This is a hard thing to write about. I wish that I could say that homeschooling is always working out perfectly for our family, that we are constantly learning, that my children love learning, that they are eager about growing with knowledge and following their passions and ecstatic about this whole lifestyle. But today isn't one of those days. I'm feeling pretty stressed about how things are going at the moment, so stressed that I'm wondering if I am making the right choice having them home and not having them in the more competitive environment of a school.

I won't make any bones about it--a major goal of mine for my children is that they will attend college. Yes, I also want them to be happy, to find the things that make them excited, to be good people. But I also have always implicitly assumed that going to a good college would be part of their life and that one of the goals of what we do with regards to education is to prepare them to be competitive applicants. When they were not yet in kindergarten, I felt much more lax about this--oh, sure, they might choose to do something else when they reach the "end of course" as far as our homeschooling or their high school education goes. I suppose what I had in mind was something like travel, a major project they were carrying out, some kind of community service, extra exploration of some area of passion. And when they were really young, I always wondered, both to myself and aloud, whether they were going to grow up to be people who could go to college. Here I am, with 11 year olds, and I know that isn't the end of the line, it isn't their full pinnacle of development, but I'm still wondering, and I'm not at all certain that they are going to be able to complete the level of high school work that would be necessary even for a less competitive college, nor that they are going to have the determination, the organizational skills, the listening skills, and basic cognitive skills necessary to do college work when the time comes.

Right now they are doing especially poorly in their schoolwork, and what's most distressing to me is that they just don't care. I have started keeping grades, especially in math, and right now Ollie has, if I'm being generous, a C-, and Walter has a B-. I'm just not satisfied with that, and I know that something needs to change. Many of their errors are pure carelessness--adding when the sign says subtract, not actually answering the question asked in the problem, copying things incorrectly, mixing up what is meant by prime factor and factor and multiple. Things just seem to be slipping, and they aren't putting forth much effort. I can appreciate that some of this doesn't feel relevent, but all across America and the world children are doing math or writing or history work that they don't love. And there's this part of me that hears other homeschoolers saying that this is why we homeschool, so that they don't have to endure meaningless drudgery. But you know what? I'm just not on that page any more. Right now, with them in 6th grade or so, I'm simply not that flexible. If they are going to be on track to be college bound, now is the time to take the work seriously and not just do what we feel like doing which, even for me, is pretty much nothing but lying around playing games.

I've given ultimatums--start taking the time to check your work and get it right or ask when you don't understand something, or you'll be over at Tomahawk Creek Middle School in two weeks. I have no idea if the extrinsic motivators of shame and teacher pressure and fear of punishment from home would be enough to make things any different there, and surely they would struggle because their writing skills are so weak, but it is disturbing to me to hear them talking about how they can drop out of school at 16. In that little fantasy world of homeschool philosophy and apologetics, my children are supposed to be on fire for learning, pursuing their passions with a fervor that no public or private schooled child could possibly muster, and realizing their life's direction. They should be getting along with one another because they have had so much unfettered time to develop family relationships. Instead, I'm wondering half the time whether I even want to be with them and the constant sniping and disrespect for one another. And I'm thinking that they have it so good--comparatively very few hours of actual work each day, no "homework" after they have been in classes for 6 hours, not needing to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the bus. Plenty of playtime, including during hours when other people their age are in school.

I've tried to take the perspective of the person I'd be complaining to--someone in a homeschool group with me, or even a "normal" person in the mainstream world. And I'm trying to see what I could change to get us back into a better place and get them working efficiently and accurately. Several things have jumped out at me. The first is that we need to start getting up at a regular hour. I'm getting up regularly, but Walter and Ollie are staying in bed until 9:30 or later most mornings (except Mondays when we have to be at RES at 9:00). This means that it's 10 or later when they are really getting down to work, or they're trying to get their math done while they are also up foraging through cabinets and pantries and refrigerators looking for something to eat, something else to eat, a refill of this, reheating that. Things like this don't happen in school. Yes, it's an advantage of homeschooling that you can eat when you're hungry, but it creates some serious divided attention challenges. If everyone was more or less ready to go by 8:30 a.m. (having eaten something, awake, kind of dressed), I think that psychologically we'd probably be in a better place to do decent work, and we'd also be able to take the best advantage of Rutledge being in preschool.

The second thing that I think we need is a more regular spot to do the work. It is one thing to be curled up reading history on the sofa. It's another thing to be lying on your back with a laptop up on your legs and glancing sideways at a falling grammar book and expecting to get things typed correctly. Sure, desks are confining, and I'm as lazy as the next person, but when you're doing the more writing intensive work or work that requires a lot of concentration, it's just hard to do that when your body isn't at least halfway at attention. The instructions for the Visualization Puzzle exercise with Learning RX really stressed this--if you see the student slumping in his seat or leaning back, then you need to start moving more quickly and upping the pace to keep the student at full attention. Every minute of schoolwork doesn't have to be edge of your seat full concentration, but certain parts definitely benefit from this if you want accuracy.

Lest I feel like I'm only griping about what is going wrong, I will say that while I still feel like I'm not spending the amount of time with Frances that I need to to feel like I am doing right by her with homeschooling, she is making amazing progress and is a rather eager learner. Now she's not going to come begging to do schoolwork, and she's as apt to negotiate as much as any of them, but she gets her work done at such a lightning pace that I feel like I maybe should be giving her more just so that we're working for a longer period of time. With her, I'm having to reevaluate the resources I've chosen for this year because she is already finding many of them too easy. I think what i really need is just to push her forward and determine what we can reasonably skip, since there's no point in belaboring things that are too easy. But just two months ago I was thinking that Saxon 2 was going to take us a while to get into. Now she is blowing through the first half of the book at the rate of 5-7 pages a day, and this is still not taking any real time and effort. I want to make sure that she has been exposed to all of the concepts that they are presenting, but since the curriculum is a bit behind some other programs, I do feel like we're fine dropping what seems too easy. We had also been working through Explode the Code 3, which focuses on long vowel sounds made in various ways. She flipped to the back of the book this morning, took the posttest, and said she wanted to be done. I figure that makes some sense, though there's some argument for the value of learning some spelling tips by doing at least a bit more of the book. I also skipped her from the Horizons Reader 1 to Reader 2, and she is having very little trouble. Suddenly she is reading things everywhere, and she has more than made up for being behind in reading this past summer. Now I have no question that she would be just fine in a 2nd grade class, which is where she would be if she was in school. In fact, she would probably be a little bored. I wish I could have that rapid surge forward with the others that I'm feeling with her.

And then there's dear little Rutledge. He's a hard nut to crack. Preschool is going well for him. He loves to go to Miss Missy's class, and he loves his Joy Preschool class at RES on Mondays. He begs for us to take him to church more than just on Sundays because he loves Sunday School. This is the kid who was crying through Children's Chapel and Sunday School all of last year. He is learning to write his name (I'm kicking myself for not naming him something simple like "Bob"!) and asking for more of his name to trace. I don't know that he is picking up all that is going on in preschool, which is a bit more academic than the program the twins were in at his age. He isn't the most chatty responder during the debriefing at the end of class each day. And he has been getting some time outs for not staying in his seat during activities. But I'm hoping that he is picking up some of the letters and sounds they are covering, if not the sight words. As his speech has improved, his entire vocabulary and sentence structure has become more sophisticated. He still seems much younger than more 4.5 year olds, and much younger than any of my older three were at his age--he has playing the baby down to a science. So I am hoping that he is learning and processing more than he is letting on. I have a hard time imagining him in kindergarten in a little less than a year because he is so much less mature and "with it" than his peers. But I guess that's part of why he isn't going to go to school....

So this is one of those less than rosy homeschooling periods. Maybe it's just a disguised version of so many people's unease, letdown, or freak out when their mental image of the schoolyear before it starts jars into the reality of the end of the first month. The moments when you realize you've only been at it for a month and you're already behind. Or where you had these grandiose plans for all that you would accomplish and how perfect these books you chose would be. And then you have to face your less-than-enthusiastic pupils, who are not acting out the fantasy schoolyear that you had envisioned. I think that's the primary issue going on here, and I should know better, because I've been there and done that. Maybe in the end, what I really need to do is acknowledge that a lot of the dissonance I'm feeling comes from a change in my own expectations this year, a change in expectation that the kids may not have had themselves and don't own. My orientation is much more serious now than it had been in the past, but I can't expect them to have read my mind and seen that I've bumped it up a notch and they should do the same. Hopefully this little phase will pass and we'll make the changes we need to to keep everyone moderately content.

Happy Birthday to Frances! My middle baby is now 8 years old, and what a difference this year has made. She went from reading at a kindergarten level, if that, to reading at a 3rd grade level in just about 4 months. What made the most difference was the online Headsprout program that she did over the summer, followed closely by some pressure from summer school, and then by us offering much more direct instruction and practice and making learning to read a priority. Suddenly she can read just about anything, and it is just plain fun to watch her realize that she knows what signs say or what is on the newspaper or that she can read a book that she thought was too long for her.

Over the weekend, my computer died...for the final time. I still think that it is possible to salvage it for some kind of minor use, but on Sunday morning I could not even move the cursor on the screen because whatever kind of video connection problem it had was making lines across the entire screen. I used to be able to tilt the screen at this or that angle to minimize where the lines were and still keep working, but now the problem is pervasive. So I'm writing from my brand new computer. I wish I could just use it without guilt, but I still feel slightly indulgent for replacing my old Mac with a new one, and I think it is going to take a while for me to bond with this new metal thing. It's cold. The keys click. It feels different from my filthy white plastic computer.

As usual, we've been exceptionally busy, with no real end in sight. Last week we had Frances's birthday party at our swimming pool on Friday night, and she had a super time. Originally she had wanted to have something at our house, but I nixed that idea because we had just come back from Isle of Palms a few days before, I hadn't had time to unpack because our school and work week began in full force right away, and I just was not up for cleaning our disgusting house enough to have ten or fifteen kids and their families over. Frances has not had a party at the pool yet, mostly because her birthday is past the outdoor summer pool season and the indoor pool starts at 4 feet deep and some of her friends don't yet know how to swim. But the timing was just right this time, and they had a super friendly lifeguard who led games and a hula hooping and limbo contest. We shut the place down because it was so hard to peel everyone out of the pool!

We also made our annual trip to Williamsburg on Friday. Every fall there are two weeks of homeschool days in Colonial Williamsburg and at Jamestown and Yorktown. I had planned on taking the older three to Jamestown again last week, but they clamored to go to Williamsburg, which turned out to be a very timely trip. Frances and I have been reading the _Stories from Grandma's Attic_ books, and one of the stories told about how the grandmother's brother had had to give his sister his brand new slate and slate pencil because he had tried to bribe her to do his chores for him and made a promise he didn't plan to keep. And lo and behold, there was a slate pencil and a slate, which she has been using diligently since we got it. We also have been studying medieval writing, including parchment and quill pens. In her medieval art class she made a map and then burned the edges and stained it with tea to make it look old, and then in her Story of the World class they were making quill pens and writing with ink. We were able to pick up some extra supplies in Williamsburg, and Frances's shopping obsession had a more legitimate purpose for once.

It was a hard decision to make to go. Rain was coming down pretty hard while we were driving there, and all day long it was off and on drizzle. But I suppose you can always tell when someone really wants to go somewhere when they are willing to brave the elements, and everyone was still insistent that we go. The turnout was slightly better for the Homeschool Days than I've seen it in the past, despite the weather, but we still had a lot of time with the craftspeople all to ourselves. We spent a good deal of time in the wigmaker's shop, in the printing office, in the blacksmith's shop, and in the weaver and dyer's shop, a place we hadn't been before. We toured Bruton Parish Church, which was extra interesting because there was a placard at one of the pews for Richard Henry Lee, who is ostensibly related to Kerry's side of the family. This made Frances feel especially important, and she is always interested in anything that will help to make her famous. Overall, it was an especially good Williamsburg trip where we were able to take our time and spend as long as we needed at each stop on our route.

One of the other things that has become more important over the past year is starting to look at colleges. I have my moments where I fret that maybe none of them will go to college, and I get deep into a woe is me, I have such narrow priorities kind of thinking. But I feel like now is the time to start exposing them to the variety of campuses and settings and feels of different schools so they can start imagining themselves in some of these places. We spent a little time walking around William and Mary, which was especially helpful on a real school day where students were walking around. We took a look at the college catalog in the bookstore so that they would have an idea of how many different classes there would be that they could take in every conceivable subject. We had lunch at a place that served chili in a Fritos bag. All in all, a nice time. The only little glitch in the day was that Walter ended up with a lack of appetite and pathological tiredness because he had accidentally eaten gluten the night before. And I, stupidly, decided that I was starving, was having trouble finding a safe lunch, and I ate a hamburger with a real bun. I totally paid for it on Saturday!

Thank goodness the weekend was somewhat relaxing. Kerry had planned to take some kids to see the band Lunch Money, which was playing at a library in Leesburg. The rain and the general weight of the world made him change his mind, and Walter and Ollie had the opportunity to go help with a service project with the youth group at church. They have a relationship with an older woman in Richmond, and once a month they spend a Saturday morning working in her yard and helping her around the house. Then they went out to CiCis for lunch, and I was so proud of Walter for choosing to eat salad so that he wouldn't have a reaction--he's really taken ownership of his diet lately. In the afternoon, it was such a perfect fall day. There were kids of all ages from the neighborhood all over the place, hiding in the playhouse next door, having some kind of battle in our back yard. The boys spent the night with our new neighbor, John. Sunday we spent what felt like half the day trekking out to the Apple store for the new computer and then the rest of the day at a birthday party for a friend who lives near Kings Dominion. I had intended to only stay until 7 or so, but the next thing I knew it was 9:30 and I still had two classes to prepare for the next morning and we were an hour from home! But it was all worth it. The kids had such a great time. The best part was setting off fireworks in their backyard after dark. There were some particularly fascinating ones called "Cool"s, which shot a variety of sizes of sparks and fountainy sparkly stuff. The grand finale was a more elaborate burning thing called Just Another Stinking Fountain, which flared in multiple colors and from multiple holes for about two minutes. Marshmallows, bottle rockets, smoke bombs...what more could you ask?!

We are now getting ready for yet another camping trip this weekend. This one is with our homeschool group, and it looks like there are about 11 families planning to go. Kerry is, it seems, competing in a triathlon this weekend (don't ask--I swear he hasn't trained much at all!), so he is staying behind. But I know the real reason: he simply hates camping. I don't mind too much--I love to be out, love the way that the kids get so excited, love to see them out with their friends. And I've camped so much in the past few months that I pretty much have our equipment moving and storage down to a science. I'm going to put forth a bit of effort to make sure that this time we have food and we aren't shopping at the last minute, but it should be another great time.

My goal from now on is to try to write here at least every other day so that I get into the habit again before November, when I always try to post every single day. We'll see!

Just a quickie to say we are back from the IOP--Isle of Palms, and what a gorgeous, perfect place that is. It looked like our beach week weather was going to be iffy and wet, but it turned out to be gorgeous and sunny, and nothing evidences this more than the orange, pus-blister filled face of my poor little Rutty-Buddy, whose lips and nose were burnt to a crisp.

This is our third year going to the Renwick family reunion that has been at this same beach house since it was built in 1994. Prior to having our current house--an incredible 11 bedroom, 12 bath extravaganza that easily holds our 35+ people--the original 8 brothers and sisters from whom the current family is descended would stay in a house on the beach while the younger generations would stay in another house a block or two back. I think we all think of this particular house now as "ours," since we have so many fond memories there.

What makes the Isle of Palms so perfect is that it is only 20 minutes from Charleston, one of my favorite cities. Though most of our time is spent relaxing on the beach, picking creatures from the tide pool (we had an enormous live sea star on Sunday), getting knocked by the waves, and getting our dyed-pink hair undyed in the swimming pool, we always make some reason to go into Charleston for a day. This year our plan was to go on a ghost tour, but there was a snafu and the tour guide didn't show, had us down for the 9:30 p.m. tour, and we didn't get to do it. But I went on an earlier excursion to the city to buy some pralines at River Street Sweets, where they make them fresh and you take them home still warm and delicious, and I made a little journey through the market with a distant cousin, so I got my fix. We also had a very memorable dinner at Hyman's Seafood, which is consistently one of the top 10 seafood restaurants in the country, and definitely one of the best on the East Coast. We sat at a table that had once seated Tom Berenger, the original Batman, and ACDC. They also have yummy hand churned ice cream for after dinner.

But the best times were those spent with the people we've come to know that I never knew I was related to. I've learned so much about my family, and best of all, my cousin-less children now have people they can think of as cousins (even though they are children of cousins of mine, so I'm not sure what that makes them to my children). Ashley and Jack live in Florida and are 9 and 11, and Colin is 14 and lives about 45 minutes from Greenville, SC and Asheville, NC. We are planning to go visit them on a camping trip in the spring. Quinn is only 3 weeks older than Rutledge, and they had an super time together in the pool, playing Playmobil, and playing on the beach. We also met Hunter, 1, and Amber, 3, for the first time--Amber totally enjoyed playing with Frances, and Frances got to play big sister to a girl, something she never ceases to remind me is her calling in life.

Alas, the trip was all too short, and we are now back, and it feels like we're finally beginning the true fall and the true school year. The trip always comes right as we're trying to get into the swing of our new routine, but now we're home for a while (well, okay, until the next camping trip in less than two weeks...).

Tomorrow is the last tennis clinic before starting play on our club's bantam team. Monday is likely to be an emotional day for Walter and Ollie, since it will be their first time playing competitively, and they can be hard on themselves. But if the weather cooperates, we'll get some court time this weekend. That is, between my singles tournament matches and the playoff match for my 6.5 combo team. I have a feel my time will be heavily spoken for.




What a wild week. And today was evidence that yeah, every day is going to be packed. It was nonstop. Deal with the returning Southwestern at home sales boys bright and early, drop off Rutledge at preschool with his newly completed health form, the final training session and debriefing about test results from Learning RX (have I mentioned again and again how far away this is and how hard the hour of driving was each day we went!), then a quick lunch out for a variety of people with a variety of dietary needs, which of course meant a variety of stops. Then pick up Rutledge, drop everyone at home, run off to my dr appointment, run home and scoop out the final dead fish (yes, we have exactly zero fish right now--a bacterial infection seems to have picked every single one of them off in the past week) and a water sample, urge a bit of math, stop at the fish store to test the water, buy a water test kit for at home, and bring the dead fish in, then rush over to Lego League, which required some whip cracking to keep everyone on task to get the ramps and obstacles built. Get barely through the door at home and my sister in law was here to pick up Frances for the weekend. Whew!

The great news from today is that Walter has really, really improved with all his work over the summer. He showed an average of about 3.5 years of improvement in the 13 individual areas that were tested. Only one subtest went down instead of up from the time he was tested back in May, and that was one where he simply missed one more question from last time and it was the one that was most heavily based on prior knowledge (it involved identifying things in pictures). Realistically, even if he has had a huge amount of improvement in basic cognitive skills, he's not going to necessarily have added vastly to his knowledge base using these new skills in just a couple of months, so I'm not concerned. But some areas showed massive improvement, and perhaps none more so than processing speed, where he went from rock bottom to well above average and even into the 90th percentiles. Processing speed is the one area that is reputed to be hardest to improve, so it really shows how much work he put in. He also went way, way up in all of the visual processing areas, some of which were his weakest areas before. I'm just so, so pleased. This whole process has felt very worthwhile. He looks better on paper now, he has so many more skills under his belt and is dragged down less by his less strong areas, and we've already noticed a tremendous change in his spelling. Also he is cranking out his math now and has gone from an average of 5-7 wrong per problem set to almost none. Math has always been a huge gift area for him anyway, but now he's enjoying it so much more and is quicker. I'd still love to see him read a novel-type book for pleasure without force, but perhaps that will come. Admittedly, I'm married to someone who doesn't read fiction for pleasure, either, so I know that there are people of above average intelligence who just don't choose to spend their free time this way, even though it seems really freakish to me. What's cool, though, is that Walter now loves to be read to, something he had a hard, hard time with before. He went beyond just fidgeting or jumping on the bed--he genuinely was not comprehending or listening at all when I would read...if he remained in the room at all. Now, though he still claims to hate history, he's participating with some connection in our history reading, and he has been begging for more and more and later and later with out nighttime read alouds (currently _Skellig_, a book he is loving).



The sad part of the day was watching my cardinal fish die. This is the third time I've had to watch the dying quivers and labored breathing of a fish in its final 30 minutes. It was excruciating. This was Frances' favorite fish, and it just confirmed that something awful was going on in the tank. They all had definite signs of fin rot, had loss of color, rapid, labored breathing, listlessness, a darkening of the scales around the dorsal fin, loss of appetite, and this one had a long white poop coming out of it, suggestive of intestinal parasites or infection. With no fish hosts left, hopefully the tank will clear up. Our nitrates were up a bit today, but they weren't earlier in the week, and it could be a result of all the death that has gone on in there. What's amazing is how fast the hermit crabs know there is something to eat--they were on the fish body like flies within minutes of death and had already taken apart the back of the fish by the time I got him out. We are doing a 30% water change today, adding in garlic and Vitamin C, and letting it sit without fish for two weeks before introducing anyone new. I'm going to have to consider what would be a good combination, since we're starting fresh. In the meantime, I did bring home a sea urchin who looks so very cool (he looks like a Halloween decoration because he is black, spiny, and has a big orange hole in the middle), 3 new snails, and a peppermint shrimp who I'm convinced is going to die, if he hasn't already. They are all supposed to help clean the tank, which is definitely something we need right now. The mild rise in nitrates has also initiated a little algae bloom, though the water change should help with that. I suppose you are not really a real reefkeeper until you've had some devastating episode where your whole tank dies on you and you're out hundreds of dollars in fish. Now I'm legit.

I probably must include an obligatory "first day of school" post. So here it is:

Rutledge's first day was a big success. It was a birthday already, so they had a little party, and the theme of the week is gingerbread men. Tomorrow they will make and eat gingerbread men as part of their "extended day."

Tomorrow is my first day teaching Junior Great Books for this session, and I am more or less ready. Our first story is "The Happy Lion," which is one of my favorites, and I have such sweet memories of doing this in past co-ops. Pre-Algebra starts for the older boys. I hope it will be a productive, if not rude awakening that they need to pay attention to detail.

This afternoon was our first art class at Art Adventures. Though I didn't see any of what they did and primarily dropped off and picked up, the reviews from the kids were overwhelmingly positive. This series of classes was a super deal at a studio with a strong reputation.

Today was also a day of endings. Walter finished Brainware Safari, a program we had purchased through Homeschool Buyers Coop. There is a lot of overlap between this program and Learning RX, so they complemented each other nicely. Brainware Safari is not nearly as intense and has far fewer levels, but it was still a fun and productive experience, and Walter was done in less than half the time that the company suggests you use the program (and not everyone finishes all the levels). Ollie has about 25 levels left, and Frances will start the program this week. Check it out at www.getbrainwaresafari.com!

Tomorrow is the beginning of Suburban tennis season. I honestly have no idea how to fit this in to my life right now, but I'm going to try to do home matches. We have a kickoff social and round robin in the morning, which I'm going to try to attend to the best of my ability. In the evening, the twins have their first clinic associated with their suburban team. I'm just glad that we're close to home with this one--there's nothing like riding your bike to an activity!

And so it all begins. The new school year, the new schedule, and a new set of activities.

Every Labor Day weekend we go to Camp Bethel, an incredible, rustic camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A friend of mine's husband is the Camp Director, and the family camp weekends for Memorial and Labor Day are the best value in camping in Virginia and are a huge amount of fun. Cabins rent for $16 a night and sleep as many as 16 people on bunk beds, and tent camping is only $5. You can make reservations for meals in the Ark Dining Hall, and there's a super new Swiss chef working at the camp now who makes extremely varied and tasty brunches (we haven't gone to other meals...). Things are definitely no frills here in general--bluegrass and gospel live music on stage at night, hayrides behind a tractor back into the fields and mountains behind the main camp, a barrel train (featured on the front of my blog), fishing in a stocked pond, a spring-fed, freezing cold swimming pool, and a very accessible camp area for biking, walking, and just hanging out. It's the kind of place where, for the most part, you can even feel pretty good about a 4 year old travelling around on wheels or foot with friends.

Family weekend is also an opportunity for everyone to pitch in to help close down parts of the camp for the winter. On Labor Day morning, there is always a polar bear swim as a final goodbye to the swimming pool for the season. If you ask me, though, it's always a polar bear swim at Camp Bethel, since the water coming from the spring is freeeeezing! It's definitely not for rarified specimens like myself who prefer 94 degree therapy pools! This was Frances after her swim this morning. She switched from polar bear to wannabee lifeguard after about 5 minutes.


One of the greatest pleasures of camp is catching salamanders in the main pond. Within 5 minutes, Frances had three of them in her net. I don't know what it is about this age, but suddenly my girl who used to love pink tutus is fascinated with trying to convince people that she is actually a boy. Now that I remember, "Tom-person" is the term that she used today to describe herself. Her proudest moment this weekend was when a boy at the lake asked her, "Are you a boy or a girl?" She was so thrilled that she immediately rushed back to our campsite to change into more obviously girl clothes so she could go say, "Ha ha." Hmmm.





Normally we camp in a field across from the camp's heifer barn. This year we might have experienced the same exciting birth of a calf as we did last year, but we decided to stay in a cabin with some friends. This is the Whispering Pines, and it is basically a room with nothing but 14 beds. We pulled mattresses down onto the floor for the adults, but we had a huge slumber party with 9 kids and 5 adults packed in. Here's our group's goofy photo. Rutledge had a total blast, since he had a whole group of boys to play with, and Frances had a girl posse of 8 and 9 year old girls. They spent the entire weekend riding bikes, fishing, and having adventures. Rachel, pregnant and in pink in the middle, was one of my LLL co-Leaders in Roanoke when we lived there. Wendy, on the left, attended meetings. And Amy is a homeschooling friend of Rachel's.


I set up the tent anyway because Rutledge couldn't decide if he wanted to sleep inside or outside, so we flitted back and forth between both for a while before I put my foot down and said we were definitely sleeping indoors and we couldn't waffle any more. It was rather pleasant to only set up a 3 person tent instead of our regular 9 person one!


This is my favorite camp building, the House of Pillars. In the front is a bunk room that can be rented in the off-season and serves as a camp cabin during the summer. But the main room is a huge, cooled room for conferences and events. Usually we have a movie night there during our camp time, and my first time at Camp Bethel was for a conference, so I have fond memories of time spent there. Plus it's just a cool looking place.

Tomorrow marks the official end of summer and start of the school year. Rutledge starts preschool in the morning. At the very last minute, I decided not to send him to the school we had originally planned and out of the woodwork came an opportunity to put him in a home preschool in a nearby neighborhood. What is great is that it's only 5 minutes away, the preschool has only 10 kids, and it's 3 days a week, which works out perfectly for me. We went to visit today, and he'll have his first day tomorrow. I have a good feeling that this is going to be a super experience for him. The rest of the gang, of course, will be buckling down just a bit and getting some work done in the morning before heading out to art class in the afternoon. Here's to another great year of learning and fun!

Well, I suppose in some ways this is officially the last day of summer. It's funny, but as fall came, suddenly it just felt like fall. It was as if September on the calendar sent a message to the weather saying, "Get a little cooler, and drop one leaf to let us know that this won't last forever." And so it did. And as always, as with so many things in life, it's hard to say when the 'last time' was for some things. The pool--I have a feeling we went for the last time...whenever it was we last went.... The outdoor pools close after Labor Day, and since we are going to be out of town over the weekend, it's doubtful we'll go back. And with a busy day and evenings getting toward the 60s, maybe people don't want to swim outside right now. Lucky for us, we have a beautiful indoor pool right down the street and an aquatic sport and lifestyle to keep us using it. But still, there's something about parting ways with those lazy days at the pool (or the not so lazy swim team days...) that just says a change is happening.

And would you believe it, but we've been doing "school" for 10 days now and are 5 days behind in grammar? But that's more of summer for you and a hazard of starting before public schoolers go back. I hate to make the kids miss out on playing baseball at the playing fields with their new friends, to say no when someone from swim team calls and wants to come over. Summer is short, and friendships are important, especially developing new ones while the new friends are still wild and free.

This also marks the final day of our Learning RX program. Well, not quite. Walter's new trainer had a family emergency, so he wasn't able to do his last training day yesterday, but today we set up his end of program testing anyway. He's in there right now, and I'm trying to stay calm and unworried. It is what it is, and I'm glad that we gave it all we had. I can't say for sure right now what effects it has had (hard to say anything when your life is made up mostly of swimming, throwing baseballs, playing video games, and camping), but I know that I'm happy that we aren't wondering What If this was something that would help his memory and concentration. So I guess the results are still unfolding.

In the meantime, Walter has finished all but 2 of the 168 levels of Brainware Safari, a program that is designed to take 12 weeks and where you aren't necessarily supposed to finish the levels, but to progress. Walter had gone thruogh 120 in the first week, and even though there are some others that have been challenging, he has come up with innovative and smart ways to work on the tough ones, things I might not have thought of. He's only been at it about 5 weeks, and one of those weeks we were out of town and he didn't have any time to work on it, and other weeks he has been below the recommended 5 hours a week because we've put his time and energy into LearningRX instead. So I'm really proud of him!

In midst of this good, we've also had some icky stuff going on. Our saltwater tank is on a dying spree. This week alone we have lost first our beautiful yellow tang, then our royal gramma, and now the new orange-eyed angel fish. I had been blaming the new fish for the other deaths, but when we found him on the bottom, being taken apart by hermit crabs, we figured he might not have been an aggressor but perhaps a disease vector. Or just the latest victim of whatever is wrong with the tank in general. I took the corpse in for a credit this morning and also took in some water to be tested, but everything is coming out fine for now. I don't know what to make of it. The fish aren't showing any obvious signs of illness--no spots or parts falling apart, so we can't make a diagnosis. For now, we're vaguely chalking it up to stress from the tank move and lowered immune systems and an illness. I just hope that Nemo and the cardinal, Edward, don't succumb. It's worrisome to say the least. A hobby is no fun when everything is dead.