Can you resist this little winter face?

It's funny how life seems to go in these waves of everything seeming to work out just peachy and you're all cruising along, and suddenly it hits a trough of disequalibrium. I think we're in that disequalibrious phase right now. Ollie is back in a socially awkward place, and I'm realizing that there are probably things I could be doing to help him out, only my own low social skills are retarding me from really having a cogent plan. Walter is struggling in his electronics class and having meltdowns every time he has to do any work for it. He is supposed to do one lesson a day 5 days a week, but right now his class officially ended yesterday and he is two weeks behind. There is absolutely no way I could ask him to do that much work at once, and it's just plain too late anyway. Frances's ballet teacher pulled me aside on Friday to say that she is not keeping up in the class and doesn't know basic ballet technique (of course, there is this part of me that says that this is her 5th year of taking dance classes, so even though right now she isn't in a ballet class, whose fault is it if she doesn't know basic skills?). She also is behind her class in gymnastics for some reason. I'm seeing a general lack of focus from her, and I'm not sure if it is bad eating, not giving her enough attention in general, my own lax discipline in all areas of life, and not pushing her to work hard or behave appropriately or stay focused. And her attitude in general has just been extremely difficult--demanding, rude, whining. I feel like all of it has a root somewhere not very far from myself. I have allowed this all to flourish, and now it's going to take some hard work to prune it back.

My schooling and parenting dilemma of the week is whether I am being a responsible homeschooler by noting areas where they are not yet ready for the work or where the presentation method is not compatible with the way they learn and saying hey, this is a poor fit right now and I didn't choose to homeschool so that they would feel incompetant or have to persist in something that clearly wasn't working at the expense of everyone involved. On the other hand, I also don't want to send the message that we'll just drop out of everything or not show up any time the going gets rough. The boys are really struggling, as is most of the class, in Latin. It's moving too fast. My own personal opinion is that they are covering too much too fast at this level, and it would be better to slow down and get mastery, rather than forging ahead with 30 adjectives at this point. They can't remember all of the 1st and 2nd declension noun endings, they have a lot of vocabulary, they're confused at what some of the grammatical terms mean, and the participants are only 10 and 12. To me, there's no rush. They don't even need to study Latin at all at this age, and maybe there are other 5th graders moving through at a faster clip, but mine don't happen to be among them. They're covering at about the same rate in Latin what I covered in my own 1st Latin class in 8th grade, but I was older and was there 5 days a week for 45 minutes. I knew that they would fail the test this week because they simply do not recall 3 declensions of endings and reliably distinguish those from the personal endings on 1st conjugation verbs. And they're crying during homework and before and after class. That is not the recipe for successful learning in any sense of the term to me.

So I said I would let them skip class this week, and it turns out that almost no one was there anyway. Ollie took me up on the offer, but Walter wanted to see how he'd do on the test, so he stayed. Result? The test has been postponed until this week, when hopefully more the whole group of five will be there. Ugh.

Then there's the matter of electronics class. A 5th grader doesn't *need* to learn electronics. This is purely an enrichment class on a topic that I thought he'd enjoy. He's not having a great time. He's having meltdowns. When he melts down, we all do, and it's just not worth it to me to suffer or have him suffer for something that was supposed to be fun. There was something else that happened this week that also fell into that category, though I'm forgetting what it was. At any rate, I feel bad that I'm not teaching them persistence or that I'm demonstrating that I'll let them take an easy way out if they just complain enough, but I also want them to follow their own interests and to not associate learning and education with agony, especially when the classes were imposed by me and are totally non-standard curricula. Still, I feel like the biggest slacker mom.

Here's what also makes me feel like a slacker. I just seriously lost two Monopoly Jr. games in a row to people who are also too old to be "financially ruining," as Ollie put it, each other in a game like this. And speaking of games, I'm a bit bummed because I ordered Settlers of Catan from Amazon on Wednesday for $27, and today I looked and it's only $19.99. Bummer. And another gift I paid $34 on amazon for last week is now $23. Sigh.... He who hesitates wins. Meanwhile, the American Girl doll claims that I shouldn't count on her to arrive before Christmas, since I ordered her yesterday. It's hippie Julie, the girl whose parents are divorced, who lives in the Bay Area, and wears a necklace like Carrie on Sex in the City. Alas, her accessories, including her Carrie/Julie necklace are backordered until sometime in January. I'm learning that it's kind of lose-lose to have a vexed relationship with shopping late. Remember how high and mighty I was back on Buy Nothing Day??!! And I can rest comfortably in the fact that the reason my games and Eyeclops cost more less than a week ago are that I was contributing to their meteoric rise up the Amazon charts, which caused their current rock-bottom prices.

Guess what I'm getting for Christmas??? A bread machine! The bread machine of my dreams! I'm absolutely convinced that we should all be gluten free for a wide variety of reasons for each of us. But gluten free stuff tastes really yucky much of the time, and I'm the laziest cook out there, so I don't do well with it in that regard. So I think I'm going to contaminate the ol' Zojirushi when I get it with regular wheat flour. All I need to do not is get that Wondermill and I'll truly be worthy of that Prius. But seriously, my aspiration is to give the GF thing a serious go. Will I be able to embrace the resolution in the New Year?

Have I mentioned I'm in love with how the Prius just kind of knows me even when I can't find my key? It doesn't even ask for me to be responsible; it loves me just the way I am. I show up, it forgives me for all of my trespasses of the day, and it open its doors wide. To show my appreciation, I went to the Wally World tonight and bought it some spiffy new rubber floor mats.

Tonight I took Frances to Open Gym, and she was awesome! She actually looked like a gymnast (rather than like a spaz, which is what she has been looking like). Of course, the point of Open Gym is to be able to boing out of control on the trampoline and wallow in a pit of foam without anyone yelling at you or trying to eke some grace out of you. She has the back handspring just about down now on any kind of mat--definitely on the Tumble Trak, on the thicker foam, and now on the resilient floor as well. And she almost has it continuous with the roundoff. Whew!

And a note on timing: just when we were ready to pull her from dance as soon as we fulfill all our current obligations to the company because she's a currently sucky ballerina, Ana has her usual impeccable timing. Our lousy ballerina was invited to go to North Carolina with the professional company on Thursday to dance in Legend of the Poinsettia. She'll be leaving at 6:30 a.m. and hopefully will be back at dinnertime. This meant a scramble for appropriate underlayers for costumes: the new black adjustable camisole strap leotard from the dance store with the fancy bags. Because she was whining and I am a pushover, she also got a red faux fuzzy bun for her hair with light-up fiber-optic stuff shooting out the top. I have to admit it's a nice touch and matches her flamenco skirt, but I doubt it will fly for she show. They're more into a corona of loud colored artificial flowers....

Milestone of the weekend: we went to see Santa yesterday, and Walter and Ollie opted to go to a friend's house instead.

Santa couldn't understand a word that Rutledge said, but he was great at responding with a lot of "Uh-huhs." I think Rutty was saying something about a battleship, but even I'm not sure.

We all know what Frances wants: An American Hippie. A charm bracelet. A make-up set. She did admit to not being such a good girl this year. Maybe her blunt honesty will sway the old red guy in her favor and he'll be generous after all. I know where there's some coal...


Hot chocolate on a cold day.

The barrel train. Obviously, in this family we find all of the barrel trains that we can ;) This one wasn't really barrels, but little wooden cars by John Deere. I think that's kind of cheating.


What I'm proud of myself for: getting to level 55 on Strawberry Shortcake Popping Fruit game, earning Frances 929 "tickets" to spend designing ice cream sundaes. Your Money or Your Life would be totally after me, since I spent about two hours of my Life Energy on this particular accomplishment. Laugh if you will, but I call it worthwhile. Go ahead...try to beat me!

We just finished _Anne Hutchinson's Way_ and in about 30 minutes we'll be done with _Willow Run_, which we haven't liked as much as _Lily's Crossing_ but still has been a great treatment of the emotions of the home front during World War II. Far, far better than any textbook! This book rocks. Highly recommended! Woo hoo for Patricia Riley Giff!