One week

One week until Christmas. This fact and the number 7 were blowing my kids' minds all day long. I have everything pretty much done--just a few small things for people other than my children to do now. Now I have to bake some serious biscotti this weekend, take Frances to her gymnastics party (my kind of party--nothing to bring, no gifts to buy, etc.).

We're a bit annoyed by her gym right now. Part of our yearly contract (signed, notarized with a raised seal, etc.) is that we must work bingo every 7 weeks. Bingo is up in Mechanicsville and involves an entire evening--leaving at 4 and getting home around 10:30 p.m. The bingo-goers can be a very cantankerous bunch. A game with a name like "Everybody Wins!" is more than enough to set off some tempers. The trouble is that bingo receipts are down. So the booster club sent out a letter to everyone saying that now we absolutely must all sell one full page of advertisements for our meet programs at $250-300 a page, depending on whether it is color or black and white. That's a pretty big chunk of change, especially in this economy, especially when we don't know but so many people with their own businesses and we aren't great at cold calling or soliciting. This command came out of the blue, and we weren't the only people who didn't get a full page (we bought a half page for Kerry's consulting business). So the punishment now is going to be the club not paying for the meet fees or coache's fees, as it usually does. Entry fees range from $55-105 per meet, and there can easily be 6-8 meets per season, so this is a significant burden now being shifted to the parents. Given that we're already paying $50 a month more here than we were at her previous gym, this is really pushing the cost up way beyond what we had expected when we signed the contract. I suspect there will be a lot of people raising hell, but I haven't been around to hear the scuttlebutt lately. So now we're seriously having to consider whether we should move her back where she was. The trouble is that Frances doesn't want to go back--she's much happier here. But you have to wonder, why are we out working bingo every month if we're getting nothing in return? I think it would be much more effective to give people options: some straight talk that funds are short, rather than arm-twisting about selling ads, choices about fundraising so that people can do what works best for them, whether that's selling items, soliciting businesses to place ads, or just buying out our fundraising obligations.

My class at the homeschool enrichment center is done now. It was a lot of fun, and I wish that I had more students in my class, since today was another example of how when one person is gone in a 4 person class, everyone feels the loss. Four weeks in a row we've been down a person, and today that person was Frances, who was in Mt. Airy performing in Legend of the Poinsettia, whcih seems to have been a huge success. Today we read _The Snowy Day_ several times, watched a puppet version on Youtube, ate snow-day inspired snacks: gingerbread, cupcakes, and clementines, and I brought out the ever-popular Insta-Snow. This time, instead of getting the big expensive can, I picked up the small test tube. I thought it was going to make more than it did--it claims to expand to 100 times its original size, and this didn't seem 100 times bigger. But it is always a huge hit. I spread a tablecloth on the floor to catch the worst of the mess (this stuff loves to smear into carpeting, and kids are constitutionally unable to keep from getting the snow all over their clothes, on the bottoms of their shoes, and in their hair). Then we put the snow in a bowl and played with animals, Santa, Mrs. Claus, a plastic Fisher-Price chimney, and the always fun test tubes. It was heavenly! As a parting finale, we did our best and loudest rendition of "Going On A Bear Hunt." I had so much fun, but I'm glad that it's done, too. It takes a fair amount of preparation and energy, especially on the day of the class, and I have a lot going on right now. The other issue is that the boys are begging to not take Latin next session. I'm inclined to oblige them. I need to find some other Latin solution--perhaps look for a class or a cooperative situation elsewhere--because I don't intend to drop it. The weekly class goes some distance in "keeping me honest" about keeping some pace going, but we really need to be moving at our own pace. If I'm teaching, then I probably need to keep the boys in their class, and since I didn't have huge turnout for my class and winter is going to be going full force with all its illnesses in the coming months, I'd prefer not to have to worry about substitutes and extra lesson plans. It feels a bit funny to be taking a break, though; we've been taking something or I've been teaching something continuously since the place opened.

Tonight was Walter's trumpet concert, and he was so sweet and cute! He has come such a long way in the past year and a half. His biggest challenge will continue to be keeping steady timing, but he has made enormous strides in that area. He has moved up to the Intermediate Band now, and they'd like him to practice with them on Wednesdays. I think he really needs to be moving that direction and needs to be spending time playing with other people, but the timing is not good for me. It would mean leaving park day early each week, which I'm not sure I'm willing to do. And it would probably mean driving out to Powhatan, then driving back in to drop Frances off at gymnastics, then back out to Powhatan to pick him up. That's a lot of driving. I can't count on Kerry to be able to cover things in the mid afternoon. So I'm not sure what the plan is now. He might be able to go with the group half time--every other week or so, so that the rest of us aren't always missing park day, but I just don't know. Sounds complicated.

Ollie now says he wants to start playing the flute. And Frances wants to do piano. In my perfect scheme of things, they would each be doing a sport, playing an instrument, and doing one other enrichment thing, like art or dance. But the budget doesn't let all that stuff happen with this many kids. I'm going to make it a priority in the new year, though, to somehow work in an instrument for Frances and Ollie. I can sort of teach piano, but honestly, I have no business doing that. I can't play all that well myself any more, I never played superbly in the first place, and I don't know the first thing about teaching music to other people. There is a very inexpensive piano teacher in our neighborhood, so I need to revisit people's reviews of her to determine whether it is worth our while to do this (because the alternative is probably nothing if it's going to cost $25-30 a week).

Tomorrow is our last day of "school" before the holiday. I say that really loosely because we aren't going to stop learning or reading fascinating things over the holidays. But it's the last day we're going to do math and Wordly Wise and grammar for a while. I didn't realize that Ollie's edition of Saxon 5/4 has 22 fewer lessons than Walter had, so he is going to be done in about 14 days. I need to make my final decision about whether he is going to continue with 6/5 or spend some time with fractions and decimals in Math-U-See. He claims that he's like to go back to Singapore, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. That program skips around a lot and doesn't have continued practice on concepts, and repetition has been good for everyone. I'm in the groove of Saxon now, and for once, I feel very confident that they can do well on their standardized test without me needing to cram with them or without me holding their breath wondering if they will know what to do with a question they have never seen before. So decisions loom in the future with that.

I feel like I should get another something for Kerry for Christmas. I got him one (previously 2, but I gave one away in a White Elephant exchange) small gift, but I should be doing more, but without spending money that now needs to go to the car, which is the unexpected big gift. I'm just out of ideas. We always are not sure we're going to give gifts to adults, so things often get down to the wire, like this feels.

Today's reads: _The Stories Julian Tells_, which is a delightful short novel. The writing is halfway decent, and it is right on the level of what Frances can relate to and process. Ann Cameron has just the right balance of serious and fun in a very satisfying length. Ollie and I started a book called, _Someone Called Eva_, which is about a Czech girl who is captured by the Nazis and taken to a prison camp where blond haired, blue eyed girls are trained to be good Aryan wives and mothers. It is intense. I'm glad we're reading it aloud so that we can talk about what is going on. Walter read _The Shoemaker_, part of a series recommended by Hilary. He really liked it, since it talked about a craft from the past, and the length was again rather satisfying--just enough detail, plenty of pictures, and doable in an hour or less. Ollie is about halfway through _The Wigmaker_, also from that series.