Aaaaaand We're Back

So! I've been out sick the last two days. Tuesday, as I wallowed in bed and wished for death, Rock took Wildman to the pediatrician. He has an ear infection. This is his third total and second in six weeks. She (the pediatrician) is starting to think we might need to put tubes in his ears. Wednesday, when I woke up feeling almost as bad as I did on Tuesday with the addition of the fact that my left ear was stopped up, Rock put his foot down and said, "Not only are you not going to work, you're going to the doctor." After writhing around in bed for a while and coming to the conclusion that I would be willing to take a rat turd in order to get well, I finally went to the doctor. So...I have ear infections in BOTH ears. And I'm on antibiotics. Yeast infection, here I come.

On to happier topics! There was great interest (read: two requests!) for more info on homeschooling based on my last post. So let's talk homeschooling. Which is a bit of a misnomer in our case. Supergirl is only five, people, we're only talking kindergarten. But we have been teaching her at home for the past year or so. We decided to try this because she's pretty hyper. We are concerned that if we send her to public school she will be diagnosed as ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. Not that there's anything wrong with ADHD or Ritalin, we just don't feel it's the right course of action in her case. See, I was hyper as a child. Supergirl is no more hyper than I was at her age. What I want is for her to learn to control her own behavior. The way I did. So we try to work with her and help her learn what behavior is appropriate and what is not. And part of that is teaching her at home. Most of our focus has been on reading. We've worked on writing letters, and she can write the alphabet really well. Then, we've taken rhyming words and taught her sets of words. (ex. All, small, mall, wall, etc) We also bought a box of flash cards that had words on one side and a sentence with the word in it on the other side. We've worked with her on spelling and pronouncing each word. We figure she's got about a 400 word vocabulary that she can spell and read. So in measurable results, the homeschooling experiment is going really well. However, Supergirl's attitude is terrible. She hates going over her words and will not do it willingly. That is why last weekend was such a fight. Rock had reminded her every day to go over her words, and she hadn't. He had used it as a test, to see if she would go over them on her own. So on an attitude level, the homeschooling experiment is failing dismally. Honestly, we haven't decided if we're going to continue or if we're going to find a local school that we like and send her there.