This last week wiped us all out. As I sit here typing this post my 11-year-old, who never takes a rest, is laying down for a nap. Like many people around the country, we got a lot of bad weather last week. For us, it was snow and about four days of constant wind. We have 5ft. tall snow drifts in our backyard and our poor neighbor had her entire garage and front door blocked off. For most of the week, it wasn’t safe to leave our house. The wind caused whiteout conditions and the roads around us shut down due to safety. Because we homeschool this shouldn’t have been a big deal but on top of the bad weather, we also had the crud making the rounds in our house. Tuesday morning my oldest woke up and didn’t feel well and then was down and out for the next 2.5 days. I don’t actually know if he had the flu or just a simple bug, either way, he did not feel well. Of course, as soon as he got over it my youngest came down with the same thing. She always gets it a bit worse and had a high fever for an entire day before it broke. I was hoping to get a good week of school done this week to make up for the last one, but it looks like we are going to need at least another day of rest. Mostly because no one has slept well in days. (I just took a break to go check on my son and turns out he has a fever again. So I guess here we go with round #2.) All of that to say we are once again off schedule for schooling. It’s beginning to look like we may end up needing to take the entire month of December off since Christmas will be here before we know it. Later today I am going to sit down with a yearly calendar and take another look at our homeschool schedule. At the beginning of the year I had planned for us to use a six-week on and one-week off schedule. This means there was plenty of time off worked into the year. We even started a few weeks early to help this schedule work. So, although we are off schedule we are not in any trouble for the school year. This is once again one of the benefits of homeschooling. A typical school year is 180 days of school but I get to decide how and when we use them. We can start early or go year round if we want to as long as we get our days in. It’s nice not having to rush through sick days or push too hard. Even though I don’t want to take this time off, and I feel a little stressed about having too much time off at once, it isn’t a big deal. I am going to use the rest of our sick time, however long that may be, to take care of the kiddos, our home, and rest. At least the weather is better than last week.