Mom & Pop Home School

Yesterday on the news I heard a report that a nearby wild fire had “consumed nearly fifty acres”. Every time I hear that about a fire, it irritates me. If I drove over there and measured, every single one of those fifty acres would still by lying there, looking all black and ashy. Not a single acre was “consumed”. All that was really consumed (that I know of) was a bunch of sagebrush and grass. Maybe some trees. That sort of thing. Funny thing about rocks and dirt and other things that go into making up an acre of land–they don’t burn. If the number of acres that are reported as “consumed” every year in the news actually did get “consumed”, can you imagine how fast the world would be shrinking? You and I would be camped on each other’s doorsteps, anxiously toting fire hoses in no time flat.

My birthday is coming up on the 11th (yay! I survived another year!) and I’ve been asked to compile a wish list. Normally I do this over on Amazon, but my Amazon list is a huge mess right now because I’ve just been shoveling fun-looking homeschool stuff in it, and half the things in there have been there so long that they’re no longer available. And besides that, some of the things I think would be really fun birthday presents are not available through Amazon anyway. So I’m going to make a list here. (NOTE: Nobody should feel obligated to get me any sort of present. This list is here for distant family members who’ve asked. Please, PLEASE don’t think I’m hitting you up to get me anything.)

This is not easy for me. I have a hard time thinking up things I want. The Lord has been truly good to me. But having wracked my brain, here are a few things I think would be fun to have.

1) Prym has a product line called “Elizabeth’s Vintage Notions” (this page shows some items, but not the whole product line). Since I really enjoy hand-sewing, and tend to be a little old fashioned, these little doo-dads are just plain intriguing to me. I’ve already got a thread cutter and Pop got me some stork scissors and a scissor sheath (from other manufacturers) for Christmas (what a great guy), but I would “someday” still like to acquire a few other old-fashioned hand sewing implements like these for my quilting hobby. I’m especially interested in the following:

• needle case
• seam ripper
• spool knave 
• thimble, and thimble bucket (medium, I think is the right size…I haven’t bought a new thimble for a while…)
• pin cushion
• chatelaine pin (although, I think I might like one with a few more chains, and I might prefer a pendant style chatelaine rather than a pin. They’re hard to find.)

The Elizabeth’s brand is one in which you can find items that match, but I don’t really care if the items match or are from a particular brand. This is just to give an idea of what I’m looking for. I would prefer that they have a ring attached so I can hook them on to a chatelaine when I find (or make) one I like. But since there’s not a high demand for items like these, they’re not all that easy to find. Prym has a store locator that might help for those of you who want to go this route.

 2) Here are a few books I’ve been thinking I’d like to read. They’re available through Amazon:

I’ve heard good things about the first one. The second one seems possibly useful. The green Eve book I’ve read, but I had borrowed it and I found it so thought-provoking that it’s one I’d like to own so I can go back and re-read some parts now and then. The other Eve book is a sequel and I’m curious what she has to say. And I heard Jane Clayson Johnson speak and found her very encouraging. I’d like to see what she says in her book. The last one also looks intriguing, as it is geared toward homeschooling gifted children, which is something I have not specifically read about yet.

3) Fun looking games

4) Movies I think I’d like

5) Something else I think I’d like is some kind of super cuddly lap quilt, afghan, or big shawl to wrap up in whilst reading. I don’t have any links for that.

6) There’s always the old standby of bubble bath, bath salts, etc. I like “food” scents best, like vanilla, or fruit scents.

 That’s all I can think of…hope that helps!

Love you!
Me.

This woman knows me so WELL. Sunshine saw me watching this and demanded that I play it again….and again…and again…and after she’d seen it about 5 times and I put my foot down, she left the room singing, “‘Cause I’m the mom mom mom mom moooooommmm….”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlY8STkhopc

Day by day the days go by. Not much is happening around here. Still pluggin’ away. But in case you were wondering how I got this weird, it’s partly from reading things like this:

1) A spoof that aptly portrays some of Pop’s clients.

2) A whole new way of looking at “feminism” and the environment. Hint: the two are merging in an unexpected way.

3) New discoveries in autism research.

Yesterday we took Cricket to the doctor. He has a stye in his eye. His upper lid is swollen, and it gives him a slightly malicious-looking, shifty sort of skeptical squint. Creepy, creepy, creepy. But it’ll go away soon, we’re told.

The real reason I’m writing this is because I want to make a note somewhere of what happened in the waiting room. It made me all teary-eyed, and reminded me that so many parents just don’t appreciate the complex and amazing things their kids do all the time, every day, right under their noses. (Because most parents wouldn’t blink twice at such an episode.)

Cricket was playing with some construction toys in the waiting room at the clinic. He was using my keys for something to scoop, lift, drop down holes, push through gates, etc., and having a good ol’ time at it, when another boy about his age entered the waiting room. He went over and asked what Cricket was doing. Cricket made eye contact. (Yay!) He smiled. He said hi. (Appropriate friendly greeting!) He explained what he was doing, and ASKED IF THE OTHER BOY WOULD LIKE TO PLAY WITH HIM. The other boy accepted. They played TOGETHER, not just next to each other, and NEGOTIATED the story line of the play. The other boy asked what Cricket was in for. Cricket didn’t know what he meant, so he ASKED. The boy rephrased, asking why Cricket had to see the doctor. Cricket pointed to his face, and said, “Swollen eye. How ’bout you?” (RECIPROCAL conversation!!!!!!) The boy explained that there was something wrong with his throat, but he couldn’t remember what it was called. Cricket OFFERED A SUGGESTION (consistent conversational thread!); strep throat? The boy thought that was it. His mother hastened to clarify that it was NOT strep. (I guess she caught my slightly worried glance at the two little heads bent so close together over toys both children were handling…lol.) The play continued for a few minutes, until the boy’s mother said they needed to go. Cricket again MADE EYE CONTACT, SMILED, and said, “BYE!” (Appropriate leave-taking!!! Oh, the explanations, the roleplaying, the verbal and non-verbal prompts, the fading….lol…yipppeeee!!! It’s paying off!)

All of this is stuff we’ve worked at so hard with him. And it just FLOWED this time! He’s getting to be an old pro at it. It’s amazing! If you can’t relate, imagine a child who has worked hard at a dance routine, or learning to run hurdles or something. They’ve fallen down lots of times in practice, lost lots of races, and been thrown out of dance auditions, and snubbed by the prima ballerina, but they kept practicing. And then, there on the stage, she dances the whole routine flawlessly, and with apparently effortless grace, or he flies smoothly over every hurdle and crosses the finish line first! The entire audience rises to their feet and roars in thunderous applause at such a seamless, beautiful performance! And it was YOUR child! You picked her up when she fell, you gave him the pep talks that kept him trying one more time. You explained about form and timing, and practiced over and over. You bandaged scrapes and blisters, and dried up lots of tears, and it all led to this moment. YOUR child in the spotlight, executing the flawless performance!

This was like that. Except without the applause.

In a drama class I took once, the instructor pointed out that sometimes applause is not the deepest, most sincere response an actor can receive from an audience. Applause is wonderful, but it’s nothing compared to that breathless, awestruck, heart-full sort of hush that sometimes precedes the applause. Or replaces it. For Cricket, as his performances improve, there will likely be no applause. The point of a masterful social performance is that nobody notices that a performance is taking place. Other actors move on and off the stage, never realizing that they’re playing a part in an evolving, intricate improvisation. They drop their subtle cues, which the performer must catch and respond to without missing a beat, without interrupting the flow of the drama, and if all goes well they move on unaware of the effort, the practiced skill that went into the performance they’ve just witnessed. But those of us who move, and work, and live behind the curtain, manipulating props, and whispering prompts, WE notice. We do not disrupt the drama with our applause, but we feel that inward hush; that sacred space of moment when all of it went just right, the actor became, the virtuoso found the soul of the music, and for a moment, all creation held its breath. And we sit in uncomfortable chairs by the wall of a clinic waiting room with tears in our eyes as the invisible curtain falls, and only the hush remains.

Pushies Game

A while back I posted an “Ask Me Anything” post, and stated that I’d respond when there were five questions to answer. There are not five questions to answer. (I guess I’m not nearly as interesting as I’d hoped…lol…) However, as it’s been so long and that post is SOOoooo buried, I decided to go ahead and answer the two comments I did receive. Here goes:

Curiosoft asks:

Hi,

We came across your blog and noticed you have a lot of years of home schooling experience. We run a home schooling podcast show and wanted to know if you would be interested in doing a quick interview. It would be a great way to promote your blog while helping to inform parents about the benefits of homeschooling. That way, you’ll get more comments

The interview would be done over Skype.

Let us know if you’re interested.

In any case, feel free to join our Home Schooling network here…
http://homeschooling.ning.com/

Take care,
Action
Home Schooling Show Organizer

Mom’s answer:

Ummm…yeah. If you’d actually spent any time at all on my blog you’d have realized that “a lot of years of home schooling experience” is rather a large…umm….exaggeration. So I’m guessing this is spam. But at least it’s not vulgar spam! Thanks at least for that.

Moving on… 

Susy asks:

OK, I have questions about:
Homeschool, politics, religion, childrearing, career, current projects, is that your real hair color (yes, all my gray is genuine and hard won too, I love mine though!), do you paint your toenails, what’s your favorite cheesecake flavor…y’know, whatever.
There you go, now get cracking!

Oh, and I have a possibly too-personal question for you: how did your version of the Christmas letter go over? My sister and my mom (and I assume your in-laws as well, feel free to tell me honestly if you know) are upset with me now, not to mention accusing me of being lazy and selfish, oh well. Just figured I should let you know…

Mom’s answer:

As far as the first paragraph goes:

Homeschool: Yes, for one year now. It has made a huge difference in our individual circumstances. I don’t know that I’d recommend it for everyone, but for some of us it’s just the ticket.

Politics: Yes. Generally on the conservative end. I’m currently registered Republican, partly because I agree with a lot more of their agenda than the Democrat party’s, and partly because I live in a Republican dominated state and being able to vote in the primaries gives me more say in who will actually be representing our state than just voting in the general election. For local politics I tend to vote more by the individual than by the party.

Childrearing: I’m doing the best I can. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that children arrive from God with an already intact personality, and as parents we can help them chip off little bits of the rough edges, but we can take neither credit nor blame for the true core of who and what our children are.

Current projects: Homeschooling; sewing (some placemats as a very late Christmas gift for my sister’s family, as well as two dresses I’ve got cut out for Sunshine that still need sewing up); a hand-embroidered, hand pieced 12:1 scale miniature redwork quilt (the top is nearly finished, I just need to finish piecing some cornerstones and adding them and some sashing to about half the top)–I’d really hoped to finish this for a quilt show this summer, but don’t currently see that as a realistic goal so it might have to be next summer, which is okay because then I won’t have to rush the quilting; a children’s book about Asperger’s (I’m having writer’s block…but I think I’ve had a recent breakthrough, but it still needs fleshing out); an intermediate level, hands-on, earth and space science curriculum for Cricket for next year (this project has priority right now, as it will be needed soonest). Also a cross-stitch family tree that I started back before Sunshine was born but still intend to finish “someday”.

 Hair color: Yes, as I said it’s real. Hair color has been a funny thing in my life. I’ve only dyed it once, red, in college. I had black hair when I was born, I’ve seen the pictures. When I was a toddler I was quite blonde (this is where Sunshine gets her coloring). My hair was sort of a honey color up until about 5th grade, but as soon as puberty started setting in my hair went dark brown. In my sixth grade school picture I have very long hair, which is very dark at the roots and honey-blonde at the ends, with an interesting gradation in between. That was real too. After Cricket was born my hair became even darker, and went slightly wavy. I sometimes think my hair has multiple personalities. Now it’s started going gray. I wonder if it will ever make up its mind and pick a color?

Toenails: No, I don’t generally paint my toenails. I’ve never been much for beauty routines that take more than 5 or 10 minutes. I don’t know why. I can sit in front of an easel or quilt stand literally all day, but the bathroom mirror is somehow much less inspiring and I get bored. Same thing with trying to get a tan. I just haven’t got the patience.

Favorite cheesecake flavor: Cheesecake. Ok, seriously, my favorite is a homemade cheesecake recipe I’ve got that takes practically all day to make, but is FABULOUS. Cricket likes it too. He tells restaurants that their cheesecake is good, but not as good as his MOM’s cheesecake. This gives me all sorts of ego problems. It’s a plain New York style cheesecake. But I’ll eat any kind of cheesecake you offer.

Now for the last question, “how did your version of the Christmas letter go over?” Ok, I have to admit that I’m not precisely, exactly, specifically sure what the question is. If you’re asking how the folks at our house responded to the letter you sent us, we were pleased and happy and relieved, and we very much approve. Well done! Good for you! We totally understand, relate, and support you wholeheartedly. If you’re asking how people in the extended family responded to a similar letter sent by us…well, I have to tell ya that we didn’t send one. Since it’s Pop’s side of the family, and some of the family dynamics are, frankly, a little foreign to my own experience, I pretty much let Pop call the shots on things like that. We’ve discussed sending a letter like that, but Pop is of the opinion that it might cause too much negative fall-out in family relationships. (Your note here seems to support that theory.) And since we’ve already gone outside the “normal” parameters of what’s considered “acceptable” behavior by his extended family in several other ways…he thinks it best if we just go on with things the way they’ve been as regards Christmas. For what it’s worth I haven’t heard any commentary one way or the other from my in-laws about your letter. I’m not sure what to tell you as far as that goes. They’ve got lots going on in their lives right now, though, and it might just not have been a big deal to them. Or perhaps they saw it as just one more symptom of the already existing rift on that side of the family. I’m really not sure. If they’re at all upset by it, they haven’t said so to us. I have to admit that the Southern version of family politics has always been a bit confusing to me. If Pop dies before me, I’ll be in over my head in the family politics, and will probably give unintentional offense left, right, and center. Sigh. I hope I haven’t overstepped here….Sigh.

 P.S. I mentioned this topic to Pop just now to see if he’d heard something I haven’t. He says he hasn’t, and that he’s seriously contemplating such a letter to send in about October or November this year. He says, “Hey, I’m already the black sheep of the family, what’s one more thing?” It will be interesting to see what he decides. ‘Tis true that we can’t get much more disinherited than we already are. Lol. Whatever. I’m just along for the ride.

Do you ever wonder whether God is trying to bring a particular concept to your attention at a particular juncture in your life by having it crop up repeatedly in different forms over a short period of time?

I was listening to another speech from BYU today while scrubbing the sink. It’s a talk by Juliana Boerio-Goates, who is evidently a well-respected member of the chemistry faculty at BYU, who is performing important research on nanoparticles, and who is also Catholic (she alludes to this in the relevant portion of her remarks, which is why I mention it). The speech was entitled, “Discovering the Riddles of the Universe, One Calorie at a Time”. I found that sufficiently intriguing to giver her a listen. Most of the speech focuses on some very interesting information relating to energy, especially in the forms of heat and light, and some interesting observations about crystal size and magnetism. But what really caught my attention, especially in light of my earlier post on the subject, was her comments at the end regarding the relationships between faith and reason. There doesn’t seem to be a text option this go ’round, but here’s a direct link to the video file: http://byubwmv.byu.edu/byudevo/2006/forum02282006.wmv. On the video, the comments I’m referring to begin at the time code “29:24″. You can drag the progress bar doohickey over to the right until it says 29:24 (or thereabouts) if you don’t want to listen to the whole thing. The speech is also available in MP3 format, but I didn’t check the time on that; presumably it would be about the same.

Thoughts?
 

This morning Pop and Cricket were off at oh-my-goodness in the morning to attend a Webelos “thing”, leaving just us girls at home. She was a good “helper” for some laundry, but then I was trying to work in the kitchen and she was underfoot to a frustrating degree so I got out the watercolor box and a big ol’ piece of freezer paper (which I like because it’s waxed on the back, preventing bleed-through messes). Then I turned on some nice calm music to encourage a more subdued mood (ok, she was bouncing off the walls; I couldn’t take it anymore), and settled her down with the paintbrush and a quart of rinse water. Sunshine’s artwork still tends to be rather “abstract” rather than symbolically representational. She started on one end of the paper with an enthusiastic painting of what she said was a picture of a sandwich with lots of toppings (yes, it was close to lunchtime), and off I went to clear off the kitchen countertops. She said she LOVED the music. It was her FAVORITE radio station (it was a disk, but Cricket has a favorite radio station, and therefore so must Sunshine). Each song that came on was her FAVORITE. After a while I noticed her painting to the slow rhythms of the music in a cool, calm peacock blue, and slow, swooping brushstrokes. I went over and complimented her on her picture. I told her I thought it looked like she was painting the music. “Nope,” she replied, “it’s not music, it’s an ant.” I squinched up my eyes and looked at it again, searching for any sign of something resembling antishness. Nothing.
“An ant?” I asked, thinking maybe I’d misunderstood.
“Yep, it’s a QUEEN ant.” She replied.
“Oh,” says I, a QUEEN ant.” Still scrutinizing…still nothing.
“Yeah,” says my happy, serene, peaceful little Sunshiney girl, continuing to make graceful, languid, blue strokes with the brush. “She got SMOOSHED all OVER the place.”

You just never can tell what’s going on in those little craniums, can you?

I caught part of a speech by Richard N. Williams on TV today while flipping channels, and was intrigued enough to track it down online. It is an interesting exploration of the relationship between reason and faith. Here’s taste to whet your appetite:

…Thus it is fair to say that the modern view is essentially that reason and logic ultimately ground knowledge and truth, whereas faith is what we are forced to rely on when we lack indubitable certainty. Faith, on this view, is a sort of positive thinking, what we cling to when we do not know. It is a believing haunted from the fringes by doubt. This is the seemingly paradoxical stuff that many self-styled intellectuals exult in–a seedbed of tragic heroism characterizing the lives of thoughtful persons.

…

In place of the common conceptual dimension anchored by faith at one end and reason at the other, I suggest that there are really two dimensions. It might be helpful to picture them as perpendicular to one another. One dimension is anchored on one end by reason and on the other end by its opposite: irrationality, promiscuous subjectivity, or even solipsism. The other dimension is anchored on one end by faith and on the other by the opposite of faith. I have pondered a bit about what the opposite of faith is. I believe the anchor opposite faith is darkness, nihilism, despair–that state of the soul that comes from living “without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). To portray faith and reason in this relationship leads us to the conclusion that faith is not what one settles for in the absence of reason and knowledge; it is a type of knowledge, sure and trustworthy and eminently attainable. Portrayed in this way, one could very well have great faith and be also entirely reasonable and rational. That is what we strive for most of the time.

I’d very much like to hear your thoughts, dear friends, on the content of this speech. Please read, or listen to, the entire speech, though, don’t just go by the above excerpts. The audio file is about half an hour long. (I like to listen to this sort of thing while folding laundry or working in the kitchen.)

I should warn some of you that Brother Williams is LDS and approaches the subject very much from an LDS point of view. He makes reference several times in passing to our belief that a restoration of Christ’s original gospel was made necessary by the apostasy of the church in the early Christian era. I am not interested in debating this belief. Rather, I am interested in your comments regarding his ideas about faith and reason, truth and knowledge. I think he makes a lot of sense, but I need to roll it over in my mind a little more. Any thoughts?

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