Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it has been more than a month since I last posted. Nearly two months really. I have been buried under a vast amount of work from which I am only now managing to emerge. So much for my end of summer optimism that, when Niccolo resumed school, I’d be able to blog, craft and be otherwise free.

Instead, I got more work, more work and even more work. Which is good for my finances, but not so good for my sanity. So my strategic decision is to try and keep the workload lighter and manageable until the New Year. This will give me time to make all the Christmas presents (I am already panicking), reduce my stress levels beyond red alert, and hopefully give some shape to my still nebulous plans for this blog and my crafty business.

And look after the kids, of course. The only non-work-related thing I have done over the course of the last two months has been to after-school Niccolo. I have been experimenting massively to try and nurture his curiosity, encourage his budding reading skills and generally keep him busy. The end result is my very own literature-based afterschooling curriculum, which mixes elements of Five in a row, Sonlight, Charlotte Mason and Old Fashioned Christian Education with some crafts and lots of hands on activities thrown in. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, is probably because you don’t have a child of schooling age.

So far, so good. Niccolo seems to enjoy it, although he doesn’t much like the copyright-free books I am getting off the Internet (which on the other hand I like because they are free, thus allowing me to cover virtually any topic he expresses an interest in at zero cost).  His reading is progressing apace, he seems to have a good grasp of basic arithmetic (he figured that two plus three equals five, and is genuinely obsessed with comparing sizes—of countries in particular) and his general knowledge of the world is expanding to a point that I consider almost scary—just a few days ago, after reading a story where a house goes up in smoke, he enquired about the levels of fire resistance of various materials. He started off with the obvious ones—wood, metal, cement—and ended up with: ‘How about carbon fibre?’

And he is definitely using his brain. He was trying to determine the biggest of numbers and, when I explained to him that numbers are infinite, he thought for a while then decreed that “so numbers come back where they begin—like a circle which doesn’t begin or doesn’t end.” For a four year old, it is not too bad a way to represent the concept of infinity.

Alas, his behaviour isn’t improving to the same degree. He is still headstrong and argumentative, although introducing a basic star chart seems to have made him ever so slightly more compliant. I console myself thinking he will make a good lawyer some day…

Meanwhile, Caterina has dramatically improved her gross motor skills—to the point that she is now a danger to herself. She has learned to propel herself on the baby chair (by pushing against the floor with her feet) and figured that if she grabs the side of her cradle with both hands, she can lift herself up. Both cradle and baby chair have quickly been retired after she took these exploits to an extreme and tried to get out of them head first.

I was too ambitious. I decided to homeschool Niccolo during the summer, in preparation for the start of (semi)real schooling in September. My chief aim is to help him learn to stay still for longer than half a nanosecond, but should he pick up something else along the road, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

After much pondering I opted for a literature-based homeschool programme because Nicco really loves being read to. I based it loosely on Sonlight because I like their choice of books. And indeed stuff like Milly Molly Mandy has been a great hit. But, overbearing mum that I am, I opted for replacing some of their recommended books—which Nicco had already read or which he no longer enjoys because he finds them a bit basic—with classic, picture-less stories. My idea was to help him concentrate on the story itself as a first step towards reading chapter books. Well, it turns out it was a BAD idea.

I read about two of these stories to him, which I printed out from Project Gutenberg, before he made it clear that he wanted “a story from a book.” Upon further investigation, it turned out that he didn’t object to the stash of loose paper I was reading from, but to the lack of pictures on said papers. So I backpedalled quickly (for fear of putting him off reading altogether) and we are back to illustration galore. I never learned the concept of age appropriateness faster than in the last few days.

That said,  there are a couple of knights stories that I printed out which I think he would really enjoy. So my next project is to find suitable images to illustrate them—something like this knight from Karen’s Whimsy.

If I find the time, that is. Because just now I am knee-deep in another project: setting up the scene for Nicco’s birthday party on Saturday. More to come as I struggle to turn my in-laws garden into a medieval tilting yard….