I'm always amazed by how fast the house can get to be a complete mess.  Especially when I feel like we weren't even home for most of the day.  

I've been teaching a "Before Five in a Row" class at the homeschool enrichment center for this five week session.  I had originally not planned to teach anything this year because I wanted to concentrate for now more on meeting my own kids' needs and to reduce general stress and obligations in my life.  But since the twins are taking a Latin class and I'm out there anyway with two extra kids in tow, I thought I might as well use the time doing something with them and with anyone else with younger children knocking around.  

Before Five in a Row is a really lame curriculum.  Five in a Row is really super for giving gentle suggestions for ways to stretch some lovable children's books.  It's not rocket science, but the activities or topics to talk about help me to apply the same kinds or tenor of ideas to other books, and the book selections this author makes have been perfect for Frances--she loves the books, remembers them and the special time we spent rereading them and putting story discs on maps and making apple pies and visiting statues of soldiers and sailors.  Before Five in a Row is really unnecessary.  But I thought hey, this is pretty simple to carry out, doesn't even require the book (which, like I said, is pretty useless), and it won't take a lot of my prep time.  The first week we read _Going on a Bear Hunt_.  It's a perfect book for a three year old, but I wasn't sure about the five and six year old who turn out to be the only other people signed up for the class.  I need not have worried.  We watched the author read the story on Youtube, which was beyond amusing and because we had to watch it four times, took most of our class period.  We painted and decorated our own bear cave.  We ate some bear-themed, bear-shaped snacks.  We sorted gummy bears, did some comparisons, and made a bar graph.  I had about ten other things planned that we never got to at all.  So when I had to come up with something in ten minutes or less for _Caps for Sale_, I was focused, I was on a mission.  And hey, I still planned more than I needed to!  We read and/or listened to the story...get this...six times in 50 minutes.  I read it once.  Read a sequel to it.  We listened to it on cassette.  We acted it out.  Four times, with four different "peddlers" and standing on the desks as monkeys.  We ate bananas.  We practiced walking with ten hats on our heads.  And that was it.  Easy peasy!  

So next week, I'm going to just revisit this week's book and take a quick glance back at the bear hunt.  I'll look for yet another media version of the cap story, we'll count some coins to see a few ways to make 50 cents.  We can make coin rubbings.  And the stuff for all of this is already in my bag, because the golden rule of classes with preschoolers/Five in a Row is that however much you prepare, you're only going to use half of what you brought.

And I'm not teaching after this session ends.  Even ten minutes of prep the night before is still the beginning of a cascade of morning prep.  Loading all that stuff in your car (today I had a new plan to bring a big bag on wheels and put all of my little bags in it--this worked, but then I left the bag with the kids' Latin homework in it on the floor in the kitchen at home), running off a few more copies of this, slogging all this stuff (50 pound bags of rice, ten cans of shaving cream, giant tubs of Crisco to put in plastic bags to see how polar bears keep insulated in the ice, a bucket of plastic jewels, etc.) through the rain, because the more you bring, the worse the weather is going to be....  I don't think the return on my investment of sanity is quite high enough. 

Kerry hates Christmas. I know that.  He thinks that *everything* about it is tacky.  He thinks that *anything* that I do with regard to decorations is over the top and "gaudy," a word that he grossly mispronounces.  How can a tree with nothing but white lights on it be gaudy?!  He faulted me for putting on another string of lights so that there was even coverage.  We have wreaths on each front window of our house and a single white candle in each one and a red berry wreath on the door.  To me, about the only thing that you could say was cheesy about this is that the wreaths and candles are fake, as they should be, I think.  I like to decorate the mantle.  We have a small nativity scene and a larger one that is falling apart but that has great sentimental value to me (my parents bought it the first year they were married at a nursery where we went every year to see an animated Christmas display and that had several cute mini-Christmas shops).  There are a few things that get put on a shelf here or there or on the piano.  There's a small stash of Christmas toys and books that come out for the month.  But there are no loud, colored lights, not an excess of plastic.  I think it's really offensive to him that we have two trees, but I can honestly say that I'm really glad that the ornaments Bilbo is chewing up are the ones that I bought in a big set from Lowe's for $16 instead of the ones that my aunt made for me in her pottery studio when I was a child or the ones that my children have made for me over the years.  It simply wouldn't be Christmas without the ornaments that have always ben part of the holiday for me; as an only child, I have all of my parents' ornaments from when I was growing up, and every year we add at least one for each child.  I don't care if any of them are "ugly" or if there are getting to be too many of them.  And I love seeing Christmas trees in people's front windows, but I also like to have the tree where our family actually spends our time.  So I can live with two trees and not feel totally crazy.  Neither of them is 12 feet tall, made of fur, flocked with silver, made of tinsel--they're just regular happy trees.  And I'd honestly risk divorce in order to have the kind of holiday for my children that I know they love and will remember.  Frances, like me, just loves to see lights and decorations, the more the better.  It devastates all of my children, just as it used to devastate me, that we aren't one of those crazy Christmas houses.  Every night, Rutledge just stands, with the front door open, looking at our neighbor's wild and random display.  There are just haphazard multi-colored lights everywhere, looped up high onto trees and from one tree to another.  What's scary is that I could so easily be one of those people if I was given encouragement from the right kind of obsessed person.  Instead, I have to live with the fact that any work I do to make Christmas happen is work that I will do all by myself, no matter how much help I might need, how much easier something would be with an extra set of hands even for a second, or how helpful an extra two or three inches of height might be.  I have to work extra hard to tune out the dissonance about how vain I am and how I'm wasting my time and "bringing it on myself" if I have any trouble.  But this is my favorite inside-the-house time of year, and it's hard to let it go and take down the extra bit of warmth from a few more glowing lights when January comes.

Funny question from Frances today:  "Do adults ever throw up?"  Her gymnastics teacher got sick and had to go home today.  I think she heard her answer.

What we're reading:  _Because of Winn Dixie_.  This is a book that I had thought of as a book for younger kids, more like Frances's age.  But the themes and treatment of them is really much more mature than what could easily be related to by a seven year old.  I'm finding it right on for Walter and Ollie--they are much better able now to empathize with the people in the book, have a broader sense of socio-economic variety and disparity, slightly more knowledge of the effects of things like alcoholism, how older children view younger ones, and all kinds of things over the head of most six to eight year olds.  So again, I'm seeing that some books are useable by a variety of ages, but have a greater impact at some times rather than others.  I have this theory I've been tossing around in my head about children's books that one of the best judges of whether a book is a really good fit for your child is to look at whether the main protagonist's age is older than your child or younger.  I think that most of the time, a book's timing is most dead on when the age is the same to slightly younger.  I think of the Ramona books--they're at their funniest and most relatable when the reader has already gone through the stage that Ramona is at.  It's not that a younger child couldn't understand the plot or find some humor, but it's your ability as a reader to share Ramona's perceptions and empathize that make them such great accounts of growing up in a middle class family.  It's too bad these books are often discarded these days as being "below" the middle grade students for whom they are really intended.  Anyway, in addition to Winn Dixie, we also just finished _Lily's Crossing_ and read another short novel, _On My Honor_.  I think that one was an eye-opener in many ways to Ollie about the emotions that a book can explore.  It was a very sad book in so many ways, and it's main theme was guilt, fear, and our terrifying sense of responsibility for what happens to the people around us.  It didn't wrap up neatly at the end; everything wasn't okay.  Ollie kept remarking about how he didn't know a book could be so sad.  There was a lot to talk about--whether the boy was honorable, why he didn't tell his parents or the parents of the boy who had drowned, whether it really was his fault, whether it was the father's fault, whether things like this could really happen and how we can't know how we'd respond.  These are so much the kinds of books that I seek out (far more than this one about a Sammyead that grants wishes or one about dragons and dragon riders).  And it seems like Ollie shares my preference for realism, for books about real people, real emotions, and real settings.  We're on a Patricia Riley Giff kick right now, and I'm looking forward to the next book of hers we're going to read--a spinoff from Lily's Crossing, also taking place during World War II.

Somehow, in here, we have to read Eragon.  I am dreading it.  Neither Ollie nor Walter is taking any initiative to read it on their own, and I have told them that they don't have to finish it, but they do need to get through part of it.  If I was a better mother, I'd be knocking myself out to get it on audio, but all of the audiobooks of it are checked out in our library system, and I haven't checked the neighboring county because I don't make it over there very often these days.  Plus Walter and Ollie really are capable of reading the book themselves if they choose to, and they're choosing not to.  I don't really know what to do about this kind of situation.  They want to go to book club to see their friends, but they don't want to take the time to read a larger book on a topic they're not interested in.  I don't want to let them skip months when they don't like the book and go when they do like it (like, say, when they chose it...) because that isn't fair to the other members.  But at the same time, I know I've been to book clubs where I haven't finished the book or other members haven't even started it, and they come anyway.  I also totally sympathize with not wanting to read some books, especially if those books are really long or will take a lot of time.  I know that if someone asked me to read a 500 page book about dragons, especially at a time when I was busy with school or when I had a lot of other projects I was in the middle of, I'd choose to skip it.  And I'd go to book club anyway ;)  But kids can't do that without (a) making me look bad and (b) looking like incompetent readers below the dreaded Reading Level of everyone else and (c) being rude to their peers.  In my book club, if someone suggested something too time consuming or that I really couldn't see myself reading (a thousand page sci-fi novel; an 800 page bodice-ripper with small print), I'd definitely speak up.  So I'm torn.  I guess I'll see what happens by next week.  If they want to be with their friends, then they're going to need to cooperate with the demands of the book club, fun or not.  And who knows, maybe they'll enjoy the book.

I have the most racking case of hiccups tonight. It's miserable!

Last night, the boys did some extra pre-emptive math work, so they had kind of a free day today (Walter is excited because his work is easy and fun right now because he just started a new book, so he's moving ahead even further because he's enjoying it). Ollie and I worked our way through www.games.johnnymoney.com and made our own virtual business and ran it for 24 months. In the end, he had a lot of money and a very successful "gifts and gadgets" shop named B is For Bob. It was a lot of fun, and I was actually surprised at how conservative Ollie was in his decisions and how seriously he thought about the situations that would arise (President wants to give a speech inside the store; movie studio is shooting a film outside your store; water main breaks and floods the store, customer slips on water on the floor and falls, etc.). I would have thought he would either be recklessly risky to test the limits or would choose the funniest answer instead of the one that might yield the best results for the business, but he was very focused on making this thing profitable. Walter, of course, was off taking a bath with Rutledge after the first 30 minutes of our adventure.

My greatest achievement today was nearly completing my Christmas shopping. Though I never set foot in Toys R Us if I can help it, they had Legos buy one get one 50% off, so I got Walter's Indiana Jones set and an airplane. With the extra 15 minutes I had left over before needing to pick up Frances from dance class, I popped in Target and there was the Nerf gun I had been looking for without success over the weekend. Big score! I found a SWAT team action figure set, an Othello game, and some sock monkey PJs for Rutledge, so I think I'm more or less done. All that's left is Frances' "big gift," which will either be an American Girl doll or an aquarium (but not both! I don't think she can wrap her mind around this!). It feels good not to have any pressure now to be in stores any more than I need to.

Ollie did a one-and-a-half tonight at dive. I can't wait to see it. He has a real talent, and I wish there was a way that he could practice and learn more frequently. He truly loves it, but there simply must be some middle ground between once every week or every other week and four times a week for two or three hours at a time an hour from home.

Franny just returned from what sounds like a very exciting weekend in Lynchburg. Annie and Tim took her home after Thanksgiving dinner, and she had a very full few days. Biking, rock climbing, a sleepover with a new friend, seeing Madagascar 2, checking out the dead animals on the wall at WT's house, learning to tie her shoes, raking leaves in the yard, dancing to Hampster Dance (yeah, the spelling drives me crazy!).

I've found this to be true in so many things, but Frances is so open to learning things from other people. When she went climbing with us, she was terrified, but with her aunt and uncle, she seemed to be nervous, but ended up going up the 40 foot wall all by herself!


Way up there, the end is in sight. Everyone there was cheering for her.




You can see here how tiny she looks next to regular people.


She parties afterwards!

While she was gone, the rest of us did a lot of nothing. We watched "Vertigo," we watched "Snoopy Come Home," we played some video games and board games. I did some Christmas shopping--pretty much have everything for everyone except Walter's Lego set, Ollie's Nerf gun, and Fran's aquarium or whatever she's getting. Most of the little stuff is taken care of, and Rutledge is well taken care of. He's going to get a lot of regifted items from the attics--a pirate ship, a mini air hockey game, a remote control snake.

Walter caught up from being 2 weeks behind on his electronics class. He had two weekly tests to complete, as well as 10 assignments to build. The work feels pretty difficult to him, so there was a lot of crying today about it. He gets it all worked up in his head as something daunting and overwhelming, when all he really needs to do is relax and just dig in and get it done. He certainly knows far more now about electronics than I do.

Ollie and I finished _Lily's Crossing_ today, and last night we finished _Bright April_ and _The Cabin Faced West_. We're on the verge of finishing _The Penderwicks on Gardam Street_ on CD in the car. The trip out to Farmville today certainly helped in that regard. It's kind of interesting that we seem to be on an extended streak of reading books with girl protagonists. He has really liked all of these books, and so have I. I'm not sure what we'll read next; probably whatever isn't accruing huge fines at the library. This week I got within two books of the 75 book checkout limit our library has now imposed. I don't even want to think how much that is going to cost me when I, as always, lose track of time and give my involuntary contribution to the treasurer of Chesterfield County.

We're getting ready to decorate the gnome house for Christmas, a yearly tradition of ours. I spent way too much time in the attic tonight trying to sort out decorations we don't need, decorations I am not ready to get rid of yet (because they were my family's growing up, and I can't let them go, even though they're really outdated--without being "vintage"--or falling apart or were just cheap plastic in the first place), and trying to thin out the mess up there. I think a lot got accomplished, though grrrr....the lights I put on our Christmas tree somehow managed to get a big problem up at the top and I had to remove a string of lights, which of course could not be fixed with any of the dozens of replacement lights I had in the kitchen drawer. So now I have to venture to Lowe's or somewhere similar tomorrow to pick up two more strings of lights before we can start putting up the ornaments. I'll be really happy when we get the boxes out of the way and move on to the part where we're just living in a fully Christmas-a-fied house.

Buy Nothing Day

According to the dominant media, yesterday was Black Friday, but to a smaller contingent, it is known as Buy Nothing Day. What's kind of fascinating to me is that if you start googling Buy Nothing Day, at first, you'll think you understand the gist of the so-called holiday. But after a while, you'll run into Buy Nothing Day parody sites, or at least I think they were parody sites. And after that, it was extremely difficult for me to read the tone of anything I was reading about both buying nothing, nothingness, and taking the message to the streets. That's the trouble with some of this social consciousness raising--the line between sensibility and joke are mercilessly blurred.

At any rate, whatever Buy Nothing Day is and whatever the point of it may be, I celebrated it yesterday by staying home, playing games, taking the dog for a walk, eating, reading to the kids, and actively avoiding spending money ;)

Who knew that this would be the greatest toy Rutledge has ever played with.  To be honest, I don't think there's anyone in the family who can't waste a good number of minutes with the Playful Penguins.  Hey, it's educational--it's a lesson in infinity.

I done broke one of the cardinal rules of Thanksgiving:  don't start meddling with Christmas until the current holiday is over.  But Thanksgiving was late this year (last year wasn't it on something like the 22nd?), and I had some time on my hands, and sometimes you just need a little Christmas right this very minute.

As of last year, we have not just one, but two trees.  We broke down and bought an artificial tree, though right now I can't, for the life of me, remember why.  Yes, I'm kind of allergic to pines (I think the worst was the Scotch Pine we got one year, though I have plenty of trouble with the Fraser Firs we normally get, too).  And yes, they drop needles everywhere because we do things like set them over heating vents or forget to water them for weeks.  And because we often buy them cut--for financial reasons (we used to routinely spend about $85-95 on a tree when we cut them ourselves, and that was when we lived within an hour of a good tree farm up in Floyd; here our local "cut your own" place that is close has Scotch Pines, but the Fraser Firs are trucked in and set on posts to look like they're really growing)--they often have been away from the soil for a while before we get them.  But since I've been grown, I've always had a real Christmas tree.  Growing up we always had artificial trees, I had never been to a tree farm or even seen one, and I associated Christmas with the smell of plastic and scented candles that had been packed together in boxes in our utility room where the heat broke each of them down into a beloved scent that spoke of our family traditions.  

I also broke down last year and bought one of those big sets of ornaments that are all color-coordinated and will trim a tree to make it look like adults live in your house.  I thought that was fitting for the artificial tree, even though we have so many ornaments from my kids, from my own childhood, and that we've collected over the years that we could easily fill two trees with them.  This year, because of Senor Bilbo, I'm afraid to put anything in our main living area that I would be devastated to find chewed to bits, so I have the fake stuff here.  It's kind of pretty, but it doesn't completely speak Christmas to me.  I'm going to have to tackle putting lights on the real tree so that we can get the good ornaments up tonight.

Our Thanksgiving holiday was really lovely.  Every family has its quirks, and ours is no exception, but though it was over all too quickly (kind of a good thing, in its own way--we're really just needing to plan for one single meal, not a big deal of houseguests or a need for entertainment), everything was nearly perfect.  There was one tense moment with a Christmas tree and a saw with unsharp teeth, but even that was over quickly--and I learned about how to remove tree sap from all over your hands, which was important before I started knitting again! Frances went biking with Tim, the boys played lacrosse with Tim, and I made some really awesome pumpkin fudge, and not the cheating microwave kind, though that tastes good, too.  I couldn't remember what the "soft ball stage" was, so I was afraid that I had let it move on to the dreaded "hard ball stage," but it seems that everything turned out fine.  It's all I can do not to eat a whole panful in 24 hours!

The rest of our time has been spent playing games:  2 grueling and long games of Monopoly, Stratego, chess, and the Wii, which has been moved downstairs.  And I had the misfortune of screwing up the hat I was working on by doing something I'll never do again:  Knitting in the Dark.  I had to unravel 36 rows!  But I'm back on track, and if all goes well, I should finish this piece by the end of today.

I used to be addicted to painting. House painting. Room painting. I have overcome it, thankfully, but today I went on a cabinet painting blitz beginning at 4:20 and not stopping until just a few minutes ago (less than 1 hour break in there). Ollie helped me, and we sanded, primed, and gave two coats of paint to all of the kitchen cabinets. I am now struggling with how to best use the very dregs of a quart can (the gallon was $53!). I think it looks a lot better, but I'm ready for the whole project to be over. I need to get a second coat on three major large surfaces which all take a beating because of their location. And I need to reinstall the doors on the bottom cabinets. But hopefully tomorrow will not be all about the cabinets. Alas, it's going to be all about cleaning all day long. I wonder if Kerry's parents will decide to come over in the afternoon or if they'll stay at their hotel until dinnertime when we'll go to Ruby Tuesday and then will not come until Thursday. Not knowing their plans is really difficult--do we go about business as usual tomorrow, or do we prepare as if for battle?

My goal for this holiday weekend is to finish my 4th elf hat. Will it really happen? Stay tuned....

I honestly think I may have the beginning of Alzheimer's. Today I was supposed to meet a friend at the park, and I went to the wrong place--Ashland instead of Crump. My ability to process information, especially printed information, is just extremely low. Tallying up how many things I've mixed up in the past three days is staggering. I went to a play on the wrong day (that's why no one was there). I went to the wrong park. I forgot the food for the Thanksgiving basket. I took Frances to Open Gym at the wrong time (in my favor, the website said it started at 6:30, which isn't what I remembered from the sign at the gym, but I let the internet take precedence). I'm really scaring myself.

I finished painting our end table black tonight, and we read a book called _The White Elephant_, which is by Sid Fleischman, the author of _The Whipping Boy_. I'm also reading two other books simultaneously with the boys--_Lily's Crossing_ and _The Cabin Faced West_. The kids all watched Wall-E while I steamed our stairs, gathering several cups of watery goo the color of black coffee out of the carpet. I'll be so glad when we one day get rid of that carpet, and I'm going to push for replacing it with hardwood until I have no more breath in my body.

Tomorrow is feeling like crunch time. Anything that is going to be done before Thanksgiving needs to be done tomorrow, and I'm glad that I have the afternoon hours while half of the gang is in pottery class to get some errands done--pick up a piece of leather or something to use as a patch on the sofa (and pick up a tapestry needle to sew it on with). Keep looking for a winter coat for Ollie and a fleece jacket for myself. Take back library books. Get last-minute baking supplies, especially butter, which we ran out of this morning. I'm so excited that Christmas is right around the corner!

What I'm tired of hearing about: Joy Behar's comments on homeschooling on The View. Come on! It's "The View," not people who matter who are talking about this!