August 7

This summer didn't go the way I had planned.

We lost Lucky, first of all.  And that led to weeks of Sam literally not sleeping at night, and sleeping all day instead.   Then we finally got Elizabeth Mocha Latte Tallulah Boo Cohen, and life is good again.  I gave him an extra week off - to adjust to sleeping like a normal person, and to bond with our little dog.  But we're back to summer homeschooling once again.

We just finished up Sassafras Zoology this morning.  I'm really happy because I think he retained a lot of it.  I asked him questions based on the book that I had forgotten the answers to, and he knew them.  So I'm going to count Sassafras as a win for curriculum, because he loves it, retains it, and is happy to keep going. We're going to order the next book in the series.

In the meantime, I'm reading Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell and Know by Alexandra Horowitz to him.  This is a great bridge, not only because it's about dogs, which is a topic he adores, he transcends zoology and anatomy (the next book in the Sassafras series), but he is considering a career in psychology, using therapy dogs, so it's pushing him towards the future as well.

We read the first half of Chapter 18 in Story of the World - covering the Crusades, the People's Crusade, the First and Second Crusade.  And then I literally FELL ASLEEP reading to him - so we stopped for the day.

I'm super impressed at his ability to retain information, though.  He really does remember a lot of the little details from what we were learning before we lost Lucky.  He's a great auditory learner....