I've been politely scolded by a few people for not writing much, so will try
to make up for it today. :-) One attempt at an excuse is that the original
reason for this blog, obviously reflected in the title, is to discuss
homeschooling in Germany, in particular highlighting the difficulties for us and
for others. Quite a few people have contacted me because of finding my blog
having googled "homeschooling Germany", so people finding my blog that way
obviously usually aren't interested in what we're doing in South Africa, etc....
There's also the fact that I don't get to the internet very often, partly
because it's sometimes not working at all, partly because it's turned off at
night, and mostly because when my husband isn't in class, he usually needs the
computer. (And when he IS in class, I'm completely responsible for the children,
and watching a 2 1/2-year-old while concentrating on writing a semi-coherent,
grammatically-correct blog entry isn't very easy.) But since several of my
friends do check my blog regularly in the hopes that I've written something
(very faithful, optomistic people, considering my track record...), I decided to
try an actual more-or-less complete update. And one that won't be of interest to
people only looking for information on homeschooling in Germany, although you're
more than welcome to write to me! :-)
First of all, of great excitement in our family is that Katie (two years and
seven months old) is potty-trained!! This is the first time in ten years, five
months, and 7 days (we declared it official on February 29th LOL) that we are a
diaper-free family!! Each of the others potty-trained after the next child was
born--in the case of Lukas, it was only four days after Katie was born, but
still...we had never had a break before, and we intend to enjoy it.
Of even more excitement, if everything goes well, is that this diaper-break
will only be six months long. It's difficult to be as excited as we want to be,
considering my history (three miscarriages in the last four years), but I'm in
the 14th week now with this pregnancy and everything seems fine so far.
(Everything did the other times, too...) I've had two ultrasound scans, both
perfect, and will have another next week.
Our time here in South Africa is already over half up, we only have another 7
1/2 weeks here. :-( The last couple of weeks my husband has been extremely busy,
but we've been keeping pretty busy ourselves. We participate in base
intercession Monday mornings, base worship Friday mornings, and class worship on
Tuesday mornings, go to "baby group" Wednesday mornings, and to a Bible study
for homeschool mothers every other Thursday. In between that are lots of trips
to the library and visits with friends, and the children go swimming nearly
every single day in the swimming pool here at the base. (The building used to be
a hotel--ideal for a YWAM base, with all the rooms, bathrooms in each room,
etc.!) It's embarrassing to say that we've only been to the beach once as a
family, and the three "men" went last Saturday while we three "ladies" went to a
baby shower. :-) As far as sightseeing is concerned, we've been to Boulders
Beach, where penguins live, twice, and we went to the Two Oceans Aquarium in
Cape Town a couple of weeks ago. We've also been to the mall once--something a
lot of people seem to find exciting, but except for the bookstore, I HATE
shopping of all kinds, was glad to get home, and will happily never go again.
LOL Oh, and several weeks ago the children and I also hiked about three-quarters
of the way up the mountain right behind us, and we go to the grocery store
regularly for milk and cheese and other little treats.
In between all this, the children do do a certain amount of "formal"
schoolwork. Marie is nearly finished with Primary Mathematics (Singapore Math)
6B, Jacob is almost a quarter of the way through 3A and mostly through Miquon
yellow. Marie has less than 10 pages left in her German workbook (I can't
remember what it's called, but it's a standard book from Bavaria, for any
Germans interested...) and Jacob is finally making progress in Zebibuch 3, now
that my husband is doing it with him every day! We're enjoying Exploring
Creation with Botany and expect to finish it before we leave South Africa--it's
pretty cool seeing such different plants here. And learning that a strawberry is
not a berry and a banana is is fun. LOL We're also working through "Little
Footprints", a literature-based unit study created by South Africans for South
Africans, advertised as being for those who are tired of reading about the
Fourth of July and snow at Christmas! LOL We've enjoyed most of the books so
far, and have discovered a wonderful South African author/illustrator, Niki
Daly. However, although Marie and Jacob do cooperate with the books, it's much
more at the level of Lukas, and we're really just doing it for the exposure to
South African literature. I think people have said it's something like Sonlight,
I would say it's much more like Before FIAR, at least "Little Footprints", which
is aimed at up to age 8, I think.
All four children have been doing a lot more Spanish with Rosetta Stone in
the last week, having re-gained enthusiasm with the arrival of a DTS team from
the U.K. that has two native Spanish-speakers (from Ecuador and Venezuela,
respectively). It's pretty fun watching Katie in the morning when we're sitting
in the dining room eating breakfast--we're nearly always the first ones
here--greeting everyone who walks in by name, and in the case of Germans (there
are two others in my husband's class, but there's also a German DTS team on
outreach here at the moment) and Spanish-speakers, with "Guten morgen" or
"Buenos dias" to the appropriate people.
On their own, I can't begin to list what Marie's reading...she did go through
a brief Nancy Drew phase (reading up to 6 of those books in an afternoon), but
now having discovered Trixie Beldon, likes that better, saying that Nancy Drew
gets a bit too scary and is a little too grown-up sometimes. She's also picked
up a lot of much better quality books, I try to read at least some of them to
have some idea of what she's reading, but I don't have the time to cover all of
them, and at least a few I probably would have vetoed if I'd known about them in
time... (One we both enjoyed very much, but had a few scenes I could have done
without my 10-year-old daughter reading, was "The Forestwife", a re-write of
Robin Hood mainly from Marian's point of view.) Jacob has been reading a lot of
Asterix and Obelix (Marie reads those too) and finished "The Voyage of the
Dawntreader" this morning, having read "The Horse and His Boy" last week. I
don't assign any kind of reading at all, that being about as necessary as
telling them to breathe...
Marie has also been having fun playing the violin with various people who
play the piano--one was a Korean DTS student (here on outreach from Hawaii) who
was a piano/music major in university, the one she's working with right now
can't even read music, which doesn't stop him from playing piano about a million
times better than I do (and I had seven years of lessons...) and being able to
help Marie so much more than I can and accompany her after she's played
something once.
In general, hanging out with everyone is wonderful for all of us. There's a
DTS running here at the moment, with 21 students (about half of them South
African) and 6 staff members, as well as of course the SOIP with 8 students and
7 staff members, lots of other staff people who are in and out (especially the
cook, who is from Brazil), mission builders and visitors who stay from a few
days to a few weeks, new speakers each week for the DTS and SOIP, and DTS
outreach teams which stay for varying amounts of time. When we arrived at the
beginning of January there were three teams here: from from Argentina, one from
Hawaii (all Koreans, except for one Canadian Korean!), and one from Florida.
After they left, another Florida team arrived, after they left the two teams
that are here now (from the U.K. and from Germany) arrived. So there is ALWAYS
someone around to play with the children--rough-housing, swimming, teaching
Jacob to do hand-stands, playing endless games of Uno with Lukas (no one person
could possibly play as many games as HE wants to play, but he always has fresh
victims!), chasing, teasing, whatever. There aren't any other children here
right now, but that hasn't been a problem. :-) (The 11-year-old daughter of the
assistant base leader does come here to swim and hang-out sometimes, and we
spent yesterday afternoon with two of my husband's classmates and their two
little girls, but they live off-base, so we don't see them much.)
Next week (Saturday morning) the SOIP will be leaving on outreach. Because of
my pregnancy, we made the decision that the children and I will stay here. (In
all honesty, not so much "because of the pregnancy", since I feel great and
this would be the best time to travel, but because of the "if something goes
wrong" part...being a two-day jeep drive over dirt roads from the nearest
medical facility wouldn't be the brightest of ideas. And, because of the
pregnancy, I wouldn't be too excited about either malaria OR malaria-preventing
medication...) The outreach is only three weeks, but this will be the longest
amount of time my husband and I have ever had apart, and I'm not looking forward
to it. Still, being here at the base I'll have SO much more support than I
possibly would have at home, and I know we'll manage! Just before they get back,
the DTS leaves on outreach--that's going to be a difficult goodbye, I know, as
they don't get back until after we've returened to Germany. My husband's team is
going to Zambia, the other team is going to Tanzania and Malawi, and the two DTS
teams are going to Sierra Leone and Turkey, respectively.
So, any questions, I'll try to answer. Also, to those who know me and know my
regular e-mail address, please write, and I'll try to write back! I'm actually
not TOO far behind, I think I only have about 12 unanswered e-mails, and only
one of those is from January, the rest from February. That's pretty good, for
me. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment