Joyful Parenting and Torturous Teaching

My biggest blessings and my most difficult challenges. The ones who love me but cause me the greatest worry. I don’t understand the whole, “You don’t know love until you have a child” thing. Maybe because my heart loved ALL children anyway, mine or not? And so I received joy just seeing them, teaching them even before I bore and adopted my own? Or maybe it’s just not African to feel that way. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I want to make them as happy as I want to make any kind adult in my life. They have as much value as someone middle aged like me. Their happiness is my happiness.

Random photo that I’ve read many autistics would resonate with. Lying on the floor brings pleasure and soothing. Cold hard tile? No problem. It brings peace. And it’s only the one under her twin. That bond I thought autism had severed has returned. She sits on her arm chair, lies beneath her feet, steals glances at her tablet as she works on some app… And she takes off her own shoes! Well done to her for having learnt that!

As for joyful parenting… I bought the foster care books so my teen girl could see how easy her life is. But Ammy is still finding them when I hide them, so her mind is still firmly on how she too has life easy. But not because of the kind of parent I am, compared to cruel parents or curl foster carers, but because I chose to become her mom.

Mommy, I am really thankful that you are my mom. You are my hero and will always be. I love you more than (I love) myself.

To Mommy…

🥹❤️

She asked me if it’s bad that she’s thankful every day that she was adopted and not left in foster care. I told her I’m glad, and I’m glad I make her happy. But it feels wrong to me, because she made my life full of laughter and she’s a blessing. Very tender.

‘Dear Mommy, I want you to remember that I really love you and pray for you. I want to thank you for adoptin me and for being so nice even when I am bad to you. It was good of you to adopt me and love me. I am just happy to be abil to call you

My

Mommy.’

I was so excited when these books arrived! I couldn’t wait to tell my children. And when evening came and I did, my sweet boy gave me the biggest hug and thanks ever! You’d think I’d sent them to Disney World. Just books. Every night before they sleep, they read. Somehow despite the visual processing disorders, they both love reading. And sometimes, though it’s hard going because the ADHD meds have worn off so Ammy really struggles to ‘see’ what she’s reading, she reads to her little sister. Just like she used to read to her brother.

I love it. I love it soooo much. Books were always my best friend.

And now I have different types of books coming between 4 days to 6 weeks from today! And I can’t wait!

I used to get most of the oldest two’s Cambridge textbooks from School Suppliers. For a while, I thought I’d follow the route I followed before, for Naynay, our nutty five year old. We did American Christian till the oldest two were 13 years old and then switched to Cambridge. But I was hooked by an email announcing a re-launch of their store under a new name. School textbooks and I are great friends. So I couldn’t stop myself. I went to go see what I could get. Mind you, I have my girl’s full Kindergarten curriculum already. But my excuse was that I want to have some sort of structure for the Afrikaans (which obviously, no American curriculum teaches), and when I saw they had reading books for English, I couldn’t resist.

See, we’ve finished our entire reading syllabus already, even though Grammar and Maths are only halfway done. Nalo loves reading, and she has sailed through her school work. If it wasn’t for the grammar portions – learning full stops, exclamation marks etc, we’d be done. Her spelling is at a higher level than she’s currently at in her school work. They expect her to only be starting to spelling ‘in’ and ‘on’ when my girl can spell ‘love, help, and Jesus’ already. So, I couldn’t stop at just ordering reading books, could I?

By the end of the order, I’d whittled it down to 17 books!😂🙈 And I can’t wait for my girl to try Key Stage 1 reading and see how she does with it. As well as computing, Geography… Things her current curriculum hasn’t looked at yet. I’m excited! I love teaching new things. I like planning and preparing school.

But I’m suffering more and more each day. The pain is indescribable. By the time I’ve taught one, I want to curl up in a ball and cry. But there’s still another to teach. I hate AS. I used to love teaching. I used to enjoy every aspect because the pain wasn’t as bad. I could focus only on the joy of learning..or figuring out how to modify a lesson.

But back to the joy of awaiting new books. I’ll be able to follow a set schedule for the children’s videos that I make for their Afrikaans. I need it! I laughed the other day. I’ve been adding the Afrikaans words for certain nouns I’m teaching but it apparently didn’t register. I had added an Afrikaans song from YouTube that had lyrics. My girl said, “These people are SO silly! They wrote fake words!”

See? I need the textbook stat!😂

And it was pure nostalgia. We used the Afrikaans Sonder Grense Books in towards the end of high school. Seeing them reminded me of how I failed my Coloured Uni friend. I didn’t speak Afrikaans using gamtaal? Mine was suiwer Afrikaans from the textbook and a white Afrikaner teacher. It was like King James English vs NIV. I remember the day we were looking to see if we’d been granted funding for our uni fees and our high school names were on the NSFAS list.

She saw my not Coloured nor Black high school and disapprovingly said, “No WONDER you talk Afrikaans like THAT.”

Ouch! 😂

Coloureds (Especially many Cape Coloureds)) have their own dialect, nasalized accent and own spelling. Sometimes it even looks more Dutch than Suiwer Afrikaans does. But today, I don’t even know if I even have the right accent at all anymore. None of my friends speak Afrikaans to me even when they ARE Afrikaans. But I have a way out of the spoken Afrikaans exam if we stick to Cambridge. If we do do Cambridge all the way up, Nalo will write the AS level Afrikaans exams but not the IGCSE one. Saves her struggling with her auditory processing disorder and the recorded speech you have to write answers about. I have no idea how the new SA curriculum examines Afrikaans.

Homeschooling is cool. I have taken Micaiah off the textbook grade 1 Maths curriculum and switched him to Ammy’s RightStart Math one. The one suitable for children who struggle. We will see how far we get. Before my girl knew I’d decided to move him, she’d gotten a bit jealous that her little brother was using a textbook like her five year old sister while she was doing what she calls ‘The Physical Maths’ (Hands on)

So she asked to try resume grade 1 official maths.

After 5 minutes, she changed her mind.Back to ‘The Physical Maths’ we went. I like that she got to see for herself that she has dyscalculia, instead of thinking I just held her back for no good reason. She sees now how difficult numbers are for her. Probably something she will forget again very soon. But for now, she knows we are working with her brain’s strengths instead of stressing her with the impossible (at the moment and very likely forever.)

Ok! I need to lie DOWN! School prep will be in the morning. Hectic lain, I feel nauseous. (Med side effects.) I swear part of my foot is numb. I’ve been feeling like that for at least two months now.

I REALLY need to go on ‘permanent disability leave’ 😩

Hoping your day was smile-filled despite the hard moments.

My girl said she wanted to “look fab for therapy!” So she changed into all pink and took pink toys for her occupational therapy session today. After I took some photos of her pink ensemble, she asked me, “What does fab mean?” 😆