First Day of School and Some Reflections on the Kids

We started our school year yesterday!  Sly is in second grade now, and Stella's doing kindergarten.  We're calling Linus "pre-school", but I truly have no planned activities for him.  Flora, meanwhile, does her best to cause disruption and destruction while the rest of us are working on school.

We're sticking with Mater Amabilis this year.  I really do love the curriculum and the philosophy behind it, but it's a lot to fit in to our mornings.  Each subject just takes 10-20 minutes (in theory.....but I'll pay you money if you can get through a Saxon Math lesson with Sly in that amount of time!), but there are so many things to fit in, and a ton of reading aloud.  I think we'll need about two and a half hours each day to fit in everything.  It's going to get a bit more challenging to juggle it all once Stella adds in next year, so I'll have to start thinking about where I can combine the kids for various subjects.

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I love watching the relationship develop between Sly and Flora.  These two have always been so alike - from their looks, to their personality.  The day Flora was born, we were already predicting her to be a "female version of Sly."  They both have quick tempers and a tendency towards violence (hitting their siblings all the time).  But on the positive side, both are sociable and talkative and very smart.  They hit it off so well, and Sly takes such sweet loving care of her all the time.

But I'm predicting some challenges ahead with Flora.  She is such a troublesome toddler.  She's into everything - throwing things in the toilet and the trashcan, pulling stuff out of every cabinet and shelf.  Sly was just like that.  I had gotten used to my two "easy" middle kids.  Sly and Flora are definitely on the choleric/melancholic end of the temperament spectrum (which I am as well, but I just perceive as the more challenging "moody" types of temperaments), while Stella and Linus are more sanguine/phlegmatic (which I perceive as "pleasant and easy to get along with").

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Tom pointed something out the other day, about how people (ourselves included) tend to "blame" a lot of things on having a large family, but that it's not always the reality.  For example, Linus was a very late talker, and hardly said much at all until he was two.  Even now, his speech is still very poor, and he's been in speech therapy for a few months because he can't pronounce many of his starting and ending consonants in words.  It's easy to say "oh, it's because he's the third child, and didn't get as much attention."  Then there's Flora, who probably has the best vocabulary of any of our kids for her age.  And we found ourselves saying, "well, it's because she's the fourth child, and has all her big siblings to learn from."  I think for the most part, the answer is just this: every kid is different, and they're going to do things at their own pace.

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I'm eight days out from my due date with this next little boy (name still very much undecided)!  I'm feeling pretty good most days, but definitely mentally ready to get this show on the road.  My earliest baby has come a week early (Sly), and my latest was a week late (Linus, of course, who is showing himself to be late to everything he does).  So I'm expecting that as my range of possibilities.....but I'm definitely hoping for an early one!