Work Stations

Almost every year I seem to design a new workplace. Last year it was downstairs on a side counter in the kitchen. The year before, it was a table right outside my room. This year, it is upstairs in our loft, where as you can see the light comes in softly. This round table was a card-playing table that belonged to my husband's grandfather -- it's a favorite of ours and has been the scene of many Lego battles and various kinds of re-enactments.

Right now my oldest, Liam, has his laptop settled across from mine (in front of the foreground of the picture). Before that, my friend Chari had her scrapbooking supplies set up across from me when she was visiting here with her family. My husband says it looked like we were playing some kind of Battleships. Here are a couple of pictures that Aidan took of me and Liam both at our stations ;-). .... see Liam in stealth mode behind the log there? But in this one, he is in plain sight.

















Liam was doing contract work on the computer for a company up in Oregon, but now gets to relax and enjoy his last couple of weeks of summer before his senior year at Thomas Aquinas College.

Now, this (below) is the bookshelf that contains the bulk of the books we are going to be using this year. Unfortunately, you can't really see many details, but the book titles are on my sidebar. A good percentage of them are books I printed from the internet and then comb-bound with my handy comb-binder.





I am still trying to decide if we are going to have our homeschooling take place upstairs, or downstairs. When this house was built, we thought the upstairs loft was going to be our schoolroom, but most years we ended up gravitating downstairs to the dining room table and couch by the hearth. Probably because in the winter we mostly heat by woodstove, so everyone tends to huddle /curl up beside that. Anyway, if we do end up downstairs again, I will be moving these books down to the shelves where they were last year.

So there you go -- our set-up! We will be starting today or tomorrow with a bit of math.... and then see how it goes from there. My 15 year old Sean went off on the school bus today -- our first day as parents of a kid in public school, as my husband said.

Here is a picture Aidan took of Sean on his last day home:


Oh, we miss him already; he went off on the school bus an hour ago and is probably now in Spanish class. He was tired when he left; had stayed up till eleven talking to a friend on the phone, and then couldn't go to sleep till after midnight.

So there you go -- endings, and new beginnings.