whoops! we've been busy a lot, so i haven't been blogging. we finished shlishi and started revii. chana is not fluent with the end of shlishi yet. last night, for the entire chumash, i think she whined the whole thing and didn't say anything in a normal tone!

i did tell her that i understand she is frustrated and having strong feelings. but i don't like it when she makes strong statements like "this pasuk isn't important." ok as i'm reading that, it doesn't seem so terrible and does seem like just emoting. but she gets into this groove where she speaks very negatively about the torah or rashi. so i asked her to confine her angry comments to things that are not outlandish, such as "this rashi should be erased and never read ever again! it doesn't help anybody and will never help anybody!"

she's been graciously working on that.

i had her do 3 old rashis yesterday. it's been a while and i was pleasantly surprised. although she didn't remember the accurate pronunciation of a lot of the words, she did remember a few that i didn't think she would, and she did remember the general idea of the rashi. not bad.

i'm on bedrest now. luckily, homeschooling can be done pretty easily on bedrest (at least the part where your kid sits next to you with the books).

so back to the whining. it is pretty unpleasant to go through all of chumash when she whines. otoh, it is much more pleasant than doing chumash through tantrums. as always, the line is a little complicated between her expressing her feelings and working through them, vs her just being indulged by me when it would be better for both of us if i put a stop to it. i tend to rely on my subjective feelings, and i tend to notice the whining when it's already past the point where i should have stopped it.
it's also hard to know for sure whether i'm pushing her up to or beyond her capacity, or whether it's just a matter of her getting used to working a little harder. so hard to know.

anyway, i see that she's in a mode now where she's feeling negative about it, and feels like it's too hard, but i'm going to see if i can coax her to do it without whining.