Birthday Girl

August is the month of many birthdays in our home. My oldest ds, my baby girl, our nephew, dh's mother, my grandmother, my uncle, dh's aunt, and my cousin all have a birthday in August. In fact, all but one of those people has their birthday the same week. And my daughter and nephew (who are two years apart) share the same day. (That year my sis didn't come to her niece's party - she was a little busy! grin)

Anyway, in spite of the work crunch and the overflowing toilets and melted carpets and school starting and general life chaos, we had another birthday party this weekend. Dd wanted a Barbie party, so we did the bake-a-cake-in-a-bowl thing and turned it into Barbie-in-a-ballgown cake.

For those of you who don't decorate cakes, this one is a level 1 - very, very easy. No hours and hours of piping tiny little stars. Once the cake is assembled, it takes about 30 minutes to frost and decorate. Perfect for those times in life when you are working like a madwoman and have to stop to throw a birthday party. Not as perfect as ordering the cake from Publix, but hey, I wanted to put forth SOME effort, and I'm pretty sure dd heard "I love you!" as she watched me and licked the frosting off the mixer beater.

But before you get to the frosting and decorating, you have to do the baking and assembling. This is not hard, but it does take some time and care, as you have to bake two cakes and let them cool, then slice off pieces and stack them just so and then cut a hole in the middle for Barbie. These things I did early on Saturday morning, while dh was out running errands. He got home around lunchtime and this is what he saw sitting on the kitchen counter:




"Will you make that for MY birthday?" he asks.

Snort. Yeah, I'm on it, honey. Cellophane-Wrapped Naked Barbie is exactly the cake I wanna serve you.

Science Lesson Redux

Notebook paper positively, absolutely cannot be flushed down the toilet.

What kind of week are Y'ALL having?

Science Lesson

Those lightning lamps that they sell at Target? They send an electrical current bouncing around a cone-shaped lantern that comprises the top half of the lamp.

If you touch the lamp, the current will converge at your fingertips. You can move the "lightning" all around the lamp in this way.

If you take some metal - say, a couple of dimes - and position the lamp on its side, and place the dimes in the area where the cone meets the base, and then touch the dimes gently with your finger, you will see an electrical spark.

The more dimes you add, the bigger the spark.

If you touch the dimes and hold a wad of twisted toilet tissue up to the spark, the tissue will ignite.

If you drop the tissue in a panic, it will land on the carpet of your bedroom.

The carpet in your bedroom is flammable. It does not burst into satisfying flame, as the tissue did. It sort of... melts. And leaves a big brown spot.

These spots are not like dirt. They cannot be scrubbed out with carpet cleaner.

And your parents DO NOT LIKE big brown spots in the carpet, the carpet that is only a year old. When you go to them and confess what you have done, there is a price to be paid. Namely, the cost of replacing a whole section of carpet. Which is going to set you back significantly, believe me, and which your parents don't mind asking of you, since you have a small but steady source of income with your very part-time job and you really, really showed a huge lack of judgment that requires stiff consequences to help you learn your lesson.

But the financial cost is still better than that sick feeling in your stomach that you had before you 'fessed up.

(And what you don't know, and won't until you too are a parent, is that after the stern lectures and warnings and exhortations about the dangers of electricity and playing with fire, is that your parents retired to their room and laughed out loud with each other, rejoicing in your natural curiosity, even if it did lead you and the whole family into danger. You don't know that your parents are secretly proud of you for figuring all this out on your own and have high hopes for your future, if you can just learn a little common sense.)

Piano Blues

Piano lessons began last week, with all sorts of changes. The boys have been taking lessons for a couple of years from a teacher I love, but after we moved it became more difficult to make the lessons fit our schedule. For one, the teacher's home is an hour roundtrip from our new house, so the driving plus the lessons meant at least two and a quarter hours out of the house. No huge deal by itself, but the kicker was that this teacher knew we were homeschoolers and would not give us an after-school slot. She said she needed to reserve those times for her non-homeschooled students.

?!?!?! This caused me huge amounts of frustration. Yes, I know my schedule is more flexible, but that does not mean that I want to interrupt my school day right after lunch to get piano in. The latest she would take us was 1:30, which meant we always had to leave right after lunch and did not get home till 3:00, when all the friends were home from their school. Getting ANYTHING done for school after 3:00 is pretty impossible. At least for me.

I tried talking to her about it, but she was firm. No, she could not give us after-school hours. No, she would only teach Mon or Tues. No, she would not drive to us, even if I got her other students on my side of town.

And then, over the summer, we met a lady in our neighborhood (two streets over) who has a studio in her basement and teaches three days a week. Yes, she teaches young kids, so the littlest one can start this year. Yes, of course we could have an after school slot - how does 3:30 sound? Sigh. It sounds like relief, to me. The boys can ride their bikes to lessons. And the lessons don't cut into our school day. The pressure is off, at least in one area.

So we began. The old teacher took the news kind of hard, which I hated. I really like her as a teacher - she brought out some amazing skills in my kids. And I tried to soften the news by assuring her how wonderful a teacher she is and how much the boys learned from her. But schedule is important, too, important enough that we were willing to take a risk on a new instructor. You reach a point in family life where you are constantly arranging and rearranging things to make them simpler, simpler, simpler. You have to.

The good news is, I think the new teacher is going to work out well. She's got the boys practicing scales with correct fingering, and she wants them to perform in a couple of months. And my littlest one, who had her very first lesson, has practiced every single day and went ahead in her book, like, four or five songs. She's SO enthusiastic. I'm eager to hear what her new teacher thinks about what she's done this week.

I've also referred a couple of friends from my "old" side of town to our former teacher. I talked to her this morning, and one of our friends is starting with her this week. This makes me feel a little better for her.

A Klutz Story

A post at the WTM site about klutz moments reminded me of this very embarrassing incident which happened to me in high school which I will now share with you since it has become somewhat funnier and maybe slightly less embarrassing in the ensuing 20+ years.

In my junior year of high school, I was the manager of the varsity boys' basketball team. It was a moderately geeky (okay, pretty darn geeky) thing to do, but I actually enjoyed it. I went to all the practices and all the games, even the away ones, and I got to ride the bus with the team. I kept the stats on all the players and learned a lot about the rules of basketball. I filled the little paper cups with water and put them in the big 3-dozen-cup tray so that the players could get a drink quick and easy when they came back to the bench after playing. It was a lot of fun. And naturally, I got to be around the very cute and very athletic basketball players, who were oh-so-much-cooler than the dopey football players. It was the closest I ever came in high school to athletic accomplishment.

Of course, you don't spend all that time around cute basketball boys without developing a crush on one or two of them. There was one named Eddie whom I worshipped from afar. He, of course, could not have told you that there WAS a manager for our team, what with his being all preoccupied with playing basketball and sucking face with his cheerleader senior girlfriend and all.

And yet one night I know I made my presence felt. Really felt.

It was a close game and we were some time in the second half - not down to the buzzer, but close enough that everyone was paying attention to each play. The score kept rocking back and forth in our favor and theirs. Eddie had played most of the game but was now sitting out, taking a break and resting in the certainty that he'd be back in the game in the last, crucial 3 minutes, which were not that far off now. I was sitting directly behind him, with my clipboard and pencil, faithfully recording every turnover, every foul. The game got more intense. Emotions were running high. Then, the ref blows his whistle on one of our guys. What? we all rage in disbelief. And naturally we leap to our feet, myself included.

What I didn't realize I was also doing was bringing the entire water tray, all 36 completely full cups, up with me, up and over the tops of the players chairs in front of me. All over Eddie and a couple of other players, drenching their jerseys, their shorts, their socks in their hightop sneakers. Filling their chairs with water, too.

Horror. Humiliation. Complete and utter inability to move or say anything. That's all I remember about the rest of the game.

At least it was a home game, so I didn't have to ride the bus back with everyone that night. And I was forever cured of my crush. Eddie was pretty nice about getting drenched. But after that he never even looked at me again.

All's well that ends well, though. Eventually I married a different guy from my high school. He wasn't a basketball player. He was a computer geek. Who now gives me lotsa love and kisses and presents and spends lotsa time with me and our kids and gives me backrubs when I've had a hard day. Call it Romy and Michelle's Revenge.

The P Word

At the homeschool convention a couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop entitled, "Keeping Your Teen on the Road to Purity." It was presented by a vendor whose business/ministry is to provide books and tapes and seminars and resources to parents who would attend the sort of workshop that would be entitled "Keeping Your Teen On The Road To Purity." Namely, me.

Except that what that vendor, and that workshop, did not acknowledge and may not have understood at all is that people like me are very conflicted on the topic of Purity (with a capital P). And I know I can't be the only person out there who is drawn to stuff like this even though the very word "purity" makes my skin crawl.

I'm not kidding about that... when I hear that word, I have a very real and very visceral reaction that's sort of like nausea. I'm pretty sure it's because there are so many people in the church who use their sexual mores as a baseball bat for beating up everyone else who doesn't adhere to their standards. The Church Lady was funny for a reason... we all knew one, didn't we? Anyway, the word "purity" has negative connotations for me that I'm pretty sure the Lord did not intend for the word to have.

And yet... I still go to workshops with the P word in the title. Why?

I spent some time after the convention thinking about this dichotomy within me. How can I mock jumper-wearing goody-two-shoes who say the word "Purity" as though it were made of syrup and still be drawn to those workshops and those vendor booths like a moth to a flame? Actions speak louder than words... if my feet are taking me into that booth, there's something in my heart guiding them.

Here's what I figured out: Purity is not something I can aspire to for myself. Or my kids. Because purity, the way I was taught it, means never, ever screwing up. (No pun intended. Ok, maybe a little.) Purity is this golden ideal that I in my sinful and fleshly form can never achieve, and I don't feel anything right about asking my kids to shoot for it, either, knowing that their bodies and hearts are no less sinful than mine.

But there is something to be gleaned from all the teaching and the books and the seminars... and that's relationship skills.

Maybe I can never live in such a way that I can call my heart pure. I'm constantly reminded that there's nothing I can do to make my kids pure! (see earlier posts!) But I can learn the skills that are required to value myself and other people, and those I can teach my kids.

For example - one little nugget of truth I gleaned from one of the P word books is the idea of what it means to love your fellow man, your brother or sister, in a Christ-like way. If you are a man, and you want to show true love to a woman to whom you are not married, you will not play games with her heart. You will not cause her to believe that you really love her and desire her as a wife if you do not. You will not use love as a tool for getting sex from her. Similarly, if you are a woman who genuinely loves a man who is not your husband, you will not want to use your body to wreak havoc on his mind and heart. You will not use sex or sex appeal as a tool for getting love from him. Whether you are a man or a woman, you will exercise self-control, not only as a protection for yourself but also as a protection for those with whom you are in relationship.

Well, this is valuable stuff. It was written for teens and single adults in an effort to encourage sexual purity... but it has implications for everyone, married or single. The self-control skills, the instinct to respect others with whom you are in relationship, the setting aside of your own needs in order to honor the needs of others - these are skills that you need whether you are single or married. Sexual temptation is not just for teenagers. It never goes away, as far as I can tell. So if I want my children to have stable, healthy, committed marriages as adults, I want to encourage a lifetime of self-control - a lifetime of thinking long-term about sexuality and not just about the desires of the moment. This type of virtue they will always need.

So, I have this big stack of books and tapes that I bought, and I can breathe a sigh of relief that all that money did not go to waste. I didn't spend it in the vain hopes of achieving the P word... it was an investment in helping them develop relationship skills. And that's a goal I can set without feeling like the Church Lady.

Bad Guy No More

Well, the past two days have been what I consider successful. We got up on time, worked from a list, and got to just about every subject on both days - math, grammar, Latin, reading, handwriting, history, and science.

I know, you're as shocked as I am. But I'm telling you, last Friday kicked my butt. I decided it was time to GET ORGANIZED! And organized I did get. Let me tell ya...

One thing we did was to "nuke" our old computer in the homeschool room and set it up as if it were brand new. This was mostly dh's doing, him being the incredible computer geek in the family, but I did help by transferring all the photos off of that computer to save them from the certain doom that reformatting brings. He, however, went above and beyond, not only getting everything back in pristine and fast-running condition, but he also went out and bought us a new flat-screen monitor, so now I actually have ROOM on that tiny computer desk! Woo hoo!

The next thing I did was install this new software I bought at the homeschool convention - EduTrack. It's taken me a little time and energy to figure out how the thing works - but man, was that a worthwhile investment. I figured out how to put in all the kids lessons for every subject, and I went through the first quarter. (Painful experience has taught me never to plan out the whole year at once. Total. Waste. Of. Time.) THEN it let me print out a weekly assignment sheet for each kid.

This thing is going to save me MAJOR time. Now that I have the "bones" of everybody's lessons plugged in, I can replicate them for future lessons. I can add, delete, and tweak to my heart's content. And I do not have to type up individual assignment sheets for each kid once I've done my lesson plans... this thing does it for me. Woo hoo!

The program does more than I have yet explored. There are places to record grades and resources and library book lists and stuff you've loaned out to other people... but I don't need all that yet. For now, I'm happy that I've finally got something that will let me MAKE A LIST for each of my kids to which they can be accountable. Now the LIST can be the bad guy... not me. (heh, heh, heh... evil laugh)

That is helpful to a homeschooling mom, isn't it? Anything we can do to help our kids see that we are ON their side and not TORTURING them with our insistence that they learn something is just pure gold.

Sigh of relief. Now I'm off to work on business stuff. I have a deadline at dh's work and now that he's helped me out, I can't very well blow him off, can I?

Happy schooling!

Wisdom

Yesterday in church the pastor was preaching about Abraham hearing God's call to follow Him out of Ur. In it he said, "I've spent years training my kids to be nice, polite, well-rounded, well-educated. But unless they hear God's call - unless He comes in and shakes up, disrupts, rocks their worlds - they'll never be anything but nice kids who worship the idols of their culture."

Nice kids who worship the idols of their culture. That's a thought to chew on, now, isn't it?

More later.

Balance Due

So you think it's easy, being a Fun Mom? Oh, no. This is work, people, real work, because Fun does not come for Free.

Today we started our Science and Art coop. Did we have our homework done? Nooooo. Up early to fill out worksheets on the Scientific Method. Did we have our supplies packed? Heck, no... you can't pack supplies you HAVEN'T YET BOUGHT. And oh, yeah, Mom, isn't today the day I'm supposed to leave for a fishing trip with Grandpa Doc? Oooh, we could get you packed if we could just do some laundry first. And oh, yeah, remember Mom, you said J. could spend the night and I already invited him and he's going to be here this afternoon and can we have chocolate chip pancakes? Yeah, let me get to the grocery store while you are at Science class. That is, after I go to the art supply store and find #8 watercolor brushes and ebony pencils and sketch pads and marker pads and watercolor pads.

And don't forget your phone appointment with that new employee and here are three thousand emails that demand your urgent and time-consuming attention and your sister called and your other sister called and you're supposed to get your hair cut at 4:00 because if you don't it is going to take on a life of its own and you will resemble Chewbacca which will NOT make a good impression at the parents' meeting tonight which is at 7 pm which is also the same time that DH needs to be at the wake of an old family friend who died on Wednesday instead of at home with the children and the friend who came over to spend the night.

Do NOT ask me, "So, what have you done all day?"

Back to School... Sort of

If you want to read a great post about getting everything done in your homeschool, you have come to the wrong place. You should go and read Melissa's blog. She gets stuff DONE.

Me? I start back to school, get a couple of days of math and reading underway, and then head to Six Flags!

Back in the spring we went to Homeschool Day at Six Flags (which rocks, btw - low crowds, temps in the low 80's, and clean shining happy homeschooling faces everywhere you turn). One of the little perks of Homeschool Day is the chance to buy a slightly more expensive ticket that includes not only lunch but a free second day. You can come back to Six Flags any day except a Saturday until summer is over.

Needless to say, we forgot all about those tickets until Monday, when we started back to school. Then, facing the horrible prospect of Saxon PreAlgebra, my 12yo ds gets desperate - "Hey Mom! We never did use those return tickets to Six Flags!" I dig through the junk drawer... sure enough, there they are... good until this Friday.

Well, what's the point of starting school 2 days earlier than everyone else unless we use those extra days for some fun? And go "na, na na boo boo" to all the poor kids who have to get on the yellow school bus?

So yesterday we bagged school and went to Six Flags. We took two friends along for good measure.

In case you were wondering, the first day of school for metro Atlanta is an EXCELLENT day to go to Six Flags. There were practically NO LINES. We waltzed right up to most of the roller coasters. My sons rode Acrophobia and the Free Fall and many other rides multiple times without ever getting off the ride. And me? I rode, among other things, the Scream Machine, the Mindbender, the Scorcher, and Batman. (I did make them all go on the Monster Plantation, though. If they expect me to risk being hurled upside down at vomit-inducing speeds without exacting a little payback in the form of a childish and very sedate ride through the animatronix marsh, they don't know their Momma very well.)

Standing in line for a ride, our 12 year old guest told me, "You're a cool mom." My oldest son smirked, amazingly, in agreement.

Two-day tickets to Six Flags? $125. Lunch in the park? $50. Being called cool by your not-quite-teenaged son and his friend?

Priceless.

!Puedo hablar espanol!

About 5 years ago dh decided he needed to learn another language. He started looking for someone to teach him German, but then he met a man at the coffee shop who was teaching Spanish**, and he decided that learning Spanish would be both a) convenient, as the teacher had now been found, and b) practical, as we live in a state where there are regular and multiple opportunities to practice your Spanish with native speakers (i.e., Latin American immigrants).

So dh took Spanish for more than three years. He got to the point where he could listen to the radio or watch TV or order dinner in a restaurant in beautiful, fluent Spanish. When we got lost in Paris, he got us found because he could ask directions of a store proprietor who spoke no English but did speak Spanish. And when we went to Mexico we found many people who loved us, were friendly to us, did nice things for us, just because dh not only knows the language, he does not butcher it with a horrible American accent.

And the whole time dh was taking lessons, he kept encouraging me to take them too. I kept resisting... I'm too busy! I'm homeschooling! I'm no good at learning languages! And besides, can't you just teach me what you're learning? Yes, all true. I did pick up quite a bit of the language from him, especially after figuring out that now that the kids can read and spell, we can still have secret conversations right in front of them if we switch to Spanish! (heh, heh, heh)

But it wasn't formal, and I never got anywhere NEAR fluent. DH leaves me in the dust when it comes to functioning well in the language. However, all that is about to change...

I had my first "real" Spanish lesson today.

It was awesome! DH worked out a deal with his old tutor to come to our office once a week and give group lessons to whomever wants to take them. He's even paying for it, as a little "perk" for being a hardworking employee at our company. I decided to make the time to join in.

Already I can see that this is going to be cool. For one thing, I'm already miles ahead from all the vocabulary that I've learned over the years from dh. For another, we speak only Spanish in class. I'm forced to learn to think in Spanish, instead of just translating. I haven't reached that milestone yet, but I can see how weekly immersion is going to go a long way toward getting there.

I'm psyched.

** An interesting side note here is that our Spanish tutor is from Ecuador. In fact, after about a year of lessons, we discovered that he used to be the Secretary of State of Ecuador. It was only for a few months, back during an era when the government kept getting overthrown. But really, how excellent is it to be learning Spanish from an ex-Secretary of State? You should see his scrapbooks...

Not Quite All Grown Up

This weekend was my 12th anniversary of becoming a mother.

Of course, my oldest ds doesn't think of it that way. He thinks he's had his 12th birthday.

(He also thinks he's going to be a teenager now. Hmph. Over my dead body.)

I have to insist on this being the last year of his childhood in spite of the fact that he is now only 2 inches shorter and 10 pounds lighter than me. "Twelve" does not have the syllable "teen" in it, so he therefore is not a teenager.

Besides, I still have so much to learn from him.

When he was a baby, he taught me just how selfish I am. But also how I really won't die if I only get 4 hours of sleep instead of 8. And how I really MUST learn to trust God for his welfare, ultimately, because I cannot be awake and vigilent 24/7 but God can.

When he was a toddler he taught me that blank walls are one great big canvas and that boys need for the world to be in trouble so that they will have something to save.

When he was in kindergarten he taught me that I am really, really going to embarrass him on the day he goes off to college because then I will be doing all that blubbering in front of his ROOMMATE. Shoot me now.

When he came home to school he taught me that he is very good company and knows more than I thought he did. And that I know less than I thought I did. But I am not too old to learn, for his sake.

I don't know what he will teach me when he is a teenager. But I have a feeling it will be something along the lines of how to let go... how to stretch my heart a little more, to trust God with his welfare even more, to prepare not only him but myself for the day when the boy is gone and the man takes his place.

You are a gift from God, dear oldest son. You have changed my world forever. Happy birthday.

Can This Be Love? (aka Part 3)

So, here I am, six years into this relationship, sitting at the kitchen table, staring across at Mr. Homeschooling with his morning breath and the sinking realization that he does not have the power to make my dream of perfect children and a perfect life come true. What now?

As Dy observed, “None of us in the equation is perfect, but is it still the good stuff?” Indeed, that is the question for me: Is it still the good stuff?

Is it? Good stuff?

To get to the answer, I have to change my ideas of what good stuff is.

I’ve read, over and over again, that when you hit the skids with homeschooling, the cure involves going back to your original vision, your reasons for starting in the first place, your core goals. I think now, though, what I need is a fresh vision. If my original vision – not the one I told everybody about, but the darker, more control-freak one about raising perfect children – is The Impossible Dream, then it must be replaced. With a vision that is still inspiring, but grounded in reality.

So what’s the reality in MY homeschool? And more importantly, what’s good here, in my opinion? When I strip away the preconceived notions of what “should” be good, or what others consider good, what do I think is worth pursuing, worth striving for? What are the rewards that really do motivate me, ones that are achievable?

What do I love about homeschooling?

For one thing, I love the freedom. I love scheduling vacations in the off-season and working our schoolwork around our own priorities. I love getting to choose what field trips we think are worthy and avoiding those that are a waste of time. I love exposing my kids to good art and music and literature. I love that our curriculum is built around really good books. And I can teach in a way that they can learn.

For another thing, I love being there to see my kids “get it.” I’ll never forget the day that one son finally understood the concept of carrying and borrowing. It really was just like a little visible lightbulb went off over his head… you could see the understanding in his eyes. It was awesome. And even now, being out somewhere with my baby girl when she stops and says, “Mom, I can read that! It says “Big Lots!” These are moments directly connected to all the boring, tedious lessons that have gone before, the times when I didn’t feel like setting aside all the other stuff I needed to do but I did it anyway, made school a priority.

And, for better or for worse, I love knowing my own kids. I love that I know their strengths and weaknesses, intimately. Yes, a lot of the time I am annoyed that I have to be the one to deal with their “stuff,” but when I stop and think about the big picture, I am glad that they are home and we are dealing with it. In spite of our struggles, I still feel like dh and I have their hearts… they trust us, and not some teacher or system or group of friends, to look out for their best interests. And we do. And they have good relationships with each other. They are learning how to build their own families by developing relationship skills right here at home, where relationships are a priority and kindness is required.

Freedom. Understanding. Connection. That’s our new school motto. Out with perfection, in with what really works.

(Mr. Homeschooling is reaching across the table and taking my hand in his own. It’s strong and solid and warm. This could be the start of something beautiful.)