Back to School Mode
In my ideal scenario, with homeschooling, we would not really have too big of a change during summer times. However, it has been proven that is not the case. Even though we are not tied to the school schedules as much, there are still seasonal activities like city-run swimming lessons happening only during the summer break during the day. I guess this is part of the learning process for me as well for homeschooling.
We are very fortunate to have a great homeschool enrichment program close by. It is run through the public school district but it is only 1 or 2 days a week. I have always loved the part time classroom experiences. This way, my kids get to experience the more traditional classroom setting so they can still develop social skills needed when they transition back to a classroom eventually. I mean, in my mind, they will go to college which will have lectures and classes in a classroom. At the same time, I still get to help my kids with the Chinese speaking environment and pace of her learning in general.
Anyways, school started in the first week of August here, which seems pretty early since we were still getting a lot of excessive heat warnings and they had to cancel outdoor recess a couple of times. We opted for in-person this year. To me, the whole point sending my kids out to a “school“ is to meet friends and be social. It doesn’t make sense for us to do virtual on top of homeschooling now. To be honest, it has been a little nerve-racking for me with the current pandemic situation to have my kids in school. There is currently no mask mandate which means, the majority of kids around my kids are not wearing masks anymore. It is hard to do risk analysis these days because there is just so much we still don’t know about this virus and things could change rather rapidly. I guess we will take it one day at a time. I think for now, we are doing ok with this specific program but I am also ready to pull my kids back home at any time too if things get bad.
While my girl is in school, I get to spend some more time with just the boys. We’ve been going to a lot of parks lately because everyone else is in school and we can have the whole place all to ourselves. This is definitely a great perk of homeschooling. You don’t have to have classes at certain times or even certain days. Not that I am against people but I just like to have more personal space in general. And with less crowd, I feel a little more at ease letting my most active youngest child to roam free a little bit without me constantly chasing after him. Because we have been going to parks, my little guy has shown his great ability of climbing. Maybe he would enjoy rock climbing!
Our girl has been taking piano lessons for a little bit now. Her teacher is amazing in many aspects. She puts a good emphasis on performances and recitals which is great in my opinion. There of course is a fine balance between too achievement driven and too relaxed with progresses. I think with the group lesson, it is a pretty good place to be right now. We had our first in-class concert this month. All the students worked on two class pieces that they performed together along with the teacher. Each student also performed an individual piece accompanied by their teacher.
Learning an instrument is not an easy task. It takes a lot of practice and there are days where practice is just so hard. I am still trying to find my balance here too. Some days I feel that I need to be more strict and just make her sit down and finish the practice. Then some days, I feel that I need to let her be responsible of knowing how much practice she needs. One week, she complained that the easy pieces were too easy and the hard piece was too hard so she didn’t need to practice the easy ones and couldn’t practice the hard one. I left her be and the teacher called her out in class and told her that it is her job to practice not mommy’s. We will see how this piano thing goes in the future.
PS. While other parents bought flowers for their kids, I bought my kid a giant chocolate chip cookie. That’s the kind of parent I am.
The most fun thing we did this month was going to Sunsplash as a family. I have never been to a big water park myself and Jonny has not been in a long time. We have the ticket included in the Pogopass so we decided to give it a try. We spent 6 hours there and kids had a blast. I bet it would be even more fun when my kids are a little older but it was for sure a great choice for a family outing.
They had lockers so I just set everything in the locker for the entire time. It was actually pretty unusual for me to not have a photo device at hand but it was really good to not feel distracted and just have fun in the water. With that being said though, I still managed to almost lost my youngest once. Facepalm. There is this splash pad area for little kids. There is a giant bucket that will dump water regularly upon filling up. At one point, Jonny went on this advanced slide by himself leaving me with all three kids. The water bucket dumped water as I was just about to check on my little guy. After wiping off the water from my face, I could not spot him by the tiny water slide anymore. I thought he was behind the slide trying to get on so I went that way to check, which gave him even more time to run further on the other direction. I definitely had a mini heart attack when I realized that he indeed was not in the area anymore. Luckily my two older ones were really good at following instructions and stayed where they were so I could run towards the other direction trying to find this little guy. Luckily a super nice mom saw that my little guy walked out of the splash pad area alone and no one was following him closely and she picked him up and carried him back towards the splash pad area. Phew. The only reason I did not totally panic probably because I know that he knows how to float, which he already demonstrated at the waterpark prior to this incident, so if he falls into water, he won’t drown immediately. But still, that was scary. I later told Jonny that I am glad I did not have my phone with me at all. Even without the phone distraction, I already managed to almost lose a child once. I couldn’t even image how much more frustrated I would be if I had my phone with me and I was distracted.
Since I cannot bring outside food or drink except for factory sealed water into the park, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money purchasing those snacks in the park, I did my research and packed a big cooler. I got a pack of 10lb ice and threw 5 bottles of water in the freezer the night before. I brought another 20 bottles of cooled water as well in the cooler. We had a great fancy brunch at home so everyone was full for a while. Then I packed lunchables, some canned Chinese porridge and a bunch of other stuff. Since the admission is good for the entire day, we came out to the car for lunch and returned for the second half. It was an exhausting day physically but it was so much fun!
Ever since I become a mentor for the Click Community, I have the responsibility to write tutorials regularly. While I have always loved to teach, it can still get tough sometimes to come up with new content to teach because I feel that all the amazing people who joined the mentors team before me had covered every single aspect of photography you can think of already! Luckily, a member asked a really specific question about a technical setting. Ta-da. I decided to take the kids to the aquarium, aka the photography nightmare because of the crazy lighting haha, and to tackle this technical issue. Of course, I bribed my kids to be my assistant and bought them tasty shopping mall lunch as their payment afterwards.
One thing Jonny did this month that was pretty amazing was taking the GRE test. He got an awesome score, which is the highest he’s ever gotten including all the practice tests. I am definitely very proud of him for the result he got—I mean, if he let me help him more with his math, he could have gotten an even higher score but alas. He said that if he got above certain score then he’s going to get an iphone AND an apple watch. But we will continue to be super cheap and use our US mobil phone plan, which doesn’t even support stand alone cellular apple watch at the moment. Haha. I asked him if I could get an iphone too as a reward for all the time I spent taking the kids out of the house so he could study. He said sure. So now we are patiently waiting to see the new iphone releases and then by the time new iphones come around, we probably have changed our minds and decided to just stay with our current androids. LOL.
Now that he has taken his GRE, he will spend some time preparing for his school applications and then we will see if he could get into any of the schools he wants to attend. Fingers crossed. Of course, I am not looking forward to potentially losing the amazing homeschool enrichment program here but well, I am sure I will be able to cross that bridge when we get to it.
So that’s our August. I will start to get really busy as September rolls around—fall family sessions will be in full swing, or I hope ;) Then I still have my full time mommying job. The best luck to me for sure and I’ll take it one month, one week, or most likely, one day at a time and keep moving forward. Looking forward to cooler weather for sure though!
As always, thank you for reading.
