Tennis is a very lovely sport when you are winning. So tonight I really like tennis. Considering how little I've played this fall and winter, I think we did fairly well at this member-guest event. Tomorrow night is likely to not look quite so lovely, but that's okay. One day of happy tennis is better than none. And it's always nice to see familiar faces of players that I see during the regular seasons as well as at this event. My plan for the spring and summer is to throw myself whole hog back into tennis, though I suppose I'll still have to have some tennis boundaries when it comes to morning school times. Or maybe not. It will all depend on how self-sufficient everyone seems to be when the time comes.

You have to be a homeschooler with kids you worry about to appreciate this next momentous announcement: Walter took notes today. Beautiful, properly spelled notes in readable handwriting, with detail and thoroughness. And apparently without threats or bribes of any kind. He is taking a 16 week life science class right now, and they are studying cells. It looks like there was a lecture/discussion today about the parts of a cell, and he came out with two pages of information, including well-drawn diagrams and a lengthy metaphor about the cell as a productive city.

The other exciting thing that happened today is that Ollie wrote a whole little report (only two paragraphs and several pictures put into Powerpoint) in less than an hour. It wasn't a big deal. I wasn't involved at all. We remembered it at 8:30 last night, he went off and looked up information online about Death Valley, he made himself a keyword outline without input from me, and he wrote two paragraphs while I was upstairs. The only help he really needed was with formatting it in Powerpoint so that things fit neatly on a single frame. A year ago this would have sounded like a miracle. This fall it would have taken three hours and intensive direction and help from me. There is hope. And I really do feel like IEW works, especially in taking the fear and mystery out of writing for people like boys, who often think they can't write or go into a panic at an assignment. There was no panic here, no anxiety. He just did it. Way cool.

Frances brought home a gigantic "castle" made from cardboard boxes today from her Story of the World class. In my disaster of an upstairs in the house where I'm always moving furniture, this is really quite the last thing that I needed, and if this 4x4 foot castle wasn't big enough, it has spawned a trash-building spree that will probably last for days. I applaud her creativity, but I am going to have to be forceful about my need to be able to walk safely through a room.

Mondays always exhaust me. I love Tuesdays because they ask so little. I can sleep comparatively late (Rutledge has to get to preschool), we have all morning to do our work, and the boys don't have any activities until Ollie's dive practice at 7. I don't have to prepare anything for anybody except people in my own family. The only trouble I see right now is that I doubt we can find any of our schoolbooks in this hellhole of a house. The downstairs is pretty decent, but the upstairs, where the work gets done, is anything but conducive to good study habits or concentration. Perhaps I should burn the midnight oil and get some organization going before the gang wakes up.

Our new read-aloud is "The Christopher Killer," which is a very graphic young adult novel about a 17 year old girl who wants to be a forensic pathologist and helps her coroner father investigate a gruesome body scene. It's off to a great, if late start. Frances is reading Kit, the American Girl's first story to herself, and I'm reading "Skylark" with her. We're also reading some James Herriot dog stories. I'm amazed at how much Walter has changed in the past few months, going from never listening to books to being totally engrossed and noticing when his vocabulary words go by (which is very often) or when derivatives of their Latin words appear.

The hardest decision I'm trying to make now is what to do with next year. On the one hand, I like doing our own thing, and I like choosing my own curricula and being free to change when things aren't working out as planned. On the other, I appreciate having direction from outside, having some structure imposed upon us by obligation, and having other adults involved in my children's lives, especially as motivators to urge them to build up their strengths. Some positive peer pressure is also not something I'm afraid of--the motivation of wanting to share something good with the class or to feel like they are competitive and competent pushes them to do really nice work and that makes them proud. Originally these are not things that I thought I needed or wanted for them, but at this point in our lives, I'm seeing more value in this. What I need to mull over is whether we should stay doing the bulk or our out of the house stuff with the homeschool center where we go now, if we should look toward attending one of the several homeschool "academies" that run much like schools that meet two days a week, or if we should do something like Classical Conversations, which provides a structured day for middle and high schoolers. It's a lot to think about. Thank goodness we actually do seem to have options, including the option to just keep piecing together what works for us in the here and now.

The worst part of playing tennis in the winter: it makes your nose run terribly.