Every Waking Hour

I told Kieron about the 100 Species Challenge and he liked the idea of it. I have been wanting to take the children on more regular nature walks so I thought this might be a good focus. Paddy was excited about “hunting for animals” so yesterday was our first venture. I hesitate to put the banner on the blog because I hate to commit to things until I have a sense whether I will actually follow through ;-).

I took lots of pictures yesterday, but they turned out over-exposed. But I liked this early sign of autumn:

and Paddy the Hero heading down through our meadow towards the bus stop. We are fortunate because even though we only have 2 acres, we are bounded by the community trail, so there is something like a long narrow preserve below our house which will not be developed by builders.

Nice how little boys make everything an adventure. I was pondering regretfully as we walked how one of those cheerful, energetic mothers could further the childrens’ sense of enjoyment in the “expotition” and help make a wonderful memory, and how I’m not like that. Yep, I do sound like Eeyore ;-). I think I am probably more of a cross between Pooh and Owl — scary thought. However, then I got rid of the Eeyore voice by reflecting upon how as a mother I can learn from my kids too, and I’m pretty Pooh-like in being able to respond to the call of adventure, even if I’m not usually the initiator.

Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!
Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!

“This was one of those perfect …days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy,…. and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.”Sarah Orne Jewett

So yes, it was cool today; I actually had to get a fire going because we were all shivering. And only last week it was 107 degrees down in the valley, and humid. Brendan, who notices these things, noticed that the barometer was almost flooding its receptacle, so once again its prophetic talent is affirmed.

The coolness was good for Sean’s sake, since this was the first week practicing in full gear, and he said he scored a touchdown in practice.

It also has made it easy for me to bake — pizza, oatmeal bread, peanut butter muffins and ginger cookies in the last few days.

Sean was up late last night working on his first language arts paper. He was supposed to take one of the life events on his “Life Map” that he had done the previous week, and write a five-paragraph passage about it using lots of sensory details. He didn’t get home till six, and by the time he finished dinner it was after seven. Then he watched a movie with his family (”Meet the Robinsons”). Then he sat down to work. Then he kept sitting there, agonizing, for about the next hour. He had decided to write about a memorable football game from his Pop Warner season, so he went and got the local newspaper article to refresh his memory about the scores and plays. But the “sensory description” part boggled his imagination, and he couldn’t make himself start.

Finally, Kevin managed to sort of half-joke him into the first sentence. I had already given him the standard advice “just start writing and fix later”, etc. Kevin started reading Sean old bios from his high school reunion booklet and making up life events for Sean based on them “I got my PhD at Wisconsin and then taught for ten years….” and Sean started laughing and some of his stress diminished. Pretty soon he was typing away. At these times I am glad the kid has two parents. In our family, it seems, laughter is the way out of a lot of difficulties.

The final product didn’t have many sensory details, but was a nice clear well-paced little account in football-speak. He noticed the jargon on the second draft and rephrased it to make it more audience-friendly, of his own volition. It had a couple of spelling errors — I am trying to be a mom not a teacher, so I stayed way on the sidelines and didn’t point them out– interesting balance. I expect he’ll get marked down by the rubric chart because he didn’t quite comply with the requirements but I don’t know by how much. I figured these first weeks were going to be a learning time in several ways — they always are with new teachers and new expectations and a new level of school but of course, he has to transition in more ways than that.

In general though, this schooling experience seems to be confirming that a relaxed, unschooly approach can work just fine and save So. Much. Time. I don’t think he ever worked at assigned academics for more than 2 hours a day in his whole homeschool career, but this work he is bringing home is well within his zone. Obviously, personal narratives for composition are going to be on the challenging side of the zone, particularly since we don’t do those much in the homeschool, but it wasn’t like it was beyond his ability.

I remember once talking to a Dad who was unschooling his son. He said that when he was a kid at a rigorous Catholic school, he got to go for a month trip to Ireland with a few people in his class. A monk tutored them for something like 3 hours a week while they were on the trip — when the group got back to the US and resumed normal academics, they were *ahead* of their class.

The days are starting to fall into our new routine — I love these changing times of year. Really, I hate realizing that changes are going to happen, but when the new things do start falling into place, it’s invigorating.

My favorite elusive blogger and thinker Steph nominated me for a Brillante award. (I loved Rosie’s “hide and seek” description : ). Steph is one of the most thoughtful writers and faithful commenters that I know. I am so surprised and honored that she likes my writing so much. Whenever I get an award it’s usually because she or Faith has nominated me.

Most of the people I would nominate probably have been nominated already and I hate trying to pick seven names, so I will escape by saying that if I’ve commented on your blog, it’s because I think you are an awesome blogger. Then I will mention my friend Chari at Heart’s Haven because she is a truly brilliant, wise, funny and competent person who is a dear IRL friend and she is trying to write more frequently in her blog and I am trying to encourage her, because I love reading her posts. So she is my choice for the Brillante award.

Also I nominate Faith. She thinks like I do, and has a lot of the same tastes and methods in homeschooling, but is an extrovert and her kids have a lot more activities than mine do. I love reading about her rich learning life and her lively, loving family.

Oh, and another! Amy at Epiphany Springs is a poet (you can tell by her haikus and her header and title. She is another elusive blogger who you don’t mind following from link to link. She founded a daily CM blog which has been going on for 2 years or more (follow-through is a sign of brilliance IMO) and she writes with sometimes painful honesty about all the “minor” trials which aren’t really so minor when they are ever-present parts of life — like food allergies, for instance. She is writing a series on My Personal Rule of Six which is very good.

Finally, my daughter at A World Incalculable, Katie at CM, Children and Lots of Gracee, and Love2Learn Mom at Studeo (one of my first regular blog reads ever). This took a long time, and I only mentioned six. But I had better sign off and start our day!

My occasional Daybook.

Adventures in Recent Past and Future:

Yesterday Sean and Kevin went with Grandpa to a City College football dinner.
Next week Liam goes back to college.

Where Everyone Is:

Clare just woke up, I hear. Aidan is getting his morning minutes on the NIntendo (he plays when everyone is still asleep, so they don’t get sucked into watching). Sean just went down through the woods to catch his bus. Kevin is asleep, having stayed up late last night; ditto Liam and Brendan and Patrick.

Recent Music:

Johny Cash.

Recent Books Seen Around the House:

The Lost World, Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Kieron); Brideshead Revisited, Do Hard Things, The Moonstone (Clare); ?? Brendan; various textbooks (Sean); Blind Spots, Brideshead Revisited (me), 1000 Art Masterpieces (Liam and Clare); 100 Great Short Stories (or some similar title) (Liam).

Weather:

Very hot and humid at the end of last week but now cooling off to late summer temperatures.

Thoughts:

I need to redeem my hours better. Why is this so hard?

What I’m Working On:

Getting ready for first day of homeschool.

What I am Happy About:

Arriving at the fourth week of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises (a first!)

What I’m Not So Happy About:

A feeling of boredom and restlessness in the air of our home, more frequent little-sibling squabbles and tension, missing the teenager.

Spiritual Focus:

Still — Ignatian Spiritual Exercises (progressing through Retreat with the Lord by Fr John Hardon)
Trying to figure out what God wants for me in this next stage of life.

Recent Kitchen Events:

A great pizza with partly whole wheat crust, garlic sauce, BBQ’d chicken bits simmered with jalapeno, crushed pineapple, and olives on top. Trust me — I was proud of this one.

Formal Academics:

Sean — Geometry and Language Arts assignments with the whole family interested.

Informal Learning:

Painting and playdough experiences for the little ones.

Culture:

Hmm — Sean narrated The Most Dangerous Game to us all when we were in the car.
Liam and Clare browsed through a Sister Wendy art masterpiece book and made up Twilight-Zone type stories about the weirder, more modern pictures.

Movies:

Walk the LIne; Monk episodes; Olympics.

Wearing:

Jeans and a heather-purple knit shirt with a loose turtleneck (can’t stand tight ones)

Creating:

Hmm…..? More photos recently, and imaginary games with my lonely 5 year old.

Grateful for:

Sweet little five year olds who get to stay home! and that my public-high-schooler is telling us his adventures when he gets home; and my Catholic Faith.

Some things I want to do this week:

Still — take the little ones outside, and call a friend — PLUS get our homeschool year off the ground.

A Picture Thought:

This will fill a backpack fast, and wear one out too — Sean’s books!

These are Paddy’s old friends. Most of them used to belong to Sean, who at age 5 carried them everywhere for months, but they have had the happy destiny of becoming loved anew after a period of exile in the toy-box. I think when Paddy has gone on to new things, I will have to save them for grandchildren; they are almost part of the family now.

He plays with them constantly; imaginary games usually involving all kinds of wrestling and adventures. Today he couldn’t find them and we had to ransack the house to recover them. But usually, they are right there wherever he last played.

Since art projects are rather unusual in our house, I have to immortalize them when they happen. This is the second time in two days that they’ve gotten out the paints.

Paddy and I also went further on the story of the Spider and the Hero. That poor spider has become such a tame creature that it will even play hide and seek with the Hero, and even let him WIN!

More and more, I think Paddy can already read but simply finds it more convenient not to, which is fine because I don’t really think he’s completely ready to focus on small print for as long as he can focus on listening.

You know, I said I had requested Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior from the library. But I was mistaken. It was Kevin who requested it from my card. I couldn’t remember where I had heard the book mentioned, so I knew I recognized the title but was puzzled about what context it was in. So it turns out that it was because Kevin was reading me the review of the book from his Wall Street Journal.

That was how I ended up reading it before he even knew it had arrived. It is a breezy, smart book, very interesting to read. Lots of studies and anecdotes — like an extended feature glossy-magazine article. But it made its point very well. The psychology of sway is convincing; you see it all around you. Since I am not planning to write much more than that right now, you can look at a blog review here.

Oh, I forgot — I was going to say one more thing — while reading it I kept thinking about what Dorothy Sayers said, and thinking that to some extent the goal of education is to rid Sway from some of its swaying power:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?….

Sean got to sleep in today, and so did the rest of us. That was nice.

I have read that school buses rides are often the worst part of school, and we have some anecdotal evidence of that, since Sean mentioned there was some foul language and teasing going on particularly during the late-bus ride. And there are some little LITTLE kids on there — the bus that comes up here also stops by the elementary school before it goes to the high school. And it takes about 2 hours to get from the top of the route to the bottom. Not a great situation. They say it usually settles in after the first few days, when kids are too bored/sleep deprived/preoccupied with school soap operas/ whatever to expend all that energy.

I got a bunch of books from the library today:

We are all getting tired of turning on the Olympics and finding only beach volleyball. Nothing personal against beaches or volleyballers — we DO live in California, after all — but there are other things to show, after all. Haven’t gotten to see fencing, for instance. Maybe because it’s not as interesting to viewers to watch players who are covered from face to toe to foil-tip.

Everyone has been spending too much time in front of screens, including me. My older boys have been playing Travian, and now Kevin is going to join their server. In that way it will be a relief to start up a schedule again, no matter how light.

Aidan has been talking a lot about dentistry recently, for some reason (maybe because of the recent orca-dentist trip) and keeps saying such reassuring things as, “I had to get all Kieron’s teeth out today.”

takes almost as long as homeschool. This is about 10 pm.

I guess the Olympics in the background didn’t help much ;-).

Today we saw Sean off for his first regular day of school (yesterday was the frosh orientation, so not a “real” day of school) and then I brought Clare down to town for her orthodontist appointment (Aidan calls this the ‘orca-dentist’). Then we had a girls’ shopping trip, something that happens approximately four times a year. We went to Salvation Army and then to Target. I got the big boys some sweatshirts and socks and the little boys some shirts. Liam got a new wallet. Clare got some frames in which to put Memorable Pictures. She bought a hat for the sorely missed highschooler.

When we got home we both slept (!) and then I made some dinner. Sean came home on the late bus with loads of paperwork. About as much as Liam needed to apply for college, I think ;-). We signed and sorted and social-security-numbered and then we all looked through his homework and his textbooks with great interest.

Sean said he liked today better than yesterday, and he ate loads of baked potatoes and steak. He had lots of stories to tell.

OK, this is not really about homeschooling, is it? In the bigger picture, I guess we are all transitioning from being a homeschool family with 2 (make that 3 now) grads to being a homeschooling family with one school kid. It changes things in odd ways. My eyebrows really go up when I see the complicated way they do things — they have a point system, lists of rules, special bonuses, etc. The homework given today was that “getting to know you, getting to liiiike you” genre so familiar to us from confirmation class —”What celebrity do you admire and why?” “Make a pictorial map of your life story”. But I see why they do this type of thing, of course, and Sean did think it was really cool to get to choose Spanish nicknames — who would have thought it? He was even rehearsing Como te llama? and Donde vives? Clare is thinking about taking up Spanish so she can talk to him!

Last night, it seemed like no one was ever going to go to sleep. Some of them were watching the Olympics; Clare and Liam were looking through a Sister Wendy art book; Sean was talking to a friend on the phone, and then even though he went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. Paddy had that exhausted hectic look that little fry get when they are up too late. Then Kieron was awake during the night, apparently dealing with some GI issues that appear to be going through the family, and is now still fast asleep.

Sean and I were up at half past six, so Sean could make sure he was ready for the school bus. He checked his backpack about 30 times, told me how tired he was, and then at slightly after 7 he and Kevin made their way through the woods below our house to the bus stop. Shortly afterwards, Kevin appeared again and said he had just watched a child of his board the yellow bus for the first time in history ;-). It is strange to think that this is simply normal life to many people; that it could very well be our 5 year old that was boarding the bus, not our 15 year old. Very odd to think that in normal American circumstances, all the seven kids would be off at their respective places by this hour. Kevin would be gone, not in his home office, under those typical circumstances. It is just strange to reflect for a moment on what “ordinary life” looks like and how different it might have been.

Nothing so peaceful as a 5 year old who was up at midnight the night before.

Sean and Kevin on a hike during our vacation

Aidan woke us up at some dreadful hour last night…. I did not check the clock, but it was dead dark. He thought it was time to get up, and earnestly pursued the goal of rousing the parents of the household, at least. Kevin went to sleep on the couch. I heard him leave, and imagined he was downstairs chasing bears outside, or dealing with a sick kid (Sean and Brendan have been dealing with GI issues recently, so I was picturing the worst OF COURSE). So I went looking for him, and couldn’t find him. Then Aidan found him trying to sleep on the sofa. It went on from there. I finally made Aidan stay in his bed in the loft and lay down beside him to keep him there so Kevin could get some sleep. You see, I can nap during the day, but Kevin is unable to sleep unless it’s night time. Still, it wasn’t exactly great sleep, and Aidan made sure to wake me up for good once it was light outside. I am remembering melatonin and special needs — but his sleeping pattern has never been a problem before.

I made pancakes and sausages for dinner and simmered the black beans I had set to soak yesterday evening, with jalapenos and garlic and diced canned tomatoes. Everyone did their weekly chores.

Clare made some special vanilla tea that I got her for her birthday. We went to the library and I got Sway and Clare got Brideshead Revisited (the book) and Monk (the TV series on DVD) from our request pile. The kids spent some time this afternoon watching Monk, and I took that nap. Cooking beans means that Aidan is guaranteed to say 100 times (not even exaggerating): ARe they ready? It’s time to turn off those things you are making, Mom. I think they’re done! He kept saying this during my nap, so no primetime sleep there either.

Sean had football practice, so he and Kevin were gone for most of the afternoon.

I was going to make fajitas for dinner to go with the black beans, but the beef was still too frozen, so I made a chicken stir-fry instead; and Aidan got his long-awaited beans, at last. Clare made a chocolate cake for her saint’s day which is today, and so that was dessert.

Kevin showed everyone who had not stayed up late yesterday, the swimming relay from last night’s Olympics.

After dinner I played a game with Paddy that we have been playing recently. He takes my Palm Treo and I take the Bluetooth Keyboard, and we do this imaginary dialogue/pretend game and type in what we say. I actually do all the typing, but he likes seeing the words come up on the screen. I am a reformed giant spider, sort of like Shelob but who has changed for the better. He is a Hero. We have two baby lions that travel with us, and 2 baby spiders (mine) who are still nursing ;-). We go on various adventures; his favorite is going to “dreamland” where the villains are from our nightmares.

This is quite mentally challenging for me. I realize what Chesterton says about the youthful energy — how the child says “do it again” and the adult does it, “until he is nearly dead.” I also realize the hidden laziness of academic structure — it’s a hidden truth of structure that it is plain EASIER for the adult than the diverse, imaginative, exploratory world of the small child. I would have much preferred a nice structured reading lesson as far as my energy level and creativity went; on the other hand, I LEARNED more and connected more with my precious youngest by engaging in his game with him. And all things considered, he was learning just as much about reading, if not MORE, than if we were sitting down with a phonics manual. He was looking at the typing and asking me to read to him, and sometimes reading bits himself. Still, I got TIRED. Since my youngers have an older mom, it’s a good thing they also have siblings to fill in the energy and creativity gaps.

Now Aidan is asleep, and Paddy says he is hungry.

Paddy and Aidan going boating, a couple of weeks ago on our vacation by the lake.