New Homeschool Group's First Meeting

As of the current date of writing this post, the kids are almost a week past their 4th birthday, so I am weeks behind posting about our lives. I'm going to quickly crank out several posts highlighting the best of the past few weeks. I am proud, though, that I've met my goal of fairly consistently keeping up with this blog for a year. Now my goal is to post even more details about how the kid's learning is evolving and feature a weekly detailed day.

So, on April 23rd, we meet with a new homeschooling group we've joined. It's called Chicagoland Homeschoolers Inclusively Learning and Discovering. Our first meet up was at the Lakeview Nature Center - a favorite hangout of ours. We met with two other families and another came right when we were leaving.

At first we hung out at the playground, just getting to know each other. There were quite a few little girls around Alexa's age, which was nice because we always seem to be around little boys. Jared wanted to hang out more by himself at the edge of the pond, throwing rocks into the water.

After a while we stopped in the nature center and checked out the small animals. Jared was upset the shark exhibit was mostly taken down.  Then, he wanted to throw bread to the ducks, but I had forgotten to bring it. We had crackers, which I assured him the ducks would love just as much, but that didn't matter. He had a nice long temper tantrum, so I couldn't talk with the moms any more. We went down to the pond where Alexa fed the ducks, and Jared still carried on. It's so hard when there is literally nothing you can do to help him see the logic in crackers are just as good as bread for the ducks.

Since he wouldn't calm down, we decided just to go, but after I said goodbye, he decided he DID want to go back down to the pond after all and feed the ducks crackers. It wound up being rather pleasant after all at the end, with the other kids joining us. We even found a dead fish washed up on the shore.

I don't think I have any pictures of this, but the following week we met up with the group again, this time there were three new families, at Wilder Park in Elmhurst. I don't have pictures because the kids wanted me to run around the park with them almost the whole time, and then Jared got whiny and crying once again, so I didn't have much time to talk with the other moms. It's very frustrating when your kids are hanging on you all the time and all the other families' kids are playing on their own or together. I have to keep telling myself they won't always be like this, and I'll miss them wanting me to play with them. Alexa did warm up to one 7 year old girl and was excited about having a picnic with them afterwards, but then we had to leave early because Steve's parents were coming to watch them so I could go grocery shopping. Ah, well.