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Thursday, September 25, 2003

mostly about children

Yesterday my 3-year-old daughter (I have to use that phrase as often as I can this week, since next Tuesday she will leave 3 behind forever and be 4, leaving me to NEVER AGAIN HAVE A THREE-YEAR-OLD, which I won't dwell on lest I dissolve into tears) came down with my sinus whatever. Fortunately for her, it doesn't seem to be causing her any pain, just a really really runny nose, and the cutest symptom of any childhood illness: that croaky, squeaky voice. I swear if I had the capability to do so I would upload a .wav file of it here, and you all could listen.


OK, I couldn't resist. Here it is. (I told her to think of something she had memorized and just recite it. This is her own unrehearsed performance).


As soon as she started talking like that yesterday, I began preparing mentally for a croup attack in the middle of the night. This has always been a sure warning before. Thankfully, however, it would appear that as well as being on the very brink of no longer having a three-year-old, I have also passed the threshold into a world where neither of my children is young enough to have croup. That is definitely a plus. Now if people could just grow out of the need to have their noses tended to every thirty-five seconds or so.



This is one of those school days that doesn't feel particularly stressful, but it is taking way, way longer than ordinary. LT is just dawdling along, taking about three hours to do about an hour's worth of work. Hey, if he wants to be at the kitchen table doing school all day, I suppose that's up to him... at least that's my current mood. However, if he continues squeaking his chair I may send him to someone else's kitchen table to do it. ahem. He has just asked me to turn off my music (goodbye, Roxette) because it is "a great distraction." "Great" as in "large," as in some Regency-era novel. Good heavens, this is really real; my son talks like a homeschooler.

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Monday, September 15, 2003

good school day

We had a really good school day today. I was looking for gaps in LT's math knowledge so far by going over chapter tests in a second-grade book, and found that he knew how to do everything in Chapter 3 except for rounding. So we started on rounding today, and had a really good, fun, informative discussion. He learned a lot without getting that "this is school, I dislike school, therefore I will dislike this no matter what" kind of attitude. Then instead of a reading comprehension worksheet, I started teaching him how to use the Internet for research. I asked him what he wanted to look up; first it was dinosaurs. He wanted to find a place to see dinosaur skeletons etc. in California. So we learned a great deal about the Brea tar pits; he even saw practical application for addition as he calculated how much we would have to spend to get our family into the museum. We added this to our list of places we want to visit. There are a lot of problems with California but really, it is a wonderful state to live in the middle of from an educational perspective. There are so many varied things we can see in a day or cheap weekend trip. Every major landform except a jungle, within half a day's drive. Both the highest and the lowest places in the continental United States; huge metropolitan areas as well as dozens and dozens of out-of-the-way small towns, and open spaces that go on for hours. And wow, it looks like our daily high temperature will get down below 90 just in time for the first day of fall! ;-) (OK, so it's definitely not perfect).


Anyway. After we looked up dinosaur stuff (I'd completely forgotten I was talking about school; had you?), he wanted to see if we could find bird calls for local birds. And boy, could we -- there are a lot of really neat sites. Here's one of our favorites: Bird Watchers' Digest's audio pages. Really useful and interesting. What on earth did we do before the Internet?


I'm back to my disciplined self regarding diet. Somehow, in spite of the fact that this is Bloat Week, and that I ate like I was meant to be having a growth spurt over the weekend, I weigh the same this morning as I did last Friday, and I'm wearing The Too Small Jeans again today. I will take that, with thanks, as special grace from God, and endeavor to keep things from going downhill (or up-scale as the case may be) from here on out. Tonight I'll have a good start -- I have chorus rehearsal and that means a walk there and back.



If T wins the ebay auction he's bidding on right now (which is likely, since the guy wants to sell these car parts to someone who will pick them up, rather than having them shipped), he'll be driving down to San Diego this weekend. We were trying to figure out how we'd manage it exactly; he has two trucks, but one has too short a bed (and too expensive a 4wd setup and tires) to be useful on this trip, and one is out of commission until he finishes rebuilding it. So he will be borrowing a friend's truck; the four of us won't fit in it; he and I can't go on our own because our overnight sitters (my parents) are, to put it nicely, a bit grandkidded-out after this last weekend and I don't want to foist my two on them for an overnight two weekends in a row; the friend who owns the truck can't go because he teaches a class at church on Sunday. Finally he figured out that if he wins, he'll take our son, which is perfect. They'll have a fantastic father-son trip, and C and I will have a girls' night in. I'm actually looking forward to it.



We went yard-sailing ;) over the weekend and bought a SORRY! game. LT is now fully obsessed with it. When nobody will play it with him (which is not often; I like it a lot better than Candyland and Monopoly, and I'm not yet as tired of it as I am of UNO; however, I do have stuff to do, like, for example, read diaryland diaries and update mine ;), he sits and plays for two players by himself. There are a lot of worse things he could spend his time doing -- not that he knows about any of those yet...

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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

kid stuff

I'm taking C to the pediatrician today. She has some odd skin discolorations, one on her face, and one on her neck. Her neck has a pale splotch, and her upper lip has a brownish area where it looks like her blood vessels have come to the surface. Not like a bruise, and not like a rash. I've looked online and there are a couple things that it looks like it could be, and neither are a hazard, but I would like to take her to the doctor to get it checked just to be sure. Of course with our sucky insurance (one definite drawback of living in a rural area is that all the good HMOs pulled out of our county, which was not profitable enough for them once they started chasing the doctors away by lowering and lowering their contracted rates, and left us with a bunch of cruddy and expensive PPOs and FFSs) this will cost way more than we're used to paying for healthcare. Man, I miss the good old golden days of Pacificare. sigh. Before, we would have a $10 copay for the office visit and that was it. Now we have $20 for the office visit and about five different bills ranging from $20 to $40, for copayments for lab stuff and who knows what all. And half the bills get contested and we have to fight tooth and nail to get them paid by the insurance at all. T broke his ankle last Thanksgiving and it has been totally depressing, calculating the difference between what we paid and what we would have paid under the insurance we had for the first eight years of our marriage. But I'll stop whining now. Must remind myself that even with all the hassles I like it better than I would some socialized 40%-of-your-income providing-insurance-for-everyone-whether-they-can-afford-it-on-their-own-or-not nationalized health care system. To each his own, right? [grin]



Anyway. School went OK today. LT is writing a play. He wants to put on a puppet show, put up signs, charge admission, that kind of thing. What the heck am I supposed to DO about this kind of stuff? He wants to do it all on his own and he's convinced it will be something that people would pay to see. But his materials are paper bags and crayons, and he's only seven years old. I hate having to give him these painful little lessons in reality, but I have to figure out a way to break it to him eventually. sigh. Maybe I'll offer a compromise -- I'll help him make the puppets with some of that construction foam stuff, he can write the story all on his own, and we'll invite friends, family, and neighbors to come and watch. Admission can be free but he could sell lemonade and brownies, or something. (taking a cue from movie theaters, who actually pretty much only profit from the concession stands :).



Well, I just received a call from the neighbor ladies, who want me to get their mail before we leave for the doctor's office. This has just shortened our get-ready time to almost nothing, so I have to get a move on.

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Monday, September 08, 2003

Every homeschooling mom's dream day

We have just had a monumental day in school. I have to make record of the fact that my 7-year-old jiggly, wiggly, energetic little boy did all his work quickly and correctly, without one single moan, whine, or complaint. This is indeed a red-letter day.


C also did her preschool things nicely and well. But she is young enough to actually be excited about school every day (I remember the days when my son was like that!) so that is more common.



On other topics: I am tired of weighing myself. I want to just throw my scale through the window. It just says the SAME STUPID -15 WEIGHT every time I step on it. It must be the scale's fault, right? I keep swearing I will only weigh on Thursdays, which is the weigh-in day for one of my weight loss online support groups. But I go past the scale every time I use the bathroom and the lure is just too great (hmm! maybe I will have miraculously lost two pounds in the past hour!). But if I only weighed once a week and I saw no progress at all after a whole week, I would be at risk of totally derailing myself with discouragement. This way it's a daily challenge -- "I will whip that rebellious scale into submission and make it show me a lower weight tomorrow!" I have been so good and careful. It's not fair. T is also losing weight -- he has lost about the same percentage of his goal as I have, and he's already breaking out his next-size-down jeans. Which is appealing, but I can't help being a wee bit jealous of the obviousness of his success. What am I doing wrong?


Still and all, it's better to be staying at -15 than to be going back up -- so I will keep working at it, even if all I ever do is maintain the same loss. And sooner or later I will have to lose more -- I have confidence in my scientific methods. ;-)

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Wednesday, September 03, 2003

"not much to report" -- right

Not much to report today.


You know, I always find that after I say that I think up five zillion things to say and it ends up being a really long entry.



hmm. nope. Not happening today. Really, there's not much. School went fine. (LT's writing prompt response: "The fair was fun. It is sad that the fair is over. My favorite is the 'wrestle' ride. My least favorite is the Tornado." explanation: the "wrestle" ride is actually the Indiana-Jones-decorated obstacle course sort of thing, so named by the kids because when they were on it once, three "big boys" were also on it, and they were wrestling each other, knocking into my kids, and really causing me to get in touch with my mama-bear side, if you know what I mean. grr. And the Tornado is a teenager ride which my kids would never even watch for long, let alone go on. Need I remind you that they are 3 and 7? Anyway, I promised no more posts about the fair, and besides, so far about 80% of this one is one long parenthetical statement, so I'll shut up about this now.). Other subjects also went well. LT loved his solar system quiz. It is amazing that I, being really pretty anal about spelling and grammar, can find his misspellings so adorable that I have a hard time correcting him on them. I mean, 'Plooto'? 'Joopitr' (can't duplicate the backward J)? Of course he does have to learn the correct spellings, and I have him write the missed ones over, but I make sure to keep his original papers intact so that when I look at them in five years I can sob because I'll never have a little boy who spells things so cutely again.



C did more pencil-control tracing and tried her first color-by-number. She had fun. She also totally blew away my plans for patterns and counting with Unifix cubes; I underestimated her abilities there. I'm going to have to step back and re-plan her math goals for the year, since she's pretty much met the ones I had for her, in the first two days. Not that she's excessively brilliant (although she is, aren't everyone's kids? ;-) ), just that I hadn't realized how much she already knew until we sat down and worked on it together.



In other topics...


I got the official Brush-Off from an old friend today. Last spring I started getting this desire to get in touch with some of my high school friends. It started because my class started planning its reunion. I did not want to go to that (posted about that in I think my first entry) but it did get me thinking about friends that I did want to find and get back in touch with. I ran into someone from my old crowd at the library, and we were both asking about the same person (whom we'd asked each other about every time we ran into each other for the last ten years or so) so I started with her. She has a really common name herself, but her half-brother doesn't, so I googled him, found him, emailed him, got my friend's phone number, and called her. Now, I hadn't had any relationship with this woman in ten years, almost no contact with her in that long, due to a lot of things, but we hit it off well, in spite of the differences between us (which had been what kept us from keeping the friendship going years ago, when we were less mature) and have been emailing back and forth, IMing, etc., and we're great friends again. We were glad about the way that turned out, and she and I were wondering about another of our close friends, so we googled her, and my friend emailed her. She emailed my friend back cheerfully, and expressed an interest in hearing from me, so I emailed her too, just before she went on vacation, as I found out later. She came back from vacation and emailed me to tell me she doesn't think a friendship between us would work, too much time has passed, we're too different, maybe if she had more time, etc etc etc. O-K. I'm really not bothered about it in any real way. It's not like this is a part of my life that's being taken away or ended; it never started and that's fine. I just got so glad about the success of one "reunion" that I thought another would go well too, and it didn't. Can't win 'em all.



OK, this is nuts, it's like a curse. Or a blessing. If I want to write a really long entry, all I have to do is start it with "not much to report today" and I'll go on and on filling several screens, unable to stop typing. sigh.

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Tuesday, September 02, 2003

First day of school

This was our first day back at school. It went pretty well overall. C is totally enthusiastic about the whole idea, and she cheerfully memorized our week's Bible verse ("Do everything without complaining or arguing" -- appropriate, no?), traced lines and shapes (and an elephant -- learning pencil control), made patterns with unifix cubes, counted unifix cubes, and then did a lot of coloring, while LT got through his work without an unbearable amount of complaining. He did a writing prompt first (topic: How do you feel about starting school? text: I am feeling bad about starting school. Because I would rather just go in the pool.). Then he had a page of math, which was actually a pretest from a second-grade curriculum. I wanted to reassess where he is and what we'll have to go back over after taking a summer off. The verdict is, he's fully, FULLY done with first grade math, and probably beyond much of second even (we'll find this out over the next few days) but he could use some flash-card style reinforcement of basic math facts, since he keeps using his fingers. After the math, he read a story to C, and then he had a state worksheet. Perhaps I was unwise in having him do Hawaii first. All those darn island names. That probably took half our school time, considering that we were interrupted in the middle of it by someone coming by to drop something off for T.


Next we have to go to the library; LT is ecstatic because I checked their website and the Star Wars Incredible Cross-Sections book he requested is there waiting for him. We have to go to the bank too, and maybe the store. It feels good to be getting back in the school-year rhythm (although I really enjoyed the break from it as well) -- now if only the weather would get more autumnal, things would be even better. Blech, a hundred degrees really bites.

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Thursday, August 28, 2003

What They Never Tell You

C has just made a picture of a ducky for me. She is 3 which means that while the picture is adorable, I certainly needed her to tell me it was a ducky, know what I mean? Of course once she's named it I can see its legs and feet and body and head and bill. Nobody told me being a mom would be this much fun. I mean, I knew it would be nice having a baby, and I knew it would be nice having little children who grew up into big people, but all the little details like ducky pictures and stuck-on kisses and favorite storybooks requested over and over -- they more than make up for all the little stresses.


As you can tell I am back to my chipper self. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that I am ANOTHER POUND DOWN (woo hoo!), I leave to you to decide. I really don't think it is. I think it is a relief from all these agitating hormones that have been bouncing around inside me for a week, making me feel easily stressed and frustrated and bored and sleepy and mindless.



I am supposed to be going to the valley and going shopping, but I put that off until tomorrow. I did get lesson plans worked up for next week, as well as a lot of long-range school year plans done. However, I did not clean the school room. You see, all summer it's been the play room, and right now LT has the floor covered in army men, all set up and waiting for T to have time to have a battle with him. This weekend is going to be crazy-busy, but I think I can pencil in about three hours on Sunday evening to clean that room -- so they'd better have the battle done by then.



Another aspect of motherhood nobody tells you about, right? Scheduling your housekeeping around your son's militaristic tendencies (gee, wonder where he got THOSE).


I spent most of this morning chauffeuring around my neighbors. They are two little old ladies who were finally convinced by their chiropractor (funny how people who see chiropractors with regularity frequently come to see them as God-figures who are all-knowing, isn't it?) to give up driving. This is a good thing since neither of them sees or hears very well. They have lived together for years; they used to run a children's Christian camp in the mountains near here but when they retired from that and sold it, they bought the house next to ours to spend their quieter years. One is very deaf but moves around OK; the other hears slightly better but takes literally ten minutes to walk thirty yards. Or rather, to shuffle thirty yards. So understandably, taking them anywhere is an exercise in patience, as well as an adventure. Small errands turn into two- or three-hour affairs. It's VERY good for the kids to be around them; they enjoy each other, and the kids are learning patience and respect for a generation that will soon be gone. I love old people; I love talking with them. They have seen so much. I mean, I feel all mature when I meet a college student whom I knew as a newborn; these ladies were already old before I was born. They lived through times I've only read about in historical articles and school history texts. So it is definitely worth the time and effort of helping them, just to listen to them talk.


Another website I've been meaning to post about in here is BookCrossing so I'm doing it before I forget. It's a really neat concept, and the website does a better job of explaining it than I can, but basically, you "release" books in public places and then the person who finds them will ideally go online (thanks to a bookmark or bookplate or whatever that you leave in the book, with instructions), post their thoughts about the book, and then "release" it again somewhere else. So far, I have released three books which were never posted about again. :(. But I shall keep trying.



I finished reading Silas Marner and now I'm buried in Pride and Prejudice again. I LOVE THIS BOOK. This means, according to some diehard Jane Austen fans (of which I actually consider myself one) that I am not as mature a fan as someone who has Emma or Persuasion or even maybe Mansfield Park for a favorite. Too darn bad, this is a wonderful story, delightfully told. Not that the others aren't. But I suppose they're deeper, while P&P is "just" romantic. Sigh. Perfectly romantic, if you ask me. [flutter flutter]

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Sunday, August 17, 2003

Quiet...

I am one of those people who love rearranging furniture. Today I shifted our couch around perpendicular to where it used to be, and I'm trying to nag T into moving the piano to the place where the couch used to be, and putting the computer where the piano is, and the armchair where the computer desk is. So far he isn't caving. ;-).



Other than that today is pretty quiet, borderline boring. My parents took us to lunch (just at Burger King, and I was a good girl, had just a chicken whopper which is only 600 calories) -- with a 600 calorie dinner (which I've already had), that keeps me under 1500 for the day, and I still have hopes for a walk after T gets back from I'm-not-going-to-say-it,-i-will-have-one-diary-entry-without-mentioning-it with LT. C would rather watch (sigh) A Bug's Life than go for a walk with me, and that's OK because with her sweet short little legs, I can't get anywhere near "brisk" anyway, unless she's on my shoulders which can only last for so long before my neck protests too much. Today's weight is the same as yesterday's -- no big shock since I ate almost exactly the number of calories I would need to maintain my weight yesterday. :) Since lunch ended we've just been home -- did a lot of tidying in the living room, and the aforementioned rearranging, and not much else.



Locally, public school starts in a week. Then will begin the dozen-times-a-day question: "Why aren't you in school?" when LT is at the store or the post office or the park with me in the middle of the day. Sometimes I feel like making a placard for his chest saying, "I'm homeschooled, that's why not. It's also why I'm so well-mannered toward adults, even rude ones, and why my natural inquisitiveness hasn't been squelched by six hours a day of sitting unnaturally still listening to stuff I either already know or can't quite grasp." Most people around here, to be fair, think homeschooling is great, and we get far more positive reactions than negative ones. But it's kind of like being asked when you're due when you're pregnant -- you just get kind of tired of it.



There is a new bookstore going in in Smallish Shopping City. T and I have one of our silly bets about it -- if it is finished before October 15th, I win, and if it's after, he wins. I hate to break it to my darling life-mate but HE'S GONNA LOSE. We aren't sure what the stakes are yet -- usually it's something like getting to choose the next few movies for our biweekly date nights. The building is totally done, the glass is in the windows, the outside decorative brickwork is done, and they were laying the sidewalks when I drove by yesterday. I say it's a matter of a month or less before "my bookstore" (as the kids say) is ready for me to go in and spend a leisurely afternoon browsing. :)

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