finishing up

Above is my very amusing (or so he thinks) elder boy, who in today's journal entry complained about the fact that we've not bound our good books yet. Here is the text a little bigger so you can read it:

We need supplies from Staples in order to do our binding, but we've just been too busy to actually get out and get them. Honestly, it's not been all errand-running! In fact, it's been very little errand running (after all, if we had been running errands, we certainly could have fit Staples into the schedule) -- it's just that our Summer has gotten underway full-swing before we had a chance to really finished up our school year. Summer Dance started a couple weeks ago, and Zoo Boy started Karate class last week (below in the front row on his first night):

Plus we've been attending park days and going to fireworks displays and free movies, and playing with puppies (and swimming in Christine's pool) and going to piano lessons (and swimming in their pool), and the lake opened for the season.

But I've not been a complete sloth -- I've already begun my fall planning. This is the first year I'm involving the kids in the process -- I made slips of paper with all the activities they want to do next year on them. Then I handed them out (Zoo Boy had 3 slips, J had a dozen) and told them to put them in order from what was most important to them down to what was least important, and to rip in half any activity they've decided they don't want to do. While they were sorting, I taped a schedule grid up onto the wall and stuck up the things that are important to me that they do (Monday Homeschool Classes, main lesson (curriculum) work on the other mornings, and some co-op type classes and activities on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, including Form Drawing, Handwork, Foreign Language, and Science). Then we discussed the other things they wanted to include (swimming and museum classes for both, Karate for Zoo Boy, and a variety of dance options, piano/guitar lessons, chorus, and social coaching for J) and either found places to tape them into the schedule, or taped them up off to the side to try to fit them in as possible with time and money constraints.

J surprised me by ripping up Jazz classes and Tap classes. But we had already discussed the fact that he and his ballet instructors thought that private instruction would be a good idea at this point (in addition to ballet classes), and I'd explained to him that private instruction was going to mean he had to give up some other stuff in order for us to afford it. In fact, he had ranked ballet privates as his top priority for the fall, followed by ballet classes and the pre-professional program he was involved with last year. Followed by Modern dance and Piano lessons. Everything below that I put off to the side for later consideration (as money and schedule allows), and he tore up the other dance tickets, knowing there was no way we could afford all of that. He's pretty focused on Ballet, and I'm relieved to have him make the decision to keep our schedule and budget in tact, rather than me having to make him give up things that he loves to do. But sacrifice is a big part of choosing a career in dance, and he's already preparing himself for that. That's a lot of maturity for a 10 1/2 year old!