Today was a better day

I am far from perfect ... I don't even pretend that I am perfect. I try not to swat my children, I try to use various types of discipline (including letting the children come up with the consequences) ... but I have to admit, as much as I hate it, there is yelling in my house. This is one thing that I have been working on a LOT, especially since we have been prompted to home school. Yesterday we had to take a complete break from school for about 2 hours due to all over frustrations. Frustration on my end, frustration on the kids end and then me turning into monster mom ... or as I call it "a Kate day." These days bring out the worst in me. I spent a lot of time talking to my husband, our home teacher, and 2 of my really good friends who also home school. We tossed around SEVERAL ideas for using on Peanut and her math. You see, Peanut has this issue with learning ... she HATES the process. She likes to be able to just KNOW how to do something (read, do math, etc) and not have to work at it. She is a perfectionist and admitting that she is wrong is just horrid to her. I think of Peanut as a nut .. you have to figure out exactly what tool is best used to crack her but when you figure it out, she spills out SO much goodness. So now that I have our tools, we are just going to tinker with each one to figure out that magic combination.


Which brings me to today. We had a complete 180 today. We opted to not do math first, in fact, I let Peanut pick her first subject. After 2 short subjects, she dove into math and not only finished it in a short amount of time, but she also had NO errors. I was SO proud of her and seeing her BIG grin, immediately sent her off to choose whatever piece of candy she wanted from our candy stash. She choose a candy bar and had expected me to nix it but I told her it was fine. She needed to know that CHOOSING to move from a bad experience and CHOOSING to find the fun in it, led to good results. Needless to say the rest of the day flew for both Bullfrog and Peanut. Peanut got one question wrong on her assessments for the day, landing a 96% for the day. While she didn't get the 100% she was looking for, the smile on my face and her ability to go play for several hours with her friends let her shake it off easily. We still have a few options in our back pocket to throw in there that will hopefully keep her happy to learn.

Just a quick bounce back, Peanut always knows just the things to help lighten the mood and make everyone just a little bit happier. *my kids really do rock* Last night, while waiting for us to get her computer open and ready for her to blog ... she hip bumped me out of the kitchen and took over dinner for a little bit. She did a most excellent job of rolling dough out thin and filling it with the correct amount of filling for our bierochs. I am sensing pot pies in our future and possibly an assistant as I fill our deep freezers! Oh, and yes, it did lighten my heart and make me completely forget about my monster mom moment in the AM. So much easier to start fresh when you go to bed loving everything about your life and knowing you made the right choices.