Puppy Love!

This is Bilbo, Mr. Baggins. Pride of the Clendenon family. I can't believe he's actually here with us. To be honest, in some ways it feels like we've always known him, and in other ways, it seems like he'll never quite integrate so that he can roam freely.

Monday, Monday

Rain, rain, go away. It's been raining since Saturday night, rather hard at times, and the end isn't quite in sight yet. It's a good thing in some ways. I don't need to be spending all morning tomorrow at a tennis clinic, even though I'd like to be, and I don't need to be spending any more money there, either. I have Sarah and Rebecca coming over tomorrow afternoon to do some LLL stuff, and I need the morning to get our regular stuff at home done. What is most exciting is that we don't have much of anywhere to go tomorrow--people are coming to us. Except for gymnastics, we're operating from our base here, which is, sad to say, comparatively rare.

Frances and I read Latin Ballet books tonight--The Steadfast Tin Soldier, which is her performance coming up in a little over a month, and The Legend of the Poinsettia, which was danced in this winter. Poor little tin soldier--melted down into bare metal at the end, even if he did turn into a heart and his love into a lone sequin. I can already picture the show--will Allison be the one-legged ballerina (Frances immediately pointed out that the ballerina did not have one leg, she was just doing an arabesque)? I was impressed today at how far Frances has come now in flamenco. She was not only keeping up, but has real verge when she dances, which I think is why Ana supports her so much--she has a lot of stage presence and a keen body sense, when she's not fooling around. Ana also told me today that Frances is going to be featured on the front of the year-end program. Last year, she managed to get up on her toes, nearly en pointe, if she only had pointe shoes, and she looked lovely. She's the youngest girl by quite a bit in her class, and though she has moments where she is overwhelmed by the desire to kiss herself in the mirror, she keeps up extremely well.

Today was our next to last class at RES. It admit, it's a little frustrating that it seems like everyone else fudges heavily on the age ranges for classes, something that has affected the classes I've taught (skewing ages lower in classes intended for older kids) and making us not really get our needs met particularly well. I wonder if Ollie would be given more opportunities if he was taller and bigger? I guess I don't do a very good job of advocating for him, insisting that he's a child prodigy, but what makes it frustrating is that others do, leaving him behind with younger kids and not with a true peer group all the time, especially when I am seeing that a situation isn't optimal. If all the prodigies kept their prodigies mostly together, think of what interaction might go on! So I'm kind of over the situation now, having some regrets that I signed up again, and wondering whether I'll use our membership for next year. I'm happy to get a break from the stress of it for a while, happy to be able to be ourselves by ourselves so that we can do what works for us without worrying about placement, grade level, age ranges, etc. It seems like suddenly "middle school" is the place to be--strategic game clubs, debate teams, Model U.N. It leaves a nearly 10 year old with interests in those areas kind of lost in the zone of less challenge, a situation I was trying to avoid by homeschooling. My leading edge of problem solving lately has been making sure that we're not just covering bases, but really making life interesting and providing opportunities, especially as the boys get to a point where they are starting to show their talents and, for lack of a better term, areas of specialization.

Ollie is still struggling some with multidigit multiplication--multidigit times multidigit. He has a lot of trouble remembering procedures, and his continuing difficulty with handwriting and controlling placement of things on a page isn't helping him. I have started making worksheets on the Math-U-See website for him because we've used up almost all of the Gamma book with Walter and I don't want to order him a brand new one when he is only about 5 lessons from the end of the book. The used curriculum sales can't come soon enough--I really need the fraction overlays and the next math books up for the boys and some Bob Books for Frances. Her reading is coming along. Maybe not at the pace or with the enthusiasm I had hoped, but it's coming.

Poor little puppy spent way too much time today in the car and in his crate, due to the rain. I am hoping that tomorrow will be nice enough that we can take him outside for some good long walks and to run around. It's still pretty high maintenance having him in the house, since he has lots of accidents, and I know that I'm not supervising as well as I should. I need to go out and get a book on housebreaking, but I'm concerned that it's not lack of knowledge that is my problem, but lack of motivation to get off my butt and let him out or watch him as intently as I need to so that he doesn't have an opportunity to make mistakes. He is really a super dog--quiet, great with the kids, calm, so very happy to see us. I think we may indeed have gotten what we were looking for!



I have a new identity as nantwins. I'm terrible at those moments when someone is staring right at you, telling you that right at this very moment you need to choose you email handle and you will *never* be able to change it. Then your first four choices of a handle are already taken, and the next thing you know, you're something like nantwins. Forever.

We are watching the movie Tom and Huck right now after both of the boys have finished reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I think Frances is enjoying the movie more than either of them, but both very much liked the books. Ollie and I finished Little House on the Prairie this week as well, though I think we'll take a break before setting upon Farmer Boy. In the interim, we've settled on another Nancy Drew novel.

I realized about two weeks ago that Frances has never really played a board game. It's shameful, I know. Third child syndrome at its worst. So tonight we played Jungle Run (our preferred version of Chutes and Ladders using multicultural children on bent paperclip stands) and Monopoly Junior. While she had no problems whatsoever with the actual game play, making change, or adding money together for payment, she has a long way to go in sportsmanship! One advantage of waiting until she's 6.5 to play is that she at least has no problems with the workings of the game itself.

Tomorrow at RES I'm planning to give the board games class a choice of games. We have such a wide range of ages and interests that letting them create their own groupings seems to work best. I'll have Great States, Great States Junior. Clue, Monopoly, Lego Creator, and Sorry available to them. For Goop and Glue, we'll make our own no-cook play-doh. That sounds messy, but it is satisfying and time consuming, which are kind of the keys to success in that class--make the activity take time and have high enough interest that they can get plenty of mileage out of just mucking around in it. We only have two more weeks of class, and I'm ready for the break. I'm in winding down mode when it comes to regular schoolyear out of the house activities. I'm ready for summer and time freedom!

Whoo-hoo! We are finished with all of the requirements for the Bear Badge for Cub Scouts. We knocked out a last few things and filled in all of the requisite lines and boxes with signatures and checks, and we're well beyond the basic requirements. From now on, it's nothing but electives, if we choose them, though there are plenty that sound interesting and challenging, so they might make nice summer projects; I'm wondering if they can get arrow points past the May Pack meeting, since we'll have more time on our hands to do things like build crystal radios and tin can generators.

This weekend was the big campout, bigger still because we took the puppy with us. He did great--fell right to sleep in his crate as soon as we put him in there. Crate training makes everything so much easier. now if only we could get him to stop peeing on the floor in the house when he has his "free" time. No matter how high my supervision, it's never quite enough. Yesterday was one of those all-out days for everyone. We arrived at camp around 9:30 a.m. and were out in the sun playing dodgeball and tug of war, fishing, and riding bikes and running through the abandoned mine and pirate cave all day long. It was a wise, wise call camp was broken up at sundown because rain was coming. Even by the time we went home there were drops falling, and by this morning, it was soaking outside with occasional bursts of thunder. We got out just in time!

Now we're off into another busy week--Spanish homework tonight for tomorrow's class, board games, ballet class in the afternoon, and a puppy in tow through it all.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys

Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

I have some seriously bad boys in my house. There's Rutledge, one man wrecking crew. There's Ollie, who got beat up not once, but twice today, and who hit back. And as usual, I was off in la-la land, hanging out with adults while my child was bullying other kids. I am feeling like a very bad parent these days. And it's not just with the humans. The wee pup also had an accident on the kitchen floor today, which is totally my fault.

I am at my wits' end with Ollie. I don't know what he needs to get his basic social needs met, but it's not happening. It's not that he never gets an opportunity to meet other kids, but he doesn't get along with anyone. I cannot figure out why. He has interests that are all wrong, especially for a homeschooler. I think he might be able to get into a scene with some jock kids, but they don't really exist in homeschooling. I think he'd have a great time playing a game of pickup basketball, 21, kickball, baseball, but the only way to do it is in more organized, adult-managed team sports, and that isn't quite his cup of tea. He likes history, social studies, archaeology, "true" stories. I think he'd like a day of playing Risk or Monopoly with friends, but doesn't have any friends who would want to play given any other option. I really don't know what to do with him. I'm ending up being his favorite playmate, and that's not my job. I'm the person he throws a baseball with, I'm the person who reads the books he likes with him, I'm the person who can't often find the time for a three hour game.

I'm wondering if he wouldn't thrive in school. Not necessarily elementary school, but if he was in a middle school with lots of club and activity options, he might connect with people who share his interests. Of course, there's lots to not like in middle school, but there are also opportunities for things that we can't necessarily provide at home. I think he'd love debate team, model UN, elective options, language classes. I think he'd benefit from access to people who are his age and in his grade, and maybe even some a little older to learn from. He's just too young, and like me, he may go through life being "too young." It's frustrating.

There was an interesting talk tonight about how to determine if you child has learned something. I'll admit, I don't give tests at home as part of our schooling. I don't even think I like covering all of these "school" subjects that are taking time from us doing things that really are interesting to us and really would help their explore their own interests instead of someone else's list of what they need to know as a 3rd grader or 4th grader or whatever. To me, merely talking with them, knowing them, observing their play, and referencing something from earlier lets me know what they've retained, what is important to them, what they are making their own. I am not a very bright student myself, so I'm no authority, but I have forgotten a lot of things that I passed tests on 'back in the day.' I was good at getting an A on test day, but I couldn't necessarily list the rocks in Moh's Scale a semester later. I'm not sure it's fair to expect that of my kids. Most of what I've retained is what I've used, revisited later in some other resource (for example, I didn't remember all of the details I passed tests on at one time about the American Revolution); the lovely thing about most subjects is that there is always time to read about them again, watch a program about them again, search for some forgotten piece of info on a website. I'm probably deluding myself, but I feel like I have a decent handle on what they know, and their test results show, to the extent a test is able, that they have retention and mastery of the basics for their grade.

Ollie is writing a short essay tomorrow on a topic that I wouldn't have chosen--how to cheat on a lie detector test. Perhaps I'll post the results tomorrow. Walter wrote about a diamond that a 12 year old boy found in his backyard. His progress has been extraordinary! I'll post that one tomorrow, too.

How can I continually suck so badly at tennis?! I'll never become a 3.5 at the rate I'm going. I should have self-rated higher last year if I aspired to be there. I can't even climb to the top of my 3.0 team at this point. This morning I felt like I was about 1 second off of where I wanted to be...at all times. I definitely need more sleep.

I don't know what is making me so unable to sleep at night. It's a rare night this week that I haven't had trouble getting to sleep before 2 a.m. It's not the thrill of having the National Geographic Channel on our new Verizon Fios TV, though at the moment we're enjoying a show about cyanobacteria on the early Earth. Naked Earth. After watching the commercials on this network, I'd really like to start keeping track of how much CO2 we're responsible for releasing in a typical day and in looking at how we can reduce our emissions, if you will. I've been reading about this here and there lately and am realizing how wasteful we are. And yet I keep consuming. Damn American!

What we're doing this week:

* Today was all about the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. One if by land, two if by sea. The geography of Boston, with its narrow neck of land and water on three sides. Where we stayed when we were there last fall in Charlestown. Lexington and Concord. How close they are to Charlestown when we estimated the distance using the map.

* The Ingalls family is collecting beads from an old Indian camp and getting kicked around by their new cow after Pa tried his hand at being a cowboy.

* Frances is challenging me with big numbers she has created with a wooden place value set.

* Review of third grade math that we might see on the Iowa test in a few weeks. Focus on not making careless mistakes on problems that aren't as challenging as what we are doing now.

* Diagramming sentences with direct objects.

* Writing about the fastest cars in the world and the most valuable trading cards.

* Listening to the final parts of the Shakespeare Stealer

Nancy's Law of Homeschooling says that if you don't feel like leaving your house, if today you just want to blow off everything on your calendar, especially the big commitment things, that you aren't sick, but you feel run down, then you should call other people you are supposed to get together with because chances are, they are feeling the same way. What's dragging you down is probably dragging them down, too.

Today was an instance of that Law in action. The ballet teacher at RES was out with pinkeye, and I decided that after our long dance week of Frances being at rehearsal or in the show 6 days out of 7 that we needed a morning to ourselves to recover and get back on track at home. It was a good thing we did. The typing teacher was out with sick kids, too, and we had a very productive morning here.

Competitiveness is on my mind these days. How competitive should one be, and what is the role of competition in our endeavours? Tennis is one of the areas where I'm struggling with my own human feelings of wanting to, well, win. And then trying to balance that with my rational side, which says that Suburban League, especially, is about having fun. But it's a game! It's a game. And games are meant to be contests. Yeah, there are cooperative games, but tennis isn't one of them, and although I don't have a massive drive to constantly be on top and I certainly have more than my share of defeats, I do like to feel that there was a good contest, that I was doing my best, and a successful record doesn't exactly drag my spirits down. I'm often paired with weaker or less experienced players, partly, I think, because I don't live at the tennis courts the way a lot of other people do, so I'm not always on the inside track. I'm also pretty "nice" in the sense that I don't request I not be paired with certain people, and I know that there are others who do, so that leaves me in a position for a broader range of pairings than some people have, and I can't discount that being paired with newer or weaker players pulls my own record down, which makes me look not so good. The vicious cycle part is not working in my favor. I am hoping that I feel better about my own playing this week and that I'll have an opportunity to play singles some, too, which is where I feel like I really shine.

Games class went great today. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what went on in the two Life duos (why they didn't combine into one four player game I'll never know), but at least one of them did end in, as Ollie put it, a "mercy termination" because Marty ran out of money. I supervised the Monopoly Junior game between three of the younger members of the class, and that too managed to wrap up in the allotted time. So far, we often go well over time and still get nowhere close to completion. Goop and Glue was also successful--Moon Sand occupied us for the entire 45 minutes, and it didn't make too big of a mess, especially on people's bodies. Rutledge was deeply engaged playing with his rockets and space men and molding sand and transferring it from one container to another. Last session, he was not so participatory, so this is a welcome change. But once again, watching the board games, I wondered whether I should feel so good about teaching competition and strategy; it's an area where I think my own children need more work--caring about whether they do their best in what are, essentially, contest situations. Wanting to put forth their best effort, even when an element of chance helps determine the outcome. Is it really any different in, say, baseball? You never know what the other players will do, there are aspects of the game out of your control, but the harder you play, the better your own performance looks, even if other things intervene to make the entire team lose.

I'm still worrying more than I probably should about Ollie's weak writing skills. He's moving along so much more slowly than the other kids in the class, and even though he has gotten a lot of practice this year in writing paragraphs, he's still having trouble crafting an entire sentence that makes sense on any level. His spelling is bad, his grammar is negligent, his sentences incomplete or so full of errors that they are impossible for even him to read aloud. I am working closely with him, but I was really hoping for a stronger self-running ability by now. Tonight he was working on a Powerpoint presentation about the world's fastest street-legal cars. The assignment I gave was to write a "Did You Know" essay--choose some topic that interests you and share some information. Ollie's was, "Did you know that the Bugatti Veyron is one of the world's fastest cars?" Walter's is, "Did you know that you can get rich by having certain trading cards?" Their favorite book right now is "For Boys Only," which is a collection of factoids, lists, and Guiness Book of World Records-esque trivia. Both of their Did you knows came from the book and then were researched further. Progress may be slow, but progress is progress, and we'll take what we can get.

Walter is still reading really quickly. Who knows how much he is getting out of his reading at this rapid rate, but he's voracious if nothing else. Right now he's reading _Huckleberry Finn_ in the Great Illustrated Classics version. I just picked up five more GICs at Goodwill the other day, as well as some other books that I thought might be of interest to him: some other books by the author of Babe, some Bunnicula books, and a Tove Jannson book. Ollie and I are reading Little House on the Prairie, and he is loving it. We are also working on a biography of Alexander Graham Bell and have been watching the biography of John Adams on HBO. It coincided perfectly yesterday with our chapter in History of US, which was about Adams as a lawyer, his passion for justice, and how he defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. We worked this weekend on making timeline cards about some of this stuff and putting in some key dates in our own understanding of relative chronology: when Great Grandmother was born, when my Mom was born, when I was born. That way we can figure out those matters such as whether there was television when I was a little girl or whether Great Grandmother was alive when Laura Ingalls Wilder was a little girl in a log cabin.

On my own docket for this week:

* next to last art class tomorrow
* dinner with Leader Applicant and other Leaders at Mexico Restaurant tomorrow night
* tennis clinic in the morning
* play practice
* birthday party Wednesday night
* baseball game Wednesday night
* Suburban match at Stonehenge Thursday morning
* not procrastinating about writing for co-op
* finishing my rearrangement of the schoolroom and the dining room and the Teen Lounge
* writing a draft of an article for Visions
* ordering tickets for the opera Lucia di Lammermoor this Friday evening
* signing up for USTA team and renewing membership

It's a pretty typical week, but there still seems to be a lot going on. Baseball really added a big dimension to our running around, one we probably didn't need. But I suppose we'll have to monitor how it goes, and at least the season is finite.

Swim team tryouts were a success on Saturday morning. Frances especially swam well in both strokes, and she was thrilled to see Katherine from church, who is 15 or so and thought Franny was just the bee's knees. But man oh man, I have no idea how we'll fit in the practices, especially for Frances. She will miss most, if not all of the swim and dive practices that happen in the afternoons before the school year ends and morning practice begins. It's only two or three weeks, but still...it's a lot to miss at the beginning when she has no experience. And she was too small for even the smallest of the team swimsuits; we're waiting to hear what the Plan B is there. I'm really holding out hope that this experience will open some social opportunities in the neighborhood for Walter and Ollie, since they'll be spending a good quantity of time with other kids every single day for a lot of weeks. And of course, it frees me up to play tennis most mornings of the week because we'll already be over by the courts, and the kids will be suitably occupied. I hope that Rutledge takes a good strong liking to the nursery, because he'll be spending a fair amount of time there.

Well, I'm off to read The Remains of the Day and try to get some sleep before I need to head out early tomorrow.

There Goes Summer!

We are so overextended financially right now. It just kind of...happened. One minute we were getting back on track with Kerry's second job, and the next minute, baseball signups and swim team signups seemed to take the last of our money for food. On top of this, I need to pay for my USTA team today, too.

This is one of our crazy weekends. Most aren't like this, but this one had so many things converging. Frances is dancing in the four performances of the Latin Ballet's Mujeres. She has four costume changes and appears in four scenes--as a dead girl during the ghost walk, as a Catholic schoolgirl, as a poor Argentine girl in Evita, and in a more formal dress in the Evita finale when Santa Evita dies into the arms of her husband. Today, Saturday, is the most challenging day. Frances did not get home until 11 p.m. last night, and today she has a performance at 3 and at 7:30; it will be another long night. Then get up, rinse, and repeat tomorrow.

This morning we had swim and dive team tryouts, and all three kids made the team. Frances is too small for even the smallest size of a team suit, so we are trying to figure out what happens next in this case--the supplier is looking into a, um, fitting alternative for her. Frances was pretty amazing swimming her laps of freestyle and backstroke. Walter was the most flailing, but I feel sure he'll come around. He is a fabulous diver off both the low and high dive. And even Ollie, who was more fearful, is now diving from the high dive, although he has a tendency to over-rotate. But there went another nearly $400, which is all we had for the rest of the week until Kerry gets paid next Friday :(

Oliver has a baseball game, his first of the season, this afternoon at 5:30. He is more excited about baseball than I've ever seen him excited about anything else he's ever done. But there goes more cash--the team fee, the new bat because everyone else's is too heavy for him because he's smaller than they are, the new glove, a stash of practice balls, a cup (!). And of course the fundraising responsibility--10 Braves tickets, 5 cases of Coke.

And if this wasn't enough, today is the Lego Expo at RES. All year the boys have been doing a Junior First Lego League, and although they did not exactly do the team challenge put out by Lego this year, which is always a vague and less interesting venture, there is going to be a group expo where they show what they have done this year, show how they have responded to this year's energy challenge (they built a power plant with generators, turbines, transmission lines, etc.) and their posters on alternative energy sources. I'm not thrilled to be going, I have to say. Saturday belongs to us, not to weekday school events, and this would have worked much better for us on a Wednesday or Friday afternoon. But here it is. Walter is also exhibiting some of his projects from home--a mega-plane, a K-Nex creation, his Lego skyride he designed.

In the midst of all of the activity, we also got the news yesterday that the Beagle whose puppies we were hoping to get only has two in this litter. It's a disappointment for everyone. So now I am having to put together a Plan B. Researching breeders again, accepting that they aren't in Virginia, trying to find someone with a litter coming who doesn't have an endless waiting list. We have two prospects, but I'm back having to convince people that we are worthy, that we are going to be good enough owners and that our children aren't a liability. Breeders are an interesting lot--they have some exacting standards for who they will release their dogs to, and it's hard to measure up to their perfection. The ideal owner, from what I can tell, would probably be someone young, athletic (takes five mile-long walks a day totalling up to 3 or more hours of exercise), has no children and never plans to have any, has a 12 foot high wooden privacy fence with a backup fence underneath, and is independently wealthy without working so that they are home 24 hours a day with time to prepare a raw diet for the dog or purchase ultra-premium fresh dog food for hundreds a month. But I digress. We have two prospects. One is a puppy who is already on hold for someone else, but the situation might fall through. That breeder also has another litter coming in a little over a month, and I'm not sure if I met her standards. The other is a breeder in NC who has a puppy available now, according to the website (when did beagles start costing $1000?!), and who also has another young litter with puppies available. Unfortunately, they aren't answering the phone or emails, so I don't know what kind of progress I can expect.

Meanwhile, I need to start thinking about testing for the schoolyear. We can't afford to do it right now--$100 for the cognitive abilities testing I'd like to do and then the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. But I have just been approved as a test provider for these, so my only obstacle now is actually getting the tests. I'm optimistic about these, though still coming to terms with Walter's ongoing "on the spectrum" reality.

Kerry's parents were up for a day. Came Thursday afternoon but didn't come over. Kerry and all of the boys met them at Ruby Tuesday and they misbehaved, which is unfortunate because his parents have no good opinion of our parenting in the first place, so this was a pretty harsh blow and may not portend much good for their future visits. Friday his parents were here most of the day, but little happened. They did take the older kids to the park across the street while Kerry got Rutledge down for a nap. I picked up some books--okay, more like 40 books--at Goodwill yesterday. Lots of Great Illustrated Classics, which Walter loves, lots of Oprah's Book Club picks because I need some diverting matter to read, and lots of Newbery Winners. Kerry and his parents went to see Frances' show last night while I stayed with the boys. Notably, I won Monopoly for the first time against Ollie; he was none too happy, but I wouldn't let him quit when he was begging. This builds character.

Ollie and I finished reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last night, and now he is very excited about reading the next Little House on the Prairie book. We need to get the full seasons of the television show once we finish all of the books. I'm so pleased that he is loving them so much. They have fit in well with the Gary Paulsen books we've been reading this winter, especially the Mr. Tucket series, which is a boys' Little House, of sorts. We also watched Shane the other night--and Mr. Tucket really was just a retelling of the Shane story. Even Kerry was taken aback by the depth of the movie, one he has disparaged for many years without ever watching. I confess that I myself had never taken much to Westerns, but now I'm finding a new fascination.

My pondering thought for today: Boy am I glad that I didn't have to qualify this well to have human children!