Weer back

We've never really kept up on this blog, and I'm hoping this return will be the one in which we start adding here regularly.

I skimmed over the previous posts to make a couple of necessary changes and realized how much didn't turn out as we planned or expected. Most obviously, Conan has mostly chosen to go to public school. I have continued my concerns, as voiced in earlier posts, however my commitment to student-driven education has made it hard not to follow her lead on this.

And the genders of my fellow crazee family members have all gone somewhere. Rae has stopped going by Kim or Kimberly and identifies as genderqueer (or non-binary) and Conan has come out as a transgender girl. I skimmed through the previous entries largely to update their names/pronouns and hope I succeeded at getting them all.

The most obvious change I've seen in both since their coming out is how obviously more comfortable and happy both of them are in their own skins since their respective acknowledgments. That's especially noticeable considering all the potential stress and difficulty we've hit.

In May, I left my job, so Rae could work full time at a job they were very excited to be starting. I was going to work on my creative endeavors as well as work toward beginning a homeschool program with Conan. It was only a very short time later that Rae had an accident on the bus home, breaking their arm, up near the shoulder. Not only that, but the pre-surgery scans revealed a cancerous tumor in the bone that was being operated on, complicating the surgery as well as raising our anxiety by a fair degree.

We have a GoFundMe set up around that, if anyone is interested in helping out. We have also set up a Patreon for this video series, if you'd like to be a part of that.

We are on our way to the other end. I'm back to work, Rae is recovering well and is looking to get back to work part time as well. Conan is ready to go back to school this year. She is nervous about coming out to her classmates, but is excited about the programs at her school, and we've been assured other students have previously made this transition there and they are prepared to work with her on any issues that due come up. We'll be watching it closely, especially me who is suspicious of schools to start with.

Not only that, Rae and I are working on a creative project together, as well as discussing the possibility of collaborating on later things, depending on how we feel.

So, while we are still recovering from recent events, we are feeling optimistic.

We are also working to start a series of videos of us a family. I thought we had enough eccentricities among us to make it possibly interesting and fun. I did this one above to sort of see if I could make anything out of my trip to the Museum of Flight with Conan. I kind of enjoyed the process and think it worked reasonably well with what I was working with. Admittedly, there will continue to be a fair amount of those issues, so long as we're assembling footage from our phones and such, which is what we're looking at, by both necessity and preference. I suspect I'll work out some tricks for my lack of coverage and inconsistent sound... It does make one see why Reality TV has so much nonsense.

I've started my own channel, Rise of the Flying Guillotine, along with an accompanying blog, also Rise of the Flying Guillotine. My intentions are more modest with that, just a place for serving real rant again, for whatever it might be worth.

I'm sure I've missed more than I've gotten, but I expect to be back to cover that later.

Scheduling homeschool

Well time has flown by and it has been a long time since we last posted. We have made some major life changes. We moved across the country to the Seattle area. We have experienced kindergarten in a public school and now are homeschooling for first grade and presumably for the rest of her academic years. We have speech therapy once a week with a one on one speech therapist(our child is autistic) and we attend a home school co op where she attends classes that she chose. We are very happy with the co-op and how she is learning.
We originally allowed her to attend public school at her request and stayed the year but our dislike of the public education system was only intensified by our first hand experience .
Don't get me wrong, I adored her teachers (class and resource room ) but the way things are handled and the lack of social skills that are taught furthered our desire to home school her.
We have been entertaining the idea of moving to a commune sometime in the near future and are currently on the hunt for the perfect fit.
Conan has recently discovered the awesomeness of "Minecraft" and we let her pay it offline. It is super awesome for home school learning and she enjoys it!
My current struggle is this game she has stumbled upon called "Roblox". She gets so frustrated and many a meltdown can be linked directly to her dying in the game. I am not sure if we will cutting this game out of our rotation of entertainment during freetime in our time.
ABCMouse has been a great help as well. We love ABCMouse and PBS Kids. My husband and I differ in some ways of parenting. She is more laid back and approaches things in an unschooling fashion. I am a follower of schedules and routines. We have discovered that our son is more of a schedule and routine person than not and so we schedule our day . I allow a good amount of freetime (he can do whatever , this includes video games and tv). We also have one day a week where she can "veg out".
Veg out day is just that , no schedule , just chill!
A sample schedule may look something like this (non co-op day)
900am -930 am :Breakfast
930am-10am:free time
10-1015:workbook
1015-1030:play dough
1030-1130:leggos
1130-1230:free time
1230-100:lunch
100-115:speech worksheets
115-215:playtime with mommy
215-315: read /no electronics
315-500:freetime
500-600 :dinner
600-800pm:movie time
800-900:bath,brush teeth ,read and bed
We attend co-op three days a week and speech for an hour once a week so this is how we roll two and a half days a week (One of the co op days is just an hour long class and of course one day a week is chill out day)
I wanna hear from other parents. How does your day look? Am I the only one that breaks it up this much? Id love to see other examples of homeschooling and unschooling !

Numbers and other things

I have been homeschooling Conan for around a year now and she is doing great. She can count to 100( of course she is convinced that the number 44 being right after 34 for some odd reason all though he totally knows otherwise). She knows her abcs, colors and shapes. This is all information she would be learning in Kindergarten but thanks to the magic of homeschooling he knows this now.
Before you start on this , yes she gets social time with other kids.
 We are part of a ton of homeschooling groups and she has a friend that lives near us that visits very often. I have sat in on a public preschool classroom and they do not encourage socialization. When the children attempt to be social with each other they are quickly "corrected" and told to sit in their seats.
Where did the idea of kids getting social skills from school become a thing? If I learned how to be social via school I would be raising my hand to ask the bus driver a question. I would be a million times more awkward then I already am and I attended public school.
In public school you learn how to isolate the kids that are different, form cliques and how to sleep with shades on. Period.
I am very happy with homeschooling as a whole right now and I recommend it to any and everyone. We recently made a life change and I quit working so that  I would have more energy and time to homeschool. This meant that we had to make some financial decisions (budget cuts if you were) and we are super happy with the results.