Journey to Excellence

Our life right now is all home renovation with homeschooling on the side. Let's start with the homeschooling. It's going so great! Every single day I tell Eli how proud I am of him and what he is accomplishing in his schooling. He is left on his own the majority of the time with a couple of hours of me in the afternoons with a one year old hanging on my leg. He is ROCKING school! I leave him a list of about four things to accomplish while I am at work in the mornings, and when I get home those things are done and done well! Pre-algebra, grammar, writing, reading. Check, check, check, check. When I ask him how things went he is smiling! He is smiling because he is feeling such a sense of pride in accomplishing hard things. The last two weeks we have not touched geology just because I have, frankly, been too busy to plan out enriching lessons. Plus I am interested in it, as well, so I want to have the time to learn alongside him. Geography/cartography is a little easier for ...

Have you ever spent time on a farm? Tell us a little about it. Have you ever grown your own pumpkin? Been on a hayride? Driven a tractor? Milked a cow? I live in Small Town, Missouri, so I have been on several farms. I tried to grow pumpkins one year and ended up with one tiny one. I've been on multiple hayrides over the years. I have driven a tractor to help pick up hay. And I used to go with my high school boyfriend to a dairy farm while he milked cows on Sunday mornings. I didn't actually milk them, but I watched him do it. What's something 'younger you' would like about you now? The younger me didn't understand what it meant to be an introvert. She spent her whole time trying to fit in with a bunch of extroverts because she wanted to be part of the "in" crowd. But she was always miserable. She looks at me now and says, "Ah, so that's what was 'wrong' with me. I didn't know that to be truly happy I needed to be exact...