Monday Morning Ramblings

I have a whole bunch of disjointed rambling thoughts this morning.

It's cold here. -1. It's an assault to the system going out in it. That cold is brutal and will definitely wake up and incoherent mom taking care of her dog on a Monday morning.

This weekend my son was glued to the computer. He was working on his website. We sent the link to my cousin and my sister. My cousin signed his guestbook and was impressed, waiting to hear from my sister. My son wants me to spread the word -- but I told him he needs some more polish and content.

I see this website as a huge learning experience. So far he's just been using the templates provided, but he's been playing around and amazing me with his ability to do so well. I set the site up and then told him to figure it out. He has. Mull-berry, thank you for the book suggestion. Our library doesn't have it so I put it on my wish list at Amazon. More on buying books later.

Aside from all the fun aspects of building a website, the reason I'm excited for his new-found love is it is the perfect opportunity for him to start writing. Up to this point we have not done a formal writing program. My son has done some Evan Moor books such as the Super Sentence and Paragraph books, he's done a few assignments from Writing Strands, but he wasn't really ready to conquer writing.

I believe that my son has dysgraphia. His handwriting is not typical of a 4th grader. His letters are big and uncontrolled. His cursive is a little better, but not much. It is physically painful for him to write. That's basically the reason we bought the Alphasmart. His typing lessons have been going well, although he hates some of the finger configurations because it hurts his fingers -- but he's had a few timed writings typing 15 WPM with one or no mistakes which thrilled him. And me.

It just seems as everything has come together and the cosmos says it's time for him to write. So today we are going to organize and map out his website on paper. I'm going to make a list of topics for him to write about. (Another benefit of the website, organization!) He started a blog at my request. One two-sentence entry so far.

This is just one of those times, as a homeschooling parent, when you get excited because everything is coming together. For once, I have a highly motivated child for a project he is loving more than anything else he's done in school to date. It can't get any better than this.

The only down side to all of this is that I really would like to buy some books as guides -- for him as well as me. I know I can find it all on the internet, but I'm such a book girl -- I like to have a book in hand that I can read, that DS can read. Our library doesn't have anything that I'm looking for and my husband has an aversion to me buying any more books.

This is the man who can read two paperbacks in one evening. This is the man who, when we were first married, would take me to the bookstore on Saturday mornings and spend $30-50 a weekend on books. (20 years ago that was a lot.) This is the man with four tall bookshelves so full of books the shelves are bowing. The books are double stacked, then more stacked in between the tops of the books and the empty space between the next shelf up. This is the man that gave up his book buying for family. This is the man that goes to the library weekly and gets 12-15 books at a time. Maybe he's jealous that he can't fulfill his book-buying addiction any longer, but he has a problem with me buying books for DS.

I don't think that's a fair statement. I think he has a problem with me spending a lot of money on homeschooling. I don't think I spend a lot by any means, but he has issues. I sneak books into the house. Not good, because I'm a very honest person and it bothers me. I use the library as much as possible, but sometimes they don't have what we want, even through ILL. Sometimes I just want to own the book, to have the new smell, enjoy the feeling of the the clean, crisp pages...

I feel an Amazon spending spree coming on.

Enough of my rambling thoughts. I have a son to get up, a school to run, a day to start, a website to plan.