I wonder if everyone's life looks like mine. I kind of hope not, because then I have cause for optimism about our own future being different.
We're in Transition Week. One of a couple. The time when summer pushes back on the spring stuff that isn't finished and then you toss in a couple of high-intensity special capstone events for good measure. Add in a little Clendenon craziness, and you get the picture.
Here's today, and yes, it's still a schoolday on top of all this, not that anything got done:
Orientation and first training session at Learning RX
Drop off leftover conference books at St. Joseph's Villa
Practice play lines with friend
Dive practice
Swim practice
Tennis practice
Dance recital rehearsal
What we skipped: baseball game; picking up flowers for Frances's hair for recital
Tomorrow is another Learning RX session (way across town), play practice, band practice, flute lesson, Cub Scouts, dive practice, swim practice. I'm exhausted just writing it.
Though we have a lot going on, probably the biggest time consumer that is both exciting and stressful is the cognitive training that Walter is doing. This program, PACE, requires 3 hours a week in the center for 12 weeks working one on one with his trainer, Andrea, and then we need to do at least three more hours at home with him on the off days. Tonight's first assignment is to have Walter watch the Karate Kid, which we're doing right now (yes, that's right, it's after 10 p.m. and the kids are still up) to learn the lessons of wax-on/wax-off and sand the floor and kicking like a bird. Walter's assignment is to try to figure out what Daniel learns from all his exercises, what the wax on, wax off has to do with karate, how practice and concentration in one thing that seems unrelated can carry over into other areas of your life. We also did some training, even though he wasn't necessarily supposed to tonight. The first thing they learn is the names of all the presidents forward and backward in order, and they are timed on this and must meet certain benchmarks. Walter has it down, but he doesn't have the time thing covered. He's getting stressed, but he's working on it. He managed to get a "gold" in the 10 and 20 categories, but not on all 44, which is where he started crying with the stopwatch going. He also worked on attention arrows, which is a variation on the old say the name of the color when the word name of another color is on the paper. Again, he is timed on how fast he can say the names of rows of colored arrows or say which direction they point and has to say the color of each arrow on the beat of a metronome at various speeds. It is cool to see the gradual improvements. For each task, he gets points, so he has incentive to work harder. My motivation is high now, and I hope it will stay that way for the next 12 weeks. It's intensive, but finite, and hopefully this will improve his auditory and visual processing and his processing speeds, which should carry over into his reading, listening, attention and other skills.
At the conference, I also picked up a new wordbuilding/vocabulary program that I'm dying to start. I'm second-guessing myself for having gotten a level that may be higher than what we should have started with, but I am hoping that this will help break down vocabulary to help with both spelling and understanding longer words. What I'm seeing is a shift as we had into summer. We'll finish up Saxon math one of these days soon--about 12 more days left or something, but then we'll focus on this brainskills stuff, doing more of the Critical Thinking Company books that I've collected over the years, playing games, doing this vocabulary stuff, and helping Frances learn to read. I'm pretty impressed with her progress over the last month. She has been working through Headsprout Reading, which is an online program (yes, I'm spending more money on "education" than I thought possible now) that has her completing one 10-15 minute episode a day and claims to get her reading at the level of an average 8 year old by the end. We'll see if it's true. I still haven't seen the real "click" that tends to happen with reading. She's still laboring through the short words like she always has, but there's bit by bit change, and her fluency is going up. I'll try to remember to say how it's going in a few weeks. She's near the end of the first 40 episodes right now, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to pay for the next 40 right away. Rutledge is doing it, too, but he's moving slowly. Amazingly, though he is delayed in many areas, he is starting to read some short words and knows quite a few sounds. He's not exactly breezing through or understanding everything, but slow and steady wins the race, right?
And Spongebob School, as we call it, is nearly over. He has been doing speech therapy for almost 3 months, but unfortunately, there have only been about 5 sessions so far because of holidays and then us being gone last week. Now he only has one more before the schoolyear ends. It's a little frustrating, since a delay in such a short life is significant and 3 months is a long time to wait to get on the issue again, and so far he hasn't gotten to material that is challenging or works on his problem areas (specifically, one of his age-inappropriate areas is that he can't say "k" and g" sounds at the beginnings of words). But he has had a lot of fun, he has learned all of his sounds taught so far, and he performs them like a little trained monkey. I'm wondering if there's something I can do to further the process over the summer. I hate the feeling that I need to become an expert in someone else's professional area, but I guess that's what parenting is, when it all comes down. We are the experts. We are at ground level and know what our kids need, and then we endeavour to find out how to meet those needs, no matter how far flung from what we thought we were experts in they might be.
Oh my goodness. I can't believe my kids are still up. Especially with a physical day like they've had (dive, swim, tennis). We're all working on getting up earlier, particularly now that I have this running ambition and program I'm trying to follow. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow will be rainy, which will eliminate some of the things from our list of to-dos, but I'm excited about the changes toward a more outdoor lifestyle that the impending summer brings, I'm excited about wrapping up some of our regular year stuff, and I'm ready for a bit of change.
Nancy
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Digging out from under total insanity, here I am again.
I have been on hiatus from what feels like everything. I think in a sense I'm lonely, maybe doing too much of things I don't really want to do for reasons I don't really understand. I'm really busy, but feeling pretty alone at the same time. Maybe I'm simply moving too fast. Maybe everyone I know is moving too fast. Maybe we all need to slow down. Who knows.
We just got back from a week in the village of Hatteras on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is the second time we have stayed in Hatteras--the first was three years ago at this same time of year. And there was a lot in common between these two trips. Rain and gale force winds, a television full of warnings about rip tides that kept us from the water for days. Not that you'd want to go in while it's in the 40s and 50s in the air, not to mention the water. Well, amend that. Actually, kids will go in just about anything, if given permission.
The first trip we took to Hatteras was salvaged by the miracle of letterboxing. There were at least 25 letterboxes back in 2006 in the Hatteras Island/Ocracoke area. Though it was cold and we were underdressed, we did get out and about into areas we never would have seen without a list of vague clues to guide us. We learned about and hiked through maritime forests with trees stunted by the salt wind we were so familiar with firsthand. We saw at least 5 snakes in 5 different environments--historic graveyards full of downed sailors, hollow trees in the Buxton Woods, in the Pamlico Sound, on a forested trail on Ocracoke, and guarding a letterbox with its life.
Unfortunately, this year when we were looking for an afternoon activity, we discovered that the placers of many of the letterboxes on Hatteras had made most of them private or by invitation only. This seems to me to violate the spirit of the communal activity of letterboxing, open to all. We did attempt to revisit one that had become overgrown, so the trail was no longer visible, but we gave up on it in deference to the snakes who doubtless called the spot home. While there, we visited the "Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum," which is fascinating and full of information about the dangerous shoals and long history of warfare and shipwreck off the Atlantic Coast. We also had fun poking through another old graveyard tucked into a condo and giant sound-house community linked to a popular shopping area by a boardwalk over a vibrant salt marsh and found a letterbox under the fourth step down off a gazebo.
Finally, on the fifth day of our trip, things were looking up in the weather. It was sunny. Our day on Ocracoke, always a favorite, ended in drizzle turning to genuine rain, which was a shame since we had just unloaded our bikes and were ready to head out into the nether reaches of a very cute place. We managed to visit a few shops (to get some blessed relief from being pelted by wetness). On the plus side, we found a super coffee shop that had perfect climbable trees, and Walter amused the many guests sitting out under the trees with his tree-shimmying skills. Rutledge, of course, made friends with many, many dogs, some of whom were searching for another friend and some of whom were offended by very short people who aren't always gentle. There were the two French Bulldogs at lunch at the seafood restaurant, wearing their life preservers because this breed can't swim. There were the two dachshunds on the beach who didn't like children. And the hyper beagle puppy who came by shortly afterward. Then there were the coarse-haired Portugeuse Water Dogs. And the chihuahua on the sound when we semi-trespassed onto land for sale on the sound. The westie on the way to the pizza place. While on Ocracoke, we also shopped at our favorite little shell and trinket store, visited the ponies descended from the ones supposedly brought on a Spanish ship way back when, and climbed the trees in the cemetery and read the names of the British who perished in an attack by a German U-Boat during World War II.
On my final day there, it was sunny, and we were able to fly the very cool kites we bought on the second day of the trip, the kites that didn't appreciate the 35 mph gusts from the early part of the week. Ollie had a red, white, and blue airplane which, when all is told, was really a delta in disguise, Walter had a Red Baron plane, and Frances had a poison dart frog on a classic diamond. We got sunburned without realizing it. The older three kids played for hours in a rather cold ocean that most sane people stayed out of. We got mahi-mahi, steamed shrimp, and bay scallops right from a local boat. And we played yet more Set, a game that figured very strongly in this vacation. We did almost all of a 550 piece puzzle (no, I haven't forgiven the others for not putting in the last 25 pieces of plain blue sky that I left off when I went to bed after midnight).
Leaving was the hard part. I had to physically peel myself away. It was as if a magnet was holding me back. The day was gorgeous, the weather warm, and I wanted more than anything in the world to (a) become very irresponsible. I had volunteered a long time back to organize the used curriculum sale at a statewide homeschooling conference. Suddenly, I wanted to just flake out, to not be where I was supposed to, to say that my mental health was such that I just *had* to stay at the beach. And that made me kind of slow getting out. It felt like there was lead in my feet keeping them from pushing the gas pedal of the car. As I was going over the bridge off the Outer Banks, Margaritaville came on. I'll admit, this isn't a song that I have ever completely understood. But at this moment, the appeal was undeniable. The life of just kicking back, shirking all responsibility to anyone else, and just drinking for the rest of the day, week, maybe month or year was calling my name. But I kept driving. For the (b) above, I also thought about just driving right on past the conference and on across the country. See "being irresponsible" above.
But I went to the conference, the book sale was successful. I wish I could have seen more of the conference itself, which i didn't feel like I experienced because I spent more or less the entire time except for a brief run for lunch and an hour out for one session on a topic that wasn't all that pertinent to me (preparing high school transcripts). But overall, it was a good experience. Just not as good as the beach would have been.
Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention our kayaking adventure. We were eco-explorers. The Outer Banks is full of these "Eco Tours" by kayak--whatever that really means. We had brought our semi-new kayak that we bought last fall and were determined to use it. Considering the crazy wind and choppy seas, it wasn't much of a possibility until close to the end of our trip. On a bikeride with the kids (which, like everything else, involved a lot of graveyard with a wide variety of years on the stones), I had scoped out a good place to park and put in our boat in a salt marsh area. When we went back a few days later to show it to Kerry, wouldn't you know it...there was a big old snake slithering through the water. I take these things as signs! So we decided, on our last night, to go out to the Sound and put in at a public access. I was pretty sure I had seen kiteboarders here at one point (almost no one was out this week!), but I hadn't seen any other kayaks there. Now I know why. When I say shallow, I mean shallow! Ollie and I loaded up with our life jackets and were pushed out, and about a minute later we ran aground in water so shallow that Ollie had to push me and the boat away. Then Walter walked out about 500 feet and helped us to get back in; he was in water up to his ankles. Meanwhile, being Walter, he was also collecting more wildlife than the aquarium sponsored class we skipped could ever have expected. By the time we left, he had clams, multiple hermit crabs, had seen a rabbit, and who knows what else he picked up off the bottom. No matter how far we paddled out, it was still shallow, shallow, shallow, and getting dark. And it required a lot of effort to drag the kayak across the sandy bottom and we didn't want to be stuck too far from home. So that was the end of our eco-tour.
All in all, it wasn't enough vacation. We did a lot of at-home things--played a lot of Set, Monopoly, chess, mancala, that dreadful little word game from Cranium that Rutledge plays (you fish for letters with a little rod and a totally useless plastic polar bear sits on a piece of cardboard watching), Go Fish, Uno. We read a Nancy Drew novel. But the beach time wasn't enough. I needed more, longer, and warmer. I was plotting my return, maybe spontaneous, for a night, with a tent, as I left. Who knows, maybe I will follow through!
I have been on hiatus from what feels like everything. I think in a sense I'm lonely, maybe doing too much of things I don't really want to do for reasons I don't really understand. I'm really busy, but feeling pretty alone at the same time. Maybe I'm simply moving too fast. Maybe everyone I know is moving too fast. Maybe we all need to slow down. Who knows.
We just got back from a week in the village of Hatteras on Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is the second time we have stayed in Hatteras--the first was three years ago at this same time of year. And there was a lot in common between these two trips. Rain and gale force winds, a television full of warnings about rip tides that kept us from the water for days. Not that you'd want to go in while it's in the 40s and 50s in the air, not to mention the water. Well, amend that. Actually, kids will go in just about anything, if given permission.
The first trip we took to Hatteras was salvaged by the miracle of letterboxing. There were at least 25 letterboxes back in 2006 in the Hatteras Island/Ocracoke area. Though it was cold and we were underdressed, we did get out and about into areas we never would have seen without a list of vague clues to guide us. We learned about and hiked through maritime forests with trees stunted by the salt wind we were so familiar with firsthand. We saw at least 5 snakes in 5 different environments--historic graveyards full of downed sailors, hollow trees in the Buxton Woods, in the Pamlico Sound, on a forested trail on Ocracoke, and guarding a letterbox with its life.
Unfortunately, this year when we were looking for an afternoon activity, we discovered that the placers of many of the letterboxes on Hatteras had made most of them private or by invitation only. This seems to me to violate the spirit of the communal activity of letterboxing, open to all. We did attempt to revisit one that had become overgrown, so the trail was no longer visible, but we gave up on it in deference to the snakes who doubtless called the spot home. While there, we visited the "Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum," which is fascinating and full of information about the dangerous shoals and long history of warfare and shipwreck off the Atlantic Coast. We also had fun poking through another old graveyard tucked into a condo and giant sound-house community linked to a popular shopping area by a boardwalk over a vibrant salt marsh and found a letterbox under the fourth step down off a gazebo.
Finally, on the fifth day of our trip, things were looking up in the weather. It was sunny. Our day on Ocracoke, always a favorite, ended in drizzle turning to genuine rain, which was a shame since we had just unloaded our bikes and were ready to head out into the nether reaches of a very cute place. We managed to visit a few shops (to get some blessed relief from being pelted by wetness). On the plus side, we found a super coffee shop that had perfect climbable trees, and Walter amused the many guests sitting out under the trees with his tree-shimmying skills. Rutledge, of course, made friends with many, many dogs, some of whom were searching for another friend and some of whom were offended by very short people who aren't always gentle. There were the two French Bulldogs at lunch at the seafood restaurant, wearing their life preservers because this breed can't swim. There were the two dachshunds on the beach who didn't like children. And the hyper beagle puppy who came by shortly afterward. Then there were the coarse-haired Portugeuse Water Dogs. And the chihuahua on the sound when we semi-trespassed onto land for sale on the sound. The westie on the way to the pizza place. While on Ocracoke, we also shopped at our favorite little shell and trinket store, visited the ponies descended from the ones supposedly brought on a Spanish ship way back when, and climbed the trees in the cemetery and read the names of the British who perished in an attack by a German U-Boat during World War II.
On my final day there, it was sunny, and we were able to fly the very cool kites we bought on the second day of the trip, the kites that didn't appreciate the 35 mph gusts from the early part of the week. Ollie had a red, white, and blue airplane which, when all is told, was really a delta in disguise, Walter had a Red Baron plane, and Frances had a poison dart frog on a classic diamond. We got sunburned without realizing it. The older three kids played for hours in a rather cold ocean that most sane people stayed out of. We got mahi-mahi, steamed shrimp, and bay scallops right from a local boat. And we played yet more Set, a game that figured very strongly in this vacation. We did almost all of a 550 piece puzzle (no, I haven't forgiven the others for not putting in the last 25 pieces of plain blue sky that I left off when I went to bed after midnight).
Leaving was the hard part. I had to physically peel myself away. It was as if a magnet was holding me back. The day was gorgeous, the weather warm, and I wanted more than anything in the world to (a) become very irresponsible. I had volunteered a long time back to organize the used curriculum sale at a statewide homeschooling conference. Suddenly, I wanted to just flake out, to not be where I was supposed to, to say that my mental health was such that I just *had* to stay at the beach. And that made me kind of slow getting out. It felt like there was lead in my feet keeping them from pushing the gas pedal of the car. As I was going over the bridge off the Outer Banks, Margaritaville came on. I'll admit, this isn't a song that I have ever completely understood. But at this moment, the appeal was undeniable. The life of just kicking back, shirking all responsibility to anyone else, and just drinking for the rest of the day, week, maybe month or year was calling my name. But I kept driving. For the (b) above, I also thought about just driving right on past the conference and on across the country. See "being irresponsible" above.
But I went to the conference, the book sale was successful. I wish I could have seen more of the conference itself, which i didn't feel like I experienced because I spent more or less the entire time except for a brief run for lunch and an hour out for one session on a topic that wasn't all that pertinent to me (preparing high school transcripts). But overall, it was a good experience. Just not as good as the beach would have been.
Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention our kayaking adventure. We were eco-explorers. The Outer Banks is full of these "Eco Tours" by kayak--whatever that really means. We had brought our semi-new kayak that we bought last fall and were determined to use it. Considering the crazy wind and choppy seas, it wasn't much of a possibility until close to the end of our trip. On a bikeride with the kids (which, like everything else, involved a lot of graveyard with a wide variety of years on the stones), I had scoped out a good place to park and put in our boat in a salt marsh area. When we went back a few days later to show it to Kerry, wouldn't you know it...there was a big old snake slithering through the water. I take these things as signs! So we decided, on our last night, to go out to the Sound and put in at a public access. I was pretty sure I had seen kiteboarders here at one point (almost no one was out this week!), but I hadn't seen any other kayaks there. Now I know why. When I say shallow, I mean shallow! Ollie and I loaded up with our life jackets and were pushed out, and about a minute later we ran aground in water so shallow that Ollie had to push me and the boat away. Then Walter walked out about 500 feet and helped us to get back in; he was in water up to his ankles. Meanwhile, being Walter, he was also collecting more wildlife than the aquarium sponsored class we skipped could ever have expected. By the time we left, he had clams, multiple hermit crabs, had seen a rabbit, and who knows what else he picked up off the bottom. No matter how far we paddled out, it was still shallow, shallow, shallow, and getting dark. And it required a lot of effort to drag the kayak across the sandy bottom and we didn't want to be stuck too far from home. So that was the end of our eco-tour.
All in all, it wasn't enough vacation. We did a lot of at-home things--played a lot of Set, Monopoly, chess, mancala, that dreadful little word game from Cranium that Rutledge plays (you fish for letters with a little rod and a totally useless plastic polar bear sits on a piece of cardboard watching), Go Fish, Uno. We read a Nancy Drew novel. But the beach time wasn't enough. I needed more, longer, and warmer. I was plotting my return, maybe spontaneous, for a night, with a tent, as I left. Who knows, maybe I will follow through!
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
I have become the world's most pathetic blogger. It's pitiful, really. I don't even know what I'm doing. I think I'm just losing interest in the things we are doing because there are so, so many of them, and I don't have time to enjoy any of them because I'm juggling so many balls in the air at once. Almost every single night of the week I am finding that we have to choose among many things and let some go as we prioritize because people can only be in one place at one time (or two parents can only be in two places at one time...). Some evenings, especially Wednesdays, can have up to five things at once. It looks like tomorrow, the Wednesday about to happen, won't be so full, but that's an anomaly....
Frances is playing soccer (I know, picture!). Ollie is playing baseball. Frances has ballet three nights a week. The boys have Cub Scouts. Ollie is doing tennis lessons. All three have music lessons. We have this play practice. I'm helping with a conference. I'm playing in tennis tournaments and two leagues, I have LLL meetings this week. Soccer has no practice tomorrow, Cub Scouts is on two off weeks, and some of the kids seem to have strep, so we may not be going much of anywhere tomorrow. What's interesting is that though Walter tested positive for strep, he showed no symptoms of anything other than a mild cold. Some coughing, a bit of a runny nose, and that's it. In fact, he was at the dr's office for a totally unrelated old piece of news (he's skinny, really old news), and by chance she picked up on a spot that looked like a bruise on the roof of his mouth. Ugh. Rutledge has an ear infection, which I normally take a more naturopathic attitude toward, but since he has speech issues, I'm finding myself choosing the path of least resistance (and hopefully fastest clearing). Again, I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't taken him in for his excessive coughing, which has been keeping us awake at night for six days now.
We will get through this with relative grace and lack of disruption. I think there's always this glitch week in the fall that challenges us just when we think we're heading into the home stretch!
Frances is playing soccer (I know, picture!). Ollie is playing baseball. Frances has ballet three nights a week. The boys have Cub Scouts. Ollie is doing tennis lessons. All three have music lessons. We have this play practice. I'm helping with a conference. I'm playing in tennis tournaments and two leagues, I have LLL meetings this week. Soccer has no practice tomorrow, Cub Scouts is on two off weeks, and some of the kids seem to have strep, so we may not be going much of anywhere tomorrow. What's interesting is that though Walter tested positive for strep, he showed no symptoms of anything other than a mild cold. Some coughing, a bit of a runny nose, and that's it. In fact, he was at the dr's office for a totally unrelated old piece of news (he's skinny, really old news), and by chance she picked up on a spot that looked like a bruise on the roof of his mouth. Ugh. Rutledge has an ear infection, which I normally take a more naturopathic attitude toward, but since he has speech issues, I'm finding myself choosing the path of least resistance (and hopefully fastest clearing). Again, I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't taken him in for his excessive coughing, which has been keeping us awake at night for six days now.
We will get through this with relative grace and lack of disruption. I think there's always this glitch week in the fall that challenges us just when we think we're heading into the home stretch!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Today was the day that Walter had testing done with the psychologist. I've been wanting this type of testing for years--a clarification of developmental questions, cognitive testing with interpretation, more information about auditory and visual processing and memory, and collation of aptitude testing with achievement testing.
I don't have information yet. It's driving me crazy. My type-A, need-to-know-now self is going absolutely crazy. I couldn't read the psychologist at all when I went to pick Walter up. It sounded like he did really well with math, but I wasn't sure if that implied (and I'm not making any assumptions that it did...) that he did less well on other things or that this was some outlier. I'm trying to hang tight and wait until I see the results in a week.
I wish that Ollie was also getting the full workup, but right now we seem to be using Walter as the guinea pig and then turning to Ollie later if it makes sense. As his teacher, principal, and mother, it's making sense to me right now. I want to know as much as I can about whether the funky test results from a few weeks ago were anomalies or whether they speak some kind of truth, however inconvenient. I was just explaining to Kerry that I'm not finding myself to be a medicator or an accomodator; I'm an ameliorator. I believe that if there are cognitive deficits, processing deficits, memory deficits, that these aren't fixed values that one must work around, but that they can be improvement with training and rewiring and sustained attention to improving the weakness. And if there's any pronounced weakness, I want to address it, not reduce expectations or simply try to take away the side effects of it. But right now, as I said, I know nothing.
Our co-op today was awesome. The boys got so much out of it. They talked about Afghanistan, the history of recent wars and conflicts in that area, and did exercises from the Time for Kids curriculum. Although Ollie had originally said this isn't what he wanted to do, I heard no complaints from him after their class today, and this is exactly the kind of engaging, current material that I think they need to be talking about and starting to delve into now. They were also able to work on some map skills--creating a paper for determining distance with scale. And they produced some writing, however labored, about a TFK article on preschool obesity, and I'm always a fan of writing opportunities within context.
Frances and the younger girls started an Ancient Egypt unit. They were all into the hands-on part of our day--making a model of the Nile River to demonstrate the fertile effects of the yearly flood. But after we created deltas out of aluminum foil and planted grass seed in our dirt, they were somewhat ready to focus on coloring pictures of shadufs and grass boats while listening to the Magic Treehouse book on Egypt. Frances is so into this now. We started our chicken mummy tonight, something I haven't done for several years now. The older boys were way into Egypt when they were around her age, maybe a little younger, and we did Egypt activities until we ran them into the ground. So it is exciting to be coming back to this with Frances, who was so young the first time around and who also deserves to make a sugar cube pyramid.
Then Ollie had a tennis lesson tonight and Walter wandered around until he found himself with two new friends who just happened to be the children of Frances's piano teacher. On his self-concept rating battery this morning, he rated himself a 4 out of 5 on making a lot of friends. Now he's calling himself a 5, which I don't doubt. This kid picks up new friends everywhere and falls in with a group or starts leading one pied-piper style wherever he goes. So he jumped on a trampoline until he was bright red in the face while Ollie improved his serve. Next time around, though, Walter is going to tennis lessons, too--I can't stand not to develop built-in partners and opponents, and Walter needs to be doing more physical activity. Ollie's passion for tennis at the moment is contagious, though. He is ready to move toward being on the Woodlake bantam team this coming fall, and I'm just happy that he's doing something right down the street because if the truth be told, baseball season is running me ragged. Even if he played tennis 3 days a week, it would make a world of difference if he did it a 5 minute bike-ride or walk from home.
And I'm playing hideous tennis. I am looking forward to improving things tomorrow when Michele and I play again together--I'm feeling slightly bad about doing so poorly at singles (though the person who took my place had no better luck on Monday, either...), but I have a private lesson planned for Thursday morning and I'm playing in a mixed doubles tournament started Thursday evening, so there's hope for me. It's a heavy tennis weekend between the mixed doubles, my weekend league where I'm finally in the line-up, and then entertaining Ollie, who can't get enough.
I don't have information yet. It's driving me crazy. My type-A, need-to-know-now self is going absolutely crazy. I couldn't read the psychologist at all when I went to pick Walter up. It sounded like he did really well with math, but I wasn't sure if that implied (and I'm not making any assumptions that it did...) that he did less well on other things or that this was some outlier. I'm trying to hang tight and wait until I see the results in a week.
I wish that Ollie was also getting the full workup, but right now we seem to be using Walter as the guinea pig and then turning to Ollie later if it makes sense. As his teacher, principal, and mother, it's making sense to me right now. I want to know as much as I can about whether the funky test results from a few weeks ago were anomalies or whether they speak some kind of truth, however inconvenient. I was just explaining to Kerry that I'm not finding myself to be a medicator or an accomodator; I'm an ameliorator. I believe that if there are cognitive deficits, processing deficits, memory deficits, that these aren't fixed values that one must work around, but that they can be improvement with training and rewiring and sustained attention to improving the weakness. And if there's any pronounced weakness, I want to address it, not reduce expectations or simply try to take away the side effects of it. But right now, as I said, I know nothing.
Our co-op today was awesome. The boys got so much out of it. They talked about Afghanistan, the history of recent wars and conflicts in that area, and did exercises from the Time for Kids curriculum. Although Ollie had originally said this isn't what he wanted to do, I heard no complaints from him after their class today, and this is exactly the kind of engaging, current material that I think they need to be talking about and starting to delve into now. They were also able to work on some map skills--creating a paper for determining distance with scale. And they produced some writing, however labored, about a TFK article on preschool obesity, and I'm always a fan of writing opportunities within context.
Frances and the younger girls started an Ancient Egypt unit. They were all into the hands-on part of our day--making a model of the Nile River to demonstrate the fertile effects of the yearly flood. But after we created deltas out of aluminum foil and planted grass seed in our dirt, they were somewhat ready to focus on coloring pictures of shadufs and grass boats while listening to the Magic Treehouse book on Egypt. Frances is so into this now. We started our chicken mummy tonight, something I haven't done for several years now. The older boys were way into Egypt when they were around her age, maybe a little younger, and we did Egypt activities until we ran them into the ground. So it is exciting to be coming back to this with Frances, who was so young the first time around and who also deserves to make a sugar cube pyramid.
Then Ollie had a tennis lesson tonight and Walter wandered around until he found himself with two new friends who just happened to be the children of Frances's piano teacher. On his self-concept rating battery this morning, he rated himself a 4 out of 5 on making a lot of friends. Now he's calling himself a 5, which I don't doubt. This kid picks up new friends everywhere and falls in with a group or starts leading one pied-piper style wherever he goes. So he jumped on a trampoline until he was bright red in the face while Ollie improved his serve. Next time around, though, Walter is going to tennis lessons, too--I can't stand not to develop built-in partners and opponents, and Walter needs to be doing more physical activity. Ollie's passion for tennis at the moment is contagious, though. He is ready to move toward being on the Woodlake bantam team this coming fall, and I'm just happy that he's doing something right down the street because if the truth be told, baseball season is running me ragged. Even if he played tennis 3 days a week, it would make a world of difference if he did it a 5 minute bike-ride or walk from home.
And I'm playing hideous tennis. I am looking forward to improving things tomorrow when Michele and I play again together--I'm feeling slightly bad about doing so poorly at singles (though the person who took my place had no better luck on Monday, either...), but I have a private lesson planned for Thursday morning and I'm playing in a mixed doubles tournament started Thursday evening, so there's hope for me. It's a heavy tennis weekend between the mixed doubles, my weekend league where I'm finally in the line-up, and then entertaining Ollie, who can't get enough.
Monday, April 27, 2009
I think life with four kids must be just a swirling mass of calendar chaos. At least mine is.
Spring just seems to be bursting a bit more than usual with things going on, and I add to the mix inadvertently by finding yet more things to explore.
Tennis season is now in swing, and the pun is intended. Alas, there's just so much to do. We had a makeup match at Westwood this morning, and I finally seem to have broken out of my atrocious playing streak. The first three matches of the season went poorly for me--I've lost 1-8 each time, which is embarrassing and leaves me wondering if I should take up golf or adopt reading as my sole hobby. Today Michele and I lost 10-8, but we put up a big fight and we were playing well, if not at the top of our game. I had a good time, it was energizing, and I don't feel like a total tennis failure now. I am supposed to play in a mixed doubles tournament this weekend, which reminds me that I need to sign up. Oops.
I am definitely not doing a good job of making lists, and with as busy as we are, this is the kiss of death. I'm forgetting all kinds of things, I'm sure...not to mention the ones that I know about. Tonight Frances had ballet, flamenco, and soccer. I had a Spanish lesson. Ollie and Walter had bagpipe lessons, a playdate, and then Ollie had a baseball game. Rutledge had an early morning speech session.
IN addition to our regular weekly stuff, I also have gotten myself into a bit of a nervous situation with cognitive testing with the older boys. It's rather complicated to explain why I felt I needed to get this done in the first place, but I have wanted for quite a while to get a basic battery of tests so that I can better understand their strong and weaker areas and to help me put into extinction any questions about Asperger's Syndrome or auditory processing problems. My attempt to get answers really only raised more questions, so tomorrow morning, Walter is going to be having a broader battery of tests, including one that I hope we'll be able to use for his end of year evidence of progress. I feel bad that he has gone to bed late tonight (Ollie's game went late and kept everyone up) and that I perhaps haven't done much to prep him for this test. I hope that he'll also be able to relax and not feel singled out, since I'd like the test to reflect his best efforts. If things go well with his testing, we'll move on to Ollie.
Frances has started working through Headsprout Reading. I am hesitant to pay for programs online, especially when the price is a little steep and it's hard to see where the material covered meshes with what she already knows, but so far I am very pleased. I'm not sure that I'm necessarily seeing a huge change in her fluency (which is just about non-existent) or the variety of what she can read, but I do see her getting exposed to lots of blends and sounds that she will hopefully make automatic in the near future. I have started working with her using Reading Rescue 1-2-3 as well, especially after seeing yet again that the older boys have issues with phonemic awareness. All of them are doing better with this now, but I feel like we need to make it a daily activity for quite a while. I find it challenging to figure out how to best work with the boys when they can already read almost anything. At the same time, I have seen that they lack fluency and some patience with phonological skills, and these might be part of what keeps them from reading more for pleasure. People don't tend to do things that are difficult or that tire them out, so I feel like before I just accept that reading isn't their choice of how to spend free time, I want to be sure that I'm not overlooking some skill gap. So I have been introducing some general phonics strategies: covering up all but the first two letters and then making your mouth ready to say them, looking for smaller words in the larger ones, and "using the other vowel." At this point, while Walter's vocabulary seems weaker compared to Ollie's, I'm having a rough time finding words that he's not familiar with in regular writing to practice on. I think this is a good sign!
Rutledge is preparing for preschool in the fall, though he has not yet gotten a spot anywhere, and we still have a few places left on our list to check out. After Second Pres in Roanoke, it's hard to find a place that meets my standards. I know they do exist, but I'm not willing to drive 30 minutes or more each direction to get this, as much as I'd like to. And the places closest to my house are the ones I'm least impressed with. I believe we've found a good situation for him, but right now he is 7th on the waiting list for 3 day and 11th for 5 day, and if I had my druthers, I'd have him going 5 days a week. For now, we just wait and see, and hopefully around May 15th we'll have more information about whether he has a spot. This means the heat is on with potty training. Right now, he's doing pretty well. This week has seen enormous changes--the first ever poop in the potty (though 3 poops in his underwear, which is gross...). Whole days with no accidents, as long as we remember to take him every 30 minutes, since he still never takes himself or initiates. This has meant that he can use the Power Wheels jeep that a friend gave us a few months ago. I replaced the battery and he has been zooming through the yard and down the street since yesterday, which I truly hope will be a reinforcer to keep up with the new skills. It just may be possible that he is going to grow up after all.
His speech therapy is going so well so far. He added two new sounds this morning, and though he has a terrible time remembering them, he is still very eager to practice and have other people ask him about his homework. He is doing a popcorn sound, an "M" blender sound, a "b" bunny sound, a "t" tick-tock clock sound, and "d" raindrop falling sound. He is very cooperative with the speech therapist, which makes things easier for everyone, and he loves to play her games. Today they played Penguin Pileup while he made his sounds and then he made pizza with a pizza topple game after using his new sounds. There is a lot of emphasis on counting objects while he's there, which isn't his strong suit, but perhaps that will be an added perk of straightening out his articulation problems--a better number sense.
So we are moving along these days. Waiting for summer. Signed up for swim team. Preparing for our end of the year proof of progress. And spending as much time as we can outside.
Spring just seems to be bursting a bit more than usual with things going on, and I add to the mix inadvertently by finding yet more things to explore.
Tennis season is now in swing, and the pun is intended. Alas, there's just so much to do. We had a makeup match at Westwood this morning, and I finally seem to have broken out of my atrocious playing streak. The first three matches of the season went poorly for me--I've lost 1-8 each time, which is embarrassing and leaves me wondering if I should take up golf or adopt reading as my sole hobby. Today Michele and I lost 10-8, but we put up a big fight and we were playing well, if not at the top of our game. I had a good time, it was energizing, and I don't feel like a total tennis failure now. I am supposed to play in a mixed doubles tournament this weekend, which reminds me that I need to sign up. Oops.
I am definitely not doing a good job of making lists, and with as busy as we are, this is the kiss of death. I'm forgetting all kinds of things, I'm sure...not to mention the ones that I know about. Tonight Frances had ballet, flamenco, and soccer. I had a Spanish lesson. Ollie and Walter had bagpipe lessons, a playdate, and then Ollie had a baseball game. Rutledge had an early morning speech session.
IN addition to our regular weekly stuff, I also have gotten myself into a bit of a nervous situation with cognitive testing with the older boys. It's rather complicated to explain why I felt I needed to get this done in the first place, but I have wanted for quite a while to get a basic battery of tests so that I can better understand their strong and weaker areas and to help me put into extinction any questions about Asperger's Syndrome or auditory processing problems. My attempt to get answers really only raised more questions, so tomorrow morning, Walter is going to be having a broader battery of tests, including one that I hope we'll be able to use for his end of year evidence of progress. I feel bad that he has gone to bed late tonight (Ollie's game went late and kept everyone up) and that I perhaps haven't done much to prep him for this test. I hope that he'll also be able to relax and not feel singled out, since I'd like the test to reflect his best efforts. If things go well with his testing, we'll move on to Ollie.
Frances has started working through Headsprout Reading. I am hesitant to pay for programs online, especially when the price is a little steep and it's hard to see where the material covered meshes with what she already knows, but so far I am very pleased. I'm not sure that I'm necessarily seeing a huge change in her fluency (which is just about non-existent) or the variety of what she can read, but I do see her getting exposed to lots of blends and sounds that she will hopefully make automatic in the near future. I have started working with her using Reading Rescue 1-2-3 as well, especially after seeing yet again that the older boys have issues with phonemic awareness. All of them are doing better with this now, but I feel like we need to make it a daily activity for quite a while. I find it challenging to figure out how to best work with the boys when they can already read almost anything. At the same time, I have seen that they lack fluency and some patience with phonological skills, and these might be part of what keeps them from reading more for pleasure. People don't tend to do things that are difficult or that tire them out, so I feel like before I just accept that reading isn't their choice of how to spend free time, I want to be sure that I'm not overlooking some skill gap. So I have been introducing some general phonics strategies: covering up all but the first two letters and then making your mouth ready to say them, looking for smaller words in the larger ones, and "using the other vowel." At this point, while Walter's vocabulary seems weaker compared to Ollie's, I'm having a rough time finding words that he's not familiar with in regular writing to practice on. I think this is a good sign!
Rutledge is preparing for preschool in the fall, though he has not yet gotten a spot anywhere, and we still have a few places left on our list to check out. After Second Pres in Roanoke, it's hard to find a place that meets my standards. I know they do exist, but I'm not willing to drive 30 minutes or more each direction to get this, as much as I'd like to. And the places closest to my house are the ones I'm least impressed with. I believe we've found a good situation for him, but right now he is 7th on the waiting list for 3 day and 11th for 5 day, and if I had my druthers, I'd have him going 5 days a week. For now, we just wait and see, and hopefully around May 15th we'll have more information about whether he has a spot. This means the heat is on with potty training. Right now, he's doing pretty well. This week has seen enormous changes--the first ever poop in the potty (though 3 poops in his underwear, which is gross...). Whole days with no accidents, as long as we remember to take him every 30 minutes, since he still never takes himself or initiates. This has meant that he can use the Power Wheels jeep that a friend gave us a few months ago. I replaced the battery and he has been zooming through the yard and down the street since yesterday, which I truly hope will be a reinforcer to keep up with the new skills. It just may be possible that he is going to grow up after all.
His speech therapy is going so well so far. He added two new sounds this morning, and though he has a terrible time remembering them, he is still very eager to practice and have other people ask him about his homework. He is doing a popcorn sound, an "M" blender sound, a "b" bunny sound, a "t" tick-tock clock sound, and "d" raindrop falling sound. He is very cooperative with the speech therapist, which makes things easier for everyone, and he loves to play her games. Today they played Penguin Pileup while he made his sounds and then he made pizza with a pizza topple game after using his new sounds. There is a lot of emphasis on counting objects while he's there, which isn't his strong suit, but perhaps that will be an added perk of straightening out his articulation problems--a better number sense.
So we are moving along these days. Waiting for summer. Signed up for swim team. Preparing for our end of the year proof of progress. And spending as much time as we can outside.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
I've been away so long that Blogger no longer remembers me.
The past few weeks have been a long blur. And suddenly it's April. And it's still raining. Not that we are supposed to be surprised by this in this particular month. Isn't April the cruelest month? It's rather hard to say. March was pretty cruel around here, though not entirely so.
First there was the snow and the lost week there. A good lost week, but a lost week nonetheless. It's amazing how a couple of out of the ordinary days can throw everyone for a loop and get things off track in your normal life. Typically I welcome the cessation of the regular that comes with snow, and it was nice, for a period of time. The trouble was that no sooner were we through the snow week than I went to Hilton Head on a tennis trip. And there went another lost week.
Hilton Head was amazing. The tennis was amazing. The weather was amazing. We were fortunate to be there in the finest four days of the season. The week before had been impossibly cold and courts were closed. After we left, there was a turn for the cooler and wetter. I'm fascinated by the fact that though we were about two blocks away, I didn't even *see* the ocean during our entire trip. I tried to park at a Marriott and get beach access, but there was not a single space in that parking lot, so I went back to our villa. Day after day our time was spent at tennis clinics, eating, playing round robins, eating, and playing Scrabble. One of my housemates brought along a nifty travel Scrabble set where the tiles snap in and you can easily leave games in progress to finish later. These games were tremendous fun. We had five people in our condo, so there was a rotating host of participants and many words were debated, looked up, and learned. Like quirt, a word I've since seen in a Kaya American Girl book. I guess it all depends upon what circles you travel in whether this is part of your personal lexicon. It was not part of any of ours. Go figure. No horsewomen here.
No sooner did I return from Hilton Head than Walter and I got sick. It was very curious. It was *like* a stomach virus, but not quite. Not quite because there was no vomiting and no diarrhea, just massive and consuming stomach aches. I've never felt anything like this before and I have never had a persistent stomach ache in my life. Nausea, yes. Fullness, yes. Crampiness, yes. But never a completely mindblowing, consuming (this was the word that kept coming to mind through it) aching that would not go away no matter what we did. What was interesting is that I was wildly hungry most of the time, especially when I wasn't hurting. And I'd be in agonizing pain that left me in fetal position for ten hours, then I'd have a number of good hours, when I would think, "Gosh, that was weird, but I'm better now." And I'd eat. And because it was hard to tell what was going on, I'd eat normal food, not the BRAT diet stuff that I'd normally eat if I was sick. To tell the truth, if I have a stomach virus, think I have a stomach virus, know someone with a stomach virus, or read an email from someone in Hawaii with a stomach virus, I tend to not eat at all. This time, I ate generously. Roasted chicken. Potato salad. Cheetos. Gluten free bread. One day I was fine from morning until 4:00 p.m., then I was writhing around again.
One E.R. visit, five dr visits for Walter and one for me later, we still didn't know quite what was going on. Bloodwork and stool cultures didn't turn up anything interesting or noteworthy. Walter got semi-dehydrated at one point, not because of anything coming out of him, but because after 8 days of wrenching stomach pain day and night he hadn't eaten or had enough to drink to sustain over this kind of duration. Any given day's intake probably would have been fine for a day or two...it was the 8 days into it issue that made the comparatively low intake bad. The trouble was that when he was forced to drink large amounts or eat when not hungry, then he started vomiting. Making it all feel very counter-productive. The vomiting didn't lead to resolution of the illness. And it didn't really lead to better hydration or nutritional status. It was just upsetting and unpleasant.
Almost two whole weeks were sucked into the abyss with this illness. For me it lasted about 15 days. Knock on wood, I've had no symptoms for 4 full days now. I still don't trust it--I've been bitten again after 3 or 4 clear days. But for all intents and purposes, our lives have resumed. Walter is no longer lying like a beached whale on a heating pad come nightfall. Everyone around me, including his doctor, thought this was a crutch, a psychological prop for him, but honestly...having been socked back into the stomachache/intestinal upset zone myself numerous times, especially after eating or late in the day, and seeing now that he has gone six days without the heating pad, I absolutely believe him that when he asked for the heating pad, he was really feeling genuine pain, not just giving in to anxiety or misinterpreting normal digestive sensations. Thank goodness our lives are mostly back. I was starting to wonder whether we were going to be the first documented cases nationwide of pistachio-induced salmonella.
What it all amounted to was 7 days of school lost to illness. More than 7 days of activities lost. And a time warp that seemed to have launched us rather abruptly, it seems, into the month of April.
And April really is the cruelest month for homeschoolers. It's that anxious time when in Virginia you realize that you need to think about proof of progress, which for us has always meant testing. I am not concerned about testing at all for the boys--they will be perfectly fine. This has been our most productive year yet and so many things have fallen into place for them. No longer do they seem "later" in any areas other than spelling, which thank goodness isn't something that we have to demonstrate to anyone. This is not, however, the case for Frances, an unschooler of the highest degree. She can do many lovely and amazing things, but reading isn't one of them. Standardized test math isn't one of them, either. So I'm going to have to arrange an evaluation for her that will demonstrate the many strides she has made this year that are poorly measured on something like the California Achievement Test.
But what's really hard about April is that you can see the end of the tunnel. You can smell summer coming. And you look at what your original plans were for the "school" year or maybe just what your current finishing goals are (I want to finish this darn math book, for instance), and you find yourself counting on your fingers and toes how many days you have left to do this kind of stuff that your kids consider "school" like what other kids do, and you know that once public school is out that your kids are far too old and wise to be willing to "do a page of math a day" or every few days or whatever kinds of grandiose plans you might have been able to pull off when they were small and naive. No, when summer comes, the endless party begins. Obviously we'll continue reading and "learning" in the "we're learning all the time" sense, but forget the Daily Grams and the vocabulary book and the 30 problem "practice set."
And what's the very most cruel about April is that suddenly there's just so much to do. So, so much. No, let me amend that. So, so, so much! Or maybe it's just me.
Here's tonight. Let me start with today, actually. In the morning I played singles and doubles with my Suburban tennis team. It was our first match of the season. We did not win as a team. I lost 8-2 in singles to a woman who most definitely outclassed me. She was remarkably consistent in terms of never missing a shot, she moved well and swiftly, she had killer spin of every type on her shots, and she could place things and keep me running like nobody's business. Rene, our pro, watched part of the match, and his analysis was that she was just so consistent and had the moves. I played well, I kept up well, and I got to deuce on more than half of our games, I just couldn't match her skill. And this is what you find in B level teams--3.0s, 3.5s, 4.0s, people who just prefer to play on Wednesdays. It's the Forrest Gump box of chocolates where you never know what you're going to get. Thank goodness Michele and I got something different playing at #3 doubles, where we won 10-5. I can't say I played my finest, but I didn't make a fool of myself.
Back to today. 3 hours of tennis in the morning. 1.5 hour break where we ate lunch and checked schoolwork. Playdate for 2 hours, during which I ran home to gather more supplies for the onslaught of the evening. Here's what we had:
Trumpet lesson
Flute lesson
Cub Scouts
Soccer Practice
Church Small Group where we had childcare duties
First Baseball game of the season
There were 2 parents. There were 4 children. It was chaos. At 1:45 I needed to have packed two instruments, multiple books and pages of sheet music, soccer gear and a total clothing change for Frances, jackets for 5 in case the weather got cool after dark, soccer clothes and ball and shoes for Rutledge because he would need to occupy himself for an hour and a half while Frances played. Baseball equipment (I misheard Kerry saying "socks and belt" as "bat" and then filled in "glove" with it and assumed he had them in his car). A baseball uniform, with cold weather shirt for under. It seems doable because everyone is supposed to have a bag with all this stuff ready to walk out the door or already waiting in the car. Only this is the first day of the official season, so all we had been given so far was a pair of pants and a hat and I had left the cleats at home because i thought that for sure we'd have 10 minutes or so at home before dashing to Cub Scouts for a 3 mile hike after the music lessons. Kerry had picked up the shirt and socks and belt for baseball because they came in much later than the pants did since the shirts needed to be personalized at the printer. Any hope of a unified bag was out the window.
The music lessons ran over time, which I hate to complain about because I like to see progress. This made it too late to stop by home and pick up the cleats and a jacket because the activity tonight with Cub Scouts was a 3 mile forced march through the trails of Woodlake for the Outdoorsman badge. If we were late, they'd leave without us. So I dropped of the boys very hastily, flew home to get the cleats, a water bottle, and my running shoes and to pee (you don't get to pee on days like today!), and then flew back, where of course the Scouts had already left. So I jogged around the mini lake, which was good exercise and part of my "I should be a runner even though I hate it" program. I probably went 3/4 of a mile, which doesn't sound like much but is impressive for me being out of shape, and I ran into them. Then we briskly walked another few miles while I tried not to have a panic attack about being so far from the car and not in control of other people's pace when Ollie was supposed to be at baseball in under 30 minutes. We arrived with about 7 minutes to spare, only to discover that no, we didn't have the bat or glove, and he's a lefty, so borrowing one at the last minute can get tricky. I felt awful. My car was so full of gear and instruments and just plain crap (fast food wrappers at this point from the dinner we had to eat at Wendy's) that we practically needed one of those hamburger boxes on top to contain the overflow. I was hating life. Oh, and it was raining by now. This rain we had been promised all day by the Weather Channel, the rain that was supposed to deliver me from the evil of overscheduling by cancelling the soccer, baseball, and hike all on one night. Yeah. It did nothing for my schedule. Every darn thing went right on. Even the baseball game in the persistent rain.
I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but that's my April. Every year. It's the time when everyone wants to get out of their winter hidey-hole. You want to, as Chaucer says, make pilgrimages. To places like the fish hatchery, the rock quarry, the park, the farm day, the wedding two states away, the Easter Egg Hunt. It's all fun stuff. All good stuff. There's just a darn lot of it. And it's the golden season of the open-ended sports. The ones that, unlike, say, ballet, you can't sign up for with a specific time like Tuesday: 4-5. No, these are the ones where you sign up and someone says, "Oh yeah, a practice a week and a game on Saturday," and you hand them your $95 check and they give you a sharp looking uniform and the next thing you know you're practicing for 2 hours twice a week on random days and playing games any which way from Sunday. Take the soccer, which puts us in a mad scramble from flamenco on Mondays. No sleep til Brooklyn. Or the baseball, which doesn't seem to ever start until 7:30 on a school night and keeps my boy out in the rain until 10.
Then there's the matter of the fish tank. The supposed-to-be-beautiful coral reef with the ailing anemone. The reef that ate my bank account. We thought the dog cost a lot. We could have about 3 more dogs by now with what we've spent so far, and it's far from over. Our bubble-tip anemone is having some undiagnosable crisis. He goes upside down (and let me tell you, he's not a pretty boy when he's upside down). He is squished in a corner and won't come out. When we blew him out with a jet, he settled himself under a rock, which was even worse. He doesn't look good. He's not being friendly. We just bought him some new frozen krill, but it's not feeding time for another few days. Meanwhile, we also emptied out our wallet buying, and I'm not kidding here, a garlic supplement and Vitamin C for one of my fish who is swimming vertically and sideways and may have an infection. And a new buffer. And some device which grounds the electrical system in the tank. And more and more and more fresh water, which evaporates at a rate you wouldn't believe and has to be purchased very specially from a giant tank at the fish store and is de-ionized, reverse-osmosisized and needs to be put in something like a kerosene container, which I can't seem to find in a size that doesn't end up weighing 56 pounds when fully loaded. And we all know my ability to feel guilt. I feel guilty when I think of how some poor sweet anemone was just reposing in his natural environment, being gaped at by yuppie tourists off the coast of some tropical Pacific island, and somehow he now finds himself in a 34 gallon semi-toxic box being tended by people who can't tell his mouth from his butt.
From here on out, I have a feeling, though, that our days will be just packed. It's probably me. Probably exacerbated by my inability to delegate (I believe we call delegating when it comes to kids "carpooling"). My megalomaniacal belief that I and we can do it all. And the whole four kids thing. I'm seeing in glaring lights the benefits of the only child. Oh, how good I had it when I was growing up. No wonder my mother seemed semi-sane. I can't help but fantasize about what it would be like if I was only micromanaging one small person.
But no, I never learn. I just sent in course descriptions for two classes I plan to teach at the homeschool center next year. One is a class on reading and talking about poetry for middle schoolish students, using a nice little spiral bound program that I found at the IEW seminar I attended a few weeks ago. I'm looking forward to working through this with my boys and it would be more pleasant and palatable to them if there were a few more people doing it with us. It covers such irritating by interesting topics as scansion, terms like "trochee" and "dactyl" and "spondee" that we don't remember from English class. And I'm going to teach an IEW class, with the hope that I myself will get my money's worth out of the DVD set I purchased at the workshop. And I'm doing Junior Great Books with Frances-aged kids. It has worked out especially well, it would appear, that there are plenty of classes for Rutledge and Frances while I'm busy. Rutledge will be doing a preschool class and art. Frances will do art, earth science, and geography. And the boys will do pre-algebra, earth science, and bagpipes. This...sigh...means that we are gone two whole mornings a week, which means two mornings of our own stuff lost. But it's good, I think. We shall see. It violates this year's policy of nothing before noon except in rare cases.
And in closing, I will try to heap on yet another superlative in the This Is Really Why April Is the Cruellest Schooling Month category. The very most hardest thing is that while you're trying your best to live in the present, next year is already breathing very hard down your neck. I don't want it to. I wish I could tune it out. But things want your commitment now. They threaten they'll fill up, raise their prices, and break your kneecaps if you don't tell them yes or no right now. They want to know if you want to help, volunteer, get paid, and so forth. They kind of want your money as a deposit. They want to claim one of the precious places in your schedule before something else comes along in some more propitious month, say August, and edges them right out into the outer darkness. I can barely think about tomorrow, much less whether I still want to be committed until next May to something I haven't even experienced yet. Yes, I'm a spoiled homeschooler. I like my always-available outs. I like my tenuous commitments.
Truly, though, at the moment I am feeling blessed and at the same time a bit selfish. My life is pretty good. I have four kids who are involved in so many things that they love. I'm getting to watch Frances develop as a soccer player and be aggressive out on the field and learn something entirely new. I'm getting to watch Rutledge turn into a boy, a real boy with cleats and soccer shorts and a reading program he's bumbling through. I couldn't even recognize Ollie on the baseball field tonight when I returned from getting dinner. He looked so confident, his stance was so ready, he was comfortable out there, and you couldn't tell he is still the comparatively new player on the team. I have people playing the bagpipes and the flute and trumpet and piano who are excited about their lessons every week. I have 5th graders who are going to do well on Latin test tomorrow. I'm not totally sucking on a B level tennis team. I've been invited to be on a 3.5 team even though I missed getting bumped up in my rating this year like I expected. I can play tennis on a Wednesday morning, take kids to a language class on a Thursday, be part of a co-op where my boys are learning about comparative political and economic systems and are getting it, can read book after book about children's experiences in the second World War, meet new friends for coffee at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, see my daughter perform in a big professional dance performance and iron the dresses and babysit the professional dancers' children during the shows. I have the world's most complicated mini-aquarium and a whole host of stuff to keep my little brain busy with research. I don't have a stomach ache any more. There really probably should be more drudgery and torture in my life, just to temper all the goodness!
The past few weeks have been a long blur. And suddenly it's April. And it's still raining. Not that we are supposed to be surprised by this in this particular month. Isn't April the cruelest month? It's rather hard to say. March was pretty cruel around here, though not entirely so.
First there was the snow and the lost week there. A good lost week, but a lost week nonetheless. It's amazing how a couple of out of the ordinary days can throw everyone for a loop and get things off track in your normal life. Typically I welcome the cessation of the regular that comes with snow, and it was nice, for a period of time. The trouble was that no sooner were we through the snow week than I went to Hilton Head on a tennis trip. And there went another lost week.
Hilton Head was amazing. The tennis was amazing. The weather was amazing. We were fortunate to be there in the finest four days of the season. The week before had been impossibly cold and courts were closed. After we left, there was a turn for the cooler and wetter. I'm fascinated by the fact that though we were about two blocks away, I didn't even *see* the ocean during our entire trip. I tried to park at a Marriott and get beach access, but there was not a single space in that parking lot, so I went back to our villa. Day after day our time was spent at tennis clinics, eating, playing round robins, eating, and playing Scrabble. One of my housemates brought along a nifty travel Scrabble set where the tiles snap in and you can easily leave games in progress to finish later. These games were tremendous fun. We had five people in our condo, so there was a rotating host of participants and many words were debated, looked up, and learned. Like quirt, a word I've since seen in a Kaya American Girl book. I guess it all depends upon what circles you travel in whether this is part of your personal lexicon. It was not part of any of ours. Go figure. No horsewomen here.
No sooner did I return from Hilton Head than Walter and I got sick. It was very curious. It was *like* a stomach virus, but not quite. Not quite because there was no vomiting and no diarrhea, just massive and consuming stomach aches. I've never felt anything like this before and I have never had a persistent stomach ache in my life. Nausea, yes. Fullness, yes. Crampiness, yes. But never a completely mindblowing, consuming (this was the word that kept coming to mind through it) aching that would not go away no matter what we did. What was interesting is that I was wildly hungry most of the time, especially when I wasn't hurting. And I'd be in agonizing pain that left me in fetal position for ten hours, then I'd have a number of good hours, when I would think, "Gosh, that was weird, but I'm better now." And I'd eat. And because it was hard to tell what was going on, I'd eat normal food, not the BRAT diet stuff that I'd normally eat if I was sick. To tell the truth, if I have a stomach virus, think I have a stomach virus, know someone with a stomach virus, or read an email from someone in Hawaii with a stomach virus, I tend to not eat at all. This time, I ate generously. Roasted chicken. Potato salad. Cheetos. Gluten free bread. One day I was fine from morning until 4:00 p.m., then I was writhing around again.
One E.R. visit, five dr visits for Walter and one for me later, we still didn't know quite what was going on. Bloodwork and stool cultures didn't turn up anything interesting or noteworthy. Walter got semi-dehydrated at one point, not because of anything coming out of him, but because after 8 days of wrenching stomach pain day and night he hadn't eaten or had enough to drink to sustain over this kind of duration. Any given day's intake probably would have been fine for a day or two...it was the 8 days into it issue that made the comparatively low intake bad. The trouble was that when he was forced to drink large amounts or eat when not hungry, then he started vomiting. Making it all feel very counter-productive. The vomiting didn't lead to resolution of the illness. And it didn't really lead to better hydration or nutritional status. It was just upsetting and unpleasant.
Almost two whole weeks were sucked into the abyss with this illness. For me it lasted about 15 days. Knock on wood, I've had no symptoms for 4 full days now. I still don't trust it--I've been bitten again after 3 or 4 clear days. But for all intents and purposes, our lives have resumed. Walter is no longer lying like a beached whale on a heating pad come nightfall. Everyone around me, including his doctor, thought this was a crutch, a psychological prop for him, but honestly...having been socked back into the stomachache/intestinal upset zone myself numerous times, especially after eating or late in the day, and seeing now that he has gone six days without the heating pad, I absolutely believe him that when he asked for the heating pad, he was really feeling genuine pain, not just giving in to anxiety or misinterpreting normal digestive sensations. Thank goodness our lives are mostly back. I was starting to wonder whether we were going to be the first documented cases nationwide of pistachio-induced salmonella.
What it all amounted to was 7 days of school lost to illness. More than 7 days of activities lost. And a time warp that seemed to have launched us rather abruptly, it seems, into the month of April.
And April really is the cruelest month for homeschoolers. It's that anxious time when in Virginia you realize that you need to think about proof of progress, which for us has always meant testing. I am not concerned about testing at all for the boys--they will be perfectly fine. This has been our most productive year yet and so many things have fallen into place for them. No longer do they seem "later" in any areas other than spelling, which thank goodness isn't something that we have to demonstrate to anyone. This is not, however, the case for Frances, an unschooler of the highest degree. She can do many lovely and amazing things, but reading isn't one of them. Standardized test math isn't one of them, either. So I'm going to have to arrange an evaluation for her that will demonstrate the many strides she has made this year that are poorly measured on something like the California Achievement Test.
But what's really hard about April is that you can see the end of the tunnel. You can smell summer coming. And you look at what your original plans were for the "school" year or maybe just what your current finishing goals are (I want to finish this darn math book, for instance), and you find yourself counting on your fingers and toes how many days you have left to do this kind of stuff that your kids consider "school" like what other kids do, and you know that once public school is out that your kids are far too old and wise to be willing to "do a page of math a day" or every few days or whatever kinds of grandiose plans you might have been able to pull off when they were small and naive. No, when summer comes, the endless party begins. Obviously we'll continue reading and "learning" in the "we're learning all the time" sense, but forget the Daily Grams and the vocabulary book and the 30 problem "practice set."
And what's the very most cruel about April is that suddenly there's just so much to do. So, so much. No, let me amend that. So, so, so much! Or maybe it's just me.
Here's tonight. Let me start with today, actually. In the morning I played singles and doubles with my Suburban tennis team. It was our first match of the season. We did not win as a team. I lost 8-2 in singles to a woman who most definitely outclassed me. She was remarkably consistent in terms of never missing a shot, she moved well and swiftly, she had killer spin of every type on her shots, and she could place things and keep me running like nobody's business. Rene, our pro, watched part of the match, and his analysis was that she was just so consistent and had the moves. I played well, I kept up well, and I got to deuce on more than half of our games, I just couldn't match her skill. And this is what you find in B level teams--3.0s, 3.5s, 4.0s, people who just prefer to play on Wednesdays. It's the Forrest Gump box of chocolates where you never know what you're going to get. Thank goodness Michele and I got something different playing at #3 doubles, where we won 10-5. I can't say I played my finest, but I didn't make a fool of myself.
Back to today. 3 hours of tennis in the morning. 1.5 hour break where we ate lunch and checked schoolwork. Playdate for 2 hours, during which I ran home to gather more supplies for the onslaught of the evening. Here's what we had:
Trumpet lesson
Flute lesson
Cub Scouts
Soccer Practice
Church Small Group where we had childcare duties
First Baseball game of the season
There were 2 parents. There were 4 children. It was chaos. At 1:45 I needed to have packed two instruments, multiple books and pages of sheet music, soccer gear and a total clothing change for Frances, jackets for 5 in case the weather got cool after dark, soccer clothes and ball and shoes for Rutledge because he would need to occupy himself for an hour and a half while Frances played. Baseball equipment (I misheard Kerry saying "socks and belt" as "bat" and then filled in "glove" with it and assumed he had them in his car). A baseball uniform, with cold weather shirt for under. It seems doable because everyone is supposed to have a bag with all this stuff ready to walk out the door or already waiting in the car. Only this is the first day of the official season, so all we had been given so far was a pair of pants and a hat and I had left the cleats at home because i thought that for sure we'd have 10 minutes or so at home before dashing to Cub Scouts for a 3 mile hike after the music lessons. Kerry had picked up the shirt and socks and belt for baseball because they came in much later than the pants did since the shirts needed to be personalized at the printer. Any hope of a unified bag was out the window.
The music lessons ran over time, which I hate to complain about because I like to see progress. This made it too late to stop by home and pick up the cleats and a jacket because the activity tonight with Cub Scouts was a 3 mile forced march through the trails of Woodlake for the Outdoorsman badge. If we were late, they'd leave without us. So I dropped of the boys very hastily, flew home to get the cleats, a water bottle, and my running shoes and to pee (you don't get to pee on days like today!), and then flew back, where of course the Scouts had already left. So I jogged around the mini lake, which was good exercise and part of my "I should be a runner even though I hate it" program. I probably went 3/4 of a mile, which doesn't sound like much but is impressive for me being out of shape, and I ran into them. Then we briskly walked another few miles while I tried not to have a panic attack about being so far from the car and not in control of other people's pace when Ollie was supposed to be at baseball in under 30 minutes. We arrived with about 7 minutes to spare, only to discover that no, we didn't have the bat or glove, and he's a lefty, so borrowing one at the last minute can get tricky. I felt awful. My car was so full of gear and instruments and just plain crap (fast food wrappers at this point from the dinner we had to eat at Wendy's) that we practically needed one of those hamburger boxes on top to contain the overflow. I was hating life. Oh, and it was raining by now. This rain we had been promised all day by the Weather Channel, the rain that was supposed to deliver me from the evil of overscheduling by cancelling the soccer, baseball, and hike all on one night. Yeah. It did nothing for my schedule. Every darn thing went right on. Even the baseball game in the persistent rain.
I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, but that's my April. Every year. It's the time when everyone wants to get out of their winter hidey-hole. You want to, as Chaucer says, make pilgrimages. To places like the fish hatchery, the rock quarry, the park, the farm day, the wedding two states away, the Easter Egg Hunt. It's all fun stuff. All good stuff. There's just a darn lot of it. And it's the golden season of the open-ended sports. The ones that, unlike, say, ballet, you can't sign up for with a specific time like Tuesday: 4-5. No, these are the ones where you sign up and someone says, "Oh yeah, a practice a week and a game on Saturday," and you hand them your $95 check and they give you a sharp looking uniform and the next thing you know you're practicing for 2 hours twice a week on random days and playing games any which way from Sunday. Take the soccer, which puts us in a mad scramble from flamenco on Mondays. No sleep til Brooklyn. Or the baseball, which doesn't seem to ever start until 7:30 on a school night and keeps my boy out in the rain until 10.
Then there's the matter of the fish tank. The supposed-to-be-beautiful coral reef with the ailing anemone. The reef that ate my bank account. We thought the dog cost a lot. We could have about 3 more dogs by now with what we've spent so far, and it's far from over. Our bubble-tip anemone is having some undiagnosable crisis. He goes upside down (and let me tell you, he's not a pretty boy when he's upside down). He is squished in a corner and won't come out. When we blew him out with a jet, he settled himself under a rock, which was even worse. He doesn't look good. He's not being friendly. We just bought him some new frozen krill, but it's not feeding time for another few days. Meanwhile, we also emptied out our wallet buying, and I'm not kidding here, a garlic supplement and Vitamin C for one of my fish who is swimming vertically and sideways and may have an infection. And a new buffer. And some device which grounds the electrical system in the tank. And more and more and more fresh water, which evaporates at a rate you wouldn't believe and has to be purchased very specially from a giant tank at the fish store and is de-ionized, reverse-osmosisized and needs to be put in something like a kerosene container, which I can't seem to find in a size that doesn't end up weighing 56 pounds when fully loaded. And we all know my ability to feel guilt. I feel guilty when I think of how some poor sweet anemone was just reposing in his natural environment, being gaped at by yuppie tourists off the coast of some tropical Pacific island, and somehow he now finds himself in a 34 gallon semi-toxic box being tended by people who can't tell his mouth from his butt.
From here on out, I have a feeling, though, that our days will be just packed. It's probably me. Probably exacerbated by my inability to delegate (I believe we call delegating when it comes to kids "carpooling"). My megalomaniacal belief that I and we can do it all. And the whole four kids thing. I'm seeing in glaring lights the benefits of the only child. Oh, how good I had it when I was growing up. No wonder my mother seemed semi-sane. I can't help but fantasize about what it would be like if I was only micromanaging one small person.
But no, I never learn. I just sent in course descriptions for two classes I plan to teach at the homeschool center next year. One is a class on reading and talking about poetry for middle schoolish students, using a nice little spiral bound program that I found at the IEW seminar I attended a few weeks ago. I'm looking forward to working through this with my boys and it would be more pleasant and palatable to them if there were a few more people doing it with us. It covers such irritating by interesting topics as scansion, terms like "trochee" and "dactyl" and "spondee" that we don't remember from English class. And I'm going to teach an IEW class, with the hope that I myself will get my money's worth out of the DVD set I purchased at the workshop. And I'm doing Junior Great Books with Frances-aged kids. It has worked out especially well, it would appear, that there are plenty of classes for Rutledge and Frances while I'm busy. Rutledge will be doing a preschool class and art. Frances will do art, earth science, and geography. And the boys will do pre-algebra, earth science, and bagpipes. This...sigh...means that we are gone two whole mornings a week, which means two mornings of our own stuff lost. But it's good, I think. We shall see. It violates this year's policy of nothing before noon except in rare cases.
And in closing, I will try to heap on yet another superlative in the This Is Really Why April Is the Cruellest Schooling Month category. The very most hardest thing is that while you're trying your best to live in the present, next year is already breathing very hard down your neck. I don't want it to. I wish I could tune it out. But things want your commitment now. They threaten they'll fill up, raise their prices, and break your kneecaps if you don't tell them yes or no right now. They want to know if you want to help, volunteer, get paid, and so forth. They kind of want your money as a deposit. They want to claim one of the precious places in your schedule before something else comes along in some more propitious month, say August, and edges them right out into the outer darkness. I can barely think about tomorrow, much less whether I still want to be committed until next May to something I haven't even experienced yet. Yes, I'm a spoiled homeschooler. I like my always-available outs. I like my tenuous commitments.
Truly, though, at the moment I am feeling blessed and at the same time a bit selfish. My life is pretty good. I have four kids who are involved in so many things that they love. I'm getting to watch Frances develop as a soccer player and be aggressive out on the field and learn something entirely new. I'm getting to watch Rutledge turn into a boy, a real boy with cleats and soccer shorts and a reading program he's bumbling through. I couldn't even recognize Ollie on the baseball field tonight when I returned from getting dinner. He looked so confident, his stance was so ready, he was comfortable out there, and you couldn't tell he is still the comparatively new player on the team. I have people playing the bagpipes and the flute and trumpet and piano who are excited about their lessons every week. I have 5th graders who are going to do well on Latin test tomorrow. I'm not totally sucking on a B level tennis team. I've been invited to be on a 3.5 team even though I missed getting bumped up in my rating this year like I expected. I can play tennis on a Wednesday morning, take kids to a language class on a Thursday, be part of a co-op where my boys are learning about comparative political and economic systems and are getting it, can read book after book about children's experiences in the second World War, meet new friends for coffee at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, see my daughter perform in a big professional dance performance and iron the dresses and babysit the professional dancers' children during the shows. I have the world's most complicated mini-aquarium and a whole host of stuff to keep my little brain busy with research. I don't have a stomach ache any more. There really probably should be more drudgery and torture in my life, just to temper all the goodness!
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Snow!
What an amazing snowfall we've had. Amazing because it has been at least three years since we've had any appreciable snow in this area, and by appreciable I mean enough to drag a sled through. So today was extra special. Unfortunately, it didn't start falling until close to 5:00, so there was not as much time to play outside as we would have liked before it got dark and colder, but there was still plenty of time to make a snowman, a snow hotdog, pull Rutledge and Frances around on a sled, have a snowball fight, and go to the school to ride the snowboard down the hill.
This picture demonstrates the concept of why raking pine needles is sometimes a good idea. Mr. Piney Snowman.
Happily, some more snow is expected tonight. The Weather Channel was saying somewhere from 4-8 more inches, but the local evening news sounded like it downgraded the expectation some--not as heavy as the snowfall earlier. I would say maybe we got 2 inches. It depends on where you measure. It would thrill me beyond belief if we got 8 more! I'm not holding my breath, but I literally expect to dream of snow tonight.
And speaking of snow dreams, as time winds down on this year's ski season, this seems to be the week we need to go. I am hoping for Wednesday or Friday. Wednesday sounds like it might be great conditions--recent heavy snowfall, still cold but not bitter (I hope!). I am mildly nervous about going because I always get a horrendous migraine by the end of the day at Wintergreen; the altitude and humidity and heaviness of the air on the slopes really gets to me. I'll be armed with my barfilicious migraine pills in case of the worst, but I'm so excited to be taking not just Ollie, but Walter this year. They may be able to entertain each other, putting less impact on me--more skiing at my own pace!
This weekend was also my birthday, and in my case, I suppose we really are talking about both days of the weekend. I just have to share my beautiful birthday gift (and no, it's not the GPS!).
Though it is looking less than spectacular in this photo, I promise more and better to come in the future. This is my slightly more than nano reef aquarium. It seems I have a consuming new hobby to, well, consume me. I had not quite meant to stumble so heavily into a research and labor and finance intensive hobby such as this. I originally had only wanted a really big freshwater aquarium with some pretty fish. After looking at Petsmart and Petco and not seeing something quite perfect (and the joke is, I thought much of what I saw was out of budget...talk about a budget buster!), I suggested we look at Fish World, whose billboard I have seen on the way to Costco so often. I didn't realize that they are saltwater specialists, meaning that they carry *only* saltwater livestock and supplies. And when I did discover this, I thought it would be interesting to look around, but wasn't thinking that this was a complexity level that I was interested in taking on myself. Surprise! The next thing I knew, I was cleaning out the back of the van to make space for 6 ten gallon buckets of saltwater, a 34 gallon all-in-one tank and a stand, a styrofoam cooler full of nearly 30 pounds of live rock, and a bag of "live sand." I had never even heard the term live sand before. I still don't know what is meant by the word "refugium." Sounds Latin. Now I find myself thrust into the intricacies of protein skimmers, evaporation replacement systems, reverse-osmosis and deionized water, power heads, and numerous lessons on the evils of things like putting a fish like Dory in a tank under 55 gallons and the stupidity of crushed coral as a substrate (not sure why...just read it and it sounded like gospel).
My tank is currently cycling, which is a short way of saying that I have had to give myself a crash lesson in chemistry, a subject I got a C in while I was in high school. Hopefully I'm learning in a bit more of a mastery way this time around--$200 in living, breathing fish and invertebrates will probably be at stake here. I am seeing some positive signs of the nitrification process. Already today I have seen some red stuff starting to grow and wave around on my live rock. There are obviously organisms waking up in there. As they do, they will produce ammonia, which still peak and then decline as it is converted to nitrite, which in turn is then turned into nitrate. When the ammonia and nitrite levels fall to zero, then things are moving in the right direction to start thinking about adding the livestock--the fish and anemones and corals and other living things that are going to make it amazing.
Part of what I'm having to do in a short period of time is sort through acronyms. A FO tank is "fish only," meaning nothing but substrate and fish. FOWLR is "Fish Only With Live Rock," meaning that there are, okay, fish and live rock, but no other organisms intentionally placed. What I'm going for is called a reef tank, or, because of my semi-small size, a nano-reef (and yes, there are whole online communities dedicated to nano-reefers). In this, the focus is on creating the entire enclosed ecosystem--a miniature ocean. With this, there are typically fewer fish and a higher focus on invertebrates like hard and soft corals, anemones, crabs and other crustaceans, starfish, shrimp, and other beautiful and strikingly colorful and very alive thingies. I can barely wait for all of this to develop in my tank. I'm also scared out of my wits.
Here is an excerpt from the website www.ratemytank.com that I found particularly compelling:
"Why keep a reef tank? Anybody who's ever stood in front of one will tell you. They are mesmerizing. You can't take your eyes off a reef tank. It's like having a little bit of the ocean, right there in front of you. Pros to keeping reef tanks include:
- Reef tanks provide a welcome challenge
- The beauty and uniqueness found in a reef tank is unparalleled
- Keeping reef tanks helps raise interest in protecting wild coral
Some people just like a challenge. You tell them "it can't be done" or "it's really hard to do," and what do they do? Turn away? No way, they're drawn towards the reef tank and make it their life's dream to successfully keep a reef tank in their home. With a reef tank, you're replicating even more of an ecosystem than a FO or FOWLR tank. You need to account for not just how fish interact with each other, but how fish, corals and invertebrates interact with each other to help support each other in a more sustainable environment. You'll learn more about the biology of organisms and how ecosystems manage themselves than you would with other set-ups.
In terms of the beauty of a reef tank, truly, there is not another experience in the world except for reef snorkeling or scuba diving that will let you appreciate up close what makes a reef tank special. Reef tanks are like none other. The beauty of the corals, anemones, and other invertebrates are unparalleled. There's simply nothing else like it. The relationship between all the different animals in a reef tank just adds to the experience."
These tanks truly are a sight to behold. They are, indeed, mesmerizing. I am looking at our entire year's science curriculum all balled up and tossed into one 34 gallon curved-front glass container. The life cycle, the chemical cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle. We have to think about, observe, worry about, and help engineer all of these. If any of these get "off," the consequences will be dire for our mini-ecosystem. We have contraptions to try to help with all of these--containers of fresh water that automatically drip in to maintain sufficiently diluted salinity as evaporation occurs; containers that collect the protein "foam" that results as organisms die off and give off waste and chemicals; things that mimic the movement of crashing waves and undulating waters so that food and nutrients are carried where they need to go to stationary animals, appropriate habitats that take into account the needs of our inhabitants (the cave dwellers, the skittish, the territorial, the symbiotic relationships, the rock snackers), filters and pumps to keep oxygen and carbon dioxide interchange in check; test kits to ascertain that even though chemical cycles are natural, that certain chemicals don't start to dominate and put the various living things at risk. We need to study up on the feeding and dietary needs of each inhabitant. Some need to be fed multiple times a day. Some need food placed right near their "mouth." Some may need to be trained to accept a variety of foods or to eat in their new and possibly stressful environment. We need to make sure our species are compatible. We have a particularly fancy light fixture that supposedly will allow us to keep the most finicky corals and anemones, and there is so much to learn about how long it is to be kept on and when each day, how the excessive use might cause unpleasant algae or bacterial blooms. Problem solving might be a skill we hone. It's rather exciting.My local fish store (LFS, as I must now refer to it) suggested that we could come in 3 days after we bought the tank and set it up cycling to have our water tested and likely begin to add livestock. This goes against what I'm seeing in most forums and informational sources, both print and online. It makes me nervous. I'm all for seeing our position in the nitrogen cycle, and I do trust the expertise of a very respected aquarist, but I'm also nervous because the fish are so dang expensive ("dang" rhymes with "tang," a fish I'm not allowed to have but that I am already coveting a 75 or 120 gallon tank for). I want to take no chances and rush nothing.
It is most likely that our first acquisition will be a Dory. That is, a clownfish or percula or false percula. I'm smitten with the black and white False Percs, I believe they are. Alas, they cost a little more than the orange Dories. I suspect it is likely anathema to call these fish a "Dory" and I don't know...Finding Nemo has probably been the bane of most fanatical hobbyists existence. I just can't help myself ;)
I am crazy about the torch coral, but it sounds like it is not a great specimen for a beginner, so I will probably have to wait to introduce it. The idea of an "aggressive" coral and watching it in action is so very cool.
Tomorrow morning will be so fun to discover--how much more snow will have fallen? How much more growth will be on my live rock?
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