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 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.

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!

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?

New year, new me. Or something like that.

Today ended up with a lot of special events. And I like to say that "every day is special" when it comes to scheduling and routines. There's almost always something that's a wrench in the normal routine. We don't remember routines so much as what departed from that; that's what makes a day or week or year noteworthy. And today was full of departures.

Starting with me meeting some new friends at 7 a.m. for coffee. It's an understatement to say I'm not a morning person. In fact, I'm so much not one that I more than occasionally do things like I did yesterday: oversleeping until 10 a.m. when I needed to be somewhere at 10:30. I turned over, opened my eyes, looked at the alarm clock, and oh shit! But today, I was up before 6:30, showered, and out the door. It was really lovely being able to talk without worrying about the kids. And I have a sense of possibility and optimism about the day when I'm up early that just gets off to a rusty start when I don't face the day until after 9. So I'm going to see what I can do about shifting my days downward. Oh, who am I fooling! But it's worth a try.

Then it was off to Virginia Eye Institute, with the total hottie opthalmologist, because my eyelid has been blowing up to three times its normal size and sprouting an odd white pimple on the underside. Turns out that it's nothing big--an inflamed oil duct--and it has probably already taken care of itself when it exploded and left an icky flap of skin having over my eyeball yesterday. But it's good to know that I'm not going to have to keep wasting my precious disposable contacts and that I'm get back to wearing them in a few days. I hate wearing my glasses because they fit poorly and I am not fond of the way they look. My glasses are for nighttime use at home while watching TV before falling asleep, not for greeting the public.

No sooner did I set foot in the house than we had to pile in the car for Latin class. Tests came back today, and Walter is the most improved in the class, essentially going from a 33% to a 79% since the last test. Woohoo! He's finally getting it! Ollie got a 91%, which is also a vast, vast improvement. I don't care if they've been "failing" the tests in the past, because what matters to me is that they come to understand the material and master it, and we're making huge, huge strides in that direction. The past is the past--we know it now. I'm proud, and they're proud of themselves.

And then I moved on to my hair appointment. I haven't had my hair cut in several months, which is a big deal when you have short hair. I haven't had it highlighted since last spring. Which is also a big deal when you are getting closer to 40 and used to be a blond and now your hair is a flat, lifeless, very unspectacular used-to-be-blond-but-now-is-mushroom-brown. I always find myself in a quandary with hair appointments because the place I like to go costs too much, especially for services beyond the basic haircut, and so it's hard to commit to always going there with my frequent short-hair haircut needs. But the bargain places are so hit or miss on quality--one time it feels like the best value out there, and the next time I think, "Gee, I could hae gone to 13 Barbers if I wanted to look like this."

Today I went to the good place, and I went for the whole shebang--full highlights, toning, and a cut. Next thing I knew I had added in an eyebrow shaping (something I had planned anyway, but still, new person, new tip), and then I was sucked in by the makeup lady offering the free makeup. Only of course it's not free to get the mini-makeover, and it definitely wasn't free for me! I walked always with toner, moisturizer, and cleanser, foundation, eye shadow, eye liner, concealer, lip color, and blush. And probably even more than I'm forgetting. My wallet is a lot lighter!

I did sort of intend to replace my makeup soon, and I had been planning to perhaps go to Ulta, a store I've never set foot in and find intimidating because I know absolutely nothing about makeup and care even less. It's not a body of knowledge I'm dying to delve into, and I'm awful at making decisions. So today was pretty easy for me. Let someone choose stuff, put it on me, I like the way I look, and then I purchase the whole set of whatever she put on me. Done. I have to say, I've never worn purple eyeliner before, so this is a new comfort zone for me, but I really loved the way it brought out the color of my eyes. I just hope I can replicate at home what she did so adeptly. I was missing from class the day they taught How To Draw With Pencils Around Your Eyes and Finding Your Cheekbones and Coloring Inside the Lines with Lipstick.


I barely had any time at home when I had to head out for an evening with the author Lois Lowry. Awesome, awesome talk. We just read Number the Stars for co-op this week, so her work is fresh in our heads. And she spoke about her experiences growing up during World War II, with a father in the Army Dental Corps and her mother concerned and alone with three children. It fit so incredibly well with what we have been studying and talking about lately. Then her anecdotes about writing, sources for stories, her family experiences, what life was like in the 40s and 50s--priceless. I could not have asked for better. The boys sat with rapt attention for an hour and a half, which is really saying something about how captivating a speaker can be, even when you have lousy seats. And even more, I'm dying to read many of her books now that I hadn't heard of before. And I can see that her newest little series would be perfect for Frances. I cannot wait to get hold of them.

Meanwhile, in this most busy of weeks with many extra morning activities that we don't normally have, we have had lots of difficulty with our regularly daily routines and activities. Tuesday was the Aviation Museum, Wednesday was orienteering at Pocahontas, today was my eye appointment and then Latin. It all converged in one week to make us have little time at home. We need to take a breather! I miss our leisurely "normal."

Our highlight of the day was a trip to the Virginia Aviation Museum to see the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the first black military aviators who trained and served during WWII. I suppose I've always taken for granted that WWII veterans are all around us, that they're just kind of, well, there. But the fact is, every day leaves us with fewer and fewer of them, and our opportunity to speak with them and thank them for their service and hear their stories is a fleeting one. This made me feel all the more eager to seize this chance to see representatives of such a groundbreaking group of men.

The presentation itself did not particularly hold the interest of my children. And that's okay. What is valuable to me about a day like today is that they will likely still not forget it--that we read about the Tuskegee Airmen, that they were the first all black aviation corps in the U.S. military, that they faced much discrimination and obstacles during their training and service, and that no planes were lost on the missions in Europe during which they served as escorts. They have an autograph in our reproduction WWI Spotter's Guide book from one of the comparatively few living Tuskegee Airmen. And the people that they see in pictures from that time period are actual, living people.

Their favorite part of the museum trip was piloting the flight simulator that did barrel rolls and complete flips. Hopefully one of the other meaningful experiences was seeing a display about World War II that included items we have been talking about for the past few weeks in co-op: ration books, War Bonds, original posters encouraging citizens to support the war effort by buying bonds to buy bombs, support aggressive military action (my favorite featured a man with a machine gun dripping ammo saying something like, "This is what the effort for peace looks like to me."), and encouraging enlistment (a particularly terrifying looking old man/Uncle Sammish soldier that you could hardly imagine saying "no" to!), and of course posters and references to Rosie the Riveter--even a "Riveting Handbook" explaining how to do the job. This display really brought our American Girl books and oral report topics to life.

The biggest news for the family today is that Rutledge does, indeed, qualify for speech therapy at our elementary school. It's no surprise. The sounds he most needs to work on are /k/, /g/, and all blends. He also uses his tongue on his /s/'s. I'm wondering when and how we'll fit this in with our already busy schedule! I took everyone with me, since I wasn't comfortable leaving them home alone and Kerry had meetings all morning, and it was interesting to have a bunch of non-schooled kids sitting in a school, working on their math. Frances was not so studious--she was playing with her virtual Littlest Pet Shop pet. She wanted to go out and sit in the hallway, as we were told we could do, but I insisted that she stay with us. I didn't want her to be captured and subsumed by a 1st grade class. Or more likely, have to answer questions from half a dozen passers-by about what she was doing there and where she belonged. To Frances, these were hardly issues. "I'll just say I'm homeschooled!" she said. To which Ollie scowled and snidely said, "She can hardly call herself a homeschooler. She's barely homeschooled. She never does any work!"

And here's a Frances-ism that she confided to me, as a retort: "I'm going to start doing schoolwork just like the boys when I turn 8."

Frances had another piano lesson today and is progressing nicely. I think as soon as the weather gets better I'm going to have her start riding her bike there, since it is only about 5-7 minutes away by bike across the school playing fields. Tonight was also her modern dance class, which is always a blast. She has a new friend in the class, and the size of the class seems to be growing by the week. I see a budding choreographer, too. She kept making suggestions to the instructor about how awkward elements could be resolved or recast ("We could go off in different directions instead of all in the same one," which the instructor decided to go with after listening). In their dance for the final performance, Frances's role has her rushing off and weeping into her hands, then the other girls coming over to comfort her and give her a flower. Next they all crouch down in child's pose and then one by one rise and raise arms with a flower growing high, then move their arms down incrementally and start turning off in a spin (Frances is finally slowing down and spotting more, which means less craziness and falling). It's really neat to watch how complex this dance is and how well the girls work together.

My celiac tests came back today, and they are, as expected, very negative. I feel a bit like a fool for having so many questions, or even caring at all about the answers to them. But I wonder things like whether the values would have been so low if I had not been gluten free, if they might have been elevated if I had had the blood drawn when I was still eating gluten and if 5 weeks would be enough time to make a response that low. In the end, it doesn't really matter. I'm staying GF no matter what through Lent. I don't normally give up anything for Lent--that's not a big Protestant thing in the demoninations I've been in--but it's a pretty convenient next timeframe, just like waiting for my birthday was. And I am redoubling my efforts to find the places where I am slipping up. My makeup, for one. Not that I wear it all that often, maybe once a week or so, but I discovered mine has oats in it (it's a mineral makeup, too, so I don't think an oat belongs in there). My shampoo is suspect. I don't see anything obvious on my own bottle, but other shampoos of this brand do have problems. I'm going to switch to something else. My toothpaste is safe--I had already checked that because it was going in my mouth. I now have seen my favorite homeopathic remedy, aconitum napellus, on a suspect list, and I'm not sure why. I took it when I had a cold, and I believed that homeopathic remedies are pretty much GF. I have eaten McDonald's french fries after hearing other GFCF people say they are safe because McD's uses separate fryers for their fries. But now I've read all about the big blowup over the questionable flavor additive in the oil and the potential deception, so that's out now. I also am committed to not cross-contaminating my kitchen any more. I'm going to dispose of my wheat flour and stop using it to bake for other people because I don't want to touch it or breathe it in. I am going to start operating a fully GF household for everyone, even though I don't expect them to eat GF when they are out or at someone else's house. Ideally everyone would go GF for Lent, but I don't think I can pull that off well without tons of fallout and cheating, primarily because they don't see themselves as having problems that might need alleviating. But it's starting to sound a little attractive...hmmm...Lent might be just the marketing ticket I need! I doubt it, though.

And last but not least, there's my eyeball. Or my eyelid, to be more exact. I've been having trouble for about 3 weeks, maybe longer, with a stye or some little pimply something on my left eyelid. I threw away my contact and got a new one, thinking that there was something wrong with my disposable contact. I replace mine monthly, so I got a new one. Things got bad again within two days, so I decided to get rid of that one, give my eyes a two week rest, and wait until the situation resolved. It doesn't look or feel like pinkeye. And the swelling and bump were gone within a day or so. I stayed with glasses for two weeks anyway. Then about four days ago I got a new contact, which is starting to use up my supply of contacts for the next 18 months. Today my eye started swelling and feeling worse and worse. It's not bothering me in a contact lenses kind of way, but I know I need to get a doctor involved now. Sigh.... I have so little free time at the moment to give to this!

Don't let the photo fool you. I'm not really a cat person. Thank goodness Crash, our cat, doesn't know that about me.

We just finished reading a book about the Tuskegee Airmen so that we'll be prepared for tomorrow morning. And Rutledge has his speech evaluation early, so it's a tight schedule pretty much all day: 8:30 speech, 11:00 Aviation Museum for 2 hour program, 3:00 piano, 5:00 modern dance. Great stuff, just a lot of it, and a fair amount of driving up. Thankfully, two of these things are walking distance from home, which is a goal of mine these days.

The piano practice is going quite well. Things can get sort of frustratingly interesting because I hadn't quite realized that I was going to have to play along with her and be right on top of her practice, but now I feel like a fool for not knowing this beforehand. Duh--of course I have to! If I didn't, she would be practicing all week on the wrong notes and with the wrong hands. She is still super happy with what she can do and has been working ahead, which is probably not a good idea. We'll see how the lesson goes tomorrow. Her favorite part, go figure, is the theory book, which she called "Piano Math."

Instead of going to bed tonight, we had a lengthy practicum on probability and statistics...also called strategizing with Yahtzee. I shared my own strategies (and take it with a grain of salt, I'm not mathematician, but I have beaten the entire adventure game now), and lots of math operations were performed--judging risk, comparing numbers and benefits of going for multiples of a kind over taking a scratch on some things to leave open the possibility of higher rolls in the future, and simple addition as we edged up toward that magic 63 upper bonus. For a while, I felt like I should be reading to them instead--that this would constitute a better use of our time (okay, if the truth be told, a good use of everyone's time is probably going right to bed at a reasonable hour!). In the end, though, this was time well spent and will at the least probably improve their enjoyment of this particular dice game.

It is so freaking cold here, and I'm getting to be one of those stodgy folks who gripe about not handling the weather well. But it makes me miserable, especially when we're not getting the pleasure of a snow day! It probably doesn't help that we've gotten a bit lazy about even wearing a coat lately because we're all so tired of unproductive winter weather. I'm still trying to fit in a ski trip, and it just hasn't worked out so far. Maybe next week. Gotta check that schedule. I am getting nervous that it simply won't happen and our tickets will be for naught. I sure hope not.

Last night I was online until way too late, reading about improving my compliance with being gluten free. I wanted to know more about the healing process and about the range of possibilities for detoxification and how long it might take and what the symptoms might be. I'm heading fast for my original "reconsideration" deadline, and though in many ways things aren't exactly better and in some they might actually be worse after going gluten free, my gut, and not my literal one, is saying loud and clear that I want to keep going. Since dropping gluten, I feel like I've had *more* headaches than I typically do. My stomach has hurt a lot. Before it used to be upset more often, crampy more often, but now it simply feels dull pain quite a bit, something it never really used to do. The rational or logical response would probably be to say (1) too bad, the diet didn't work; gluten must not be your problem or (2) Hmmm. Maybe you weren't broken to begin with, so there was really nothing to fix. Your GI issues are nothing but stress. (3) You didn't eradicate all those pesky little hidden sources of gluten, so you weren't truly gluten free, so no wonder you didn't experience miraculous, vibrant health. The truth is, maybe all of these are true. Or maybe two out of three. I have no doubt that I've been a victim of the steep learning curve of this lifestyle. I feel like I've been pretty careful, but early on I had some high-profile spaceout moments I've already mentioned, I intentionally ate gluten twice in order to try to make myself have something to react to with the blood test, and I'm positive I've eaten some cross-contaminated items, sometimes unintentionally, and once or twice taking my chances because I was really, really hungry and it was a while until I could get to my own food. Then there's that whole matter of the pounds of lipstick women supposedly eat each year. I am truly not sure that I've worn lipstick more than once in the past 6 weeks, but I'm not sure about the other makeup I might have worn from time to time (works out to probably once a week, if that, but still...little bits, little bits, that's what makes us fail). My shampoo could be glutening me. My children's shampoo could be glutening me (can't help but kiss Rutty's sweet little head). I still make gluten items in my kitchen while I try to purge my pantry. So I have more to aspire to with complicity. But from what I've read, my stomachaches, headaches, and less than earth-shattering response seem kind of typical for people who are undergoing the healing process. It's not cool of me to feel this, but the whole concept of healing crises is really irritating to me. I get it--that's not the problem--it's just that it leaves open this constant Big Uncertainty. If you take a remedy and you don't get better, then maybe your body hasn't fully processed it yet, maybe it's the die-off of this or that, maybe it's the toxicity leaving your body. If you get worse, then maybe you're really getting better, even if it looks like the opposite. Call me a simple gal, but I really love it when improvement looks like, well...improvement.

At any rate, I'm going to keep going. I'm hoping that what is going on is that my intestinal villi are growing and not feeling especially tolerant of things like lactose and soy. Or that all the nasty poison in my life is working its way out of wherever it is. And maybe I wasn't such a mess that there's really a lot to create drama in the healing. A lot of gluten happiness stories I hear seem to involve people so debilitated by something that they can barely move from bed or were so ill they were having a hard time imagining living the rest of their lives. Nearly instantly they had amazing energy and lost all kinds of diagnoses that were frightening. I don't have any frightening diagnoses. I'm not particularly debilitated. I have things in my health that are mildly annoying, but not exactly life-disrupting. So things are likely to be subtle for me, especially if it legitimately can take years to fully recover; people with the unmistakable early health miracles probably still have some little things that could be better. Still, for me, it's upward, onward. Conquering that bread tomorrow night. Got my Zojirushi custom settings for the bread I'm going to make, and I'm ready to try again.

Man oh man am I hungry right now, though. My stomach is shouting out through the night for someone to feed it. I still don't do things like eat at midnight if I want to sleep soundly, so I'm going to keep telling the darn thing to shut up.