It got me

Well I have caught my first cold in over a year. That nasty booger has finally got me, I've been able to ward them off so well in the past but this one snuck up on me and I was caught unprepared. Usually if I feel the slightest irritation, or sneeze to many times, or have that funny feeling I start drinking tons of echinacea tea, (4-6 cups a day), and I take garlic. I never got even one cold last year, but several attempted to get me.

In other news I gave Austin a placement test that a local homeschooling christian school gives for its enrollment. He has never had any kind of testing (standardized), he should of had one a couple of years ago, but that didn't work out, and then last year Tonya was going to give it to our big boys, however she had to travel to Ukraine for some cute little reason, and then she moved to Alabama. So this year I will have him tested at this school, but in the meantime it drives a insecure homeschooling mother like me crazy not knowing if he is even remotely close to other kids his age, is he retaining any info, and such. I am considering sending them there next year and I was dying to see how he would place in this classical school that uses a charlotte mason approach. He is 10 yrs old and if he started kindergarten at 5 he would be in the 5th grade, but lots of boys don't start kindergarten till they are 6, so he could be in the 4th grade. I was hoping that he would at least be somewhere in the middle. They use Saxon math and that is what we use, so he scored well in the math dept. It said he was on a 6th grade level. I was thrilled although he has a few gaps that need filling which we are working on this year. The history part was for 5th and 6th graders and he knew most of the info. There were only 10 or so ?'s, and he missed 3, but they were stuff that we haven't covered yet like the state capitals, and the past presidents. In public school that is usually done in 5th or 6th grade. His reading comprehension was very good, and that was for 4-6th grade so he was right on track there as well. The only bomb was in spelling, which I knew was not he strong point, but as he reads more it will improve, so I'm not to concerned about it. He tested in 3rd grade for spelling. I must say that spelling test was pretty hard, they had a lot of the trickier words like, fourths, width, and scissors. Anyway I was very pleased with his performance, I gave it to him cold turkey, with no warning or reviewing. The only thing that was a big problem was his speed, if this had been standardized testing he would have failed the math part because it took him 1 1/2 hours to complete the 30 ?'s, so we need to start making up the pace. I think I will start using a timer more often when we do math.