Sometimes simpler is just better.

This seems to be the lesson that I've learned from reading Betsy-Tacy with Frances. The book is old, and it feels that way. It simply lacks the intrigue, intensity, and self-focused issues that are so common in children's books today. No trailer parks, 12-step meetings, mothers in rehab who didn't tell that's why they left. These are just simple stories about two little girls, 5 or 6 years old in the first book, who go for picnics up the hill near their house, who care for each other when there is sadness in the family, and who think of imaginative ways to spend their days.

I didn't realize Frances was so interested. It turns out to have been not only interesting, but inspiring. First, yesterday she woke up and announced that she wanted to go calling. "Do people still go calling? Will people know what I'm doing?" she asked. Would they invite her in to sit their living room and sip tea? I told her I doubted that, but that it might be nice to go calling, make some cards to leave to say she had been there, and perhaps bake some cookies to bring to the people she visited. It's unfortunate that most people aren't home on a Thursday morning to receive callers, so she mostly left cookies on doorsteps with a calling card. But she did talk to one person. Both she and Rutledge had worn their finest: she in a tiger striped leotard, fluffy jazz skirt, and knit boa, and he in a cape and sunglasses.

Unfortunately, partway through her calling she decided that maybe it would be even more fun to make a little money with the cookies, and she came home with $2. I was not all happy that she had gone door to door as a saleswoman. So the money had to go back. Then she set up a stand with her cookies, but given the extreme heat and humidity and the early daytime hour when people were at work or shut up in their houses escaping the heat, there were no customers.

Then today she made paper dolls with people she cut from magazines. This was another chapter in the Betsy-Tacy book. The girls cut out families from magazines and then cut out clothes and household items. I remember how much I used to love to do this with the Sears catalog when I was growing up. I'd choose the cutest babies to paste into notebooks that were supposed scrapbooks of my imaginary family, a family filled with boys under 2. Funny how one day our imaginary musings can kind of come true.

Her paper dolls ranged from cute to monstrous--little heads on giant bodies, grown women in onesies and snap-up pajamas. Then she used the box that the Rock Band 2 guitar came in to make a house with many rooms and pictures on the walls. I love seeing so much non-battery, imaginative fun, as well as seeing how she makes books her own. Right now we're also living with a giant clubhouse refrigerator box--with a skylight--in the middle of our garage after we had many nights of reading one of my favorite childhood books, _Christina Katerina and the Box_. These are the kinds of days that I wish could go on forever for her, free from self-consciousness, free from outside ideas about what she maybe "should" be doing, and just reveling in being 7.

The boys and I just finished reading _When Zachary Beaver Came to Town_, which was an outstanding book, though I'll admit, just a little too early for Walter and Ollie to really be able to get the most out of it. We and they have been reading more young adult books lately, and there just is a bit of a jump in subject matter that they aren't quite ready for yet in most of them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I can see how much more meaningful and rich some of these books will be at the right time, which isn't quite now. This book deals some with a love interest, but more than that are the themes that layer through the story--loss, betrayal, grace, coming of age, redemption, coming to selflessness, and then there are the obvious Christ figures and the theme of the baptism (by the town drunk), which would be great material for discussing in a literature class.

I'm just really glad that we can still read together, something that I feel strongly about in our family life and as an educational tool. I hear so many places about how one of the best things you can do to help your children intellectually and emotionally is to continue to read long past the time when most parents stop reading to their children, and this has been so true for us. It is just a special time, and not only do we get to share great books together, but we can talk about more challenging topics and I can pick books that I think are going to push them in some way. It allows all of us to reach a little beyond where we might be on our own and it gives us something that we can talk about in common because we've all experienced it together.

In my own reading, I just finished Nic Sheff's _Tweak_. What an intense book. Autobiographical, it is a very unflinching account of his addiction to meth, heroin, cocaine, and a collage of other drugs, both legal and illegal and the incredible challenge of finding lasting recovery. I lost a great amount of sleep staying up because I couldn't put the book down. I cringe a little when I think that originally I picked it up because I thought it might be interesting to Ollie. This is definitely not a book for 11 year olds--male prostitution, sexual addiction, as well as the potentially confusing message about how incredible it feels to shoot up at the same time that the author is describing how his body deteriorates and he can't work or keep relationships with people and ruins his connections with all of the people he cares about. So I'm glad that I chose to read it to myself and then send it right on back to the library. Still, it's one of those books that I know is going to stay with me for a while.

Before this, I finished that darn 3rd Twilight book. Repetitive. So repetitive. I'm wondering how she manages to get 800 pages or whatever of a 4th one when it's a one theme pony, but still, I have to admire how the first book drew me in and had me paying nearly no attention to page numbers, percentage of book read, and all the other extra-literary physical aspects of a book that have always distracted me when I read. I think I'm seeing some changes in my own reading speed as a result of Walter's training--my pace has picked up in a significant way, and I guess I'm more focused or something, but I will notice that 30 pages have gone by without me once looking at a page number lately. I doubt it's just that the books I'm reading are more riveting than in the past. This could be kind of helpful!

Whew! I'm back from a crazy week of camping. Almost a week, I should say. The trip originally was to be 10 days, and I lasted 8. It was a hot, hot time. Although we were in Massachusetts, it was during a heat wave during which heat records were being broken, and this was particularly challenging in a scrub pine forest with a lot of black asphalt down the front of the campsites. We had a great time nonetheless.

Our trip started with almost 12 hours in the car. We hit New York City, or the exterior of it, around 4:30 on a Friday, through no real fault of our own. So we decided to spend the night with our neighbors who recently moved to Madison Connecticut. I'll admit, whenever I get on the Merritt Parkway, I instantly have dreams of picking up everything and moving up there immediately. And Madison...what a dream of a little town. It's about 20 minutes out of New Haven, it's right on the Long Island Sound, it's directly adjacent to a lovely state park with a beach, and the town itself is straight from a movie or novel. It's the quintessential New England coastal town, with an adorable Main Street and shopping district, picturesque boats anchored all along the shore, houses so charming you'd swear they were a movie set, and we were there on the perfect day. Sunny, warm, pleasant for the beach but not too hot, Saturday. It was hard to imagine that anything but perfection ever is the case there. What I heard, however, is that before we came, there had been a month of nearly solid rain, so precious few beach days or outdoor activity days. Still...the place had its best foot forward when I was there and therefore will live in infamy (or just plain famy?) in my head as high on my I'd-move-there-if-I-won-the-lottery list.

For the next three days we camped. Notice my conspicuous lack of pictures. That's because Ollie dropped my camera at the Woods Hole Aquarium and broke it. So it's going to take a while to extract what little I had. We stayed at Myles Standish State Forest, right at the mouth of Cape Cod. It's a humongous park that takes about 20-30 minutes to drive across, and it is primarily scrub pine forest, dotted with about 6 ponds. It has me wondering what the difference is between a pond and a lake. Ponds are a very big thing in Massachusetts. I don't know that we label anything on a map of Virginia as a pond. The particular pond our campsite was near was called Charge Pond. It was relatively small--a strong swimmer could easily go across, but it had a cute little roped off swimming area (people were happily swimming all over, though) and a sandy beach, and the water was clear and felt incredible after sweating in the campground. What I found particularly nice was that there were trees around, and you could find a shady spot on the shore and there would be a magical little breeze and the temperature would drop by about 10 degrees when you sat there. The kids, especially Rutledge, found no end of fascination with this swimming hole. We were there for hours a day. Hours and hours. Throwing each other, throwing mud at each other despite numerous warnings, building tunnels through the sand, squeezing the sand until it oozed something that looked like blood, racing each other, knocking each other off rafts, spitting water out of their mouths. Then there were the nightly skit shows around the campfire. They would start out with canned skits of the Girl and Boy Scout type. But then the improv would start. Frances found a medium that was right up her alley. I felt like I needed a shepherd's crook to pull her off the stage after a while! She would spend half the day rounding up girls to participate in her skits and making up sequels to ones from the previous night. The skits these kids made up rarely made sense to adults, but they found them incredibly humorous.

On day 5 of the trip, we decided to go to my friend Nikki's house in Halifax for the night. I was about to have a heat stroke, or at the very least, to start vomiting from the heat. So we had the longest late lunch in the history of lunch at Friendly's and then we went to her house where we had a real dinner and slept in real beds. We were warned that if we went home, it would feel impossible to come back to camping, and sure enough, it was. Now it didn't help that it was 97 degrees the one day and about 95 the next and who knows how hot on the day I threw in the towel, but dealing with the camp stoves and sweltering tents was not a pleasant thought. When more record-breaking heat was expected, as well as two fronts coming from the west that promised some rain and a tropical storm coming up the coast that was supposed to wreck the ideal beach day, I determined that we would be wise to start heading home and try to compose ourselves before the school year starts in about a week or two.

Our trip home was long but somewhat leisurely. We stopped in Mystic, CT to have a look around, and we walked around a bit at Yale. Then we made one final push in the car to get to New Jersey for the night (ack--didn't get to the hotel until 10!). The next morning, we toured Princeton, got ourselves something to eat, and then headed for home, arriving around dinnertime. All in all, it was a great trip, we saw many new places, met some new people, caught up with old friends, and had a whole free weekend to unwind at home as the cherry on top.

Tomorrow is going to be our first day of schoolwork. The public schools don't go back for a little over 2 more weeks, but I'm ready for us to get on track, especially since we're going to South Carolina right after Labor Day. I don't feel completely organized in terms of location of items, but I have things laid out fairly well for at least tomorrow. I think it's going to be challenging combining that agenda with the summer that is still going on and its obligations, but I'm ready for a return to routine. Even if we're not running at full capacity right now, we'll at least be accomplishing something.

My computer is on the blink. Literally blinking with some kind of major problem. My screen is hopping up and down, which is making it very hard to type.

I am off to a wild and crazy camping trip for the next 11 days. I didn't realize how close to Cape Cod the campground is, which I'm suddenly finding very exciting after kind of dreading it for a few months because I was sue we'd be isolated and I'd starve to death.

I doubt that I will be fully GF during this little foray. I have a bunch of things packed, but being in the woods isnt' the easiest place to eat under any circumstances, so I have my doubts. But the canoe is on the car, everything is packed and ready, and we just need to put ourselves in the car in the morning and drive.

Hello!

This is my entry for today. I'm writing with some friend and need to see how it's going to look.

I have a guilty confession to make. I deeply desire to live in a house that is "Designed to Sell." I want to inhabit a staged house.

Unfortunately, I live in what I refer to in my own head as "Reality House." I find myself frequently trying to put it in some positive light--it's a house that speaks to at least some ability to live in the moment. In fact, it is filled from top to bottom with evidence of moments I've lived in or that my children or husband have lived in and that were kind of left as they were after we moved on to another moment.

And the truth is that I am bothered by this Reality House. I can't relax when I'm in a mess. In those rare moments when there is a place for everything and it's already there, I feel such a tremendous energy and creativity. We find ourselves playing all kinds of board games, working puzzles, watching movies together, undertaking art projects, and just plain getting things done. When things aren't pristine, I'm more grouchy, distracted, and more likely to leave things right where they are because I don't know where to begin. Even the kids become amazingly more creative when there is plenty of space to do it in. The Lego buildings proliferate, Frances produces volumes of artwork or write little books or makes scrapbooks, and Rutledge and I manage to actually do things like practice his speech sounds and play games with gratuitous plastic polar bears (have you ever played that Cranium game Polar Bear ABC? It has nothing to do with polar bears! Who designed this thing!) and all those other things I am all good intentions about.

This all comes on the heels of today, a day when I felt like I spent hours spinning my wheels mentally trying to figure out how to put all of our stuff into what I always refer to as "funcational groups." This means that the room that the builder of our house imagined as a dining room really shouldn't have a china cabinet, an art table, a piano, a piece of exercise equipment, a plastic crate full of PC hardware detritus (and three stray bags of homemade play-doh that snuck in there), a wicker basket of library books, a nearly empty World War II filing cabinet, and a wooden bookshelf with two printers on top and a motley collection of school books and children's novels.

The real dilemma is that I have our "homeschool" stuff in at least five rooms of the house. There is a shelf of stuff in the "dining room," a shelf of stuff in our family room, a corner cabinet of books and puzzles in our kitchen and another shelf there with math stuff and sloppy office supplies and art books. Then there's the "living room" with no furniture to sit on but with four tall bookshelves packed to the gills, a big cube thingy with the bulk of the stuff I've bought at used curriculum sales. And the books that made it into my bedroom. And in the upstairs hallway. To a normal person with a modicum of organizational skills, this would seem to be a minor issue--you just put all the stuff in one room, duh.... But for me, for some inexplicable reason, it's just not that easy. I'm deeply confused about how one would do this. Like how would you pick which room? And what if all the furniture didn't fit? And if I put all those books and little wooden tiles with numbers on them into the same room, do I need to have a table in there for people to use these things at? Or should I try to create separate workstations for each child, knowing that in my real life experience with these particular children, they've never even worked at a desk before, no matter how appealing the setup is to me?

And in the middle of all this sits two very large pieces of fitness equipment. Not my fitness equipment, I might add. Sure, I wouldn't mind a Bowflex body, but I don't have any immediate plans to achieve one. I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to get in a 20 minute walk for the dog each evening. Kerry, on the other hand, is adamant that this stuff remain right there in the middle of the living room, no matter how ugly it looks and no matter how it gets right in the face of my love of "functional groups."

I could literally feel my brain seizing up and refusing to cooperate. No matter how much I thought, I could not come up with a workable solution. And meanwhile I have a birthday party happening in fewer than three days, I have regular old messes in the house, the kind like spilled plants and a mountain of laundry and cobwebs and dust bunnies climbing up to the ceilings. And dirty dishes. And a filthy floor. And piles of things dumped into my upstairs hallway that we need to get rid of but that maybe need a slight bit of repair before that or that need to be sorted (all the Groovy Girls need to get dressed...). I had to repeat to myself like a mantra every time I would start to lose focus that this Bowflex/homeschool books/should I list my kitchen table on Craigslist dilemma has nothing to do with the impending party in mere days. Solving those mysteries of our time is not a prerequisite for having my house ready for 9 to 12 year old boys.

Nonetheless, I did make some progress. I just started moving things, but not things that required me to take books off shelves. First i just turned the Bowflex. This created a visual vista that was very pleasing, even though there was still an elephant in the room with all my books. Then I decided to just remove all the things that didn't belong in the room--the desks that were crowding in there because I couldn't figure out where else to put them, the piles of things on the floor. And then I got very bold and moved that Bowflex right out of the room. Moved the piano. then moved it back where it was before. Then moved a whole filled china cabinet by myself. Rerranged dog crates. Got to a point where I was just putting those dang books into the room with the other books regardless of whether I had a clear spot for them just then.

What I have now is hope. And light. Perhaps this is a bit melodramatic for redecorating or moving furniture, but truly, there is more light in my house. Doors that were closed are open again, and I don't mean that abstractly. The french doors that we had a computer in front of are now free and clear and light is shining right in from the front windows. Nearly all of the school and book-related things are in one room now. It's a room with absolutely positively no wall space whatsoever for anything, and I'm going to probably have to live with that, but it's a room with a monolithic purpose. It's for keeping all those things that make our goofy little life run, it's for the table where art projects happen, and it's for the printers that make us such poor stewards of the earth in the name of education.

And the dining room? I'm okay with that. At least I can walk through it. People can get to the piano to practice.

And I have the satisfaction I get when I am able to pare down some things in my life. In the end, I'm going to get rid of several school desks. We listed on Freecycle a giant tube-type computer monitor, a giant bag of miscellaneous computer cords (we have no idea how we ended up with over a dozen ethernet cables) and about 15 shelf inches of those supermarket checkout cookbooks. This week I'll be able to sell a huge wooden toy horse barn, a box of books, and I'll give away a bunch of My Little Ponies and other quirky little plastic toys. In the end, my dream is that I'll live in a house that is just one step closer to looking like somewhere that normal people would like to live.

What's most amazing is that I could accomplish this because we were home all weekend. Walter and Ollie were at the Bay with some friends for the weekend, and Frances, Rutledge, Kerry and I had a chance to do younger kid-centric things. We had a fabulous day at Busch Gardens yesterday, all the better because it didn't last all day. We forced Frances to go on the Log Flume twice, and though she didn't love it, she did survive. We spent plenty of time at the two squirty areas with the dumping water, and we couldn't have asked for a better day for it. I'm always impressed with how light on our feet and nimble we seem to be with just two children, no matter which two they are.



Oh, and can I say one phrase that I hate? Cash for Clunkers. If I hear that one more time this week I'm going to run over whoever said it with my fuel-efficient car.

The summer surely seems to be flying by. Only six more weeks left of it, or something like that. It feels rather short. And yet, at the same time, I'm ready to move on to the new structure that comes with fall.

This summer has been far more structured in terms of how our days are spent than any previous summer. In fact, it looked suspiciously like our school year in that regard. Except that we were doing entirely different activities. Sometimes I think I just never learn!



Swim and dive teams both ended this week. They were great seasons. Frances missed practice for the last three or more weeks of both, but she continued to compete in all of the meets for both sports, and she had a decent showing despite her lack of time on the board or in the lap lanes. None of the kids is going to champs for swim, and I'm not entirely sure that for most of them that their times didn't even go down a little this year. But our real focus is on dive. I was so very proud that all three of them made it to Champs this year and did very well there. Frances won 3rd place in the Mini-Mite division, Walter won 7th place in the Midget division, and Ollie won 2nd place in Midgets. This was a huge accomplishment for everyone. Ollie now has a repertoire of about 9 dives, not all of which he can do on any given day, depending on his anxiety level and whether he has had a recent close encounter with the board, and Frances has five dives, which is more than most girls her age. Walter went from not having four dives and therefore not being able to compete in the first few meets this seasons to having five solid dives and having cumulative scores over the course of only three meets to get himself to Champs. We are so pleased with the effort he has put in and how much he has grown. At our dive team's awards ceremony, all three kids got trophies, and both Frances and Ollie won an award for highest points of anyone in their division in the club, so they have really big trophies as well. We think Walter should have won the award for most improved!



Rutledge has become a little fish in his own right. He has been taking swimming lessons with the legendary Miss Erline, who has been teaching swim lessons for the past 65 years. She has an amazing rapport with the children and brings out their best. Rutledge went from having panic attacks on the side of the pool and refusing to even wear a bathing suit or dip his feet in the baby pool to swimming underwater and paddling about 30 feet across the pool to the lap lanes! He is still very nervous on his back and flips over as soon as he realizes that no one is holding on to him. But now he has become the biggest pool rat. We're there several times a day many days, and he jumps in from the side over and over and in so many different ways--cannonballs and corkscrews and supermans. He wears his doofy clear white goggles that do him no favors, and he picks up things off the bottom of the pool. This past week he even stood under the mushroom that pours water down on his head, something he never would have done even two weeks ago. We're just so proud of him. I'm actually kind of proud of myself for sticking with his 8 a.m. swim lessons, when this used to be a time of day that I was not even up!



Walter is a little more than halfway through his program at Learning RX. I wish that I could say that we're seeing a massive and unmissable change in him, but I'm not sure that is happening yet. I wouldn't say it's not happening, but I think the proof will be in his schoolwork when we start again in a few weeks. It's hard to show academic progress and faster processing when you are spending most of your days in the pool, playing with friends, and moving up levels in video games. That said, he is finding many of the procedures of the program easier and easier to handle, and it's neat to see how he has mastered the earlier levels of most tasks and can now do them on command without a lot of fuss. What I am hoping to see happen is for his auditory processing to improve and for his executive processing to become more rapid and reliable. I can definitely see changes in his memory, especially as it relates to the tasks where he has to recall strings of numbers, words, ideas, or connected material. His spelling also seems to have taken a leap forward. One of his tasks is to take a list of spelling words of gradually increasing length and be able to spell them forward and backward at the same rate. For someone who last year couldn't consistently spell words like "were" and "begin," it's very nice to see him last night tackle a word like "modulate" forward and backward in under a minute. I have determined that I need to up my commitment to the training during the week, though, for the last few weeks remaining. We have always done at least the minimum expected and typically a bit more, but my goal would be for us to do the training at least 5 days a week at home, adding 5 hours to his 3 hours he does in the office. I'd like him to conquer most of the levels on most of the activities by the end and to have felt like we gave it the best we could for the short period it lasted.

In addition to this, we have found a downloadable program called Brainware Safari that makes similar claims about raising cognitive skills by over four years with 5 day a week use for 11 weeks. The program has 168 levels, and Walter has been doing it for 8 days now and is on level 126, which I think is pretty impressive. He really enjoys it, and though he cries sometimes through the games, he is dedicated to having his character grow up (they choose an animal character for the program and it matures and grows as they progress through the levels of the game). Now he is at a point where it takes much more concentration and thought to complete a level, so I suspect his meteoric rise is going to be a little more sedate. Ollie is on level 85, and he devotes a lot less time to the program than Walter, but has been staying consistent with 30-60 minutes a day. Since he is not yet doing Learning Rx, I'd like for him to stick with this program and we'll see where he is before commiting to something with a lot of driving involved. Frances will start it as soon as she gets her password and login.

But here we are with the school year's warm breath on the backs of our necks, and I'm wondering where the bulk of the summer has gone. School, sports, some playdates and travel, some trips to Busch Gardens, and the lazy days are not quite so lazy and not so numerous now!