I am such a stressed out Mama these days. So many things seem to get to me, so many things, so much "small stuff" ... I'm missing the big picture. I've been very worried about Jessie and her homeschooling, whether she is doing enough, learning enough, smart enough, polite enough, kind enough... ENOUGH!! enough!!! We did a lot of math today, but this time I really made a big effort to sit back and try and let her figure it out for herself. She complained to her Dad that I don't give her enough time to figure it out for herself... Oooops. It comes from my fear of being judged a poor mother AND a poor teacher. As a homeschooler it's hard to get a good feel of where your child "should" be in comparison to other kids. There is such a wide range of normal it's hard to pick out the spot she should be at. Ahaha! you should be right THERE and you ARE so that's GREAT! Mamma rocks. Rather, what happens is one friend's daughter is rocking the times tables, another has all the presidents memorized and their shoe sizes to boot..!! ( not really !!) whereas other friend's children are more artistic and eclectic and kick butt at sciences and general knowledge..... WHERE DO WE FIT!?!?! LOL!! In school at least my child would be in a group of, say, 30 kids. I would know if she was doing better than, worse than or as well as the others! I worry so much that she may fall behind ( and it would be all my fault and everyone (including myself) would blame me if her life gets screwed up 20 years from now!!) that I make myself and her sick with it!! Today though, was a better day. We've been weighing the rats now for 13 days and have a pretty good sample of their growth rate. We had just been writing down their weight each morning. Today I showed Jessie how to plot it on a chart. I made up the chart and she plotted each rat's weight and joined the dots! It looks really impressive and she was pretty proud of it. We're going to go on and try and extrapolate out and see how big the rats would get if they continued at their current rate, we're also going to see who is growing fastest and who has grown the most etc!! It's been a heap of fun. This afternoon I happened to be looking on a math website to see what third grade kids ought to be learning. We'd covered, in one way or another, all the stuff they had mentioned!!! LOL!! And I was worrying!!!!!! So tonight, I let go. We had a great evening playing ghosts and running around giggling and laughing together... Much more healing. I'm going to try a whole new approach to our schooling. More laughing, more living, more fun, less stress.
I'll let you know how it works out!! :D
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