Oh my goodness, I had the worst migraine for most of today. I take Maxalt for my migraines, but in many ways, it makes a dull, steady pain into a festival of nausea and nastiness that can last for half of the day. If I don't nip my migraines either in the bud or in mid-stream, they may go on for days. I always try to use a lesser evil of medication before resorting to the ill-making prescription that works (eventually...), but lately these haven't been incredibly successful. So I had to crash for about 40 minutes this morning when I wanted to be taking advantage of our free hours without Rutledge distraction.

It's a hard week here because of Frances's production schedule. Nightly practices which have kept her out until 10 every night except Tuesday, shopping for last minute items (you wouldn't believe how challenging it can be to find a bright-colored (not pale pink, not black, not white, not light blue) leotard in a child's size small on short notice. I also really needed to find some kind of hair extensions, but I gave up on that. Now they want me to color her hair "any color." Ummm, okay. She told me blue and pink and purple, but is that what the director really said? The world may never know.

Meanwhile, we're trying to pull together Halloween costumes. Tomorrow is our homeschool group's annual Halloween party, and I think we have things mostly together, but there is always some scrambling at the end. Tonight I was mixing up the pumpkin muffins and realized that our milk was sour (actually, I didn't realize it, Kerry did that this morning, but I remembered that he had realized it when I had already started to cream the shortening and sugar). Another trip out for supplies....

Ollie has managed to get himself into a heap of trouble this week and is now on restriction, which is going to affect his trick or treating and the sleepover he had planned. It seems that it's going to be just me and Rutledge out here, which should be interesting. Rutledge is going to be Yoshi from Mario Brothers. I hope that Kerry doesn't leave tomorrow with my safety pins, since the head of his costume is a bit large and unwieldy and keeps falling in his face. I had also planned to make him a Mario Kart, but so far that hasn't happened (and yesterday was recycling pickup, so I'm low on boxes).

Tonight we started reading Oliver Twist at Ollie's bidding. This morning we finished The Shakespeare Stealer, which everyone loved. I think we must have listened to it on CD at some point, since the story was pretty familiar to everyone, though I couldn't quite place where I knew it. I am so loving finally being able to talk about literature and literary and cultural history and having at least one interested party.

Whoa, our life is always a whirlwind! We've been very busy, hence the lack of writing about what we have been doing to keep so busy.

We're on a geology bender at the moment. So far, we are lagging a bit behind in our own science studies at home, but at RES, where the kids take classes twice a week, all of the older ones are taking an Earth Science class during the first session, and this should be continuing through much of the year. Last Friday we went on a field trip to a winery in Goochland County where the kids participated in a rocks and minerals program. And tomorrow we are going to Morefield Mine, one of the all-time favorite field trip destinations.

Morefield Mine is like Williamsburg--it's not a do it once and get everything possible out of it event. It's one of those things that needs to be repeated yearly or so, each time bringing some extra bit of information or some new twist on the endless thrill of collecting rocks. Morefield Mine is constantly in danger of closing, is closed forever, just emerged from being closed forever, or is only open for this here limited time before it will be gone. But like the phoenix or the dirty wormy thing that becomes the beautiful butterfly, there it is just when you need it. So we'll spend a few hours in the morning at the sluice, in the pit, and covered with dirt so that we can bring home yet another bucket of rocks that I will strive not to vaccuum up because they are everywhere!

And then the following week we are visiting the Midlothian Mines, a spot which I pass nearly daily but have never actually stopped to investigate. There is currently a county park on the site of these mines, but I am anxious to learn more about the history of this area, and hey, it's all in the theme of what we're doing lately, so it is a timely opportunity.

Rutledge also had his first Rutledge-only field trip this past week. Kerry took off work on Wednesday to take him to the pumpkin patch at Chesterfield Berry Farm with his preschool class. This place is always a favorite--hayrides, pumpkin picking, a firepit to roast weenies in, a corn maize, the whole nine yards. I was a bit sad not to share it with him, but the boys have math class on Wednesdays and I teach in the early afternoons, so the older ones of us stayed home and got some work done.

We are doggedly pursuing our own work at the moment as well, so all of this disruption of field trips, lovely as they are, can tend to get us behind. I'm pleased that we've stayed the course as well as we have so far. Frances continues to learn by leaps and bounds. All of those promises about how if you leave them alone and let them learn slowly and prioritize play, exploration, and down time to ponder instead of early academics they will catch up in a short amount of time when they are a little older do seem to be panning out, at least in this case. Her reading continues to explode, her fluency increases by the day, and we're about ready to leave behind her 2nd grade math book in a couple of weeks. What's incredible is that a mere 5 months ago I was fretting about her being able to pass a non-ambitious standardized test with 1st grade math. Now she's multiplying, adding and borrowing, and complaining that what we're doing is too easy. There are still areas where she needs work and where she needs to have facts and ideas come more automatically, so I'm in no huge rush, but the change is so staggering. We're also catching up on some of the Story of the World material from last year, and Frances is the ideal audience for the activity book. Though she wasn't feeling her best this morning, she was meticulous in rolling out, cutting, and drawing bricks on her Mohenjo-Daro house, and she is looking forward to making a diorama with it tomorrow. She also has a similar aural memory to Ollie, which is so easy to work with.

Our Lego League is also rocking along. The competition comes up in just a few weeks, and today was an especially productive day. The boys have programmed the robot to complete almost four of the tasks that can be awarded points, which is more than we had dared to hope for even a week ago. The robot is still being tweaked, but they have come a long way in their ability to delegate tasks, problem solve, and work together in small groups to meet a challenge or troubleshoot. This has been a great experience for everyone involved, and I hope that this will just be the first of several of these competitions to come. I am hoping to find some time this weekend to play around with our robot, which we redesigned today. I am dying to work through the Mayan Adventure book as well when our official competition duties slow down some. It is a nice, methodical introduction to how to build robots, but also a super introduction to design and planning for projects in general. If only we had more time to tinker with this kind of thing!

One of the highlights of this week was Rutledge reconnecting with his friend Beckett, whom we had not seen in a long while. They hit it off immediately and Rutledge cannot wait for a playdate again. Alas, my older ones are getting less and less interested in park day. Walter and Ollie opted to bring a friend home from their math class to play Guitar Hero with, and Frances just didn't want to come. I think partly she was feeling a little phlegmy and wanted to hang out at home, but partly she just doesn't have the same good time she once did. It's hard to be the parent through this stage of hers. I think she is working out where she fits in with various groups and people she spends time with. It's hard work. It seems like she's always relegated to a younger age category than where she chronologically belongs, partly because she's small for her age and very active and goofy, partly because her interest before now hasn't been very academic (which I think is fine--she should spend time being a child and not just pushing toward the next stage), and partly because I and she have been complicit with his. But now she is wanting to find ways to have some responsibility, to play the part of something other than the younger tagalong. She is practically obsessed with wanting to start a preschool or to run some kind of classes for babies, toddlers, or Rutledge's friends. And as always, she wants to make money at it. I've told her that that might be hard right now, but she's welcome to spend time with the little ones that we know, and I'd certainly appreciate her helping Rutledge with things he needs to do. But it's like there's some ineluctable urge to parent/nurture/have authority over people younger than her right now. But it has meant that she's seeming more aloof and less interested in social situations with her own peers. As a parent, I feel good when I see her integrated, see her having fun. Much of the time she is off by herself now, even in groups, and she is complaining that she is bored. This too shall pass, I presume.

Ollie is off on a reading binge again. He recently reread the entire Harry Potter series over a few weeks, and he just finished Ender's Game, The Bullfight, and I don't know what else. Walter, Ollie and I just read Where the Red Fern Grows as a read-aloud and finished it tonight. This was my absolute favorite book growing up, and I was sobbing as I tried to read that next to last chapter--excruciating! They both really liked it. Frances has been enjoying a bunch of books as well. She likes reading the Usborne classics adaptations on her own, and we still do lots of reading aloud together. Recently we read Frindle, the Cricket in Times Square, the Littles, More Stories from Grandma's Attic, and we're getting ready to start Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, since she really loved the first Betsy-Tacy book.

Rutledge's current on-list is The Monster at the End of This Book, Puppies are Like That, The Little Engine that Could, Peter Sis's London Bridge is Falling Down, and a non-fiction book called Are You a Spider? For him, repetition is the big key, and we have no lack of that around here.



This is a bit of a creepy picture, but there's always something a little creepy about Latin American productions. After the big disappointment of not being able to perform at the Department of Education this month comes more than you want of performance on the stage! We had not been told until this week, but apparently the younger performers are going to be in next weekend's production of Dio de los Muertos, which will be running for four performances and will coincide with a Day of the Dead festival on Halloween day. Frances is performing in three numbers--Shake Senora, a group circle dance, and a procession of the dead. Next week will be one of those marathon weeks--4 days of rehearsals across town, followed by 3 days of performances, sometimes two per day. The bummer is that she will miss trick-or treating, since she will be dancing during those hours, but the good thing is that she gets more stage experience, and I had meant to go to the festival anyway, and now we have more of an excuse.

It's blogworthy. My house is clean. At least the downstairs is. Tonight we had our Community Group from church over, and I spent much of yesterday and today getting things in order downstairs.

I have this problem, and the problem is that I am severely, pathologically challenged when it comes to interior design...or any kind of design, for that matter. Kerry would say that it is because I have too much stuff, but I believe very rationally and honestly that I don't have as much stuff as many people, and certainly that I don't have more than most. I just have a tremendous amount of trouble figuring out what to do with what I have. I have the messy's issue with feeling like if I put something in a drawer, behind a door, or into a box, I will forgot that I ever had it and will never use it again. But then when it's all out in the open, there's a clutter problem, and I can't tell what is anywhere. Precious time gets wasted looking for things, or I need a book, and there are 13 different shelves where it might be, unless it's under the bed, or in that stack on the plant stand in the kitchen....

I also have mentioned here that the boys were having a problem with a lot of errors on their math work, a problem that has largely been remedied by, gasp, punishing them with rewards. And not just any rewards, but politically and nutritionally incorrect rewards. Alfie Kohn, cover your ears. I take anyone with a perfect 30/30 on their math out for a drink at Starbucks, and a highly caffeinated one is one of the options. So far, Walter hasn't made it, and ironically, he is arguably the stronger math student. Ollie has had a perfect score twice, but has only been out once for his caramel macchiato. But scores have improved dramatically. The real secret is simply the amount of time and effor they put into checking their work before calling it done. They each do the work independently, then they get together and compare answers and settle any disputes (sometimes for the wrong, but that's part of the learning process and the learning to collaborate process), and then they give me their work, which sometimes still has some differences. But they've gone from Cs-Fs to As and Bs since the change and rewards.

But part of my attacking the problem and streamlining the schoolday has involved making a new schoolroom. Anyone who knows me knows that I've done this before. Several times. And that each time we don't end up actually using that schoolroom. But I'm going to give it another go. The trouble is that I need a very large whiteboard--a 3x4 one--and we have had it in our eat-in area in our kitchen. It violates one of my central principles of placing things, which is that things should be in their functional groups. But the real issue was that the whiteboard only fit in one place, and that place was not one you could easily see from the table if you were sitting there with your work. To use the board for actual demonstration and work, they had to sit on the stairs with their books, and that impeded traffic, wasn't comfortable, things were always falling, and it meant they had no hard surface to write on. What I liked about the whiteboard there is that you can't help but see it every time you head toward the stairs or down them. At least subconsciously, you had to see those Latin declensions or that demonstration of scientific notation, even if you chose not to actively register it. Moving it to a new spot means, almost by definition, that it is going to be less obvious and in a less-trafficked area.

Kerry completed his first triathlon this past weekend--a sprint tri up at Lake Anna called the Acorn Run or something like that. He is now convinced that he needs some gazillion dollar road bike and that he will cover up for the expense by selling the Bowflex that he so desperately needed three months ago and which was going to transform his exercise life and his health. Yeah, right. And it absolutely had to go right in our formal dining room, where it took up the entire space. And it came with a NordicTrack exercise bike, which took up more space in the rom, leaving a very narrow path to the piano and no real space for the trumpet and flute stands. All of a sudden, the Bowflex that was only used about 3 times was sold, the bike went this morning, and there's an entire room with nothing but a china cabinet, a piano, a painted file cabinet, and two dog crates. I made the difficult decision to part with my mother's china cabinet. I've had it since she died 7 years ago (wow...I hadn't realized that until I wrote this, but 7 years to the day today), though I got rid of the dining table that matched a long time ago because we had a table surplus and this one wasn't one I needed. Without a table, and with some scratches on it, and being kind of plain tending toward not entirely up to date, I felt like I could get by without a cabinet and pass it along to someone else while I put our Christmas and formal china in a cabinet in the kitchen. So that moved out.

And thus began my quest for a new schoolroom. The goal was to have it be really open and clear, with almost nothing in it. And to have lots of wall space, something that is always lacking in my schoolroom attempts because we have too many bookcases, and they're all tall. This time, I wasn't not going to overdo it. But I think I already have.

For hours I moved furniture back and forth. The requirements for the room are the 12 cube Ikea shelving unit that will hold our school books and backup stuff, the 3x4 whiteboard, the U.S. and world maps, and maybe the printer stand, which is another small bookcase. I still don't feel like I have it right. And I don't have my whiteboard up because it took so much brainwork to make a decision to put it where I think it's going. On the plus side, it's kind of visible from our foyer when you come in the front door. This means that maybe, if you subconsciously glance to the left when you come in, you'll see something on it and it might slip into your long term memory. But I don't have it up yet because I'm also kind of impaired when it comes to using those little plastic wall anchors. I need it up, and fast.

So a lot of energy has been going into not only making the downstairs presentable and clean for guests, but also into settling out this old china, this soon-to-be-gone china cabinet, the layout of this schoolroom, and the movement of items from all of the other places where they have been (the other "schoolroom/library/artroom," the kitchen, the living room, etc.), and managing the area near our garage entrance. I'm just really happy to have a clear living space for even a few hours. It makes me feel such a sense of possibility and productivity!

It is very rainy and cold now, after a long period of relative clearness and warmth, and I have an urge to just sit at home and read books with the kids and hole up in our little insular life. Swine flu reports both from the media and from other families in the neighborhood who have this illness have me a little cautious about wanting to go anywhere. But mostly I think that this time of year is supposed to be a time where there is a turning inward and some quiet time in the warmth of inside. Tomorrow should, hopefully, be a day of relative less-activity than our other days of the week, and I'm really looking forward to it.

As I'm getting ready for bed, there is a great show about intelligence in plants that I would like to record for the boys to watch tomorrow, and I've realized again, to my chagrin, that I cannot operate our TVs in even the most basic of ways. We pay to rent a machine that works as a DVR, and yet we have never, not even once, taped something and watched it. I've tried a bunch of times, including tonight, and not only couldn't record, but couldn't even figure out how to turn on the television itself. Earlier today, I wanted to put on a VCR cassette for Frances and Rutledge, and I couldn't figure out how to hook it to the television, despite color-coded cords that were in the correct colors. In fact, even Oliver, who is our resident technology help desk, could not figure out why we were getting nothing but a blue screen with the words AV1 on it. So we gave up. And I gave up on the plant show. Is it really too much to ask to return to the place wehre you just pushed a button that said ON and the television was on? Or when you put in a tape and press PLAY that something would just play? Every single time I turn the television on or off (and I don't know how to operate the one downstairs at all, and it has no buttons externally, only an invisible touch pad that you cannot see at all, even if good light), it takes me at least four attempts. I still have no idea what the correct order of operations is for pushing the buttons, I just try all kinds of things and eventually one of them works, usually with an annoying time lag. I feel like such an idiot, but then again, maybe I'm just not displaying the best attitude, one where I behave as if I am indeed competent and capable of learning. I just don't know.... What I do see is that I could be using History, Science, and Discovery better in our schooling life, and I'm not tapping that potential.



I'll leave with this image. As if Bilbo really needs any extra incentive to attack plush toys. He has this thing for Webkinz and Beanie Babies--he'll sneak them out of bedrooms and playrooms and from under furniture and rush them outside, where he vigorously breaks their necks. Why, oh why, would we need to make him salivate over a Spiderman?

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good:

* Great day teaching at RES. I think I lost Ollie, who had tears standing in his eyes the way he always does when he doesn't understand something right away and goes into the shutdown mode, in our discussion of rhyme scheme in poetry, and it was probably even worse as we got into accented and unaccented syllables in scansion. But it was productive, we covered good ground, and I have some very fun students in my class. The IEW writing class went even better. We watched a video and there was a near revolt when I mentioned working again with writing from the Sea Wasp outline, so I substituted their homework assignment outlines and paragraphs for our who/which exercise, and it went well. I feel like most of the kids are very comfortable now with making a keyword outline from a short source text and with combining lines of the outline by using a who/which clause. Next week we will be adding a few more elements rather quickly so that we can progress to more interesting compositions. I'm really liking the video format, which is helpful for them as reinforcement and helps me to know exactly what I'm going to present the next day in a logical and systematic manner.

* Amazing camping trip this weekend. Our homeschool group now does several campouts a year, and this was as memorable as the rest. We went to Bear Creek Lake State Park and had a nice loop that allowed our whole group to be together near a clean and well-equipped bathhouse, hiking trails, and within a short walk to the lake. Many games of capture the flag, zombie tag, pet wars, card games like Spit and Kings, and who knows what else were played. There was kayaking, chasing, burning everything (including the lid to my Sigg bottle) they could get their hands on, truth or dare, sleepovers in other people's tents, and clubhouse making. The setting was lovely, the weather perfect, and the company unparalleled.

* Kerry ran his first triathlon this weekend, and he is very proud to have made it through without stopping and without fail. Now he wants to sell the Bowflex, which has been gathering dust, to buy a road bike. I'm a bit cautious about spending so much so soon, and a road bike is quite an investment, even from Craig's list, even from Ebay. The Triathlon was at Lake Anna, a nuclear plant heated body of water, so even though it was October, which is a questionable month for open water swimming without a wetsuit, the water was about 84 degrees. Now he is chomping at the bit to do it again. Perhaps this will be the fire under him that will drive him to exercise daily!

* Frances is going to be travelling to Washington, DC this Friday with her dance company to perform at the Department of Education. My source isn't always totally reliable, but I hear that Michele Obama might be there to see the performance. Frances leaves early in the morning in the van with the other company members and will be one of just a few children dancing. She is so excited! Since the election, she has had a bit of an obsession with the Obamas. She plays with her Sasha and Malia Obama paper dolls, she wrote a letter to Sasha asking to meet her, and she received a letter back, with an official presidential seal, from Michele Obama, and she is fascinated by wher ethey go to school and how they deal with their family's fame. I truly hope that she does get to shake hands with the First Lady!

* Frances is reading so well now. It's unbelievable how much progress she has made since May. Tonight she asked me to find her a fairy tale to read, since she likes to read to Rutledge, and she read The Three Bears from a book that was definitely not written for emergent readers. She went through page after page of dense, single spaced typewritten text (this is from an Oak Meadow collection designed for parents to use for storytelling). What is most exciting is that she is just so motivated and wants to read and show what she knows. I think she is still surprising herself that she can just look at things and know what they say. While we were in the checkout line buying Gatorade today, she looked over at a tabloid magazine and asked, "What does 'Backs Out of Divorce' mean? Or she'll ask, "Why is there a clearance sale there?" or "Why is that road named Lake Harbour and why does harbour have an our in it?"

* Walter reached a score of 8-8 in his Bantam tennis match today and went to a tiebreaker, where he ultimately lost. He was in tears from the intensity and just the confusion of why the game wouldn't end when he thought he had already finished. It was an insult to have to do all of this switching and odd score-keeping with the tiebreaker when he had been up 8-7 and that should have been it. Believe me, Walter, I've thought that many more times than you have. Just let the game end already, and let it be mine. We lost all 5 lines today, which is close to our usual team score for a match, but I was incredibly proud that he had such a close score. His past two matches ended with him losing 8-1. He's no Roger Federer yet, but the improvement over the beginning of the season is striking.


The Bad:

* Ollie lost his tennis match and is discouraged. We need to get out frequently to practice.

* We couldn't go to the County Band Night because of the "Ugly" below.

* Our new purple sea slug in our aquarium disappeared without a trace.

The Ugly:

* As the evening progressed, the pieces all fell into place and we realized that Kerry's missing iPod, my missing cell phone, and two missing digital cameras, one of which was going to be returned to Wal-Mart for a refund today because I ended up choosing a different one, were all connected. It seems that they were stolen from our cars while we were unloading triathlon and camping equipment. All told, they represent about $1300 worth of items, and although our homeowners insurance will cover the loss, our deductible is about $1000, so it probably isn't even worth filing the claim. The worst part is that I'm without a cell phone until we settle this problem. I still have another year on my contract, and I desperately want an iPhone, but we are locked into a 2 year contract with Verizon and Kerry doesn't want to switch to AT&T anyway because their coverage is poor, including being unavailable in the Philip Morris production facility where he works. I don't want to pay hundreds for a cell phone that I'll only have one year, and I liked the one I had because it was shock and water resistent, designed for construction sites. And worst of all, all of my camping pictures on that camera and my beach pictures are gone. Not to mention I don't have my good camera any more. There were two other car break-ins in our little neighborhood last night, so perhaps they were all related. It's been almost 2 years since a big rash of things like this happening. And while it is most likely kids trying to get some extra cash (or beer--fridge break-ins are really a big thing out here in suburbia), it's very costly to us.

So there's the rundown of the weekend and day. Upward and onward to tomorrow. I have some LLL work to do in the morning, my kids have a ton of schoolwork to do to catch up after the weekend and RES classes today. They have homework for Latin class in the afternoon, they have math homework that they should have been doing for days before now, and they need to catch up on trumpet and flute practice. Here's to less of a mixed bag of a day tomorrow.

Today was Kerry's birthday. First thing in the morning he was greeted with a crown made by Frances and Rutledge, coffee made by Frances, a card made by Frances, and a picture made by Rutledge (well, okay, Frances drew the head, eyes, nose mouth, hair, body, and left arm, but Rutledge made the right arm, the legs, the sun, and the mountains).

On Thursday afternoons we have our First Lego League meetings to prepare our robot for competition in November at the Science Museum of Virginia. Walter and Ollie are part of a First Lego League team that is working to complete the challenges from this year's program, which focuses on transportation. Working with Lego materials can be very, um, challenging, since the instructions frequently seem as if they were written by...engineers. Or some other people who don't always have a full grasp of how to adequately communicate instructions. I think vagueness is part of the purpose of this particular academic program, so we are still a bit confused about exactly how many challenges there are, how some of them work (can you really move this robot without knocking something over when the smart brick itself is wider than the path it seems to need to go down?), and whether they are linked together. But we still have a few more weeks to uncover the mysteries. Meanwhile, the boys have built the challenge course, which was no small feat. They have programmed the robot, such as it is at the moment, to complete the first challenge (though we don't quite understand exactly what the challenge is...), and one of the boys is doing research on current transportation issues and challenges for their presentation. During the course of the past month they have met with a graphic designer who helped them create designs for their team t-shirts, and today we had a now-graduated homeschooler who did JFLL and First Robotics team challenges for many years. Sam share with them what his experiences had been like, what to expect at a competition, how he learned over the course of several seasons about what will take them furthest in the contests, how to prioritize the challenges, and about how his teams divided the work involved. I think they were particularly impressed to hear him tell about how he spent 9 hours one night working on the program for the robot as the competition date loomed close by.


Frances is also part of a Junior First Lego League, which has a slightly different challenge based on a similar theme of transportation. I won't reveal the secret of the Lego Girls' choice for an item to be transported, lest there be enemy spies lurking here, but they also are preparing a display with moving parts, simple machines, and demonstrating how a good is brought to them in a way that is graphic and interactive.


In our family, we lose teeth around our birthdays. It is rather amazing to me that this front tooth did not come out on her 8th birthday, since it has been hanging by a thread for days. No, she had to wait until it practically fell out on its own. She was at the pool, playing ping pong, when it dropped right onto the floor. The last sentence out of her mouth before it fell out was, "I need to stop hitting for a minute because I need to put my tooth back in place."


I have a guilty confession to make:

I'm one of those people who has become pathetically addicted to Sudoku. I had avoided it for a long, long time. Then I saw it listed yet again on a "Smart Parents' Toybox" email that I get, and I thought it might be a good activity to add in for Walter with his schoolwork. And here I am now. Books and books of sudoku puzzles filled in myself, but I've only had him do one :) I lose sleep staying up to finish these. I find myself frenziedly filling them in at stoplights. I understand now why I saw a plain-covered Sudoku book that was designed to "hide" your all-consuming mania. The only thing that has made me feel better is that yesterday while I was waiting for the twins at their tennis clinic I saw another parent there off to the side filling in rows and columns of little numbers....

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!