Terribly Unfashionable: Tales of a Geeky Librarian

Snippets

2012-01-24T00:57:00.002-05:00

* I took K to see Beauty and the Beast 3d last week. It was fun to have the opportunity to take her to see another Disney princess movie in the theatre. We could have done completely without the 3d - the best I can say about it is that it didn't take away from the experience much. I mean, I recognize that even seen in the theatre, after 20 years (!) of revolutions in animation, including seeing what Miyazaki can do with hand-drawn animation it wasn't going to blow me away the way it did when I saw it the first time. But it's still a beatifully drawn movie, and the 3d made me think of some sort of 70s animation gimmick that doesn't quite hit the mark. Note to Disney: landscape that looks like a bunch of flat layers propped up in rows to give the illusion of depth as you move past them isn't what I would call an effective 3d experience.

* Alec often will sit and "read" books to himself, which has progressed in detail from the early days of merely going through books of animals and making the noise for each animal he sees to going through each page of Sandra Boynton's Doggies and saying "One dog - woof! Two dog - woof, yap!" etc. Today, he was reading through Peter Spier's Oh, Were They Ever Happy! (a childhood family favorite which serves as an excellent cautionary tale on what an ominous sentence "But the sitter never showed up" can be) by saying "Uh oh, paint!" on every page. Which just about perfectly sums up the plot of the book.

* I reached 26 weeks yesterday, the cusp of the third trimester. How did that happen? Mercifully, the pelvic pain hasn't kicked in yet, but my back (and sciatic nerve) is starting to realize that I'm pregnant. According to every test in this overmedicalized pregnancy, Godric is doing fine and growing well. He led the ultrasound tech on a merry chase for 45 minutes during the fetal echocardiogram (his heart is fine), and then lay sleeping sweetly nestled against my hip during the growth ultrasound two weeks ago (his growth is also fine), nicely covering up several parts that needed to be measured. He is certainly related to his big sister, the queen of ultrasound non-cooperation and fetal contrariness. I saw the cardiologist my ob wanted me to see last week and my heart is fine too (it always has been, just overenthusiastic). Meanwhile, Godric continues to happily kick away.

* I found the most fantastic children's series today at work - The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. It looks exactly like one of the various happy family series written between 1920 and 1960 (The Moffats, All-of-a-Kind Family, The Bobbsey Twins before they started solving mysteries, etc.), but actually started in 2005. In fact, I passed it up the first time I saw it in our booksale room because I was sure we already had it in the library because we have all of those classic series. But no, it's actually a modern series, although it's next to impossible halfway through book one to figure out when it's taking place because there's been no mention of technology.

I think the thing I love about it is that it has all of the good aspects of those classic series without many of the drawbacks. The four-year-old, for instance, is captured wonderfully, without the horrible tweeness that seems required for this sort of book. All of the characters, in fact, so far seem to have a realistic blend of good and bad points and I suspect even the villain in the end will wind up being not so bad. Their problems are real problems, not nonexistent issues created solely in the minds of children because ha ha, children are Like That, aren't they and isn't that what makes them so funny? Best of all, a modern author means I've been able to read without wincing my way through rampant sexism and racism. I'm already looking forward to getting to B's library tomorrow to check out the other two books in the series as well as what looks like an absolutely charming picture book by the same author about a girl and her little brother who get blown away by the wind.

FIAR: A New Coat for Anna

2012-01-14T01:49:00.001-05:00

In the week after Christmas, we made a stab at schoolwork by rowing A New Coat for Anna. We didn't do it justice, since we only covered the fiber arts aspects of the book, but K's grandmother, who both spins and has dyed wool, was here and that made a great opportunity to do something fun enough to capture K's attention even in the Christmas season while we had a great resource present. Anna has lots of other aspects that are worth covering, so I'm hoping that we can pull it out again either to row on its own or as a supplement to other books with similar themes.

In A New Coat for Anna, a young girl living in post-war Europe (country unspecified, but most likely Germany, The Netherlands or somewhere in Scandinavia from the names) needs a new coat but she and her mother have no money. So her mother gathers up their valuables and proceeds to trade them for the things needed to make a coat - wool from a farmer, spinning it into thread and weaving it into cloth, then finally a tailor to make the cloth into a coat. So K's grandmother came for Christmas bearing several wool fleeces and her spinning wheel. They started with spinning, a process that fascinated both children. They wound up spinning enough yarn for a pair of mittens.

Then came the really exciting part: dyeing. In Anna, Anna and her mother use lingonberries to dye the cloth. I considered going to IKEA and getting either lingonberry juice or lingonberry cordial for the dyeing, but I was a bit worried about the high sugar content and how well it might wash out (in retrospect, it occurred to me that people use things like blueberries which are quite sweet and they seem to come out okay, so it probably would have been fine). Then I saw had used cranberries for the same project. Coincidentally, my absentmindedness around Thanksgiving had resulted in the purchase of four bags of cranberries, so we were well set in that respect. We simmered the cranberries the evening before and left them in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, we strained out the cranberries and added some vinegar, then put it back on the stove and added a skein of yarn.

After a while, it was a nice dark pink and we took it out and rinsed it a couple times to get out the excess dye.

For variety, we also experimented with easter egg dye. K decided she wanted purple, but there was only one tablet, which didn't seem like enough, so I experimented with combining the blue and red/pink shades until I came up with a comparable purple color and mixed them together. We added the yarn and heated it in the microwave. Less than ten minutes later, we had a lovely purple yarn.

In the end, we wound up with one pink skein and one purple, which will be made into a lovely pair of striped mittens.

After taking a week off to go to Michigan, we started out this week talking a bit more about textile production. We read a bit on making cloth from cotton (from the every-useful What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry), then pulled out the good old potholder loom for a lesson in weaving. K turned out not to be terribly interested, and after she played around with it enough to demonstrate that she understood how to weave, I decided she could probably happily live life without having made a highly synthetic potholder that will melt if used on something too hot and ended the lesson. I think I am going to try to teach her to knit soon - she was very excited about the idea of making a blanket for the baby, and while I think that will probably be too much for her attention span, she could certainly do a nice doll blanket, or maybe I could convince her to make a hat for the baby instead.

The last straw

2012-01-12T00:54:00.000-05:00

We came to the conclusion this morning that we need to do something I really don't want to do: move. I really can't describe how much I don't want to do this. There are many things we love about this house, and we've done things like unpack the good china, hang pictures and put up a swingset. But the management company has gone from requiring weeks of nagging to make repairs to refusing to do them entirely. Our landline phone hasn't worked since the beginning of June, and I admit that the lease is a bit vague about whose responsibility the phone lines are (the phone service itself is ours, but the actual wiring in the house itself we feel is the owner's responsibility). But this morning when they refused to fix the broken garbage disposal, which is preventing the sink from draining properly and causing waste water from the dishwasher to back up into the sink when we run it was entirely unacceptable. Leaving aside the issue of the fact that the garbage disposal is an appliance specifically mentioned in the lease as being their responsibility, the ability to have water drain down our kitchen sink is something any reasonable tenant should be able to expect.

Sigh. I don't want to pack up all of our crap again. I really don't want to have to spend money we don't have right before adding another person to the family and a temporary reduction in income. The last thing K's schooling needs is the disruption of moving right before the disruption of a baby comes along. But we can't live in a house where things don't get fixed, and I have a strong feeling that since our lease is up at the end of February and we'll be moving to a month-to-month lease, if we call in a lawyer, we'll find ourselves having to move anyway, but not on our timetable.

Fortunately, we are close to the end of our lease, and I found at least three good-looking listings today. I've actually spent a lot of today reminding myself it's foolish to fall in love with an online house listing, since you can't really tell dimensions from online photos. Actually, I really like two of the listings for very different reasons (the third is essentially identical to our current house, but less stylish, although I'm willing to put up with ugly paneling for $100 less a month). I'm going to try to set up a schedule for us to go through the house systematically and purge and pack everything that's not vital to everyday life (while I will be eternally grateful to B's parents for all of the packing and moving they did during our last move since I didn't have the time to do it myself, it did have the drawback that I didn't get the chance to do some purging that would have been useful).

Argh, argh, argh. Contemplating all of this just makes me so tired. It definitely needs to get done before the baby arrives, since if there's anything worse than trying to move in your third trimester, it's trying to move while recovering from a c-section and breastfeeding a newborn. But that doesn't mean that moving in my third trimester is going to be a picnic either. I'm just hoping this will all coincide with nesting impulses and give me the kick I need to get unpacked promptly.

Happy New Year

2012-01-09T01:23:00.000-05:00

Well, look at that - over a week into the new year and I haven't managed to write anything yet. Our holidays were very nice and low-key, yet by the time every evening rolled around, I was more interested in collapsing than typing. I'm still mostly feeling fine, but I think the third trimester is creeping up on me.

Anyway, B's parents were here for Christmas and it was wonderful, then we packed up and went to my mother's for a New Year's Christmas celebration with my brother and that was lovely, then we swung through Indiana and Ohio to see various friends and relations. A good time was had all around, the driving was surprisingly pleasant and we're awfully glad to be home.

I suppose now this means we need to get back to school again. We did engage in educational activities after Christmas, but although I brought books along, we didn't manage anything while we were in Michigan. I'm really trying to get us more organized this year. Hopefully if we can get ourselves in better habits in the next three months, we'll be in better shape to keep them up when we add another child. To this end, I'm going to try making extensive use of Google calendar, as well as setting up a chore chart for K and a concrete school schedule. I planned out our FIAR books through April today, and hopefully this week I'll get a booklist set up to go with each topic. After the baby comes, my plan is to only do math and reading until probably the end of the school year.

FIAR: The Duchess Bakes a Cake, day 1 and 2

2011-12-22T00:52:00.000-05:00

The Duchess Bakes a Cake is the story of a medieval duchess who gets bored one day and decides to make a cake. She adds some yeast, and then adds some more yeast, and then more for good measure. The results are about what you would expect for a children's storybook, which is to say it completely ignores the fact that all the yeast in the world can only make a finite amount of dough stretch so far and the resulting cake carried the duchess far above the castle.

With a story like that, you obviously would have to spend time talking about baking and the role of leaveners. We started with yeast. I showed K a couple Good Eats episodes featuring yeast, because if there's a better way explain how yeast works than with belching sock puppets, I haven't seen it. After that, we moved onto the hands-on portion of the lesson. First, we tried setting out two mixtures of warm water and yeast, one with sugar and one without. Within fifteen minutes, it was clear that sugar is necessary to fuel the yeast, since the mixture with sugar was bubbling merrily away and the plain water mixture was sitting there tepidly. I had K look at the yeast foam and see the bubbles in it.

To further cement the idea that yeast gives off gas (and because it was really cool), we took a two-liter soda bottle, put warm water, yeast and sugar in it and then stretched a balloon over the top. Within half an hour, the balloon had popped up and was clearly inflated on top of the bottle. We could see the yeast foaming away at the bottom as well. We went out for several hours after that and when we came home, the balloon had gotten quite a bit larger and the yeast was clearly still working away, which really impressed me. Even though I've baked more than enough bread to know that yeast keeps working for hours and even days, it's still hard to carry that over to realize that the yeast really is a living organism that keeps eating and producing as long as it has food, even when it's not hidden in bread.

The final experiment of the day was to talk about other leaveners, specifically baking soda. Since baking soda is much more commonly used in making cakes in modern times, I wanted to show K how it worked. I suppose it wasn't so much an experiment as a demonstration: I put baking soda in the bottom of a glass and poured vinegar over it, and as everyone who ever made a baking sode volcano knows, it bubbled up quite impressively. To learn a bit more about making cakes and baking soda, we read The Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake and watched an episode of the Magic School Bus tv show that covered pretty much the same story.

Then, of course, we had to bake a cake. At that point, we were done with science for the day since there was no recapturing K's interest when there was a cake to be decorated.

This week, I decided that right before Christmas is not the time to try to get a six-year-old to concentrate on school, so we're putting off the rest of Duchess until after we get back from Michigan. There's more than enough of the Middle Ages to fill a full week, and it will give me a chance to get some books that I had wanted but didn't have time to get through interlibrary loan. We will be doing A New Coat for Anna next week because K's grandmother will be visiting with her spinning wheel, and that's far too good an opportunity to give hands-on experience with fiber production from fleece to yarn to pass up. I don't think we'll have any trouble getting K to pay attention to the process of dyeing wool or spinning it, even with new Christmas presents to distract her.

Books used today:
The Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virginia Kahl
The Magic School Bus Gets Baked in a Cake by Joanna Cole

Anatomy lesson

2011-12-16T23:41:00.003-05:00

This week, we took K for an anatomy lesson I don't plan to ever repeat in our homeschooling career - to my 20 week ultrasound.

I can't quite believe it's 20 weeks already (21 actually, by the time this gets published). The morning sickness was pretty much gone by 14 or 15 weeks, and while I've been more tired than normal, I could almost forget that I'm pregnant if not for the regular kicks. My waist is thickening but I can still fit into one pair of normal pants and my uterus isn't far enough up yet to create any difficulties when it comes to bending or twisting.

The ultrasound went just fine. Everything looked good and we were treated to some nice views of tiny feet and hands, a sweet little profile and super-creepy skeletal face shots. And a penis. K was terribly disappointed to hear it, but she's getting another baby brother. B and I are feeling a bit stymied because now we have to come up with another boy name.

I have another ultrasound scheduled in four weeks because one of the medications I'm on is associated with smaller babies. Since I've managed to gestate two nine-pound babies while taking said medication, I'm feeling like monthly ultrasounds is overkill, but it doesn't hurt and I don't mind more pictures. I'm also supposed to get a fetal echocardiogram and see a cardiologist, neither of which I've managed to schedule because I'm finding it hard to see the necessity (the cardiologist I can kind of see because it's been nearly a decade since I've seen one. But the fetal echocardiogram because a single study on one of medications suggested a slight increase in heart problems? I'm having trouble seeing the need if everything looked fine at the 20 week ultrasound). I have to make the appointments Monday though, because my next ob appointment is Wednesday and I don't want any more nagging.

Anyway, the really important part is that since he was nice and cooperative on the ultrasound, he gets a new, more gender accurate prenatal nickname. So my fetal passenger is now Godric. He's currently kicking his approval.

FIAR: Mirette on the High Wire. day 4

2011-12-13T01:55:00.002-05:00

On our last day of Mirette, we studied the geography of Paris. I didn't have a lot of luck finding age-appropriate non-fiction books, but found several nice picture books that gave a good overview of the geography of Paris. We started with Everybody Bonjours, which I nearly didn't check out at first because the text is so basic, but then I flipped to the back and found the detailed guide of all of the Paris landmarks pictured in the book. Highly useful. From there, we read a few more books and looked for the landmarks we had already learned about. We did a brief detour to learn a bit about gargoyles, then watched a few videos on Paris aimed at tourists. Since Mirette takes place in the 1890s, we've been reading a Magic Treehouse book that takes place during the World's Fair of 1889, for which the Eiffel Tower was built.

Then we moved to the hands-on portion of the lesson. First, I had K cut out a paper model of Paris that I found on the Web, which was great fun to play with. Then we made a wooden model of the Eiffel Tower from one of the many kits available at Michaels. We've done a number of those kits and they're surprisingly good for $5 or less. They're marketed as 3d puzzles, but with some glue (and I highly recommend using glue if you want it stay together), they become very nice little models, or in a couple cases, lovely little dollhouses with functional furniture. It became clear quite early on that K inherited my interest and ability in working with her hands. I did a lot of the model (there were parts that just would not have fit together and stayed without adult strength), but she was very good at spotting how the pieces should fit together. Altogether, it was a very pleasing project.

Our next book is going to be The Duchess Bakes a Cake, largely because it came in the mail the other day and once I said the word "cake," K was set on it. I wouldn't have necessarily chosen right now for it because we have plans for two other books to take advantage of grandparents being around for Christmas who can help with certain topics. The medieval theme of Duchess lends itself to a more extended study that we won't have time for if we want to cover the other books while grandparents are here. Life is also pretty distracting right now, which is why I haven't been pushing heavy academic work right now. But we can always find another book to cover the Middle Ages if we want to come back to it later.

Books used today:

Everybody bonjours! by Leslie Kimmelman
Babar Loses His Hat by Laurent de Brunhoff
Come fly with me by Satomi Ichikawa
Night of the new magicians by Mary Pope Osborne

FIAR: Mirette on the High Wire, days 1-3

2011-12-07T01:41:00.001-05:00

We did what was essentially two different activities over the course of three days, so I'm just going to talk about them in terms of activities as opposed to what we did when.

Mirette on the High Wire is the story of a girl in Paris who learns how to walk on the high wire after a retired high wire artist, Bellini, comes to live at her mother's boarding house. Through teaching Mirette, Bellini manages to work past the fear that had forced him to retire and they end up on tour together. I chose this book because I had sold K on the idea of studying Paris, but not on Madeline, and this also takes place in Paris. But you can't study Mirette without covering the circus, which has added huge amounts of excitement to our week.

After reading Mirette, the first book on the circus we pulled out was Peter Spier's Circus. Peter Spier has long been a family favorite for the fascinating level of detail he puts in his illustrations, and Circus is no exception. We spent a long time looking and pointing out interesting things. Then two non-fiction books on the circus, and The Greatest Elephant in the World, which on cursory inspection was about a circus elephant, but actually reading it revealed it had almost no information on the circus and was pretty depressing to boot. We ended with Olivia Saves the Circus, a Mr. Rogers dvd on the circus and a Reading Rainbow episode with a section on high wire artists.

I found out last weekend that Philadelphia actually has a circus school, but I was sad to discover when I checked their website that it was a couple weeks too late to see any performances this year. I will definitely be keeping my eye out next spring for anything I can take K to, since the circus is by far best experienced in person.

Our second activity was exploring the physics of balance. We read The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, the story of a man who disguised himself as a construction worker to snuck up to the top of the Twin Towers and string a rope between them so he could walk it (I was a little worried about the awkward questions that might come up since the book does end by saying the towers are no longer standing, but thankfully, K was too incensed by the injustice of Philippe being arrested to really register that part). We looked at the pictures in that and Mirette, and looked at the poles they used for balance. I pulled out a marker and first asked K to try to balance it on her finger standing up, which she couldn't do, and then with it lying down, which she eventually got. I took the cap off the marker and had her look at where it balanced versus where it balanced with the cap on. I think she got a pretty good understanding of balance without having to use terms like "center of mass."

Then we went to a local playground where there are some balance beams so K could try some balancing herself. She needed a bit of help to walk the beam initially, but she was fairly successful with the pole from our Swiffer. I asked her to try to lean as far over as she could and still stay balanced, and we saw how her hips leaned out in the other direction to compensate. Then her brother made his lack of nap known and we had to go home before she could spend as much time as she wanted perfecting her high wire act.

Tomorrow, Paris!

Books used:

Mirette on the High Wire by Emily McCully
Peter Spier's Circus! by Peter Spier
The World's Greatest Elephant by Ralph Helfer
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordecai Gerstein
Olivia Saves the Circus by Ian Falconer
Big-Top Circus by Neil Johnson
The Circus Comes Home by Lois Duncan

Sick day

2011-11-30T23:29:00.001-05:00

Today, I was getting a cold, Alec was wandering around coughing and hacking like he had a 40 year, 3 pack a day smoking habit, and it's become painfully obvious that K is incubating another UTI. She hasn't gotten to the point that she will admit to pain and hasn't developed a fever, but she has the Smell, and has in general been a colossal pill. She has also spent the past two evenings lying down under a blanket, which confirmed for me this evening that my choice not to attempt schoolwork was the right decision. Poor bunny.

She has an appointment with her new doctor tomorrow, so hopefully we'll get a better antibiotic and a referral to a new urologist who willingly makes eye contact.

In other stellar parenting news, when K and I were doing reading yesterday, something about the way she was looking at the words made me ask her if she was having trouble seeing them clearly. No, she just has trouble reading words when she's bored, was the response. Uh huh. Probably more like she stops trying to see things clearly when she's bored. Sigh. We've been meaning to get everyone including K eye exams for the past nine months, but somehow it keeps falling to the bottom of the list, largely because we didn't like the last person we went to, so we need to find a new optometrist. And it occurred to me last night, if we want K to have an accurate exam, we need to find one who's excellent with children.

K is the same age I was when I got my first glasses. As I thought about it last night, I have to wonder if her absolute refusal to try to read the eye chart at her physical last summer was because she was having trouble seeing it and didn't want to get anything wrong. So I totally feel like Responsible Parent of the Year for letting this slide now.

FIAR : Cranberry Thanksgiving, day 3, sort of

2011-11-30T00:35:00.001-05:00

I think we are going to try to do Cranberry Thanksgiving again next year, the week before Thanksgiving, because nobody was focusing well last week.

Today, I tried to finish up a little with some talking about Thanksgiving foods and nutrition, largely because it gave me a sheet I can include in our portfolio that shows we engaged in nutrition/health and wellness education. So first, I showed K a sheet I made up with pictures of typical Thanksgiving foods - turkey, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans and pumpkin pie. I asked her what these foods might have in common and why they might get eaten at an American Thanksgiving, as opposed to harvest festivals in other countries. K didn't know, so we started looking up the foods in Wikipedia, and over and over, native to the Americas kept coming up. K still felt tha the thing these foods had in common is that they grew on farms, but I managed to get across that we eat those foods for our Thanksgiving because they're all native foods.

Then I had her cut out the pictures and we placed them on a printout of a plate with the food groups from myplate.gov by what food group they belonged to. And lo, we had one sheet to stick in the portfolio. I really don't feel first grade should be about output, but it's always in the back of my mind that I need to purposefully create some for the sake of the portfolio.

Tomorrow, Mirette on the High Wire. I had initially planned on Madeline, but while K liked the idea of learning about Paris and loved the idea of building a model of the Eiffel Tower, she didn't want to do Madeline. I looked at the FIAR list and strongly considered The Giraffe that Walked to Paris - K loves giraffes. But ultimately I decided that it wasn't a good idea to do that book when we wouldn't be able to go to the zoo, and also couldn't quite stomach the idea of talking about the Eiffel Tower while doing a book that takes place 50 years before it was built.

So that left Mirette on the High Wire. It's actually quite a good choice for getting K engaged, because the circus is always a fun topic. And I admit, I didn't plan this at all, but we went to IKEA last weekend and K begged us to buy her this set of circus finger puppets and now she's really excited by the circus. Really, I wish I had thought of it, but no, it was just dumb luck. This should be a lot of fun.

Other things accomplished today: read to the end of Progressive Phonics beginner book 1, did an MEP 1a worksheet.

Reading, 'riting and fainting in coils

2011-11-29T01:26:00.001-05:00

Today, we got back to reading and math, which is a frustrating proposition in some ways, because I have no idea where to place her.

If you were to ask K, she can barely read a word. Certainly, if you want her to sound out a word, she won't oblige you. But at the same time, when she was taking the placement test for Reading Eggs, she got the first 20 questions right before getting bored and demanding an end to the test, at which point I decided it was probably better not to have her placed so high that she would be constantly frustrated and had her get the next questions wrong so we could get out of the test. But getting that far (and I suspect she could have gotten farther) required quite a bit of reading. A child who can't read doesn't start out on level 5 of a reading game. She can use our dvr well enough to find the specific episode of a tv show she wants, which you can only do by reading. And this summer, when we were looking for a dvd of "Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue," she found it and yelled, "Hey, this says 'Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Escape!'" So sure, sweetheart, we TOTALLY believe you can't read at all.

However, being fairly sure she reads much better than she's letting on doesn't tell me where to place her when it actually comes to curriculum. So I've decided to just start her at the beginning of Progressive Phonics, in the hopes that starting her out easy will help her gain enough confidence to start showing her actual skills. As I've said before, I like Progressive Phonics because it has the parent reading along with the child, which both gives K added confidence to have me carrying the bulk of the reading load and makes for much more interesting reading than "The fat cat sat" school of phonics reader. We made it to the end of the first beginner book tonight without much problem. She really likes to try to guess at words based on the pictures instead of taking the time to read them, but if you make her stop and focus on the actual word, she usually doesn't have a problem figuring it out.

Progressive Phonics has a handwriting component, but K really wanted to use the handwriting book we had been using with the online school, and since it's a perfectly good handwriting book (Zaner Bloser), I was fine letting her continue with it. She was really excited to discover she had moved from writing individual letters to actual words (her response: "Real words! Score!"), so I'm hopeful she'll respond well when we finish this book and move onto Writing With Ease, a writing curriculum that will involve writing quite a few words.

Math presents a slightly different problem. I have a pretty good idea of where K's math skills are, but in switching curricula, I'm not sure where to start in the new one. MEP levels 1a and 1b seem to be the equivalent of the first grade math she's been doing, but not necessarily covering things the same way. From what I can tell, 1a covers addition up to 10, which K can do pretty well, and 1b covers addition from 11 to 20. But looking at the sheets at the end of 1a, I'm afraid she would be a bit lost if we skipped straight to 1b, at least partially because the style of problem is so much different than the straightforward style of addition and subtraction problems she's been doing that she'll get too frustrated. So I've been skimming 1a and picking out some sheets just to get her used to the more game-like style of problem. Also, while we've certainly covered greater than and less than, she's never used the actual < or > signs, so the first sheet I pulled out tonight focused mostly on that.

I feel like we need to get her to the point that she knows the addition and subtraction facts up to 10, without having to figure it out with fingers or counting cubes. She has the theory down just fine, but again, there's a confidence issue holding her back. I'm hoping maybe some time with some math games will help cement some of these basic sums so she can move on to more complicated problems with confidence.

Tomorrow, a last day of activities based on Cranberry Thanksgiving, then we move onto Paris and the circus with Mirette on the High Wire.

It's time to light the lights...

2011-11-27T00:55:00.001-05:00

We went to see the Muppets on Thanksgiving. It was just so awesome I can't express it more eloquently than that. I said a couple months ago that I thought it would take Gen-Xers who grew up loving the Muppets to regain the old magic, and by golly, I was right. Of course, the effect of having two writers who grew up loving the Muppets is that they couldn't have written a bigger (quite literal) nostalgia trip if they had tried. I would say the movie has a heavy subtext of the quest to regain the lost innocence of childhood, but it's really pretty much just plain text.

Not that any of this is a bad thing. And the thing that really catapulted this movie past a simple rehashing of the past is that they were able to pay homage to the past (they included Wayne and Wanda!) while introducing new, good material in the same style and spirit.

I have to say, if you're going to see a movie like this, I higly recommend finding a six-year-old Muppet fan to take with you. I mean, B and I enjoyed ourselves, but I looked over during the opening song and she was singing along and dancing with her doll. She loved it in the unselfconscious way you only can when you're six.

I must say, there are a lot of things I love about six. One big one is that she's made a big leap forward in bravery and can watch a lot of things she used to find too scary. There were several previews before the movie that we thought we would like to see, and for the first time, they all looked like things we could take K to. It was a long year the year she was four and just the thought of a darkened theater was too scary for her. The movie we finally got her to go see in the theater was Toy Story 3, and as I sat there holding K on my lap at the end of movie, with all of the main characters headed towards a fiery death and listening to children around me sobbing, all I could think is, "Are you freaking KIDDING me, Pixar?" An entire year of not being able to take her to a movie and they decide to load a supposedly G rated movie with prison and horror movie tropes.* But she managed to survive (although she still won't watch it on dvd) and started being able to go to select, mild movies again. And now this year, we've actually seen multiple movies, with more in the offing that we can really look forward to seeing (as opposed to movies like Winnie the Pooh, which while sweet, had most of its charm in its ability to get us out of the heat on a 100 degree day). Yay!

* Don't get me wrong, I loved Toy Story 3. But it didn't deserve its G rating. Muppets, by comparison, with absolutely nothing remotely scary or traumatic, was a PG, presumably for the fart shoes. I'm hardly one to put much stock in the movie rating system, but I do feel like if a movie is rated G, I should be able to have a reasonable confidence that it will not lead my five-year-old (as well as half of the other children in the theatre) sobbing in fear. What's the point of having ratings, otherwise?

FIAR: Cranberry Thanksgiving, day 2

2011-11-24T00:08:00.001-05:00

I confess, the extent of our educational activities yesterday consisted of multiple viewings of "Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," which I couldn't in good conscience write up. But today we managed to read some books on Thanksgiving and discuss it a bit.

We started with a book on the history of harvest festivals which described harvest festivals all over the world. Then we read Molly's Pilgrim, which related Thanksgiving to the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Then we finished up with a couple more fun Thanksgiving books. The attention span available today was rather limited, but I think we got across the idea of Thanksgiving as a harvest festival and time to share our blessings with others.

Books used today:

The autumn equinox : celebrating the harvest by Ellen Jackson
Molly's Pilgrim by Barbara Cohen
Thanksgiving at the Tappletons by Eileen Spinelli
Sometimes it's turkey, sometimes it's feathers by Lorna & Lecia Balian.

FIAR: Cranberry Thanksgiving, day 1

2011-11-22T00:41:00.001-05:00

We're celebrating Thanksgiving this week with Cranberry Thanksgiving, a book I remember fondly from my youth and devilishly hard to get my hands on presently. Buying it was out of the question, because the cheapest copy I could find online was $50, used. I've already complained about how the Philadelphia library allowed the copy I had on hold get checked out by someone else. So I tried one suburban library only to discover it had been checked out in the four hours between when I checked the catalog online and getting to the library. I finally tracked it down at another suburban library.

K's reaction, upon being presented the book, was to declare she didn't want to read it and she was going to hide it under the couch, which she did. After the ordeal I went through (and the fact that I didn't have any alternate plans for the week), that was not going to fly. I told her she had to listen to it at least once, and I figured if we didn't read it again, we at least would have a basis for the rest of the activities for the week.

Sigh. There are many good things about having a child that's very independent and self-directed. And then there are the times I mentally chant to myself "Stubbornness is a trait that will serve her well in life. Really. No matter how much I want to shake her until she just cooperates without argument." At least she'll be resistant to peer pressure, right?

Anyway, after a show of plugging her ears, K did in fact listen to the story and seemed to mostly enjoy it, although she never did warm up to Mr. Whiskers, despite the fact that he's the hero of the story. Then we talked a bit about how it takes place in New England, where many of her ancestors lived. I told her a bit about her great-grandmother, who grew up in Maine. Then we watched a Reading Rainbow with a segment on harvesting cranberries. We finished with a short video on Thanksgiving.

I feel conflicted about how to teach about Thanksgiving, since I'm not fond of the idea of promoting our national myth of happy Pilgrim and Native Americans, conveniently glossing over how within 20 years, said Pilgrims would be mercilessly killing the same Native Americans. I think K should know about the Puritans, since they're her ancestors (we're direct descendants of Roger Conant, the first colonial governor of Salem). But she's a little young for a reading of Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, which I feel does a good job of both appreciating the good points of the Puritans while showing them warts and all. So I'm mostly ignoring all that and concentrating on Thanksgiving as a harvest festival, which is how I choose to celebrate it. Tomorrow, we're reading a bunch of Thanksgiving books that talk a lot about giving thanks and sharing our blessings and very little about Pilgrims. I'm also planning to show her "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," which is Pilgrim heavy, but at least the Thanskgiving video we watched today gave a pretty accurate history, including the fact that Europeans had enslaved the Wampanoag.

Books used today:

Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin

Stuff

2011-11-21T01:41:00.001-05:00

I admit, I was so tired last night that I didn't even try to post. Too tired even to put up a "Gone Fishing" post crying off for the evening. And I'm still tired tonight, although the post-dinner nap helped a lot. I'm really looking forward to a holiday in the middle of the week, as well as a day off for everyone on Sunday. That's almost like a two-day weekend, right?

Anyway, here are some of the non-homeschooling things going on right now:

* We took Alec to the dentist last week and an x-ray revealed that fortunately, there was no damage to any of his teeth. Apparently the looseness was caused by damage to the soft tissue, and as it heals, the tooth will get back to normal. It definitely seems more firm to me a week later. There's a risk that it might turn brown if the blood supply has been damaged, but it's not showing any sign of it after a week and that's only a cosmetic issue anyway. I had a brown tooth myself as a small child due to an unfortunate encounter with the back of my brother's head.

* We're really enjoying this season of Next Iron Chef. I think the decision to use celebrity chefs was brilliant - we recognize many of them, so we came into it with pre-existing attachments; they're all already comfortable on camera and able to project a likeable persona (one of the things I think they didn't emphasize nearly enough in previous seasons was personality. Yes, an Iron Chef needs to be able to cook, but part of what makes the show enjoyable is that they can cook and be likeable at the same time). And one big advantage of choosing among established chefs is that all three women all still in the competition after four rounds of elimination, when previous competitions have tended to eliminate women and minorities very quickly (which isn't hard when you don't start with that many of them to begin with). That show really needs another woman since Cat Cora doesn't seem to be competing this season.

* Speaking of tv, I think Once Upon a Time is my pick for favorite new show of the season. I've always loved fairy tales, and retellings of fairy tales in new and interesting ways. This show scratches that itch very nicely, in a visually gorgeous and emotionally engaging way. The other fairy tale show of the season, Grimm, has so far completely failed to catch my attention. I think I'm just not in the mood for police procedurals right now, even with the X-Files twist of the criminals being supernatural.

* And I know there was more I wanted to write, but darned if I can remember it at this time of night. Perhaps this is a sign I should go to bed.

FIAR: Make Way for Ducklings, day 4

2011-11-19T00:50:00.001-05:00

Today was not a great day for school. We all had a lot of trouble getting started this morning, and while cuddling together in a big pile in bed is lovely, it doesn't get schoolwork done. K was also not in a very cooperative mood because I had enacted a new policy the night before in an effort to get a response to my attempts to get her to clean up her toys besides whining and delay tactics. Perhaps I should have given her more warning last night, but sometimes scorched Earth tactics are the most effective and I was fed up. So she was rather preoccupied by the Rapunzel doll residing in my closet and not inclined to pay attention to school (but she did do a bang-up job cleaning up the living room tonight!). Then we spent the afternoon on time-consuming errands, including irnonically driving out to a suburban library to track down a copy of the book we're doing next week, Cranberry Thanksgiving.*

But I did manage to get some geography in, thanks to Google Maps (the FIAR manual keeps suggesting things like looking up maps in your Worldbook Encyclopedia - how quaint). We found Boston first, and looked at how far it is from Philadelphia (and then we looked at Michigan, and Illinois, and Hawaii - I never said we were particularly on task today). Part of Make Way is drawn from a duck's eye view flying over the city, so it looks something like a map. I zoomed in on the map of Boston and we were able to identify where on the Charles the mallards built there nest, and then trace the route they took to walk back to the Public Gardens. We used as much of Google Streetview and the satellite view as we could to see the Gardens themselves. We could see some swanboats, but I had to go look up the statues of Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings that are in the Public Gardens, since K really wanted to see them. I'm quite certain we won't be able to get out of a trip to the Public Gardens on our next trip to Boston, which is just fine with me.

If I can manage it, I'm going to try to read two more McCloskey books, Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine with K this weekend and discuss how he uses the same artistic style for all of them. But even if we don't, I think we've made a decent showing of our first week of rowing, given how recently I started preparing. We're going to do Cranberry Thanksgiving next week, but continue to go easy on other subjects, then try to start up with reading and math as well as FIAR the week after Thanksgiving, which will hopefully get us past both the school fatigue and the holiday distraction (for the moment, given how soon Christmas distraction will start up).

*I would like to extend a gigantic raspberry to the Free Library of Philadelphia on this issue. Last Monday, there were three copies listed as available in the system - two were checked out and one was available, but at a branch on the other side of the city. So I put it on hold so it could get transferred to my branch. For three days I kept checking its status and it just kept saying it was still on shelf. Then yesterday I checked again and it had been CHECKED OUT. What exactly is the point of putting a book on hold if no one can be bothered to take it off the shelf and HOLD it for you? I truly have more sense than to be trying to track down a popular Thanksgiving book a week before Thanksgiving, but it was because my own library failed me, apparently through being too lazy to actually retrieve books people have requested.

FIAR: Make Way for Ducklings, day 3

2011-11-18T00:21:00.001-05:00

Today was pretty simple, because we belong to a homeschooling group that meets at the park during the summer and at a local gym during the winter for socialization/running around like maniacs time every Thursday afternoon. K gets more than enough exercise on these afternoons for me to consider it a free-form phys ed.

We started the day reading Ducks Don't Get Wet, and then we followed the instructions at the end of the book to prove how ducks stay dry. Actual ducks stay dry because they have an oil gland they use to spread oil over their feathers (this is why you see ducks rubbing their bills over their bodies so much; it's called preening). For our experiment, we spread vegetable oil over a feather:

and then sprayed it and a dry feather with water:

(K insisted on the goggles. It really is just harmless water in the spray bottle). And the water beaded up and rolled off the oily feather while soaking in the dry feather. Pretty nifty.

Tomorrow: some language arts and hopefully geography.

Books read today:

Ducks Don't Get Wet by Augusta Goldin

FIAR: Make Way for Ducklings, day two

2011-11-17T00:18:00.001-05:00

N.B.: I'm not planning on making this an all-homeschooling, all-the-time blog. But I need to keep track of what we do every day for portfolio purposes and I can't do both this and NaBloPoMo at the same time, so I'm sorry if the homeschooling stuff bores you, but we're over halfway through November and there's a holiday next week, so there won't be too much more of this. At the end of November, I'll be creating a separate homeschooling blog that anyone who's interested can follow.

As I suspected, today wasn't greeted with quite the same enthusiasm as yesterday. My child, she loves her some science. We started the day reading Make Way for Ducklings, and then I asked K if she thought the story took place in the present day or some time in the past. I was firmly informed that this was a make-believe story and therefore my question was absurd. Okay then. After trying to point out that even make-believe stories are usually meant to take place at a certain point in time, I took a different tack and asked her to look at the cars, and then pulled up a picture of Doc Hudson from the movie Cars, who was a '50s era Hudson Hornet. Did he look anything like the cars in the book? A bit, but not an exact match. After promising to look up pictures of Lightning McQueen when we were done with schoolwork, I pulled up a Wikipedia article on the history of cars, which is well-stocked with pictures of cars from every decade. I scrolled to the end to pictures of present-day cars and scrolled backwards until we hit the cars of the '30s and '40s, which looked very much like the cars in the book. Having established the book takes place in the '40s (it was in fact published in 1941), we looked at some other clues that it was from a different time - everyone was wearing hats, all of the women and girls were wearing skirts or dresses, Office Mike uses a telephone from a police telephone booth to call his precinct.

Then I pulled out the only book I could find for children on life in the 40s on short notice: Welcome to Molly's World, 1944: Growing Up in World War Two America, an American Girl supplemental book. Once I pointed out to K that her grandmother was six in 1944 (i.e. exactly her age!), she showed quite a bit of interest in it. I told her about how her grandmother had lived on the coast in Connecticut and therefore had to participate in blackout drills, which impressed K quite a bit. She asked if she was afraid during them because it was dark and I told her that yes, sometimes her mother wouldn't want to wake her up during them, so she would sometimes wake up in a pitch black house where everyone else was in the basement (I think the fact that nearly 70 years later, she still vividly remembers this says a lot about the trauma of them). That made a big impression too, since K is scared of the dark. Topics like clothes girls wore and victory gardens went fairly well. She was incensed to discover that they didn't have televisions but had to make do with radios, but perked up when we got to a page on going to the movies, which I told her many people did every week, and she also discovered that movies she's seen, like Snow White and Bambi were from that time period. Fortunately, although concentration camps and the nuclear bombings of Japan were covered, the pages didn't have any graphic pictures, so I was able to skip them without comment. K did show a lot of interest in a page on Sadako, the Japanese girl with leukemia who tried to fold 1000 paper cranes (they had a picture of hundreds of origami cranes, which caught her eye because she's very interested in origami), but I was able to just say that Sadako was a girl who was very sick after the war without getting into why. I also discovered that during pregnancy is not a good time to try and relay stories like that calmly.

Tomorrow, we are enthusiastically looking forward to our feather experiment. It might have been smarter to do it today, since today's topic might have been better received if it hadn't been in the way of something she was eagerly anticipating. But I didn't feel up to dealing with feathers, oil and a curious toddler, so it's waiting until Alec is at preschool tomorrow.

Books used today:
Welcome to Molly's World, 1944: Growing Up in World War Two America by Catherine Gourley

FIAR day one: Make Way for Ducklings

2011-11-16T00:25:00.001-05:00

We started our first day of Five in a Row out with a bang, with a reading of one of K's favorite books, Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey (although she said she didn't want to learn about Boston, she clarified the next day that she still wanted to do Make Way for Ducklings and she does love Boston, she just doesn't want to learn about it). Since most of the book is taking up with the process of a pair of mallard ducks finding a site for a nest, laying eggs and raising the hatchlings, it seemed natural to move into a study of ducks.

We started out reading Make Way for Ducklings, and then Thump, Quack, Moo by Doreen Cronin, who writes a series of hysterically funny books about a farm with a very mischievous duck, just for fun. Then we moved back to more real life birds with The Egg, a book about, well, eggs and how chicks develop in them. While it was mostly about chickens, the basics of how eggs work is the same. We took a break in reading to go shine a flashlight through an egg in a dark room to show how eggs are porous. I also asked K when we got to the section on reptiles whether she thought cold-blooded animals would be able to sit on their eggs to keep them warm and she correctly deduced that no, since they don't emit heat, they couldn't keep their eggs warm (thank you Dino Dan, I guess, which is largely where K learned about warm and cold blooded animals). After that, we read A Duckling is Born, which was specifically about the mating process and fetal development of ducks. Then we read Ducks!, which was a more general book about the different breeds and types of duck. We finished with K rendering a pretty accurate drawing of a female duck on her nest.

Thursday, we're going to revisit ducks by doing an experiment to find out why ducks don't get wet. But K was so excited she got up and made her own project. She had been cradling the egg since our light demonstration, so she ran outside and got some twigs, grass and leaves to make it a nest:

She even found an obliging duck to sit on it:

I realize that male mallards don't sit on the nest, but we didn't have any female ducks available.

I don't think I can express how different today was than pretty much any day of school so far this year. The only times that have come close have been after a few science lessons. I realize not everything is going to generate this level of excitement, and I'm a little afraid it's downhill from here, but one of the big reasons we pulled her out of school in the first place is that I was afraid she was going to lose her love of learning in a sea of test preparation. Today, we able to get that back, an enthusiasm for new knowledge so strong that she had to jump up and make up her own project. I can't think of any better reason for homeschooling than that.

Tomorrow, some geography and history (I may be sneaking some information about Boston in there if I can get away with it). I'm not sure we'll achieve the same level of excitement, but it should still be fun.

Books used today (bear with me, I need to keep track of these things):
Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey
Thump, Quack, Moo by Doreen Cronin
Duck for President by Doreen Cronin
The Egg by Pascale de Bourgoing
A Duckling is Born by Hans-Heinrich Isenbart
Ducks! by Gail Gibbons

Ack!

2011-11-15T00:03:00.001-05:00

Nearly missed posting for the day. I didn't have all of the books I wanted, so we're starting FIAR tomorrow instead of today, but we did at least take a first pass at Progressive Phonics, which K thought was hilarious. So that's an improvement at least. But now I have all of the books I need thanks to my special library delivery service, so tomorrow is all about ducks!

Snaggle tooth

2011-11-13T23:15:00.001-05:00

I didn't see exactly what happened yesterday, but when I looked over, Alec was on his knees in front of the wooden castle, starting that slow cry that lets you know they're building up to a good howl because they're really hurt. It quickly became clear his mouth was bleeding, and the little inspection I was allowed to do showed all of his teeth and what looked like some scraped skin on the inside of his upper lip, so I applied pressure and cuddles and thanked my lucky stars it wasn't worse.

Well, until I noticed he kept rubbing his lower teeth against his upper teeth and that when he did, one of his front teeth was at a distinctly different angle than the other. Oh crud. A quick Googling revealed that a baby tooth knocked loose wasn't a dental emergency worthy of a visit to the dentist on a Saturday night (because of course this sort of things always happens at 4:30 on a Saturday). So I cuddled him some more and tried to control my inner freakout, because dental injuries squick me right out. It's here that his infant habit of sucking our fingers for comfort came in handy (we're trying to wean him off of it, but it's a process, and oh, don't even start), because my finger in his mouth held his loose tooth in place for what turned out to be over an hour because he fell asleep and I didn't want to pull my finger out for fear of yanking it out of place.

I'm not sure how much you can do for a two-year-old with a loose tooth. Soft foods, try to stay alert to keep him from messing with it and a call to the dentist tomorrow. Apparently it will hopefully reattach itself with time. We just have to keep him from knocking it out of his fool head in the meantime, since he certainly doesn't see why he shouldn't try to practice all of his wrestling moves on his sister or use the couch for gymnastics practice. Oy.

Okay, if I don't feel like posting, here's a discussion question:

2011-11-11T01:15:00.001-05:00

I always feel a bit lazy soliciting book recommendations since I am a librarian, after all, and that's suppose to be my job. But one of my library school professors used to say that the most powerful reference tool is the telephone (and I suppose by extension these days, e-mail), so making use of the knowledge of others is a perfectly valid reference technique. Anyway:

Can you recommend any children's books that use magic, particularly where the children are doing the magic, for a six-year-old who isn't ready for something as scary as Harry Potter yet? I ask because I looked over at K the other night and she was brandishing a stick like a wand and attempting to make up incantations to make her brother disappear. My first thought was that we should start on Harry Potter, but she is very sensitive to scariness and danger. She's only very recently (as in, the past month) been willing to watch The Princess and the Frog and Tangled regularly, neither of which is all that scary but both have scary moments that were too much for her a year ago. I think she could take more scariness in books, but I think the highest level of scariness we could tolerate is the first Harry Potter. So: books about kid magicians for the scaredy-cat? I think Narnia is a given, but again, probably too scary.

Tired

2011-11-11T00:26:00.001-05:00

I'm allowed at least a couple "I'm too tired to really post" posts, aren't I? Because I'm really tired. Tomorrow is the first day in three weeks B have had off together, and it shows. So I'm copping out for the night.

Maybe we'll do Madeline instead

2011-11-09T23:37:00.000-05:00

Tonight, we got K to bed a bit later than we should have, which we could tell because she had reached the emotionally fragile state of tiredness. We were discussing her passionate desire to make a papier mache volcano, and B and I both agreed pretty readily that it seemed like a fine thing to do. I reminded her that one of the great things about homeschooling on our own (besides no more Fast Forward! I'm a bit giddy at the thought) is that we can decide ourselves what we want to learn, so if there's something she really wants to learn, we can do it.

"Okay," she said, "But I don't want to learn..."

She trailed off, either unwilling to say it or too tired to come up with the words.

"But I don't want to learn about..."

I braced myself, prepared to explain sympathetically that she was still going to have to do reading and math.

"Boston!"

Well okay, sweetheart. I guess we won't start with Make Way for Ducklings after all.

****

I actually think we'll broach the topic again, to see if she was just tired, or attempting to express reservations about the entire FIAR concept (which I expect to dissipate pretty quickly once we start doing it, but I can understand how a completely new way of learning could make her nervous). Because if there's one thing K loves, it's Boston, where her aunt lives.

We filed the paperwork and withdrew her from school today, so we're official. We still have to hear from the school district that everything is in order, and get instructions on how to return all of the online school's stuff (you mean we have to give the computer back? Drat). I have declared the rest of this week a deschooling week, where we all recover a bit from worksheet fatigue (and give the teachers time to prepare) before starting fresh next week.

The napping house

2011-11-09T00:04:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure if it was something in the air today, but everyone in this house has been exceptionally sleepy. Alec took a much longer nap than he has been recently (I think he's flirting with giving up his nap in the next six months. He can't get through the day without one, but they keep getting shorter and shorter). K had a massive meltdown of the sort she only has when I'm about to find her asleep in the next ten minutes. B fell asleep putting Alec to bed and I fell asleep downstairs while that was happening.

Tomorrow, knock wood, we will deliver our homeschooling affidavit to the school district, call to withdraw her from school, and we'll be flying solo educationally. Whee!

Logistics

2011-11-07T23:42:00.003-05:00

I spent most of last evening on forms; generating our affidavit and educational objectives (largely cribbed from the Internet) and medical and dental forms (ditto). And then I spent a good hour bashing my head against the Philadelphia School District's web site attempting to figure out where we should send all this. Searching the web site resulted in the names of at least four different offices, none of which could be found in the directory. I found a FAQ which said we needed to contact our Regional Office, which was a link to a 404 page, and there were no other clues on the web site as to where our Regional Office might be.

So it really wasn't a surprise when a phone call this morning revealed that it had to go to an office in the School District's main office in Center City. It can in fact be found in the directory, so this is likely the right place. One hurdle (potentially) down.

We got everything notarized this morning and I stopped by the dentist to get the form signed to prove we're making a reasonable effort to keep her teeth from falling out of her head before their time. All that's left is the TB test tomorrow, which kind of chaps me because we didn't need to do this to actually send her to mingle her germy self with other children in the public schools. I briefly considered filing an exemption request on the theory that I do feel this is a bullshit requirement, but couldn't make myself actually say that I have a religious or strong ethical objection to medical tests when really I just want to avoid a minor pain in the ass.

So if all goes well, I can get the medical form signed tomorrow and we can get this all wrapped up by Wednesday. Of course, we are dealing with big city bureaucracy, so we'll see.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, now that our plans to withdraw from school are underway, we're feeling astonishingly apathetic about getting work done this week. I did make K do some work today, partially just to avoid giving her the idea that we might suddenly no longer be doing any work around here. But I did then let her spend over an hour watching whatever videos she wanted on BrainPopJr, an educational video website. It was educational after all, even if it wasn't fulfilling any actual assignments. Goodness knows what we're getting accomplished tomorrow.

Homeschooling redux

2011-11-06T01:05:00.000-04:00

So it took me a while to come around to it, but once I did, homeschooling on our own seemed like the most natural choice. With the online school, we have the worst of school and homeschooling: the constant accountability to someone else, living on their schedule and having no control over curriculum, but we're still stuck with our kid all day. The big advantage of homeschooling is supposed to be having the flexibility to adapt your curriculum to your particular needs. So that's what we're doing.

The logistics:

Starting to homeschool in Pennsylvania isn't very hard: you submit an affadavit to your local school superintendant with a couple medical forms (bizarrely, including a tb test, which K didn't need when she was entering a brick and mortar school), and that's that. We can call and withdraw her from school the same day we submit it. My current goal is having it all done by Wednesday so I can avoid the biweekly teacher call on Thursday.

After that, you need to keep an attendance log and enough work examples to be able to put a portfolio together at the end of the year to prove you've accomplished something. The part that makes me a bit nervous is that we also have to find someone to evaluate K to make sure her learning is on track, but I've decided to file that under "bridges to cross once we arrive at them."

So what sort of curriculum are we planning to try?

The main curriculum I'm planning to use is Five in a Row, a curriculum where you read a storybook five days in a row and do different studies based on the book (an online friend does a good job of making it look like a lot of fun at her homeschooling blog). For instance, I think we will probably start with Make Way for Ducklings, one of K's favorite books. The first day, we'll probably look at bit at the geography and history of Boston. The next day, a science lesson on ducks. The third day, a study on the art techniques used to illustrate the book. And so on. I can see a lot of reasons to try it:

* it looks like fun, and with the issues we've been having, I'm for anything that might produce some enthusiastic participation.
* it allows us to cover most of the subjects we're required to cover without having to have a separate curriculum for each one.
* it looks toddler-friendly - Alec can listen to us read the story and participate a bit in some of the activities, and we can plan messier, more involved things for his preschool days.
* it doesn't require tests or worksheets or any of the required, repetitive output that has been making us miserable.

I do plan on separate math and reading curricula. For reading, I'm planning on starting with Progressive Phonics, a free phonics program that looks like it might be a bit easier to get K to participate in. Instead of having the child read incredibly stilted and boring phonics books with the tiny number of words they know, it has the teacher read the words in black while the child reads the words in red. This allows for more fluent and interesting things to read, and I'm hoping the fact that I will be reading too will make it easier for K to read out loud. It also has a handwriting component, so that will take care of that state requirement. Once we work our way through that, I'm hoping she'll be a confident enough reader at that point that our reading can be from easy readers. We'll have to find another writing and spelling curriculum at that point, but once again, bridge, cross, once we reach.

K has been doing an online reading game called Reading Eggs, and I think I may splurge and get a subscription so she can keep doing one of the few things she's been enthusiastic about. I know there are plenty of free reading games online, but this is a really good one and I think worth the money for this year at least.

For math, I'm thinking about MEP math, largely because it's free, but also because the lessons and exercises look like they'll appeal to K. There are also any number of free math games online, so we'll try to do some of those as well.

So I think our days will go: FIAR, reading, math, plus computer time. I'm contemplating only doing FIAR four days a week and using the time on the fifth day for more science, or maybe doing history in a more organized, linear fashion. And we should fit music somewhere in there beyond what FIAR covers. I'm sure these things will become more clear as we start into it.

Interstitial

2011-11-04T23:57:00.002-04:00

And after leaving on a cliff-hanger yesterday, I'm too tired to go into any detail today. Don't worry, it was just mostly blather about curriculum and logistics, which I will probably find time to do tomorrow.

I will observe that one big difference between the first and second trimester is that a month ago, I couldn't really deal with all of this except with helpless weeping as I attempted to contemplate finding the energy to deal with, well, anything, let alone our teacher issues. And student issues. Now? My dander is up and I'm feeling feisty and excited to try something new. To be honest, I've been pretty bored too. It's not that I expect first grade curriculum to be the most exciting thing in the world, but there are so many fun and exciting things you can teach a kid, even when they're just six.

Once again, more tomorrow.

One of the longer posts I mentioned

2011-11-04T00:12:00.001-04:00

I haven't been talking much about school this year, mostly because I've been preoccupied with keeping my eyes open and food in my stomach. Truly, I don't recommend combining homeschooling and the first trimester if you can help it. But as I've started coming out of the first trimester fog, I'm realizing that quite a bit of the difficulty has been K and her resistance to most of what we're doing.

One big issue is she has a combination of shyness, perfectionism and performance anxiety that prevents her from wanting to answer a question unless she's absolutely sure of the answer (and to make it even more fun, when she's bored or feeling resistant, she sometimes likes to play dumb). This is a poor combination for a program where a teacher calls every two weeks to ask her to read out loud, let alone with standardized testing time comes along. Her kindergarten teacher last year had a reasonable amount of success with her, but we got off to a bad start with her teacher this year due to miscommunication, and while things have improved, K absolutely refused to read for her the last time she called.

The other issue is something it took me longer to realize: she's bored. This is too easy for her. The way she moans and whines through a list of three-letter words but brightens up when you start introducing more difficult words makes that clear. But I can't make any sort of case for accelerating her if I can't get her to show what she knows.

So she resists while we slog our way through a program with a heavy emphasis on output - worksheets, projects, constant mini-quizzes between the frequent tests. Just the thing a child who doesn't like to give answers needs. I keep thinking that if we could have at least half of her school day be things she likes, it will be possible to get her to do the stuff she likes less. But so far, that's only science, which is three days a week. No word on when we might introduce some other (state-mandated!) subjects, like social studies, music or art.

So: we have an educational program with only three subjects (reading, math and science), two of which are on too easy a level and which emphasize all of the things that she dislikes most. It demands that a child who is very shy and has performance anxiety when it comes to showing her knowledge get regularly quizzed by someone she has never met in person. A surefire recipe for success!

If we were homeschooling on our own and were having this kind of trouble, we could go out and find a new curriculum that's better suited to her strengths instead of her weaknesses (if we were homeschooing on our own, we would be required to be covering about nine different subjects, so I'm more than a little confused about why it's okay to just be doing three through school).

So clearly the answer is to start homeschooling on our own. More on that tomorrow.

Sick day

2011-11-02T23:33:00.000-04:00

Well, on the plus side, it turns out K isn't sick with anything contagious. The drawback is that it's in fact another UTI. Drat. She's been on a daily dose of antibiotic (Bactrim) since early August, and other than a trip to the urologist a month later that revealed an infection so mild we hadn't noticed symptoms yet, we've been infection-free. Only apparently what it's been doing is mostly suppressing infection while letting some other bugs simmer along until she breaks out in the heavy-duty symptoms. Dammit.

I have been repeating until I'm blue in the face that Bactrim doesn't work on her infections. Or rather, it suppresses them for the time that she's on it, and then they come galloping back the second she's off. One memorable time, we missed a single dose six days into the course of medication and within twelve hours, she had a high fever and was screaming at the pain of peeing. And yet, I just keep getting these blank looks from medical professionals every time I say this as they point to lab reports that say the bacteria should respond to Bactrim. Well, usually they do, partially. But clearly there are some other bugs in there that don't, and we keep making them stronger every time we give her this freaking useless medicine.

Ahem. Not that I'm annoyed or anything.

Clearly we need a new daily antibiotic. But we were hoping to get a referral for a new urologist, one with a competent office staff and who actually makes eye contact. And we were also planning to switch the kids from their pediatrician to the family practitioner and I have been seeing (the waits in her office are like, five minutes, whereas I have never waited less than 45 minutes at the pediatrician, even when the waiting room is practically empty). So I'm sure what to do. I really don't want to go back the urologist, but do we ask the current pediatrician for a new referral? Get off our asses and do the paperwork for the switch quickly so the new doctor can give us a referrall, hoping that we can do it before the antibiotic for the infection runs out? Argh. Someone needs to tell K that being in the middle of a doctor switch is a very bad time to develop acute medical needs. Very inconsiderate of her. I don't suppose I could convince the bacteria to just put a pin in it and chill out for about a month until all of the paperwork is properly transferred, can I?

It's certainly too early for this

2011-11-01T23:40:00.000-04:00

I think the second day of November is definitely too early to be staring blankly at an empty entry box, but while I have a number of longer posts in the back of my head, K threw up tonight and now I'm too busy with my psychosomatic nausea to concentrate on them.

It's a good measure of how far I've come that this is the first time in a couple weeks I've been worried about throwing up. I still don't have any appetite and quite a lot of food is off-putting, but I can see a distant future where I might want to eat again and maybe even enjoy it. Now all I need to do is remind myself that just because K has a virus doesn't mean that I, the person who spends all day with her and has a weakened immune system, will get it too. Norman Vincent Peale, eat your heart out.

On the non-whiny front, my last birthday present from B arrived today: this t-shirt. I am very pleased with it.

Halloween

2011-11-01T00:39:00.000-04:00

Around 3:30 this afternoon, I decided that sanity dictated I not try to force a six-year-old to do any more academic work on Halloween and called an end to our school day. A couple hours later, I helped dress a princess:

and a dinosaur:

and we went out. Two hours later, all of our children were suitably hyper from sugar consumption. And I do mean all - after filching some candy, I became aware of a fluttery, squirming feeling in my lower abdomen. I guess it's true that you start feeling movement earlier every time - it was 17 weeks with K, 15 with Alec and now 14.

Anyway, a successful Halloween all around. I was particularly pleased that K got a huge charge out of passing candy out to the trick or treaters, which saved me from having to get up and go up and down stairs multiple times.

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Given my posting record over the past year, I was hesitant to commit to NaBloPoMo this year. But I have more time now and the fog of the first trimester is definitely lifting (although the physical fatigue is still there, probably because I still can't properly breathe two full weeks after first getting this stupid cold), so I'm hoping I'll manage it. And it's technically already November 1, so I have my first entry done!

Thirteen weeks, four days

2011-10-27T00:28:00.001-04:00

So I had another ultrasound on Monday, which looked just spiffy and I'm almost out of the first trimester, so we're going public. To my great surprise, I'm thirteen weeks pregnant. See?

Nothing even vaguely legume-like about this one (unlike the nine-week ultrasound, which bore a remarkable resemblance to a kidney bean). It's amazing what a difference four weeks makes.

Anyway, I'm freaking out a bit about having three children and homeschooling for the past couple months has been remarkably like trying to swim through pudding and we gave away a bunch of baby equipment. Despite all that, I'm remarkably attached to our little tadpole. In keeping with my tradition of nicknaming fetuses for medieval English saints, I'm calling it Morwenna for now (to be changed if it's cooperative at the 20 week ultrasound and turns out to be a boy).

Items

2011-10-10T01:09:00.000-04:00

* Tomorrow is Columbus Day, so everybody in the house has the day off (except for the fact that I kind of slacked off on schoolwork last Friday, knowing we would have the day free on Monday. But still not a full day of work). Everyone gets the day off together! I may swoon from the novelty.

* After swooning, I should go through the childrens' cold weather clothes and find any of K's stuff from last year that might still fit and dig up the 3t clothes and see how much I can get away with putting on Alec, given that that was the age when K discovered she was a girl and stopped being willing to wear so many dinosaur shirts, or really anything except dresses. I am willing to put him in some remarkably girly stuff, including jeans embroidered with flowers, but I'm not quite willing to send him out in public in a dress, unless he asked to wear it, of course.

* Alec is starting preschool this week at the local Jewish Community Center (thanks to the generosity of B's parents, for which I am very very very very very grateful). He wil spend two days a week playing in a well-equipped classroom and on a lovely playground, singing songs, fingerpainting and getting socialized with children his own age, while I will have two days a week with him out of my hair. Win-win. It comes with a family membership at the JCC, which gives us access to the gym and pool and gives us discounts on classes. It looks like K may finally get the ballet lessons she's been pining over and we can get her some very overdue swimming lessons. Yay!

* I have to hand it to Doctor Who: after a season that barely captured my attention aside from a few good moments, the finale completely grabbed me and brought me around from a general "meh" feeling about the next season to feeling a bit sorry it's not coming for another year. The thing I liked the most is that the Doctor solved his problems by being clever like he was in the past, not like the more recent incarnations where he uses his supreme coolness to bring about a magical Doctor ex machina solution. There are a lot of things I love about Russell T. Davies' reboot of Doctor Who, but his worship of the character to the point of actually deifying him at times isn't one of them.

Apropos of yesterday's post

2011-09-19T23:50:00.002-04:00

I was rather amused that all of the children's television we watched today was pirate themed. Disney channel had a marathon of "Jake and the Neverland Pirates" and NickJr pulled out all of the pirate episodes of their shows they had. It's kind of amazing that thanks to the Internet, it's now possible to not only create your own silly holidays, but have them catch on to the point that major television networks are observing them.

2011-09-18T23:23:00.000-04:00

Plus: a touch spoilery list of character descriptions for the movie which gives some good plot information.

I'm getting pretty darn excited about the upcoming Muppet movie. I admit, I'm fairly easy when it comes to the Muppets, but even so, I've haven't felt the need to rewatch much of what they've made from about Muppets from Space on. There seemed to be a long dry period where studio executives knew that the Muppets were a great source of cash, but didn't know how to find the right people to milk it. But in the past couple years, they're really started to put out some good stuff, starting with the viral videos and now (while I hesitate to judge anything based on previews), the previews for the new movie look not just good, but spot-on, like the people who made it really get what made the Muppets great.

The answer, of course, is that they needed to find some Gen-Xers who grew up with the Muppets and truly loved them. And now (I hope) it seems we have what Jim Henson finally dreamed of: people who understand the heart and soul of the Muppets with the colossal Disney marketing machine behind it. Because say what you will about Disney, they know how to promote and distribute the hell out of a product. There has been no danger of any old Muppet material languishing in obscurity once Disney got their money-making hands on it. So: we now have a full dvd library of Muppets to show our children, and Disney Channel's incessant promotion has gotten K really excited about the upcoming movie, which makes me very happy, because I think it would kill me to have to get a babysitter to go see a children's movie.

First week

2011-09-12T23:57:00.000-04:00

Week one of school has come and gone, leaving us mostly intact. Our workload is really light right now, and almost everything we're doing is review from last year, so the only real challenge has been to keep K interested. I've taken to doing things like telling her if she can pass the quiz at the end of the math lesson, she can skip the lesson. Because somehow it doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of either of our time to review counting to ten with a child who has been counting over a hundred for over a year. To my surprise, Science has gotten off to a poor start. Although perhaps not so surprising when you consider of all of the world of exciting, hands-on topics available in the universe of science education, they opted to start six-year-olds out with a rousing discussion of classification and the scientific method. Whoopee. I believe tomorrow we talk about safety. Be still my heart.Part of the reason things went poorly is that we started out last Tuesday watching a video from BrainPopJr (a website she loves), which, while it was on the scientific method, used magnets as the sample experiment to illustrate it. So she got really excited about magnets, only to have me open the textbook and attempt to interest her in talking about classifying animals, along with a discussion of the various things scientists do that made their jobs sound very dull indeed (Did you know scientists observe and record their findings? And communicate? Doesn't that sound like exactly what you were interested in when you were six? Yes! It's non-stop science excitement over here, I tell you). They sent us safety goggles, for crying out loud, so I'm taking that as a promise that science will start to get more hands-on and interesting.One very pleasant surprise has been how well FastForward, a set of reading computer games, has been going. It was a huge struggle to get K to do it last year. We finally wound up sitting with her the entire time, working the mouse for her and chivvying her endlessly. As a bribe, her teacher allowed us to let her skip one day a week, and we still struggled to finish the allotted amount every week.But now? She's doing it mostly on her own, with no complaint. To my great shock, she actually wants to do it every morning. There's one game we need to work the mouse on because it moves so quickly that even we have trouble responding quickly enough. And there are a couple games where I look over her shoulder and help talk her through some of the questions because I think she will learn more by my coaching her through finding the correct answer than getting the answer wrong on her own without any explanation as to why it was wrong. Plus, she's much more likely to stay interested if she's doing well, and I'm not about to mess with this sudden miracle turnaround in attitude. So one week down, going fairly well. Here's hoping for more of the same this week, hopefully trending in the more interesting and more challenging.

First day of school!

2011-09-06T00:47:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, school starts up again and we get back into a routine. I've been enjoying the reduced workload, but I think it will be good for us to have some more structure. Part of me wishes I were shoving K out the door tomorrow, but I have to admit I don't miss school mornings from last fall one tiny bit. Since we can't afford any daycare, we will be learning how to do school with Alec around full time. I'm hoping we can take heavy advantage of the fact that he is a rare sort of toddler that wants a morning nap. Looking at our current workload, we should be able to get everything done in a couple hours. Apparently we will add more stuff in later, but right now, we just have the basics - science, reading, 'rithmetic and fainting in coils (or Fast Forward, our nemesis from last year, a dreadfully tedious and slightly creepy reading computer game). And the stuff we add in will be things like music, art and phys ed, which will be much easier to do with a toddler around. Well, music and phys ed at least. The toddler's "help" with art projects is rarely appreciated by his sister.The school room is... useable, mostly. We will continue to chip away at the crap infesting our basement. It's much better than it was two months ago, at least.

Water, water everywhere

2011-08-28T02:26:00.000-04:00

I think Irene has mostly passed. We had a wet day, followed by a more exciting hour or so in the evening where the power surged a couple times, and now we're down to a middling sort of rain. People on Facebook were talking about tornado warnings, but they had passed by and I think it was for the western suburbs anyway. A couple more inches of rain forecast, but then there's SUN tomorrow. I wonder if all of the government buildings that were closed will be open after all. B was supposed to work tomorrow, before the state of emergency, which leaves me wondering if work will be back on.

So we got off pretty lightly, all things considered. I'm deeply grateful that we're not still in our old house, where the garage always took on water when it rained because it was on a downslope. During heavy rains, it would seep in through the basement door and on one memorable occasion, water started coming through the back of the garage wall into the utility room. Right under the litter boxes. There's nothing like the threat of spilled litter getting turned into concrete to keep you frantically mopping.

In any case, if this is the worst hurricane we get for the next fifty years, we will be very lucky.

Updates

2011-08-20T23:56:00.000-04:00

We've had rolling waves of visitors over the past couple weeks. First my best friend Sarah and husband, then my mother and her aide, then my aunt and uncle came down from Connecticut to help celebrate my mother's birthday. All delightful, of course, but very tiring by the end and making me want to crawl into my cave of introversion. Not conducive to posting, is what I'm saying. But life keeps going on, not necessarily in a very exciting way:

* We finally made it back to the urologist, and it has been determined K isn't completely emptying her bladder when she pees. So we're going back for some biofeedback sessions to try and train her to empty it better, and FINALLY have daily antibiotics.

* School is starting up again in two weeks. Fortunately, having my mother visit spurred us to muck out the basement and uncover the pile of boxes we called a school room. It wasn't the vision of organization and loveliness I had in mind, but both the family room and school room are now usable. We have a big box of school supplies and textbooks from our cyber school, which caused great excitement. It included goggles for science experiments, which alarms me a touch and thrills K no end. If you hear about any alarming explosions, you should probably check our house first.

* Our 11th wedding anniversary was two weeks ago and we didn't remember until the next day. I confess, the romance does wane a touch. The fact that the 11th anniversary is the steel anniversary didn't help matters. Although I suppose it would have been a good excuse to get each other swords. B's birthday was yesterday, and we DID remember that on the day, at least. He still didn't get a sword, although he did get Legos.

* Alec appears to be in a language development period again and is adding words and phrases at a great rate. I think "graham cracker" is my current favorite. Sometimes he will sit and obliging repeat words after us, and sometimes he decides to be two and answers any request of "Can you say x?" with "No!" And then we ask "Can you say 'I am not your performing monkey?'" and he grins and says "Eek eek eek!"

2 cars / Cars 2

2011-08-05T00:15:00.000-04:00

So after only two years of talking about getting a bigger car, we finally got all of our ducks in a row and went out on a Tuesday night and bought a 2008 Mazda5. We left on vacation three days later and oh goodness, it was the right choice. We came home with a bunch more stuff than we left with, and despite that, we could still see out the back window! Crazy!

The best way I can describe this car is that it's a cross between a minivan and a station wagon. It's about the same size and cargo space as a station wagon, but has a third row that can be folded up when grandparents are visiting. While I don't think I'd like to go on a three-day road-trip with six people in the car, it did work fine for trips to the beach as long as the short people were in the back row. It also has passenger doors like a minivans as well as seats that are higher up. I'm really enjoying not having to lean down to buckle children in.

One weird thing is an odd mix of really sophisticated and really cheap features. For instance, the heating system allows us to set a target temperature, and the car will adjust the fan as needed to get to the target. On the other hand, the headlights don't turn on automatically, so for the first time in nearly ten years, we have to remember to turn on the headlights when it starts to get dark and turn them off when we get out of the car. There are other small amenities lacking, like no power outlets. It's odd. But all in all, we're pretty happy.

*******

K is a big fan of the Pixar movie Cars, so it was a given that we would take her to see Cars 2, especially since it was coming out right after her birthday. We wound up seeing it twice - I took just her on a weekday afternoon when Alec was at the babysitter, and then she really wanted to take my mother to see it, so we all went while we were in Michigan.

I should say that overall, I liked it very much. It's funny, a good spy movie parody and of course has fantastic animation and all of the little fun Pixar touches. There are ways I liked it a lot more than the first movie, since sports movies tend to bore me and I couldn't actually predict the entire plot of this movie from the first ten minutes unlike Cars.

That said, there's something about Cars 2 that really bothers me.
Big spoilers ahead for Cars 2
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The main villains in the movie are lemons: models of cars like the Ford Pinto that have terrible motors and parts and break down all of the time. It's really not a wonder why lemons would become bitter enough to become villains. Everyone, including the heroes, views them with utter contempt and feels free to make fun of them to their faces and discriminate against them.

I recognize that the cosmology of the Cars world doesn't bear close examination, since it's about as tightly knit together as a chain-link fence. Still, it's hard not to see how creating a world where characters with bodies that don't work well are worthless and objects of contempt doesn't send a message - intentional or not - about disability and people with disabilities.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's really unnecessary to the story. These days, simply owning an oil company makes you a villain and the prospect of sitting on a huge oil deposit while not wanting the world to turn to alternative fuels is plenty of motivation for the plot. How the lemons deal with how they're viewed by others is clearly set up to contrast how Mater comes to accept himself for who he is despite how he is viewed by the rest of the world, but it's not really a good comparison. It's clear that Mater has always been accepted and valued in Radiator Springs and it's only once he spends, what, a week in the outside world that he realizes people see him as an idiot and maybe 24 hours elapse between that realization and his deciding he can like himself anyway. Compare that to spending your entire life being treated like that and being discriminated against. Also, Mater has spent his life towing lemons around and feeling superior to them, so he's not really in a position to tell them he knows just how they feel. It's sort of like saying, "Well, I've always been tone-deaf, so I totally know what it's like for you to have spent your life in a wheelchair!"

I'm fairly certain that Pixar didn't want to send the message that people with physical disabilities are worthless, but we often say things that send messages we didn't mean them to. I'm also much less willing to give a children's movie a pass on these things, because children are excellent at picking up subtext whether it's the subtext we wanting them to read or not, and unlike adults, they're still learning about society and peoples' places in it. Children with disabilities especially don't need to see a movie that sends that message.

I don't know. I don't have any ringing condemnations, just disappointment that Pixar once again has made an excellent movie with some stuff that really bothers me (I have some issues with The Incredibles as well). I'll probably still let K watch Cars 2 when it comes out on dvd and I'll probably spend a lot of time talking about disabilities to counteract it. It's not as satisfying an answer as declaring that we're boycotting Pixar forevermore, but more realistic.

Harry Potter and Tigger too

2011-07-25T02:13:00.000-04:00

I spent Thursday at the movies - I took the kids to Winnie the Pooh in the afternoon, and we adults went to Harry Potter that evening. What can I say? The high was 101, and while we had Harry Potter planned for a while, taking the kids to a movie sounded like a great way to spend the afternoon, given that ticket prices go up significantly on Fridays and we really needed to go to Ikea wednesday (incidentally, I discovered last summer that if you live close enough to one, Ikea is a great way to spend an afternoon - cheap lunch, and hour of free child care for K to have fun in the ball pit while Alec and I hang out in the children's department where they obligingly have samples of all of their toys set out to play with, not to mention lots of drawers and cabinet doors to open).

Winnie the Pooh (no cut for spoilers because really, it's Winnie the Pooh) was very sweet and a surprising throwback to the original 70s Many Adventure of Winnie the Pooh, the one where they simply animated stories from the books, with the cute addition of including the book and interaction with the animator in the story. You know, the good ones before they started simply beating A.A. Milne's corpse repeatedly to see how much more money might fall out of his pockets. Today's movie had the same animation style of the Shephard backgrounds with the more Disneyfied style of characters, plotlines taken from the books (although they went off in different directions from the books, but not in a way that seemed out of character for the books), and even 70s Disney style music and a cute animated short that made me think I was sitting on a square of carpet in my elementary school gym on one of the days they decided to troop us in to show us cartoons for a treat. It got two thumbs and two feet (she was literally leaping with excitement as I bought the tickets) from K, and I certainly recommend it with children in the 2 to 6 age range who need to get out of the heat.

Harry Potter was simply fantastic. It made me cry in several spots and always seemed true to the spirit of the book.
Inserting spoiler space because there are most definitely spoilers and while Blogger is able to put a cut in, it's hella complicated:
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Watching Lily Potter desperately tell her son how much she loves him as she waits to die - oof. This isn't the first time that being a parent has made these books and movies hit me harder (end of Goblet of Fire, for instance) but this one was the strongest for that. It's one of those things about having children - the idea of dying starts to not bother you so much about not being able to live anymore as the idea of leaving your children behind helpless without you.

There were changes in the final battle, but I felt they were all appropriate to make the action more cinematic. And don't shoot me, but I think it actually improved on the books in one place - one of my big problems with the book was how Snape gave his memories to Harry without any clue about why they're important, and then Harry just decides to go browse through them in the middle of the battle because he's so darn depressed. The movie's decision to have Snape say more (and thank you, Voldemort, for deciding to kill Snape in a way that would let him linger instead of your customary method of execution that kills people instantly - supervillain syndrome strikes again, I suppose), and to have Harry look at them in the lull between battles made a lot more sense.

So all in all, a good end to the series and definitely worth the babysitting money.

Home!

2011-07-21T01:16:00.002-04:00

Since Thursday night, actually. We headed out the evening of Friday the 1st, got to my mother's the next day, went up to b's parents' the next Wednesday and the starting wending our way back home the next Monday, with stops in Lafayette and Columbus. It was fantastic. We went to the beach, made sand castles and had a cookout. Alec sat straight down in Lake Michigan and laughed with glee while the surf did its best to knock him over. We saw family and friends and watched our children play with their similarly-aged cousins. We enjoyed copious amount of vacation ice cream. We saw two movies in the theater (one with children, one without. Too bad we got home just before Harry Potter came out, because my desire to see Green Lantern in the theater was never that big). We slept and slept. A lot. One morning, we even didn't have to get up with our son when he decided 5:30 was a great time to be up for the day.

I'm not sure I can communicate what the vacation was like without talking about why I quit the online job. The shorthand version, of course, is that working 35 hours a week and homeschooling was slowly killing me. But that doesn't give the full flavor. I was busy with children all day, so I had to work late into the night. Then I had to get up with the children at a normal time most mornings. We couldn't do anything in the evening because I had to work. B had to do all evening childcare and I couldn't help, even when I wanted to. I had no time to do anything, because even when I had some spare time, I was completely bone-deep exhausted.

So almost three weeks later of not working late into the night every evening, it's hard to convey just how relaxing it has been. I'm feeling actual ambition again to get things done. Like finally cleaning up the basement (the fact we have houseguests coming in three weeks is also a good impetus for that). Or exercise, something that's fallen shamefully by the wayside in the past year. I'm also trying this new thing where I take care of things right away instead of letting them pile up. Like I immediately scrape off the high chair tray and wash it off instead of leaving it to fester on the counter, or put things away. Crazy!

I've been working on this post for four days, so maybe I should just post it and start slowly writing about other stuff tomorrow. Because I have time now to do that sort of thing. It's good to be home.

2011-07-05T23:39:00.002-04:00

So! Since last Tuesday, we have:
-bought a car
-quit my online job
-driven to Michigan.

So just a regular, boring week. We're at my mother's right now, but we're driving up to B's parents' tomorrow, where there is only dial-up Internet. So I will update more when we're back in the land of wi-fi and expand a bit on the above. Hopefully now that I'm only working one job, I'll find a lot more time to update regularly.

Two

2011-06-28T03:21:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday, my gigantic baby turned two. I don't mean gigantic so much as in "My tiny baby is so gigantic!" but in that he routinely dwarfs the three-year-olds we meet. He is a big, solid kid. He is also our sweet, happy goofy baby. Happy birthday baby. You're the best two-year-old in the world.

But maybe not ready for potty-training yet.

Six

2011-06-28T00:19:00.001-04:00

My baby turned six last Tuesday. SIX.

It's hard to believe how big and capable she's gotten. And even more than her physical capabilities, she starting to develop the sort of empathy and ability to think about others that makes a parent delighted to discover they might not be raising a little sociopath after all. And despite spending pretty much all day with her for the past six months, I'm enjoying her company enough to sign up for another year of homeschooling. She's funny and creative and an excellent big sister.

That all adds up to a pretty great kid. Happy Birthday sweetheart.

I would like to note that she looks about 8 FEET LONG in this picture, which is pretty much accurate for how she's growing these days.

2011-06-20T02:30:00.000-04:00

K's fever continued unchanged all week, worrying me no end until Friday, it magically got lower and we able to get her temperature down to normal with ibuprofen. She still has the cough that developed towards the middle of the week and needs a daily nap, but is definitely getting better. Whew.

She does have another UTI, which we found out about only because we called the doctor on Thursday. She's on a new antibiotic that she's only been on once before and loved, because it tastes good, is once a day and gave us a full three weeks before the next UTI, which is quite a record these days. So yay for that. Pretty much everything else about our interactions with the medical community has me livid though. Reasons include, in no particular order:

1. The fact that her pediatrician doesn't use the strips for dipping into urine and immediately seeing if there's an infection. No, we have to wait for the urine to get sent to the lab, which takes a minimum of three days and nothing gets prescribed if she doesn't have a fever or is in pain. It does mean, however, that the infection gets to party on in her bladder for another three days before we do anything about it.
2. Every single doctor that has said, "She should be on daily antibiotics," yet not actually prescribed them. I absolutely agree. She should be on daily antibiotics, especially if it's what the urologist thinks it is. At our last urologist visit, the nurse practitioner we were seeing noted that the urologist had written orders for daily antibiotics in K's chart, but they didn't have a phone number for a pharmacy. And yet she didn't give me the daily prescription the urologist clearly thought K should have. Everyone seems to be in agreement on the daily antibiotics issue. And yet here I stand, my hand completely full of no prescriptions. WHY CAN'T SOMEONE JUST GIVE THEM TO US ALREADY?
3. I have a special hate-on for the nurse practitioner, who gave us the antibiotic I told her over and over doesn't work, even if the lab report says the bacteria they found can be killed by it and then failed to call us back after two days of us calling repeatedly to say that it wasn't working and K was in pain. I can put up with a certain amount of distraction, and an office where I have to wait for two hours just to check in. But my child in pain is unacceptable.

*****

We spent a quiet and sleepy Father's Day. B doesn't care about it too much, which has been good for me since I haven't been up to doing much the past three years. But this year I pulled it together to at least help K get him a gift and have a low-key sort of celebration. I've made it that far at least. I'm not at the point yet where I can participate in Facebook memes or post happy reminiscences about my father, but I'm not in the mood to talk about how much I miss him. Just a sort of carefully neutral fatherless Father's Day.

Weather continuing hot and humid

2011-06-14T03:05:00.000-04:00

Verdict of the doctor: no signs of any bacterial infections in the various orifices, probably a virus. Come back if the fever isn't gone by Friday. She took a urine sample, but K isn't having any of her normal symptoms, so I would be surprised if it were the primary cause of all this (it wouldn't shock me if there were another infection brewing, since when hasn't there been one brewing in the past nine months?).

This evening, K napped on the couch next to me and I could feel the heat radiating off of her without even touching her. The immortal UTI aside, we've been extremely lucky with our childrens' health. Neither of them has had a virus last for more than a couple days or an infection that hasn't cleared up promptly with antibiotics. A case of bronchitis as a baby has given Alec reactive airway disease, which means he gets a couple weeks of wheezing every time he gets a cold but nothing that a few nebulizer treatments won't help.

This is the longest either of them has been this sick in such a worrying way. I know it's probably a virus that she'll finally kick in the next couple days, or we'll get a call saying she does have another infection, but it's hard not to let my mind go in worrying directions the longer this goes on with no change.

Something is better than nothing, right?

2011-06-12T23:48:00.000-04:00

1. K and I got up too early last Wednesday morning and went to the children's hospital for another attempt at a vcug. They gave her versed this time, which makes children very sleepy and mellow, and thank goodness, because K was freaking out again. I was impressed with the nurse who gave her the medication, who was the right combination of kind and tough, and managed to get K to willingly take the medicine when she was more interested in curling up in a little ball and hiding her face. The doctor had warned me that she was on the older end of children that Versed works well for, and it just doesn't work at all for some children. I held her in a rocking chair for a while, talking about her grandmother's trip to Alaska and other distracting things, until the nurse came back in and I looked down and realized her eyes were closed. Clearly working for her, thank goodness. It was all pretty easy after that, since while she wasn't really asleep, she was pretty happily zoned out. Thankfully the test went very quickly (and everything is fine, or at least, what they were testing for isn't the cause of the UTIs). K was quite amusingly goofy and wobbly for quite a while.

We couldn't get an appointment with the urologist to actually go discuss this test until August. To say I am ... unhappy with this doctor's office is putting it mildly.

2. The last day of school was last Friday, and we celebrated by getting up waaay too early to go to Hershey Park for an end-of-year celebration with our cyber school. I have to say, if you're the amusement park type, Hershey Park is a pretty good one. Lots of rides, including water rides for hot days, clean as a whistle and the extra bonus of chocolate.

The end of the school year deserves its own post for purposes of reflection on successes, failures, plans for next year and general navel-gazing. We are planning on homeschooling again next year. But meanwhile, we're enjoying the general slothfulness of the first week of summer break.

3. Both of the children were out of sorts on Friday - Alec had woken up obscenely early on Friday (a general trand last week - what the hell child?), fell asleep on the way to daycare and when I carried him in and set him down on the couch, he opened his eyes just long enough to wiggle into a more comfortable position and went back out. He was asleep again when I picked him up, and he stayed asleep when I carried him out to the car, during the twenty minutes we waited for B to get out of work and for another hour after we got home.

K, meanwhile, had had a rather fragile day and was cuddled up with the sitter when I picked her up and inclined to be tearful for no reason any of us could see. I was utterly perplexed, since she loves the sitter, until we got home and she cuddled up to me on the couch and I suddenly realized she was burning up. We took her temperature : 103. Then we stuck the thermometer under Alec's arm and got the same result.

Oh. Well, that would explain it. They were both inclined to lie around a lot yesterday, although they would both perk up with application of ibuprofen. Alec was pretty much better last night. K, poor bunny, still had a fever tonight, and will probably go into the doctor tomorrow if she's not any better tomorrow. I keep quizzing her about any possible symptom of another UTI, but so far she seems clear. It's almost certainly a virus, given her brother was sick too and her father and I aren't feeling too chipper either, but it's hard not to be paranoid when you're constantly dealing with a chronic illness.

It was a very stinky day

2011-05-30T00:01:00.000-04:00

Friday, we discovered the source of the horrifying smell in the car was from a gallon of milk we had missed bringing in with the rest of the groceries that were purchased on Monday. Oh my. It took all week for it to get to the point that it actually burst, but burst it did and thank goodness it was in a cloth bag, because who knows how well a paper bag would have done. As it was, we wound up deciding that preserving a $1 grocery bag was not worth the work it would take to salvage it and threw it away.

That afternoon, on the way to pick B up from work, Alec threw up in the car. I think it was a combination of too long in the car and the heat, because he was perfectly chipper, albeit in possession of an unspeakably gross shirt. And once I got him into the library, I discovered the poopy diaper.

What a shame I had forgotten to bring the diaper bag.

Thankfully, we did have wipes in the car, so I cleaned off his carseat as well I could, and since the fabric is a decidedly unnatural artificial fiber, it didn't really soak in. But as for spare clothes or even a clean diaper - out of luck. This is how Alec wound up running around the library wearing nothing but a diaper cover I had rinsed out in the bathroom sink, with his pants stuffed inside to substitute for a diaper.

Say what you will about the relatives advantages of cloth versus disposable diapers, but cloth will definitely serve you better in this sort of emergency. I freely admit this is not the first time I have diapered my children with a piece of their own clothing, and as long as you have a useable cover, it works just fine to get you home.

Well, that was fun

2011-05-19T03:13:00.000-04:00

I took K to get her VCUG on Monday, to try and help figure out why she's getting so many infections. Instead, K FREAKED out. It hadn't been a good sign the night before when she had thrown a massive tantrum over something trivial and then cried herself to sleep over how scared she was. But I was hoping when she walked into the hospital and sat in the waiting room without a problem that it would be okay. Sigh. We got into the procedure room, we were handed a hospital gown and she absolutely lost it.

Thankfully, since we were at a children's hospital, they place an emphasis on not traumatizing small children, and the suggestion was quickly made to reschedule so we could perform it with sedation. I suspect this is pretty routine, since absolutely nobody who I talked to about rescheduling afterwards acted surprised. The scheduler in the urologist's office said sympathetically, "Yeah, you look like you put up a fight."

Of course, I still have to get her back in the hospital. Normally, I feel it better to be as honest with children as is developmentally appropriate, so I had told K about the test, emphasizing over and over again that they would use something so it wouldn't hurt. However, we all can see how that went. I find myself wondering if it would have been better not to tell her the details so she wouldn't have time to develop anxiety about it beforehand. Unfortunately, that's a bell we can't unring, so short of cold-cocking her before carrying her into the hospital, we're going to have to deal with more pre-test anxiety and freaking out until they give her the mellow juice.

Anyway, two days later I still feel emotionally wrung out from the ordeal, plus now I get to look forward to trying to do it again. I had really been hoping Monday would be our last day of warming the waiting room chairs at that hospital for hours at a time for a while.

Of course, the real question is - should I bring along the camera to record her as she recovers from the sedation, in hopes of getting a video to rival David After Dentist?*

*Note: before anyone decides to flame me, I wouldn't actually do this. Although I clearly don't have a problem sharing my childrens' lives over the internet, I feel like turning your child's vulnerable moment into a cottage industry is where my personal line for exploiting your child gets crossed.

Books so far this year

2011-05-06T03:18:00.000-04:00

I took a stab at keeping track of my reading this year, but here we are over a third of the way through the year and the list is getting too long to be able to get into every specific book in any detail. Fortunately, I haven't so much been reading new books as reading several new authors, which makes this much more efficient.

Rhys Bown, Her Royal Spyness series : This is a mystery series, starring Lady Georgianna, a young noblewoman living in London in the 1930s. Great-granddaughter to Queen Victoria and 34th in line to the throne. Unfortunately, her branch of the royal family is quite broke and her dreadful sister-in-law makes the family home in Scotland unbearable, so she is attempting to live independently while being too well-born to be able to earn a living. She scrapes by while periodically getting called upon by Queen Mary to do various favors, like attempt to distract the Prince of Wales from that dreadful Wallis Simpson. But really none of this gets across how hysterically funny these books are. Imagine the love child of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers (conveniently ignoring the fact that Dorothy was FAR too proper to do something so scandalous) with a generous dollop of Cold Comfort Farm (there's something very Flora Poste-ish about Georgie), and you begin to get the tone of these books.

Jennifer Crusie : I admit, I've been on a kick of light reading. She's a romance author, but her books are intelligent and well-written, and usually very funny. Her female protagonists tend to be intelligent women in their late 30s with real bodies who enjoy eating, as opposed to Barbie dolls in their early 20s. Her male protagonists aren't asssholes who make you wonder why anyone would ever want to get within 15 feet of them. There are very few moments of even slightly dubious consent. They're really about as good as a romance novel can get, particularly when you're in a mood for light and entertaining but don't want to have to turn your feminism off.

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games trilogy : And now for something completely different, a dystopian future where teenagers are chosen by lottery once a year to fight each other to the death for everybody's entertainment on tv. Hijinks ensue! Need I say that it isn't a good idea to get too attached to any of the characters? Truly, not so much the series I would recommend for someone who wants something light and easy. But much like Battlestar Galactica, despite the fact that I'm generally feeling too unsettled about the state of the world to be able to enjoy dystopia, this is just too damn good for me to put down.

100 years of waiting

2011-05-01T00:55:00.002-04:00

I took K to the urologist last week, to see if we could find an answer to why she gets a new UTI every time she turns around. We got a maybe answer (this is the part where I hedge because I'm starting to feel like K's getting to the age where she deserves some privacy on these issues. So rather than get into the whole saga, Google "dysfunctional elimination" if you want to), and get to go back in a couple weeks for a delightful test called a VCUG, which involves a urinary catheter. I anticipate great fun getting K to sit still for that. Sigh. It will be at a children's hospital, so they should be used to dealing with uncooperative children.

Mostly, I'm hoping the office staff will be a little more on the ball this time around. We had a 9:45 appointment and didn't get home until 1:30, due to little things like the fact that it took over an HOUR just to check us in. Then we saw the actual doctor for about 30 seconds and a highly distracted nurse practitioner the rest of the time, if by "see" you mean "Spent five minutes someplace else for every two minutes she spent with us." And part of that approximately ten fragmented minutes was spent informing K that she needed to give up what the NP saw as a bad habit (completely unrelated to K's urinary tract) and outlined the behavior reward system we were apparently going to implement. All without every even directly speaking to me, the parent sitting right there in the room, let alone thinking that maybe things like this should be up to me, K'S MOTHER. Plus we already use a good bahavior chart, so her stupid star chart would be kind of redundant.

So now I have another reason to want the UTIs to end, so I don't have to keep finding myself wasting my quickly waning youth in a waiting room while waiting to get passive aggressive unwanted parenting advice.

Settling in

2011-04-05T02:46:00.002-04:00

We have been in the new house for two weeks now, and things are settling down. We're in that somewhat unfortunate state where the living areas are pretty much set up and we have all of the things we need for everyday life, so we can just ignore all of those unpacked boxes downstairs and on the back porch, right?

Well, not if we want to set up the basement bedroom as a schoolroom. Currently, it's piled high with tubs of outgrown clothes and a refrigerator and dryer. We meant to put the refrigerator (and portable dishwasher, currently living on the back porch) up on Craigslist before we moved, but didn't manage it, so they came with us. We had intended to sell our washer and dryer as well, but we discovered the ones in this house are currently lacking such amenities as knobs for changing the settings and don't work well, so we brought ours over here instead. Only neither the owner nor could get the old dryer unhooked from the gas line, so we have a dryer sitting in our spare bedroom instead.

Despite the rogue appliances, we are definitely chipping away at the piles. We still need to do a big toy organization and general purge (which I meant to do when packing, but I didn't wind up doing much of the packing). And one thing I love about this house? It's so big that even with piles of boxes and crap all over the place, I'm not going crazy from the clutter, feeling like I'm surrounded and everything is closing in on me.

We're slowly getting back into normal life as well. School has not been high on K's list of priorities in the past couple weeks. Everything was in chaos, grandparents were here B's parents, to whom we are unbelievably grateful for all of the help they gave us moving and cleaning), and she's developing another fucking UTI (she scored a referral to a urologist after the last one, but that's not for another three weeks), none of which make any of us inclined to concentrate too hard on school. Unfortunately, we still have to do it. I'm hoping getting the schoolroom set up will help everyone's focus.

I keep meaning to write more. Every night, I open a page to write a post and somehow the time to write never really materializes. It was somewhat gratifying when I was recently describing my schedule to someone and from their reaction it was clear that apparently working 35+ hours a week and homeschooling IS a lot of work, so it's not just me, since sometimes I feel like I'm just malingering and I really could find time to do more.

Anyway, I'm planning on posting on how homeschooing is going plus developmental updates for both children. As a teaser: Alec's latest phrase is "Oh no!" It makes me want to engineer minor calamities so I can hear him wander around saying "Ohhhh nooooo!" like a little toddler Cassandra.

Distracted

2011-03-18T03:30:00.000-04:00

Our moving date is currently this Saturday the 19th. So far, B has been the hero of the move, progressively packing and taking a couple loads of stuff over the new house every night for the past couple weeks. Of course, this is because he has time to do this, whereas between homeschooling every day and working every night, I have approximately 15 minutes of spare time every day. And I will probably to the lion's share of the unpacking. But he's still heroic.

Equally heroic are his parents, who are paying for movers to come this Saturday to move all of the furniture and really heavy stuff. Yippee! Although the price we were quoted was reasonable enough that if we do another in-town move in the future, I think we will do the same thing even if we have to spend our own money, because it would be worth it.

I am going to be so thrilled when we reach the point in our lives where we feel confident that we can just buy a house and stay there for the next 50 years. We're not there yet because we don't really want to stay in Philadelphia, and even if we stayed in the area, we want out of the city. But someday on that glorious day, we will move our stuff in and gleefully start accumulating stacks in the basement that our children will be forced to excavate someday when the time comes to move us assisted living.

If we did decide that it looks like we're not going anywhere for quite a while, I think we would strongly consider putting an offer in on the new house. I could burble on for quite a while on all of the things I like about it, and not just the ways it improves on our old house that you would never think to look for, like kitchen counters that haven't been painted (I'm all agog at the thought of what the counters must have looked like for them to decide that house paint would be an improvement. No, not even some sort of enamel paint, just flat white). It's more things like the walk-in closet in our (huge) bedroom. I think 3/4 of the reason I started wanting to move is the lack of closet space here - we have a tiny closet in our bedroom taken up entirely by 's work clothes, and my clothes are in the similarly tiny closet in Alec's room. Or the ample number of grounded outlets, which is something you don't truly appreciate until you've lived in a few old houses and worried that the electrical system would rise up and kill you someday in revenge for the abuse you have to put it through to power our modern lifestyle.

*****

Oh. My. God. I don't think I ever could have dreamed how badly Daylight Savings Time would affect us this year. One of the things I love about homeschooling is that we don't have to haul K out of bed in the morning for school. The fact that she is both very slow to wake up and is not at all a morning person is how I know she's certainly our child. But the downside of this is that if she stays up too late, like, just to pull an example out at random, her body thinks it's an hour earlier than it really is, she doesn't have to get up in the morning and doesn't have anything forcing her onto the new schedule. Thus began the pattern this week of her staying up too late, then sleeping in, falling asleep for a brief time in the evening and using that to have the stamina to stay up half the night. Last night, she was up past 3 AM after a half hour nap earlier that evening. Then we both slept until noon today. Insane. Not that I mind being able to sleep in, since I was also up that late working, but we can't keep that schedule.

Thankfully, she fell asleep at a relatively sane 10 tonight, and will have to get up to go to the babysitter's tomorrow morning and then the movers are arriving at 9 Saturday, so that will give us a couple days of forced rising to get her back onto a better schedule. Because even though she's such a big kids that she lost her first tooth last night and got her first pair of shoes in kid sizes instead of toddler sizes today (what can I say? For such a tall kid, she has teeny tiny feet), she's not ready to keep teenage hours yet.

*****

And finally, we didn't get to have corned beef and cabbage today, because getting up at noon precluded getting it into the crockpot on time, but we'll do that tomorrow. Astonishingly, I managed to get both myself and K dressed in green today despite completely forgetting about St. Patrick's Day, even though K has very few green clothes. But even if we're too distracted to do a proper celebration, here's a little something to honor St. Patrick's Day:

2011-03-06T23:11:00.000-05:00

Last Monday's schoolwork delaying tactics:

Sharpening her pencil to the Platonic ideal of a sharpened point.

Writing secret notes.

"I need a break!" After a whole five minutes of work.

Wearing her coat as pants.

"You know who's my friend Mom? You!"

Aw, that's sweet honey. Now get back to work.

******

A week ago Friday, I worked at the library, and worked another four hours that night. Saturday, I was alone with the children while B worked. Then I worked at the library Sunday before starting the weekly grind over again on Monday.

It used to be I felt quite put upon by weekends like this, because of how tiring they were and how long I had to go to look forward to any time off again. Now, however, Saturday was positively relaxing because instead of K going to the babysitter with her brother friday, she stayed home with B and they did schoolwork. So we don't have to do any schoolwork Saturday.

I suppose it just goes to show, if you're feeling tired and overworked, take on another huge obligation and you'll feel so much better when you just don't have to do that.

*****

K found a pair of Elmo slippers in a closet last week, a pair my mother gave her when she was two that are now long outgrown. They fit her brother just fine though. We put them on him this afternoon and he walked around with them, utterly pleased and intrigued by the sudden appearance of fuzzy red monsters on his feet. He would take a couple steps and then pause to look at them with a pleased little smile on his face. Step, step, lift foot carefully for inspection, grin.

Before we put them on him, he was carrying them around lovingly in a big armful along with his stuffed Big Bird. I'm very pleased about the Big Bird. For the longest time, his only interest in stuffed animals was in how far he could fling them. But once he hit 18 months, he made a huge leap forward in imaginative play and began playing with them along with dolls in fairly typical baby care-type play. So when he started lavishing a lot of attention on the stuffed Big Bird at daycare, I went out and bought him one and it's definitely been a big hit.

I've been hoping to get him attached to a lovey, in hopes that it will help in the process of getting him to be able to get himself back to sleep. And a stuffed Big Bird is ideal, because they're all over the place and easy to replace (particularly when you live ten miles away from Sesame Place). K decided to imprint on a stuffed rabbit that had been mine as a child, so it was basically irreplaceable. As an added bonus, it's a mother and baby bunny, so in addition to the danger of losing the mother rabbit, there's a much greater danger of losing the baby, which happened for six months at one point. Part of the joy I get when I see Alec asleep with Big Bird clutched in his arms is how frigging cute it is. But another part of it is knowing that there are a thousand replacements available if anything happens to it.

Miscellanea

2011-02-21T02:31:00.000-05:00

On entertainment:

We just started rewatching Babylon 5, and I have absolutely no problem seeing why it took me a while to warm up to it. I can see the seeds of the characters I grew to love, but holy stilted dialogue, Batman.

In other brain-rotting, we enjoyed Downton Abbey on PBS immensely. I think there's something about a highly regulated society that makes for the best soap operas, probably because there are so many more ways to transgress, and the stakes are so much higher. People sleeping together in these dissolute days means very little, but 100 years ago, just the hint of impropriety could exile someone forever. That makes for the really good drama.

I'm very glad to find out that there's a second season coming, because the number of dangling plotlines. I hope we don't have to wait an entire year or more for it to come over. I may have to find out when it's showing in the UK so we can acquire it early.

On children:

K's latest entertainment is cleaning things. She's really not too bad at it, going at things with a spray bottle of cleaning solution so diluted that it's practically water and a cleaning cloth. Although we're still dealing with the aftermath of last week when she decided to clean the bathroom with Goo Gone, on the whole this is a hobby I encourage. I was rather bemused to find myself having to say yesterday, "You may not clean the bathroom until your schoolwork is done!"

On Wisconsin:

Being a household that is largely supported by a unionized public worker, we've been following the events in Wisconsin pretty closely and feeling a great deal of solidarity with the demonstrators there.

I... don't even know how to respond to the things I hear about this. I can say that while I'm sure there are ways that unions can create abuse, most of the frothing I hear about lazy union workers who get fat salaries and benefit packages for no work are rather heated fantasies. Certainly every union worker I know works quite hard for the same number of hours as everyone else. B's good benefits package more or less makes up for the fact that he's making less money than he would in the private sector. The number of times B has had to fear for his job in the four years we've been here certainly shows that it's possible to get fired from a union job.

And then there are the people who feel it's preferable that other people lose there entire pension or even livelihood to their having to pay another $30 a year in taxes. I'm not sure my response to this is printable, except to say to the people insisting that we all have to make sacrifices that, well, we all have to make sacrifices, so why are you insisting that other people's sacrifices be so much bigger than yours?

And the attitude I understand least of all is the people who seem to resent the fact that we've found a way to make our working lives better. The chain of logic seems to go: your workplace treats you well and mine treats me like crap. Therefore I want to take away any protection you have so you can be treated like crap too. Er, I can think of better solutions to this problem. I mean, while B's benefits package is good, I don't consider it unreasonably generous, I consider it reasonable because it's the sort of benefits everyone should get. The only area that it's really better than many benefit plans it that we get very good health insurance and don't have to pay a lot for it. This is something everyone deserves. Wouldn't you rather work to get what we have instead of trying to take it away?

Government workers are struggling and sacrificing in the bad economy like everyone else - B hasn't had a raise in two years, there have been multiple waves of layoffs and it's entirely likely his next contract will include the city having the ability to impose furlough days. But being part of a union means that even though we work for what is quite frankly a fairly corrupt city government that is scrambling to deal with a lack of money, we can feel like we have a measure of protection. I can think of several instances where B's union prevented the city from doing something abusive, and goodness knows how many things they haven't tried to do because of the union being there. I can't imagine how bad it would get if that protection were taken away.

And in other news

2011-02-13T01:55:00.002-05:00

We have found a new house. A really really nice house.

One of the nice things about the current real estate market is that it's not just good for buyers. It's also very good for renters because the people who can't sell their houses are often renting them out instead. And since they're just trying to cover the mortgage, not make a profit, you can get quite a nice price indeed for a house that's been fixed up to sell.

So it's not just that we're getting:

- Much more space
- A lovely setup in the basement with a family room with a wood-burning stove and an in-law suite that will serve as a great space for having a schoolroom connected to a playroom for optimal older-kid-teaching and toddler-entertaining
- A fenced backyard with a storage shed, across the street from some nice woods

The fact that they were trying to sell the house means that we also get:

- Nice, up-to-date appliances that aren't the cheapest models available
- Clean walls and carpets that aren't Rental Beige (and thankfully also not orange shag)
- New, energy efficient windows and doors

All for not much more than we're paying now. Groovy.

Really, the only real drawbacks I can think of are that it's not that convenient to a grocery store and all of the banisters are metal which will make it hard to set up baby gates, a necessity in a three-story house. In particular, we need them on the stairs going up to the third floor, which are fairly steep and lead down to a brick wall at the bottom. Ai-yi-yi. We like our toddler's brains on the inside, thank you. Right now, he's terrified of going down stairs on his own, but he'll outgrow that eventually and I think my hair will go entirely grey at that point, the hair that's remaining after I've torn large portions out, that is.

And, of course, the REAL disadvantage of the new house: now we have to move. Sigh. Can't I just hope for helpful moving fairies to arrive and magically transport all of our stuff to the new house, conveniently organizing and purging in the process? Sounds like a plan to me!

Homeschooling, week 2

2011-02-08T03:21:00.002-05:00

Last week, K read, with heavy prompting, a little phonics book today of the "Pat and Nan sat" variety. I think the unwillingness to read out loud is something that will probably improve as she gains confidence with reading. I suspect the unwillingness to give answers unless she's really sure of them is something that will go on for years.

I am quite sure that the problem is that she doesn't want to take risks, not that she doesn't understand. Last week, in the middle of a lesson where we were adding letters to -an and I was struggling to get her to read "fan" and "pan," she said "If we add 'K' we'll have the beginning of 'kangaroo.'"

...okay then. You can't get "man" but you can extrapolate "kangaroo"?

Her last school was working on more of a whole word approach to reading while this school is using phonics, and I think phonics definitely suits K better. It gives the student tools to figure things out on their own, instead of expecting them to simply memorize things and be able to repeat them back on demand. This suits K's learning style and personality vastly better. After only two weeks, she's really getting the idea of sounding things out. Today, we were about to close the tray on the dvd player and she looked at a label and said "C-c-c-close" and then hit the right button. Not too shabby.

We're getting a better rhythm to our days. We start out with a recorded message from her teacher and a round of educational computer games assigned by the school, then work on the parent-taught lessons. If we're on the ball, we can have the vast majority done by lunch. The majority of the work isn't hard at all for her, but my goal has never been to stretch her to her limits academically but just to prevent her from having to sit there all day doing stuff that's too easy for her over and over again. Right now, she's engaged, she's learning, and she has plenty of free play time, which is what a kindergartener needs.

Homeschooling: week one

2011-01-31T02:47:00.000-05:00

This was a long and somewhat odd week, what with the city being paralyzed by snow on Thursday. In some ways, it made life easier, since B was home Thursday to help out, although I think that was more or less balanced out by Alec also being home instead of at daycare.

Anyway, we've survived our first week of homeschooling. Here are some notes, mostly for my own use:

Curriculum:

We are using Calvert reading and math, which are pretty straightforward. There's a bit of prep needed ahead of time, mostly to make sure we have the math materials ready and have found all of the readings in the various reading books we've been given (I'm not sure if this is a "Starting in the middle of the year so it's assumed we know how to find readings" issue or they're just not being explicit enough, but it took me quite a while to find everything I needed on our first day because we have three different reading-related books and they didn't say which one we could find the stories we needed in).

Science and social studies, on the other hand, are requiring quite a bit more preparation and thought because so far, they're just telling us what to talk about without a textbook to read. Social studies, at least, has a list of suggested books you can read with your child. Science last week, however, blithely told me to discuss land masses, glaciers, the water cycle and air with very little guidance. Thankfully, I was able to message my personal librarian to ask him to bring some books home.

So far, of all things, What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry has been by far the most useful book for this. Social studies has been a discussion of various professions, and even though it was written in the seventies, the sections on riding on airplane and taking a train trip were still surprisingly relevant (although the flight attendants served food. How quaint!). And while I used library books for the overcomplicated science lesson, I later opened What Do People Do All Day? to discover a perfectly good explanation of the water cycle, and also realized that we had his Great Big Air Book, which would have been very useful as well. Sadly, the next social studies lesson is fishermen, and Richard Scarry seems to be letting me down on that topic, so I'll actually have to find something else to be my social studies textbook.

Organization:

So far, our days are pretty free-form, but I would like to be a bit more strict about scheduling so we don't wind up having to do work in the evening. Part of the problem last week was unanticipated breaks while I did things I should have prepped ahead of time, like when I found myself having to cut out 78 letter cards, so hopefully we'll have less of that this week.

The workload is pretty reasonable. We're supposed to be spending five hours a day on schoolwork (since this is a public school, there are attendance requirements. We also had to send them vaccination forms, despite the fact that we're not coming in contact with any other human beings), but this is all on the honor system, so as long as we're getting everything done, well, no one is the wiser as to how much time it actually took.

Toddler wrangling is another area we need to work on. Right now, he's still going to daycare Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we have those days free, but there's still Mondays and Wednesdays to figure out. He's pretty good about being self-entertaining, but he does have a tendency to want to get in the middle of whatever K is doing. My best strategy so far has been to create an obstacle course between him and us, so he has a number of things to distract him as he comes toward us.

Another aspect of organizing our days is that instead of the various work options laid out, I apparently have decided on 5. None of the above, continue your normal schedule and level of childcare and just add a ton more work on top of it. Ai yi yi. Doing the math, working 20 hours a week plus childcare is about the same amount of money as working ten hours a week without childcare, but I don't feel ready to have both kids all day every day while we're still figuring out the homeschooling thing. So I've been trying to get some work done during the day and haven't been doing too badly. We'll see how long I can keep this up.

The student:

K seems to be enjoying pretty much everything except Reading. We're definitely going to need to stock up on strategies for when she doesn't want to do any work at all, but mostly she's been pretty good about doing schoolwork. I suspect the Reading issue is that she's always been very shy about demonstrating knowledge until she's quite certain about something. That doesn't mix well with being asked to sound out words, which so far she mostly refuses to try to do, even when it's things I know she's capable of doing. She's happy to listen to stories and to work on handwriting, but the phonics lessons are going to be our big sticking point, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Does anyone know any good strategies for encouraging the reluctant student who is too shy to reveal what she knows?

"You don't know inefficiency until you try to reach consensus with 100 Quaker-educated teenage radicals"

2011-01-21T02:21:00.002-05:00

The life of a librarian, as seen through Youtube:

Logistics

2011-01-21T02:12:00.000-05:00

After some confusion over faxed forms and time on their 800 line, I went to finalize our enrollment at the online school Wednesday. Included was a big warning that we had to withdraw K from her current school before enrolling because she can't be enrolled in two schools at once or THE UNIVERSE WILL EXPLODE from the logical impossibility.

I looked at the enrollment date they gave us and it was... that day. I see. Was I supposed to just go yank K directly out of class or could it wait until 3? Cue the second phone call and it was explained that there could be a little overlap, but I was able to fix it so K can finish out the week in her current school and start homeschooling on Monday.

So we start homeschooling on Monday.

Gulp. Oh my.

I'm still working on the logistics of working and homeschooling. Currently I'm working 20 hours a week at the online job and a varying number of days between Friday and Sunday at the library. Alec goes to the babysitter's three days a week; we have already arranged that both kids will go on Fridays so that I can work at the library any Friday I want. The cost of that one day a week will take pretty much everything I earn at the library, but I consider it worth it to have something that says "library" on my resume and I'm getting lots of good experience there. I more or less consider it highly beneficial volunteer work.

That leaves the online job and the fact that 1) trying to do it late at night and then get up in the morning might kill me and 2) I kind of hate it and want to quit. The problem with that is that the city now owes B two raises, but it's not looking like we're going to get them any time soon. We should get a nice chunk of change in back pay once we do, but much like Elijah, we can't count on it coming at any defined point. But without that raise and without essentially any of my income, money will be quite tight. So here are the options as I them, from least to most income:

1. Quit my online job, keep kids in daycare on Fridays. Advantage: life will be much happier and more relaxed. Disadvantage: life will be much poorer and I'm not sure there will be room in the budget for a car payment. Also, our plan for socializing K revolves around sending her to classes and afterschool programs, and we won't be able to afford anything except the super-cheap offerings from the city rec centers.

2. Quit my online job, give up all daycare and do what we did last year, switch off who works Friday and Saturday. Advantage: we'll have more money. Disadvantage: wow, that's quite a lot of quality time with my children. I'm a generally happier person when I get a bit of time off from my children. Also, while we'll be doing better financially, we'll be in the same financial position that made me decide to go find a second job. Also, I really like our babysitters and will feel guilty if I take the kids away from them entirely since they so clearly love them.

3. See if I can switch to a similar job with fewer hours, only have kids in daycare on Fridays. Advantage: will be making about as much money as I am now after paying for daycare, so we'll be doing relatively well financially and will be able to afford higher quality classes for K. Disadvantage: Taking care of kids all day and working in the evening won't be as bad, but it will still be stressful. There will still be the hate-my-job factor, although I might hate it less if I did it less.

4. Keep my job, find someplace cheaper than our babysitters to send Alec four days a week (as much as I love them, our babysitters are too expensive to use fulltime), use babysitters on Fridays. Advantage: We'll have money, having Alec in daycare will make teaching K much easier. Disadvantage: The work Thursday night, work all day Friday, work Friday night and possibly then work Saturday combo is already slowly killing me and adding homeschooling on top of that? Ack. I'll really miss Alec if he's in daycare full time. And did I mention I really hate my job and want to quit?

Right now, I'm kind of leaning towards quitting and trying to live frugally for a while, although I waffle towards the try to work fewer hours option depending on how I'm feeling about my job at any given moment.

Well, I have at least another week of working because I was put on a special project and I'm a good enough sport not to quit in the middle of it. Meanwhile, we're all getting excited and nervous. K is really excited about not having to wear a uniform any more. I am super excited about not having to drag her out of bed in the morning and get her someplace on time. We have also gleefully ignored homework for the past two nights - what are they going to do, fail her? Friday, I think B and I are going to Ikea to get K a desk for her computer (that the school sends us for free! And they're even sending us money to help pay for Internet! It's amazing what a school can afford to offer when they don't have to pay for buildings). Then I suspect we're going to have to do another major rearrangement to set up the living room for optimal learning/toddler entertainment. Because we're starting this all on Monday. Whee!

Homeschooling

2011-01-13T20:27:00.000-05:00

So I guess we're going to start doing it.

We had a parent-teacher conference before Christmas. I've been trying to write about it ever since, but never seem to find the time, and then the weekend before Christmas happened, which is the reason a lot of stuff I meant to do before Christmas didn't happen.

Anyway, we learned a number of things, many not surprising (our child is stubborn and likes to go her own way. Imagine our shock). But there were two things that stood out:

1. They have a two hour block of reading instruction every morning (and related, they're not supposed to have any formal playtime, but she has a good teacher who finds ways to give it to them by calling it other things). TWO HOURS of expecting five-year-olds to sit still and study the same subject, not to mention there's also math, science and social studies to cover over the course of the day. And then she gets to go home to at least another 45 minutes of homework.

2. One thing K needs to work on is that she tends to space out and fidget (gosh, I wonder why). And apparently that's fine now, but it won't fly in first grade, when apparently all six-year-olds are expected to stay on task at all times.

And perhaps the most important thing is that while K will vary on whether or not she says she likes school (usually based on whether she doesn't want to get out of bed or what sort of day she's had at school), she will very consistently say she's bored.

I don't want to make it sound like my precious genius is too good for public school. My concern is that 1) this curriculum is seriously developmentally inappropriate for five-year-olds and 2) if K's only good coping method for dealing with what must be a huge amount of repetition during the school day will start getting her in trouble, we have a real potential problem. And while moving might get her into a school with less crowding and better test scores, the curriculum is going to be the same.

So our conclusion is that while our preference for K's education is school, the Philadelphia Public Schools aren't it.* So after a lot of talking and thinking and discussing this with just about everyone we visited over Christmas, a couple weeks ago, we took a deep breath and pulled the trigger in the form of applying to Commonwealth Connections Academy, an online charter school. I don't feel quite prepared to come up with a curriculum myself this quickly, and truthfully, I almost always do better if I have a bit of external pressure motivating me.

There's a lot of logistics to figure out yet, ranging from what to do about my job to how to rearrange the house to how to manage several hours of schoolwork a day with an active toddler in the house. Part of me is really excited - lately, it's just so cool having a five-year-old around who gets so excited about learning - and part of me is terrified that I'll be scouting out unmarked graves in the backyard within a month. But we're really doing it.

*This is the place where I say that I don't think every public school here is terrible - there are certainly individual ones that are very good. But the conpetition for spots in charter schools, the only place we would escape the standard curriculum, is such that we would have to apply to every charter school within a five mile radius to possibly get a chance at a spot. And I'm definitely a big proponent of public schools in general. I'm the product of an excellent public school system and sometime I may treat everyone to my treatise on: Our Education System: Why It's Not That Damn Bad.

I'm also conflicted about leaving the public school system, since I generally feel it's not going to get better if people abandon it. By withdrawing my child, I'm also removing potentially involved parents, the influence and good test scores a good student provides, and perhaps most importantly, the funding that K provides. I mean, it's not like the cost of the facilities or teachers will change if K leaves, so the money they're losing is a lot more than what they would save. I generally feel that homeschooling parents probably should do something to make up for what they're taking out of the system. Fortunately, I think we have that more than taken care of by choosing to be underpaid civil servants in the public library system. We both provide for the education system all the time. But I've said more than once that it's not fair to make my child my agent of social change, and my primary responsibility is to prepare her for adult life in the best way I can.

2011-01-08T23:20:00.001-05:00

1. K has another fucking UTI. We had gone several weeks this time and I had really hoped, but her pee started to get The Smell right before Christmas, and I knew I should get her checked, but she swore up and down it didn't hurt and we were so darn busy. And then this week she spiked a fever and it very definitely hurt. We did at least get a different antibiotic this time, one that doesn't taste horrible going down and then give her reflux, meaning she got to re-taste it all day long. This one actually tastes pretty good.

Maybe this one will work. Dammit.

2. We've progressed to looking at actual houses lately, although we haven't found anything that's totally blown our hair back yet. There was the one that was pretty nice except for the little issue of its only yard facing onto a twelve-lane insanely busy road. The house yesterday where they totally lied about the square footage, unless they were including the unfinished, low-ceilinged basement.

Today, we saw a house we might actually take. The positives were considerable: a nice neighborhood with a number of families (if the number of houses with swingsets is any indicator), reasonably sized yard on a quiet street, excellent size, great layout downstairs, good layout and good cabinet space in the kitchen, reasonable bedrooms with decent closet space, a decent sized finished room downstairs to serve as a playroom, good storage space and an excellent rent.

But here are the negatives: being instantly blinded by the gold-striped entryway, an almost equally blinding yellow kitchen, ORANGE shag carpeting in the dining room and living room, and perhaps most scary is how much time someone must have put in putting up that flocked wallpaper in the stairway. Basically, this house was decorated by Austin Powers. We can live with all of that, but the stove is an incredibly tiny wall model and dates from the 60s, possibly the 1860s.

We don't really bake that often, certainly not large things like turkeys. The stove is big enough for casseroles or a single loaf of bread, and probably a pizza, which pretty much covers the majority of our oven use. We would probably have to buy new baking sheets though.

Hmm... typing all of this out makes me lean a lot more towards taking it. I suppose my real problems are 1) it's hard to be truly enthusiastic about moving into a 60s shag lair, and 2) I really want to move into some nice spacious Midwestern house with about 2000 square feet. But Philadelphia houses just aren't like that and we can't possibly afford that much space. But it's nice to dream, isn't it?

Oh yes, almost none of the electrical outlets are grounded, which is workable but a pain in the ass.

So would you rent a house that left its heart in the 60s if the price was right?

Happy new year!

2011-01-02T23:40:00.003-05:00

Well, it seems I've survived after all. I made it through the two days of extra work followed by the weekend in New York for the funeral, then through the four days we had left to prepare for travelling for Christmas. We pulled it all off and have even managed to enjoy ourselves.

The funeral weekend was, well, a funeral, and for someone who died too soon and will be awfully missed. It's always a bittersweet feeling to those occasions, where you're so glad to be able to see family you don't see often, but for the most awful reason. So it was a good service and we saw people we were happy to see, and it was a draining weekend.

After that, it was the whirlwind of last minute present shopping and packing and occasionally doing things like actual paying work. I had many more plans to do things and make things that were pretty much killed by having to go out of town, but we did at least get the shopping done and even managed to have the car packed and ready to go so we could get out of town promptly after B finished work on Thursday. It was kind of astonishing, really. For once, we left pretty much when we planned to instead of about three hours later. We made excellent time and stopped in Johnstown for the night, having shaved over 200 miles off of the trip and made it to my mother's by 6:30 on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Eve was exactly the opposite of what I had imagined: K had been feeling punky all day (there was a moment of panic in the morning when she complained her stomach hurt and said yes when asked if she might throw up, but fortunately she recovered from that) and insisted on going to bed early. When a five-year-old on Christmas Eve lies down on the couch and pulls a blanket over herself, you know she must really be tired. Alec, on the other hand, was going strong late into the night. He's been on a pattern of falling asleep at a normal time, then waking up a couple hours later and acting as if he's had a lovely and refreshing nap. 18 months often has a big developmental spurt accompanied by a monstrous sleep regression, so I guess he's embracing his age. Since today he stacked six Playdoh containers on top of each other and said something that sounded suspiciously like "I love you," I think it's safe to say he's on a developmental tear. No wonder he can't sleep.

Christmas went quite pleasantly. I experienced one of those moments of "I guess I'm really a grown-up" on Christmas morning when I found myself up before everyone else cooking breakfast. It's that realization that it was my mother who made holidays special when I was a child, and I'm the mother now. Like, whoa. I don't know why Christmas breakfast should engender this feeling more than say, having a mortgage or giving birth, but there you are.

Anyway, Christmas was over, we were enjoying our bounty, my brother has gone home, we saw an old college friend and we were a bit bored, so we decided to liven things up by all getting the flu. I had it worse, spending essentially all day Wednesday asleep or out of it, with a lovely host of fever and body aches. It was mostly fatigue and lack of appetite, with a vaguely gastric element. I say "vaguely" because K and I threw up once (and I'm not sure she would have if she hadn't snacked on Hot and Spicy Cheezits the night before) and we all had it a bit from the other end, but it was't one of those attached to the toilet bugs. I'm just as happy about that, since none of us felt that hot when we piled back in the car on Friday to head home. We stopped in Columbus for the night and I wish we could have stayed longer, but we desperately wanted to get home, so we headed out Saturday afternoon and arrived home late last night. I'm incredibly grateful that we've had a lazy day at home today.

Some highlights of the trip:

* We got various lovely gifts, including a large new toaster oven (something we had a sudden need for after our old one caught fire (!!!!)) and a basic espresso machine, which I hope will reduce the amount of money I spend on frothy coffee drinks.

* We saw all of our usual Christmas movies, but this year got to add back an underrated classic A Midwinter's Tale, a wonderful little movie written and directed by Kenneth Branagh about a ragtag group of actors putting on a production of Hamlet at Christmas. Somehow my tape of it didn't make the move but I finally managed to find it online.

* We went to see Tangled again, and it definitely holds up to repeat viewing. I didn't think I'd ever say this about a Disney movie, but I think it actually improves on the original fairy tale. It's weird and creepy and pretty much everyone acts inexplicably. I mean, I suppose the witch gets to be mean because she's a witch and that explains demanding a baby in exchange for stolen vegetables, but why the tower? And it all starts because of really strong pregnancy cravings? I mean, get a grip lady. Tangled, on the other hand, gives all of the principles strong, logical motivations for their actions. And manages to make the witch evil in the most lovely subtle way that involves actual character depth and complexity.

* We had the most lovely afternoon in Columbus with B's cousin and family,along with his parents who were stopping in Ohio on their way home. His cousin has a three year who is exactly two years younger than K, and an 11 month old, and it was so much fun watching little cousins play together. I never had that. I just wish we could arrange it more often.

Best laid plans

2010-12-17T01:44:00.000-05:00

B's uncle died at the beginning of the week. He had been fighting pancreatic cancer for a year and a half and was only in his 60s, and we are all quite sad, particularly for his wife. He was a kind and funny man and will be missed by many, many people.

The funeral is in New York this weekend, which is a complete departure from my previous weekend plans of working on Saturday and maybe doing something Christmassy on Sunday. But it will be good to see the rest of the family, even though I wish we could find ways to get everyone together that didn't require anybody to get married or die.

*****

And now that I've said all that, here's sampling of the running dialogue in my brain for most of today: So we need to get packed and how will we keep two small kids quiet at a funeral and I need to get work done tonight and work both jobs tomorrow and make something for the staff Christmas party tomorrow and I've been chosen for a new project at work which is theoretically a compliment since I was chosen because of my good work but mostly it's a pain the ass because it's suddenly added four morehours of work to shoehorn into today and tomorrow and we should dig out and clean up baby equipment to pass on to B's sister this weekend and did I mention I now have houseguests and no time to actually spend with them and let's not forget packing to leave for Michigan next week and we should really shovel out the car and AAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

So there's that. I'm going to concentrate on the fact that thanks to the houseguests we have the grandparent babysitting service who are at least taking the children off of my hands and be thankful for that.

Tantrums and thriftiness

2010-12-09T03:26:00.000-05:00

Two months ago, I kept wondering why it was I thought I hated early toddlerhood so much. Was it because when K was that age, B was out of work and we were insanely stressed? Because our current toddler was unendingly delightful.

Now, I can remember why: because at 18 months, they turn into little monsters. Little screaming, tantrumming, perpetual motion, howler monkey monsters. Actually, K waited until she was 19 months to really pull it out (although to be fair, my memories of that period of her life are very hazy because of the little distraction of moving to Philadelphia), while Alec is proving to be precocious. Or maybe it just feels that way, since the headbutting has made this quite literally a painful phase for all of us.

Despite waking for the day at 4:30 yesterday morning, he still manages to be cute enough to keep himself from being put out on the curb with the recycling. He seems to have a good sense of when to pull out the cute and distracts me from finding a cardboard box by playing peek-a-boo. K was cute at that age because toddlers are naturally cute. But Alec has been deliberately clowning to make me laugh for several months. The difference between an introvert and an extrovert, right there.

I've been feeling a bit smug lately because I've managed to keep him occupied for hours lately with two simple things that cost less than $10 together. The first is two sets of Mardi Gras beads from the Target dollar bins. Alec adores putting things around his neck, so these are perfect for him to put them on, and take them off, and put them on again and take two off and drop one and put the other one back on... you get the idea. We always let him know he's very pretty in his beads, which makes him happy.

The other was the $6 purchase of a large poster board, to which I glued down some train track. Alec loves the train table at the bookstore, but when I tried to pull our trains out at home, he was interested but couldn't restrain himself from lifting the track up, descending like the hand of God to ruin the fun quite effectively. Now, we have a nice little track setup that lives under the coffee table until gets pulled out so he can play on it happily for hours (often after we've found him lying on his stomach attempting to push trains on the track under the table). Our little train boy.

Ouch

2010-12-01T00:04:00.002-05:00

I took a trip down the basement stairs Saturday night. My feet flew right out from under me and I went sliding down on my butt. K was walking down in front of me, and my legs rather neatly slid under her and she travelled down on top of me until she landed safely at the bottom. She thought it was a lot of fun, but the big bruise on my ass would beg to differ.

****

Alec's new habit of expressing his frustrations by banging his head on things has ramped up. I will grant that it certainly makes it hard to ignore a tantrum (not that ignoring it was ever our approach to tantrums), given that if we wait too long, he winds up with carpet-patterned bruises on his forehead. Our poor little soccer hooligan. I have sympathy for the fact that he's feeling things that are far too big for his undeveloped brain to handle yet. I had less sympathy when he bent my glasses last week. And it wasn't so much that he tried to headbutt me in the face last week that gave me pause so much as the fact that he put his hands on either side of his face to aim better.

****

B came home sick today, complaining of general malaise and achiness. I thought I was fine until I went to pick up the kids from school and daycare, and by the time I got home, it was quite clear that I was sick too.

I'm always torn as to whether it's worse to have to take care of sick kids when you're sick, or kids that are disgustingly healthy when you're sick. On the one hand, sick kids don't move as much, but they often demand more attention. On the other, healthy kids can often play on their own, but they have lots of energy to get into trouble and still need to have attention paid to them. Either way, parenting while sick sucks golf balls through garden hoses. We didn't actually resort to sowing the carpet with cereal for them to eat for dinner, but it was under serious consideration.

2010-11-28T02:36:00.000-05:00

So apparently when I decide to lose NaBloPoMo, I decide to lose hard. I've been home the past three days and haven't had to work my online job, so I theoretically should have had time. But instead, I think I've mostly been recovering (and working my other job, and doing solo childcare today, so maybe it hasn't been much of a spa trip).

Thanksgiving turned out to be lovely after a rocky start. I woke up to discover two fractious children, a fed-up husband and a pumpkin pie that needed to be made again. As it turned out, Alec is taller than I thought and I left the pie too close to the edge of the top of the stove, so he pulled it off and then grabbed the crust to pull it half out of the pan. At least he was finding it tasty before other inconsiderate people came along to ruin his feast. Our plan had been to go see an early afternoon showing of Tangled, then come home and do a relatively simple Thanksgiving meal, but after I took in the general mood, I suggested we go out after the movie.

Tangled was just great. We accidentally went to the 3d showing, and while it wasn't worth the extra $9, there were parts that were lovely in 3d. It was also nice to find out that I can handle 3d all right. I've always wondered about that because I'm Magic Eye-impaired (really, I'm pretty much the guy in Mallrats who spent the entire movie trying to see a Magic Eye. Every once in a while I can start to see shapes starting to move, then I lose it). I'm also prone to headaches if I ask too much of my eyes or from motion that's too quick or weird. But this movie, at least, was fine.

It was also just a great movie. Really funny, good action, an evil witch who managed to be incredibly evil but in a way that didn't terrify K, which I think will put this movie high up on our Disney Princess rotation. She's of the Cinderella's stepmother school of honeyed barbs and psychological warfare instead of the Maleficent over-the-top cackling and shrieking evil (what Terry Pratchett called "hearing the clang of the oven door" when talking about witches going evil). I think K will always be a Cinderella girl, but Rapunzel is going to be a close second. For me, I enjoyed it just about as much I did Beauty and the Beast, which is one of my favorites, for a lot of the same reasons (I admit, I've never actually been much of a Disney Princess person at any point in my life, but I've liked the new wave of Disney animated movies that started with Little Mermaid).

Alec slept through 90% of the movie, so we were all much more chipper leaving the theatre. Then we discovered the restaurant we wanted to get dinner at wasn't going to be serving dinner for another 45 minutes, so we decided to go home and take a crack at cooking after all. I made another pumpkin pie* and then an apple pie, then we cooked a turkey breast with dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and gravy. Along with some spiced cider, it made a nice meal that didn't overwhelm us with leftovers or require anyone to stick their hand in a very personal area of a dead bird. And then, of course, the pie.

So then I worked Friday and B worked today, but not only do we both have tomorrow off, my best friend and her husband are visiting tomorrow! Hooray!

* Previously, my only experience with Thanksgiving food getting pulled off of the table was one year when we were eating with family friends who had a large irish setter, and the leftover turkey had been left on a table that was just about at his eye level. Really, who could possibly blame him? I hadn't thought of toddlers posing so many of the same dangers as dogs, but maybe K actually knows what she's talking about when she calls Alec "Puppy" and tries to make him heel and fetch.

I guess toddler pumpkin pie will go down in the rich family history of holiday meal disasters that nobody will ever let die. There was the time we had rubbed the turkey with oil, which meant there were very few drippings for making gravy and what I could get had a lot of oil in them, resulting in a tasty gravy that nonetheless was very off-putting for its tendency to separate into a ropy, gluey mess. Or the year my mother forgot the sugar in the cranberry relish, or my father put the dough for the rolls into the oven to rise and my mother came along and turned the oven on to preheat it for the pie, resulting in one very very large and burned roll. I know those two incidents couldn't both have happened the same year the dog stole the turkey carcass, but somehow it's all melded together in my memory as one very disastrous Thanksgiving when I was about eleven.

2010-11-22T02:48:00.002-05:00

So Mom came and went and we all had fun. We let K stay home from school one day to go the local children's museum, and we just spent a bunch of time together, which we don't get to do enough of. The thing I didn't get was time to work during the day, resulting in my complete NaBloPoMo failure because I was too busy making up for work at night. Ah well. I will soldier on this week.

*****

We looked at a house on Friday night. While we like the neighborhood, the house itself was remarkable in its ability to feel more cramped than our current house despite being larger. And the closet space was even more laughably inadequate. There were a number of other things - no garage (ie, place to shove our shit), small yard, nightmarish to get my mother in the house, price that seemed too high for the amenities the house was lacking - that just added up to no go. So we're searching on. It was nice to have seen the house, though, because the cookie-cutter nature of houses around here means that we will know now what that type of house is like on the inside and be able to save ourselves a lot of time.

*****

So poor K is back on antibiotics for the immortal UTI, an antibiotic so esoteric that it had to be special-ordered and can only be stored in glass bottles. And not only does it taste bad, it gives her reflux, so she gets to keep tasting it over and over again. I don't blame her one bit for fighting taking it, which is why we resorted to bribery. Hopefully having a new Rapunzel doll's hair to thoroughly rat up will carry her through the full ten days.

*****

Speaking of new toys, I'm typing this on a shiny new laptop, which I actually didn't want that much. We had been talking about new computers when B's raise finally comes through and we get nearly a year of the backpay owed him, but that hasn't happened yet and I didn't want to spend money we don't have yet (and in the month before Christmas, no less. Ideal timing!). But my laptop, the only computer I can use to do my job, has stopped wanting to acknowledge its power cord, which is what you might call one of those problems you can't work around, and fixing it will require sending it away for two weeks.

This whole dispute about raises has been in arbitration since July, and we're finally supposed to hear by Thanksgiving. I'm quite sure it will be in our favor, but I'm feeling that sort of jiggly anxiety that comes from anticipating something that I'm sure is coming, but I don't know quite when.

It is quite a nice fast and shiny laptop though.

2010-11-17T03:33:00.002-05:00

So why is it that even on the nights that I'm all proactive and get work started nice and early, my computer and/or the work server conspire to malfunction juuust long enough that I can't justify stopping work for the night, but will have to be up obscenely late to get my hours in?

On that note, good night.

Letters to my children

2010-11-16T03:19:00.001-05:00

Dear Alec,

Sixteen months is far too young to be able to work a doorknob. Furthermore, it is inexcusably young to be able to open a child-proof cap.

Love,

Your harried parents

Dear K's bladder,

We're giving you a third round of antibiotics, and even taking you for an ultrasound just to say hello and make sure you're doing okay. So if you've been feeling neglected, I think we're giving you more than enough attention now. Please get better this time, okay?

Pleadingly,

Me

Dear bacteria in K's bladder,

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE

Homicidally,

Me

Surreal estate

2010-11-15T01:25:00.000-05:00

So the next Iron Chef is going to be another white man. What a refreshing change of pace. Sigh. There goes my interest in the outcome of the final battle.

***

The grandmother has landed! My mother is here, that is, or I should say that she's in a nice hotel. The only way she can get into our house is to go in through the walk-out basement, which only has a doorsill. She can get up out of her electric wheelchair and pivot around to get into her manual wheelchair with the heavy support of her aide. Thank goodness we have a finished basement, is all I can say, since she's never seen the main floor of our house.

I found a nice-looking house for rent on Craigslist tonight, and while we haven't formally said that we're looking yet, we decided to look at it this week. If we took it, we would have to give up hope of moving to the Northwest, but since nothing had opened up there in the first round of hiring and promotions, we may have to wait a while for the possibility of a transfer to appear. The neighborhood this house is in is a nice second choice, since it's a lovely neighborhood with a great elementary school which is right on the edge of the city and therefore a lot closer to all of the things we like to do in the suburbs. And I'm starting to feel like I would happily gnaw my left hand off if only I could have some actual closet space.

Anyway, the way this connects to my mother is that from what I saw on Google Streetview, the house would only have a couple steps to go up, which would make getting my mother in a relative walk in the park, so to speak. Since there have been at least eight steep steps to get into both of the houses we've lived in here so far, it would be a nice change of pace.

Speaking of my mother and houses, she has finally sold her house, my childhood home, a mere two and a half years after moving to her condo. The amount of time it took her to get the house cleaned out completely and actually get it on the market was actually beneficial to me, since it gave me quite a while to get used to the idea of it being sold. I'm pretty much over it now. Between the addition that was put on after my mother's accident and the loss of the gigantic cherry tree that had been outside my bedroom, it was already significantly changed from the house I grew up in, and after two years, I was more than ready for it to just get sold already.

It only took two days and she got more than her asking price, which even in this housing market isn't surprising. It's a ranch house of the type with three bedrooms on one end of the house, living room, dining room and kitchen in the middle, and laundry room and family room at the end behind the garage. After my mother's accident, an addition was built behind the family room and laundry room, since there was no hope of making the main bath accessible. One lovely aspect of Michigan car insurance is that the insurance company is required to pay for everything associated with a car accident, including $80,000 of modifications to a house. So our modifications were done right - a ramp inside the garage so there's a covered ramp, a fully accessible bedroom and bathroom and a door out of the new bedroom leading onto a deck with a ramp leading to a sidewalk that goes around the house. What this adds up to is the perfect mother-in-law apartment for a family with an elderly infirm parent or two who will have a large bedroom with a bit of privacy and even its own sitting room in the form of the family room. Since it's so horrendously expensive to make a house even partially accessible (did I mention the $80,000 ours cost?), the only shocking part is that there wasn't a bidding war.

Sigh

2010-11-13T02:56:00.001-05:00

It is very late, I have worked over 12 hours today and my mother just got into town, so this is likely to be a busy weekend. So why am I wasting time on the Internet when I could be asleep?

Good night.

School fret

2010-11-12T02:27:00.000-05:00

Two months into school, K is lukewarm at best. Somedays, it's not too hard to get her out the door, others, there's a lot of crying and attempts to claim she's sick. I know part of it is that she's not a morning person, but it also happens on mornings when she's been up a while. She's usually happy when I pick her up, but she's going home, so of course she's happy.

Socially, she seems to be doing fine. She has complaints about a boy who sits next to her, but she has a best friend and a boyfriend, and I've seen several other kids hug her goodbye. Sometimes, when she doesn't want to go to school, I can get her on board by reminding her that she'll be able to go play with her friends. Other days, it doesn't help.

Part of the problem, I think, is that she's an introvert, and being around that many people for so long is just plain tiring and stressful for her. I know that she's going to have to learn how to cope with being an introvert in a crowded world, but surely there are better places she can learn than in a class of 30 kids in an urban school. She's also very shy about showing what she knows until she's absolutely sure she knows the answer. She often would rather say she doesn't know something at all than make a guess on something that she knows the answer to, but not confidently. This doesn't mix well with school. But I also got another big clue tonight when she said that she doesn't like school because she gets punished for not paying attention in class. To two parents who spent our primary school careers bored out of minds because class always moved to slowly, that's a big red flag.

So what to do? We're going to an open house for a local Friends school next week, but I have big doubts about our ability to afford it, and doubts about whether it's really the best decision to spend our limited money that way now instead of saving it for college and retirement. That leaves homeschooling, which I'm actually starting to warm up to a bit. Ironically, as much as I dislike homework, it's convincing me that done in the morning when everyone isn't tired and ready to go to bed, doing school work with her could be a lot of fun. There are online charter schools available here, so we wouldn't have to have the responsibility of planning a curriculum, but we could still go at our own speed.

The drawbacks, of course, is that K would be home all day. It feels like missing the point to say that I feel like I could homeschool as long as I had someplace to send her every day, but that about covers it. Even if I tried a lot harder than I have in the past, doing the things that would get her well socialized are profoundly uncomfortable for me, and I've more or less counted on having places to send her where she could get her socialization and I could get a break. Would it be totally weird to send her to an afterschool program?

This is the short short version of everything I've been thinking about the school situation lately. Sometimes I think we really need to find a new situation for her, other times I think I'm overreacting and probably projecting a bit too much and it would be bad to take her away from her friends. Sometimes I think it would be a lot of fun to have her at home, other times I think it would drive me around the bend, especially when I factor in trying to do schoolwork with an active toddler "helping." It all adds up to a big ball of inconclusiveness.

2010-11-11T03:25:00.001-05:00

I just finished my work for the night, and am propping my eyelids up with toothpicks and bribing the cats to lick the soles of my feet. So I'm going to bed, and leaving a cop-out post in place. I shall endeavor to do better tomorrow.

Alec postscript

2010-11-10T02:04:00.001-05:00

I've always had trouble precisely describing Alec's personality. He's a very very happy little boy, calm and cheerful most of the time. He has a gigantic fan club due to his happy smile and cheerful wave that he favors people with indiscriminately. But despite that, it's hard for me to describe exactly as "easygoing," because once he experiences distress, he pulls out the drama queen. It's more like his barometer is set at extra happy, so it takes more to get it to dip down into unhappy, but once he's there, he's really there.

Lately, he's started in on tantrums when his will is thwarted, and I must say, he's certainly mastered them with style - arching his back and hitting me if I'm holding him, collapsing dramatically to the ground, crawling along the ground hitting his forehead on the ground. There is no end to the depths of his woe over my refusing to let him fish old coffee cups out of a public trash can.

Today, however, I noticed that while he was collapsed on the ground, weeping, he was glancing up at me to make sure that I was paying attention. This fit in nicely with what his babysitters were telling me earlier today, that when he's begging for their food, he uses an incredibly fake cry to try and convince them that he's starving.

K certainly could throw a good tantrum, but I never got the feeling that she was expressing anything more than the true intensity of her feelings. Alec though? That one is destined for the theatre.

Alec at 16 months

2010-11-09T02:20:00.000-05:00

At 16 months, Alec:

* pretends to feed me by shoving a spoon or a cup in my mouth and helpfully saying "Mmmmmm!" in case I don't get the hint
* does the same thing to the cats. They are less receptive (although surprisingly patient given they're getting bashed with a cup)
* takes my face in his hands and kisses me sloppily on the lips
* presses parts of his head (some might say the relevant verb here is actually "bashes") to my lips to get me to kiss him
* happily scribbles on paper with crayons for several minutes before attempting to enjoy a nice colored wax snack
* identifies dogs (and cats) with vigorous woofing, including paging through Sandra Boynton's "Doggies" and woofing
* points to cats in a book and says "Cat!"
* LOVES sending cars down ramps
* has started putting trains together to push along train track instead of just wandering around with a train car in each hand
* walks around with a toy phone pressed to his ear, saying "Hello!"
* can accurately sort shapes into his shape sorter and can place puzzle pieces on the correct slot, although he can't get them in yet
* can turn doorknobs well enough to open all of the doors in the house, making us panic daily
* requests a rousing chorus of "Itsy-bitsy Spider" by making the finger motions
* flirts shamelessly with everyone he meets
* carries a broom and dustpan around whenever I take him to work, which is very convenient because I can still see him even when he's on the other side of the circulation desk
* is quite possibly tied for the cutest thing I've ever encountered

2010-11-07T23:18:00.002-05:00

It feels a little pathetic that with an extra hour yesterday I still couldn't find time to post. In my partial defense, neither of our children is especially interested in sleep lately. I think that's a lot of what's so hard about two children. Not so much the dealing with two sets of needs at the same time, since often that mostly requires efficiency. Mostly, for me, it's the needs that come serially that really get me, when you think you're done for a little while only to have another kid come along and need something more. Or more to the point, get one child to sleep in the middle of the night only to have another crawl in bed and demand attention. Yawn.

Poor Alec turned out to have an ear infection. That would explain a lot about how he would perk up magnificently when given ibuprofen - it didn't just bring the fever down, it made his ear stop hurting, until it wore off and he would once again collapse to the floor and imitate an air-raid siren. I know there's a school of thought that says that you shouldn't try to bring down a non-dangerous fever or indeed give antibiotics right away for an ear infection, but while I could see doing that with a child that's a bit punky but not acting like they feel too bad, I can't imagine not doing everything I can for a child who can do nothing but wail in misery. It seems like a lot of the same people I see advocating this are the same ones who feel that crying it out is the worst thing ever because children shouldn't experience the least amount of psychological distress. And yet somehow prolonged physical pain is just fine.

Anyway, he's on the mend and much happier now. Now if we can only kill the persistent UTI K has been carrying around for more than a month. She's had two rounds of antibiotics, and just two days off the last round, she started complaining of pain and her urine started smelling like a sewer again. Sigh. And of course this was late Thursday, so we couldn't get the urine collection cup to get her pee tested until Friday, and it takes a couple days for the lab report to come back, so I don't see getting her on more meds before the end of the week. She's not in acute distress, which is why I'm not pushing for immediate medication, but I wish we could just kick this for good.

Halloween picture post

2010-11-06T01:25:00.000-04:00

It's late, and I'm tired and still have a bit more work to do. So this will be a quicky picture post of Halloween pictures.

First, an exercise in 5-year-old problem solving. So you're wearing a very pretty but short-sleeved Cinderella dress that your devoted mother stayed up way too late the night before to finish, but it's about 40 degrees out. What to do? Apparently, this:

Here's a picture where you can see the full dress (it's a bit big, but I figure it will fit longer that way):

And the tired trick-or-treater enjoys her spoils:

Meanwhile, if you're a 16-month-old dinosaur, you don't need candy because you're just high on life:

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't use your cuteness to try and get some anyway:

And in the end, you can use your toddler cunning to steal some from your sister:

And just because, toddler meets chocolate pudding:

(More here)

Kid notes

2010-11-05T03:51:00.000-04:00

Lately, the best way to get K to go through her number and sight-word flashcards that are part of homework every night is to let her write every number and word down as we cover it. Oooookay, whatever gets you excited, I guess. If she wants to practice handwriting, I'm certainly not going to argue. It's pretty cool to watch her get so excited about writing though.

She has a new best friend, and phone numbers have been exchanged, so hopefully we will progress to playdates (this is an area we've had a combination of bad luck and laziness going). When I picked K up from school today, she announced that she had invited her friend for a sleepover. Way to go for the gusto kid! Don't sweat the little details like asking us first, or even having her over to our house once. On consultation with B, we're theoretically fine with a sleepover, but we think we should try at least one afternoon playdate first before we commit to an entire night. Plus, with the weekend schedules we have, this will take more planning than average. But I love that she has such a good friend already.

She also has a boyfriend (her term), who is her boyfriend because he wears glasses like her father. I guess the theory that women are attracted to men like their fathers IS true. He's replacing last year's preschool boyfriend, with whom she bonded over a mutual love of puzzles before he tragically moved to India. Ah, young love.

Sick note

2010-11-04T01:29:00.002-04:00

I had more substantial things to say, but instead Alec has developed a fever and refused to settle for more than ten minutes at a time this evening. Poor puny baby. B has been carrying him in a carrier as he alternates between dozing and restlessness. I foresee a fun night ahead. I just hope he's not too sick for daycare tomorrow. Thankfully, since he's the only child they have, I don't see why they can't take him as long as he isn't totally miserable or vomiting.

Library-a-go-go

2010-11-02T23:42:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite birthday presents is this t-shirt from the store for Unshelved the comic strip:

It seems particularly appropriate for my current job wrangling our card catalog into submission.

I was wearing it today and had it remarked upon by one of the librarians at B's library, a woman in her fifties. She started telling me about interlibrary loan as it was practiced in the city in Ukraine she lived in twenty years ago, before the age of networked libraries. Apparently interlibrary loan was her, making phone calls to libraries to find out if they had the books she needed and then travelling all over the city carrying bundles of books between libraries. And she didn't have a car, so she was doing all of this on the bus. Oh my. I guess I'll remind myself of that the next time I'm feeling put upon because I'm hip-deep in catalog cards : at least I'm not carrying stacks of books on the bus in the middle of a Ukrainian winter.

NaBloPoMo

2010-11-02T01:01:00.001-04:00

I hesitate to even consider this, given just how bad my posting record has been of late. But I've been doing NaBloPoMo for five years in a row now, and while I haven't always been successful, I've always at least tried. Hopefully having to write even just a little bit every night will help me get back into better habits.

And now it's after midnight, so I guess this will have to do for tonight. This does not bode well.

(bi)Weekly update

2010-10-28T00:08:00.002-04:00

* Life continues busy as usual. The children and I have acquired the sniffles, which is mostly annoying and keeps us all slightly dragged down, but not enough to give up and take to our beds. But mostly, life is just routinely busy, in a very boring way.

* We are watching the new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes on PBS right now. It's actually our second time through because we acquired it when it was being broadcast in Britain, but it's well worth more than one watching. Really, highly recommended viewing, legally or not.

* My birthday was a week ago last Sunday. I spent most of it working, but the compensation for that is that I had taken the previous Friday off when B also had the day off, so we got to spend a whole day together child-free. We had lunch out and got to browse in a bookstore without once spending time at the train table. And now I have new books to read - the latest Terry Pratchett and Caroline Stevermer's Magic Below Stairs, although they're languishing a bit behind the stack of library books.

* Alec has recently decided to start expressing his frustration by headbutting things - the table for instance, or my face if I'm picking him up to take him away from something he wants. Does it make me a bad parent if when in a fit of pique over some outrage like not being allowed to play with knives he pounds his head on the table, I have trouble keeping myself from laughing at the outraged look of "Hey, that HURT!" on his face before he starts crying? I don't actually laugh at my child's pain, of course, and he gets duly comforted, but I confess my sympathy is somewhat tempered by the fact that I'm quite certain he's going to give me a bloody nose before the instant negative reinforcement finally ends this delightful phase.

* K has declared that she is going to be Cinderella for Halloween. Or Belle. Or possibly both, possibly at the same time. I've been working on a Cinderella dress, and I decided to hedge my bets and bought a Belle dress last weekend. I know that both dresses will get plenty of use, but I'm damned if I'm going to work to finish a dress on a deadline only to have K decide she wants to be a different princess. Although I suppose I could have split the difference and made her a green dress.

Update: apparently buying the Belle dress was an excellent example of cunning foresight, since we got a note today about a costume parade at school on Friday. So I seem to have saved myself from having to frantically finish the dress by Friday instead of Sunday. See how smart I am?

Two day weekend!

2010-10-11T19:42:00.002-04:00

I didn't realize it when I woke up this morning, but I appear to be enjoying an honest-to-gosh, bona fide two-day weekend. B and K both have the day off because of Columbus Day, but I was expecting to put my four hours in as normal, although enjoying the fact that instead of taking care of Alec all day and K after 3 until 8pm when B gets home from work, then starting in on my paying job, I would get to have a leisurely day at home with another parent to help out, dinner together as a family and maybe even a family outing if we were organized enough.

Instead, once I finally got on the computer (I spent a leisurely morning reading a book. How analog of me), I discovered the server was down at work. And sure enough, when I tried to log in, I got a long page of computer code. And now the server has been taken down deliberately for upgrades. So no work for me!

Two days off together in a row. Gosh. I admit we haven't done much with them - lunch out and a trip to Trader Joe's yesterday, followed by an afternoon of napping, then K and I went to take advantage of good sales at the fabric store today - but not having to do anything is a big treat in and of itself. Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory, I remember this is how normal weekends used to work, you know, the kind that lasted two days in a row with nobody having to go to work.

What shall I do with my evening? I meant to do some crafting Saturday and Sunday, but I wound up, well, picking up the house and sleeping. Worthy pursuits, but not exactly soul-enriching, you know? K and I bought a bunch of fabric today which I have promised to turn into a Cinderella dress before Halloween, so I think the evening shall belong to that.

No time

2010-10-03T01:35:00.000-04:00

Last time I was working both of these jobs, I had spare time. K was in daycare every day and B took bedtime the nights he was home, so I had plenty of blocks of time to both work and do, well, anything else (like update my unbelievably neglected blog).

This time, all of my time is neatly spoken for. Alec is only in daycare three days a week, so I can't start working until after 8pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, which sets me up to need to sleep late Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I'm trying to recover from the night before when I could be working in the morning. Then B comes for lunch, I take him back to work so I can pick the kids up, and if I have a single errand to run, that's pretty much all the time left until I pick K up at three and Alec shortly after. Then dinner, homework, bedtime, and somewhere in there, I attempt to start work. Then I'm up super-late and the cycle starts all over again. Which isn't so bad until I have to be up in the morning on a Friday or Saturday for my other job.

I'm not sure how long I can keep this up. I took a mental health day yesterday and only worked one job. And it felt so good not to work all evening, it's making me seriously question if I want to start working again on Monday. Sigh. Between daycare and taxes, I'm barely adding anything to our monthly income, which just doesn't feel worth it. I think once 's raise finally comes through, I'm going to have to reevaluate the working situation.

****

We have survived two full weeks of kindergarten so far. K seems to like it and has almost always been happy when I pick her up at the end of the day. We had a lot of resistance the first week when I think it was starting to sink in that this was the new routine and she had to do it every day. But I don't think there was a day once last week that B had to leave her there crying, so that's improving. She seems to be making friends and is getting greeted by classmates as we arrive or leave.

Homework is... argh. It's not hard at all, and there are times it's fun and easy to get her involved with it. Her math assignments, for instance, which involve things like going through the house to find things with numbers on them and pouring water in and out of different containers to see what different volumes look like. Those have been easy to get through. There's just so much more of it though. I've given up on the alphabet flashcards because she doesn't need them, and I save the number flashcards for when she clearly has energy to spare after finishing everything else. The handwriting worksheets started out well but had definitely palled by the end of last week, and by Thursday night, I had to decide how much I intend to flog my five-year-old into finishing her kindergarten homework. Not that much, is what I decided. I have declared that after dinner, there will be no tv until homework is done, so if K wants to watch anything before bed, she has to finish her homework. But if she decides that she doesn't want to watch tv enough to slog her way through it all, I'm not going to try hard to get her to finish. I don't know what consequences there are for not finishing homework at this level, but she can experience them. I realized Thursday that a great deal of my problem is that I don't want to look bad to the teacher, and since her homework requires so much of my involvement, it's hard to detach myself from that. But it's really hers, so I need to give my inner teacher's pet a rest and let her sink or swim based on her initiative.

I'm not sure my opinion on giving kindergarteners homework at all is printable. Part of me sits and wonders why it is exactly that I decided not to homeschool if we're going to go through this volume of schoolwork every night. This is not at all developmentally appropriate, and it really shows in the fact that she's often just too tired to concentrate well. Can they really not accomplish learning letters, numbers and writing in a six-hour schoolday?

****

And as a break from the tired complaining, a brief update on the one member of our family with energy to spare. Some days, Alec is so high on life he has to lie down and flail his arms and legs out of sheer happiness. He adores Little Einsteins, and will dance to the music and wave his arms when they're increasing the tempo. Tonight, he came by to visit me while I was in the bathroom, and after a brief tour of the room to do important things like poke at the wastebasket and throw some toys in the bathtub, he turned and gave me a big small and a wave good-bye before he left. That boy is so delicious I could devour him whole. I love fifteen months.

First steps

2010-09-19T16:29:00.002-04:00

Alec slept like crap last week. He's never been a great independent sleeper, but last week he simply couldn't sleep without being in contact with another body (if only we could convince the cats to snuggle up to him), and then would be up and ready to greet the rosy fingered dawn.

Meanwhile, he's been doing a lot of taking one stumbling step between objects, but still not doing any real walking. Until Monday, when we went to pick him up from daycare and he walked three feet towards us, which the babysitter said he had been doing all day. And then that night, he slept straight through without a peep. Not a coincidence, I think. Those developmental leaps are tiring for all involved.

So yes, he's walking! He still uses crawling for going at any speed, and he can't stand without pulling up on something so if he falls, he has to switch to crawling. But he's definitely rocking the Frankenstein/Mummy technique, stumbling along with his arms outstretched. And he's just so proud, which is so cute to watch.

Meanwhile, K had her first day of kindergarten on Thursday (am I going to use Alec's first steps as an overwrought metaphor for his sister starting school? Why yes, yes I am). She's been as pleasant as an industrial strength enema most of the summer, which I think was largely due to school anxiety (a choice quote from two weeks ago: "But I don't want to go to college next week!"). She avoided the subject or acted scared every time the subject came up, and her new stack of uniforms languished untouched. But we went in on Wednesday to meet the teacher and see her classroom and suddenly everything was fine and she was nothing but excited.

They were treating us parents like we were very fragile. I suppose I should have been nervous at sending my baby off to kindergarten, but honestly, this is the third year in a row I've sent her off to full-time care. I think I've worked through the abandonment issues (I did have some logistical anxiety, but that's the normal anxiety that comes of trying to figure out a new building and new routines, with the added complication of a babysitter picking her up once a week).

Still, when I saw her in a uniform, lined up with all of the other adorable small children, it still hit me how she looked far too old, and my babies are growing up way too fast:

Autumn is icumen in

2010-09-09T17:43:00.000-04:00

It was over 90 every day last week, but I can feel Fall coming in my bones. I'm hoping my bones aren't given to wishful thinking. It helps that we just got back from Michigan and have been wearing long pants for the past four days. It was over 90 again when we get home, but temperatures have dropped below 80 again as apparently the weather from Michigan has obligingly decided to follow us home.

There's something about the change to cooler weather in the fall that reactivates me and makes me want to make changes. Maybe over 20 years of living on the academic calendar primed me for the idea that September means starting something new. Or maybe my inner psyche wants to observe the Jewish new year. Either way, this year we're giving into that impulse in spades.

The first change is one I've been talking about for a year now, a larger car. We just paid off the current car, so of course it's time to take on a new car loan, yes? Aargh. I would love to keep our current car and drive it to death, but because we only have one car, it has to serve every purpose we need a car for, including cross-country trips, and after a few trips where we could barely slip in a piece of paper between the roof and all of our crap, it's abundantly clear we need something bigger. Everyone in the back seat would also be a lot more comfortable in a slightly bigger car as well.

I had been thinking about procrastinating on this until the new year, until I talked to my brother about it today. He's buying our old car, and starting in November, he'll have a hard time getting vacation time for a while, limiting when he could travel out to get the car. And then my mother mentioned she had been thinking about driving out this fall, and could bring my brother along, saving the cost of a train ticket. So suddenly a new car by October seems like an excellent idea.

The second big change we're thinking about is moving. Which isn't so much a big change except that B brought up that since the Free Library has a bunch of branch head positions that need to be filled and is therefore about to do a round of promoting and hiring, now is an ideal time for him to ask to transfer to a library in the Northwest part of the city. We had been wanting to move over there right before he was offered his current position, and it's been a very good library. But as I've complained so many times, our section of the city has all of the drawbacks of both the suburbs and the city, except that in the actual suburbs here, there's shopping available. In the Northwest, they have walkable shopping areas with bookstores and coffee shops. Here, we were unbelievably excited when we finally got a Starbucks last year (really, this is possibly the only densely populated geographic area this size I've ever encountered without a Starbucks. There's practically a Starbucks in the parking lot of Starbucks). It's not that I ever really wanted Starbucks per se (although I've managed to develop a shameful frappuccino addiction), but there aren't any local coffee shops either. Or bookstores. Or anything interesting within walking distance, including a train line.

Basically, if we have to live in the city, we'd like some of the positive aspects of city living, like cool shops and convenient public transportation and a playground we don't have to cross a twelve-lane road to get to. That's available in the Northwest. As an added bonus, the fact that the Northeast and Northwest splay out like two outstretched arms over the rest of the city means that we'll be as close or possibly close to most of the places in the suburbs we go now, plus we'll be much closer to all of the things we'd like to do but don't because it's so much effort to drive to the opposite side of the city.

So now we're contemplating which libraries B should express an interest in and I've started looking at rental listings in the Northwest as well as the Northeast. I've been pleasantly surprised at the offerings - when I was last looking two years ago, we couldn't afford nearly as much as we can now, so looking at my target price range has gotten a lot of results. And some of them aren't even cookie-cutter postwar rectangles. Gosh.

Ketchup

2010-09-09T17:33:00.000-04:00

Ack. Life just keeps going on and on, doesn't it? It's not so much that I'm incredibly busy as I'm just trying to find my new balance with working and child care with another child in the mix. I spend pretty much all evening alternating working and wrangling children, which leaves no time left over for typing. Lots has been happening, but it's a novel and a half, so here's the brief version:

- Online job is fine. I'm not fond of the stress of constantly having to live up to certain numerically based standards, but I was able to do it fine before, so I can do it again.

- We had our tenth wedding anniversary on the 5th. It's hard to believe it's been an entire decade, and thirteen years that we've been together. *insert various schmoopy things here*

- Remember the gum abscess in February? Well, it never quite went away, and then flared up again, and then I got sent to an every-increasing line of dental specialists until I wound up with a root canal and various doubtful predictions about keeping the tooth. The worry is that the infection is being caused by something like a small fracture in the tooth that is hard to see on an x-ray. My personal theory is that I had strep throat along with the abscess, and only got a week of a rather low dose of penicillin, so I just wasn't given enough antibiotics to knock the infection out. I have it on record that I didn't feel all the way better when the antibiotics were done. I got antibiotics with the root canal and the sore spot on my gum has vanished, so I'm hoping maybe the infection has been killed. Because as little fun as the root canal is, the thought of losing a tooth gives me the shivers.

- The new babysitters are doing fine as well. The kids both love them. I'm looking forward to school starting though, so K will be occupied five days a week instead of just three (because I couldn't really afford full-time daycare for both kids, so they're going three days and I have very, very full days the other two), and I'll bump Alec up to four days. I kind of want to have him home at least one day a week, just because I miss him. We had a good time, just the two of us last year.

- K is starting kindergarten next week. She's starting on a Thursday, which seems a bit weird, but I think it's because the first week of school is so screwed up by Rosh Hoshanah - the schools started the day after Labor Day, go two days and then have two days off for Rosh Hoshanah. Kindergarteners start a week later than the rest of the grades, so starting the following Thursday would be starting five days after everyone else.

-We just got back from spending an extended Labor Day weekend in Michigan with my mother. My brother came up and B's parents came down, so we had a pleasant all-family get-together with gorgeous cool weather.

But my baby is starting kindergarten!

- Our dealings with the Friends group at work has once again descended into utter madness. But that deserves a post all of its own, if not an epic gothic horror novel.

That's it for the moment. I will really try to find more time to update more than once every two weeks.

Alec at thirteen months

2010-08-12T03:26:00.001-04:00

You know, I had kind of been dreading this age, the age of mobility with absolutely no sense of self-preservation or discipline. The age when they cheerfully try to kill themselves on a regular basis while ignoring your yelling at them to stop. And then throw a tantrum because you ruined their fun.

What I had forgotten is how astonishingly cute this age is. Little babies are cute because of what they are, while toddlers are cute because of what they do. Whether he's making his toy cell phone play music and dancing to it or clapping and cheering for his ball popper, he exudes cuteness from every pore. He dripped cuteness this morning when he picked up his sister's electronic hamster and went crawling after it. He radiated cuteness as he sat down on the bathmat in the bathroom to examine it closely. And then he positively radiated cuteness as he got up on his knees, lifted the toilet lid and threw it in the toilet, as we shouted and futilely ran to try and stop him, which was difficult given that we were almost helpless with laughter at the same time. That's early toddlerhood in a nutshell for you.

Anyway, Alec is busy adding skills at a great rate:

Gross motor: No walking yet. But he can stand unassisted for a good thirty seconds or more, and can sometimes stay standing when I put him down on his feet. He has taken a step when moving between two support objects. He can also walk while pushing something, but after a few days of doing that, he largely lost interest. He's on the cusp of movement, but just needs to decide he wants to do it.

When it comes to climbing, however, he has seized the day and then some. For quite a while, he would crawl over to the stairs and just look up at them curiously, which was quite a relief given that K had figured out crawling up stairs before she could really crawl across the floor properly. He has it all figured out now though. I'm not sure how to feel about the fact that when he manages to get free in the basement, he now makes a beeline for the stairs instead of the cat food. He can also climb onto couches and the bed. Thankfully, he has also figured out how to climb down safely instead of his previous method of falling off head first.

Fine motor: This is more of a gross motor age, but he's definitely working on using his hands. He's very interested in using a fork and will pick up pieces of food and stick them on his fork. One of his favorite pastimes in restaurants is putting straws through the hole in cup lids.

Cognitive:

We're starting to hear new words pretty often: Mama, Dada, Ka (Katherine), cat, woof, book, train, block, uh oh (this is a big favorite, especially when he's peering over the edge of something at an object he's just thrown down. I keep telling him it's not uh oh if you do it on purpose, but does he listen?)

We're seeing a lot of imitative behavior now. Putting the toy phone to his ear, attempting to use silverware, pulling tissues out of the box and blowing his nose are all fun games. The other day, I had grabbed a couple packets of Splenda to put in my iced tea, and he grabbed a packet and looked at me expectantly until I opened it for him and let him pour it in my tea. He looked incredibly pleased when I called him a good helper. And then K got upset because she's supposed to be the helper. Ah, sibling rivalry.

He loves music and paging through books. Books featuring baby faces and touch and feel books are the favorites right now. He's starting to work on stacking rings and nesting cups. It's incredibly cute to watch him put one cup inside another and let out a very pleased "Gah!" with a grin.

At his last checkup, he was 26 pounds six ounces and 31.5 inches (although I think it was close to 32). That's 85 and 95 percentiles respectively. He's pretty much out of 18 month clothes. He's our huge, happy, good natured baby.

July can suck it

2010-07-30T22:55:00.000-04:00

So. I had a bizarre urge to look up my father's obituary tonight, and then realized the reason was that it's the third anniversary of his death. Four days ago on July 26th, I was talking to my mother and realized it was the eighth anniversary of her accident, which ironically was also the twentieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Both of my grandmothers died in July.

If it weren't for the fact that several people I love were born in July, I would happily abolish the month entirely. As it is, I'm happier than I can say that there's only one more day to go.

2010-07-30T02:05:00.000-04:00

So I don't think I mentioned before that when I got sick, after the first couple days of fever and achiness, it morphed into a truly impressive hacking cough, the sort that would normally require a three pack a day habit for thirty years while working in a coal mine by day and asbestos removal at night. I lived with it for a few days, then decided when I realized that if I sat quietly I could hear my lungs crackling that perhaps I should take this one to the doctor. As it turns out, I have a lovely case of walking pneumonia. Groovy.

Pneumonia always sounds so drastic, doesn't it? Too many 19th century novels, no doubt. I suspect literature would have lost quite a lot if we could have tossed all of those tragic heroines a Z-pack 150 years ago. I mean, I've been functioning for the past two weeks. Not really well, but everyone's clean and well-fed, just not quite as well-nurtured by me instead of the tv as they might be. I will say that I don't feel so bad any more about my complete failure since we got home to live up to any of my ideals about providing lots of activities and an organized schedule. Now I feel accomplished for maintaining regular feedings and hygiene.

Anyway, after liberal applications of azithromycin, codeine and an inhaler, I'm starting to feel better. Which is good, because I started working my normal schedule at the online job this week. I'm slipping back into the old routine without much effort, although I'm actually hoping to improve on the old routine a bit. I had been in a bad habit of squandering my child-free time before and then being up late at night doing the actual work. I had high hopes of spending my first child-free day today doing just that, until I remembered that they had generously assigned us two more training exercises on top of our regular work, due today, so that's how my afternoon was spent and here I am, yet again, up obscenely late at night with another hour of work to go.

But let's ignore the obscenely late part of that last sentence and focus on the child-free! I managed to find a nice mother-daughter pair looking to start babysitting and willing to take both kids for a quite reasonable price. And they will happily pick K up from school once she starts, so the problem of what to do with her on Fridays when I'm working at the museum until 4 is resolved. I'm a little leery of the fact that they're just starting out and don't have any other kids, and just the fact that our record with home daycares and daycares found off of Craigslist is so very bad, but I'm so giddy with the idea of daycare again that I just don't care. As long as they last through the summer, that will be fine and I'll figure something else out. And if they do work out for the long haul, I'll be very happy, since I think right now, a home daycare is better for Alec. They're willing to do cloth diapers and to rock our finicky baby to sleep, so right now it's all good.

2010-07-26T00:07:00.000-04:00

Oh, I don't want to whine any more. But any description of the past week will wind up sounding like it. So let's just say that spending Tuesday and Wednesday:

-being sick
-taking care of two sick kids (thankfully, they shook it off very quickly)
-attempting to simultaneously do mandatory online training sessions for an hour and a half each day and keep said fractious children occupied while was at work
-doing homework every evening

wasn't my most fun two days ever and leave it at that. But I made it through training, with two sessions next week, thankfully on days B is home (well, since it's training for a job I've already done quite well for a year, it was more like Farmville time while listening in case something important got said), and passed the tests, so I anticipate I'll be starting work next week. Yay?

****

In happy news, we have a new stove! This is especially happy because unlike the refrigerator last fall, our landlord paid for this one. See, back in the Pleistocene, when the first owner of our old stove used it to cook up a nice greasy mammoth haunch and it dripped all over the bottom of the oven, they didn't bother to clean it up. And this set the pattern for every single disgusting person who has used it since. I could live with a discolored stove, and an oven that apparently used a dart board to decide what temperature it was going to heat to, but having to take the batteries out of every smoke detector on that floor every time we baked something was more than a tad annoying, not to mention flirting with fiery death.

The new stove is nice and shiny, although nothing fancy - it pretty much heats food using fire, without so much as a self-cleaning cycle or a timer. Someday when my ship comes in, I'll have an oven with a proof setting for bread dough.

I keep thinking there are more things I want to write about, but they keep vanishing once I open the computer, replaced by really boring things like how big the floor downstairs suddenly was once I got all of the toys off of it. I'll spare you any similar truly riveting insights.

2010-07-20T01:50:00.000-04:00

I really meant for this week to be the week that I started posting more again. Instead I got a fever. Sigh. It wasn't until I went to sleep at 8pm Friday night, then woke up aching and feverish the next morning that I came to the brilliant deduction that the crushing tiredness of the past couple days was from getting sick. And then I got up and dragged myself to work. The B went to work Sunday while I attempted to do as much parenting prone as possible. It's times like these that I really really wish we had family nearby. I wouldn't dream of asking a relative to do fulltime daycare (at least not for free), but someone to dump the kids on for the afternoon when we're sick? What a wonderful thought.

I've been in a pattern of feeling okayish after taking ibuprofen, which brings the fever down, then feeling rotten as the fever goes back up, but I think this evening I'm finally fever-free. And thank goodness, because while B stayed home from work today (I had the night from hell last night, thanks to our lovely children), he can't keep staying home.

****

Anyway, to get off the self-pity portion of the post, we've been watching The Next Food Network Star lately. This is the third season I've watched and the first one where I've really felt invested in who won.

One of the problems I've always had with the show is that it's constructed in a way to find someone with a wide range of skills, which prejudices it towards a certain type of generalized, bland chef, often someone who's just like someone already on the network. If I could point to one area I think Food Network is really lacking (well, besides, you know, actual cooking shows), is a lack of shows from different non-European ethnicities since they stopped showing the original Iron Chef. The closest they come is various Southern cooking shows and Southwestern cooking as done by a white guy. As much as I love Alton Brown, I would love to, say, learn about Asian cooking from an actual Asian.

So two years ago, I was rooting for the Indian chef, whose downfall was being given fish, something she had never cooked before. Now she really didn't seem like real winner material and she could have handled that challenge with a lot more grace, but it didn't seem like a good way to get a good balance of shows to choose new people based on Iron Chef-style challenges. Last year, it was the Korean chef I was interested in, and it seemed for quite a while like she could go the distance, mostly because she had a background in general catering. But she showed enough personality flaws that I couldn't truly disagree when she washed out.

This year, though, Aarti looks like she could really go the distance. She seems to have just the right combination of the ability to cook and a great personality. I'm just hoping after the bad week she had this week that she manages to pull it together and doesn't lose confidence, because hers is the first show that I would actually like to watch.

***

File under "Awkward conversations with your five-year-old":

K has been really interested in family relationships this summer, and has been verifying with us multiple times that her grandparents are our parents. So I suppose it shouldn't have come as a surprise when she asked me for the first time where my father was. I've told her about him before, and even said that he was dead, but she's never been very interested in what that meant. Until this time. I think it went fairly well as a first conversation, but not as well as it might have because I surprised myself by choking up, something I haven't done in a long, long time.

But the awkward conversation that really surprised me this week was when she asked me what my medications were for. I didn't have a problem explaining the medication for the rapid heartbeat, and even managed a decent explanation of Metformin. But for the life of me I couldn't come up with a child-appropriate explanation of antidepressants without making it sound like there's a magic happy pill for when you're sad, and that's not really the message I want to pass on about either antidepressants or dealing with unhappiness. Hopefully I can avoid the conversation for another couple years until she's capable of a bit of nuance.

I ramble way too much when I'm tired

2010-07-11T00:11:00.000-04:00

Four days home, and I keep wishing we were back in Michigan. It was a great trip all around. We drove out through Columbus and spent the night with my friend Sarah and her husband, then went on through Lafayette and had dinner with friends there (we drove past our old house and discovered it was for sale, at a price reduced 18000 from where they had started. Their upper price was what we had priced it at in 2005, before the bubble burst. And we sold it for 10000 less than that. Their new price is less than what we bought the house for when it was a foreclosed house being sold by HUD and needed major work. Goodness, I'm glad we sold it when we did). Then up to my mother's, for a long weekend that happily coincided with a local anime convention that my brother and the Champaign crew always go to. So we got to see at least some of the people we didn't get to see at Christmas, albeit not nearly long enough.

And then up for a glorious week at B's parents, where the only drawback is the lack of fast Internet. Everything else was great - lovely weather, gorgeous scenery, happy hours spent on beautiful beaches, free babysitting. Okay, mentioning the last one seems crass, and I think it goes without saying that we're there to see his parents and would be happy to see them even if there were no babysitting at all. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't spent nearly so much time visiting my mother. But it's been a long, long year with no outside childcare and only having one day off together every other weekend. So being able to relax a little and actually leave the house without children occasionally made it a much better vacation.

As a bonus, B's aunt and uncle and cousins were visiting as well, so we had some enjoyable family meals, and K discovered the joy of playing with older cousins, who were 10 and 13 and absolutely wonderful with her. And it's nice to be able to go someplace to visit with people and not have to worry about entertaining at least one child. There wasn't much chance of prying Alec from my side much. He could be distracted periodically by other people and be taken into a different room, but if I was there, he usually wanted me. However, the presence of other people did give him lots of people to flirt with, so that made him happy and easily entertained. It almost compensated for his learning how to climb stairs.

And then, it was sadly time to come home, far too soon. Back to 100 degree heat and caring for discombobulated children with no help, accomplished by spending far, far too much time in the car. The last hour of the trip was spent with both children sobbing to get out of the car, with K saying over and over again, "I want to go home," to which I could only think "I'm right there with you, kid." I'm so very tired that I was actually dozing off at work today.

****

Apropos of the whole being tired and overwhelmed issue, I've come to two decisions. The first is that we really need to be making more money*, since we're doing okay for everyday expenses but don't really have enough to weather emergencies. So I've e-mailed my former online job and am in their reserve pool for the next time a job opens, which is expected to happen within the month.

I wasn't enjoying my job very much by the time I left it, but I'm trying to remind myself that I was 9 months pregnant at that point and literally struggling to keep my eyes open by 9pm. There are a lot of jobs I would rather have, but needs must, and part time jobs that pay well enough to pay for daycare and have money left over are a rare beast.

The second decision, not coincidentally, is we're searching for childcare. For one thing, I can't work Fridays this summer unless I have childcare, and since is working a bunch of Sundays downtown, we could go a full 8 weeks without having a day off together if I can't work some Fridays (if I work every Saturday and every other Sunday, and he works the Sundays I don't...yikes. I'm collapsing in nervous exhaustion just thinking about it). But if I'm working 20 hours a week again besides my library job, I'll really need some childcare. I'm a little torn about how to approach it. I've been e-mailing someone with a home daycare who seemed promising that I found through Craigslist, but then she suddenly got a bit weird and I haven't gotten a response to the e-mail I sent five days ago. This is bringing back to me what horrific luck we've had with home daycares since we moved here, and that as childcare finding agencies go, Craigslist is a bit of a back alley operation.

The other option is a center, and we definitely had a lot more luck once we went that route with K. Unfortunately, that center just went out of business. But while I think a center would be great for K, it's not as ideal for a baby/young toddler, and Alec is the one would be staying there into the fall after K goes back to school. The other issue is that everyone is full up with older kids for the summer, so it may be difficult to find someplace in July. I should have made this decision back in April or May.

*The infuriating thing is that we should be making more money, if not for our rat bastard mayor. 's contract ran out over a year ago, so he's currently working under the terms of his old contract until a new one is negotiated (which isn't happening any time soon, since no one really wants to be negotiating their contract during a financial crisis). Standard for pretty much all city employees is that they step up in pay grade every year they work for their first five years, but the mayor is claiming that because they're working without a contract, they don't have to give raises. This is patently absurd, and arbitration has already found in favor of the firefighters over this issue, so once this goes to arbitration for our union, it will almost certainly be found in our favor. However, this was initially supposed to get decided in early May and has been progressively pushed off by the city's attorney until July 20. So who knows when it will happen at this point, while we build up a tidy sum that the city owes us.

While this is plenty of reason to be infuriated, it's all the worse because this is so incredibly typical of how this mayor operates, declaring that what he wants is how it's going to be, without bothering with little details like whether it's legal or not. The hospital next to the park my library is in wanted to lease some park land, and it was building up to a big legal battle until the mayor came into office and declared that it was simply going to happen, and at a nice discount for the hospital. However, once it got to court, it turned out that Pennsylvania has a law forbidding the sale of parkland that's being actively used, which ours most certainly is. He tried to close several library branches, only to have it turn out that the mayor doesn't have the power to close city facilities without city council approval. During the snow emergencies this winter, he tried to make city employees either use their vacation days for the days off they got when city facilities were shut down, or attempt to go into work, a move that was thankfully shut down mighty quick by the unions. People like this are the best reason for unions. Solidarity forever, baby.

Home

2010-07-06T01:31:00.002-04:00

We just got back from a week and a half in Michigan. We had a wonderful time, and are oh so very glad to be out of the car. Although going from temperatures in the 60s and 70s to a high of 99 tomorrow (!!!) is enough to make me tempted to get right back in the car and go back, even though both children spent the last 45 minutes of the trip crying inconsolably out of sheer car exhaustion.

I have lots and lots of news, both small and bigger. But I'm going to do the smarter thing and go imitate my children, who are passed out in their respective beds. More on the morrow.

One

2010-06-23T02:07:00.001-04:00

One year ago today, I was... in bed asleep, actually. But it's after midnight, so it's technically Alec's birthday. I would wake up in six hours, drive blearily to the hospital, get undressed and sit through an unnecessary EKG (I had had one the day before in my intake appointment, and it would take me three weeks to get all of the residual glue from the sensors off), and then proceeded to surgery to have a baby. And it turned out to be quite a high quality baby indeed. I attribute it to superior genetic material.

It's hard to describe how much I've enjoyed the past year. He is such a joy. And I can't believe how fast he's grown over the past year:

Happy birthday, Alec. I can't wait to see what the next year brings.

Five

2010-06-21T23:53:00.002-04:00

So yesterday we had a birthday party, with cake and princess decorations and lots of splashing in the wading pool. It was a great success all around.

And then today, we woke up with a five-year-old. I can't believe how tall she is, and how much she's grown up over the past year. I know that the infrequency of my posting over the past year means that I'm most likely to post about her when she's driving me crazy, which could give the casual reader the impression that I don't like my older child much. But really, she's quite a delightful little girl.

She's enthusiastic. Everything she likes is her favorite. She loves just about anything you give her.

She's creative. She'll make clever lego creations or creations from paper and tape or cloth that actually resemble what they're supposed to be.

She's imaginative. I love listening to the running dialogues she gives pretty much any inanimate object she plays with. She rides her imaginary horse through the parking lot and then hitches it to the front of the car so it can pull her carriage. She spends about half of her life as a puppy and brings me items to throw so she can play fetch.

She's an excellent big sister. I won't say there aren't times that she doesn't want her brother touching her stuff, and she's not always gentle about pushing him away. She also takes rampant advantage of his good nature by snatching away things he's playing with, knowing that he probably won't fight. But most of the time, she's very generous with her toys, and very gentle with him. She's the best of all of us at getting him to laugh and is so good about playing with him. She loves her brother so much, she's campaigning for another baby.

She's such a kid. Her body has gotten so long, and her face has lost all of its baby roundness. Tantrums are being replaced with shrewd bargaining.

Happy birthday Katherine. I can't believe you're such a big girl already.

Water baby

2010-06-19T01:11:00.000-04:00

We went to what was theoretically SCA archery practice on Sunday, but in reality was a bunch of people hanging out while the kids frolicked in the wading pool and under the sprinkler.

All of the kids had fun, but oh my, Alec is apparently part selkie. He splashed in the pool, he splashed in the water table. He climbed in and out of the pool through sheer force of will. Finally, he crawled over and just sat under the sprinkler, occasionally waving his arms in joy, too exhausted to play any more but utterly unwilling to leave all of the wonderful water.

Incidentally, I have to say that I'm very impressed with the waterproofness of Bumgenius pocket diapers. I had put one on him without any absorbent material as a swim diaper, and it would take on water when it gapped, but then wouldn't let it drain, so he routinely had a cup of water hanging off of his crotch. As I said, impressive water retention abilities there. I finally just took the diaper off and let him frolic naked. I figured everyone there knew what baby boys look like under their diapers and there's really such a short in your life that you're allowed to have no modesty at all.

*****

It was K's last day of school today. They had a short ceremony to celebrate moving up to kindergarten with the parents looking on proudly (and brilliant people that we are, we remembered the camera but forgot that the battery was still in the charger). It was particularly nice that the teacher they had the longest this year came back to be part of the ceremony and say good bye to the kids. Her class had four teachers this year. The regular teacher had to take a leave of absence for health reasons, so they got a long-term sub who was a retired fifth grade teacher. He was pretty good, especially considering he wasn't used to being surrounded by four year olds every day. His training wasn't in preschool, but he tried hard. But then the school district informed him that if he taught past a certain point, he would start losing retirement benefits, so he had to leave six weeks before the end of the year. Then they got the sub who seemed entirely unprepared to deal with small children. My opinion of her was cemented the day she informed me that K had had a tantrum over something and I was supposed to talk to her to keep it from happening again. I... see. One, what on Earth are you doing teaching preschool if you can't handle a tantrum, and two, if only I had realized the way to put an end to tantrums was to talk to her. And here I had been sending her memos, which didn't seem to work at all! Yeesh. But she left after a couple weeks, and they got the final teacher who thankfully seemed to actually know about preschool.

And now I need to figure out what to do with us for the next three months. We can't afford any sort of day camp (do they have camps based on the theme "Get this kid out of my hair for a few hours"?), but I'm thinking I need to figure out at least child care for Fridays. B and I had been switching off working Fridays and Saturdays, which was tiring but at least we got one day a week off together the weeks I didn't work Sundays. But since the branch libraries have stopped Saturday hours for the summer, I'm only going to be able to work Saturdays and Sundays. And since he also managed to get a bunch of Sunday hours at the Central Library downtown, there's going to be something like a seven week period this summer that I will have to work every Saturday and we will switch off who works on Sunday. Meaning that we won't have a day off for nearly two months if I can't get some child care and work some Fridays. Yikes.

As for what to do with the other four days of the week, I foresee taking heavy advantage of museum memberships and trying to schedule a lot of playdates. I really want to get her in some swimming lessons, but that may have to wait depending on what our finances look like.

First, though, we have the kids' birthdays to get through next week and then a pilgrimage Midwestward. I'm looking forward to going home for a while.