what about schooling?
It's not all skating and outdoor adventures over here. In fact, in January we've been refocusing on academic time—the ever swinging pendulum of my home education desires has moved away from unschooling towards a desire for some organization. And so far everyone is surviving! Surviving, and even some of the time enjoying themselves. Besides the regular things, the older two boys are working on learning all the states and capitals and are having a fine time looking them up in our giant atlas (it doesn't matter that it features the Soviet Union and two Germanies, though I guess we'll have to think about alternatives if we want to learn about current European geography...).
We're also working on writing, which is probably the area where all three boys are the farthest off where the expectation would be if they were in school. Not that that's particularly concerning; they're all fine storytellers and they're all enthusiastic consumers of all kinds of different writing, so I have no doubt that when they find something they want to write about they'll do fine at it. Still, I do want to give them the opportunity to do that sooner rather than later if they want to, so we're doing some practicing. This being homeschooling, though, we do try and keep the writing time cozy!