Enough oxygen to burn it

Instead of going to bed, tonight we are watching a History Channel show about the Sun. Ollie is amazed at the sheer amount of energy that the Sun puts out--more in a second than has been generated on the entire earth since its very beginning. Before this, we watched a show about Mars. It must be planetary week. Next week begins a new series on the Universe that sounds fascinating. I will need to put it on the calendar or we'll certainly forget it. Our study of chemistry this year probably feels rather relevant right now to the kids, which is just what I hope for what we learn.

Kerry says that he is going to start working with the boys on the upper times tables, which by all counts they should have down by now. They are still skip counting to find answers, which means that they lack automaticity. My goal is 2-3 seconds or less on these facts, and we're just not there yet. I'm not sure what Kerry has in mind--mostly the traditional speed drills that we remember not so fondly from our school days. I ordered Times Tales the other day, a program that is highly recommended by a lot of homeschoolers for learning the last little pocket of facts, the 6-9s, that are often simply hard to recall, and it uses a mnemonic approach with a story. The claim is that they will have mastered these facts within an hour, and I've heard personal testimonial as well as what is on their site and what I've seen elsewhere, so I hope this will be the magic bullet for us. Otherwise, I'm continuing to throw out to them the more unique concepts that are covered in Saxon 3 while I wait for another workbook to arrive, and we are using the speed tests from the first half of the year to review what we've already covered. Meanwhile, we're proceeding with Math U See Gamma on to double digit multiplication, though I'd feel better about this with instant recall of single digit stuff. In the middle of all of this, we are also experimenting with Time4Learning this month. Unfortunately, it lacks some features that would make it even more user-friendly--timers for the older grades (there is no timer after 2nd grade), and most especially something to make assignments so that when they log on they know what they are supposed to do next. Instead, I'm finding I have to be more involved than I want to be. Not that I don't want to be involved in what they are learning, but I had signed on to this with the idea that it might be a painless way to do extra practice and cover concepts that didn't require me to be on top of them like I am with everything else. But overall, I like the scope of what is covered, and I wish that the boys would be a little more enthusiastic.

Who wants to watch math instruction and do problems when there are Webkinz to buy flat screen televisions and air hockey tables for?! Today I found myself a rather irate help desk when the site seemed to be refusing either our password, our user name, our secret code, or some combination of the three. At least 30 minutes was wasted in increasingly frustrated ranting before I discovered that a "G" in the secret code tag had been rubbed off to become a "C," which was wrong. What is immensely irritating about this whole episode is that there is no interactive tech support or a phone number AT ALL for the site. If you can't figure out what is wrong using their FAQs, you're just SOL. I was cursing myself and Ollie for picking out something that requires either batteries or electronics of some kind. Nearly anything that we've ever had that is electronic or battery-driven ends up causing nothing but frustration, and eventually it is missing some piece or hits some glitch we can't get past and then it is tossed aside until it is completely obsolete. I'm so glad that we finally figured out what was going wrong.

Tonight Kerry and I played tennis in an attempt to break me out of my into-the-net rut. My serve was much more on (though I suspect that some of my Thursday morning troubles have to do with needing sunglasses that I can actually see through when I'm on the court), and though I buried a good number of balls into the net, I was a little more consistent in my ground strokes. I continue to have trouble with the "easy" shots--the ones where I have way too much reaction time and a whole clear court in front of me and where I end up blowing the ball too hard way outside the alley. So I'm going to try to breathe through these next time they present myself and not go for some big kill, just work on gently putting the ball away with placement rather than power. And for once, all three kids in child care were complaining that it was time to leave. This is quite good, since I have appointments both for clinic tomorrow morning and then for my match against Hilary on Thursday. I'm not supposed to be this competitive, but I have been a bit disappointed that my partner this week isn't one of our stronger players, which means I feel a higher need to compensate...at a time when I'm feeling like I need someone to compensate for me!

And tomorrow night is the long-awaited play and the rescheduled picnic. I need to go over lines with Passaportout, since it has been a while since he has read through them, and I need to figure out how I'm going to take four kids to Costco to pick up fruit to make my skewer kebabs. And get meat to grill. And I'm going to have to be organized enough to get it all over to Jenn's house without the benefit of Kerry being around. I am so excited to see how it all turns out. Now, if only I could find my camera.

Today we had a pretty good day. Schoolwork out of the way before 9:30, then over to Cheryl's for another meeting about her Homeschool Center idea that she needs to get off the ground by Friday. It was energetic, to say the least. It is an understatement to say that there were lots of kids--close to two dozen. But her project is really coming along, and I hope that enough people will join in to help this become a reality, because we so sorely need adequate and affordable meeting and class space in this area and a central location for homeschoolers to find one another beyond just the internet. After that, I was not very smart and bought us all Slurpees, and for the rest of the day, I could feel the energy of post-Slurpee buzz emanating from Walter. Arrgggh!

This afternoon we went to the pool after our stress-fest with the Webkinz and the all-too-short nap from Rutledge. I'm still not quite ready to get terribly wet there because the water still feels a bit chilly to me, but it didn't stop anyone else except Rutledge. I'm telling you, I tend to make these very unwise parenting decisions when I'm put on the spot, and today was no exception. I allowed Ollie to buy something from the snack bar with his own money, and the next thing I knew, I had three other children sobbing and whining because they had nothing and didn't know they could have brought money. Ooops. That was my big sign to go home, so that's what we did.

Right now I'm going to snuggle up with some of my favorite bedfellows, Ollie and Frances and enjoy the sweetness of a little girl with her head against my arm, snoring.