Three Plus Two

Today was the kind of day...

... where you wake up and your eyes feel like they have been rubbed with sandpaper and you realize that 2.5 hours of your 6ish hour sleep time was spent sitting up against a wooden headboard with a baby on your shoulder, and then you realize that two of your little ones have runny noses - again! - and it is December 17 and you are not done with your (online!) Christmas shopping and also that even your well kids are moving in slow motion and so the scheduled cleaning up the house is probably not going to happen.

So I declared a "nothing is going to get done" day.  Having had experience with these sorts of days, I know that the only thing worse than feeling like your eyes have been scoured with sandpaper is the accompanying feeling that you are running behind with no hope of ever accomplishing what you need to accomplish.  If I don't stop and do a reality check, what I end up with is a whole lot of meaningless guilt.  This sort of guilt -- "if God is a God of order, why'd he give me this brain and 7 kids, there's no way I can ever manage, blah, blah, blah" -- is counterproductive in the worst sort of way because at the same time it is paralyzing ("I just want to give up"), it also just gets worse as the day goes on and more falls by the wayside because of that sandpapery-eye thing ("Just how long have I been sitting here staring at this open jar of peanut butter???"). 

Today I wasn't going to get sucked into that well of destruction.  No, today I was just going to give myself a day of not getting anything done.  I called Andy at work and told him the situation and that nothing was going to get done today.  "Fine by me," he said, because he is a nice guy, and also because we have twins and he knows what sandpapery eyes feel like, but mainly because he was having one of those days himself.  So now it was a family affair, and I felt better.  Having your husband's seal of approval on a "nothing is going to get done" day will dispel any remaining shreds of guilt you have. 

So.  There I was.  The day had been completely written off.  There was absolutely no guilt about staring blearily at a computer screen, searching Amazon for Christmas presents...

It was about 2 PM when I realized that I had gotten something done today.  In fact, not just something but some things.

I'd gotten the Christmas shopping done because I gave myself permission to sit at the computer, but I couldn't just stare at the screen.  I might not have done my bedroom the way I was scheduled to because I had to put the baby in the Ergo and picking up the floor seemed a little bit too much like doing squats at the gym, but I did clean my mirror (finally) and I swept up the kitchen and the front room and did two loads of laundry, folded them (!), and put them away (!!)  I made a Target list and gathered coupons for it.  I oversaw the baking of shortbread cookies and my teenage son did his usual Friday bathroom cleaning chores, which does not mean that the bathrooms are clean but that they are cleaner.  I used our stash of emergency Annie's mac and cheese for lunch, but we ate.  I put small people down for naps.  I took out some recycling. 

And now here I am with the third load of laundry awaiting folding, and a fourth in the washer ready for the dryer.  My washing machine may or may not actually be cleaning these clothes -- it's making this high-pitched eeeeeeee noise of the sort you usually hear in bad 50's scifi movies -- but I figure rinsing them in hot soapy water must count for something.

Kind of like a day on which nothing is going to get done so there's nothing to lose by doing just one thing, regardless if it's the thing that's "supposed" to get done or not.

This Advent my primary reflections have been about my vocation and coping with the difficulty of slowing down to embrace ordinary life again after a year (or more) of constant upheaval and uncertainty.  On the one hand, constant upheaval will wear you out.  And on the other hand, some of us have the sort of personality that can come to expect it.  And when the upheaval begins to even out... it's tempting to create more upheaval rather than embracing the ordinariness of staying put.

Anyway, what I'm faced with these days is how to create a new ordinariness here in

 

Week in Review: May 10-16

It was the sort of week that goes by without being captured on film.  Or pixels.

We started off with a trip to the doctor for Farmerboy, who was diagnosed with a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics.  In the middle of the week, I had a doctor's appointment.  Then on Friday it was back to the pediatrician for Katydid and Pip, after a loooong night of coughing.  More antibiotics.  I was sick -- not too sick, but sick -- for most of the week, too.  But it has meant a lot of draaaaging in the mornings.  And a bit of fretting, since I was just scheduled for my C-section: June 15.   I am only fretting because I have to meet the requirements for New York state's homeschooling laws, which require me to document 180 days/900 hours (990 for Gareth) and turn in quarterly reports on everyone and (because we aren't testing this year) yearly evaluations, too.  I make this all harder on myself by actually providing a narrative.  Quarterly reports are about 2 pages long; yearly evaluations about 3.  I could have given the kids standardized tests this year, but that takes so much time out of our normal routine (going through the test prep book, taking a week out to do the testing...)  that we only do it when we have to.

However, in between and around (and at) doctor's visits, most of us managed to get a few (unphotographed) things done.  We...

• Took a brief walk with Daddy after dinner on the one warm evening of the week, into the field and along the treeline to check on trees downed by the snow this past winter.  We noted that the horsetails seem to be invading the top corner of the field, that the pin cherries were still blooming a little, and that the bee tree was quiet... hopefully because it was dusk.  The kids and Andy did a little running; I just kind of lumbered along behind. (***Note here: if you're curious about finding bee trees, there's an excellent description of "bee lining" in Bernd Heinrich's The Snoring Bird, which is a terrific book for all sorts of reasons... but unfortunately not the sort you'd probably assign your high schooler, due to all the complicated relationships Heinrich's father is constantly getting into.  You can read the description aloud, though, which is what I did as we were driving home from Tennessee this year.  If you'd like a simpler, picture book description of finding bee trees... Patricia Polacco's The Bee Tree is one of our favorites.) 
• Listened to the song of a Baltimore Oriole.  Read an old I Can Read! book about Baltimore Orioles the doctor's office conveniently put in their waiting room for us.
• Tried to watch the History Channel's new series America: The Story of US, which we have DVRed.  The problem is that the episodes the boys are most interested in -- the Civil War episode, for example -- are quite graphic for prime time TV... in my opinion anyway.  It was a good thing we had the episodes DVRed so we could fast forward through the gorier parts, but the younger boys were not happy at having to miss the battle scenes.
• Did a little Montessori.  A very little Montessori.  Chipmunk retrieved the knobbed cylinders from my rotation closet (which also holds sheets) and started working on them again.  He has also been a fiend with a pair of tongs lately, using them to open doors, pinch his brothers, pick up toys, etc.  I tried to channel that energy into a pom-pom and ice cube tray activity, but that only kept him happy for about 5 or 10 minutes.  Then it was back to using the tongs to turn door knobs.  (He also figured out how to open the gate latch on our fenced-in area of the backyard.  Not a good thing.)
•  Sold some eggs.  (Gareth and Katydid's new business.)
• Watched some John Wayne movies.  Does that count as school?
• Did a little math.  Gareth wrestled with functions.  Farmerboy worked on telling time. 
• Used the markers.  Sometimes even on paper!!
• Decided that Gareth will be adding Greek to his schedule next year using the textbook Athenaze.
• Built tractors out of Legos.
• Packed a few boxes.                       

As for me, I dug Women with ADD out of my "to be read" stack and started reading it again.  I had, um, lost it actually (I should probably insert a blush here at the irony)  when I started reading it before we left on our trip to Tennessee.  I had been planning on reading it in the van.  Anyway, it's been sitting on my nightstand for a while, but last week was definitely the time to pick it up again as much of the world which I have responsibility for managing and organizing seemed to be growing ugly people-eating tentacles at an alarming rate.  Anyway, I am finding the book quite helpful and when I finish it I do hope to post a review.  If the tentacles will behave, of course.  

Winter Term: Weeks 3,4, and 5, or Cabin Fever Hits and I say, "No TV".

Weeks 3, 4, and 5 are being lumped together as cabin fever weeks.  I think we did actually do something, and I have a few pictures to prove it, but mainly winter insanity took over.

This week (week 5) ended up a little better than I expected, after a disastrous Monday on which I informed my husband that I was going to pack the kids up myself and head south for a month or two, just so the three year olds would be able to GO OUTSIDE.  The twins have broken every Christmas present that can be broken.  Every time I go outside to feed the chickens I come back in to find that they have been throwing Duplos as "bombs". Invariably, this means that the living room looks like a bomb has gone off in it.  They have completely demolished the laundry room (we haven't replaced the fifth gate to be broken in two years), the hallway, and their bedroom (daily).  They hit each other with wooden blocks, light sabres, and anything else that can be pressed into service as a weapon.  Of course, it's easy to focus on the twins because they're usually the loudest, but really, all of the kids have been a bit out of sorts. (Cough.) On this particular Monday, every single time I opened my mouth to read, Chipmunk and at least one of the twins would be involved in a punching, hitting, kicking wrestling match on the floor. There were more tantrums than I care to mention, and my older kids were not helping.  Thus, the threat. Sensing things had gone a little farther than normal, my dear husband met me at the optometrist's office so we wouldn't all have to stuff into the small waiting room, and he took the other kids to Home Depot where he bought me a plant.

So I did not pack off after all (although my mother called on Friday offering to fly up here and drive down with us so Andy could stay here and work, an offer I may just accept.) What I did was to take away TV time in the morning.  I had to do this with Gareth, too, a long time ago.  No TV time in the morning, no background music during the day, no media period. Not even Bach.  Too much screen time, too much noise = too much hyperactivity. But, being a sluggish riser, I had wanted a babysitter for the mornings.  TV as a morning babysitter was doing more harm than good, though, and the rest of the week saw a vast improvement over Monday. I haven't revoked all TV, but it's down to 30 minutes a day, in the afternoon.

Because I said "no TV" in the mornings, I am also having to deal with my own screen-time habits, namely computer use.  I used to get online while the boys watched TV, but since saying, "No TV," I thought I probably ought to tell myself, "No computer," too.  Revoking my own online priveleges in the morning means I'm less distracted about getting the day going, and I can hop right on it if the boys start revving up.  I find it immensely difficult to be "on" all day like this -- considering that sometimes the boys open their eyes and immediately start climbing all over their beds and hanging off the bed rails, hooting and pretending to be monkeys, and when they do go down for a nap is the only time my older three can concentrate on academics, and Chipmunk will only nap on me, and then it's time to start dinner -- but it is introducing some sanity to our days.

But enough of my winter woes and on to some actual accomplishments.

• We finished studying ancient India and moved on to ancient Africa. There isn't a whole lot of information on ancient Africa for kids, so we are mostly focusing on folk tales.  (For ancient India, we also focused heavily on fairy tales and the Ramayana.  I should post some book lists.)

• We started learning about caves.  We watched Mysterious Life of Caves - NOVA and were all suitably disgusted and amazed by the formations eloquently named "snottites", which look like... well, you can probably figure it out.  They're formed by bacteria which produce sulfuric acid.

• In an ironic twist of fate, just when I had given up on the Montessori materials because I had to put them all away to keep Chipmunk from scattering them everywhere, the little boys decided that they really wanted to use all the sensorial stuff I have tucked away in the linen closet. This week (week 5) the boys used the color boxes, the geometric solids, the knobbed cylinders, and the constructive triangles.  Chipmunk just loves putting objects in containers and putting the lids on them.

• Gareth was awarded Tenderfoot rank at a Boy Scout ceremony.

• Gareth and Katydid started swimming lessons.

• Katydid wrote and delivered a five minute speech on the life of St. Agnes.

• I started long picture book reading sessions with the little boys after lunch.

• Katydid read aloud Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- the entire book -- to Farmerboy (and the rest of us.)   

• And everyone did math.

To make a long post even longer, how about some pictures?

The kids set up a pet village in the family room.

Katydid, concentrating on writing her speech.

 

Pip is a robot.  Every game the twins play -- farm, dogs, monkeys -- ends up with an evil robot.

 

Andy and Gareth fixed the dishwasher when it broke.

 

Gareth drew more of his invented animals.  This one is based on the marbled cat, which he read about in an old Scientific American.

 

I'm not sure what this one is based on.

 

Drawing maps has also been big around here lately.  Gareth likes to draw maps of the worlds he uses in stories.  He's been working on this map for a while, but this week he started a new map as a collaboration with Katydid and Farmerboy.  The kids have an intricate world system they've formed over the years.  It has its own languages, geography, creatures, planets, cultures, mythologies, and economies. I am privy to some of it, but not all of it. I like watching them map their imaginations. 

St. Ignatius' Prayer for Generosity

St. Ignatius' Prayer for Generosity

 

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

 

I used to have this prayer on my refrigerator.  I don't know where it came from, but it appeared at a time when Gareth's Tourette Syndrome related problems were at their height.  He's come a long way since those days, but I find myself wishing that this prayer was still on my refrigerator door.  I went looking for it today, and thought I would send it out to other mothers of kids with behavioral disabilities.  I said a prayer for you today, too.

Collecting my thoughts on a Monday morning

It's not morning anymore, but I'm going to post this anyway.  At least it's still Monday!

Outside it is cold and gray, but warmer than it has been.  The snow is melting off the driveway, but a patchy drizzle has left a thin film of ice on all the vehicles.  It spits against the western windows as rain.

I'm feeling just about as scattered this morning.  It is Monday, after all, and the Monday after Christmas vacation (which wasn't long enough) and the Monday after I stayed up too late watching a Jimmy Stewart western with Andy.  Then after the movie was over, I still couldn't sleep because I was thinking about making a menu plan rotation and so I had to write down lists of all our commonly eaten meals before I went to bed, which meant I fell asleep to a litany of puff pancake salmon patties chili roast chicken cheese quesadilla leek and potato soup... which is honestly not the best sleep you can get.  Chipmunk woke up 3 or 4 times between midnight and 6:15, and here I am.

I did manage to get a shower before Andy left for work, though, and that is a victory.  Before Christmas our mornings kept starting later and later, as I kept having to drag various people out of bed so I could leave the little ones to take a shower.  It's funny how something so simple -- a shower -- can seem like an insurmountable task sometimes.  I can do 3 loads of laundry a day, teach my kids percents and averages and all about ancient Greece, but I can't even figure out how to work a shower into my day?  Not to mention bathroom breaks... but I'm sure that many of you know exactly how I feel.

So this morning I've had a shower, started a load of towels, sent Farmerboy back twice to wake up his older brother and sister, rescued Chipmunk when he fell off the chair at the table, rescued his cup from Pop who drank almost all his juice, found the proper books about Romans for a number of small boys who were playing legionaries, taken Chipmunk out of the art cabinet, made myself a cup of tea with honey, wondered if that small tickle at the back of myself means I'm coming down with Gareth's cold... and I've eaten the last of the pumpkin custard for breakfast.  Now I have to make breakfast for the three legionaries (plus a small tagalong), clean up their breakfast and the table afterward, and remember that I had decided to pick up the Baltimore Catechism again and read a story from Angel Food v. 1 this morning, followed by the chapter on ancient India from A Little History of the World.  Gareth snapped up The Ramayana for Children as soon as I opened the Amazon box, so my plans to read that out loud have had to be reconsidered a bit. 

After that... Chickens, I'm working on the laundry, Farmerboy should paint his castle, the Hogwart's experiments, and must remember to do Latin after lunch. 

Okay, and now I have a battle to break up, but at least I've collected myself (sort of) until 1 PM or so.  I'm pretty sure this is why people make to-do lists... say, the night before, while they're up late watching Jimmy Stewart westerns with their husbands.

Update:  Well, no painting castles because we didn't have time.  Instead, Katydid investigated chicken coops, Gareth washed some coins from an ancient coin kit he got for Christmas, Farmerboy and the little boys did some stamping, and then we read a lot of Jack Prelutsky poetry at lunchtime.

Week 5: Reggio Emilia, the Emergent Curriculum, and a lot of art

Lately I've been questioning whether or not it's worth it to post these weekly reviews, considering the fact that I often lack the time to do a careful (useful) job.  But I've come to the conclusion that it is worth it -- whether anybody reads them or not -- because it's helping me keep track of the year.  This summer, when I was packing up our finished school year, I missed those missing weeks from last year.  This year I hoped to do better.

Another reason for keeping up with these weekly reviews... some reading I'm doing about Reggio Emilia and the emergent curriculum.  The first time I encountered that term, I laughed.  See? I told myself.  It's not that I'm incapable of planning ahead.  It's just that our curriculum is *emergent*.  All joking aside, the more I read about Reggio, the more familiar it seems.  Apparently I've been doing a lot of this all along -- observing and talking to the kids about their play, their reading, their interests -- in order to figure out what we should be doing at home.  Reggio educators stress documentation as a means of communicating the children's work.  As a home educator, I don't have an audience of parents (or an international audience of researchers) to whom I need to communicate my children's work, but it occurred to me that home learning blogs often serve a similar purpose: we use our blogs to synthesize, display, understand, and communicate our work with our children, our children's independent work, our own work, our family's work.  So I think that perhaps these weekly reviews should be written into my job description.  They aren't frivolous.  They're about understanding and respecting what we do.  (And maybe I should do a more careful job of them.)

Gareth, working on a soapstone carving kit I'd set out on the table after a discussion of statuary in ancient Greece

Week 5 saw a few changes in how we have been doing things.  I'd become a little dissatisfied with the way Choice Time was going.  We had a few problems.  The first was that chores and dressing were taking too much time (not because there was too much to do), and/or the big kids were having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.  This meant that Choice Time was getting squeezed.  The second problem was that the kids expected new choices every single day, regardless of whether or not they had actually finished what they'd begun the day before.  Another problem -- one which has been around since I started writing things on the whiteboard -- is that too often the kids would say to me, "There's nothing really on the board that I want to do."  I would try to set things out on the shelf or the table, Montessori-style, but more often than not, it would be ignored in favor of the whiteboard.  Then I would get upset or at least frustrated that all of my work was being ignored... etc., etc.

So. (Pardon me while I attempt to collect my thoughts, considering the NOISE LEVEL IN THIS HOUSE RIGHT NOW. Ahem.)  I had already been driven to the depths of despair frustrated by my complete inability to make standard Montessori work in any kind of organized fashion.  (Which, if you understand Montessori, means "at all", basically.)  Looking at things realistically, I'm not sure how I thought I could set up an ordered Montessori environment when 6 of the 8 people in this house could run down the list of AD(H)D symptoms, checking off the majority of them (and the ones for whom the jury is still out are not those in charge, if you know what I mean.)  However, the twins were in the process of driving me so insane that when Andy came home for lunch one day, I showed him what I had been googling: the nearest Montessori (or rather, Montessori-inspired) school.  This was not actually because I hoped to push them out of our way, but rather because I could not conceive of any way I could ever hope to engage their enormous supply of energy.  And I felt like I was letting them down.

This was the point at which I took a deep breath, picked myself up (I feel like I have to pick myself up quite a bit), decided that I would not think about being a "failure", and went searching for some new ideas.  After a long period of investigation, I had borrowed a few bits and pieces from Waldorf -- which I had begun researching because of its emphasis on art -- but as a family we're much too scientific, and the standard fairy/gnome/elf menu seems a little too scripted to me.  I'd bought a few books about Reggio Emilia last year when Chipmunk was a newborn, but they had languished unfinished.  Now I took them down off the shelf and finished them.  (I'll put up my list of books later.  This is turning out to be a really long post already!)

One of the things I find refreshing about the Reggio approach is how often the Italian educatiors say: "This is what we do, but don't copy us.  If these ideas are useful, use them, but you need to make your own way in your own context."  

So, for week 5, I decided to make a few changes based on my reading.  First, I decided to stop writing down my ideas on the whiteboard in favor of encouraging Gareth and Katydid to choose and work on their own interests.  Gareth has been doing quite a bit of reading on prehistoric mammals, and Katydid's interest in missionaries has been stewing for quite some time.  I also let them know that they could work on art projects at any time.  Because we had been talking about statuary in ancient Greece, I started by setting out some clay and a soapstone carving kit that had been sitting in the closet for a long time.

 

The clay was a huge hit.  I'd had it for years.  But we had done nothing with it.  Inspired by all the work in clay done by children in Reggio Emilia, I set it out on the table.  And I took a big step and got out the paint... which I had not been brave enough to get out for a long time.

Pip loved the paint.  Katydid and Gareth both chose to paint, too.  Farmerboy enjoyed mixing colors.  Pop liked playdough more, but that was okay.  Because a funny thing happened.  When everyone was involved in the art materials, we had peace for almost an hour.

I have to tell you that this success made me feel like a big dip.  I first started trying to use Montessori about three and a half years ago, and my kids have always chosen to do art.  They have never freely chosen a Montessori language or math work.  They have never chosen a 3-part card.  In fact, when we first started, all anybody would choose was watercolor.  Day after day after day.  I always blamed this on a faulty environment.  But I now think that I should have clued in to the positive nature of this information.  Honestly?  I should have just let them do art.

Week 5 was a very successful week, which gave me some good ideas on ways to proceed.  I'm not ditching Montessori completely, and I am happy that Reggio's ideas of the "environment as the third teacher" and free choice fit so well with some of the Montessori ideas I also like so well: "freedom within limits" and independence.

It's probably past time to end this post, but I do hope to post more on this topic sooner rather than later.  Leave me a comment if there's something you'd like me to write about!

Logistics makes my head hurt

I just wanted to say: I have hit a wall.  Any woman with six children should be able to buy executive functioning (the part of your brain that helps you plan stuff) over the counter when she needs it.  You know, like vitamins.  Say, when she is trying to prepare for a vacation and a new school term at the same as she is researching the probability that her twin toddlers have sensory integration difficulties and she is also trying to decide whether or not to bring all or only some of the tomatoes in, because the forecast changes every fifteen minutes.  In this scenario, without supplemental executive functioning, she is likely to give pride of place to the tomatoes.

My wonderful husband bought me a fancy new laptop to replace the one I burnt out at the beginning of the summer.  This fancy new laptop came with Windows Calendar, which I am using to make up a schedule for our fall term.  My goal is to start up again on September 22.  I'm not sure we're going to make it that long, considering that my kids are reacting to this "break" the way they react to all breaks -- in other words, not very well.  But I still have a few things to do.  Like clean off the table.  And the hearth, which is full of potatoes and onions.

But back to Windows Calendar.  I like it, but I am not using it in the way that its authors intended.  I started out by using a day to make Gareth his own schedule.  Gareth's schedule is easy.  Gareth likes to work independently.  He does not like anyone hovering over him while he does his work.  This means that all I need to do is give him the books, let him know what my expectations are, and spend about thirty minutes or less going over his work when he's done with it.  After we get past the rocky adjusting-to-the-new-routine period, my responsibilities overseeing his education are not that hard.

After I did Gareth's schedule, I went on to Katydid's.  Here I ran into trouble.  Katydid will be in the fourth grade this year, and she does not always do well when asked to work independently.  She needs me to work with her in a few subjects, most notably math and Latin.  It should be easy to work two subjects into my day, right?

Um.  Have I mentioned that I've been researching sensory integration issues with the twins?  It's gotten to the point lately that I can't do much else when they're awake but be with them.  If I try to read aloud, even while they're eating, one or both of them will yell, fight, throw blocks, dump toys, hassle the baby, and just generally make it impossible for me to read.  (By now I'm pretty good at reading over and around chaos.  Believe me when I say they are making it impossible to read.)  Behavior of this general sort goes on all day.  The boys have always been just a little MORE than your average kid: MORE intense, MORE active.  But lately it has escalated to the level of breakdown -- which would be mine and Andy's, thank you very much. 

Anyway, the sensory integration road is no stranger to us, although when we have trod it in the past it's been for sensory defensiveness, not sensory-seeking.  Still, I know the drill: behavior improves when appropriate activity is built into their day.  In the case of sensory-seekers, a lot of jumping, swinging, heavy lifting, pushing, pulling, stuff with weight to it. 

Okay, so when the twins are awake, I need the older kids to be very independent.  What about when the twins are asleep?

By the time the twins go to sleep, I'm shot.  I need a break.  And, oh yeah, Chipmunk naps in twenty minute intervals in the afternoon.

Sometimes it feels as if my day is a special needs roulette wheel.  We'll just give it a spin and see what turns up next.  Sensory defensiveness?  Got that.  Sensory seeking?  Got that, too.  Visual processing problems?  Yep.  ADHD? Yep.  ADD without the H? Oh, yeah.  Tourette Syndrome?

Now, where does math go?  Windows Calendar doesn't seem to have a function for this.

         

Burn Out and Re-Inspiration

As I was typing in the title of this post, it occurred to me that it meant something different than I thought it did when I came up with it.  I was thinking of "inspiration" in the standard sense: being "inspired" to do something, generally better than one might have done otherwise.  But as I typed the word, I was reminded that "inspiration" also means "to breathe".  And that's what I really want to write about.

Until a few days ago, my breathing was, literally, quite diminished.  I have never been officially diagnosed with asthma, although some years ago one of the kids' doctors told me I ought to have been.  I have a problem with certain molds that often grow in housing ventilation systems and old carpets.  I have a problem sometimes with hay fever and colds that combine to restrict my bronchial tubes.  When I was a kid, it was almost a given that I would spend half the winter (at least) with bronchitis.  Some of my earliest memories are of getting shots in the doctor's office.  Thankfully, I do not remember the ER visits in the middle of the night that my father has told me about.  I do remember the year I spent 6 months with walking pneumonia, though, the year my grandmother died.  I had to relearn what it was like to breathe that year, too. 

This month I didn't want to be sick.  I had too much to do.  So I put off acknowledging that I needed to go to the doctor, in the hopes that "it would just go away."  In other words, I was in complete denial.  Of course the wheezing did not just go away, and even when I finally went to the doctor and received the all-important inhaler, the wheezing did not go away entirely, and neither did the congestion in my head, in spite of the antibiotic.  So I did what mothers often do (again): I put off going back to the doctor.  In both cases, I had to feel like I was drowning before I went in.  And when I say, "I felt like I was drowning," I mean it literally.  This time the doctor perscribed me steroids, and now, a couple of days later, the difference is amazing.  I'm not completely 100%, but I can breathe again.

It's amazing what you can do when you feel like you aren't drowning.  When your lung capacity is suddenly cut by any sort of percentage, walking across the room can become a chore.  Talking may be out of the question.  Sometimes you lie awake in bed -- well, you don't lie exactly, you might have to sleep in a completely upright position -- and you listen to the cacaphony coming out of your lungs and you start thinking things like, "How would I know if it was time to get help?  Am I overreacting?  I can't be sick; I have so much to do!"

Then, when you finally receive medication that works -- when you finally STOP and admit that in fact, you are sick, and you do need help, and you cannot keep on doing everything you are trying (and failing) to do -- and you can finally BREATHE again, you can look back on yourself as you were and say, "What kind of crazy person WERE you anyway?  It's no wonder you couldn't do what you thought you needed to do! "

Sometimes life has to reach a critical mass before I realize what it is going on.  I try to keep on as if everything is "normal" when everything is anything but normal, until some tiny little event makes me understand how ridiculous things have gotten, and how ridiculous I am being about them.  For me, that one little event happened yesterday morning.  I received those precious steroids Wednesday night, but was going to leave them until Thursday morning to start so I wouldn't mess up the pill count.  But I woke up at 3 AM feeling like my throat was closing shut.  So I got up took all the medication I could handle -- steroid, Albuterol, nasal decongestant -- and then I couldn't go back to sleep for a while.  Thursday morning, I was feeling better than I had in a long time in spite of the little sleep that I'd gotten... and then Katydid walked into the family room in tears.

"My hamster is dead," she said.  "He died overnight.  He was just laying there, and I picked him up and he wasn't moving and he was cold.  Why is God doing these things?"

And that's when I knew that this summer had become ridiculous.  And that I had to take some kind of action.  We all needed to relearn how to breathe.

See, we started back in May when Katydid got strep, which we thought might be Lyme.  We were relieved when it wasn't Lyme, but then it gave her a headache that wouldn't go away.  For most of the summer there have been blood tests and MRIs and neurologist appointments and medications that don't work.  She got a pet rabbit that was killed by raccoons three weeks after we brought her home.  There was the pit bull in the yard who killed chickens on two different occasions (thankfully, "dangerous dog" proceedings were brought against the dog's owner last night.  I wrote a letter of evidence).  There was some mystery virus that passed through our ranks and hit Andy with such a vengeance that it mimiced a case of E.coli.  There was van trouble that reduced us to one vehicle for about a month.  There was soccer season and art classes that we couldn't attend because we couldn't get there and eye exams and a full travel schedule for Andy and all the food coming out of the garden, and me thinking that we needed to catch up on all the school that we'd missed back in May when we were running Katydid to another doctor every few days and laundry and laundry and more laundry, and a dining room that fills up again as soon as I clean it out.

I might have been the one wheezing, but it wasn't just me who needed to stop and just breathe for a while.

So that is what we are going to try to do.  I had a big pile of laundry that needed to be folded yesterday, but after wrestling with the twins all morning, and after Katydid and Farmerboy buried the hamster, I stopped and thought, "This is nuts.  We are going to meet Andy for lunch, and then we are going to the playground."

And that's what we did.  We met Andy for lunch (even though it was his first day back at work this week), and then we went to the playground.  Everyone had a great deal of fun.  This weekend we are going to the zoo in Syracuse.  After Labor Day, we are not resuming lessons as usual.  We are going to take a break.  We are going to attend a potluck with our homeschool group.  We are going to pick corn and beans.  We are going to head up to the Adirondacks and mess around up there for a few days.  We are going to clear out some of the detritus that has collected over this too-short, too-long summer.

But first, we are just going to stop and learn what it is like to have air in our lungs again.  We are going to inspire and re-inspire, and enjoy it.

What's in my File Folders

As promised, I'm going to try and detail the contents of some of my file folders.  (This reminds me of when people say about authors: "I would even read their grocery lists!"  Friends of mine who ran a speculative fiction 'zine did just that once: they asked their contributors for their grocery lists, scanned them in, and dedicated a whole issue to them.  Of course, I read every last bread, milk, and juice.  Because I'm that kind of person.)

This is a picture of my fle folder for the first week of July.  (I took the picture at the end of that week, but am just getting around to posting now.)  The folder includes:

• A set of coloring pages about Noah from Abeka's Bible Friends Coloring Book.  (Their online catalog is difficult to link to, so I haven't provided a link.)  I've had this coloring book for ages, and Katydid (I think) colored in it when she was about the same age as Farmerboy.  We were talking about the Flood -- comparing the Biblical story to the story of the Flood in Gilgamesh, the Hero.  Farmerboy looked the pages over, but didn't actually color anything, so I've just been moving this forward week to week so I don't forget it.
• A flyer for our village garage sale
• A Roman coloring page that Farmerboy did
• Katydid's math work (place value)
• A copy of Annie's Precious Blood post, so I can read the prayer with the kids
• Gareth's math work (from Saxon)
• A list of art classes at a local museum for July and August

At the end of the week, I put the flyer for the garage sale on the refrigerator so I would remember to do something about it.  I moved the Precious Blood prayer and the list of art classes to the folder for the new week. 

Now, in reading back through Dawn's original file crate post I see that she does two things I haven't been doing:

1. She moves the folder from the week past to the back of the crate, so that the current week is always first.
2. She has the folder out and open so she can look at it throughout the day.

(Correct me if I'm wrong, Dawn!)

I think both of these practices would increase my efficiency, but practice #1 is easier for me than practice #2.  In order to leave the file folder open -- which would be a nice visual cue -- I'd have to put it on the kitchen island, where various people would cover it in Legos, books, papers, mail, and apple juice whenever I turned my back.  So, for now, the folder will have to remain in the file crate.

In this week's file folder (in no particular order):

• Lesson plan for the week (a piece of paper with notes for Faith, History/Lit, Math, and Spelling which I scrawled down in my spiral notebook last night before I went to bed, nothing fancy.)
• "What God Made" coloring pages from the Abeka Bible Friends Coloring Book.
• a handwritten list of projects to put on the whiteboard
• Magnifikid
• handwritten list of books on Mesopotamia and also Geometry to run down
• A Dell flyer (my Mac's screen burned out)
• handwritten planning sheet for a geography course for Katydid: "Birds of the World".  I need to type this up, perhaps laminate it, and post it for her to work on in the coming year
• Boy Scout camp flyer
• some addition work from Katydid (3 pages)
• Assyrian coloring pages
• information on fireflies

Things I have in future file folders:

• reminders of doctor's appointments
• seasonal activities
• activities tied to the liturgical year

And probably a bunch of stuff I can't remember right now.  Which is the beauty of the system, of course: I can put a piece of paper in the folder and forget about it, but it pops up again when I need to remember it.  I don't need to wade frantically through huge stacks of paper or anything. :-)

Planning a Rainbow

When Gareth was younger, one of his favorite books was Planting a Rainbow, by Lois Ehlert.  Sunday night, after I nursed Chipmunk to sleep, I got out my multi-colored Sharpies and some printer paper so I could plan a rainbow.

Some time around the beginning of June, I realized that I was going to have three official "students" this year, and that, not next year, but the year after, I would suddenly have five official students.  (I'm not sure the steep learning curve of twins ever really levels out.  Whenever there's a new stage, it's always going to be two more and not just one more.  Two to potty train, two for kindergarten, two to teach to read, two to go through that difficult nine year old year with, two to become teenagers at the same time, two to teach to drive at the same time... Mothers of triplets are laughing at me. ;-)

Anyway, I had been feeling for some time that my freewheeling planning style was probably not going to work for much longer, and that I needed a bit more of a guide to get me through the year.  I do have to produce plans for the school district every year, and I try to make them pretty vague (without making them useless), but at the end of the year, I'm always looking at those IHIPs and thinking, "I said we were going to do what???" and laughing.  The school district hasn't seemed to mind yet (and my kids have excellent standardized test scores), but still -- it makes me nervous.

So I set about to learn how to plan.  It was like my own unit study.  I looked at all sorts of styles, printed out blog posts and charts, asked questions on 4Real, downloaded the Simply Charlotte Mason planning e-book... read through many of my favorite homeschooling books again... and...

Got really muddled. 

It does not help that this time of year is so busy.  On Saturday, over lunch at Arby's, Andy and I talked about how we were both feeling that it was all too much.  Now, the rest of the homeschooling world is breaking and decluttering their homes like mad in preparation for the new school year.  They are planning up a storm.  I was trying to do all that, too.  But -- there are also chickens in our laundry room, a huge garden to tend, food to put up, soccer three nights a week (taking up nearly five hours, total, each time), allergies, a baby who doesn't sleep, and kids who need CONSTANT INPUT to factor into my equation.

"Summer and the living is easy"???  Don't make me laugh.

It's TOO MUCH.

So.  Andy and I decided that next year we would try to do a better job working all of this by OUR schedule.  Decluttering the house is best saved for fall or early spring.  Planning needs to be spread out over the year more, although we're still pretty dependent on the school's year: our end of year report is due in June, and IHIPs in August.  I can't do anything about that.  Hopefully next year we'll be able to do more school in May and June (which we didn't this year because of doctor's appointments) and then we'll be able to take July completely off, to just focus on the extracurricular. 

As it stands, I am planning to take some time off in late August/early September.  I am hoping to focus on the harvest then.  (Which means, of course, that the house is going to fall apart.  I can't seem to focus on more than one thing at a time.  And actually, considering the amount of sleep or time off I am not getting on a regular basis, it's a wonder I can focus on anything at all.)

The TOO MUCH doesn't mean that planning is a bad thing, although it does mean that there are no large chunks of time in which to do it.  I really need a throughline to grab onto when I get off track.  But first I needed to sort myself out of the muddle.

Enter the rainbow Sharpies.

                                                                                             

I am just going to say now: rainbow Sharpies make me happy.  Lo, these many years ago, back when I used to write fantasy fiction, I would write rough drafts of short stories using rainbow Sharpies.  I also used Crayola Washable Markers.  Either way, it helped to remind me that I was just writing a rough draft.

Anyway, this time the purpose of the rainbow Sharpies was to help me sort my homeschooling philosophy out of the pile.  As you can see, I made four columns for the four different philosophies I thought were most useful.  (You will note that I included Waldorf as one of the columns.  I don't really consider our homeschooling as Waldorf-inspired, but I have been reading up on Waldorf education for the past year -- first, because I didn't know anything about it, and I really can't stand that; and secondly, because when Waldorf first began floating across my radar, I had already decided that art and creativity were absolutely necessary to any learning in our house.  Waldorf seemed to place a heavy emphasis on art, so I started reading.  I've borrowed some good resources, found that main lesson books are really useful, looked at ways art can be included in every subject, and am thinking about ways to include story in the teaching of math, but that's about as far as it goes.) 

I then wrote down what I had taken or thought I could take from each.  After I listed everything I could think of, I made a list of what to me formed the basis of learning in my house.  Which would be living books, freedom within limits, art, and nature.  These must all be present in order for us to be happy.  Without any one of them, learning is subpar at best. 

Then I worked on a family list of subjects, color coded again as to philosophical origin (sort of -- obviously Math does not "belong" to Montessori, but math is one area in which we use a lot of Montessori materials), with topics underneath.

I took the topics and wrote down which were themes for Choice Time, to help me decide on choices:

If it looks like a lot, remember it's for Choice time, which means that the kids will not be required to hit every one of these areas every week.  I went ahead and put in the Math Gnomes from Serendipity, but I'm not sure we're going to use them; I may write my own stories, involving knights or pirates or animals, or we may just use living math books.  Either way, I want Farmerboy to have fun this year.  He's heard his older brother complain about math so much, he's already started moaning and groaning about schoolwork.  (He's never actually done any.)

I did think a bit about kindergarten, too:

(Kindergarten looks impressive, but the History/Lit and Nature Study boxes are totally informal and stuff we would do anyway, regardless of whether Farmerboy was "official" or not.  I put out book baskets, and he chooses the books.  Katydid reads many of them to him, and his younger brothers often listen in as well.)

And now I feel a bit more centered.  I actually have most of our core resources for Gareth and Katydid already; I just need to go through them so I can be familiar with them.  It's kindergarten -- if you can believe it -- that's my stumbling block so far, mainly because I don't think I did a terrifically good job of kindergarten with my older two and because it's been four years since Katydid was that age.

Okay, next up: I did promise Erin that I would show her what I put in my file folders.  I was just proud of my rainbow Sharpie flow charts. :-)