Serious Study?

Silence.

It is a welcome, but eerie sound in this house. For 3 days, the boys have studied at least 4 hours every morning. I am the noisy one around here. I do not have their attention span.

The boys are calling this our "season of study". If history repeats itself, it will last about one month..then we will be in OM crunch mode and will once again, be going through the motions.

Sandy and Devin are coming over every morning. Sandy patiently sits with Austen each morning as he works himself through the confusing world of fractions, polynomials and figuring area and perimeter. He is spending a lot of time reading 39 Clues and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy triology.

Devin is a bit more mathematically self-sufficient. He plops himself in a chair and just works through textbooks. He occasionally murmurs he is stuck, but before you reach him he inevitably says,'oh, never mind..I got it." He is spending a lot of time reading Usborne's Book of World Religions and looking at grammar and German.

Both Austen and Devin are spending a little bit of time each day diagramming sentences (like 15 minutes) and have returned to daily essay writing.

We all read together each morning..mainly because I like this time together. We are almost finished with Brizinger. The boys are also reading the Bhagavad Gita for next week's discussion during co-op.

Cody and I are plodding through his Latin together. We decided in the Fall that since the bulk of his time is spent on the soccer fields, Latin was a way to get comfortable with English grammar and meet college foreign language requirements in one shot. At the time, he was debating whether to spend a semester playing soccer in Mexico for his senior year, or go to Italy for his first year of college (also for soccer). We figured a year of Latin wouldn't hurt him, either way.

We started with Latina Christiana. We worked about 1/2 way through it and then Cody decided it would be more interesting to switch to the Oxford Latin Course. This is one brother Brian used for a year. It involves lots of translations, but revolves around the biography of Quintus Horatio Flacus...the assasin of Julius Ceasar. Am I surprised that he finds the life of an assassin more interesting than liturgical prayers?! The biography of an assassin is a bit more time consuming though. Cody is reading and re-reading Darren Brown's Trick's of the Mind. He is returning to the routine of working through the Saxon Alg.II book.

As for me, I am stalling. I need to read the book of Acts, identify some specific groups, etc. for discussion. Instead, I am reading Three Cups of Tea, lots of magazines, The Shack and a book on care-giving. I am filling out a zillion impact assesment things for work..and..well..blogging. Like I said, don't have the boys' attention span.

Why am I writing this? Because years from now, I want to say.."do you remember that time when we studied...like every day? I think it was January of like, 2009 or something.."