Loss tonight. Carol Beth and I had our combo match a few days early because many of us will be at the beach this weekend, and we lost badly in the first set and then lost the second set, a big comeback, in a 8-6 tie-break. Call it heartbreak, if you will. I was playing slowly and languidly, taking my cues from the weather. It was sticky when we arrived, then overcast with menacing black clouds overhead, then solidly windy, then an owl flew by, and finally it cooled, with some wetness to the air. When we arrived back in Woodlake, it was raining. Better luck next time.

Hilary and her gang we back. We got on the subject of how homeschoolers always talk shop. It's true. It's our life. Or maybe no one else wants to hear that part of our life, so we have no choice but to chatter to each other about it. Heather was there as well, and we were talking about how much work it is--the constant reassessing, second-guessing, the processing of new information every time we bump into someone else we know who starts talking shop. Are we doing enough? Should we be doing what they are doing? Like tennis, it's largely a confidence game. You can't do it all. You just can't. You just need to keep your eyes on your own ball and determine that maybe it'll be a short match and maybe it will go on into three sets sometimes, but you're going to come out of this where you want to be.

So today I was, in this vein, looking through someone's blog and found myself spending too much time on a website with language arts curricula for "gifted elementary students." I'm wondering if this would be interesting to Walter. Ollie would likely find it rather cheesy, but I do like the grammar and the poetry books, which seem to be manageable but at the same time substantive. That's kind of the benchmark for what I seek now: easy to engage with and not too time-consuming, cuts to the chase, covers the material I need covered without a lot of excess. Now how to come up with $100 or so. Good thing Kerry has that contract renewal for his second job.

I'm actually feeling really good about the fall, at least for the twins. I have picked up a lot of material at the used curriculum fairs so far, and I think we'll make real progress. Here's what I have:

Math: Saxon 6/5, and I'm still waiting to find a Math-U-See Delta or Epsilon
Language arts: Easy Grammar Systems, both the full deal and Daily Grams; a Classical roots program;
Latin: Latina Christiana through a class we're taking at RES
History/Reading: Sonlight Alt-4, which is the combined 3-4 American history list
Critical Thinking: Building Thinking Skills from The Critical Thinking Company. This should be a nice fun diversion.
Science: LifePak science books. I need a second set.

Great news. CAT scores came back this week, and Frances only missed two on the entire test (should have been none, but couldn't get to her slow down or review what she marked). She was in the 98th percentile for reading and similar for math (don't have it right on hand). The twins both were in the 99th percentile in their overall composite score for the test. Yahoo! Now I'm waiting on the IOWA scores and the CogAt to come back. I'm wondering if Bob Jones is withholding things until I pay for the test books I got mustard and water on.

I'm so bad about actually posting what I write. Much of it ends up transferred elsewhere more private because it's unfinished.

Summer is fleeting right by. Here's what I'm doing:

* Outrageous numbers of crosswords. My friend Kate took the twins home from the tennis courts one day while I was playing an important tournament match, and when I went to pick them up I noticed a half-finished crossword puzzle on her breakfast bar. I could barely resist the temptation to fill in the blanks, so I went home and printed one out for myself, and I've been addicted ever since. I haven't done a crossword since I was lying in bed for who knows how many weeks, pregnant with the twins. It was an addiction then, too.

* My 3.0 USTA women's team is going to the State Tournament in Newport News, VA this coming weekend. We rock! And it looks likely that I'll be bumped up to a 3.5. In preparation for both that and for the tourney, I have been playing with a bunch of the 3.5 ladies, and with the exception of today, when I got eaten for lunch by an about-to-be-bumped to 4.0 singles player, I've been holding my own fairly decently. Carol Beth and I are teaming for doubles tomorrow night at our combo (6.5) match at Raintree, and if our practice yesterday was an indication, we're going to be just fine.

* I finally earned my A in Big Brain Academy. Kerry says that A is for Loser, but I think I'm immensely smarter for all my hard work. Now I'm obsessed with the Crosswords game he brought home for me last night, partly because it has a word search component, which is very like the identification game on BBA.

* The twins have new friends. Grayson, who lives around the corner, spent the night here last night. There was nasty fallout for all children of ours this morning after a late night, but overall it was a smooth event. My wish for the summer was that swim team and the pool would introduce them to some kids in the neighborhood. This is our 5th summer here, and it hasn't happened before now, but swim team forces a camaraderie that chance encounters can't quite match. Success. Yesterday we spent most of the afternoon and evening with 3 extra boys in the house who live right here in Fiddlers Ridge. And then there are the ones who call Walter "Wal-Turd" at dive practice and the Runescape junkies who congregate after swim team is over. Can you believe that sometimes other families actually take my children to the pool?

* Ollie demoed a new dive team this afternoon. It's a year-round practice (sigh...another nearly $200 a month and mega-commitment of nearly 8 hours a week, I think), but the good news is that it's right here at our own indoor pool. Though he came in with rather rudimentary skills--his hurdle approach is choppy and not up to Mr. Bill's standards--he learned a stunning amount in just 2.5 hours today. Now he's smoothly approaching the end of the board and he also has a pretty good tuck now on his front, back, and somersault dives. I think his scores will go up quite a bit at this weeks' meet. The Clendenons had a pretty good sweep last week at the meet: Ollie won 1st place in Boys' Mites, Walter won 3rd place in Boy's Mites, and Frances won 2nd place in Girls' Mini-Mites. Coach Bill wants all three of them, but we're not totally made of money ;) His program has produced a lot of successful divers, and he claims that all of the divers who have worked with him have gone to "to the college of their choice, without exception." Now with Title IX, there aren't really going to be scholarships for male divers, but admission is still a pretty attractive perk. I'm not ready to count my chickens before they hatch--he's only been to one practice, but he seems to have some real talent, and the coach was begging for him to return in the fall and is eager to work with him.

* Rutledge got a pile of stitches in his head on Wednesday. We're not quite sure what happened, but he claims that he fell out of Christi's van in front of our house. Walter did a serious job of CSI, but couldn't find any clues or extra blood, so we'll probably never know. Just as Christi and the kids were getting ready to leave, Walter came dashing into the house saying that Rutledge was bleeding. Someone is always bleeding at my house. But he was really, really bleeding (it was "weeely, weely scawee," in Rutledge-speak). There was blood cascading down his face, all over his arms, hands, shirt, the doorknob, across the floor, and there was a gaping hole that looked like a musket ball had hit him over his left eye. We took him to Dr. Clark right away, and he got 3 internal stitches, about 6 external ones (he's pulled a few out, so I'm not sure what the original count was), and a popsicle. I swear we weren't home 10 minutes before I heard someone yelling, "Mom! Rutledge is rollerblading down the steps!" Sigh. And not only that, but this all happened two hours before we were supposed to go to an open casting call for models for a stock photographer. Needless to say, no callbacks.

* We've been reading a lot of books. Okay, Ollie and I have. Rutledge has been really into Madeline. Ollie and I are reading Sign of the Beaver right now, and we just finished The Apprentice. Before that was The Penderwicks, Fever 1793, and a selection of Clyde Robert Bulla books. Holes is our next book club book; only Walter is making any progress at all through it. I'm going to have to crack the whip.

* Ollie is getting ready to go to sleepaway camp next weekend. He's leaving while I'm probably still playing tennis. Frances does dance camp at Woodlake in the afternoons that week. And Walter goes to Slippery, Slimy, Odd Pets and Electric Gadgets camp the week after

I was at a conference last year and one of the panel speakers referenced a "Co-op That Ate My Life." So I've now dubbed this the summer that Swim Team ate my life. Time management isn't really one of my strong suits in the first place and the back and forth shuffle that is handling morning practices is about to kill me. All three kids have dive practice at 9 a.m., then the twins have swim team practice at 10 a.m., and Frances swims at 11. This leaves me from 10-11 with two underage children and an unopened pool with no lifeguards and too much time on our hands. Add in that I'm deeply swayed by anyone who utters the words, "Want to play tennis?" and I'm toast. Drop off Rutledge at child care, drop off 3 kids at dive, run back in to make sure they all actually made it through all the doors and to the pool with their appropriate clothing, pull one aside to say that when you're done, you need to come to the tennis gazebo and keep quiet because there are USTA matches going on, play, deal with little heads popping in asking what time it is and telling me they're hungry, shuttle Frances back to swim team, argue with the boys about why they can't just go home, finish tennis, run back to pick up Rutledge, run back to pick up Frances.... Whew!

At least when you can't talk, you can write. I have the worst case of laryngitis I've had in recent memory. Actually, when I think about it, I'd say that laryngitis is my illness M.O., my own sickness idiom. Almost every year I lose 2 weeks of read-aloud time and basic communication to my lost voice. This time around, and it's been a while, I have been having Ollie read aloud to me. Sometimes I alternate with him by reading a page or two in whisper, but mostly he has been taking my usual role. It's working out nicely. We are halfway through the Invention of Hugo Cabret right now.

Today we played with our friends Asa, Isaac, and Charlotte at the park in Ashland. The big draw of the Ashland park is that there is a skateboard park right next to a playground, so everyone can be happy and appropriately supervised in a compact area that has plenty of shade. Ollie and Walter's skateboarding skills have improved since last summer when we were there. Okay, so they're hardly thrashers, but they were riding very confidently on their bottoms on the boards down even the biggest ramps and then going across the small ramps and platforms and catching air and landing. I hate to think of the bruises that they will have on their butts tomorrow. Frances, as usual, met a girl while she was there and was off playing all kinds of imaginative things.

We are going through Ukrop's White House rolls like they are going out of style, or going stale, or whatever it is that you would say about fresh baked items. They make life easy, but I have to face the facts: they are white bread. And not just white bread, but white bread of the whitest, sugariest sort. But man are they yummy with the tarragon chicken salad on them.

I have a confession: I am in love with XM radio. Crazy, madly in love. I love XM15, which is the folk station. At any given moment, I might hear Christine Lavin or Richard Shindell or Mary Chapin Carpenter. Yeah, there's a lot of Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary and other things that I'm not totally turned onto at the moment (don't worry--it's just a life place, not a lack of love or admiration for them; at other points in my life they have meant practically everything to me), but I'm finding this station filling my cup most of the time, and I'm already cringing at the prospect of life without it. XM Kids is also a pretty good station. I find myself listening even when I'm alone, although I did have to pull the plug on a rather rockin' rendition of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" tonight; a girl has to have standards.

It's not just XM that I love--it's the whole sound system. I'm loving the ease of popping in my iPod. And I'm loving having a 6 disc changer to make our audio books go more smoothly. Today we had a boom box hooked up through the plug in the back so that the boys could listen to "Tucket's Gold," by Gary Paulsen. Because we were in the car so long today going to Ashland, they got through almost the whole book. But when you're cradled in brand new leather seats and taking long drags of that new car smell, a long ride with a good book is no punishment.

This morning, the kids watched Alvin and the Chipmunks. I felt too wretched this morning and had no voice for doing much cracking of the whip...or work with them. I also was out of printer paper, which meant that I couldn't photocopy the math review pages I've decided we're going to concentrate on for a while as we get ready for our test. I remedied that situation today, so tomorrow it's back to hitting some of the books. I'm also printing out an endless (400 or so pages) science program that I'm planning to do with all three of the bigger kids over the next few month. The printer, not surprisingly, is balking a bit. Since we don't always "do" a lot of science, my plan for the summer is to work through this life science sequence, participate in www.quickstudylabs.com's Summer Science Club with weekly material, and work through our three Young Scientist's Club kits. The boys will read the nature reader I picked up a few weeks ago. And I'm hoping to pick up this one particular Critical Thinking Company science book for young elementary kids for Frances. The RRHE used curriculum sale is coming up soon, and I already have my list prepared.

What we've been reading: We just finished Johnny Tremain. Ollie's feelings were that he really liked the human interest part of the story and was less happy when it drifted off into history textbook style. But overall, it was a great experience. We spent the better part of the week really delving into this, adding in other reading from Story of US, poetry, and another book on Paul Revere's ride, which was ever so much more meaningful after we had the context of Johnny Tremain in our own personal backgrounds. Ollie is finding it laborious that we aren't yet at the War of 1812, but I want to finish Volume 3 of Story of US before we move on. We have a decent ways to go.

My new scheme is that I'm having the kids read it, aloud, to me. This helps keep Walter at least marginally paying attention, and it gives Ollie reading practice. I picked up a Christian Liberty Press Nature Reader as well that I think Walter will respond to. I haven't done a lot of required reading, and because I was comfortable that they were reading solidly most of the time, I had dropped specific reading instruction. Now I'm thinking that it doesn't hurt to give it a little more extended attention, just to make sure they are as comfortable with reading as they should be. I gave the DONA test on the website www.letsgolearn.com, and their results were both what I expected and better than I expected. The test was broken down into a number of subtests--word recognition, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension, vocabulary. Both were extremely high on word recognition--late 12th grade and middle of 11th. Ollie was super high on reading comprehension: grade 11.5, and Walter was above grade level at grade 6.5. Both had vocabulary a few grade levels ahead. But spelling. Oh, our perennial bugbear, spelling. Ollie was at early 2nd grade, and Walter was at middle 2nd grade. Both also had results saying that they were "poor" at phonemic awareness, though after I went back and re-read, I saw that they probably weren't even tested on this because they are too old and their grade level too high based on the other tests It did make me stop and think about how proficient they are at what is jargonically termed "word attack." And I do think there is room to work there. To that end, I've started doing the "Advanced Code" Reading Reflex chapters with Ollie (I haven't actually snagged Walter long enough to do much with him yet; the weather is good and he's out making fairy houses and rigging up pulleys to hoist things into the trees in the yard). It's obvious that most of the work is too easy for Ollie, so I may need to modulate it much more than I have, but he really needs to make some prolonged contact with the types of word patterns and combinations of letters that trip him up in spelling. Nonetheless, I have to say that so far, the tincture of time has been helping us more than anything else. We've started breaking down words into chunks and shoving together the chunks we've already decoded so that we're not having to hold ten sounds in succession in our brains.

That's the boring part of our homeschooling life. The exciting part is the many park days, the play dates, and the spate of recent birthday parties. Welcome spring!

The world's most comforting sound is that of a snoring beagle.

Here it is, 1:30 a.m., and I'm still flying on the caffeine I took for an earlier headache. And there's tennis tomorrow. Yawn!

Finally, the weather broke. It wasn't exactly a perfect day outdoors, but I'm not complaining. We're back at the park, and that's where I want to be in April.

Time sure is winding down on the schoolyear. I'm not ready to stop by any means--in fact, I'm feeling energized by my new commitment to doing things in the way that has worked for us in the past, which means fewer workbooks, more time spent on the things that matter to us. It has been more or less successful in the past, and perhaps I was wrong in looking down another path thinking it offered some kind of insurance. We owe it to ourselves to choose what makes us happy, and not some list of "shoulds" that come from the great beyond or someone else's paradigm. I don't want to lose sight of why we chose this lifestyle in the first place, which was so that we could do something different, so that we weren't tied to anyone else's timeframe, so that our standards didn't have to be dictated by someone else, especially a someone else over whom we have no control.

Writing was more painful than usual tonight for us. The assignment felt pretty straightforward, but Walter was just not in the game at all. Maybe it's spring fever. Maybe it's that he wasn't invested in his topic. Or it was just too late--too much swimming, too much time running around it the park, too much time since he had woken up in the morning. But he was just out of it, and his writing seemed to come from another world. I see this as an area where we need to continue to focus, and maybe I need to scale things back.

Kerry and I did something a bit out of our normal range--we instituted an incentive system to try to encourage greater effort on what they do for school. I don't want to call myself skeptical, because that isn't the right word, but I know that it will be challenging to fight against some of their personality tendencies, traits that seem pretty deeply ingrained in them. Ollie has always had a hard time embracing tasks that he can't master with little to no effort. It is not simply perfectionism, it's that he really expects things to come easily to him or that skimming the surface is enough (I can strum a few things, therefore I know how to play the guitar). They have a harder time seeing the value of long, steady practice, that this is how people get to be experts, how they get to be successful. So we are offering points/stars for accuracy and completion on a number of our regular educational pursuits, and when they reach 100, they can choose a Wii game. I've been having this feeling that they wonder what the point of doing better on their math might be. So I guess we'll see how this goes.

Walter is speeding along in trumpet. I didn't hear a lot from his lesson this morning, but the reports I'm getting are that he is going to be ready for intermediate band when the fall comes, especially if he keeps up with some lessons over the summer. I'm really proud of his progress.

My teeth are feeling filthy now. I must go brush. TMI, I know!