so far

Well, Martin seems to like homeschool. That doesn't mean that he hasn't thrown fits. Nor does it mean that he always does the activities we have planned. By and large, though, he likes working in the homeschool room. He enjoys a lot of the activities. And he spends most of his free time during the day (about an hour in the morning before the tutor arrives and another hour after she leaves) doing more activities in the room. During one of those sessions, he matched pieces of paper with the names of state birds to each of their respective states on a map. He did it from memory. I had no idea how many states picked the Northern Cardinal. No state picked the peacock. Bummer.

The homeschool transition is definitely more difficult for me and my husband. We're trying to come up with activities for the next day. Late last night I found myself searching Google Images for line drawings of pumpkins. Another problem is that Martin likes to take little breaks in my office, usually right in the middle of an important sentence I was trying to get out of my brain and into a Microsoft Word document. But these things seem minor compared to worrying about his classroom status everyday. Or paying tuition. MArtin will never get kicked out of Quinby Avenue School and he goes for free.

My guess is that Martin will be totally acclimated to homeschool in about two weeks. The more pressing question is whether or not we will have found him a new tutor by that time. No matter what my husband and I do to make homeschool a success, we still need a tutor to do language and social skills work with Martin about four hours a day. Anybody up for working with a quirky 5-year-old? The job comes with lots of fringe benefits, namely exposure to obscure information. There's so much to know about the Western Meadowlark.