I have a guilty confession to make. I deeply desire to live in a house that is "Designed to Sell." I want to inhabit a staged house.

Unfortunately, I live in what I refer to in my own head as "Reality House." I find myself frequently trying to put it in some positive light--it's a house that speaks to at least some ability to live in the moment. In fact, it is filled from top to bottom with evidence of moments I've lived in or that my children or husband have lived in and that were kind of left as they were after we moved on to another moment.

And the truth is that I am bothered by this Reality House. I can't relax when I'm in a mess. In those rare moments when there is a place for everything and it's already there, I feel such a tremendous energy and creativity. We find ourselves playing all kinds of board games, working puzzles, watching movies together, undertaking art projects, and just plain getting things done. When things aren't pristine, I'm more grouchy, distracted, and more likely to leave things right where they are because I don't know where to begin. Even the kids become amazingly more creative when there is plenty of space to do it in. The Lego buildings proliferate, Frances produces volumes of artwork or write little books or makes scrapbooks, and Rutledge and I manage to actually do things like practice his speech sounds and play games with gratuitous plastic polar bears (have you ever played that Cranium game Polar Bear ABC? It has nothing to do with polar bears! Who designed this thing!) and all those other things I am all good intentions about.

This all comes on the heels of today, a day when I felt like I spent hours spinning my wheels mentally trying to figure out how to put all of our stuff into what I always refer to as "funcational groups." This means that the room that the builder of our house imagined as a dining room really shouldn't have a china cabinet, an art table, a piano, a piece of exercise equipment, a plastic crate full of PC hardware detritus (and three stray bags of homemade play-doh that snuck in there), a wicker basket of library books, a nearly empty World War II filing cabinet, and a wooden bookshelf with two printers on top and a motley collection of school books and children's novels.

The real dilemma is that I have our "homeschool" stuff in at least five rooms of the house. There is a shelf of stuff in the "dining room," a shelf of stuff in our family room, a corner cabinet of books and puzzles in our kitchen and another shelf there with math stuff and sloppy office supplies and art books. Then there's the "living room" with no furniture to sit on but with four tall bookshelves packed to the gills, a big cube thingy with the bulk of the stuff I've bought at used curriculum sales. And the books that made it into my bedroom. And in the upstairs hallway. To a normal person with a modicum of organizational skills, this would seem to be a minor issue--you just put all the stuff in one room, duh.... But for me, for some inexplicable reason, it's just not that easy. I'm deeply confused about how one would do this. Like how would you pick which room? And what if all the furniture didn't fit? And if I put all those books and little wooden tiles with numbers on them into the same room, do I need to have a table in there for people to use these things at? Or should I try to create separate workstations for each child, knowing that in my real life experience with these particular children, they've never even worked at a desk before, no matter how appealing the setup is to me?

And in the middle of all this sits two very large pieces of fitness equipment. Not my fitness equipment, I might add. Sure, I wouldn't mind a Bowflex body, but I don't have any immediate plans to achieve one. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to get in a 20 minute walk for the dog each evening. Kerry, on the other hand, is adamant that this stuff remain right there in the middle of the living room, no matter how ugly it looks and no matter how it gets right in the face of my love of "functional groups."

I could literally feel my brain seizing up and refusing to cooperate. No matter how much I thought, I could not come up with a workable solution. And meanwhile I have a birthday party happening in fewer than three days, I have regular old messes in the house, the kind like spilled plants and a mountain of laundry and cobwebs and dust bunnies climbing up to the ceilings. And dirty dishes. And a filthy floor. And piles of things dumped into my upstairs hallway that we need to get rid of but that maybe need a slight bit of repair before that or that need to be sorted (all the Groovy Girls need to get dressed...). I had to repeat to myself like a mantra every time I would start to lose focus that this Bowflex/homeschool books/should I list my kitchen table on Craigslist dilemma has nothing to do with the impending party in mere days. Solving those mysteries of our time is not a prerequisite for having my house ready for 9 to 12 year old boys.

Nonetheless, I did make some progress. I just started moving things, but not things that required me to take books off shelves. First i just turned the Bowflex. This created a visual vista that was very pleasing, even though there was still an elephant in the room with all my books. Then I decided to just remove all the things that didn't belong in the room--the desks that were crowding in there because I couldn't figure out where else to put them, the piles of things on the floor. And then I got very bold and moved that Bowflex right out of the room. Moved the piano. then moved it back where it was before. Then moved a whole filled china cabinet by myself. Rerranged dog crates. Got to a point where I was just putting those dang books into the room with the other books regardless of whether I had a clear spot for them just then.

What I have now is hope. And light. Perhaps this is a bit melodramatic for redecorating or moving furniture, but truly, there is more light in my house. Doors that were closed are open again, and I don't mean that abstractly. The french doors that we had a computer in front of are now free and clear and light is shining right in from the front windows. Nearly all of the school and book-related things are in one room now. It's a room with absolutely positively no wall space whatsoever for anything, and I'm going to probably have to live with that, but it's a room with a monolithic purpose. It's for keeping all those things that make our goofy little life run, it's for the table where art projects happen, and it's for the printers that make us such poor stewards of the earth in the name of education.

And the dining room? I'm okay with that. At least I can walk through it. People can get to the piano to practice.

And I have the satisfaction I get when I am able to pare down some things in my life. In the end, I'm going to get rid of several school desks. We listed on Freecycle a giant tube-type computer monitor, a giant bag of miscellaneous computer cords (we have no idea how we ended up with over a dozen ethernet cables) and about 15 shelf inches of those supermarket checkout cookbooks. This week I'll be able to sell a huge wooden toy horse barn, a box of books, and I'll give away a bunch of My Little Ponies and other quirky little plastic toys. In the end, my dream is that I'll live in a house that is just one step closer to looking like somewhere that normal people would like to live.

What's most amazing is that I could accomplish this because we were home all weekend. Walter and Ollie were at the Bay with some friends for the weekend, and Frances, Rutledge, Kerry and I had a chance to do younger kid-centric things. We had a fabulous day at Busch Gardens yesterday, all the better because it didn't last all day. We forced Frances to go on the Log Flume twice, and though she didn't love it, she did survive. We spent plenty of time at the two squirty areas with the dumping water, and we couldn't have asked for a better day for it. I'm always impressed with how light on our feet and nimble we seem to be with just two children, no matter which two they are.



Oh, and can I say one phrase that I hate? Cash for Clunkers. If I hear that one more time this week I'm going to run over whoever said it with my fuel-efficient car.

The summer surely seems to be flying by. Only six more weeks left of it, or something like that. It feels rather short. And yet, at the same time, I'm ready to move on to the new structure that comes with fall.

This summer has been far more structured in terms of how our days are spent than any previous summer. In fact, it looked suspiciously like our school year in that regard. Except that we were doing entirely different activities. Sometimes I think I just never learn!



Swim and dive teams both ended this week. They were great seasons. Frances missed practice for the last three or more weeks of both, but she continued to compete in all of the meets for both sports, and she had a decent showing despite her lack of time on the board or in the lap lanes. None of the kids is going to champs for swim, and I'm not entirely sure that for most of them that their times didn't even go down a little this year. But our real focus is on dive. I was so very proud that all three of them made it to Champs this year and did very well there. Frances won 3rd place in the Mini-Mite division, Walter won 7th place in the Midget division, and Ollie won 2nd place in Midgets. This was a huge accomplishment for everyone. Ollie now has a repertoire of about 9 dives, not all of which he can do on any given day, depending on his anxiety level and whether he has had a recent close encounter with the board, and Frances has five dives, which is more than most girls her age. Walter went from not having four dives and therefore not being able to compete in the first few meets this seasons to having five solid dives and having cumulative scores over the course of only three meets to get himself to Champs. We are so pleased with the effort he has put in and how much he has grown. At our dive team's awards ceremony, all three kids got trophies, and both Frances and Ollie won an award for highest points of anyone in their division in the club, so they have really big trophies as well. We think Walter should have won the award for most improved!



Rutledge has become a little fish in his own right. He has been taking swimming lessons with the legendary Miss Erline, who has been teaching swim lessons for the past 65 years. She has an amazing rapport with the children and brings out their best. Rutledge went from having panic attacks on the side of the pool and refusing to even wear a bathing suit or dip his feet in the baby pool to swimming underwater and paddling about 30 feet across the pool to the lap lanes! He is still very nervous on his back and flips over as soon as he realizes that no one is holding on to him. But now he has become the biggest pool rat. We're there several times a day many days, and he jumps in from the side over and over and in so many different ways--cannonballs and corkscrews and supermans. He wears his doofy clear white goggles that do him no favors, and he picks up things off the bottom of the pool. This past week he even stood under the mushroom that pours water down on his head, something he never would have done even two weeks ago. We're just so proud of him. I'm actually kind of proud of myself for sticking with his 8 a.m. swim lessons, when this used to be a time of day that I was not even up!



Walter is a little more than halfway through his program at Learning RX. I wish that I could say that we're seeing a massive and unmissable change in him, but I'm not sure that is happening yet. I wouldn't say it's not happening, but I think the proof will be in his schoolwork when we start again in a few weeks. It's hard to show academic progress and faster processing when you are spending most of your days in the pool, playing with friends, and moving up levels in video games. That said, he is finding many of the procedures of the program easier and easier to handle, and it's neat to see how he has mastered the earlier levels of most tasks and can now do them on command without a lot of fuss. What I am hoping to see happen is for his auditory processing to improve and for his executive processing to become more rapid and reliable. I can definitely see changes in his memory, especially as it relates to the tasks where he has to recall strings of numbers, words, ideas, or connected material. His spelling also seems to have taken a leap forward. One of his tasks is to take a list of spelling words of gradually increasing length and be able to spell them forward and backward at the same rate. For someone who last year couldn't consistently spell words like "were" and "begin," it's very nice to see him last night tackle a word like "modulate" forward and backward in under a minute. I have determined that I need to up my commitment to the training during the week, though, for the last few weeks remaining. We have always done at least the minimum expected and typically a bit more, but my goal would be for us to do the training at least 5 days a week at home, adding 5 hours to his 3 hours he does in the office. I'd like him to conquer most of the levels on most of the activities by the end and to have felt like we gave it the best we could for the short period it lasted.

In addition to this, we have found a downloadable program called Brainware Safari that makes similar claims about raising cognitive skills by over four years with 5 day a week use for 11 weeks. The program has 168 levels, and Walter has been doing it for 8 days now and is on level 126, which I think is pretty impressive. He really enjoys it, and though he cries sometimes through the games, he is dedicated to having his character grow up (they choose an animal character for the program and it matures and grows as they progress through the levels of the game). Now he is at a point where it takes much more concentration and thought to complete a level, so I suspect his meteoric rise is going to be a little more sedate. Ollie is on level 85, and he devotes a lot less time to the program than Walter, but has been staying consistent with 30-60 minutes a day. Since he is not yet doing Learning Rx, I'd like for him to stick with this program and we'll see where he is before commiting to something with a lot of driving involved. Frances will start it as soon as she gets her password and login.

But here we are with the school year's warm breath on the backs of our necks, and I'm wondering where the bulk of the summer has gone. School, sports, some playdates and travel, some trips to Busch Gardens, and the lazy days are not quite so lazy and not so numerous now!