public school.  The problem was not my first grader.  No, she's great!  Doing her assignments, not complaining, enjoying school - the problem was ME!

Our schedule is gone.  My organization is gone.  My house is a mess and climbing back up the ladder of success seems like such a long hard climb.

So, we made a new rule for school days.  All school days are screen free from 8 am - 3 pm unless it is an educational website that has to do with our math, science, or some other assignment.  This eliminates two BIG problems we have - the constant whining and asking to watch a movie or play a computer game and then me losing track of time and letting them watch another movie and play another game... which can wrap into more time than we intended.

Today is our first day screen free.  (I also said that this rule does not apply to me, because much of my other home activities involve some sort of screen) Although, right now this blog writing is just therapy.

Can I be honest though, so far today has been awesome!  I feel like super mom again, even though the house is still a big mess.

Another thing I did today that I'm going to try and keep up with is keeping a bowl of healthy snack food out on the table.  This morning I cut up a melon and left it out with a plastic wrap over it.  Every time the girls whine that they're hungry I send them to the table for a bite of melon.  It has been awesome!  They just go and eat it - and they stop whining.

Today I also mandated that we spend time outside running around.  So we got out the soccer ball and set up some goals and played a rudimentary game of soccer.  And I officially lost.  We ran around and got hot and sweaty and tired for an hour!

After lunch we sat and Amariss read to me while I picked through her hair and then we switched and she picked through mine.  We were pretending we were monkeys looking for bugs.

I know that not all days (infact, most days) will not be like this, but today it feels pretty nice to have a good day and remember that its okay that we had a bad week last week.  It won't be our last one, but it wasn't our first - this is just a part of life.

I'll let you know how we feel at the end of the week.

Any other homeschooling parents have bad weeks?  How do you handle them?

Moving along, like a turtle. And other random thoughts...

I had every intention of being a great blogger - one of those awesome webpages that is graphically appealing and is updated every evening with beautiful photos and words depicting a wonderful life.  

In truth, our life is wonderful - for the most part.  I mean nobody has a perfect day every day.

But I want to formally offer my apologies for any broad claims I've made about "keeping my blog updated" or "posting often".  

It's just not gonna happen.

Also, my blog isn't going to look cool.  I'm not a photographer, and I spend more time cleaning up the mess of the moment and worrying about how my messy fingers, or someone else's, might ruin the camera.  I tried today, though.  We made moonsand together - me and the girls.  And I took a couple pictures of it too!  I even wanted to upload them, but our computer is running really slow tonight (which means I’m actually uploading this post 3 days after writing it).  So, it's going to be a boring picture-less blog.  And I got moonsand on the camera.  And the driveway has a lot on it too.

A lot of people have been asking how our adoption is coming along and get really excited when I say "It's coming along!"  or "We're in process!" or "We're waiting on our USCIS paperwork right now!"  They follow this up with "Does that mean you get to bring your little boy home soon?!"  or "So where is your son right now?"

I think I disappoint them a little with my answer.  So, for clarification -   

This isn't a speedy process.  

However, we are moving along and that is VERY exciting news for us!  One thing we have learned and are continuing to learn, and will continue to learn even more - is patience.  This is a waiting game.  

We completed our home study at the beginning of August (YAY!!!) and then mailed our I800-A to the USCIS a little over a week ago and today I received confirmation that they received it.  Lead times here can be up to 12 weeks.  The I800-A is the governments pre-approval for us to travel overseas to adopt a child.  Getting this pre-approval (the 797) will get us much closer to submitting our dossier (paperwork) to the Chinese Consulate in the U.S. and then it will go to China.  At any point we could be assigned our child, but this isn't likely to happen before our dossier is submitted to China.  There are a lot more documents to be filed and wait for before we get to travel and bring home our son.  But at this point each small step is a step in the right direction.  

Thank you for praying for us and with us!  Thank you for being excited with us!  

We are still selling raffle tickets for our fundraiser until September 25!  So if you'd like to purchase raffle tickets for our freezer full adoption fundraiser let me know!!  Tickets are $5/1 or $20/5   and if you'd like to help by selling raffle tickets to your friends/neighbors/coworkers let me know and I will mail you several!  I just need all money and tickets returned to me by September 25.  Again, this is limited to the QCA area.