A Plug for High School Theatre

I'll admit, I can belt it out when anything from High School Musical comes on the radio.  And I have to put in a big plug for high school theater in general.  It's the untapped resource in the community that isn't given its due!  Recently when we've been to some of the professional theatre productions, particularly the "theatre for families," we've been sort of disappointed.  And it gets kind of expensive, takes a trip downtown (gotta think about use of resources these days), and parking is an adventure much of the time.  What I've discovered is that right down the street are high schools with amazing, incredible talent in them. 

Tonight we saw "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."  I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough that I don't want to see someone dressed as a dog for Snoopy, but the kids had a great time, and there's always the real draw of live theater--intermission and a soft drink and candy!  I'd like to get us over to see "South Pacific" and "Into the Woods" next weekend.  

I think that as you have more children, you get to the point where you just kind of accept these "phases" that they go through. For the moment, we're past the one where the toddler/preschoolers wears rainboots everywhere. Now we're at the one where Rutledge will only wear "Army Man Pants," which means camouflage . He has at least three pairs of camo shorts, including the typical army green, grey, and khaki, but now that real fall/early winter is here, they're not quite cutting it. Yesterday I found him three pairs of pants at a consignment store, so I think that's enough to get our Army Man operation going. He also got a pair of "Army Man" work boots, which, unfortunately, are at least two sizes too big. No problem.

Here's one of those archetypal preschool moments from our week: Gum In The Hair. Yes, a mohawk of it from front to back, and then another strip from the temples, up over the ear, to the nape of his neck. I tried the peanut butter method of removal (see below--the filthy face). I think with a few more minutes of patience on his part, this might have been enough, but when you have a child with sensory issues, there is only so much he can take.



I had only one solution: shaving it.

I also checked one more thing off my list today: winter boots for Walter and Ollie and snowpants for whichever one of them was lacking them. Now I think we're officially ready for any kind of weather that might come along. Ollie could really use a decent winter coat, but I'm holding tight until I run across an affordable one that will last a while (if he doesn't lose it...). It's been years since I've thought much about winter apparel, and we haven't really had/spent money on snow stuff much since we've lived here, but between the dire predictions of the Farmer's Almanac and simply the observations of how the weather has been so far this fall (colder, a bit wetter at times than normal), we could be in for a difference.

Positive moment for the day: running into a fellow knitting friend who helped me recover from a big disaster right in the middle of the elf hat I'm working on. I was about 25 rows up when I made The Big Mistake that I tried to repair myself (Big Mistake #2). I lost about 7 rows of work, but since this is a hat I'm making for someone else to give as a gift, it's worth the slight extra work. This is the 4th one of these hats that I've made, and I'm getting much more reliable and better as I continue to knit, especially as I make multiples of some of my recent projects. But I'm still not quite a Zen Knitter--if I don't watch myself, I tend to do lots of spacey, dumb things ;)

Everyone's concerned about the state of both the Economy with a capital E and also their own--we've switched in our family from freely working from home and working flexibly to a greater sense of the need to make a constant appearance in the physical offices so that he might make the impression of being more indispensible. I sure hope it works. So in the spirit of supporting this Improvement of Appearances and Commitment to Work as well as the necessary conservative belt-tightening, I've made a little list of some things I'd like to have if we didn't have to be fiscally responsible at the moment.

* Rachmaninoff Wind Chimes, which play "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini." This song was so intensely, incredibly significant, in that way that so many things are in high school. My friend Donna and I went crazy over this song, the movie "Somewhere in Time," and some odd little writing project we started about a protagonist named Jeremy Edmond Stone. Ah, the good old days. What I think is amazing is that my wind would blow so that the chimes hit in the correct order. On some fundamental level, I feel like we're just screwed when we believe that we have any control over nature.

* I'd also like one of those garden plaques that says, "I TRIED, BUT IT DIED."

* I've never been a jewelry person, but I'd really like a silver bracelet that says something simple and thoughtful on it.

* I still want a better bread machine. I do it by hand, and I didn't adore my old and yucky bread machine, but when the paddle started to bubble and the coating buckled, I was completely icked out.

Right now I'm watching a news piece on "Living on Only $20 for One Week." Hmmm. I think that's for one person. And only includes food. Is that really living?

My musings for today: which part of a year is the out-of-sync one for children? A friend said she thinks it's the 2nd half of the year, which is disheartening considering that we're in our first halves with Walter and Frances, and they're having a rough enough time already. Or perhaps it's simply that they are working on other skills (others ones than the ones that I see them struggling with right now), the way that a toddler often lags in language when making huge strides in gross motor skills...or vice versa. At any rate, despite some rough spots in the road, Frances is hitting a kind of flow in some areas. She's long been a slacker through much of gymnastics and dance, but in the past two weeks or so, she seems to have turned a corner. When she concentrates, which is certainly not all the time, she really does some amazing things. She recently mastered the shoot through, which is where she does a back turn up onto the uneven bar and then casts and pushes one leg through and onto the bar. She doesn't always control her flip around the bar afterwards, but it's a big achievement. Then, after some very rocky weeks in her modern dance class, she was acting like a limp noodle, sleepy, or just goofy. But yesterday, she was all on (thanks to her very untalented and crotchety mother joining in the class), and by the end she was remembered multi-step choreography and had learned the pretzel roll and the fan and was putting them together without any major blunders. It was pretty cool to watch. This followed up on a high-flow day in pottery class as well. Her teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I need to keep Frances in art classes because she is thriving there. Her trivet was pretty amazing, and then she made a small army of half inch long fruit, including an extremely cute pineapple. The pieces will be fired in two weeks, and then they'll do the glazing, at which point I'll have pictures. Walter has also had some big improvements in trumpet lately, especially in tempo and timing.

But our non-flow areas right now are math (Walter), anything academic (Walter), impulse control (Frances), and emotional stability. I'm kind of holding out with the belief that these things always seem to come around, just not all at the same time.

I hate my computer. I hate all things with batteries. I hate all things that are electronic and purport to have online or live help but really don't help you all all.

I recently got a card for Henrico County Public Library, which is a sort of neighboring county, because I knew that they had Joy Hakim's _History of US_ available to download. Hours later, I still haven't heard a darn thing. The download won't play on my computer. The Microsoft free download of Windows Media Player is giving me some kind of error and refusing to download onto my Mac. Without WMP, I can't play the file at all. And the format isn't compatible with the iPod, which is a pain. If your Macbook is like mine, you can barely hear audio on it, even at the highest level. And I don't want to drag around what probably amounts to 40 hours of audio on my computer to listen to it. And you can't burn it to CD because it expires and probably isn't compatible with however you transfer it. What good is an eAudiobook if you can't hear it anywhere??? And what good is hours lost with nothing to show for them?? I'd gladly pay $100 for a CD set of this book, but I don't think one is made. At least not that I've seen. I'm frustrated.

{Whenever I want to hurl some thing with a battery cover that requires a screwdriver to get off or anything involving the words "Windows," "download," "Error," or "You Must Enable...," I just have to look at this sweet face that was in my kitchen tonight, wearing his "Army Man Pants and Folk Festival Shirt" and I feel calm again...}

It's late already tonight, but tonight's other thought is about choosing the best books for your children. Someone told me tonight that I should write a book or a guide or something to choosing right books at the right time for your children based on their age. We're all guilty at times of choosing the right book at the wrong time, or the wrong book period, or pushing ahead of where our children are or even, at times, ruining the experience of an amazing book by having our children read it too early, because they can fully appreciate and enjoy it the way they might have been able to if it had come along a bit later. And homeschoolers can be sort of paradoxically guilty of both pushing ahead (because as we all know, All Homeschoolers Are Brilliant) and of also embracing delayed academics, acknowledging that we have some children who are "later readers" than what the mainstream academic society would like. So while we're simultaneously pushing them beyond what is recommended by whatever sources might be recommending appropriate material and at the same time letting them develop at their own pace, which sometimes includes not decoding on their own at all, they often are not getting quite what they need, what will be most mind-blowing, most engaging, most-able-to-relate-to, most life-changing, most makes-me-want-to-find-even-more-books-like-this. And that's kind of a shame.

We've been discovering a lot of books in our family now that seem, well, perhaps not all that challenging to some. They're not super-thick. They won't always amaze you with their SAT vocabulary. They aren't always written very recently. They don't all have very trendy themes. Their "reading level" is below where my children test, and often even below their grade or age chronologically. And yet the kids are eating them up, or, at the least, not complaining when I assign some of them as something I'd like them to do as part of "school."

I have had a tough time myself coming up with my own personal stance about assigned reading. We have the freedom to not have forced reading, to not be reading things that bore us to death, that we hate, or that someone else thinks we should be reading for some reason or another (it's on an Accelerated Reader list; there's a prize for it; it's a "Battle of the Books" selection; questions about it will appear on a standardized test, etc.). And I'm of the belief that the way to raise a child who loves to read because the act itself is pleasurable--and the material being read does not need to be lengthy, chaptered fiction to count--is not to require a timer or an adult signature to say it was done. Nonetheless, as part of what we do as schoolwork, which admittedly is determined by my own whims at times, reading a book of fiction or non-fiction is part of what I'd like us to cover or discuss. So while my kids do spend time every day reading, time that I don't measure by a clock, that I don't supervise, that I don't sign off on, that I don't even know happens all the time, I'm careful not to make reading into an "academic" subject handed from another person but something that is done at times for information, as a means of expanding our knowledge about another subject (not reading for the sake of reading), or at many times, as a special time when we can just be together doing something that we all enjoy together.

We've been guided a lot by the Sonlight reading lists this year. I'm not a Follow The Schedule type person, so even though I have the big binders of Sonlight materials, I only look at them to get a general sense of their time frame and sometimes to try to get a clue as to why a particular book was chosen as part of the program. Right now we're reading Mother West Wind's Children, a book that I still can't figure out quite why they chose it. It's a fine book--not exactly my type of story or set of stories, but still, it has its good points. And interestingly, Ollie is the one enjoying it most, since he finds the humor in the ways that the animals act toward each other, in their anthropomorphism, in their foolishness; he gets it. But most of the other books chosen for the "read-alone" list are, I've determined, pretty short and not very challenging as reading material. And yet they've turned out to be kind of perfect for me to expect of the kids.

Here are some of the titles we've done in the past 3 months:

A whole passel by Clyde Robert Bulla: Pocahontas and the Strangers, A Lion to Guard Us, Squanto, Friend of the Pilgrims, and these led us on to read a number of other titles by him

All of those Jean Fritz books with titles like, "And Then What Happened, Paul Revere." These are books we get through in 30 minutes, including talking about them, but they're not entirely without substance. And combined with the other reading and videos and history work we do, they give the kids just enough work on their own so that they're having to actively participate in what we're doing, but no one is going to feel overwhelmed or like we're perseverating on the same thing for weeks.

Very short novels, like _Stone Fox_--about a race, about two cultures, about debt, about love of the land, about kindness, about determination, about the effects of stress. Not the most challenging book to decode and "read," but a book of substance with real issues that a 10 year old boy might relate to or think about.

These have led us on to bumping into other books in the library of about this length--50-100 pages, some full page pictures to look forward to, chapters that move quickly so they give a sense of accomplishment (I'm 36 and still need this to be happy while I read!). Books about Christmas on the Mayflower, what George Washington ate for breakfast, Lewis and Clark, Eli Whitney. All short, one-night reads, but with enough of a story to keep everyone focused.

That's what has been on my mind tonight.

And not what I was thinking about while I was rock climbing. Tonight I got a little bit further along in my ability here. Up until now, I don't think I've made it to the top of a 5.8 wall, but tonight I conquered one of my first try. I did have to do a 5.7, which I thought shouldn't have been a 5.7, twice to hit the top without cheating (using a wrong color), and I felt pretty good about that, too. At best, rock climbing gives me the same high as giving birth, as silly as that sounds. That same sense of, "My body rocks! I did something amazing that I didn't think I could do!" Some nights aren't quite so satisfying, but when you're hanging on the side of a wall, looking at the next steps and seeing no way possible for you to get there using only your body, it's a tremendous sense of accomplishment when you overcome the fear of heights and the seemingly impossible to solve a problem that only you and your body can get through. I probably will never be a 5.10 climber, but every little bit of improvement amazes me.

Fall used to be my favorite season, and it still is, in its purest form. What has knocked fall down a notch for me since having children is that is the launching point for Illness Season, which is definitely *not* my favorite time of year. Now I find myself looking forward to spring as the reprieve from sniffles and the threat of vomit. But it's hard not to have your heart simply ache at the beauty of the leaves covering the ground and the vibrancy of the trees against a perfect blue sky.

It's been a while since we've been there, so we trekked down to Maymont Park today with some friends. The Nature Center was closed, since it's Monday (who knew?), but that was a blessing in disguise, since today was absolutely gorgeous. We're a bit past the peak of leaf beauty, but being a tad past peak doesn't mean that the beauty is over--the colors of the trees were amazing, and the clarity of the blueness of the sky could take your breath away in the way that it only can in the late fall. The kids climbed trees, scaled cliffs of rock, got lost in a bamboo forest, jumped off tall rocks into dry waterfalls, "fished" in a pool in a grotto, collected pond water to look at under the microscope (there better be a euglena in there!), rolled down a grassy hill, got hurt (what's a day out if you don't bleed a little!), got sticky little fuzzy flower parts stuck all over their clothes, and harassed some animals. This is what our free time should be all about!




It's a good thing you can't smell Rutledge's diaper from a picture. Whew, it was a bad one! Kerry came and rescued Rutledge and took Frances to gymnastics right after this picture was taken, but the boys stayed on for a while longer and climbed on the rocks. I try to be calm about this kind of thing, but I'll admit, my blood pressure went up a bit as I saw them fooling around next to what seemed like a big dropoff. This picture below is really sweet, though, of Ollie and a friend with their backs to us.

Yesterday I took three kids--Walter, Frances, and Rutledge to Annapolis, Maryland for my Uncle Bill's memorial service. I am still questioning exactly what I was thinking taking them along, since it was not an environment where they would be on their best and quietest behavior, but Kerry had to take Ollie to diving practice, which most certainly isn't a good place for accompanying sibling, and I feel strongly that it is a priority to give my children some sense of extended family, since they have fairly little of that now. They had never met my Uncle Bill, so the service was a bit boring to them.  But they were also able to meet their cousin, Quin, for the first time.  And I want them to have some chances to see the people they are related to as real people, not just lines on a family tree (not that I'm that organized at this point to have made a real family tree...).  

My heart goes out so much to my cousin, Lisa.  She has lost her father after a long, long illness that took his abilities away from him bit by bit.  And her mother had a stroke last year and requires a great deal of care.  There's not enough you can say about the gift she has given her parents by taking care of them, living with them while they need her help, and her family's dedication to each other in sickness and in health.  I ache for her because I've been through my own time of amazing pain with my mother and her death and the massive crater that has been left in my life because she is gone.  During the terrible, awful, unbelievable week when she was dying, lying semi-conscious in the hospital, the whole scene was surreal.  It felt like it was never going to end, like it was the longest week ever, and like she was always going to be held in that space between living and dying.  And yet, I can firmly say that six years later, she is definitely gone.  She's not coming back.  I don't have her with me, even in a terrible state that is nothing like she was during the time that she was living and was the mother I knew.  It feels so crazy and so wrong not to have a mother who is there to be with my children, with her grandchildren, to be someone that they know, that they do things with, who is part of their life and their childhood and their history.  Instead, at best, my children remember her as an old lady in a nursing home, and at worst...they don't remember her at all.  Worse yet, one of them never even met her.  It feels, on my feeling sorriest for myself days, that its simply unfair, that there is nothing that can ever take her place and nothing that can ever fill the role that a grandma should be filling for them, and this is a gap in their life that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  And so I feel all the more acutely sympathy for Lisa, because her little boy is just three years old, mere weeks older than Rutledge, and I know how she wants him to know and love the parents that she knew and loved, not just live through their illnesses, the hardships of the last part of their lives, the chaos that comes with a house full of nurses coming and going, medical equipment, distressing doctor visits, excruciating decisions that you never asked to have to make.  We can tell our children the stories of our parents, of our childhood, of the people that we knew them to be, but the sad fact is, we can't really make our kids know the people that meant everything to us.  I feel like my mother is as much myth as anything else to Walter, Ollie, and Frances (Rutledge can't even comprehend yet).  About as unreachable as anyone else who might appear on our family tree from the past.  The experience of losing a parent certainly is part of what has made me reassess what I want to do to bring my own family closer, to be sure that we live to the fullest together, that we have plenty of time before they inevitably grow up and move on to their own families.  Because in the end, it is, for sure, these families that we have now, our young families, that provide what healing there is out there for the giant hole that the loss of a parent causes.  And I suspect it will be, eventually, that way for my cousin as well.  There's nothing like a preschooler, with mischievous antics, little illnesses, broken bones, parties to send snacks for, Halloween costumes to pull together at the last minute, violence on the playground, and the zillions of things that we worry about with our children to force you to live in the here and now.  It doesn't really make things better, but it does take your mind off of it, and eventually, it makes you focus on what you can do with the people in your life who are still here, because you'll never be naive enough again to think that however it is, that it's going to be this way forever.

Today was sugar skull day.  Yearly ritual.  It's interesting to see the skulls change/improve? from year to year as the kids get older.  Or to see how the lure of mixing all the colors together to form brown (one of the colors in a bag we had already made) never really loses its charm.  Two friends and their kiddos came over, so it was a minor party.  Complete with cookies and pistachio cupcakes.  Yum.  

And we all know what yesterday was.  Here's my special Nancy version of election day.  Kerry was at the polls at 6 a.m., before heading off to the gym--he has recently joined American Family Fitness because they have better equipment and, um, those TVs on the treadmills.  He waited close to an hour, so I decided to play a timing game myself.  Plus I had gotten very little sleep the night before because I had a headache around dinnertime and took a caffeine-containing powder that kept me alive and kicking until around 3 a.m.  So we slept late, then did their basic schoolwork (the math/grammar/science/history stuff) because I was afraid that with public schools being out that I'd lose them to the neighborhood if I stalled too long.  And that's when Kerry called to remind me to take some I.D. to the polling place.  This is a big problem since I have lost my driver's license!

So, here's what makes my visit to the polls unique:  I burst into tears there!  I spent about 1.5 hours ripping my house, car, purse, etc. apart looking for my ID.  I didn't find it.  So I had to move on to Plan B.  Both McCain and Obama were calling me repeatedly all day long, so I took the opportunity to ask the poor Obama non-robo caller what else I could use as ID.  Big problem.  I have no passport (I'm a SAHM who hasn't been out of the country in 14 years).  We are huge recyclers/throwers away/shredders and also take any opportunity possible to be paperless with our bills, so I didn't have any utility bills, bank statements, etc. with my name on them.  I freaked.  I assumed that nothing in my life is in my name.  The new van doesn't seem to be in my name (Kerry reminded me that the actual transaction took place with him signing because I wasn't there at the time and he brought it home after I had described a fantasy where I just walked out one day and someone else had made the decision for me and left a vehicle in my driveway with a bow on it).  No investment statements (again paperless, and lately my policy has been to rip them in half and pitch them without looking at them).  I became absolutely obsessed with my lack of legal identity.  Without a 2x3 piece of plastic with my picture on it saying that I am permitted to operate a motor vehicle, I have no way to prove that I truly exist.  Or matter.

I ended up taking a bank statement that I printed out from online, a letter addressed to me from the Woodlake Homeowner's Association telling me that I suck because my kids built a treehouse in our front yard, and a 1.5 year old statement from our bank.  None of these flew.  So I had to sign a paper swearing that they could stick a needle in my eye and take my firstborn child that I am Nancy Renwick Clendenon and that I won't vote twelve times or I'll get a fine of $2500.  And that's when I started crying.  Four kids in tow, and I'm not really a person, citizen, or legal entity.  

And then I walked to the voting booth and couldn't figure out what to do--I could see a pen and a little instruction sheet, but nothing to vote on.  While I was blinking through my tears and crouching down under the desk thingy, everyone kept telling me I just had to fill in the circles with then pen.  What circles?  They forgot to give me a ballot!  

I was late for art class because I was still crying AND I had missed the turn into the correct neighborhood and had to do a complicated U-Turn.  And the art teacher was upset with me for being a few minutes late.  That just got me crying again.  Bad, bad day.

But we did have some fun points.  My intention was to have a little party during the election returns in the evening and buy some red, white, and blue balloons.  I wasn't that organized, though.  Three hours of pottery class and then an hour of jazz dance class and hearing that Frances isn't making progress, and I was wiped out on this day of no sleep.  So we just piled into the bed and colored in our "Color Your Own Electoral Votes Map."  Walter declared that he wanted to do this every year because it was so much fun!  We also took a quiz at www.scholastic.com where you had to guess which candidate held which view on a variety of issues including health care, illegal immigrants, pulling out of Iraq, homeland security, No Child Left Behind, school choice, taxes, and the economy.  And Ollie created his own newspaper article about himself running for president and his platform, based on a series of questions about where he stands on major issues and what his priorities would be.  Surprise, but he wanted to use 100% of his budget on the military.  Reminds me of the boys in my 7th grade history class who formed a team for a class debate called "The Warmongers."  It must be in their blood at that age.

I feel a little silly admitting this, but I was much more affected by the election than I ever anticipated I would be.  Seeing the jubilation in Chicago when it was announced that Obama would be our next President, I found myself with tears in my eyes.  I'm sure a lot of it was just that I was having a fragile day in general, but I was so touched by what this election means to so many Americans.  And I'm not a person who cries at movies or books often (I did sob through the scene in Juno where "Sea of Love" is playing), so this was out of character for me.  It was pretty exciting to experience with the boys, through, because they have been watching the debates, reading news articles, and studying the election process, and they were so aware of what was going on this year.

Totally unrelated notes on reading:  Tonight Frances and I read Gloria's Way, which is by the same author as the book for her book club last month.  It's a short, fun read.  Then we read _The Thanksgiving Story_, which is one of our Sonlight books.  The older boys and I just finished _My Side of the Mountain_ last night, and tonight we read _Stone Fox_.  Super-engaging, short book with a heartbreaking ending.  Ollie has just finished _Meet Thomas Jefferson_, _Star Wars: The Swarm_, and _Julian Rodriguez, Episode 1, Trash Crisis on Earth_.  Alas, Bilbo ate the corners off of the cover of Ollie's favorite book right now, _Diary of a Wimpy Kid_.  Darn dog!

Calm in Chaos

Our new church has a bi-monthly program called Mothers Mentoring Mothers. It's held at the home of a member whose children are grown, and each month there is a cooking demonstration of some sort--this month it was making pie crust and I left with some great tips like rolling the dough between pieces of Saran Wrap, which allows you to keep your counters clean and lets you transfer the crust straight into the pie pan, where you can peel it off like the back of a sticker--and then a presentation by one of the "mentors" whose children are grown, and then small group discussions. Keep in mind that this is the church where nearly 50% of the population is under the age of 10, so there were 18 of us younger mothers and about five or six older (by older we're not talking all that old here!) mothers, so it was a minor crowd for someone's living room! Tonight's general topic was Calm Amid Chaos, and boy did today fit right in. What's pathetic is that there was nothing special about today...just a normal day at home.

Here are a few of the "special" moments:

* Not once, but twice I was sent on a mad dash through the house for immediate changing supplies because (a) I was urgently informed that Rutledge, still naked from his morning frolic in the bathtub, had pooped on a paper towel that was wadded up on his plastic ride-on motorcycle. Truth: false alarm. It was really chewed up Snickers that dribbled from his mouth. But his butt definitely needed some covering. (b) While I was reading to the older boys, Rutledge came in with a reeking diaper (yes, he's only 3.5 months away from his fourth birthday; I am a toilet-training failure). The next thing I knew, there was a vocal ruckus claiming that there was poop on a pillow. Here's how bad things are at my house: I had to ask whether the pillow had a pillowcase. Affirmative. So I tore down the stairs at breakneck speed to get the only wipes I could confidently get my hands on from under the sink in our half bath. Then flew back up the stairs to change the offending diaper, only to find that everything in it was perfectly intact and had not leaked. Once again, a false alarm.

* It was The Day of Unfinished Projects. And yes, I brought them on myself. I can't say no. Frances, on her quest to complete that list of Projects Every Elementary School Student Must Do, wanted to have herself traced on butcher paper today so that she can make organs to place on herself. We made it as far as police outlines taped to the floor, but my three minute web search for some printable organs turned up nothing so far. Crap. We might have to draw them ourselves. Then we moved on to the pumpkins which we scooped out but didn't make faces or carvings on yet. They're waiting to rot and attract bugs on my dining room floor. I started trying to clear out our schoolroom and eating area bookshelves to consolidate our school materials, largely because Ms. Near-Ph.D in lit can't be totally sure of the answers to 7th grade level reading comprehension questions. No, I still haven't found my answer key. And now I have books and papers and folders all over the floor in, count them, three rooms. Then there's the matter of the sugar skulls. See yesterday's post. This morning I scooped out, with nary a regard to the difference between 1/2" and 1/4" (I was supposed to leave at least 1/2" thickness for the skull with my scooping), the fronts and backs of our sugar skulls. There are so, so many of them! I think I'm at 18 now, fronts and backs. There's not an inch left on my breakfast bar for one more square of cardboard (today I went at another cereal box, a macaroni and cheese box, and a stuffing box). The trouble is, you scoop out the skulls, and then you can make more skulls with the scoopings. And then when those dry enough to scoop, you can scoop those and make, you guessed it, more skulls from those scoopings. And so on and so forth.

* Frances and I started a puzzle. Got about 1/3 of the way through it. Then got distracted. Then dinnertime came, and Kerry had Ollie clean up this partially worked puzzle off the floor.

* Walter had a rough day. Too much candy. The banner moment was when he got really, really, angry (remember that book, "When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry!"?) at Rutledge for messing up his Lego Mindstorms robot that he started kicking doors, slamming doors, throwing things, and then STANDING ON THE PIANO!!!! I was livid. And not very patient. Not a good mother. He ended up in his room and taking a 30 minute nap, which I'm sure he needed.

* Walter worked on his Mindstorms robot, but then we got all snagged up in the pictographic instructions Lego gives about EVERYTHING. All we needed to know was how to charge the rechargeable battery (we couldn't find anything that looked like an AC adapter to plug the thing in) or how to get the battery cover off of the rechargeable battery so we could put it on over the 6 regular batteries I had to hunt down hither and yon in the house. But alas, Lego uses no words. It's like dealing with a mime. We got it eventually, but not after Walter burst into tears because he had been forced to remove some complicated Technic arms to deal with the power supply issue. The robot was way cool, though. It responds to his voice and darts toward him with surprising speed. We never did get around to loading up the software tutorial, so we haven't been able to do any programming yet.

* Rutledge was in high form today. His big thing now is screaming at me things like, "Stop saying Yes!" when I'm answering his many, many questions. Or screaming at me to, "Talk, Mom! Talk to me!" while I'm driving and he is chattering nonsense or screeching about something. Most of his utterance in the car is screeching. He hates his carseat. He hates the feeling of the seatbelt in his sister's pink carseat (why did I buy him a blue on? He wanted pink!). He hates that I drive at night with the interior lights off and that I won't appease his demand that I turn all lights on so that he can see. "Mom! Mom! It's dark!" He was angry because I wouldn't give him a big bag of acorns to throw around. Because I wouldn't give him more candy (how much candy did my children eat today? The unit of measure would surely be bushels). Because I had gotten another movie in addition to Bee Movie at the library. Because I had checked out anything at all when he didn't want me to check out anything. Because, if the truth be told, it was really 6:30 and not 5:30 p.m. because of the time change, and he was tired. Then he spilled his milk all over my new table runner that doesn't look particularly maching washable. The same table runner that several somebodies chucked pumpkin guts all over yesterday after I told them that no, they could not work on the pumpkins at the table, they had to do it on the floor.

* Frances, bless her heart, just comes up with anything to do but schoolwork. It's okay. I'm not too concerned. She's young. But I feel like I'm teaching in an institute for those with severe ADHD most days. All I wanted was a few minutes of attention to put some dates on a calendar and blow through some pages of Singapore Math. We hadn't looked at this particular book together before, and I thought it would be fun for her. Guess what? She prefers Saxon. What's wrong with the girl?

* Here's what we ate today on my watch: macaroni and cheese AND oatmeal for breakfast (because, you know, some people want oatmeal and some hate it). Candy. Apples. Candy. Our favorite recent delicacy: chicken nuggets done in the oven, not in the microwave. Candy. Stuffing. Candy. Cheese slices. Candy. Vitamins in the disguise of candy. Fruit Roll-Up, the "real" kind that I won't ever buy, because it was part of the Halloween candy that will never disappear.

* Frances got her new team leotard today. It was rather ceremonious how they passed them out to the girls and then they all ran to the bathroom to try them on. Frances, of course, ignored all directions and immediately ripped off all of the tags that had the byzantine washing instructions for these precious, rhinestone-studded showpieces and then threw the bag and tags into the giant trashcan by the door. So I got to hone my dumpster diving skills.

And that's what my day has been like. Hours worth of math procrastination. A big mess wherever I went. A pudding container on its side with a spoon hanging out on our carpeted stairs.

But we also finished My Side of the Mountain tonight. Ollie read the second half of the Star Wars Swarm book club book, so he's done now.

Amid all the chaos, I'm not sure what wisdom can really be found. Or what peace. Perhaps simply getting out for nearly three hours tonight and stepping away from the scene of today's life of crime is as much as one can wish for.

Sweetness

It's been a week of sugar. Yeah, yeah, there has been Halloween. We know about that. Walter was a "rich man," perhaps Bill Gates--at least that's what is on his nametag at this party. Rutledge went from having a pirate costume to being afraid of it to getting back his devil costume from last year to finally declaring that he was going to be "A Star War." In the end, this meant that he would reuse Ollie's Jango Fett jumpsuit from last year and would wear the mask for a grand total of less than one minute. Frances made it easy on us by wearing an old tablecloth with two eye holes cut in it and going as a ghost. And Ollie was Freddy Kruger. We ran around like crazy people looking for a mask on Halloween morning, but since I wasn't willing to pay $20 for an ugly piece of rubber, he settled for using makeup. I think he looked fabulous!


But that doesn't really address the many roles sugar has played in our life this week. There was last week, when we made pyramids and then igloos out of sugar cubes. I determined that this whole Classical Education thing was not entirely working when I was benignly neglecting Frances. When the twins were her age, we were knee deep in listening to the Story of the World CDs and making models of the Nile and mummifying things and doing science experiments with bouncing eggs. But now we were forging forward with our own plans, and Frances wasn't getting to do the projects and the endless listening to the story of Tarak, eating his lizards that served as their foundation for the study of history. Let's just say that the pyramid went a lot better than the igloo. Someone was telling me this week that it is very expensive to build round rooms and round houses, and I can fully understand why. Plus glue plus sugar cubes often equals a puddle.

Then there was the "edible" cell models. We've been attempting to cover Biology in a rather schizophrenic way this year. I almost always refer to books and education materials as "resources" rather than curricula, and this is because my real problem is that I can't make decisions. I'm a low commitment kind of gal these days. I use a little of this, a little of that, and I'm constantly looking for something that will fill things out just a little bit further or offer just a tweak on the perspective. And that is my justification for using, ahem, three separate curricula so far for science this year, and it doesn't even touch on the other books I've pulled in on the side. We started with LifePac Science, which has a bit too fundamentalist bent for my comfort, but it does systematically cover the major topics that one might see on a 4th or 5th grade standardized test and has the kids writing down the vocabulary words that marginally literate people should know when it comes to basic sciences. Walter and Ollie find it deadly dull. I find it often lacking in depth, including even the basics of the type that you'd find in the generalist Seymour Simon or Gail Gibbons picture books. Not that we're not reading those as well, but it makes me realize how much we need to supplement in order for me to feel like we've done justice to the topics. Much of last month was spent on weather--causes of differing weather, fronts, heat and cold and their ups and downs, pressure of various kinds, instruments for measuring various things that affect weather. It was really boring! Now weather could be a very exciting topic, but not in a LifePac. I was eager to move on--draw some diagrams in their notebooks, take some quick tests that say they know enough not to be meteorologically ignorant, and then upward and onward. Back to Biology.

So the topic now is cells. Animal cells and plant cells. Another of our so-called curricula this year is the E=McQ free Life Sciences curricula that I downloaded and printed over the summer. This is much better suited to doing while including Frances, which is appealing, and it introduces just a few more terms than what we've seen elsewhere. So far we're not on cells there, but the focus on biotic vs. abiotic was a start. Then I popped over to my newest acquisition, Real Science 4 Kids Biology. We used this series for Chemistry a few years ago (two years too soon, but I digress...), and the Biology lives up so far to my expectations based on my past experience with this author. Since we've already chugged through quite a bit of the LifePac on cells and have rounded that out a bit with Time4Learning's segments on cells, organelles, and the "building blocks of life," the extra material and its lively presentation in the RS4K book went down well. Plus there was a pleasant diversion with an initial chapter on taxonomy. Ever the comedian, Walter had a great deal to say about old King Philip Came Over From Great Spain. The Kingdom was King Arthur's. What do we do to our nails? Phylum. The Order is a McRib. The Family is the Clendenons. The Genus has an IQ of 150. Ha ha.

But I digress again. The big adventure wasn't what we studied. It was what happened next. Last Thursday evening we made these jello cells. They involved a transparent shade of flavored jello, some Knox gelatine, and a variety of bad pre-Halloween candy.

First, Frances' animal cell cracked in half. So she ate it. Then Ollie's nucleus blew his animal cell apart. Walter had better luck, but overall, the plant cells went a bit more smoothly. For one, we had figured out a better system for implanting organelles at that point. And we also benefitted from the more rigid cell walls that distinguish the plant from the animal cell.

But the true excitement came in the morning, when Frances popped excitedly into my room and announced, while my eyes barely had the sleep rubbed out of them, that she had puked four times during the night. In her room. On the bed and the floor. And she had moved the sleeping Rutledge to the floor to get him out of the way. This followed right on the heels of vomit and dog poop all over Bilbo's crate and the living room floor from Hokie. Anyone who knows me know that this is way too much provoking to me! I responded by cancelling our plans to go to Inflation Nation, the indoor inflatable bouncy monstrosity place I had set up a trip to for our homeschool group. And then I began cleaning. Ten hours later, I was still disinfecting. And ten days later, we've managed to go unscathed by her illness. I'm almost certain that that gelatinous cytoplasm was at the root of the ordeal!

This weekend's sugary moment involved...drumroll please...twenty pounds of sugar. Nearly a cup of meringue powder. For the past two years, we have had a tradition of making sugar skulls to celebrate Day of the Dead. I couldn't let it go by this year without some royal icing, so this afternoon I bought my own sugar skull mold--an XL one--at World of Mirth. In the past, we've used Adena's, so I'm thrilled to have one of my own, but I think I preferred making the Large size instead of this gargantuan one, which takes a lot more raw material than I had bargained for!



This is my base of operations. A teaspoon of meringue powder and of water for every cup of sugar. I didn't have a bowl big enough to prepare the whole bag of sugar at once, so I kept it going six cups at a time.



The sandlike mixture is packed tightly into the skull mold--once for the front and once for the back. After I let them dry overnight on little squares of cardboard on the counter, I will scoop out some of the sugar mixture from the back of the pieces and then allow them to dry for another 12 hours. When that time is up, I'll use cement-like royal icing (powdered sugar, more meringue powder, and water) to glue the two parts together to make a 3-D sugar skull that we will then be able to decorate with more icing, pieces of colored foil, bottle caps, sequins, shells, or whatever we decide to use. When they are dry, they can last for years. If Rutledge hadn't made a snack of our previous ones, we would still have the ones we made at previous co-ops. Unfortunately, all I have left is a smeared half of one on my schoolroom bookshelf.



Here are the blanks, reposing on pizza boxes, stuffing boxes, cereal boxes, and whatever else I could scavenge. Our recycling was picked up on Wednesday, and any boxes that didn't go out with that are being saved to wrap Christmas presents in. I had to get creative!

While we weren't being artistic with sugar, we were on field trips this week. Tuesday we saw the play "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" at Theatre IV, which is the local theatre for children. It was pretty bad. Frances liked it--it was silly. But it completely lacked the spirit--and yea, the pun is intended--of Irving's original story. We've seen a few other live drama productions of Sleepy Hollow over the years, including an awesome one at Explore Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway that was done outdoors and included a great deal of memorable music. But this particular prodution belabored the less-important details of the story, took some liberties not exactly implied by the author, and most of all, wasn't creepy. Hmmm.

Thursday we traveled to Mount Vernon. Can you believe that I've lived in Virginia for 36 years and I've never been to Washington's home? It is a full-day affair. There was an engaging introductory movie, an anticipatory line to buy tickets to the whole shebang in the first place, and a pretty amazing model of Washington's actual house that had walls that moved up and down so that you could see the perfectly scaled and detailed interior. I think the kids enjoyed the food court most, with its historically accurate Pizza Hut and 32 ounce soft drinks. We added on a "National Treasure Tour" to our regular ticket, and this got us into the basement of Mount Vernon as well as took us on a walking tour of the grounds to all of the places where the movie was filmed, with commentary on the historical accuracy of what was portrayed, how the Mount Vernon Ladies Association or whatever it is called that owns the property communicated with the Walt Disney company about how they could use the property, and gave us stunning views of the Potomac.


It was a chilly and windy day, but the turning leaves were inspiring.


But not quite as inspiring to 10 year old boys as this: a 3 person privy with wooden drawers underneath that could be taken out and emptied. This was a pretty state of the art privy for its day because it represented centralized sanitation set apart from the house. Their friend was especially repelled by the group aspect of the layout.


Everyone needs a photo prove that they were really there. In this one, the house looks more proportional than it does to me in real life. Up close, it looked a little, well...short. Like a model of a house instead of a whole one. It must have something to do with those second story windows that go right up to the roof. Some of the interior highlights include the very fashionable green room (I'm so glad that this is not the vogue these days--I can't stand when molding is painted as well as the walls!) and the bed where Washington died. We had just seen Jefferson Davis' house the week before, so the continual question the boys had, as they did there, was, "Is this the original ____." Imagine that repeated over and over and over again. What's neat is that Mount Vernon has been working tirelessly to acquire as many of the original items in the inventory in the house as possible--many were sold at estate sales when George and Martha died or were pilfered over the years.


The formal gardens and fruit orchard were not of interest to my world-weary historical house tourists. But they were heartily impressed by the very large trees, including some stunning tulip poplars on the property. When we were at a wedding reception at Washington's River Farm, which is down the street from Mount Vernon, there were only two trees there that were original to Washington's time, and both were the dreaded Black Walnut. I say dreaded because for several years I did battle with a large and violent black walnut in our yard on Sherwood Avenue. I hated that thing! Darn rock-hard nuts with sharp points that embed in your yard and stab your feet when you think you've picked every last one of them up!


And finally, we had a good time Saturday night at the fall festival held by our church. The site where it was held was perfect--many acres for hayrides behind the tractor (all you need is a 3 year old boy to access the deep appeal of this again!), a gladiator moon bounce that could hold about 30 kids at once (this is a church with about 25 kids ages 3-5, not to mention the many on either side of that), a chili cookoff, a bonfire and marshmallows, and plenty of friends. So even though we didn't make it to a pumpkin patch this year, I do feel like we lived fall to its fullest so far. Now if only the leaves would come off the trees!