Tomorrow, Tomorrow...

You're only a day away.

Tomorrow we start our new academic year! Sundays will be our lighter days, with geography, art, music, Shakespeare, and the like. So today's plan is to get as ready as possible... library (forgot they are closed for Labor Day weekend), crafts/art supplies store, and getting our baskets organized, writing up The Boy's first weekly planner (and one for The Girl, and one for their studies together), find my Kindle, etc. I even have a special breakfast planned, though I am swapping out these amazing strawberries (minus the agave) for jam.

While many of our books have arrived, I totally forgot to order The Giggly Guide to Grammar until this morning, and The Boy's prealgebra books have gone awry. Unfortunately, the seller transposed 2 digits in my zip code, so the books went to another city entirely, arriving and being rejected yesterday. Apparently they are back in transit now--I am hoping to my home, and not back to Illinois--though the seller did tell me that if they are returned to her, she will ship them back out via priority mail, at no cost to me. I'm going to have him work in Zacarro's Challenge Math until the new books arrive.  UPDATE: The math books arrived today!! Thanks to the Post Office for rerouting them rather than returning them! I still might have him play around with The Book of Perfectly Perilous Math, perhaps on Sundays (?)

And while I love Drawing: A Complete Course, it seems a little advanced for what I want at the moment, so one of today's library books to be picked up is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, though I think my mom might have a copy I'm researching other art lessons focused specifically on drawing. Speaking of my mom and books, The Girl saw a copy of Dr. Dolittle's Puddleby Adventures on a bookshelf there yesterday, and decided that should be her first book of the year (for me to read to her), while The Boy chose The Phantom Tollbooth and Lord of the Flies as his first assigned book. I have a few chapters left in The Twenty-One Balloons to read aloud, and then we'll start The Princess and the Goblin, or The Marvelous Land of the Snergs... or maybe Black Ships Before Troy.... And I still haven't quite decided if I want to accompany The Human Odyssey with the Famous Men books, OR we might go ahead with The Ancient Greek World.

I do have an artist picked out for our first month of "picture study" -- I simply put printouts (full color) of the artist's work on the fridge, a new one each week, and the kids study it as desired. And for music study, we listen to a composer each month while working on our art projects. We'll be listening to Mozart tomorrow, since it is the last day of the month, and they haven't revealed September's Composer of the Month yet. I might have the kids start watching Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts again too.

I think we're almost ready!