Summer has FINALLY arrived. We are spending a lot of time outside. I hate not being at the lake though. Tomorrow we are going to take the motorhome to Ft St James to a wedding. The wedding is the next day and before the wedding Pete and I are going to have our first homestudy visit. I am not sure what to expect. I feel like we may be looked upon as though we need to prove ourselves because of past accusations. That is hard to do because how do you prove that you just love kids?
We are leaving Charissa and Damon with a family that is involved with the wedding while we go to meet with the social worker. I am not sure how to convince Charissa to not play the manipulation game while we are gone. Hopefully she will just go with the flow of the other kids around her and forget about it.

Summer Fun

Well so much for continuing Charissas school work over the summer. We did an hour last night and I forgot how much she really loves to do it. Damon wanted to do it too so next time I will have to photocopy the sheets so that he can do his own.

The family is gone now and as usual I feel like a failure. Charissa as usual pushed all the buttons that made me have to react and make me look like an ogre. She knows full well that if she does something that makes me unhappy then I will either give her yet another consequence and she will look like poor little Charissa or I will do nothing in front of the company and she will get away with what she knows is pushing my buttons. It is a lose/lose situation for me. I wish I could find a way to deal with her as secretly as she dishes out the behaviours. Oh well. And such is the life with RAD.

Otherwise it has been a great summer. We are making the most of the few nice days. Camping and boating mostly. We are supposed to go camping again on Friday but to be honest I have not seen a sign of the rain clouds dissapearing.

We need to start vacationing to sunnier destinations more often. I wish!

Oh boy we are getting back on track!!! I have been pretty sick lately so have not been getting enough done. Nor have I been spending a lot of quality time with Charissa. Although it is better than when she was at school. It is fun doing the work and Charissa seems to really enjoy it also. My adoption Counselor Brenda McCreight was happy to hear about the homeschooling. She is a huge believer in it and of course if she says its great then it is great. I completly hang off of every word she says. She knows so much and in my opinion she is the Queen of the adoption world.

Solid shape are still very difficult for Chrissa but we did get some activities done. We had to take pictures to send in to the teacher so I will try to post them here.

I think the best part so far about homeschooling is that I can get the boys up and off to school with out the added stress of Charissa's issues. All is calm and relaxed. The day gets to start off smoothly for us which is very nice.

going slow

Our lesson started with trying to think up an object that symbolizes the season. Then we were supossed to move on with the school work. Instead we ended up outside for an hour trying to learn what the seasons are and in what order they go in. Charissa was positive that the order was fall, winter, fall, summer, fall. There is no use in just telling her because she does not learn that way. We went outside to look at the leaves that fell and were under the snow. Although she knew that they had fallen before the snow she was convinced that fall came back again because the leaves had reappeared. Also in her mind fall is the coldest season. And even though we cannot snowmobile or go boating right now then it has to be still either summer or winter. No in between season. And then spring comes after summer. Soooo hard for her.

Poor Girl

One thing that I am learning is the extent of Charissas weaknesses. WOW there are things that I thought would be easy for her but she has such a difficult time wrapping her head around. I have heard her talking in the past about the english language rules but yesterday she was trying to apply them in words that dont even contain the letters or sounds. eg she was trying to figure out how to spell Barbies. She got Barb then she was rattling on about the C making the I say its name. First of all it takes an E to make a vowel say its name and second of all the I does not say its name in this word. I have heard her before using this rule and it sounded like she understood it but it is clear to me that it is just one that she has memorized but does not understand so she throws it out there to sound smart and hope that it works.
She does seem to enjoy doing the work. We will have to see how she does as it gets harder. She loves having her little setup in her school space. It works well.

Well Petes sled blew up yesterday so it was a bad day for him but it was a good day for charissa and me. Our first day we just worked on math. I have started her at the beginning of grade one level so that we can learn to do this without having it be too hard. She was great! She ripped through about 10 days worth of work!!!
Today I was sick so it was a lot harder for me to be on the ball. We did a little work on LA and this is clearly more difficult for her. There are also a lot of materials so I really need to get the office done so that she can get set up and organized. Hopefully by the end of the week.