Full plate

A few days ago Ethan's curriculum for kindergarten showed up. At first I wasn't going to use any curriculum (or organized curriculum rather) and just continue working on his reading and reinforcing basic concepts of counting and and such. But as the time drew nearer for Gwen to start pre-k, I got more and more stressed about making sure he'd have what he should need. Its strange. I feel two completely opposite ways on this issue.

1. I feel that kids these days are pushed WAY too young and WAY too fast academically. In theory, I have no problem with delaying all "official" schooling until 7.

2. On the other hand, I see the natural desire my kids have to read and the love they have of worksheets and other typical school-like tasks. I want to take advantage of that natural desire to do those things.

So I ordered the Kindergarten curriculum from My Fathers World. Its pretty cheap (total cost is just slightly more than 1 month of Gwen's pre-k class!) and seems to be a low-key and fun paced curriculum.

My plan is to work with him while Gwen attends the church pre-k that Ethan attended last year. Both kids have gotten so much from the pre-school and pre-k classes and we wanted her to finish that out before going full time into homeschooling. Next year, I think we'll be using Sonlight and have both kids in the same "grade". I say "grade" because they won't be in grades per se but just working at their own speed through the curriculum.

Although both these curriculum that we plan on using are extremely user-friendly and require little prep-work for me, I'm still scared. Really scared. I'm scared I can't do this. No, I know I can do this... I'm scared at how overwhelmed I'm going to feel when I do this. I can't even keep on top of housework and other things I want to do (sewing, how I miss you), and now I'm adding more to the plate.

Another thing pending is changing our diet completely to help Ethan get off dairy, eggs and gluten for at least six weeks. Ideally we should be doing 3 months, but 3 months from now runs us through Thanksgiving and Christmas and I can't do that! So I'm going to aim for 6 weeks to start and that should give us a good idea of how his body is doing. That means I really need to start planning and getting an idea of what we can and can't have NOW. But the very thought makes me quiver in my boots and want to take to my bed.

In short, I'm a ball o' stress. I've not felt this consistently low and overwhelmed since I was on therapy and anti-depressants 2 years ago. I don't feel like I need to go there again, but I need to figure out a way to handle this all. My current method is not to handle it at all and push everything off to the last minute. Hence our last two camping trips in which I forgot lots of things and was mostly unprepared and waited until the day before to get anything together. I keep waiting for the morning when I wake up and feel energized and ready to take on projects again. Usually it does happen that way. One day I just wake up and feel about 1000% better.