Last night I went to SHIELD's kickoff meeting for the homeschool year. I signed up the girls for girls clubs, Max for the boys club, and Rose for the high school community service group called THRILL. Homeschoolers love clever acronyms.
These are all of the great ideas I have at the beginning of the school year, but when the work actually begins everything changes. This year the youth chorale disbanded, so I need to find a place for Rose to continue working with her voice. I also need to find a place for Max to make friends, since most of the time he's at the mercy of his older sisters, and their social calendars. While my instincts tell me it's neither unnatural nor undesireable for children to enjoy playing with their siblings, I think it's time he make some friends of his own.
I might not pursue the girls club since Ella & Meggy are already in a Girl Scouts troop for homeschoolers. The great thing about our group in particular is that we don't do cookies. After realizing that the amount earned by the group from the sale of one child's cookie sale could easily be written as a check (i.e. 50 boxes of cookies=$10 for the troop) the moms decided that we'd rather write checks than go through the whole cookie fiasco. We probably make more doing our own fundraisers like read-a-thons and bake sales anyway. We send our obligatory tithe to the main office, but otherwise most of the money goes to our group, and we don't contribute to the cookie mafia.
