I've been away so long that Blogger no longer remembers me.

The past few weeks have been a long blur. And suddenly it's April. And it's still raining. Not that we are supposed to be surprised by this in this particular month. Isn't April the cruelest month? It's rather hard to say. March was pretty cruel around here, though not entirely so.

First there was the snow and the lost week there. A good lost week, but a lost week nonetheless. It's amazing how a couple of out of the ordinary days can throw everyone for a loop and get things off track in your normal life. Typically I welcome the cessation of the regular that comes with snow, and it was nice, for a period of time. The trouble was that no sooner were we through the snow week than I went to Hilton Head on a tennis trip. And there went another lost week.

Hilton Head was amazing. The tennis was amazing. The weather was amazing. We were fortunate to be there in the finest four days of the season. The week before had been impossibly cold and courts were closed. After we left, there was a turn for the cooler and wetter. I'm fascinated by the fact that though we were about two blocks away, I didn't even *see* the ocean during our entire trip. I tried to park at a Marriott and get beach access, but there was not a single space in that parking lot, so I went back to our villa. Day after day our time was spent at tennis clinics, eating, playing round robins, eating, and playing Scrabble. One of my housemates brought along a nifty travel Scrabble set where the tiles snap in and you can easily leave games in progress to finish later. These games were tremendous fun. We had five people in our condo, so there was a rotating host of participants and many words were debated, looked up, and learned. Like quirt, a word I've since seen in a Kaya American Girl book. I guess it all depends upon what circles you travel in whether this is part of your personal lexicon. It was not part of any of ours. Go figure. No horsewomen here.

No sooner did I return from Hilton Head than Walter and I got sick. It was very curious. It was *like* a stomach virus, but not quite. Not quite because there was no vomiting and no diarrhea, just massive and consuming stomach aches. I've never felt anything like this before and I have never had a persistent stomach ache in my life. Nausea, yes. Fullness, yes. Crampiness, yes. But never a completely mindblowing, consuming (this was the word that kept coming to mind through it) aching that would not go away no matter what we did. What was interesting is that I was wildly hungry most of the time, especially when I wasn't hurting. And I'd be in agonizing pain that left me in fetal position for ten hours, then I'd have a number of good hours, when I would think, "Gosh, that was weird, but I'm better now." And I'd eat. And because it was hard to tell what was going on, I'd eat normal food, not the BRAT diet stuff that I'd normally eat if I was sick. To tell the truth, if I have a stomach virus, think I have a stomach virus, know someone with a stomach virus, or read an email from someone in Hawaii with a stomach virus, I tend to not eat at all. This time, I ate generously. Roasted chicken. Potato salad. Cheetos. Gluten free bread. One day I was fine from morning until 4:00 p.m., then I was writhing around again.

One E.R. visit, five dr visits for Walter and one for me later, we still didn't know quite what was going on. Bloodwork and stool cultures didn't turn up anything interesting or noteworthy. Walter got semi-dehydrated at one point, not because of anything coming out of him, but because after 8 days of wrenching stomach pain day and night he hadn't eaten or had enough to drink to sustain over this kind of duration. Any given day's intake probably would have been fine for a day or two...it was the 8 days into it issue that made the comparatively low intake bad. The trouble was that when he was forced to drink large amounts or eat when not hungry, then he started vomiting. Making it all feel very counter-productive. The vomiting didn't lead to resolution of the illness. And it didn't really lead to better hydration or nutritional status. It was just upsetting and unpleasant.

Almost two whole weeks were sucked into the abyss with this illness. For me it lasted about 15 days. Knock on wood, I've had no symptoms for 4 full days now. I still don't trust it--I've been bitten again after 3 or 4 clear days. But for all intents and purposes, our lives have resumed. Walter is no longer lying like a beached whale on a heating pad come nightfall. Everyone around me, including his doctor, thought this was a crutch, a psychological prop for him, but honestly...having been socked back into the stomachache/intestinal upset zone myself numerous times, especially after eating or late in the day, and seeing now that he has gone six days without the heating pad, I absolutely believe him that when he asked for the heating pad, he was really feeling genuine pain, not just giving in to anxiety or misinterpreting normal digestive sensations. Thank goodness our lives are mostly back. I was starting to wonder whether we were going to be the first documented cases nationwide of pistachio-induced salmonella.

What it all amounted to was 7 days of school lost to illness. More than 7 days of activities lost. And a time warp that seemed to have launched us rather abruptly, it seems, into the month of April.

And April really is the cruelest month for homeschoolers. It's that anxious time when in Virginia you realize that you need to think about proof of progress, which for us has always meant testing. I am not concerned about testing at all for the boys--they will be perfectly fine. This has been our most productive year yet and so many things have fallen into place for them. No longer do they seem "later" in any areas other than spelling, which thank goodness isn't something that we have to demonstrate to anyone. This is not, however, the case for Frances, an unschooler of the highest degree. She can do many lovely and amazing things, but reading isn't one of them. Standardized test math isn't one of them, either. So I'm going to have to arrange an evaluation for her that will demonstrate the many strides she has made this year that are poorly measured on something like the California Achievement Test.

But what's really hard about April is that you can see the end of the tunnel. You can smell summer coming. And you look at what your original plans were for the "school" year or maybe just what your current finishing goals are (I want to finish this darn math book, for instance), and you find yourself counting on your fingers and toes how many days you have left to do this kind of stuff that your kids consider "school" like what other kids do, and you know that once public school is out that your kids are far too old and wise to be willing to "do a page of math a day" or every few days or whatever kinds of grandiose plans you might have been able to pull off when they were small and naive. No, when summer comes, the endless party begins. Obviously we'll continue reading and "learning" in the "we're learning all the time" sense, but forget the Daily Grams and the vocabulary book and the 30 problem "practice set."

And what's the very most cruel about April is that suddenly there's just so much to do. So, so much. No, let me amend that. So, so, so much! Or maybe it's just me.

Here's tonight. Let me start with today, actually. In the morning I played singles and doubles with my Suburban tennis team. It was our first match of the season. We did not win as a team. I lost 8-2 in singles to a woman who most definitely outclassed me. She was remarkably consistent in terms of never missing a shot, she moved well and swiftly, she had killer spin of every type on her shots, and she could place things and keep me running like nobody's business. Rene, our pro, watched part of the match, and his analysis was that she was just so consistent and had the moves. I played well, I kept up well, and I got to deuce on more than half of our games, I just couldn't match her skill. And this is what you find in B level teams--3.0s, 3.5s, 4.0s, people who just prefer to play on Wednesdays. It's the Forrest Gump box of chocolates where you never know what you're going to get. Thank goodness Michele and I got something different playing at #3 doubles, where we won 10-5. I can't say I played my finest, but I didn't make a fool of myself.

Back to today. 3 hours of tennis in the morning. 1.5 hour break where we ate lunch and checked schoolwork. Playdate for 2 hours, during which I ran home to gather more supplies for the onslaught of the evening. Here's what we had:

Trumpet lesson
Flute lesson
Cub Scouts
Soccer Practice
Church Small Group where we had childcare duties
First Baseball game of the season

There were 2 parents. There were 4 children. It was chaos. At 1:45 I needed to have packed two instruments, multiple books and pages of sheet music, soccer gear and a total clothing change for Frances, jackets for 5 in case the weather got cool after dark, soccer clothes and ball and shoes for Rutledge because he would need to occupy himself for an hour and a half while Frances played. Baseball equipment (I misheard Kerry saying "socks and belt" as "bat" and then filled in "glove" with it and assumed he had them in his car). A baseball uniform, with cold weather shirt for under. It seems doable because everyone is supposed to have a bag with all this stuff ready to walk out the door or already waiting in the car. Only this is the first day of the official season, so all we had been given so far was a pair of pants and a hat and I had left the cleats at home because i thought that for sure we'd have 10 minutes or so at home before dashing to Cub Scouts for a 3 mile hike after the music lessons. Kerry had picked up the shirt and socks and belt for baseball because they came in much later than the pants did since the shirts needed to be personalized at the printer. Any hope of a unified bag was out the window.

The music lessons ran over time, which I hate to complain about because I like to see progress. This made it too late to stop by home and pick up the cleats and a jacket because the activity tonight with Cub Scouts was a 3 mile forced march through the trails of Woodlake for the Outdoorsman badge. If we were late, they'd leave without us. So I dropped of the boys very hastily, flew home to get the cleats, a water bottle, and my running shoes and to pee (you don't get to pee on days like today!), and then flew back, where of course the Scouts had already left. So I jogged around the mini lake, which was good exercise and part of my "I should be a runner even though I hate it" program. I probably went 3/4 of a mile, which doesn't sound like much but is impressive for me being out of shape, and I ran into them. Then we briskly walked another few miles while I tried not to have a panic attack about being so far from the car and not in control of other people's pace when Ollie was supposed to be at baseball in under 30 minutes. We arrived with about 7 minutes to spare, only to discover that no, we didn't have the bat or glove, and he's a lefty, so borrowing one at the last minute can get tricky. I felt awful. My car was so full of gear and instruments and just plain crap (fast food wrappers at this point from the dinner we had to eat at Wendy's) that we practically needed one of those hamburger boxes on top to contain the overflow. I was hating life. Oh, and it was raining by now. This rain we had been promised all day by the Weather Channel, the rain that was supposed to deliver me from the evil of overscheduling by cancelling the soccer, baseball, and hike all on one night. Yeah. It did nothing for my schedule. Every darn thing went right on. Even the baseball game in the persistent rain.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but that's my April. Every year. It's the time when everyone wants to get out of their winter hidey-hole. You want to, as Chaucer says, make pilgrimages. To places like the fish hatchery, the rock quarry, the park, the farm day, the wedding two states away, the Easter Egg Hunt. It's all fun stuff. All good stuff. There's just a darn lot of it. And it's the golden season of the open-ended sports. The ones that, unlike, say, ballet, you can't sign up for with a specific time like Tuesday: 4-5. No, these are the ones where you sign up and someone says, "Oh yeah, a practice a week and a game on Saturday," and you hand them your $95 check and they give you a sharp looking uniform and the next thing you know you're practicing for 2 hours twice a week on random days and playing games any which way from Sunday. Take the soccer, which puts us in a mad scramble from flamenco on Mondays. No sleep til Brooklyn. Or the baseball, which doesn't seem to ever start until 7:30 on a school night and keeps my boy out in the rain until 10.

Then there's the matter of the fish tank. The supposed-to-be-beautiful coral reef with the ailing anemone. The reef that ate my bank account. We thought the dog cost a lot. We could have about 3 more dogs by now with what we've spent so far, and it's far from over. Our bubble-tip anemone is having some undiagnosable crisis. He goes upside down (and let me tell you, he's not a pretty boy when he's upside down). He is squished in a corner and won't come out. When we blew him out with a jet, he settled himself under a rock, which was even worse. He doesn't look good. He's not being friendly. We just bought him some new frozen krill, but it's not feeding time for another few days. Meanwhile, we also emptied out our wallet buying, and I'm not kidding here, a garlic supplement and Vitamin C for one of my fish who is swimming vertically and sideways and may have an infection. And a new buffer. And some device which grounds the electrical system in the tank. And more and more and more fresh water, which evaporates at a rate you wouldn't believe and has to be purchased very specially from a giant tank at the fish store and is de-ionized, reverse-osmosisized and needs to be put in something like a kerosene container, which I can't seem to find in a size that doesn't end up weighing 56 pounds when fully loaded. And we all know my ability to feel guilt. I feel guilty when I think of how some poor sweet anemone was just reposing in his natural environment, being gaped at by yuppie tourists off the coast of some tropical Pacific island, and somehow he now finds himself in a 34 gallon semi-toxic box being tended by people who can't tell his mouth from his butt.

From here on out, I have a feeling, though, that our days will be just packed. It's probably me. Probably exacerbated by my inability to delegate (I believe we call delegating when it comes to kids "carpooling"). My megalomaniacal belief that I and we can do it all. And the whole four kids thing. I'm seeing in glaring lights the benefits of the only child. Oh, how good I had it when I was growing up. No wonder my mother seemed semi-sane. I can't help but fantasize about what it would be like if I was only micromanaging one small person.

But no, I never learn. I just sent in course descriptions for two classes I plan to teach at the homeschool center next year. One is a class on reading and talking about poetry for middle schoolish students, using a nice little spiral bound program that I found at the IEW seminar I attended a few weeks ago. I'm looking forward to working through this with my boys and it would be more pleasant and palatable to them if there were a few more people doing it with us. It covers such irritating by interesting topics as scansion, terms like "trochee" and "dactyl" and "spondee" that we don't remember from English class. And I'm going to teach an IEW class, with the hope that I myself will get my money's worth out of the DVD set I purchased at the workshop. And I'm doing Junior Great Books with Frances-aged kids. It has worked out especially well, it would appear, that there are plenty of classes for Rutledge and Frances while I'm busy. Rutledge will be doing a preschool class and art. Frances will do art, earth science, and geography. And the boys will do pre-algebra, earth science, and bagpipes. This...sigh...means that we are gone two whole mornings a week, which means two mornings of our own stuff lost. But it's good, I think. We shall see. It violates this year's policy of nothing before noon except in rare cases.

And in closing, I will try to heap on yet another superlative in the This Is Really Why April Is the Cruellest Schooling Month category. The very most hardest thing is that while you're trying your best to live in the present, next year is already breathing very hard down your neck. I don't want it to. I wish I could tune it out. But things want your commitment now. They threaten they'll fill up, raise their prices, and break your kneecaps if you don't tell them yes or no right now. They want to know if you want to help, volunteer, get paid, and so forth. They kind of want your money as a deposit. They want to claim one of the precious places in your schedule before something else comes along in some more propitious month, say August, and edges them right out into the outer darkness. I can barely think about tomorrow, much less whether I still want to be committed until next May to something I haven't even experienced yet. Yes, I'm a spoiled homeschooler. I like my always-available outs. I like my tenuous commitments.

Truly, though, at the moment I am feeling blessed and at the same time a bit selfish. My life is pretty good. I have four kids who are involved in so many things that they love. I'm getting to watch Frances develop as a soccer player and be aggressive out on the field and learn something entirely new. I'm getting to watch Rutledge turn into a boy, a real boy with cleats and soccer shorts and a reading program he's bumbling through. I couldn't even recognize Ollie on the baseball field tonight when I returned from getting dinner. He looked so confident, his stance was so ready, he was comfortable out there, and you couldn't tell he is still the comparatively new player on the team. I have people playing the bagpipes and the flute and trumpet and piano who are excited about their lessons every week. I have 5th graders who are going to do well on Latin test tomorrow. I'm not totally sucking on a B level tennis team. I've been invited to be on a 3.5 team even though I missed getting bumped up in my rating this year like I expected. I can play tennis on a Wednesday morning, take kids to a language class on a Thursday, be part of a co-op where my boys are learning about comparative political and economic systems and are getting it, can read book after book about children's experiences in the second World War, meet new friends for coffee at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, see my daughter perform in a big professional dance performance and iron the dresses and babysit the professional dancers' children during the shows. I have the world's most complicated mini-aquarium and a whole host of stuff to keep my little brain busy with research. I don't have a stomach ache any more. There really probably should be more drudgery and torture in my life, just to temper all the goodness!