Poem (not by Me)

Best Thing about Homeschooling
by Marty Layne

Time to sit and read to your children out loud
Time to stay in your pajamas all day and play
Time to watch your children as they put on plays
Time to listen to your children
Time to look at spiders
Time to go for a walk when the sun is shining,
or the rain has just started to fall, or the wind is blowing hard
Time to understand your children, to discover what makes them happy,
sad, mad, or glad, and help them understand themselves
Time to build relationships
Time for a child to follow an interest
Time for a child to be bored
Time to sing
Time for a child to learn how to live in a family with other people
all sharing the same space
Time for a child to just sit outside and daydream
Time for a child to read
Time for a child to discover things
Time to paint in the kitchen and make a mess
Time to learn patience
Time to laugh together
Time to play games together
Time to just sit with a child and be quiet together
Time to call your own.

Little Guy came dancing into the school room today. I was working with Sweetling on something. Little Guy was chanting, "More school for me! More school for me! I love my school! More school for me!"

Sweetling took her first unit assessment for Pre-Algebra today. It is, by the way, totally NOT ok to call pre-algebra "math." She has a pre-algebra book, not a math book, thank you. And its not time to do math, its time to do prealgebra. And of course, the notebook is a pre-algrebra notebook, not a math notebook. And the student pages are pre-algebra student pages, not math. And on it goes. And "Sarah sold 17 more cakes on Saturday than she sold on Friday. How many cakes did she sell in all?" can be found with the expression 17 + 2n, of course.

Unfinished Business

I got tired of having the unfinished Richard and Fawn sketch as my wallpaper. So I took a few minutes and made this instead.

From an email forward

North and South

The North has Bloomingdale's, the South has Dollar General.

The North has coffee houses, the South has Waffle Houses.

The North has dating services, the South has family reunions.

The North has switchblade knives; the South has Lee Press-on Nails.

The North has double last names; the South has double first names.

The North has Indy car races; The South has stock car races.

North has Cream of Wheat, the South has grits.

The North has green salads, the South has collard greens.

The North has lobsters, the South has crawfish.

The North has the rust belt; the South has the Bible Belt.

FOR NORTHERNERS MOVING SOUTH . .

In the South: --If you run your car into a ditch, don't panic. Four men in a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a tow chain will be along shortly. Don't try to help them, just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.

Don't be surprised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store.... do not buy food at this store.

Remember, "Y'all" is singular, "all y'all" is plural, and "all y'all's" is plural possessive

Get used to hearing "You ain't from round here, are ya?"

Save all manner of bacon grease. You will be instructed later on ho w to use it.

Don't be worried at not understanding what people are saying. They can't understand you either. The first adjectives to creep into a transplanted Northerners speech are "big'ol," and "little 'ol". Most Northerners begin their Southern-influenced dialect this way. All of them are in denial about it.

The proper pronunciation you learned in school is no longer proper!

Be advised that "He needed killin" is a valid defense here.

If you hear a Southerner exclaim, "Hey, y'all watch this," you should stay out of the way. These are likely to be the last words he'll ever say

If there is the prediction of the slightest chance of even the smallest accumulation of snow, your presence is required at the local grocery store. It doesn't matter whether you need anything or not.

Do not be surprised to find that 10-year olds own their own shotguns, they are proficient marksmen, and their mammas taught them how to aim.

In t he South, we have found that t he best way to grow a lush green lawn is to pour gravel on it and call it a driveway.

AND REMEMBER: If you do settle in the South and bear children, don't think we will accept them as Southerners. After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we wouldn't call 'em biscuits.

Send this to four people that ain't related to you, and I reckon your life will turn into a country music song 'fore you know it.

Your kin would get a kick out of it too!

Flora and Fauna

Background Info:
--On Mondays we have a pretest of the week's spelling words. If she gets a 90% or more, she doesnt have to do any worksheets for the week. We just write down the words she missed on a 'sticky' note and tack it to the wall. On Friday's we test all the stickies (and the words for the week, if she got less than 90% on the pretest).
--Each day, she lets one of her nine and teen webkinz have a special day. That webkinz joins us for school and goes everywhere with her that day.
--Today was Monday. Ergo spelling pretest and also Stompy the Hippo's special day.

Me (reading the spelling word and the prefab sentence from the teacher's guide): "Fauna. Poets often use the word fauna when writing about animal life in nature. Fauna."

Sweetling: What's fauna?

Me: "animal life in nature" (cause I'm so clever that way). You know, ...the flora and fauna of the forest bespoke my secret heart...

Sweetling: Stompy is covering his ears, which is very smart.

In other news, I'm not doing AHG next year. I haven't told Telephone yet. I was *going* to tell her today, cause we were going over to her house in the afternoon to watch high school musical 2. But, yeah. We got there, we started the movie right away, and Telephone had to scoot out RIGHT after the movie to get her boy to his soccer game. So.

Mouse Trap

Its 9am on a Friday morning. I've been up since 5:30. For those 3 and 1/2 hours...I have nothing to show. I've gotten a shower, true, had breakfast, true. I surfed the web. I made Little Guy his breakfast (which he is now refusing to eat for some unknown reason.) Sweetling has been making a penguin family since 7:15. (And the "What were you thinking, Mommy?" question from yesterday is totally forgotten in her little mind.) We did have a short discussion about multiplying both sides of an equation by a reciprical fraction when a variable has a fraction as a coeffiecent....but you know, that was just light morning time conversation.

But the real reason I'm blogging is that my sink has a stack of four stinky mouse traps sitting in it. Oh yes it does. Stinky like, there might still be a dead mouse inside of one of them. That degree of stinky. We have a mouse in the laundry room somewhere. he nibbled on a bag of brown sugar in the downstairs pantry and I heard him making his mousey noises yesterday morning, when I was awake at 5am. I told the Jedi we needed to pick up some mousetraps. (Meaning of course, that he needed to pick up some mousetraps.) The Jedi went out to the garage this morning and found this four box like mousetraps from a few years ago. He brought them in to show me them at 7am....cause that's exactly what I want at 7am. He said, "They're going to need some cleaning, then I'll set them up when I get home tonight." Appparantly by that he meant "you are going to need to clean them so that they are ready for me to set up when I get home tonight." I found them stacked in the sink when I went in to make myself some hot chocolate.

Let the universe hear and tremble, for I am NOT touching those things.

I sprayed them with Lysol, which didn't help. It will, however, probably be enough to render them useless as micetraps. (Is micetraps an acceptable plural of mousetraps?) I'm working up the courage to go in, unload the dishwasher, put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, put the stopper in the sink....and fill the sink with bleach water. That is as close as I am willing to come to cleaning the things. Even then...I have to be much nearer to them than I want to be. I'll just have to keep adding water and bleach to the sink throughout the day, cause the stopper doesn't totally seal the sink.

Vaya is going to have all kinds of animal right fits about this post. Fine. Vaya can come remove the mice from my house if she wants to.

What were you thinking, Mommy?

Sweetling, in theory, starts school at 7:30 am. Little Guy, in theory, sleeps later...then wakes up and watches a PBS show. At 8:30, in theory, the tv goes off, and everyone goes to the kitchen for breakfast and devotions. (Though for Sweetling, its a morning snack, cause she eats breakfast with daddy before school.)

So, at 8:30 today, I went it to turn off the TV and collect Little Guy for devotions and breakfast. He was watching Little Einsteins on Playhouse Disney. Now, the thing with turning off the TV is that you have to do it AFTER the closing credits of the last show but BEFORE the "stay tuned" clips for the next show. Mommy, who is timing challenge, loses at this precision based task quite often. So he caught enough to know that Mickey's Playhouse was next. "Mickey Mouse? Mickey Mouse? Mickey Mouse please Mommy?"

Now, I'm pretty sure that he has never watched Mickey Mouse since coming home with us. I don't know how he even knows who Mickey Mouse is. But, I...being the great educator that I am...immediately decided that Little Guy absolutely needed to be familiar with Mickey Mouse. That's like foundational American culture and history there. I said as much. It totally counts for school for Little Guy. Sweetling, who had wondered into the room, was looking at me like I might be an alien in disguise.

I brought Little Guy his breakfast at the table in the living room. (Breakfast, by the way, was pink eggs on toast with green juice. Hooray for food coloring. Yesterday it was green eggs and pink juice.) Sweetling is still staring at me. Finally she says. "I can't believe you're doing this. What were you thinking, Mommy?"

I then proceeded to remind the little girl of the number of times we suspended regular lessons for any of a number of creative projects...the most recent was an entire webkinz village made out of boxes and paper grocery bags decorated with tissue paper. This consumed the whole afternoon and took up the entire floor of the game room. She challenged me to name another time. Here was the very incomplete list I rattled off. Maybe tonight or tomorrow, I can get Sweetling to help me add to it.

--a spaghetti restaurant for advarks complete with dishes, play food, menus, drinks, tablecloth, and of course, aardvarks.
--beds for cyberworms and paper clothes for the cyberworms to wear
--a pet sitting business
--multiple lunch time diners
--inumerable paper puppets drawn, cut out, and attached to popsicle sticks
--math word problems that develop into 90 minute imagination games with fisher price people
--Cyberchase marathons
--Fetch marathons
--Jo Jo circus marathons

Now, its just gotten unnaturally quiet. Mommy senses are tingling. Have to find Little Guy.

Penguin, Mommy, Penguin!

I just need to make note of the fact that if a penguin is spotted anywhere, in any format, whichever of my children has spotted it (or both if they are together) immediately start crying "Penguin, Mommy! Penguin!" This earnest plea is repeated frantically until I drop whatever I am doing and come running to see the penguin. Tears occur if I don't make it in time. Cause they love me.

Little Guy has legos. He loves the legos. He is discovering certain engineering principles the hard way. Rather, certain engineering principles are demanding to be taken into account, despite how much Little Guy whines or gets frustrated when his towers break apart. There are whimpers coming out of his bedroom now. He wants an exact lego duplicate of his fisher price castle. Now, his a tiny bit used to handing me a crayon and a piece of paper and having me draw any cartoon character or other object that he names. He doesn't understand why he can't hand me a bunch of legos and say "Dinosaur, Mommy." Mommy therefore should build a dinosaur, right? Wrong. Mommy tells him that I am not the Lego engineer he is looking for.

Sweetling is wearing her hair in pigtails today. This is significant cause its the first time she's worn pigtails, ponytails, or braids since getting her hair cut to donate to Locks of Love.

I need a new wall paper. I'm tired of the unfinished Richard and Fawn sketch. And no, the solution to this is *not* to finish the sketch. Foolish mortal.

Chocolate bars left in the van in the summer time melt.

Also, I should get xp or drama points for walking out to my van *all by myself* last night after Smurf subjected me to the movie "Perfume".

How long do chocolate bars need to stay in the fridge before they become edible? And, should I do anything about the tears in Little Guy's room over the legos? He hasn't asked for help. Mommy instincts say go in and make it all better. My brain tells me not to be a helicopter mom and to let him try to work it out himself. The rest of me just says go get the chocolate bar and a straw.

Snips, snails, sugar, and spice

We dropped the Jedi off at work this morning because the drum brakes on his car have fused to something and are being stubborn. Anyway, I turned the wrong way coming out of his work, forgetting that I wanted to take the back roads to avoid the highway construction. "Shoot," says I.

"Shoot," says Little Guy.

"Mommy," says Sweetling, "you need to watch your language around small children."

"Shoot," says Little Guy.

"You're right," says I as I turn the car around. "I should be more careful."

"Shoot," says Little Guy. "Shoot, shoot, shoot."

Now, I'd like to point out that this word was, in fact, "shoot," and not another variation thereof.

In other news, we've started school, so expect more computer time from me. I also have two yummy containers of Heggy's hot fudge in the fridge. (And a Webkinz chocolate lab named Heggy....for those of you who are Webkinz challenged, that makes my third...all of them gifts from Sweetling, who now has 19. Nine and teen.)

The airconditioning in the house has died. After running for nearly two weeks straight because we had days that were ranging in the high 90s to low 100s with 90% humidity and nights that barely got below 80, our air conditioner has finally died.

More stories later. Going to pick up Sweetling's good friend....who has yet to be blog named. That's like a special Christening ritual. Blognaming.

Or an old norse ritual. It has the consonents for that.