The February newsletter is up!

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This month’s issue of “The Imperfect Homeschooler” newsletter landed with a thud in email boxes near and far early this morning. It answers questions like:

What’s another skill (besides cooking) that our kids will need for the future?

Need some ideas for celebrating Valentine’s Day, Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday with your kids?

How can teens get two years of college paid in full, plus a stipend?

And as always, there’s a true story in the “What Our Kids Are Missing Out On Dept.” that will make you extra glad you keep your kids home from school….

Here’s the link; if you want your own copy to go thud in your emailbox each month, sign up here.

Threatened While Homeschooling

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In some ways, our teenage son with Down syndrome is very similar to his siblings when they were teens. He likes his privacy, talks about wanting a girlfriend and a car, and is very picky about what he wears. He also spends a lot of time primping in the mirror, getting his hair just right.

On the other hand, he can watch “X-Men 3” one day and “Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree” the next, and appear to enjoy them equally. It’s the same with games. He can beat his brother and his sister’s boyfriend (both in their mid-20s) at video games, yet he insists on playing Candyland and Chutes and Ladders with me, which we’ve played since he was little.

So we’re in the middle of working on his lessons this morning, and he gets mad at me because I’m making him pronounce a word correctly (he has major speech issues), and like a typical teen he loses his temper and bellows, “Stop it, Mom, or I’m not going to play Candyland with you today!”

LOL  🙂

(The rest of the story: he didn’t mean it. We had to play twice after he finished his school. Sigh. If I had a nickel for every time we played Candyland over the past 13 or 14 years……)

Kangaroo Care

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After having three healthy babies in a row, I’d gotten used to the idea of bringing a baby home a few days after his birth. So it was quite a shock when my fourth baby had to be transferred to a larger hospital, where he ending up spending almost a month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

That was nearly 17 years ago, but I remember how hard it was to sit and stare at him through the plastic Isolette incubator as clearly as if it happened last month. Watching the numbers on the monitors go up and down, hearing alarms going off, freaking out when they were his alarms……it was a very difficult time for our family.

The best times were when we could hold him: gingerly of course, because we didn’t want to disconnect any of the lead wires attached to him. We could never do it for long because he’d get too cold and his heart rate would go down. It was so hard to let the nurse put him back in his little plastic box, which was decorated with photos of the siblings he hadn’t met yet.

How I wish there would have been something like Kangaroo Care back then*. I just read an article about this concept, written by a reporter whose baby was born prematurely. She got to “wear” her baby when she visited him in the NICU, and it made a traumatic experience a little easier on her and a lot healthier for him.

If you or someone you know ends up with a baby in the NICU, knowing that Kangaroo Care exists will be a real blessing to the baby and his parents.

*I also wish I could have known that, 17 years later, he’d be the healthy, feisty guy he is today 🙂

Enjoy the Carnival of Homeschooling

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Carnival of Homeschooling

Another cold January weekend….the perfect time to stay home where it’s nice and warm and spend some time visiting this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling.

We can learn so much from others on this homeschooling journey. The carnival makes it easy to check in with a variety of bloggers and get their take on all sorts of homeschool-related topics. It’s a great way to relax and learn at the same time. See you there!