School Planning

As I have mentioned before, I am pretty much set with our schooling for this year. We plan on starting September 17th. One of the things I had been putting off was creating our schedule for the day. It is usually one of the most stressful things to try to figure out who will practice piano when, the individual lessons for the younger children, who will cook meals on what nights, etc. so I just kept procrastinating. Well, I knew with us starting in two weeks and the baby possibly deciding to arrive before then that I shouldn't put it off any longer.

So, earlier this week I poured myself a glass of Plexus Slim and sat at my computer and got to work. I am surprised at how quickly I was able to work out all the details. What normally takes me an hour to start with and then a week of revamping, I had done in about an hour. I did have two of my older girls look over it to see if I had missed something or made any mistakes, and I had made a few small mistakes, but those took less than 15 minutes to figure out and fix.

The interesting thing is that I did this in the afternoon. For as long as I can remember (for at least the past 20 years), afternoons have always been the hardest for me to accomplish anything. I usually hit the wall around 2:30 in the afternoon and need to take a nap (and by nap, I mean at least an hour nap). I used to figure if I don't get it done before lunch, it wouldn't get done because after lunch I just slow down. I didn't sit down (which means I had been busy until then) until about 3:00 in the afternoon to start working on the schedule and I was alert and could think clearly. Even after finishing the schedule, I worked on some laundry, picked up around the house, and helped get dinner ready.

I attribute this change to my body healing and to the natural energy that comes from the natural ingredients. I never had the sustained energy I now experience from drinking a cup (or two) of coffee! I'm sure my family appreciates how much more I am able to accomplish in a day. One would think that a mother of soon to be 13 would be experiencing more and more tiredness, not more and more energy. I am so thankful God led me to Plexus to help me with the ministry of motherhood to which He has called me.

For those who are interested in what we do for schooling, here is a brief explanation. We use the Robinson Curriculum as the base for our education. I have taken the Robinson book list and adapted it for our needs. Some of the books I replaced with books on the same topic that we already owned. I also added some books that I feel are important for my children to read. We also do not follow Saxon math all the way through as so far my girls aren't planning on college, but rather would like to own their own businesses or hope their future husbands own their own businesses. Instead of the higher level Saxon math, we have them do a year of personal finance (using Dave Ramsey's Financial Foundations) and then a year of business math (Rod & Staff's Recordkeeping). We also always do a separate Bible class, but we have not decided for sure what we are doing for this year. I am waiting for my husband to make the final call on a particular study. If he hasn't decided by the time we start school, I have a few options of short studies we can do until he decides.

I kept my oldest (who graduated this past summer) on the schedule for this year as she will be helping around the house and possibly with some of the schooling when she isn't working outside the home. I decided not to add the baby on the schedule because the baby will just be eating and sleeping most of the day and we'll just work that in our schedules (that and I'm running out of space if I want to keep it all on one page!).

If you have any questions about Plexus or our schooling, please feel free to ask!