One of the reasons that I have not blogged much lately is that it is hard to know what to write about that is not too personal and perhaps too obnoxious to make public.  My inner struggles with having sent my boys to school, my concerns about Walter's health, and just general feelings of not succeeding as a parent are not exactly blog material.  Tonight is one of the nights when I am feeling that pain fairly acutely.  It causes me physical pain to see the F's my kids are getting in school--multiple of them.  It is mentally draining trying to help them figure out what they need to be doing and what various assignments mean so that they do not get more bad grades--at least not ones for not completing work they should have known about. I suppose I would just say I feel a little helpless in the face of the edmodos, edlines, planners, acronyms, and "technology in the classroom."  And I know that honestly, my own helplessness and confusion in the face of this is really not a problem that *I* should be having at all, because I should not exactly be micromanaging their school life.  Why didn't anyone tell me how very no-guarantees being a parent would be?  I often find myself wishing that I could resign from this particular job--if there was a boss over me, I think I would be fired by now!

This morning I went to a Bible study with a friend of mine.  When I first walked in, especially when tarus wasn't there and I was not sure if she was going to be a no show, I had an overwhelming urge to run out the door and never come back.  I looked around and saw mostly old people," and I thought they looked too "Baptist" (which they were), and I could not see myself fitting in.  As the morning went on, while I am not sure I exactly fit in, I became more convinced that sometimes we are led somewhere out of our comfort zone for a reason--that whatever got us to the place where we want to escape may have had a plan after all. I think the big thing that I left with was a set of resolutions.  Yeah, they were nothing hugely new and earth-shattering, but in a way the reiteration of them from yet another voice in my life was what woke me up a little. 

The first of the resolutions is to create and use a blessings jar--or a "good things" jar.  I have seen this posted on pinterest by a lot of people during the past few weeks, and I am going to do my best to be disciplined about making one and using it daily.  Lord knows I could stand some help seeing the positive some days!  But I really do look and see, even while I am in the midst of wondering what is going to happen with my family, that there are so many blessings.  Like getting to go out with Tarus this morning.  And her daughter going to lunch with us and helping Frances get excited about doing her latin.  And Frances doing her math without any involvement from me and doing two lessons because her friend was doing two lessons--and taking the time to get the grade on the assignments that I know she can and should be getting.  We finished one of my very favorite books of all time this morning--From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  This time around, and it is at least the third time for me, it was even more special because I am so crazy, fanatically in love with New York City and had a visual and personal attachment to all of the places mentioned in the book.  What's even more cool is that there was the mention of the name "Clendennan" in the book, which pretty much blew Frances away.  As if this was not enough, we read about 20 pages in "Listening For Lions" today, and that also is a book that I completely loved, and it is exactly the kind of book I love sharing with Frances because it has all of the elements that she finds in her favorite books--British orphans, influenza and infectious disease, a female protagonist who is strong-minded, and introspective heroism.  I feel so fortunate to be able to share it with her and to get to share loving reading.  Rutledge continues to motor along with his reading lessons.  It is slow going, to be sure, but his progress is steady, and his fluency is gradually improving.  I am thankful that I am finally coming to terms (at least partially!) with the truth that Rome was not built in a day.  Especially if there is a glitch or issue underlying whatever is frustrating--slow and steady is still progress, and the tougher the problem, the less likely it will be solved in an instant.  I am pleased with my follow-through and discipline.  And I am proud of his work and persistence.  Maybe the best part of my day was watching the dress rehearsal for Frances's dance competition pieces.  Breathtaking is all I can say.  The improvement and poise and growth I have seen in the past two years is beyond measure.  I am amazed.  I am so grateful to the teachers and friends who have pushed her to her potential and have given her the gift of something that she loves.  She was born to do this, and I never get tired of watching her perform and see her use the gifts she has been given.  I am crazy about her "We Can Do It" piece. She looks straight off a Rosie the Riveter poster.  Her Audrey Hepburn piece also is stunning.  I am so looking forward to being able to go with her and her friends and my friends to Pittsburgh next weekend.  We are going to have an amazing time, and in many ways, this is what our dance year is all about.  In short, I have so much to be thankful about and so much good that is going on in my life.

The second resolution is related to the rubberband scheme that a friend of mine has going on her arm. She is working on controlling negative thoughts and puts a rubberband on her arm whenever she thinks or says one of the targeted problem things, and this helps remind her of what she is trying to change.  I had forgotten about this, but this morning the speaker at our study suggested putting ten pennies in our pocket and then moving one to the opposite pocket each time we show gratefulness to someone.  I love this.  And I especially like the positive spin.

Third is to challenge yourself to perform 27 acts of kindness or thankfulness in honor of those who died in Connecticut last month.  Again, simple, but I intend to do it consciously.

As always, I suppose life is a mixture of both worry and gratitude.  When I find myself slipping into perseverating on the things that are not working well or that I could blame myself for and then get sucked into the abyss of my thoughts, I am now trying to shift my attention to the happy jar and ideas for what could go inside today.  Because every day has happy jar moments, however small.  I guess you could say my biggest resolution now is to make that jar the full one.

So here's my attempt at a new year's resolution.  I am doing my best to resurrect my blog.  With appropriate recognition of reality, my real resolution is to be, well, realistic with my goals.  For example, not saying I'm going to post in my blog every day.  Because who am I kidding?  But I could perhaps post in my blog, say, once a week.  Because life goes by fast and it often leaves little real record of itself if we don't take the time to leave the record.

What's the purpose of the blog?  same as always.  Blah, blah, blah.  The thoughts going through my head.  The edited reality of my life.  The ups and downs of having my hand in too many things at once. regular life.  Something like that. 

So here's to a new year.  Heading out to a party with my bacon-wrapped pigs in blankets.  Thinking maybe I should have some lofty resolutions.  Like avoiding the wal-mart, for example, where the bacon and pigs were purchased just today (it's not January 1 yet!).  Or attempting to only set foot in a grocery 3 times a week instead of 8. Or thinking I'm finally going to start running.  Nope.  My resolutions are pretty simple.  Try to mess up my kids a little less this year than I did in the one before.  Try to eat just a little better than I have been.  Get back to ordering that quarter of a cow.  stop buying meat at Wal-Mart.  Try to move toward making my own laundry detergent.  Little stuff like that.  The big stuff?  Probably not gonna happen.  But one step at a time, one step at a time.  Right?

Moral Authority?

I've had it on my brain to get back to my blog (which I keep spelling "glob" because my hands are moving faster than my mind), and now I remember why I don't each time I think about doing it. The main reason is that I am technologically impaired. I think I have reached my lifetime quota of learning new systems, packages, and devices. When a sign-in page asks me a question I cannot answer, I am at an utter standstill. I cannot problem solve. When a Google-owned platform tells me that I cannot associate my account with a Gmail address, I'm stumped. Truly stumped.

I also don't like to be in a box. I was investigating BlogHer because, well, it's kind of a brand name, and I was confused and it raised my hackles a little. I'm not sure that I can say for sure I am "engaging community," and I even cringe a little at the thought of that. What if I go on, say, an unengaging binge? What if I find myself totally engaging, but the rest of the world finds me not so much so? Or the powers that be that accept my application to be part of the community don't find me communal enough. What if my material does not primarily appeal to women? I am not quite a rule-follower, and I get twitchy when things get sort of institutionalized. I would freak out if I felt I had to concoct contests or have giveaways of any kind. I don't really want to develop a brand or style identity. I like being inconsistent. I'm not a snappy subtitle with too many periods and no capital letters kind of person.

I could probably win a prize for attempting to set up blogs on the most hosting services. I am still in love with the old version of iLife, which required no brain cells from me to operate. But here I am again, back here instead of there, because I'm not even sure there still exists. And I kind of get this.

My thoughts today:

* I have no voice. Again. For 4 days, I had a scratchy throat. Then at 2:00 p.m. yesterday, my voice began to ebb away. To a place it will probably stay for the next two weeks. I don't really feel bad; I just feel angry about it. How dare it desert me when I have things to do!

* We are skipping school today. I had Older Kid writing this morning, but with no voice and a very disruptive contingent from my own family, it was hard. I want my kids to do things exactly the way I want them, with a minimum of whining. I want them to take the assignments as seriously as I do in my own head (yeah, I'm not actually writing them myself. But I would!). It's a pretty spring day, and I'm all for enjoying outside. But the real reason we are not doing school today is that we have a number of extra people over today for various reasons--family emergencies, errands to run.

*  And here's the shocker.  I started writing this particular post, in all caps (not sure why--can't get it to stop!), back in March.  And it's going to be May in, oh, about 31 minutes.  So clearly I cannot get my act together enough to accomplish much of anything.

*  So I might as well write what's on my mind at this particular moment, and I will solemnly promise myself to press post and then set myself a goal of writing every single day for the month of may, kind of a nanoblomo personal event...or something like that.

*  What's on my mind at the moment actually has something to do with the message at church this week, which is not really my style as a writing prompt.  But there it is.  The gist of the message is that it would be really nice if people who were in power--politicians, leaders of any kind, people we work for, etc.--had "moral authority"--defined in a non-partisan way.  Moral authority means that your walk matches your talk...even if I don't agree with your talk.  And the final thrust of the message was that if there is no duplicity, leaders, wherever they fall in specific beliefs, could work together to solve problems.  My favorite line was: "I would much rather vote for people on the other side of the political equation if they had integrity and moral authority than someone who agreed with me who did not." 

But because, as my family will gladly tell you, I'm a pretty selfish person and yes, it is all about me, I have been chewing on this particular message in a personal way.  And I am bothered by the fact that I'm about as crooked, non-straightforward, and afraid to just be myself as any politician.  I have a bad habit of trying to be what I think the people around me want me to be.  And I also have a bad habit of being a severe shades of gray person, which means that most of the time I'm not sure where to even put myself, whether we're talking about a specific hot-button issue, whether we're talking about a generalized political party or persuasion, or whether I'm even talking about how I generally live my life.  I'm a big believer in the idea that we are always making choices, the old "to choose not to choose is a choice," and that even if we think we are dodging pinning ourselves down much of the time, we're pinning.  Oh, we're pinning away. 

Personal topic #1on moral integrity:  It bothers me when people make assumptions about where I stand on something.  And it bothers me more when I am forced to acknowledge that I usually create that situation myself.  The current manifestation:  I have a child who will pretty much post the last thought in his head at any given moment right onto facebook. His filter is coarse.  Well, actually he has no filter.  So he posts a very right-leaning, rush limbaugh/glen beck kind of sentiment the other day.  I make a snarky type comment, but my general rule is that I steer pretty far from politics when I post on facebook. So a family member replies in a direct address to me that I should maybe expose him to some more "progressive" viewpoints.  facebook is not my media choice for family conversation, but the comment raises my hackles because...that is our everyday conversation at home.  if my distracted, inattentive child does not listen to the discussions, if he has tuned them out because he does not understand them, have I neglected to beat him on the head with what I wish he would say?  And then my next thought is to blame myself--well, I'm not a person who is constantly posting a clear alignment with a particular set of political or social beliefs in the public forum.  Well, I don't strongly identify myself with a particular party or vocal special interest group.  I tend to talk on and on at length about how I see situations as complex and how I think we need to be compassionate and nice and that being a follower of christ does not mean being "conservative" or republican to me...no wonder 13 year olds tune it out and start daydreaming about the ps3 or, well, pretty much anything else.  And no wonder strong, even if stupid and mean, rhetoric can have some sway.

But I see myself as not very morally integrated or authoritative if you want to call it that.  Because I am afraid.  Afraid that if my liberal friends knew that I was not, maybe, as liberal as they are, that they would have no respect for me and not want to be with me any more.  And that if my more conservative friends knew I was not conservative, at least not in the way that they view it, that I would be shunned there as well.  Or lose my position.  And I like the things I do.  And I like the people I know.  So I feel pretty disingenuous, and at the same time disinclined to just come all clean for everyone.  Because for one, that would be weird and awkward out of the blue, and two, I still am conflict averse and my thoughts aren't entirely clear even to me, and I really don't enjoy stirring hornets' nests (though some would beg to differ), and I still adhere to the dictum that it's probably best to avoid politics and religion as topics of conversation and confession in mixed company.  Nevertheless, I aspire to be more open and honest.  And that's out of my comfort zone.

Personal topic #2:  I do not want to draw any more attention to the article in the paper than it already has.  It was a completely awkward process in so many ways.  And I'll confess, it was most awkward because I was concerned I was going to piss off homeschoolers with it.  The whole thing still leaves me feeling uneasy, and as I've been pondering the concept of moral authority/integrity, I'm realizing that once again, I'm trying to be everything to everyone (at least in my head).  I'm so worried about raising the hackles or getting a snub from people who probably are not even deeply personally engaged with me and who I may not even know that I have trouble just being...myself. 

first of all, I felt from the start that talking to a reporter is maybe like talking to the police--a dumb idea whether you are guilty or innocent.  But once someone approached me at a conference, I was also in the dilemma of perhaps making a different impression if I did not respond or if I blew it off.  Then I might be cast as the reclusive, secretive homeschooler who was anti-social, had something to hide, had some motive for not being open and clear.  And I'm not ashamed.  And I am legal.  And I don't have anything to hide.  Do I think everyone understands what I am doing and why I am doing it?  Of course not.  I don't really get everything everyone else does, either.  But even talking at all or allowing someone to ask questions about what we do felt somehow risky to, if not me, then to someone, somewhere.

Second, I was anxious about the prospect of having something that we did portrayed as indicative of what homeschoolers do in general, and thus offending someone whose homeschool does not look as "schooly" as what was pictured.  Or worse yet, that I would be damaging years of some homeschool advocates' (who I suppose I view as always being someone else) work.  In the back of my head, I believe that there are people out there who have the "right" views or right words or safe things that can be said in public, and I should know what these are, but my intuition is screwy.  What's kind of funny is that the article originally stemmed from questions about spelling bees--do we do them, why do homeschoolers do them (lots don't!), and if we aren't doing spelling bees, what kinds of things do we do.  I'm again not very consistent.  On the one hand, I can be ridiculously naive and trusting--and not in a good way.  I usually think the best about people's motives and intentions and assume if they sound interested that they are, and that they are not plotting to stab me in the back or manipulate my words or whatever other malice is possible when it comes to, in this case, print.  On the other, I can indulge paranoid fantasies in the middle of the night--they're going to talk about my dirty baseboards and the handprint smudges on my walls, or my first grader who was running around the yard like a maniac in the middle of a "school day" or my teens who currently do not want to identify themselves in the same sentence as the word "homeschool" and we would be painted in some nightmare image of parental and educational laziness and then mainstream folks would be fuming and fellow homeschoolers would be fuming because I talked to people who misinterpreted the entire ethos of what we do and we should not even be conversing with the world outside our culture of shared understanding. 

But back to the moral authority walk-the-talk thing, I know I need to let some of this anxiety go.  Of course being judicious and using common sense and protecting yourself is all good (and some of us are deficient in these areas, and my finger is pointing right at myself here).  However, the pictures, the life I think I showed is the life that I think I live--even as I try to imagine the ways I could have shown everyone else's life so as not to 'misrepresent' anyone or draw negative attention.  No events were fabricated.  It was neither my "ideal" of what I wish homeschooling looked like for us nor a conscious attempt to show what some other people's life and education look like.  We *DO* go to taekwondo and dance practices.  We *DO* have friends over to do science experiments, and this is the second time in a month I have boiled red cabbage and pulled out my bottle of ammonia.  And we *do* go to band every week and have concerts and run around in Mr. Robinson's driveway.  And we did not begin homeschooling for religious reasons. And this was only what this particular Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday looked like, which is not necessarily what the next ones will be. 

I'm not sure if the writer or the photographer "got it" because I'm not sure what it means to "get it."  I don't even really know what "it" is, to be honest.  I suppose what I do know is that I am compliant with Virginia law.  and i know (except when I forget to check the calendar!) what we do with our days.  And I know that I will always be second guessing how our days go, wondering if I should be doing more, less, different, like someone else, not like someone else.  I don't want to be a spokesperson for anyone other than myself.  And I don't know that anyone else ever really "gets" other people's lives, no matter what their lives are.  It can still blow my mind, when I stop to think about it, that each of us lives a unique reality and has an entire history and experience and set of memories and the processing of those memories and experiences.  When I do think about that, I feel it is a wonder that we are able to communicate and get along with other people as well as we do. 

So my personal challenge to myself for this week is to continue to scrutinize and make a ruthless moral inventory or whatever you want to call it of the ways that I am not very genuine or consistent or morally authoritative--able to be relied upon so that what you see is what I really do and so that people can kind of know me and not some cobbled construct.  This is not for others, it is for myself.  It has been sobering to see how much fear governs how I let myself engage with other people, either through the personae I seek to create or the ways I try to appease and not rock a boat because I fear rejection.  Who knows what awaits us if we really are genuinely ourselves.

Okay, I know know it has been something like four months since I have posted anything. And I'm not moonlighting over on Facebook, either. I'm AWOL there as well.

I'm lost in the land of homeschooling four children. Boy oh boy is it still crazy!

This is such a different year from our past ones, and there are great points and transition points. I'm finally in a place where I am not worrying that we are not covering what we should be covering or where I am solemnly swearing that this is the year that I will not neglect Frances. The pace of what we are doing has picked up tremendously, and our discipline is also at an all time high. Well, okay, the discipline of actually keeping up with an outside workload and staying on schedule. I am writing this while Jane Eyre sits by my bed with the bookmark only at page 101 when I need to get to 383 by Monday. I suppose in a way I'm procrastinating.

My own workload is what has gone through the roof. I am tutoring and directing a program for 10th grade students, and the philosophy of the program is that a single tutor who engages students in every subject can create an integration of topics and subjects in a way that separate classes taught by master teachers in their own individual subjects cannot. It's a fascinatingly different take on how to manage education in the upper grades, and sometimes there is a part of me that thinks, "Really? You think I ought to be tutoring Algebra II to anyone?" But there it is. I sub out my Algebra II tutoring to Kerry, who comes in and handles that hour of class, but then I work through Latin II, British Literature, Western Cultural History including art history and music history as well as an overview of philosophy and cultural periods and trends over the past 2000 years, traditional Aristotelian logic, and biology. It is a handful! Last week was the first time that my time management choices left me scrambling in the dust to complete what I needed to for the week. I won't do that again!

We tend to run in cycles of a heavy week with a lot of work and then a slightly lighter week. Actually, my weeks are lighter than those of my students because I do not have to write all of the papers they do (though I do research the topics and take pages and pages of notes on them so that I can effectively engage with what they do write) and I don't have to take and pass the tests they do (woe to me if I had to do the biology or logic exam!) and I don't have to do all of the math problems. But our workload is pretty intense. So far we have read Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selected Canterbury Tales, several books of Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, and A Tale of Two Cities. There was a time when I had a lot more time to inhale a heavy reading load, but that time is...kind of past. Now I'm shoving it in after 11 p.m., trying to sneak away on campouts to get a chunk of pages down, and tucking my novels into my purse no matter where I am going, since you never know when you might have a spare three minutes, and three minutes might be three pages....

I am totally loving what I am doing, though. I have learned more than I ever thought I could in a short time, and I have to say that it is much more pleasurable to be doing school again when I don't have to worry about grades and a transcript. Now I'm just along for the ride and for the enrichment of my life. I can't wait until my own kids are doing this work because it is truly the good stuff.

Meanwhile, I do have to keep up with my own children and their work, which can be daunting for their level. In some ways it has been a rude awakening to them to have deadlines and a week's worth of work to accomplish in, well, a week. There's not a lot of self-pacing possible. There is enough work that it is hard to get ahead. And the expectations are very high. Two to three page essays when they aren't always quite ready for that. Interpretation of the passages they are reading before they are writing about them, rather than just reporting or expressing an opinion. Having to use multiple sources for almost everything that they write now. The IEW book we are using this year is, in my opinion, well beyond what they should be expected to do right now. It is better suited for high school students, and writing is not my children's precocious area. They are still struggling with basic structure and consistently having all of the parts of a sentence in place. So adding in Bible interpretation and an increasingly complex checklist of stylistic devices (dual adverbs, adjectival teeter-totters, invisible who/which clauses, rhetorical questions) has really pushed our limits. But during this time, I have seen them go from needing a hand held while writing to now being able to take their weekly science topic, research it themselves from several sources, and write a pretty respectable report to read aloud to their class. They have also come along in Latin and math, conquering some of their previous difficulties with poor handwriting and sloppy organizational skills. It's not that we don't have our challenge areas with it, but they are really starting to be more meticulous and to see the value of taking things step by step.

Probably the most growth has been with Frances. She is really astounding me with what she has managed to learn and retain this year. In 9 short weeks, she has learned all of the multiplication table through 14x12, has learned squares and cubes through 10, and can skip count any numbers 1 through 15. Constant repetition and some strategic songs have really made these things stick. She has also improved a great deal in writing, going from not knowing what a sentence is to writing one or two paragraph essays, with help of course. And she can do her chart with the four types of sentences, four purposes of sentences, five parts of a sentence, eight parts of speech, and seven sentence structures in under two minutes. She complains that she is still the slowest in her class, but I have seen her go from never having done any grammar at all to mastering concepts and memorizing information that probably most adults do not know. Each week she has material in six subject areas (history, math, science, Latin, English grammar, geography) as well as music theory information and Bible verses to memorize. In addition, we are learning a 200 point timeline 8 cards at a time. So now we are up to 64 points on the timeline, and even Rutledge can sing most of them, though there are some words that he either ignores or says as one droning syllable ("unification," "monotheism," "Phoenician"). In a perfect world I would be keeping up better with having her go deeper into what some of these things are, but right now, it feels most valuable just to get the exposure and have a sense of relative time. There is plenty of time for filling in the gaps later.

The beauty of all of it is that there isn't time to second guess whether one curriculum or another might be an improvement. We're just so darn busy with what we have there isn't room for much else. And yet they are all learning by leaps and bounds. In three more weeks we have a very big break--6 weeks. It is going to feel good, but we will also have enough work in there so that we don't get rusty.

I'll have to save our non-school life for another post. There is much to do and it is late, I have to read more Bronte, and tomorrow morning starts nice and early with Rutledge's speech therapy.

Isn't my cutie sweet? I'm so proud of him. He improved his time on freestyle by about 25 seconds last week. Alas, this week he was back to over a minute again because he had some kind of asthmatic fit on the way and he couldn't find his bathing suit and wore one of his brother's suits and it was falling off and he had to keep yanking it back up while he was going across the pool. But he's still a swimming superstar in my book!



And Frances qualified for Champs in another event this week. I've never had anyone qualify for Champs in swimming before, so this has been a fun surprise. She qualified in backstroke at the second meet and has continually improved her time since then, and now she has qualified in freestyle. She was lucky not to get DQ'd in butterfly this week, and her time went down by about a second and a half, but she is still fewer than two seconds from qualifying in that event as well. And she may be on a relay team, since her relay teams have done exceptionally well. Even last week, when she wasn't on the A team, her B team won second place. Considering the Blue times that several of the A team members have, it's a pretty good showing.

My boys are gone. I know they should be gone, and I'm excited they are gone, and I was the one who insisted that they should be gone. But I still miss them. It's just incredible how the dynamic of a place changes once you have even one fewer warm bodies.

I am continuing to do a bad job of my summer, and sadly there are only a few weeks left. I need a big, fat, honking vacation. Tropical island. No plans. Warm, sandy beach, hammock, gigantic frozen drink (or 12 of them), maybe a snorkel, just so I can say the word snorkel and laugh. Snorkel, snorkel, snorkel.

Instead, I'm still in my pajamas at 9:30 a.m., sitting in a very messy house with unpacked boxes from our carpet extravaganza, with a child in a dirty swimsuit playing Strawberry Shortcake on the Nintendo DS and with a dog who won't stop licking her foot.

Last night I spent most of the night playing cleanup from my computer disaster (inbox wiped out, anything left resorted into about fifteen different mini-mailboxes that had nothing to do with the sender) and trying to have a crash course in keeping up with my various commitments. I think the reason I'm not dressed right now is that I still have a zillion things to do to make right all the stuff I botched last week or should have done but didn't that I'm thinking if I just sit on my floor long enough with my computer I'll start to grow roots down into the subflooring and not have to actually face reality.

I also was supposed to break my Starbucks habit and I didn't. Heh.

Okay, I'm just such a sorry blogger lately. I have a whole pile of posts I started but never finished. I don't think I'm pushed "publish" in about two months.

So no matter how short or boring or pointless this is, I am going to upload it just so I can say I did it.

I just got back from the district championships with my tennis team. It was a fascinating experience. In many ways, I think I don't fit in especially well with my team, but I had a fun time nevertheless. We made it to the semi-finals, which is further than most Woodlake teams make it at these events, and we should be very proud. I lost my first singles match, and I lost it pretty badly (really bad first set, but almost a tiebreaker in the second), handily won my first doubles match, and then lost our final doubles match in tiebreakers for both the set and the match. It was heartbreaking, and I wish my record looked better. I should not care about these things, but I know that I am not going to be moved up to 3.5 this season, and the remaining bit of my friends will. Oh well. I am really into swimming these days, and I think I might just put my energy there and put tennis on a semi-permanent break.

This week I'm back to my overwhelmed self. I need to set up meetings for CC, I need to enter a bunch of stuff in the computer, and I need to handle a whole pile of dive and swim team things. If I'm honest, right not I want to waste away in Margaritaville about 800 miles from here. I'm just in a rough spot right now and doing a poor job of everything I do (except playing Yahtzee). I could be on the verge of the biggest change in my entire life, and I'm scared to death and also trying to just keep it on the DL. If I think about it too much, I'll both have no answers and will freak myself out. Game face is my phrase of the week. I'm just trying to perfect my game face while I quietly totally lose my mind ;)

Once again, it has been so long since I have posted that Blogger has forgotten me. It's not that hard to do.

It has been one of the hardest months ever. Physically it has seemed, from the outside, a little exhausting because there are so many things wrapping up. Softball season is winding to a close on Saturday. The dance recital and all its rehearsals are now behind us. Preschool graduation is tomorrow. Tennis is going full force. Swim and dive team have already started before other things have managed to finish up. The overlap in these few weeks is always unwieldy, and this year was no different in that regard. Everything wants to have some capstone event--an end of the year party, a ceremony, a big show. In some ways, I am happy letting the end of the routine be a punctuation mark in itself.

But what is really different is the attitude. My attitude, which is inflected so heavily by the attitude of burden all around me. Doing these things is "bad" because I'm being told that they are bad and too much. And what has made it so difficult is the realization that my fundamental beliefs and motivations are, at their very root, so terribly flawed. And that I am the one who must change.

The first thing that I have been having to come to terms with is that although I desperately wanted each of my children, to the point I was willing to subject myself to physical pain, an emotional rollercoaster, financial stress, I suppose I just have too many and I needed to heed my partner's desire to stop. It is, as they say, water under the bridge at this point, but the fact is, I should be feeling remorse for my desire for children, and I do not. I honestly don't know what to do with this set of information. How can you want something so very much, love people so very much, and yet have to acknowledge that they were, in fact, a bad idea? How can something so bliss-inducing, so sweet to you, be wrong?

The second issue deep on me is how I have chosen to help them grow. So much of our own attitudes come from our own upbringing, and most especially our overcompensations. As a child, I was exposed to fairly little. I had a happy, comfortable life, but we were so simple, so narrow in what we did. I always felt different, somehow inferior to the other people around me in the gifted program or at camp or in my academic high school classes. I never had the opportunity to play a sport as a child. I took piano lessons, but I did not do any other activities. I did not travel much. I did not spend time outdoors other than in my own small, suburban neighborhood. I went to college having never seen an animal in the wild other than a squirrel. I had never even seen roadkill other than a duck that has been hit by a car near the small borrow pit near our house. I had never seen a deer cross the road, never seen a raccoon, never even seen a woodchuck. I had never been hiking. Never been camping. Had never been off the East Coast until I was 14 and my Dad had been given a comp ticket after giving up a seat on a plane on the only business trip I ever remember him taking in my entire life. Even though my grandparents lived in Myrtle Beach during my early years and my other grandparents had moved to Florida right after I was born, I seldom even got to play in the waves at the beach because my parents couldn't walk on sand.

So I have tended to overcorrect. I have wanted my children to have the chances and experiences I didn't have. People often ask me if I did gymnastics as a child. Nope. But I wish I had. I wish I had played softball. I wish I had been on a team. I wish I had taken art classes. I wish I had been more places. Wish people had recommended more good books.

Now what I'm having to come to terms with is this: we're just as poor as my parents. Maybe a little more able-bodied, but we're still poor. If we want to retire, if we want to have savings, if we want to be responsible, we must pull it all back. I made the painful decision to give notice to Frances' piano teacher this week. We also will not be renewing the various classes and activities we have just finished. The music lessons will be something that we can perhaps continue with me as a teacher at home. I get tears in my eyes when I think about how I must do this in order to appease the person who is supposed to be my partner. Sometimes I wish that I could expect as little out of life as he does. To treat it simply as something to be endured until the day you die (alone).

Kerry and I have been seeing a marriage counselor, and the one thing that has become clear from the experience is that everything about me is wrong. Unfortunately, so far there hasn't been much focus on how I am supposed to grow and change, so I am still stuck in my old ways and feel unrepentant. I'm just not sorry for who I am, only for the fact that I am likely losing my children and a warm roof over my head. What I have learned is that the things I stand for: family, time together, adventures, trying to live in the now, are not what work. At least not for me in this relationshp. My greatest wish in the world is to feel that I have a place to call home, a place where I feel safe and loved and know that I can return even when I'm not perfect. I'm terrified of being alone in the world with no friends and no family. Right now I feel very much like I'm in that place. I don't have any close friends. I had unrealistic expectations of what marriage would be like. I don't know what I've done to cause not only myself but my whole family to be rejected by our families of origin. So, well, I'm a little scared. And also rather defensive. I feel like I should wish that I would just die, but that's the last thing I want to do. What I really want to do is survive despite the contempt and indifference around me because there's a big part of me that feels like it isn't wrong to want to build a family where one is lacking. I want to be somewhere where people are not afraid of my children, where they aren't seen as a burden or a mere financial liability or something so out of control that no one would want them to be where they are.

I actually have had bags packed for several days to set out on a totally crazy adventure. It would be considered kidnapping or legal abandonment, and the responsible streak in me knows that I would risk losing my children forever if I acted on my desires, but I'd love to just get in the car and keep driving until I get to California or Canada. Alas, it's a little hard to do with no money at all in my pocket (to make matters worse, I lost my ATM card and my credit card this weekend).

In the midst of my contemplation of my future, in our present we have been doing a lot of reading:

* My Louisiana Sky, which is probably the best book I've read in the past several months
* Be the Pack Leader, which we listened to in the car
* The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
* Berries in the Scoop, a sweet story about a family from Cape Cod
* The Mystery in Old Quebec, which has me wanting to leave it all behind and run to a little piece of Europe in North America
* a book about a family that travels to see the Sphinx in 1898
* a book about two children who are trapped on an ice floe near Greenland
* The Breadwinner, a young adult book about a young girl in Kabul when the Taliban took over
* Milagros, the story written by local author Meg Medina, and the story behind this year's dance recital
* The Glass House, a book I unfortunately identified too much with right now in my life; I kept feeling horrified that I may not be very different than the mother and father in that book and that my children's lives are equally chaotic
* The Art of Racing in the Rain, very sad and also sweet in the way only dog books can be
* Ali and the Golden Eagle--just started today
* Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest, about a boy who searches out the truth about his father, who died in Vietnam

Tennis, tennis everywhere. This week I have five matches, thanks to a rainout last week. For that one, I now have a 6-0, 6-0 win thanks to a line on the other team defaulting. But I am on for the other four days. So far I have a 4-6, 6-1, 10-4 win from Monday, and tomorrow I have a 3.5 match at ACAC playing at #3 doubles with a partner I've never played with before. Thursday Michele and I are playing at #1 singles, or at least I hope we are. I'm not in the mood for singles right now--too much pressure when my rating is on the line, and I'm not psychologically stable enough to ignore my feeling that if I blow it, I'm going to be a 3.0 for the rest of my natural born existence.

Right now I am taking a reading break to watch a show on the National Geographic Channel about human feet, with no legs, washing up in shoes in British Columbia and northern Washington. I really cannot imagine a more disgusting topic, but I'm strangely drawn to it despite the nastiness. Today was a fairly productive day, about which I will post pictures tomorrow, so I'll save the information about Shalom Farms for that. Last night I went to a used curriculum sale that typically nets me much of my material for the following year, and though it was not as good as I remember past ones to be, I did come home with a few gems. I bought two IEW products--The Elegant Essay, which is aimed at high school students, and Teaching the Classics, a DVD set that sets out a procedure for analyzing literature. I don't particularly need that, but I am fascinated by procedural methods of teaching skills, so I look forward to watching it and using the materials with my boys. My understanding is that the techniques and charts can be used with any age student. I also got some very entertaining SAT prep books (I especially like the vocabulary one, which has extremely funny sentences), the next Wordly Wise for Ollie, and a used copy of Algebra 1/2 by Saxon. But the best find was a little group of older books from the 1950s that are just delightful. One is by Elizabeth Coatsworth, who I really like, and the other was a mystery story by Mary C. Jane called Mystery in Old Quebec. We read it all today as a read aloud, and everyone loved it. It is well written, well paced, just the right length (123 pages with some illustrations here and there), and quaint enough to make us all smile at its language and what the children were allowed to do--10 year olds left on their own all day long in an unfamiliar city in another country while their father is in business meetings. I'll be looking for more books by her, though I suspect they have probably lost popularity and may be out of print because they are no longer "current."

And speaking of the library, I paid a $60 fine today. Yes. I'm embarrassed. But it's still cheaper, I suppose, than buying all those items I didn't return in a timely fashion. I figured the best response to that would be to turn right around and check out fifteen new items, including three movies (movies are what get me into trouble most of the time).

Meanwhile, we are still reading My Louisiana Sky and we just finished The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. As luck would have it, the movie of that appeared on the Disney Channel yesterday, and despite our tight schedule, we saw all of it by watching the end earlier in the day and then the rest of it later, since there was a reshowing (no, I don't really know how to use our DVR, and we happened upon the movie halfway through in the first place).

Now I'm obsessed with the idea of a spontaneous trip to Quebec. I've never been to Canada, and I'd like to go. Of course, I have no time whatsoever for something like that in the foreseeable future, but that, in my opinion, is what is wrong with my life right now. Details, details, but we also don't have money for it, and I'm not brave enough to camp solo outside a major city so far from home when I know nothing about the place.

Overcorrection is a word that has become a bit prominent in my mental life lately. I spent a few hours with a new friend before I left for camping on Friday, and we were discussing some of our "overcorrections" in our life. Like having four kids and wishing for more when I was an only child. Or making camping a priority in our family when I never once went camping or hiking or even really into the woods when I was a child. Or wanting to take on a lot of volunteer responsibilities when I don't have a significant paying job that makes me feel competent and useful and contributory to society. Now, I'm not sure that this overcorrection is "bad," so to speak, but perhaps it is explanatory, or perhaps it is a clue to what is wrong with how I conduct relationships. I make no bones about the fact that I am to blame for my awry relationships, and any clues about what drives my selfish single-mindedness are, well, clues. It doesn't mean I have the faintest clue about what to do about these clues or, blush, that I feel especially ready to renounce what I want (you're probably not going to get me to stop camping, for instance, though I suppose I could be flexible and not involve other members of my family in my own passions). Counseling will probably never be particularly helpful to me until I decide that I am ready to change. So far, I'm just not sure. I'm sort of sad to say that, but it's hard to let go of my own hopes and dreams with a clear heart and conscience, even if my own hopes and dreams are seriously flawed and self-destructive. I guess I cling to my right to self-destroy in the name of dreams. At least it sounds kind of romantic, right? I promise I will grow up and be mature some day, so perhaps I'm in the adolescent phase right now and harmony is yet to come as I develop.

Since this is a place I can put my own personal feelings, I'm going to talk about this spring of my discontent, but with a disclaimer that I really do think I'm becoming one of those cantankerous, impossible to please old ladies. I'm starting to wonder if I'm just determined to be displeased no matter what is going on and if I'm just well, kind of getting off on being crochety. So there. Now I'm going to talk about my carpet.

I had been looking forward to getting new carpet in our house as the event that would Change My Life Forever. Now we got it, and from the minute I first walked on it before it was even installed everywhere, I was not happy with it. It's too thin. It doesn't feel soft and wonderful and luxurious. It feels kind of chintzy. It feels too thin. It isn't cushy. Though it looks loads better than our old carpet (hey, mulch would have looked better than our old carpet!), it doesn't feel as good. The padding is too thin. You can feel where the staples are when you walk barefoot. You can feel seams. You can feel where the padding ends. It looks funny on the stairs. And in some places it isn't tacked down properly. That is something that we can get redressed, but what do you do when you aren't happy with the...whole thing?

I went to a major local flooring retailer with a good reputation because I didn't want to fall into the cheap trap we typically fall into by using someone that a friend recommended who was "cheaper" and who then vanishes off to the Philippines by the time you discover that the hardwoods were improperly sealed or the granite wasn't measured and cut to the right length. I also wanted a full service experience--wanted to come in and say, "I have four kids, two dogs, and we're slobs with poor bladder control. We want the best carpet for our situation that we can afford," and to have them direct me to just the right product. I felt like this is what I did. I had three estimates from three different places, I went with the middle one for a variety of reasons--price, full-service (furniture moving and replacement, not sub-contracted, etc.), reputation if anything went wrong. And I took home carpet samples and chose the better of the ones I brought home. I asked several times if this was a good carpet choice for fairly active people who are fairly rough on things, and I was told yes. Maybe they just don't make things like they used to.

But what is a person to do? Sure, we can get "I feel carpet staples" addressed, and we can get "this stuff on the stairs doesn't seem tacked down well enough" addressed. But let's just say you ordered a sleeping bag from LL Bean for your Boy Scout son. It came, and you felt it and decided that this bag you ordered isn't going to cut it for that Northern Tier trip, that you really were thinking that the 15 degree bag would be fine with a liner, but after feeling it, you just *know* that you need that -15 degree bag that weighs a little more but that will serve for years to come. Obviously, you send it back and get what fits your needs. Now imagine that you just spent $7k on carpet that is going to put you in debt, that you really didn't have, and that took some sacrifice on everyone's part. You bought it as an investment that you expect to have for the next 15 years or so and that will improve the value of your home if you find you have to sell it in three months. The company custom orders it, custom cuts it, and sends out two people to spend nearly nine hours moving your furniture and installing it. You removed every single thing that you own out of your upstairs. You risked your already risky marriage over this thing. And it comes in, and from the second you step on it, you know that it isn't "right." What do you do? And quite seriously, I don't want representatives of a flooring place either suing me or killing me in my sleep if I say this isn't what I was looking for and isn't up to my expectations.

After all, I picked it, right? I asked for help with the choice because I didn't know how to pick, but in the end, I picked it. I feel like a total dunce. And you know what? Nothing's going to change because (a) my husband thinks I'm insane and imagining things (even though I invited two friends over to corroborate my suspicions that it isn't "right") and (b) we're wimps and even if we do feel deeply disappointed, we'll never do anything because we're too afraid. And I'd add a (c) I'm afraid I'm a whiner, so I don't want to do something that will prove it.

I really hoped for a carpet that felt so clean, plush, and wonderful that I would want to invite everyone I know over to have a sleepover on the floor. When I've bought a bound remnant as a rug for downstairs sometimes, I've had that *awesome, cushy, can't keep my body off the carpet* feel. I don't feel that up here.

So enough about the carpet. Carpet is probably the least of my troubles. So I'm going to focus on the positive things in my life right now. My boys are Boy Scouts now and are having a great time. At least I assume they are having a great time--they are gone camping at Dutch Gap this weekend, a two night campout. Unfortunately, last night there was one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory, featuring driving rain, intense lightning, and pounding hail. And they neglected to take along the suggested synthetic fiber clothing that would dry easily and had only a change of cotton clothes. But I'll bet it was a grand adventure. I had two friends and their husbands over for dinner tonight, partly with that ulterior motive of making them opine on my new carpet situation, and partly because now that my floor won't entirely nauseate people, I'm eager to let people in my house now. We also had some new friends, Rutledge's speech therapy buddy and his family, over for several hours yesterday. It was a lot of fun to spend time with them, and the dogs got a lot of good exercise. We have an excellent dog trainer and had our first dog training session this week. I can already see a difference, if not in behavior, at least in response to us. Right now we are working on "loading" them on the clicker, making sure that they know that the click means a treat is coming. We are going room to room and making sure that they are associating the click with the treat no matter where they are. And we are working on getting them to respond by looking at us when we call their names. Poor Helen is still very nervous--she cried all through class because she was across the room with Ollie when she wanted to be with me and Bilbo. She also was too anxious to turn over to be cradled and massaged, though I think she'll be fine doing it at home. Our other task is to make sure that we are supervising them 24/7 for the next 8 weeks while they are in class. I have to admit, I've already screwed up a few times. I have lost track, forgotten to watch, and one of those times, Bilbo swiped a plate of potato skins off the table on our screened porch. And Helen worked a little more on the hole she is digging in the middle of the yard. But we're all kinds of works in progress, so I suppose we can cut ourselves a little slack.

Otherwise, I'm sort of drowning. Falling apart, really. I am wondering if I'm finally just losing it. I am not keeping up well at all with my various volunteer and supposedly paid responsibilities. I literally just cannot get my act together. I am getting resentful of people who ask me questions or put demands on me. I want to slink away in a hole and disappear. I am privately very snappish and snotty ("Find the damn swimsuit order information yourself--you can check the website or ask someone as well as I can, for God's sake!"), but unfortunately, when actually asked, I sound all contrite and willing to serve ("Sure, I'll find it for you and get back to you."). I'm about at the cracking point. I wish I had nothing to do with swim or dive team. Wish my kids weren't even on them. Wish we were doing nothing at all this summer and all of our time is our own. Now that I'm in charge of all volunteers for dive team, etc., I have to be at all the meets, I have to be at all the meetings, I have to be available.

I currently believe that the only way out of this is to move. Pronto. Like in the next month.

So I'm left just feeling really, really resentful, especially of myself. I can't believe I put myself in a position where I'm stuck, alone, and barely have my head above water (truth be told, I think everyone can see that at this point, my nose and mouth are clearly submerged and I'm circling the drain). I hate failing. But I'm also thinking I really wouldn't mind a selfish phase where I don't commit to doing anything for anyone but myself and my immediate family.

Then I have this situation at church where I've been asked to teach Sunday School, my visceral response was, "No! I love going to a Sunday School class myself and it's a high point in my week getting to see these women, and no way do I want to take myself out of that to take on more commitment." Next I'll think, "But gosh, that's selfish." And then I'll remember, "Didn't my last therapist keep telling me that I needed to be selfish, that my problem was that I wasn't selfish enough?" (Now my husband would be guffawing and rolling on the floor if he heard someone say that about me, but whatever...). I actually led that class on boundaries a few weeks ago and mustered up some courage from that and said No, I can't, it would be irresponsible of me at this time to take on any further responsibility and I need to be in this other place and helping there. But now I've been asked again--a kind of pretty please, everyone else is chipping in, can't you just do one or two weeks. And my gut response is No! No! I want to be selfish! I want to go to the adult class! I want to get support for myself rather than teach others! I don't want to commit to being in town those weeks! And then, being me, I feel guilty for feeling that. And then justified, and then guilty, and then justified. And around and around it goes. So guess how I actually respond...by avoiding it altogether, not answering email, and thinking, "Hmmm, maybe I'll just find myself a new church or become an atheist or something."

Why is life so complicated!

You know what isn't complicated? Sitting here typing on the bed across the room from my daughter, who is feeling a little lonely in the house without her older brothers, the same older brothers who she normally feels are tormenting her. Having her tell me, as she is drifting off to sleep, that the book she is reading, "The Care and Keeping of You" by the American Girl company, has the word "vagina" in it and that she just flipped ahead, but she isn't really sure she wants to read the part about periods yet because that is gross. I agree. Periods are gross. I remember my own shock when I first heard that this was not just going to happen to me, but would happen for *decades*! And knowing that my warm, sweaty, curled-up sleeping little boy in his Mario Kart Wii pajamas is going to be carried upstairs in a few minutes to cuddle next to his big sister. And that tomorrow we will all be happy to see Walter and Ollie come back all dirty and smelly and with lots of wet things that will need to be hung all over the yard, even though Friday before they left may have been full of screaming because he spit on me or he touched my ears or he's telling on me. Then there are my roses blooming so perfectly in the front yard, next to my indulgent yellow perennials (we only trampled two playing softball). And my two trying-their-hardest doggies, including dear Helen, who is probably just really happy that she is no longer living in a concrete and chain-link run and has a soft bed and den of her own and a family who loves her and feeds her treats continuously for ten minutes at a time three times a day in the name of "training." Deep down, I know that there's really a lot more to life than thick carpet or even analyzing your many deficiencies to death.

Can't get pictures uploaded.
New dog=Helen=perfect
Starting dog training classes with both dogs on Thursday
Carpet going in Thursday
Freshly painted upstairs hallway, stairwell, trim, doors
Painted Frances' bedroom, but not done
Need to recoat Ollie's room
Still need to bail out upstairs
Lots of boxes of miscellaneous items needing sorting
6 trips to Goodwill
Trash can overflowing, pickup three days away
Lots and lots and lots to do

Facebook has been spying on my mind. I must have posted something, because now it is setting ads in my right margin about moving back to Blacksburg, job listings there, and solicitations from moving companies. I swear I do have one foot already out the door.

My carpet moment coming is the perfect time for me to reassess whether I need certain things. We are already starting the process of getting books and things from dressers and shelves downstairs so the rooms are empty. I have a feeling I'm going to like the sparse look, so maybe some of the stuff won't go back up!

We are in the midst of looking for a new dog. It's hard to be emotional about the process. Right now we have in an application with Richmond Animal League, but they are pretty tight about who they will adopt to, and we may not make the cut. Because our cat is an indoor/outdoor cat, it might be a problem for an adoption through them. We also had been not entirely up to date (based on traditional, not holistic schedules) with vaccines for Bilbo. He has been extremely healthy and also doesn't have much of a social life--up until recently he rarely left the backyard or our house. We also don't board him or send to him any kind of daycare. So Friday I took him in to make sure he had had his yearly exam and everything recommended. I hope it wasn't too little too late.

The dog we would like to adopt is a 3 year old black lab who we have called Helen (she's Jamie at RAL). She seems relaxed, happy, smart, and plays very well with Bilbo. Bilbo, we have noted since Hokie has been gone, is a pretty laid back dog for someone so young. He is pretty much a couch potato. It's a sad commentary on one's activity level if I run faster than they do! But I have been walking him 2 or so miles a day for the past two weeks, and he is getting faster, if not thinner. I'm still having trouble figuring out how to keep the cat food in a place where the cat can get it, but he can't. My latest attempt was to put up a gate in my walk-in closet door, which sort of worked with Bilbo (until he knocked it out), but for some reason was higher than the cat was willing to jump. So the next step was on the counter. This works fine unless he stands on his hind legs and pulls it. Now I'm on to trying the washing machine. So anyway, sweet Helen would probably fit well for us because she seems calm, friendly with us, and would be a good companion to Bilbo. She looks like a classic man's best friend. I suppose we shall just wait and see if we are approved, and move on from there.

Fish tank remains. Now that I don't care, it doesn't seem to cost quite as much or be so unstable. We just replaced one of our T5 lights, but otherwise, things seem stable and uneventful. Hopefully they stay that way!

The last thing I should be doing at nearly 1 a.m. is writing here, but I'm not tired yet, I have a bed full of kids next to me, and I don't really need to leave the house until 8:45 tomorrow, I think. That means I can sleep until 8:25!

Rutledge just got bumped into a "reading group" at preschool. In some ways, this feels like a ridiculous and American concept. He's not yet in kindergarten, and yet it felt like he was "delayed" and therefore somehow deficient because he was one of the last holdouts in a class where he is definitely not the youngest. I tend to be of the philosophy "better late than early" when it comes to this kind of thing. Of course, saying that, I'd really appreciate having just, say, one "early" in a sea of lates so that my heart would beat a little more regularly. If he was in a Waldorf school or a European-inspired environment or even a little more hardline NAEYC preschool, this wouldn't be an issue at all, but I can't help having my brain wander over and think about how other kids seem to get this whole reading thing at all the "wrong" time so why won't mine?

But now Rutledge is making progress in that area. He knows all the letters and their various sounds. He can read the words "see" and "I" and has memorized the text in his little book he brought home. He is working through Headsprout reading (www.headsprout.com) and getting 96% or more correct in each lesson. This is the program that moved Frances from a low 1st grade level to beyond a 3rd grade level in reading in about three months. I don't expect he's going to be truly reading at the end of it, but he perhaps will have some ideas planted in his head that he will find useful at a later time. What I can say is that he is proud of his ability to sound out some words, he is pleased to be in a reading group, finally, and he does have that doofy Hooked on Phonics tape memorized.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this Vitamin D thing, and I've determined that my official feeling, at this point, is that sure, it may be a problem, but it is a red herring. It's not the REAL problem behind why Walter is of short stature. There seems to be little causal relationship, barring a more severe situation like rickets, between small size and low vitamin D. We're forging ahead with him taking about 15 times the RDA of it anyway, but the jury is kind of still out. Meanwhile, I've been continuing to make a serious effort to improve our family's mealtimes and nutrition. In particular, this has meant seriously limiting the treats and sugary food that, unfortunately, I crave with unstoppable fervor. It is revealing to me yet again, as if I need more revelation, that it is just really darn expensive to eat the right foods. Fifteen cups of fruit a day, which is what we need to cover everyone in the family, is just, well, a lot, and it costs a lot. And it takes a lot of cutting and processing and creativity. And a lot of trips to the store. If we all drank as much milk as we should, we would be going through a gallon and a quarter a day (we're not all doing this, though; I'd be truly ill if I drank 24 ounces a day without consuming half a bottle of Lactaid). I also still don't believe anyone who claims that those baby carrots taste like candy. No they don't! They taste like carrots! I really like my chocolate, thank you very much. But I have been good.

My mini-goal lately has been to move Bilbo closer to being accident-free in the house, and I cautiously can say that there has been small progress. We have been taking him for walks 3-5 times a day, and we have been making an effort to have him walking about 2-2.5 miles a day in an effort to help him lose weight that he has gained this winter lounging around the house and stealing food from the cat. I have sliced his calories way down by making one simple change (I should sell this secret on the Internet!). He is no longer getting any cat food. I put up a gate in my closet door that is so tall that even the cat can't get over it! I also switched him over to "weight control" dog food, now that I'm not having to balance needs with a dog who was too skinny. His multi-mile walks are also mine, and my goal is to move us both up to running the whole way in the near future. I'd settle for just having a walk without a thunderstorm in the middle of it, though.

This week we also seem to have gotten back into our routine of reading and getting regular schoolwork done. All of the appointments and labwork and morning engagements last week really cut into our time, but this week we've hit all major subjects, and we are making good progress in Walk Two Moons, a book that could not be further from what I thought it would be about. Somehow I thought it was going to be about a Native American girl, but instead it's a pure example of the "trailer park" genre of Newberry winners--right in there with The Higher Power of Lucky and Because of Winn-Dixie. They can get to be a little formulaic. Some themes that are really a bit much for the intended age group (8-12), quirky characters with a mysterious pseudo-profound air about them, mothers who leave their own children because of their complicated issues, children who blame themselves and try to understand the coping of imperfect adults. I am kind of anxious for it to end, just because it isn't engaging me all that much. But I'm going to stick with it. We're also reading Island of the Blue Dolphins at the same time. And I honestly do want to finish Heidi and Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It's kind of interesting reading several things at once and also revisiting books that I've read with one or more children over the past few years. I had wondered how I would handle it when Frances and then Rutledge got older and I had already read everything, but I guess the answer is, it's never a bad idea to reread aloud something that you already know. The ones who have already heard it are free to leave, but they are liking hearing about Ramona or Fudge again.

I still feel so fortunate to have the time to spend in copious amounts with my children. It is becoming more clear each day that the older ones are truly going to grow up. They aren't going to be sitting around listening to me read forever, and I can see that these really are the wonder years, the ones that I'll miss deeply when they are gone. It's good to keep that in perspective on the frustrating days and to really treasure the days that we have.

Hokie Clendenon
1994-2010

Today was one of the hardest days. We have known for a while that Hokie was not going to live forever, and over the past few months, he has lost an incredible amount of weight and had become emaciated. He was blinder, deafer, and didn't always have his balance about him. But he still was living a decent beagle life--dumping our kitchen trash can, valiantly defending his food dish, checking out the back yard, roo-rooing at other dogs. For the past two weeks, I actually believed that he might be putting on weight again (he had a voracious appetite, and we were feeding him 3-4 times a day trying to add anything back to his frame), but on Friday, he started to look very, very gaunt. Friday night I found him hiding underneath some blankets and clothes on the floor of our laundry room. Saturday morning, before I left for my Dad's house in Pulaski, I had to guide him into his crate because he was wandering aimlessly, and he felt like he was hollow when I picked him up. Then Kerry called to say that he knew why Hokie was looking so skinny again--he wasn't eating or drinking. He had been given food several times, and he just walked away. Anyone who has beagles knows this is a sign of serious trouble.

Last night was rough. Hokie went outside and went under the house and wouldn't come back out. I was out of town, but Kerry was afraid that he was going to have to send a child under to get his body. But he lived until morning. And then he started vomiting, and it was deep, smelly vomit coming from his intestines. He went to the emergency vet, who concurred with what our vet has suspected, that he has liver or stomach cancer. We could have taken him to a veterinary oncologist tomorrow, but chances are, his condition couldn't be fixed anyway, and the treatment would just be further trauma. And then, when I saw him when they brought him in from the back of the office, it was clear that he was not likely to live until morning anyway. Poor boy was actively vomiting while they gave him the injection, but now I know he is out of his pain and he will not have to starve or dehydrate to death, nor would he have to die without us if he had to stay for treatment. We were able to be there with him in his final moments and to pet him afterwards. We were given some clay pawprints from him.

Hokie was my baby long before I had human babies. I got him from the Rio Hill pet shop back in my last week of my first year of graduate school. I know better now than to buy a dog from a pet store, but in his defense, he was from a local breeder who was not a puppy mill, and though he may not have necessarily been bred with the utmost care for health and conformation, he was a gorgeous, healthy, perfect-tempered beagle, and we had been to shelters all over the state looking for the right dog, and he was it. I hid him in my apartment and slept with him in the tiny bathroom there so that he would not howl at night or pee on my floor that week. When I took him for walks on Montebello Circle, I would have to carry him home because his tender pink pads on his feet weren't callused yet and the road was too rough for him. He lived with me on 14th Street, and he worked with me every day of his first summer, when I was helping to edit Piers Plowman for an electronic edition. We went up to Shenandoah National Park several times a week for most of his first year and a half and hiked every hike under seven miles. He had many good buddies at the dog park and at the park down the street from us.

During later years, after the Shenandoah Era, which ended with Tucker, who wasn't very reliable off lead and who got carsick, he shuttled back and forth between Charlottesville and Craig County, where he had the opportunity to chase horses, romp in fields, and play with our kitten. He was always gentle, tolerant to a fault, and affectionate. His only vice as an adult dog was that he could be aggressive toward puppies. As a family dog, he put up with all kinds of pulling and dragging and falling on top of him. Like most beagles, he was a couch potato, but if called to action, he was more than ready to leap up and stay with you as long as you needed him to be rugged and athletic. During his prime years, he was the kind of beagle that people who stop us on the street to walk to because he had such a beautiful coat and square muzzle.

It feels odd to be in a house that doesn't have Hokie in it. The picture above was from just last year, when he still had a healthy looking body. At 14.5, our vet called him "The best looking fourteen year old beagle I've ever seen." Bilbo is pretty subdued tonight.

I am putting my energy now into helping Bilbo become the dog he should be. I have not been a good pet owner with him. I have done a very poor job of training him. He's a sweet, affectionate, calm, tolerant beagle as well. But after the previous owners' dogs marked the carpet and floors and then Tucker had trouble in his old age and then Hokie backslid when Tucker did, he isn't the best housebroken dog. I recognize that this is my fault. We have a crate, and to some degree we have "crate trained," but I know I haven't done it by the book, and I've let him out unsupervised too often and we have also slacked off because we have a fenced back yard that he can go in while we aren't home or while we aren't watching. Just because he goes outside doesn't mean he's not going to go in the house, also. In the past few weeks I have started regularly walking him for a mile or two a day, trying to get in a short morning walk and a longer evening walk at the least. I've never had to walk a dog in order to housebreak before, but this is a new dog, and we're always being asked to adapt and learn, aren't we? I'm also being meticulous about having him in the crate when we are not able to active watch him. So far I haven't seen any accidents, but then again, I may be missing some of what happens upstairs. Since we are getting new carpet in three weeks, even though we will gate the stairs so that he can't go up, I would still like to feel like I have not been a complete dog failure. Over the past few weeks I've been researching dog breeds and thinking about what our next dog might be, and it has really hurt me that even close friends have said that I should absolutely not get any more dogs because I have been such a bad owner of the ones I have. The immature side of myself wants to get one just to spite them (not that they care...I'm the one cleaning up the messes), sort of a "ha, I'll do what I want." I'm not the best human parent, and I'm not the best dog parent, and it is perhaps selfish of me to want living things as a comfort and companion for myself, but I can say with all honesty that my life has been much, much better for having had Hokie in it, and the sixteen years I spent with him not only would not have been the same without him, but have given me so much love and so many wonderful memories that I wouldn't trade them for clean carpets or even an intact sense of accomplishment as a trainer or person. Hokie, may you find much peace and happiness over the Rainbow Bridge, and I hope the bunnies are plentiful there.

My garden is gorgeous. In fact, my lettuces are ready for harvest and taste scrumptious. However, I have a confession to make. I AM the biggest loser. Excited by my lovely bounty and the tender crispness of the salad blend up front, I bought Kerry a few leaves and forced him to eat them. The next thing I knew, he was vigorously spitting them into the sink! I was offended! He said it was "dry." Hmm?

So I went out to get a few leaves for myself, and soon I found myself spitting into the kitchen sink.

When I went to the garden and picked up the marker, what did I find but "Petunia!"

Now he is so angry and terrified that he is going to die of petunia poisoning that he is not speaking to me. Now he is sick. I'm afraid. And it's all my fault.

Which is kind of a shame because this is the first time we have been home with no children (they are watching a movie with a neighbor) in probably, well, ever.

I have researched the toxicity of petunias, and the flowers are not toxic. What's less clear is whether the leaves are; no one touches this subject to my satisfaction. They do seem to be okay for turtles and deer and dogs and cats, but I don't know much about people. Plus I noticed that the pictures of petunias didn't look at all like my leaves. My leaves looked like crinkle-edged lettuce, and online petunia leaves are small teardrops. I fear that I have no idea what I ate! But it is sticking in my throat and still feels like it is there.

Who said gardening is for wimps?

And who has been moving my garden markers?!

Anyone who has seen me in the past three weeks has the same question. "What were you painting?"

I can't seem to paint the walls without painting myself, too. But the answer to the question is, "I'm painting my family room." And I'm painting it turquoise. The tank is dirty in the front (overflows of salt water leave behind a lot of salt!), but you're really supposed to be looking at the amazing color behind it.

I also painted my stairwell, upstairs hallway, and the area below the chair rail and breakfast counter in my kitchen, as well as the super-high wall where I can't reach the top angle.



Nobody in my house sleeps alone. And who can resist a guy in candy striped jammies?


I hope that my prominent memory of these years will be how there were always lots of extra people in my bed. This is what every morning is like--everyone makes their way to my room and we all watch Spongebob or Toot and Puddle together. Now it's still kind of true that some of these cuddlers in my bed are still doing things like lying there, lazily peeing in a pull-up instead of hauling their little butts out of bed and going to the bathroom. But this is still may favorite moment of each day, and we are fortunate to have the luxury of time to wake up slowly before heading out into the busyness of the rest of the day.

I just cannot finish one of these entries lately to save my life! I sit down to write, and the next thing I know I'm distracted and never return, and when I do, my whole Firefox session is over and I don't think about blogging, and the cycle continues.

There are so many things going on, both good and bad.

The bad: hanging out today with a friend, and Frances comes to me with a half gallon of ice cream and tells me that it is a liquid. Suddenly, the information I forgot from earlier-- the ice and water dispenser were not functioning when I went to fill Rutledge's school water bottle, after we spent about $350 in December getting them fixed--had a bearing on the ice cream situation. A major reason that the ice and water cease to work is that the temperature gets too high. So we threw away a lot of food, and really, we should throw away more. I'm willing to pay a pretty high price not to get food poisoning. We made the best of it--made a huge amount of baked chicken with the stuff thawing in the freezer, reacquainted ourselves with the blackeyed peas that were frozen, are finally going to eat the chili we had canned and that now needs to be consumed ASAP. Still, to pay several hundred more for a new computer for the fridge really wasn't something we needed to do when we just put down a 50% deposit on the carpeting that is supposed to go in three weeks from now. The fridge problem was the computer board that governs the cooling system and its readouts. Who knows why it spontaneously decides to go on the fritz, but I estimate the unit could have been failing to cool from sometime during last night or during the night to 3:15 when I discovered the problem.

The other bad news is that Walter may have some deficiency disease. Like rickets or a vitamin D deficiency. I feel just terrible, like I should have put more effort into feeding and supplementing. We all know the ruckus about breastfed babies and vitamin D these days, and Walter was lucky enough to be breastfed for about 27 months. He has always spent a lot of time outside...probably more than some of my other children, and definitely more than the average child who is in school all day. And I'm not a big user of sunscreen, I blush (burn?) a bit to admit. I definitely have never used it in any season other than summer, and I have been guilty of not using enough of it and having my children get tan. And, ironically, I do give him a specific calcium and vitamin D supplement, but apparently not enough (I just follow package labeling, but I now know that there really isn't believed to be a toxic level that is easily reached). What I don't do is give him a lot of milk. Milk is something that we use in fits, rather than on a daily basis every single day of the year. This is my fault. During my entire childhood, I was forced to drink a small glass of milk every morning and every evening, probably only about 6 ounces each time, and I'm fascinated by Walter having an issue like I did with the last half inch or so of milk in a glass--it just tastes yucky for some reason. For me, the forced milk was difficult. I thought it tasted bad, no matter how it was presented (chocolate, etc., though most of the time it was just white) and no matter how local and high quality the milk (we had it delivered to a little insulated metal milk box on our porch by Yoder Dairies, a super company that left the business in 2008). And worse yet, it made me feel sick a lot of the time after. It made it hard to eat the rest of my breakfast because my stomach would be upset, and I left for school with an upset stomach many, many, many days. Of course, being a girl, I believed that it was "stress" or something like that. But in adulthood, I've realized that no, it wasn't stress, it was lactose intolerance. The only time I've really been able to tolerate milk and ice cream well, without Lact-Aid, was during my pregnancies, where I drank prodigious (to me) amounts of milk. Now that I know how much milk many nutritionists and the food pyramid currently recommend, I was really not drinking too much more than what is recommended for everyone, but I thought a half-gallon a day was kind of over the top. Surprise, surprise, I ended up with four children who were then sensitive to dairy while I was nursing in the early months. Going off dairy was a fundamental remedy for Ollie's chronic ear infections; it was my last ditch effort after seeing the ENT and getting scheduled for ear tubes, and it worked--he has probably had four ear infections, if that, since we did that (and yes, he drinks incredible amounts of milk now...). At any rate, I have been guilty of not pushing large amounts of milk on children who express extreme dislike of it. Right now, only Ollie and Rutledge drink high amounts of regular milk, and Rutledge is still kind of sporadic. Ollie drinks what seems like his body weight in milk...whole milk...and he's still shorter than most of his friends. Who knows what his Vitamin D is like. And yeah, I'm very familiar with websites like www.nomilk.com, which on some level I can deeply identify with.

So we had this bone age scan last week that showed Walter has a nearly 3 year delay in bone age. This is a semi-subjective test, so I have to have it re-read by the endocrinologist, but 2 years difference from the chronological age is what is considered within the "normal" range. Tuesday we saw the endocrinologist, which was a humbling experience. I felt like a really bad parent. And I told lies. Lies that made me appear worse than I really am. For some unknown reason, I said that Walter drinks soft drinks 5 times a week, which really isn't true at all. I'm sure there has been a week sometime--like when we visited my Dad and were traveling, when this was true, but I'm not sure why this number came out of my mouth. I'm awaiting CPS with bated breath. He also had eaten primarily a lot of Canadian bacon and eggs in the two meals prior to our visit. Now to be fair, the Canadian bacon is really just what we'd call ham, and it was very lean ham at that, with only 1.5 grams of fat per serving (though I didn't know that until I looked at the package at home). What we didn't have in those meals was fruit or vegetables. Now don't get me wrong--this doesn't mean that none were consumed, just not at these meals. And he asked what Walter had for lunch the day before, and it was really embarrassing: the hot dog and drink deal at Costco. I don't shy away from hot dogs altogether, and this was a very blessed hotdog, which I think adds a little bit of nutritional value to a "bad" food, but I truly don't think I've ever had lunch at Costco before with them. I was kind of representing us on our worst kind of day. Sigh....

The good news: My garden is totally rocking. We have incredible looking lettuce and cabbage and broccoli growing. My spinach is trying. But my one 4x4 garden is producing beyond my expectations. I can't wait to start harvesting, which we should be able to do soon. The rain today can only improve it.

Frances is loving playing softball, and she's really good at it. She has a very good eye, has far, far better hand-eye coordination than the rest of the family (though Rutledge might well be our best...), and she has a strong throwing arm. Tonight was her second game, and it had a lot of drama. Crying girls, gloves thrown down, Frances getting hit in the eye with an errant pitch. I wish that I wasn't always having to ferry people to other activities instead of watching her games.

Walter and Ollie went on their first Boy Scout camping trip this past weekend. The campout was, ironically, held at my friend Amber's former house. Actually, the house was one she rented, and it was on kind of a family compound, but it is a beautiful setting, and thankfully was very close to home. Their next campout is going to be at Dutch Gap, near the Citie of Henricus, and this is a longer one and they'll be able to take the kayak and canoe (note to self: get kayak out of impoundment and figure out how to remove spraypainted graffiti). I'm ready to not attend these weekly Boy Scout meetings. They are enormously boring (sorry to those who are volunteering--I just have a lazy attitude and want to be consumers here rather than attending 1.5 hour meetings every Wednesday). But I think that they will have a lot of opportunities here, especially if they can find some friends and stick with it for a while. Last weekend was cold and wet at the beginning. We definitely need an equipment upgrade as far as their tent and sleeping bags go. I don't know if I should get them an adult-sized sleeping bag or not. Who knows...they just might grow some day soon, and a child's bag will be outgrown. Or they could be half a decade away from puberty and never fill a big bag. Right now I have 2 man Eureka tent that Kerry and I bought at an outdoor store in Afton fifteen years ago. It's not the most rugged tent, but it packs up nice and small. But I think I'm going to replace it with a different Eureka tent, the Apex, which gets great reviews and is pretty affordable from Amazon.

I spent part of the weekend in one of the most beautiful places I know--Front Royal, VA. Alas, I spent the very vast majority of the day-8:20-4:30 indoors with no windows at a business training session, but the drive was breathtaking. Front Royal lies at the gateway to Shenandoah National Park at the north end, and there is just something that absolutely stirs me about getting that first glimpse of the Blue Ridge as you are driving down a road from the eastern part of the state. I get tears in my eyes and feel like I am home when I see Shenandoah or any mountain looming ahead of me. The town itself is not an affluent one, but it is cozy, and there is still a bit of the flavor of the more upscale areas right to the east--Middleburg, The Plains, etc. I love the little stone walls near fields, the rustic homes, the rolling meadows. The training itself was also very inspiring. It's just so different from what I have been used to either in previous training for various jobs and in teaching. I have kind of set myself apart from Christian organizations in the past, partly because I've always felt like maybe I just don't fit in, but I met such wonderful people who really have such a strong belief that we were led to this particular job and that we won't be doing it alone. Classical Conversations is a very organized organization, and this is just what I need at this point. I've had some understandable qualms about what I've taken on, and this really put my mind at rest and has me eager to be engaged and be part of the community that I hope we will find. Still, it was a tiring, very long day, leaving at slightly after 5 and then turning around and driving back again right away.

The so-so, neither good nor bad: I'm really interested in getting another dog. The breed I have identified as a good fit for us is the German Shorthaired Pointer. This dog seems to have little drawback, other than a high activity level, which isn't a drawback, I suppose, if you have one yourself. But they seem to point, retrieve, like water, like people, be intelligent, learn quickly, enjoy challenges, get along well with children and dogs. Plus they look cool. Unless you are my husband, who thinks they look like two or three different dogs put together like Legos. I think partly he has to not like them because I found them, and there's always a power play going on. He can't like them. I wish I had played my own cards a little differently (or that I wasn't playing cards at all...), so it might be a little too late. I'm just feeling lately like I'd rather go for more of an A student dog than a C student. Beagles--gotta love them. But they're a C student. It's not that they aren't smart, they just, well, have some other priorities. And boy are they fun to party with! You can't help but want to just hang out at their place all day and night! But having cleaned up at least 2 major shits in the house today (the latest party involved eating about 2 pounds of peanut and raisin trail mix), I'm just kind of thinking that I'd like a dog with a little more passion about trying to please and be obedient. Maybe even to have some self-control. Of course, the RIGHT answer is that I shouldn't have a dog at all because I don't deserve one. And because it is sure to create more and more and more tension in an already screwed up relationship. But there's a space in my life begging to be filled by something fuzzy and cute that I could hang with. Whoever told me that you could have three dogs in Chesterfield County now should have kept her mouth shut!