Mom & Pop Home School

Today Cricket finally internalized a very important academic concept that if retained will stand him in good stead for the rest of his life. What is this vital tidbit plucked from the wisdom of the ages, you ask?

You can skip a question or problem and move on to the next one.

Up until recently he had this funky hang-up in his brain somewhere that caused a total system shut-down if he came across something he couldn’t answer, or that was intimidating enough to cause an unacceptable level of stress. Then, if pushed, utter meltdown could ensue. I was ever so grateful when he got to the point late last year where he could hang on to his composure (most of the time) long enough for me to come walk him through the problem very calmly and carefully and then he could go on.

Have you seen the movie A Bug’s Life? Right near the beginning there’s a line of ants carrying seeds to the anthill, and a leaf falls in between one ant and the ant in line behind him. That ant can no longer see the ant ahead of him, and he PANICS! What are they going to DO? Where’s the LINE? The line is GONE! OH NO OH NO OH NO!!! The ants behind him begin slamming into each other and the whole line comes to a screeching halt. Quickly, a supervisor ant rushes over to help. He calms the ant down, gets him to focus on his eyes, and says something like, “Now remain calm. We are going AROUND the leaf. Ready? Here we go…around the leaf…a little more…look right at my eyes…it’s ok…a little further…and HERE’s the LINE!” The worker ant is SO grateful and relieved! And once contact with the way forward has thus been re-established the line of ants continues following each other around the leaf, back to the line, and on down into the ant hill.

That’s kind of where we were. Wait! Don’t panic! Follow me and we can get THROUGH this! Now…pick up your pencil…

Only today he was working independently on his math (hooray!), and I happened to be…um…occupied in the lavatory…ahem. He’s been really good about math lately, so I wasn’t concerned–only we forgot his meds yesterday morning, and then when I went to clear the breakfast dishes halfway through the morning I found this morning’s dose still sitting there next to his plate (mommy slept in this morning…hasn’t been feeling well the past few days.) I had him take it then, but it hadn’t had time to be absorbed, and his blood levels of meds were already down from missing it yesterday. So there I was in the bathroom and I heard him start to hyperventilate and then holler, “MOOOOOM!” Just like that ant going, “There’s a leaf! Where’s the LINE?”.

Only I could not rush in to defuse and redirect. So I hollered back, “I can’t come yet! Can you skip it and move on to the next one?”

The hyperventilating increased…”NOOOOOOO! It’s tooo HAAAAAARRRRDDD!  I CAN’T…DO…IT…” pant, pant, pant. (Poor kid.) 

I thought, great. There goes school for at least half an hour, and all because I needed a trip to the loo. But I thought it was worth another try, “Just put your hand over that one and try the next one! I’ll help you with it when I get out! You can do this! Take a deep breath…”

Pantpantpant pant pant….pant…..pant………..pant………….   “Ok. I’ll TRY!” Silence.

.

.

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“Hey, it worked!”

(Fancy that.) 

Me: “Great! Now try the next one!”

 By the time I was out, he’d skipped two more and almost finished the rest of the lesson (did I mention I’ve been having tummy issues the past few days? It took me a little while. Blush.) We both enthused about how nice it is not to have to panic, and to be able to only have three unfinished problems and be calm, instead of eleven unfinished problems and be a wreck because you couldn’t move on. You could just about see the lightbulb floating in the air over his head. I really hope it doesn’t disappear when he goes to sleep.

 For now, though….

 .

Yay!

This row was finished in January. It took me a while to get the blocks scanned and uploaded due to a nasty bout of flu compounded with bronchitis and asthma. I think things are mostly cleared up now, though, and I’m hoping to get back to making progress on a lot of things, including Dear Jane.

Click on a block to see a close-up. Each block is 4.5 inches square

Click here to see the blocks in place.

Notes:

I originally planned to finish this row by the end of September, but I just finished the last block yesterday (thank goodness number 13 was so simple!). Part of the delay was due to already being behind from August, but another delay was due to taking a break from the quilt to work on another art project. I’ll post pictures of that later. It’s not quite done yet. Almost, though.

My friend tajott posted on a home school forum in search of coloring pages of historic black Christian missionaries. Nobody could find any, anywhere on the web. I thought that was really sad, so I asked her to point me to some pictures, and I made some. So for all those kids out there who need some black Christian role models to color, here are some pages for you.  Included, as per request, are Lott Carey, Amanda Smith, and Rev. Francis Burns.

These pages can be printed, copied, and used to your heart’s delight for personal or church use. If you want to do anything else with them, please check with me first. Thanks!

Here you go tajott: http://www.decheck.com/blackmissionaries.pdf

I must report how proud I was of Cricket over Christmas break. He was calm, cheerful helpful, and in control almost the whole time. There were a few moments of angst due to the suspense leading up to Christmas morning, but for the most part he was wonderful! One of our relatives sent us a nifty new game called Cathedral. Cricket and I played it together a number of times. The first ten times or so I won and Cricket, who historically has struggled with maintaining control when he is not the winner, just smiled and said, “Good game, Mom. Can we play again?” After this had happened several times I complimented him and told him I was very impressed with his attitude. He said he’d discovered that sometimes it’s nice to have a real challenge instead of things just being easy all the time. And he surely was excited when he finally won a couple of games (with a little coaching at first, but now he’s gotten pretty good at it!).

Sadly, the resumption of school has been a bit rocky. I think he was awake quite late the night before we started up again doing some stealth reading of White Fang. As a result, he was really cranky and had an honest-to-goodness melt-down for the first time in a long while. As melt-downs go, however, it was really not too bad. A bit of yelling, a few entirely unreasonable accusations, a rather vehement demand that we get rid of his little sister (to which she responded, “Oh Cricket, you’re so funny when you’re mad!” in an affectionate tone of voice), and a retreat to his room “forever”, which lasted only about 15 minutes. When he came back down he apologized all around and we got to work. There were a few other touch-and-go moments too. I’ll be glad when we can all see school as “the routine” again. I’m sure it didn’t help that his mother has a cold, which she caught from his sister, who stayed home from school (”It’s not FAIR!!!”) to cough on us, and who wanted to ”help” Cricket with his work.

Came across this cute app., which says I can put it on my site. So I thought I’d give it a try. Here goes.

No, nothing earth shattering. Sorry to have gotten your hopes up. However…

Today I got a call from the guy who did our homestudy. I’m feeling somewhat more kindly disposed toward him after our conversation. He is finally (I know, but the wheels of bureaucracy are notoriously slow and understaffed, so what’re ya gonna do?) gotten a chance to sit down and do some revisions on our homestudy. He had to check with the licensing office about procedures and was told that unless there’s something fairly major that changes they don’t usually allow alterations before the 1 year relicensing hooplah. But they’re making an exception and allowing him to make some few revisions. He sounded a bit sheepish about the typo where Cricket was born a month after we were married, and will definitely change that, but he wanted to call and see what our other concerns were. Wasn’t that nice of him? He coulda just made a quick revision and left it at that. So I explained a little about the kinds of feedback we’d gotten from people who’d reviewed our homestudy, and what some of our concerns were. He says that he can see how someone who was reading it completely out of context would maybe be a little confused about some things like the bugs (ex. yes we do some unusual things to support our children in their interests, but no, we don’t have giant cockroaches roaming free in the kitchen, and you don’t even have to look at the durn things if you don’t want to; seriously, we’d be willing to ditch the invertebrates if necessary to make a new child feel comfortable!).  He says he understands our concern about the summary of what the school psychologist said, and will add a paragraph explaining our perspective on that. He may expand on a few other things as well, with the idea that the thing will be read by lots of people who have not met our family and have no background information to put these kinds of things in perspective. So, thanks for your help, M. Hopefully it’ll do some good as we continue down this road. If not, well, we’ll see what happens when we hit our one year mark and get relicensed. And can start making out of state inquiries.

And on we go!

I know some of you are wondering.

When last I wrote about this we were strongly considering working with a private adoption agency to get a new homestudy done. After taking a few weeks to cool off, we’ve changed our minds and decided just to wait out the year and see what happens. But we reserve the right to change up our minds again at any moment without notice.

Getting a new homestudy done is not a speedy or painless process. It involves not just the interviews and home inspection stage, but takes us all the way back to the beginning. We’d have to redo background checks, physician clearances, references, paperwork proving that we’re legally married and financially stable, and all that jazz. By the time it was all over with we’d be pretty close to hitting our year mark anyway. When we do, we’ll be able to have our homestudy updated, probably by the person who normally does it rather than the guy we got stuck with before, which would hopefully enable us to clarify some of the things that annoy us in the current version. We knew this would likely be a long and drawn-out process when we started it, so this is not particularly surprising, even if it is frustrating.

Also, as the children we already have get older, so does the age range of children we’d be best able to integrate into our family. This is a good thing in that in foster care there are more children available for adoption in the older age ranges than in the younger. So if we wait another year, there will be a bigger pool of children for whom we can be considered.

We’ve also been muttering about moving again, and didn’t want to start anything as big as a new homestudy with a different agency until a decision had been made regarding whether we were even going to be living in this state when it was finished. If we move to another state, we will likely have to start all over again. At this point it looks like we’re probably not going to move anytime soon, but we may begin sorting through our junk and getting organized so that when we do decide it’s time to go it won’t be such a daunting project.

We trust that God will send us the right child at the right time, and we’ll be patient and ride out the process until it happens. But we don’t want to get too obsessive about it all either. Life marches on a little at a time.

I listened to this talk today and enjoyed the sentiments expressed. I haven’t found a transcript, but here’s an audio link: 

http://byubmp3.byu.edu/wconf/2001/5/JDToronto.mp3

It’s from a 2001 Women’s Conference at BYU. A Brother and Sister Toronto (no, I’d never heard of them either) share some interesting insights on interfaith relationships.

 I have a few more minutes now, which I think I will use in continuing my earlier thoughts about marriage in the context of the recent turmoil surrounding Proposition 8 in California. As I said earlier, to me this is a complex subject without easy answers. In our society we like to view problems in terms of what will fit in a headline or on a protest sign. We like our answers in sound bite-sized chunks. That way we don’t have to actually spend time thinking about the intricacies of human existence. We can just slap a “them” label on whoever subscribes to the other slogan and get on with the fun of drawing battle lines. But life doesn’t really happen as news clips. It happens in long, drawn out complexities of belief, doubt, action, indecision, apathy an emotion. It happens as life. And life is just not that easy. At least not to me.

I have heard some people say in effect, “Marriage is just a civil contract. Why can’t those religious people just keep their noses out of it.” In my earlier post I touched on this a little. Marriage was not invented by the government of the state of California, and then usurped by religious zealots in that state and turned into a fancy religious ceremony. Marriage has a vast historical context that predates the government of California, and indeed the government of the United States by thousands of years. It existed before the government that wants to regulate and alter it came into being, and will, in my opinion, exist on into time after California has crumbled into the ocean and the United States has passed into history (as hard as that is for us to imagine that in this instant on the time line of eternity). The concept of marriage as a religious practice extends beyond the chronology and indeed the geography of the United States government. In some ways I think it’s arrogant for a single state government to presume to claim such a behemoth as its vassal, to reduce it to a mere piece of paper with a fancy embossed seal that makes it officially binding. Indeed, I think that many people in our society place their signatures on such a document without the foggiest notion before, or after, of what marriage actually is and in doing so invalidate the “marriage” even as they move the pen across the paper. They have a civil contract, yes, but does that really constitute a marriage? Does a blueprint constitute a shrine? Is the marriage the piece of paper, or is it the edifice that the piece of paper is intended to assist in constructing? (more…)