Busy, busy, busy

Tomorrow is the official first day of school with CAVA and well, I'm not nearly as prepared as I would like to be. Go figure. I go through this every year but honestly, I have no clue where the summer went so quickly. All I can figure out is I was in the car for most of it. *sigh* Then I really wanted to get the boys' new chore system in place before the start of school. I looked at everything I had for doing Manager of Their Chores and decided to just go ahead and buy a subscription to their service for a year and set it up there. I knew it would take some time to set it all up initially but I had no idea I would spend 3 days fighting with it! It's a good system but the interface has got some bugs they still need to work out which ended up making the process much longer than I think it needed to be. None-the-less, at least now it's set up and changes will be much easier to make from now on so that's something to be very thankful for. I do plan on having Mark drop them a line with better technical information than I could give on a couple of the bugs so hopefully they can work on fixing those for the future. Today is day two of doing the morning chores and it's showing me where we need to tweak things slightly. I definitely will need to go buy a ream of cardstock while we get things tweaked. LOL

But those 3 days meant that I didn't get our new schedule in place, the checkbook balanced from our trip, and my desk is still a right mess. I still don't have science or music materials for Jonathan yet even tho his classes are ordered and I still haven't been able to meet with our new teacher to get Matthew's new classes ordered and I still don't know which soccer team Matthew will be on even tho his first game is this Saturday (all the boys are playing together right now and they still need to assign them to teams) and I still don't know if Christopher got into the Young Actor's Workshop or not....Well, I guess I don't feel so bad not being totally ready to go. LOL I don't seem to be the only one.

The one thing that did finally get done was Chritsopher finally settled on what electives he's taking for at least the first semester so we can nail that stuff down. Of course, 1 of them is going to require me to do a bunch of work to put it together (home ec) and 1 is going to require a bunch of work on the part of his dad (web design) and the stinker didn't choose Japanese which would have been easy to do. But at least, we have a decision. Our new LOTR curriculum is in and it looks just as fabulous as I had envisioned. I'm truly excited by the prospect of doing this with him. Just remind me of that mid-year when I'm feeling totally swamped and all of the kids are trying to skate by. LOL

Matthew is already back to his tricks of managing to duck out of doing his work and I'm ready to lock him in a room, shackled to a desk, with his eyes pried open. Ugh! He drives me nuts because he CAN do the work. It is not beyond his capability. He just chooses NOT to do it! I'm racking my brains trying to figure out yet another way to motivate that child to put a move on. Yesterday was a perfect example of that as all he had to do was turn in some papers he had already done only I grade them to find out that he hadn't finished 1/2 the problems on them. That's so typical of him. He reads the first step, does that, and moves on. Then every time I turned around, he was somewhere else and I had to keep reminding him to do his reading. I wanted him to read 10 pages in Tuck Everlasting! This was not a hard assignment but it took ALL DAY! Seriously. He finished it about 4:30p even tho he knew about it on Monday! Seriously, all day to read 10 pages?! And yes, I realize just how hard a read it is. It's really hard when the book is in another room and you aren't even looking at it. Ugh!

We have done some modificiations to the PEG board again and I'm going to be putting in some serious effort to use it with part of it being they will get bonuses for getting chores and schoolwork done before the assigned time is up and bonuses can earn extra allowence. And if they do everything on time for the whole week, they can get as much as 20% more plus an extra $1. It seems to be working well with Jonathan, a little with Matthew, and Christopher could care less. Of course, he's also the one that is continually broke because money leaves his pocket for candy or coin operated games as soon as he gets it. Or it goes to pay someone back for something of their's he lost or damaged. *sigh* It's not going to be an easy road with him but I just keep praying he'll make it through ok and that eventually the guidance I keep trying to offer and show him how to receive from others will make it through to him.

So for now, I'm trying to do some deep breathing and just realize that I can only do so much. Everything will get done in time, maybe not the time I think or would like but the right time none-the-less. G-d knows what is most important and has an agenda that is beyond mine. I just need to make that my new mantra. LOL