President's Day

At one point I planned to take the kids to Valley Forge yesterday as they were having special activities in honor of Washington's birthday, which actually Martha did have a birthday celebration for him there once during the Revolutionary War. Also, it seemed fitting to visit that site in February considering it was cold when Washington and his troops were there, although we planned to have warm coats and suitable footwear, which was not true for most of the men in the army. Since I am still sick (I can't recall a time in the last 30 years that I've had a sore throat for more than two months straight- Ugh!), I was not at all interested in driving that far yesterday. I do really want to take the kids there since it's less than three hours from our house and we have been studying that time period. We're currently in the early 1800's. The last chapter book we read was Fever 1793. They are having an event for homeschoolers in May. I am hoping to take the kids then. The weather will be much nicer, and it's after the spring semester is over so hopefully I will have the energy for the drive. I'm doing less driving this semester, which I greatly appreciate.

Our local school district was closed yesterday because of the holiday, but we had school. I let them skip a couple of subjects such as typing yesterday. On Sunday Paul's parents joined us in the second service at church because the kids' choir sang. They joined us for lunch; I made beef stroganoff, which the adults liked but wasn't a hit with the kids. They played with the kids for a few hours before they left.

Yesterday I had a shock when I went to check to see if we had read a certain book, and I discovered one page of my blog was missing. It was the page where I had listed all the picture books, chapter books, DVDs, and CD's we had used thus far for history and science this school year (since July 2018). It had more than 500 titles (plus authors).

I hadn't backed it up anywhere. BIG mistake. I didn't delete it. I had only created one Read Aloud page (all the chapter books since December 2012 to present), and now I have two Read Aloud pages (on is a duplicate), but the other one that had science/history for this year has vanished. I had spent HOURS creating and updating that list over the last 8 months. Since my blog is private, there aren't any cached versions of it for me to access. If any of you happened to access that particular page (the URL had early modern history at the end) and can do so again through your browser's history or a cached version, I would be SOOOO thrilled if you could copy and paste it and send it to me.  I can give my email address if anyone can retrieve it. I know the world won't come to an end if it can't be rescued; I was pretty upset about it yesterday, but I've put it into perspective today. We're supposed to keep lists like that if we homeschool in PA, but I'll just have to tell my evaluator that my list disappeared and she'll have to trust me that I read the kids 500+ books for history/science this school year. Hopefully I have learned my lesson about doing a better job of backing things up! I have already copied and pasted the other lists (read alouds, Ian's chapter books, Nadia's chapter books, etc.) into Word documents and saved them elsewhere.

Today was my longest work day at the university thus far this year. I left the house at 8:15am to go observe two student teachers in our district, drove to BU, spent 3 hours in my office, and then taught for six hours. I got home at 8:45pm. I'm exhausted. Thankfully there are only 9 more Tuesdays left in the semester (not counting spring break and finals week). I think I can, I think I can. Tomorrow I'm only observing one student teacher. Thursday I'll be gone from about 9:15am to 5:30pm, and then I plan to be home with my kiddos for the four days after that.