For my regular visitors, if you find that this blog hasn't been updating much lately, chances are pretty good I've been spending my writing energy on my companion blog. Feel free to pop over to Moving On, and see what else has been going on.

Sunday, November 07, 2010

The official start... sort of!

Well, we have now officially started our school year.  Sort of. *L*  We just had our facilitator visit.  It usually happens about a month earlier, but since we did our registration during our spring meeting, it doesn't matter quite so much.

It was, as usual, a great visit.  We're fortunate to have such an excellent facilitator.  He's a great guy, and we all look forward to our visits.

For the first time since we've home schooled, we're actually looking for some sort of formal assistance from our school board.  I've mentioned Youngest's interest in learning trades skills earlier.  It turns out that our board can help us take advantage of an apprenticeship program our province offers.  What it basically amounts to is, if we can find someone who would be willing to take Youngest on as an apprentice, our board would help us work out a formal arrangement that would satisfy our province's legal requirements.  They could do something similar for us with a work experience scenario, too.  So, in the next while, we can look around and see what we can find locally.  Even if it's just a day or two a week, I think a local source would work out better.

During the visit we told our facilitator about our trip to the ranch and how that all worked out, what we liked, what we didn't, and how things were different than what we'd expected.  He ended up sharing his own story of how expectations and reality didn't quite mesh.  His wife had been interested in becoming a midwife and one of the options they were looking at was for her to train at The Farm.  The was quite a few years ago and he wasn't sure he was remembering the name right, but as soon as he described it, I knew where he was talking about.  They'd driven out there for what was supposed to be a one week stay.  They knew a bit about the place before they got there and were prepared for a few inconveniences, like no electricity or running water, and having to use outhouses.  Still, they weren't quite prepared for the reality of it.  He recalled going to use an outhouse at one point and discovering a HUGE spider on the toilet seat.

He decided he didn't need to use the facilities quite that badly after all.  *L*

Ah, that brings back childhood memories!  Except in our outhouse, it was the wasps nests that were a concern.  We liked the spiders, as they kept the other insects down.  Mind you, I don't think our spiders got quite as big as they do in warmer climes. ;-)

In the end, the deal killer turned out to be something totally unexpected - body odour!  It seems cleanliness in general wasn't exactly a high priority, to the point that they had concerns about how safe it would be for women to give birth in such unsanitary conditions. 

Their one week visit ended up being just one day!  They left the next morning and drove back to Canada.  (Looking it up, it was an almost 40 hour drive one way, not counting stops to eat and sleep!)  His wife did go on to become a midwife, but trained under very different conditions!

He tells us some of the greatest stories.

Aside from apprenticeship discussions, we also talked about Eldest's plans with her art, job hunting and eventually living in her own place.  At the end, we did our paperwork and got all the official stuff taken care of.  He stayed for about 2 1/2 hours, and it probably took less than half an hour to do with paperwork, even with all the talking we did in the process.

As far as our official stuff goes, we still need to submit our education plan for the year.  I wanted to wait until after we visited with the ranch, since that would have changed things quite a bit.  Now, I just keep forgetting about it.  We've got until the end of November, though, so there's still time. 

I do like home schooling in our province.  We have to jump through more hoops than in other provinces we've lived in, but they've been fun hoops to jump through.

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