More OSU and Homeschool Stuff

We've been getting a lot of OSU related letters this last week. My son has told me to open any of them and call him to tell him what they are about. Isn't it funny how different kids are? If I were to open any of my second son's mail he would have a cow, my eldest wants me too so I can sift though what's important and what's not. Strange how two children raised in the same family can be so different.

Any way, he's been getting letters from the Bursar (Latin for "the keeper of the purse" they are the ones sending him his bills,) the engineering department, Residential Life (about his dorm, roommate, and food plan,) and the BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries.) He also has been getting letters from the First Baptist Church at Stillwater. There are several Baptist churches in Stillwater; two of them fairly close. One of these is First Baptist Church and the other is University Heights.

Our pastors wife went to University Heights so I had a good feeling about it which grew after I had checked out their web site. It has the added advantage that it is very close. She had told me about First Baptist as, well but she had only been there once. She said they had a good worship service but that they were a little further away and he would have to drive to service. I couldn't find a web site so I wasn't sure what to think about them. Well we got a second letter from them and guess what they have a brand new web site. It's not finished yet but it's coming along.

I called my son to tell them that they had sent him another letter and seemed to really want him to attend. I gave him their web site http://www.fbcstw.com/ so that he could check them out. The first thing he did was go to their Belief section to see where they stood. (Most boys would have started and stopped with the Wednesday Menu and the college section, but not my son.) The next thing I hear over the phone is "Oh... they support both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Hmmmm... they follow the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message." Coming to the Baptist Church from a Catholic background the first part didn't mean a whole lot to me. All I cared about when I joined was do their follow what I understand the Bible to be saying. Hearing the second part though my first thought was Older = more conservative and said as much to my son.

At that point my son gave me a short lesson in the Southern Baptist Church and why that was wrong. So to make a long story short He has decided that they are probably a little more liberal than we are. That doesn't bode well for them as he tends to be even more conservative than I am. Still he may give them a chance, he is fair to a fault. Right now though he seems to be leaning toward University Heights. On the other hand, all this is based on things we have heard and what we have seen from their respective web sites so all bets may be off when he starts attending services in the area. Oh, out of fairness here is the University Heights Site http://www.uheights.org/

Home School lesson planning is going well I have planned through to the middle of the year for everything and all they way through for a few thing. Still this is very fluid. Stuff happens and changes tend to need to be made at the blink of an eye. If my husband ends up in the hospital again then all bets are off. In those times we flip to a schedule that only includes the bare minimum and put the rest off till later.

Normally, if it was in a lesson plan book, I would only plan two week into the future to so that making changes would be easier. This year I am doing something different. I have made a Sonlight type schedule that I have put in the computer and will print out a week at a time. This I will use as a checklist for my sons. The oldest still homeschooling will be able to handle this by himself. The youngest will need my help. That's OK though because if it works then next year he may be able to handle a lot of it by himself and the year after that it will be easy for him. By keeping it in the computer and only printing out a little at a time, making changes will be easy. I can just go in and cut and past to get things where they need to be. I have also geared in an optional week at the end of every trimester. We can use these if we need to, to catch up without destroying the schedule too much.

This is a new way of doing thing so I expect bumps in the road. Still I think it will be good to make my second youngest more responsible for his schedule at this point. He only has a few years before college and I need him to understand how to do it before then. I have a nephew who didn't know how to handle the responsibility and he ended up totally blowing his first year. I don't want to see that happen to my boys. It's so hard to pull your grade point average up after that and a lot of times those kids will just quit instead. We'll see if this works.