We are all deep in production week for Legend of the Poinsettia here. It's a time warp kind of week, because even though rehearsals aren't until the evening, somehow the whole day gets sucked away without me even seeing it happening. We also still have a lightly scheduled week because our classes at RES haven't started back up yet (though they're looming way too close and I need to prepare for the two I am teaching), and art class doesn't resume until Tuesday, either. I also spaced out on trumpet and piano lessons this week because I lost track of time because we are so off of our normal routine still. And because we had more open space than usual in our schedule, I spent time with friends who I hadn't spent a lot of time with lately due to conflicting schedules, school, proximity issues, and illness. Today we went up to see my friend Christi, who lives up near Kings Dominion, and Monday Rebecca came over to move furniture. Both of these afternoons were great, but by the time they were done, I was in a rush not to be late to the theatre and to feed everyone before a long night. There also hasn't been the catch up time in the evenings to tie up the loose ends of our work or reading for the day. Tomorrow starts the actual performances, and after watching the dress rehearsal tonight, I can say that they have a fantastic show this year. It's always great, but this year especially doesn't disappoint. I'm especially impressed with how much Frances has improved. She looks much less jerky, spends a lot less time picking at her leotard or nose or rubbing her allergy-ridden facial features, and she really has the moves down pat. She still works to weasel her way to the front of the stage no matter what she is doing, but hey, she's my kid, and I don't mind seeing more of her! She is definitely maturing more as a dancer now, and I can see promise for future roles. Each year she seems to be in more dances in this show, and for this one I think she is in around 10 numbers. There are six in the first half alone. I'm also thrilled to be playing the part of the Virgin Mary again at the Saturday afternoon performance. Unfortunately, this year there isn't a live baby. Last year's baby Jesus has aged up, and she wasn't too tiny last year and wasn't overly thrilled to be held by someone other than her mother when she was already overtired from a hectic production schedule and being away from home for days on end. The doll is probably more reliable. But I'd still prefer the real thing.

I need to get to work early tomorrow figuring out where my writing classes are and how to push us ahead in both of them at a better pace. So far we are a little less than halfway through the program that I had chosen to use, and that's fine, since we are a little less than halfway through the number of weeks I had allotted for the class with the schedule. However, I'd like for my own children, at least, to make it all the way and to get to slightly more complex writing. Because of the short time period for the class (45 minutes) and the wide range of ages and abilities and parental involvement, I've had to modify as things have gone along. I'd like to stick more closely to the original plan now, if we're able, and to get us solidly into the next unit, which is where I think we need to be. We'll be using what the program calls a "Story Sequence Chart," and I have to admit, I'm not overly thrilled with stories because I'm not all that interested in what I guess you'd call creative writing. It's not that I don't value it, but I really want to focus on writing essays, and every other "unit" in the program at least focuses partly on something other than that, partly just to mix things up and give students experience in organizing ideas, writing topics and clinchers, and playing around with the dress-ups and decorations in what may be a less stressful environment than something that appears more academic. The IEW program can feel overwhelming sometimes because there are so many different products, components, and then this whole slew of helpful files available through the website and on some email lists I'm on. I often feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to go through it all and then come up with lesson plans or I'll start reading this stuff and then feel like I'm not accomplishing enough. My primary motivation for teaching was to do this material with my own children, and I think the break we've had has felt too long, and I'd like to have everything done already yesterday with them. I should be thankful for the steady progress we've had and just recommit to doing my best as we go forward now.

It's also getting to be testing season again. Not quite, but people are thinking about it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to simply use the CAT again this year because it's inexpensive. I have no concerns about how anyone is doing at this point--the boys could take a test tomorrow with no preparation and do just fine. Their grammar is improving a great deal, especially if they do not have to generate the grammatically correct sentences themselves and just need to describe, mark things, or identify errors in someone else's sentences. We have been using Saxon Grammar 5 this year, and it's a nice program and is fairly comprehensive. It is arranged the same way the Saxon math books are, with 30 question mixed review problem sets each day and a small new concept for each day as well, with a minimal amount of practice for it. I also appreciate the vocabulary words that it introduces two at a time and then reviews frequently in the problem sets. We didn't get off to a roaring start to the program because I fell into the trap of asking too much of them and myself. Yes, in a perfect world they would be writing down everything from the text in a separate notebook, rather than writing in their textbook like it's a consumable workbook. Yes, it would exercise their handwriting and just be more "like school" if they had to recopy the sentences or write out the whole word for their answers instead of just circling things or making marks under letters than need to be capitalized. But what I was finding it that though this didn't take overly long and they could use a computer for it, we simply were not getting to grammar many days, and so we weren't making much progress in the book. Our "school" time can feel rather limited, so if we have two things with 30 problem review sets, it gets to be rather time consuming, and something often falls by the wayside, and this is it. I don't mind actually sitting down and doing the work with them, since discussing it or seeing it modeled by someone else writing it down can also be an effective way to get through to them. They are now mostly on their own able to diagram sentences with prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, compound predicates, and multiple adjectives. I had to review these procedures myself, since I've never been a huge diagrammer myself. I know there are some people who insist that this is a lost art that is shameful to ignore. I'm not one of those people. And I'm no grammar nazi. I personally fall into the camp of people who believe that grammar is a cultural convention and not a set of laws sent down from God above for us to flout to our own peril. Correct grammar is what our culture at the time agrees upon as acceptable and as common usage. I also believe that grammar is fluid. But at the same time, I think that there is value in understanding how sentences come together, how the parts cooperate and relate to one another, and to knowing enough about grammar to insure that what you write makes sense and isn't confusing or unclear for a reader. Frankly, just about everything I know about grammar I learned from Latin. And the case is becoming the same for my boys. They can now speak comfortably about the predicate nominative (or subject and complement) and identify direct and indirect objects, and this mostly came from having to analyze parts of speech and their endings for translating Latin sentences.

I'm really pleased now with our change to a new Latin instructor and program. We had been using Latina Christiana, and part of the problem was me. I wasn't having them do the work in a disciplined way, and we'd end up doing the whole worksheet on the day or so before class. The program also doesn't have them doing a lot of translation, and because it focuses so heavily on church Latin, some of what they were learning didn't feel as interesting or relevant to them because it felt antiquated and Catholic. I'm still having them do some of the work in those books, but I guess I felt like there wasn't enough repetition or exercises for them in the book, so if I wanted more, I had to design it myself and supplement, and that takes time and energy I didn't usually find to devote to it. Now we're using Ecce Romani, which is what Chesterfield County Public Schools use for their Latin I classes. They are doing well with it, largely because they are so well prepared from doing Latina Christiana I last year and part of II this year, but the book itself is interesting because it has them reading whole paragraphs about a Roman family from day one. It's a bit light on the grammar--it takes the opposite approach from our previous book, which had them learning vocabulary words in isolation (not as part of something they were reading) and then grammar as something to simply be memorized, rather than demonstrating it in action as a method of teaching. This book has them reading, with a mini-glossary for each lesson, and then has them asking and answering questions based on the text. There are some drawbacks to this, but because they're already gotten down some of the grammar basics, I feel like maybe for now we have the best of both worlds. They have their first test with their new instructor on Monday, so I'm trying to coax through demonstration what good study habits would be, namely rereading the passages they will be tested on each day, doing a short exercise each day so that they have to think about their words and the content of the chapters multiple times, and not cramming at the last minute.

Tomorrow is book club, and this month's selection is Lord of the Rings. I hate to admit it, but I really just cannot love this book. I recognize its importance and role in the development of the genre of fantasy and even of the novel, and I can acknowledge its influence on our culture and on many later writers. But the story itself just fails to engage me. I've read it before, I'm listening to it on CD now, I've seen the movies, I've seen shows about it, read articles about it. But I just don't feel all that much readerly sympathy with Frodo or any other character in the book. And it's a long book to not feel a lot of identification or engagement. I can't help thinking about the book as having an EEG or an EKG readout, and though I wouldn't call it a flat line, it is a very regular heartbeat. There aren't the peaks and valleys and huge blips up that make so many other books exciting to me. The forward motion of the journey just seems to go on and on, with worry about whether there are black riders behind them, to meeting some new race of creatures with Welsh-sounding names to a warm fire, then back into a dank, dark forest or field or mountain, to wondering what's behind them, to some new creature with a name with a lot of "y"s and "l"s, to a warm fire. I was right there with them for about the first 3 CDs or the first 150 pages of the book. Since then, I'm fighting my urge to just move on to something that I actually enjoy. The kids are bored too, mostly for similar reasons. I feel awful, since I worry that my own non-enthusiasm for this book and its genre has influenced their feelings. But then I get on my little high and mighty mental horse and start thinking, well gosh, this book, rightly or wrongly, still isn't really considered canonical. Sure, there are scholars who study it, but it's still not generally treated by the stuffy literary establishment as really serious literature. And I know why. I guess I'm just not enough of a geek to want to argue otherwise. I have always avoided Star Trek, too.


And what we are enjoying right now is the book for another book club at our public library, The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke. I haven't really liked her other books--more of that dragon crap that bores me. But this book so far is about real people (I'm definitely a realist and like all characters to be human), and it's well-paced, well-written, and has an interesting setting and plot. The boys both really like it, too. We started it as a read-aloud because we only have one copy and three people wanting to read it, but now I'm having them alternate listening to me and reading about double that on their own. We actually own another copy of the book, but unfortunately have lost it this week when we really need it. The sad thing about this book club is that last month no one except Ollie showed up, and he was super excited about discussing the book, Elephant Run, which he had loved. It was set in Burma during World War II and dealt with a number of historical, political, and social issues that he found interesting (and no orcs, elves, goblins, or magical rings in sight). So in the end, Ollie opted to stay for a one-on-one book club with the librarian by himself--he might as well get the snacks, he figured. It seemed to be a good experience, since he's eager to go back. The first month they went there were two other girls there, which is still a small group, but better than a book club of one. I wish more people would find out about this, because this librarian has a super handle on what kinds of books are just right for this age child. The content is challenging, the topics are varied, but everything has been a real hit for both of mine so far, and they can have rather different tastes from one another. We've been working on going back through some of the earlier selections from before they joined, and no one has been disappointed yet. I feel like I have a real ally now in helping us find good books we might not uncover ourselves, though to be honest, I have such a long list of books I know are good that we're in no danger of having nothing decent to do next. What can be challenging about my kids is that they don't seem to like the kinds of series books on fantasy topics that it seems like most kids their age prefer. Again, I hope I haven't poisoned (edified?) then too much with my own opinions of that genre, since I myself can't abide that genre and have read plenty of those books and never want to go on to whatever book is next in the series, either. But there's just so much out there that really does seem to enlighten the human condition or teach a lot about another culture or time period that I feel okay that they aren't primarily reading variations on a theme of a boy/girl discovers that he is a wizard/djinn/vampire/guardian/etc. and now has the responsibility of saving the world/universe from evil/chaos/darkness/destructive forces.

I was desperately hoping for some real snow again today, but we are getting passed by. There were flurries when I came out of the dance rehearsal tonight, but by the time we crossed the river, they were gone. I had mentally counted on a day or so of being holed up in the house with a fire and few responsibilities. No such luck. When we had the amazing snowfall last month, it felt like it was a permanent situation. There was so much of it and it stuck around for a week or so, and it started to feel like this is what winter looked like. You know, like it does in postcards or in your dreams, where there's white stuff blanketing the grounds and the roofs. I had to remind myself that this is Virginia, and we can go whole years without getting more than an inch. Sure enough, there hasn't been any since then. I really believed for a while there that maybe we were on a roll and were going to have a truly snowy winter, but it seems to not quite be the case. Just a really cold one. And with that, I'm going to curl up under the covers and dream fluffy white cold dreams, and I'm sure I'll wake with at least enough optimism to rush to the window to see if maybe they came true.

I am very naughty starting a post at 11:59 p.m. when I should be sleeping. Tomorrow's a school day after all (for Rutledge). It's the most treasured, anticipated day of the week, Lunch Bunch. We all love lunch bunch. I'm in it for the extra two hours that Rutledge is out and occupied doing age-appropriate activity with friends, time that I can use to be productive with the other schooling we do at home. Rutledge, however, is in it entirely for the Lunchables. Yes, I'm talking about the King of Processed Food. Processed lunch meat cut into perfect, processed circles, processed American cheese cut into precise, stacked squares, real Oreos (none of those Paul Newman imposters or the overpriced gluten-free K-Toos), and most important of all, the juice box. All tucked into what has been caustically indicted as the most wasteful packaging in America, which is saying a lot. In a panic with no "real" food in the house--or should I say, no easily shelf-stable and able to be thrown together in three minutes before we walk out the door food, since our problem is that we have an abundance of genuinely "real" food like frozen, organic grass-fed beef, brown rice that needs 45 minutes to cook, and raw potatoes--I ran into Wal-Mart on the way to preschool one morning and bought this for him. Now he expects it like clockwork every Wednesday. Did I mention or emphasize enough, With A Juice Box?

The trouble is, I often forget to pick it up before, well, Wednesday morning. So I often have to make a blitz trip into the store to get one on our way there. Well, let me just tell you, it is freaking cold out there. I thought I was going to perish on my way into the Ukrop's tonight while Frances was at ballet without dinner. It's that kind of cold. And there is no way in hell I'm going to make an extra trip out tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn to pick up any Lunchables. The kid is going to have to suffer and figure out how to deal with the leftover Papa John's pizza he's going to get. And he's going to have to deal with water in his new camo stainless steel reusable bottle. And he's going to be reducing, reusing, and recycling, being a good steward of the earth and our family's food supply, and he's going to like it!

Yesterday was one of those perfect days in our homeschooling life. It was what I wish every day felt like. We were so productive. We read Act I of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we actually got to our science books, I felt responsive to people's reasonable requests for changes in my agenda. All of this happened in less than a whole day. They went to music lessons. They went to Latin class. Okay, well I forgot both and they were late for both, but it all worked out in the end. There are a couple of keys to our success here, the most important of which is WE DIDN'T LEAVE THE HOUSE. At least not until all of our work was done. No classes, no activities. No distractions. I put that little patch on Walter's back and I was one disciplined puppy. If he started to wander away or was lured by Frances suggesting he join in her imaginative play in the other room (no, we can't all work at one time...), I immediately squashed that. Nope--you've got about 3 hours and you're not going to be soaking in medication so that you can make cardboard houses for Calico Critters or shape cheese wax into little people. When that patch is on your back, you are working! I have no idea if it actually made him concentrate any better than usual, but it sure kept me focused on the limited hours for the tasks at hand.

I've faced a lot of protest as our schoolwork starts up again. Frances simply burst into tears when I said that I'd like for her to read to me from a book I had pulled out. She was sent to her room where she promptly fell asleep. Walter started fussing and whining because math is boring and there's too much review. He made a reasoned case for a new math book because his current one, as he put it, introduces a new concept and then goes on to immediately ask you do a pile of problems about everything else you've ever done in math and not much on the new thing. True. So I have him doing a few pages out of the "Key To..." series on dividing decimals and he'll work through that series of books while I figure out a way to ramp up the pre-algebra class he's taking. I think what I'm going to do is use that, have him watch the videos (one of which I broke, unfortunately), and fast-track what they're doing. It's moving a little slow, so I think I'm just going to have him work ahead in that book, which will have several effects: he won't be scrambling to do each week's homework and should already have done it weeks before, eventually; he will cover the whole book instead of half, which is the teacher's plan. I think he can handle it, and I think he needs to not spend two years on this. I was going to have them work through the rest over the summer, but maybe it's better to just do it now. We can always change our minds if it gets to be too much. Then the material will get reinforced in class as it gets covered, so he'll get review.

Frances is deep into tech week for her dance show this weekend. I'm going to take Walter and Ollie to it, under the guise of "field trip," since it is a super show for exposing them to traditional Latin American dances, Colombian culture, a traditional legend, and the Spanish language. I can't believe this is true myself, but they have never been to one of Frances' shows before, mostly because they are across town and can get expensive for the whole family to go to. Tonight the rehearsal ended fairly early--we were home by 8:20. Last night she wasn't home until 10:20. Tomorrow night is the run-through of both acts (Monday and Tuesday are only one act each), so it's likely to be long. Thursday night is the dress rehearsal, which is always a late night. And Friday starts the 5 show run of the production. She has never done 5 shows in 3 days before, so I'm a little worried that we'll all be worn out. Friday and Saturday nights she won't be home until 10:30. But she is passionate about performing, being on stage, and being a star, so although I'll deal with the fallout of her physical exhaustion, she will, like always, end the run by fervently wishing that it would go on for several more nights.

If yesterday was the perfect homeschool day, today was the typical one. For one, I completely neglected the educational needs of an entire child. Rutledge went to school and I did math, grammar, vocabulary, science, and root words with the twins, and then we read half of the second act of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frances, however, made headwear for herself out of construction paper and kept appearing in the doorway of our room with her crafts, clearly wanting attention that I didn't have to give her at the moment. By the time the boys got done, a friend was coming over to help me rearrange furniture in my downstairs, so Frances never got to any of her own work. I have to console myself that at least she is "learning all the time" about theatre, Spanish culture and language, backstage bustle, and playing imaginatively with a 4 year old. Rutledge's friend David was over, and Rutledge refused to play with him, instead hovering around Walter and Ollie, who were playing video games and weren't letting him join. David played for hours with Frances, who was happy pretending to be a puppy or a pirate shipwrecked on a desert island. Witnessing this strengthened my resolve and reminded me that we need to banish all video games to the weekend and have no computer time except for research and school time until 5 p.m. The break got us way off track. It shows in everyone's behavior and in Rutledge's inability to play like a kid because he's obsessed with technology and what the older kids are doing.

Rebecca and I moved furniture for three hours. I'm not sure things are any better than they were. I have one very empty room, but it isn't set up, either. My schoolroom is still not functional, and I still don't know if a schoolroom could be functional for us. We just may not be schoolroom homeschoolers in the first place. If my current vision is going to work, I need to get at least one and possibly two more big desks. I just freecycled a small desk, and though it really didn't meet our needs and was badly painted about five different colors, mostly hot pink and purple, I'm second-guessing whether I did a smart thing. What I'd like is three large computer desks with file cabinets, shelving, and hutches on top and cushy leatherette executive chairs with very high backs for each one. But I'm not naive enough to believe that if I bought this that they'd really all sit there doing math, or that we'd be able to find the math books every single day because they would be exactly where they belong, which is on the shelf of that child's desk. And I could invest a lot of money and have a lot of furniture that takes up a lot of space and that would need to be sold in Craigslist a year from now. So I'm working on a more realistic Plan B, which would be to use the antique table/desk I already have and maybe use bookends for the current and active schoolbooks, perhaps take a large desk that Rebecca thinks she has in her attack for the second person, and maybe make something out of the slab door in my garage and some shelves or file cabinets for a third person. And think about putting our computer in that room, which is challenging because we don't have the cable for internet in there, and the desktop is really slow when it is operating wirelessly.

What we did accomplish was moving and repairing some very big bookcases full of books. Now they are on another wall and blocking the french doors that go into our living room. I like those French doors, so I'm not sure how I feel about that now that it is done. But I'm terrified to change it, too! I don't think the bookcases can handle too much more movement. I can't handle any more unloading and reloading of books. We moved the TV on its cart out of that room, which I'm not sure was a workable solution. The room looks better without it, but I kind of liked the small TV with the DVD/VCR and the Nintendo 64 in there. It's true that a video game system tends to generate a mess--cartridges on the floor, too many cords, controllers all over the place. But it's a finite thing in a finite room, and it's kind of nice to have a place to sit and a separate place to go. I also don't really want these things in anyone's bedroom, which seems the only alternative now. So I'm still fiddling with the arrangement. We had to rearrange some things in our living room as well, and that's taking some getting used to. That also is going to have to be re-evaluated over this week. And last, I have a big mess now. I need to get rid of our china cabinet, since it doesn't match anything and has no functional home in our house. I need to move the "workboxes" that we didn't end up using much to a new place in the house (Playmobil people?). I have a corner bookcase that doesn't have a clea home in our family room any more. And, of course, we're still doing all of our schoolwork all over the house, mostly in my bedroom or on Ollie's futon. I'm probably delusional thinking we'd ever do it anywhere else. Hey, I like to be comfortable, too. It's no surprise that as usual, I set out to clarify a room, and what I end up with is an unfinished project and a really big mess that spreads through many rooms.

I have that awful feeling that there is something we're supposed to be doing tomorrow that we're not, and I can't, for the life of me, remember what it is. I hope that I'm wrong, that we have no real obligations until the evening. But if my track record this week is any indication, I should trust my gut and check and double check my calendar!

Tomorrow we go live with school again. It's sobering, but I'm very ready for it. Most of our holiday stuff is packed away, except for the outside of our house, which still looks very much like it is anticipating a jolly visit from Santa Claus. I didn't want to put away a bunch of wet wreaths, and my house is messy enough without a lot of soaked fake greenery all over the foyer floor, which is where it would inevitably end up.

Tomorrow starts with a hair appointment bright and early. My hair is too short right now, so the thought of getting rid of any of it is a little odd, but at the same time, I haven't been too happy with this haircut, so maybe Tara can do some magic and make what little hair I have do something completely different. Or tidy it up while it grows into the longer, less-layered thing I covet. Then I already have our books set out with an ambitious plan for a day at home.

Tomorrow also starts, I think, our trial of Daytrana, for ADD. I don't know whether ADD is really behind the inattentiveness and driftiness in classes or during work, or, should I say, I don't know WHOSE ADD is responsible, since my doing-ten-things-at-once-and-not-finishing-any-of-them and my organizational challenges can't be exactly a benefit. Of course, given my own inattention to time and detail, I don't even have the medicine yet, since I forgot to go to the pharmacy. Actually, now that I think of it, I was even in the store on Saturday, but I was trying to put one foot in front of the other without falling over, so my mind wasn't really on what I was forgetting at the pharmacy.

We have been reading some really lovely books lately. If there is one thing that I could firmly say I stand for, it's reading aloud. I love to read aloud, love to spend time with my children and even with others' children reading great books and enjoying them together, talking about them afterward, and commenting in the midst of them. The way that we read aloud makes it sometimes difficult for my children to be in other settings, since they are so indoctrinated in interrupting to ask questions, to make connections, or to respond to something I ask them to look for. All of us just finished Babe, The Gallant Pig, which was every bit as good as the movie, which has always been one of my favorites ("If I had words to make a day for you..." is a song that makes me so happy and that gets delightfully trapped in my head for days and I can't help singing aloud, which is not such a good thing). Unfortunately, it was about 9:10 when we finished the book, and I had an immediate hankering to watch the movie immediately, while it is still fresh in our minds. Thank goodness we don't have to be at a bus stop or carpool line early tomorrow, but it was absolutely worth the late night. Whirly-Popped popcorn with a ton of butter and salt, our new little pull-out loveseat...pure bliss. We could immediately note the many differences from the narrative in the book, but it was nonetheless a fairly true depiction of the characters and their traits.

Babe is one of the books dealt with in the book _Deconstructing Penguins_, which I read a few weeks ago. It's a book about parent-child book clubs and how they might be structured and how to read literature with children, especially in an inquisitive, interactive, analytical manner. There's not much, or even anything about deconstruction in it, at least from my own lit crit vantage, but that's a good thing. I took a good reading list from the book that I've decided to prioritize in our read-alouds for the next month or two. I plan to start Animal Farm with the older two tomorrow, which will coincide with a multi-part show tomorrow night on Russia's Tsars on the History Channel. We also seem to be on an animal stories kick (Frances keeps asking why we are reading pig books and what's up with so many butter baths and talking barnyard creatures, since we just read Charlotte's Web, too). I think I'm going to make her listen to Ace, one of Dick King-Smith's other books, just to get her goat.

With the older boys, I'm reading _The Wednesday Wars)_, which is also a really nice book full of material to think about, discuss, take apart, make connections with. I wasn't familiar with this book before, and I've been quite taken with the way that it introduces Shakespeare's works, mirrors the themes in its own story, and yet feels close and relevant for right now. We have been studying Shakespeare for the past two months in an indirect way--that is, we're not directly reading plays yet, but we have been to see one (Hamlet), have read synopses of three of them, watched a movie of one (Henry V), and have read middle-grades novels that directly treat Shakespeare without actually being him: The Shakespeare Stealer, Shakespeare's Scribe, Shakespeare's Secret, King of Shadows, and The Wednesday Wars. I didn't originally set out with any real intention, and some of the books just happened to auspiciously appear for us even when I didn't know what they were about, and yet they fit in perfectly in this sequence. My plan for the next two weeks is to read A Midsummer Night's Dream together. I'm kicking myself for not buying at least two copies of many of the books I had come through my house when I was collecting items for the used curriculum sale at the VaHomeschoolers conference last spring. We ended up donating a bunch of these books to St. Joseph's Villa, and now I realize that I would like to have had more of them and should have bought them when I had the chance and they were cheap. Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it?

In the South, there are many superstitions surrounding the New Year. One of them is that you don't do any chores on New Year's Day that you don't want to repeat all year. Okay. So I didn't do any laundry that day. Now, three days later, I'm still waiting for the New Year's Chore Fairy to show up and deliver me. Hasn't happened yet. I just finished folding and putting away five mega-loads of clothes and towels (we had another disastrous aquarium sump siphon moment yesterday, which is a major towel-consumer). I had to empty the dishwasher, load it, hand wash big dirty stock pots (Kerry made a delicious hambone and black-eyed pea soup today), mop the bathroom floor, clean my bedroom, and sort silverware anyway. New Year's Day: YOU LIE!!!

I'm writing this while taking Antivert, so if things seem a bit funky or sdrawkcab or something, blame it on that. For the first time since I was probably seven or so, I have an ear infection. I woke up in the night with the symptoms that were always so obvious in the kids when they were small--feeling like screeching from the pain shooting from my ear down through my jaw and into my neck and feeling better when I was sitting up or better yet, walking around, which unfortunately isn't what I want to be doing at 3:30 a.m. I still managed to have a good day on the tennis court, and then I got my antibiotic and hoped to reduce my dependence on Motrin before the New Year's Eve party that night.

Then I did something kind of dumb. I was through with day 2 of the antibiotic (cursing myself for being so principled with my children and making them try all sorts of homeopathic sugar balls and dropping garlic oil all down their faces--all I wanted was a quick fix NOW!), so I thought, hey, I'll just get out my handy syringe and hose out my ear in hopes of releasing that not-popped, can't-hear feeling. By the time I was done, I was so dizzy that I staggered into the bedroom and fell right onto the floor next to the bed! When I tried to get up, the room was spinning. I thought it would get better if I just let it wear off, like a bad game of ring around the rosy, but it didn't. It just got worse. Hours later, I was finally stabilized and could settle down enough to watch a movie, He's Just Not That Into You, which wasn't at all what I expected, but was timely and really enjoyable nonetheless. When I woke up this morning, I was afraid--afraid to take a shower because I thought the relaxation of it would send me back into paroxysms of faintness and vertigo, afraid to walk too quickly, afraid to bend down. There have been some very dicey moments today. I managed to shower, run some errands, go to the fish store and add yet more drama to our Tank Saga. But then I could not focus, felt like I was ineluctably moving to the left (there must be symbolism in this), and like if I took my full attention off staying upright and keeping my eyes in just one place for even a second that I would find myself lying flat on my back on the ground somewhere. I managed to pop into Walgreen's to buy some Dimetapp, hoping a decongestant of some kind would release some of my ear pressure, and the peripheral sight of so much cold medicine and the excess visual sensory input about put me over the edge.

And so the new year begins with a trip to the urgent care doctor to get something to help me stop the world from spinning (there must be some symbolism in this). And now I sit here writing and watching Charlotte's Web and being thankful for the things we take for granted, things like a stable viewpoint, everything in its rightful place, a sense of one's true self.

And it wouldn't be a year in our house without some drama at the fish tank. As a recap, we have three fish now--a striped tang, a tomato clown, and a hot pink pseudochromis. The kings of the tank, however, are Nem, our giant anemone, Mr. Halloween, our completely regenerated, better-than-ever-before sea urchin, our yellow polyps, who have spawned two frags of babies, and our xenia, which waves madly and reproduces with reckless abandon. Oh, and Shrimpy and the Purple Mushrooms (they're kind of a band...). The inverts love us. The fish, well, not so much. So today we went out to replenish our supply of hermit crabs and snails, since our cleaning crew is more of a skeleton crew these days. We also have a rather positive coralline algae bloom and a less positive cyanobacteria issue. Like idiots, we came home today with an exceptionally beautiful little fish, a blue and yellow banded angel. In under four hours, this poor thing had been bullied until he was upside down in a corner, clinging to life. Actually, to tell the truth, I don't think he was clinging to life. I think he was praying for his death to come swiftly and deliver him from the evil that is the Clendenon Reef. The striped tang hounded him and rounded him up like a snapping border collie if he so much as poked a fin from his rocky corner. he tried to snuggle sideways against a turbo snail and that odd little mini-tank filter thingy hanging near the top of our aquarium. I convinced Kerry that the kind thing to do was not to see whether they managed to work out these turf issues, but to get him out while he had perhaps a 5% or a 2% chance of survival, rather than let him meet his inevitable fate in the next hour here while we watched (what a poignant juxtaposition it would have been, however, to the Battle of Agincourt going on on the screen right next to the tank as Henry the Fifth urged his men on to St. Crispin's Day glory). I think that as I write a brain coral is on its way home in exchange for the shell-shocked angel.

Poignant is probably the best word for this holiday season, which is so rapidly coming to a close. I am in a place in my life where I am longing for a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger, of a family that is full of love and comfort. The truth is, I belong to a family that is no longer in its prime, and it's a bittersweet place to be. Maybe I'll have some wisdom or beneficial experience to share when my peers find themselves at this place in a few decades, but it's not an experience that seems appropriate for right now. We should be in the good times, the family years. Should is such a useless word.

For Christmas this year, Kerry's parents came for two days. I can't say how much this meant to all of us. There's a primal part of all of us that wants to be close to our family, especially during holidays. We are a difficult and often unloveable lot, this nuclear family of mine. We're loud, we might have germs, we have a lot of people who don't always have a lot of self-control. We're also, I am ashamed to admit, terrible guests and terrible hosts. We can lose sight of the details and the big stuff, and I'm embarrassed by it even as I watch myself commit the inhospitable deeds. So to have his parents take that chance on us and be here, well, it was really special. The kids loved having grandparents around when they were opening gifts.

Kerry's grandmother, who is now 98 and a half years old, has pneumonia. I'm worried about her. We should be going to see her, but between Kerry's cold that is acting more like bronchitis and my vertigo, it probably is best that we not challenge her immune system even more. I wish that she could have been with us on Christmas. Often she has come up and has sometimes stayed in our house, even when Kerry's parents have stayed in a hotel, so something is a bit absent when she isn't here with her Christmas bell on and her red and green knit hat with the big puffball on top. Kerry's father has, unfortunately, aged a great deal this year, and he's no longer able to do many of the things he used to. I feel a bit helpless when I think that they could use some extra help, maybe some bright spots on their life, but we're just that wee bit too far to be that. We're at the distance where, unfortunately, we're more burden if we come than we are respite--more guests than angels. They have recently moved into a senior apartment, and I think that the environment there probably provides more care and service than we could ever hope to.

Then in the middle of the week I took the kids to see my Dad and his friend Patsy. They live in a gorgeous area of Southwest Virginia. I used to think of Pulaski as the middle of nowhere, as a backwoods. My first year at Virginia Tech someone living in a friend's dorm insisted that we had to go on this little roadtrip to see a hick town where you could look from the street right into the three-celled jail. But now I love the remoteness of it, the incredible natural beauty. The houses in my Dad's neighborhood are small and rather unimpressive. In fact, some of them are even falling down--literally have a roof that has caved in and fallen onto the front porch--and still have people in them. But there's a simplicity there, a removal from the rat race that is undeniably alluring. It's not a small town feel outside of a metro area with amenities. It's just out there.

I have a terrible time every time I visit Roanoke. Almost six years later, I should probably be content where I am, but there's a very big part of me that feels that people are just plain lucky who get to live their lives in such a lovely place. Mountain views arise no matter where you're going, even to the humble CVS or Wal-Mart. There is tradition and charm and quaintness. And most of all, it's masterable. You can know what's going on in the area, where everything is, have a sense of ownership, of knowing, and of being a part of a cohesive community, not just many sub-communities. So yes, salaries are not very competitive there, and there are fewer places to work, but for a day or two there, having the middle class American dream of the ample house with the most current amenities and just the right activities for the kids seemed kind of hollow. Perhaps the authenticity of being crammed into a too-small house on a too-busy road would get old quickly and we'd long for our flamenco classes and competitive diving, but it sure was calling out my name this week.

We had a very nice visit with my Dad. Again, I feel like we're pretty horrible guests, even as I was thinking that I'd like to come up again soon and stay for a week, perhaps when the weather is nicer, and get to share some of the places that were most special to me when I was in college and graduate school. It was bitterly cold--under 20 degrees. But snow was still on the ground, and my Dad has a good hill in his backyard that stops before you are plummeted into an icy stream. Ollie was able to use his BB gun for the first time, and they spent a lot of time putting BBs in a mayonnaise bottle and some Coke cans at point blank range. We were not sure whether it was okay to be shooting within the town limits, but guess what? The neighbors came out and brought their guns, and we had a genuine SW Virginia moment, complete with shooting out the windows of a broken truck cab lying in a backyard. My Dad built a room on stilts for his trains a couple of years ago, so the boys spent some time checking out his setup, and Frances is scheming about how we're going to landscape his layout. Right now it's rather bare bones--he's mostly interested in the trains themselves, not in developing a complete countryside. I was thinking that if he's open to it, it might be fun to have him send pictures and we could gather materials to dress the place up some and spent a few days in the spring working there.

As always, with aging parents or grandparents, there are the business moments. A big reason my Dad wanted to see me is that he wanted to give me his will and advance medical directives. I know this is all important, but it seems whenever we get together with family there's a lot of reminder of mortality in the middle of whatever we do. Sometimes it's the poem in a birthday card from Kerry's Grandmother that talks about how the recipient of the card is so wonderful and full of promise and how This Old Critter is About to Shrivel Up and Crawl In Her Grave, and Let it Be Soon. Or someone handing back to us the pictures of children we had given on past holidays or family mementos that hung so faithfully on the walls of their homes, and now were packing them into our van to bring them here. Our house tends to feel full of the furniture or things of our family, but not so often their bodies or souls. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the warm fuzzy moments could last all the time and there were not the Reality moments?

I've been joking all day today that this is the Face the Music season. The Reality season. All that magic holiday stuff is packed up in boxes (or still sitting in the front yard cold and wet and now looking like a lot of work to take down), and the store shelves seem kind of bare because everything has been put on clearance and moved out to get ready for...something. We were in Ukrop's today (right around the time I was going to fall down from the spinning), and the bakery was just depleted. The kids and Kerry were looking for something yummy to eat, and I had to acknowledge that all the fullness and sweetness and endless offerings of the Christmas season had given way to the day after a couple of days of holidays, when we've moved on to eating to live instead of living to eat, at least until everyone returns to their regularly scheduled lives on Monday.

I really miss my camera. Really, really miss it. I still have my little camera. And I have my new mini HD camcorder, which I'm having fun with. But I miss my good camera that I could really play with. We got a call from the Chesterfield County police a week or so ago saying that they had found a camera, and might it be ours (um, check the serial number we gave you?). But it appeared to have pictures of two little girls, Disney World. Not us. My goal for this coming year is to start documenting our life better, to be on top of things with the camera. And to try to be better about being in touch with people and being our best with them. I'd like to make this blog a better chronicle of what our life is really like, and to have it be something that we could use to keep in touch with the people who might care about us. Many people I know use their blogs to stay in contact with family and friends and to share a bit of themselves when they can't be close or can't explain in other ways what it is that they do when we aren't our magical holiday selves, and I've been afraid to do that with the people who really know me. I'm embarrassed a lot of the time, embarrassed about how non picture-worthy our lives often are, and a bit too aware that to make it more presentable and crisper might not be very genuine or would be a bit deceptive and would I be able to live with myself doing that? So who knows, maybe we actually will become those better selves that I want to photograph and write about. Wouldn't be such a bad resolution, would it?

Ever sat there some evening and thought, crap, my life is just imploding? Or worse yet, you wish it would implode and know it probably won't, that you'll just kind of drag on in a really unpleasant situation forever and ever because you don't have the guts to just get the hell out of it? That's me tonight. Sigh. I hate feeling like I have to take action, because I really am a gutless wimp, and I'm more likely to sit around seething and prickled for years and years because that's easier than actually just walking out.

But enough of the gutless wimp self-deprcation. Everyday life proceeds nonetheless. Even though there are still six or seven days left in this break, it feels like the time is getting dreadfully short. Tomorrow I'm taking the kids to go see my Dad, and while I am really glad that I am going to see him and that it's still vaguely within "the holidays," it's going to be a long solo trip. I would leave Rutledge home, which is a possibility, but it's time for him to stop playing video games. I am feeling like the worst parent on earth right now because I haven't stopped him from playing or watching because I get distracted doing other things. If he stays home with Kerry, it's a guarantee that he will spend from morning to night for the next 36 hours in front of a screen, and while having him in a car for 8 hours while we try to listen to an audio book isn't really my idea of meaningful interaction, it will probably assuage my guilt a bit.

I also hate to admit this kind of paranoia, but I guess I have to spit it out somewhere. Walter had an ECG this afternoon, and while it was kind of billed as a standard procedure before he begins a trial of a medication for ADD (something that back years ago I never would have thought I'd go in actively requesting), I'm wondering if it wasn't also because I raised some concerns by saying he seems to not pay attention and when I ask him what's going on, he'll say he's tired. You know how you get kind of a funny, off feeling when you have a medical procedure done and the ultrasound tech or the nurse doesn't give you information and gets a funny look and says the doctor will talk to you? That's the vibe I got today. I couldn't tell if the nurse was just having trouble feeding paper into the machine or something wasn't positioned right and that's why they ran it twice, but I sat around for about 10 minutes afterward, waiting for the doctor to come in to interpret, but the office was closing, Walter was getting restless, and so we were told they'd just call us. I guess since I didn't get a call, that may be good news. But there's a part of me that is wondering if there's more. I'm not a pessimist, but sometimes I feel like I have been so amazingly fortunate that I have four healthy children, that no one has any serious conditions, and that I'm just plain lucky. I had my share of little scares before they were born--questions about low amniotic fluid, poor growth, and then there was the little cardiological anxiety during the first few weeks, but thankfully that turned out to be nothing serious. So hopefully I'm just letting some reticence and shifty looks get the better of me.

I am still a bit incredulous at myself for following through with this medication thing. I'm not a big medicator, and I especially freak out a bit at anything working on little brains, but I was also feeling like I don't want to have regrets that I haven't tried to make things the best they can be, and this is one of the things I've wondered about for a long time. For now, we're going to try two weeks with half of a patch delivering the medication, whose name is escaping me now because it isn't one I hear about much. I'm grateful that our pediatrician is very cautious and low-dose about this type of thing, and like many have said, we can stop at any time if it feels like it's not working or is making things worse.



I wonder if everyone is having the year of the penguin. I feel like I'm surrounded by them! Our favorite place lately is the penguin area at our local zoo. And the house is overrun with penguin clothes, stuffed penguins, penguin earrings, penguin books, penguin questions.

We're watching a documentary called Wetbacks right now, about Latin American immigrants to North America. It was a huge adventure to get the DVD player set up in my bedroom, and it's kind of late to be starting a show at all, but I'm determined not to have fines. Just paid my $38 Henrico fine earlier this week, and it made me immensely unpopular with my whole family. I don't blame them--I am irresponsible. And it probably would be better to just buy any books that we want or need, but the support-the-community and anti-clutter sides of myself make me hesitant. Plus I really don't believe this would cost less. For every $10 in fines, I probably get forty books.

Pre-New-Years Resolutions:

1. Get kids to bed before 11:30. And up before 10 a.m.

2. Finish rearranging furniture. I'm deeply, heavily impaired in the area of interior decor and furniture placement. It irritates my family so very much that I can't leave things well enough alone, but darnit, we have whole rooms that are so non-functional that we barely use them at all. My current ambition is to make the schoolroom somewhere we will actually do work, but so far, after nearly a whole fall, it's not even close. In fact, we've kind of lost our art room in my quest to make this other room work well. Right now I have an obstacle, which is our china cabinet. If there was anywhere in the house I could put it until I rehome it, I would. I have this sense that if we could only get the whole house in perfect order, life would kind of run itself and our productivity would shoot through the roof.

Ahh, the week of the year that is hard to define. Kerry is back at work, having "sold" off his vacation time for this year (a topic all unto itself) for more work. The rest of us are home, and our time is both spoken for in sporadic ways (an appointment today, a piano lesson tomorrow, a hair appointment Wednesday) and too wide open. We've had some rainy days, some sick friends whose germs I don't want, and we've had too many consecutive days now where all of us are glued to our respective computers, victims of our atomized, technology-driven culture. I've spent hours and hours pushing an electronic skee-ball, without ever having a score that purports to justify that time investment--though perhaps that is merely a credential validating lost time. We've watched a disjointed cinema festival: Chipmunks, psychological thrillers, vintage horror (60s and 80s), sentimental holiday, and the Dirty Dozen. It's easy to ask, well, really, Nancy, what more do you want?

I think I'm ready for some authentic human interaction. Not with people on screens. Not with a houseful of people looking at different screens. I am limited by the lack of desire on the part of the people around me to do anything different. No one will accompany me on the dog walk. No one except Frances really wants to go out shopping or to the library. Friends are generally busy, gone, or both. Today, we finally are going out into the larger social world, which is likely just what we need to pull out of the after-Christmas week torpor. I could not be more excited.

I'm reading the book _Unless_, which is hard to put down, though I have to say that I do a lot of putting down because there are nonetheless many crises in our individualized house. The dog that peed on the floor, the squabble between two people, the hunger. I wish I could not identify so readily with the worries about a near-grown child, the questions about goodness (a big question on my mind lately), the often oppressiveness of the everyday details.

I wonder did everyone receive so few Christmas card this year, or it my lack a result of bad communication last year, some unintended bridge burning, and failure to get a card out yet this year, though I do have the cards and pictures for them. Each year we seem to get fewer, and this year I think we got six. I remember years when the cards would be taped up around our doorway and you'd be knocking them off every time you walked through. Facebook is a poor substitution, I think.

You know how the first few days of a holiday you get to say that you've done all of these wonderful, edifying, creative things with your surplus of unfettered time? All those family bonding moments with sledding and board games and reading great books and wrapping gifts while listening to festive music? Yeah, well, today was the start of Holiday, Phase II. Today was the day that I spent about four hours playing Skee-Ball and Doodle-Jump on the iPod.

Sure, I wrapped the remainder of the presents, which I'm embarrassed about now because they are so copious. I thought we were behind on things, but now I'm seeing that some people have way, way too much, and everyone as a whole has too much. We should have donated a flock of chickens in our name to everyone (the favorite gift and joke of this year).

Actually, today was kind of historically unique in that Kerry and I went out by ourselves and had lunch at Eurasia (I had what I'm pretty sure was the only potentially gluten-free offering on the menu, which was, as always, a salad) and faced the music of my Henrico County Library fines, which I've been avoiding paying because I'm so embarrassed. We originally intended to do some last-minute shopping, but in the end we did none of it. So I am still on the case of finding an inexpensive tent for Rutledge and picking up some movie tickets for Ollie. We relented and decided that yes, we will get the Red Ryder BB gun for Ollie, against our better judgment (for example, where on earth will he be able to shoot it, what with us living in the suburbs and all). So I'm breathing a sigh of relief that we are truly finished and I can spend my time on less crass pursuits than shopping. Like getting the ball into that hundred hole while the double-bonus light is flashing.