Ordinary Time

It's been one of those days where I run from one thing to another and things like blog posts just don't get written. Better late than never, right? I've noticed that the back-to-school gear up has begun and homeschoolers are not immune. (I would like to be immune, really I would. I'm still feeling as though it's the middle of summer. Please don't disabuse me of that notion.) I've also noticed that, for homeschoolers, teaching high school , especially when one is just beginning is a major hurdle to wrap one's mind around. I can remember that feeling of being a little (or more than a little) afraid of homeschooling high school when M. was a freshman. I was worried that we would have to completely change how we learned things; that we would never have fun together again because it would be all academics all the time or else I would have failed my daughter miserably. I can remember secretly hoping that she would decide that she never wanted to go to colleg...

As much as I don't want to, I need to start thinking about school plans for the fall. We have done very little formal school work this summer and I have appreciated the break. (I may change my mind about that when we start back. That first week of math can be unpleasant.) I think my children have appreciated it too, in that they are starting to ask when we will begin school and what we are going to be doing. I have the general idea in my head as to what we are going to be working on, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. You would think that by the 16th year of homeschooling I would have the logistics of it all worked out. I thought that as well, but as I think about how the school year is going to work, I'm realizing that I really need to go back to the drawing board and rethink how we are going to do school this year. It's all because I've never had this odd set of ages and abilities before. And it is a bit odd. Here's the spread. I have two doing high school...

This is what happens when you let your oldest daughter, who really likes power tools, to babysit while you are gone one afternoon. She cobbles together a sulky using an old lawn chair. Parts of this were left over from when she first tried to make one many years ago. M. had seen a very expensive one in a toy catalogue and wanted to try to make her own, and so she tried. It never worked quite like she envisioned it. Yesterday, after having rolled around different plans for how to remake it in her head, she came up with this. It's pretty sturdy and can hold an older child or adult. Or it can hold two smaller children. I anticipate this gets a lot of use over the rest of the summer.

Sometimes I'm never sure where to draw the public/private line when I'm writing here on the blog. Not everything needs to be or should be shared, but I've heard from enough people over the years that knowing someone else has been having the same struggles has been immensely helpful. I don't think it's healthy to pretend everything is all right when you are really struggling. People aren't mind readers and how can they help if they don't know anything is wrong. The couple of weeks before we left for Michigan were particularly dreadful around here in terms of trauma behavior. I'm not exactly sure what set it off (and sometimes with trauma, there really isn't a reason), but I think that integrating our house guest and her two children into our home had a lot to do with it. Without going into details, let's just say it is a couple weeks of my life I do not care to repeat. Now, what no one often shares about therapeutic parenting is the difficulty a...

That would be the dog, Gretel. Here she is curled up in her favorite chair. Gretel is now 1 year old and I think we may have survived her puppy-hood. There were days when I wasn't so sure about whether we were going to manage that, but we are all still breathing. The other thing I wanted to show you was this photo of the doorway between the kitchen and the butler's pantry. Now you are probably wondering what's so special about this particular view. If you have visited my house in the past year, you will notice immediately it's not what's there, but what's missing. Two days ago we took down the baby gate that was perpetually set-up across here. Hooray! When my parents were visiting last month, my father decided it was all a secret plan to develop a dynasty of hurdlers as he watched my children leap across the gate multiple times a day. (It was particularly exciting when they were leaping while also trying to carry glasses of milk into the dining room....

A while back (quite a while, actually), a reader asked me about my thoughts on Ch*na's policy on not allowing people with facial deformities to adopt. I do have some thoughts on that, but that has also broadened into thoughts about raising a child with a facial deformity, in general. If you do not live in adoption-world, you may not be aware that there is a strong and active anti-adoption movement. Some of you may have caught some of it on the comments that started on a post I wrote about adoption and homeschooling for another site. The main gist of the comments stated that a child should never be removed from her country of origin to be adopted; the loss of culture is so great it trumps the benefit of living with a family. As you can imagine, I don't buy this argument, though I also believe that inter-country adoption is a third option, with the first two options of staying in the family of origin and adoption by a family in the country of origin being far better solutions....

While this past vacation was a fairly short trip, both in time gone and distance from home, there are a few things I noticed about this time around that I hadn't really been aware of before. We've been a conspicuous family for a while now. We are unusually large in number and the varied ethnicities coupled with some special needs and look-alike twins make us noticeable. Since our house guest and her children were travelling with us this time we were particularly noticeable. I'm used to fielding questions and comments from interested by-standers and usually these are positive, or at least neutral. Rarely have we ever had anything negative actually said to us. (And I'm ready, I tell you, if that ever happens. I have stock-piled responses in my head if I ever need them. Thankfully I haven't.) Anyway, my short list of ways it's different travelling with many people. You can't get away with telling the hostess at the restaurant, "Only 14," just lik...