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Tuesday, December 14, 2004
late-night ramble, ack
"Are you ready for Christmas?"
You can't get away from that question in the month of December. It's a conversation starter -- it takes the place of talk about the weather, and just as any pregnant woman is seen as fair game for such questions as "when are you due?" and "Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?", it's simply a given that any time you encounter anyone during the first three and a half weeks of December, from the post office clerk up to your close friends, the conversation is likely to open with "Are you ready for Christmas?" And, God help me, I answer it every time with, "Yes, almost done with the shopping." It just comes flying out of my mouth. I should come up with something witty, or just smile, or maybe I should be super-spiritual and expound on how we're preparing spiritually for this celebration of the incarnation of Christ. But I don't, I take the easy way out and give the expected response about (gack) shopping. I was never brave about it when I was pregnant, either. I always wanted to come up with smartass comments: "[sigh] No, I'm not pregnant. I guess I really need to lose this weight." Or "The next person who asks me that will feel the significant force of my wrath. Beware." I never even made the t-shirt I always joked about, with all the pertinent information, so as to avoid having to answer the same-three-questions over and over and over. It's easy to shrug philosophically now, and figure that people don't mean to be annoying; they just like to know what to SAY to a person, and dang, an obvious pregnancy makes it really simple. It was not so easy then, as any woman in late pregnancy will attest. It's the same trap with the Christmas shopping line, except that I do feel a faint sense of spiritual betrayal when I cave in, because after all, aren't I contributing to the crass commercialization of this holiday when I take the easy way out? Ah well.
As an aside, we are doing something nice this year, and we did it last year too. We made up a set of ornaments last year, each with a date (1 through 25) and a Bible verse reference having to do with the birth of Jesus or the reason for it, written on it in gold paint pen. Each night LT looks up the verse and reads it, and the kids take turns hanging the ornaments on the tree. It does help to focus us, at least once a day, on what this is all about. It's not just shopping, or cooking, or even family and togetherness and generosity. And it's certainly not just about Mommy spending three hours on the roof, risking life and limb and getting sore muscles on Sunday afternoon putting up Christmas lights which now look really cool, although she's mighty proud of that (go girl power!).
******Possibly Boring/Mildly Bragging Homeschooling Blurb Follows********
Speaking of LT and "proud of that" -- he surprised the living daylights out of us the other day. He was quizzing C on math problems, asking her things like 5+3 and 4+4, things that she has the barest grasp on (because, hey, she's not even halfway through kindergarten!). So I thought I'd teach LT a little bit of humility and even the scales a bit, and I presented him with a scrap of paper with "3x=6" on it, and asked him, "What's x?" I thought he'd be stumped. He didn't even THINK about it, just said, "Two." So I gave him some harder ones, and he got them all. This is, you have to understand, an eight-year-old boy who "hates math", who adds with his fingers, who probably wouldn't know how to calculate "fifteen divided by three" if you just presented it to him in those terms. So his father and I are giving really basic algebra problems, like 5x+4=44 or 8x-6=50, and he's nailing them all. This is both a homeschooler's dream, and a homeschooler's nightmare (well, nightmare is too strong a word. It gives me a thrilling, excited, challenged feeling like a roller coaster, not a horrified, ominous feeling like a bad dream), because hello, now the rubber actually meets the road and I have to do what I've always said is so great about homeschooling: work up a customized solution. For a person whose grasp of concepts is advanced, but whose practical working-out of grade-level things is average. Fun and rewarding, and definitely possible, but challenging too. He's shown signs of being able to grasp concepts that he couldn't explain since he was a very little boy -- things like knowing how many animals would be in each group of you divided 25 into 5 pens when he was in kindergarten. But it took much time and effort to get the multiplication tables into his head, and he still doesn't have them "memorized to automaticity" -- heck, he doesn't even have addition facts to that point yet. I am thinking he's strong on concepts and not so strong on memorization -- which, hey, if he has to be weak in one area and strong in the other, that's the way I'd want it to go. I asked him today how his brain solved those problems so fast -- what did he think about to get the answer? It took him a while to be able to slow it down enough to tell me, and he says that he knows that the 5x has to be 40, so the x has to be 8. He says that he does not think about subtracting the 4 from both sides, which is of course the "proper" way to solve the problem, and the way he'll have to learn when he's older in order to be able to move on to more complicated equations.
While I'm on the subject of school, I should put in that C is also doing really well. She finished her kindergarten math book a couple of weeks ago, so I'm having her go through the homework workbook that goes along with it, as a review, and then I'll move her on to the next grade's book. She is the opposite of her brother in learning styles -- she has a very good visual memory, and when she's read something, it stays in her head if she wants it to. She is also at the age where she is always coming up with little sayings that sound very funny to her parents, but which bore the pants off people not related to her, so I won't torture you with expectant punch lines here.
OK, OK, one story, I can't resist. But only one, I promise. We were watching footage online of elk damaging vehicles and chasing after people in Yellowstone National Park. The elk in one video would make his high-pitched yelling sound just before charging at cars driven by people who had stopped to look at him. C's cheerful, matter-of-fact comment about elk was: "Well, they make cute sounds. Buuuut, they're evil." I cannot possibly duplicate her expressiveness in type. See, I told you. I don't expect you to gush so don't feel guilty if you don't.
Good Lord I should never update this thing after midnight. I get so stupid. I'll probably delete this in the morning.
