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 Day 67. One more day in the Old Testament! I never realized how LONG the OT is until I took on this reading program. WOW is it long! Two-thirds of the Bible is made up of the Old Testament. I think most of us doing this Bible in 90 Days plan are SO ready to get into some New Testament Jesus-talkin’, that we’re aching for it. We’re begging for it. We’re just flat out THIRSTY FOR JESUS at this point!
And what better way to be made thirsty for the Living Water than to spend 67 days reading the Old Testament! We have covered so many rules and regulations, so many “declares the Lord” and “you shall not”s, and of course all of the specifics regarding tabernacle and temple worship, food practices and sacrifices, and what did it lead to? It leads to the fact that there is no possible way, by any stretch of human effort, that we can ever hope to be sanctified and saved by following the law. It leads directly to the One who can do what we humans, with our built in propensity for sin, could never hope to do on our own. It leads us to Jesus. And I’m SO EXCITED to finally be able to jump into the New Testament!
This past week I went out of town Thursday through Saturday night. I managed to stay current on my reading until Saturday. I was away at the Summit youth pastor’s & leaders conference in Yakima, WA. Saturday was a very busy, tiring day which began with a terrible night’s sleep. (Frightened 18yo girls with us in a scary motel in a creepy part of YakiVegas… periodic loud banging of the axe murderer in the room next door… girls thinking someone was coming in our window…uh yeah… fun night) So suffice it to say that I didn’t get any of my reading on Saturday. By the time we got home Saturday night I was so tired I didn’t even try. I got it knocked out Sunday, along with Sunday’s reading, and so I’m current again!
I want to say a huge THANK YOU to all of my Twitter friends on the #b90days trending thread who prayed for me regarding my reading this weekend. I know that it helped!! =) Oh, and if you don’t follow me on Twitter, please do hop on over and do! I even Tweeted highlights and one-liners from the youth leadership conference… which, BTW was an AMAZING conference. But we had Mark Batterson, so how could it NOT be? 
 This is my first Weekly Wrap-Up in three weeks! Things have just been getting away from me lately. I’m glad to “be back!”
Here I am, at the beginning of March, and my well laid out school plans have been pushed aside. I feel disappointed in myself, and yet I see that adjustments needed to be made. What I am missing right now though, is Charlotte Mason. I spent last summer reading all about her, and planned our curriculum with her methods in mind. Now I am finding myself reverting back to old habits… not necessarily good ones. Time to pull out my Charlotte Mason books once again! We break for the month of April, and I will definitely be doing some mid-course corrections.
Some mistakes thus far:
Expecting too much seatwork, and not enough hands-on work. I enjoy hands-on things with the boys, but I do not enjoy preparing for them. This is something I just need to get over and DO. Somebody kick me or something! If I can get a lapbook all printed out with all the little books cut out, then I have no problem getting the actual project done as we go through a study. If I have to piece it together day by day, it just doesn’t happen. There has been a lot of “just doesn’t happen” happening around here lately.
Unrealistically expected us to be able to get through double the reading material than was actually possible. I am a bibliophile: I confess. I love books! I love book LISTS! This is where my problems come in. If there are two dozen books on a curriculum list, my brain (being the legalistic brain that it is) thinks we must read them. All. We did end up ditching all of the mythology books on our list this year except The Children’s Iliad, and that has been a very good thing!
I slipped into old habits and quit using the timer for math and penmanship. We used to do 20 minutes of math and 10 minutes of handwriting per day, with the “no matter how much you get done” philosophy. Also Charlotte Mason’s “Slow, careful practice…” theory to which I added “…makes nice handwriting”. And it does. And I’m a dufus for forgetting that.
Grammar. We haven’t. Done. Any. Not this term! First term we did grammar 2-3 days a week. It’s not like it took us very long, either. I use Shurley English, just the grammar portion, and we do the sentences together on a white board. The boys enjoyed it and were beginning to really “get it”. When we began 2nd term we just never got back in with grammar. We will when we start back up 3rd Term! It only takes us about 10-15 minutes.
I need to get back into learning more about Charlotte Mason and her teaching techniques. Her ideas on teaching children SO resonated with me, and the way I feel children should be taught, and I was so excited when I discovered her! Her teaching style fits my special needs child so perfectly, that it seemed she wrote it all just for him. Now it’s been so long, that I have forgotten most of what I read. Time to pull out my books once again and get reading!
My reading list includes:
A Charlotte Mason Companion by Karen Andreola
A Charlotte Mason Education by Katherine Levinson
More Charlotte Mason Education by Katherine Levinson
and the Charlotte Mason Study Guide by Penny Gardner. I REALLY need to go back through this one!
For the rest of our term, which is the month of March, I am going to do the two unit studies that I agreed to review. It should be fun for a change of pace, but I feel sort of guilty for my well-laid plans taking a detour. I know, it’s my school. I shouldn’t feel guilty. I should just go with it. I should take my own advice. And when we start back up again in May after our break, I plan on being refreshed and have my purposes renewed once again!
 I feel like this week was a total dud, but it wasn’t. I just did not get to exercise enough this week! What I am finding now, is that I am enjoying what I am doing. I am pushing myself in the area of running. At this point I still don’t know if you could call it RUNNING, because my 15yo daughter sure doesn’t think so, but for me it’s a good thing.
I went to the Y on Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday this past week. I missed the Ladies Workout at the church because early Saturday morning E decided we had to tear the house apart. He’d sold the entertainment center that he built back in 1987, so we had to clear everything out of it. We ended up shifting a lot of furniture between three rooms, moved TVs around to different rooms, and I only just this morning got the kitchen counter cleared of all of the old music (see yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday for a small taste of that). From morning till night, plus a few more days, we were reorganizing and rearranging.  Suffice it to say, I’m not too happy with myself for not going to work out.
But what did I accomplish this week? Well, I changed my running goal just a little bit, and rather than striving for a certain distance, I decided to strive for a length of time. Now I can run for half an hour without stopping! This is huge, you guys! On Tuesday I did 2.17 miles in 30 minutes. It isn’t a marathon, and definitely not a sprint, but I did it. I ran 10 min. @ 4.2mph, 16 min. @ 4.4 mph, and 4 min. @ 4.8 mph. E came up to tell me he was taking D2 home and that I had D1, when I was in the last two minutes of my run… I answered him but just barely. I was working hard!! Then I glanced over to the treadmill next to me, and the 17 year old girl who was there was running at 6.8 mph… Yeah… well…. I just won’t look at other people’s treadmills any more!
I am proud of myself. I am gradually working up to where what I am doing could be called running, and I actually feel really good about it too. I mean, I work really hard when I increase the speed, but it’s still very do-able, and I feel good afterward. Maybe I will do Bloomsday. I’ll have to do some outdoor training for that though, and I probably won’t be able to run/jog the entire thing. Still, I have always wanted to do Bloomsday, and I have never even tried. Lots of people just walk it! It’s a thought anyway.
Oh, look for a new graphic in my sidebar. I am going to create one for my dropping jeans sizes! The ones I bought at Christmas time are too big for me now. Oh darn.
I went over my points nearly every day this past week, but not over my weekly bonus allowance, so it still worked out. If you think of me today through Saturday, please pray for me. I’m on my way out of town to our A.G. ministry network’s Leadership Summit (for youth pastors & youth leaders) and we will be eating out 6 meals. I’m bringing my WW Dining Out Guide, but it’s an old one and I am afraid I will need to guess and ballpark my points. Yikes!
Oh, and I lost 1.5# this week, for a total loss since starting with iWatchr, of 7.4#. Actually, this is confusing the crud out of me, because if I count from Jan. 1, 2010 I have lost 10.4#!!! I just didn’t start using the iWatchr app until 4 weeks ago, so that’s when I started counting this way. I’m not cheating, because I HAVE lost over TEN POUNDS. So I think from here on out I will just count it as it is, rather than from where I began with the app. What say you?
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Momma’s Talk