Balancing School and Extracurricular Stuff

Our week here since Tuesday has been pretty mundane. Friday morning, T. and I got in as much work as we could early on, then we all went over to the library so that K. could go to storytime. T. and I would have stayed home except that Ed met a homeschooling mom on Monday while picking up T. at his piano teacher's, and the mom mentioned that she and some other "classical" homeschooling moms also take their little children to the library story hour. "Classical" homeschooling covers an awful lot of territory, and really didn't mean that we would have much in common, but then I got an e-mail from the group mentioning that they were planning to put together a book discussion group for the children. T. was part of a homeschooler's book group in Florida and enjoyed it, so I figured we would give this group a try. I'm glad we did. There were four homeschooling moms there, and a couple boys around T.'s age and some little girls around K.'s age, and they all seemed very nice. At least one of the other moms is even teaching her kids Latin. Aside from being a comfortably small group (the group we joined last year was a bit overwhelmingly large), I think this group might also be a better fit for us from a religious standpoint, since they specifically mentioned that they preferred to keep religion and homeschool meetings separate (last year's group had an overtly anti-Catholic statement of belief, and we felt like there was a little too much religious emphasis). They picked Shiloh for the first book, mostly because it is a Newbery winner and the library system has enough copies for everyone, but it looks like a good one to me. My only reservation about the whole reading group thing is that it will make it so hard to get in all our school work every Friday. I think we will try it for a little while and see if it is worth the hassle.

T. and K. had friends over this afternoon, a brother and sister who match them in ages, and also fairly well in disposition. Their mother came too, and we had a nice time drinking coffee, eating banana bread, and talking. Bo was in seventh Heaven, with two little girls playing with him all afternoon, but the cat spent the day hiding in the basement.