Ordinary Time

One of my (not so) secret desires in life is to be able to speak more than one language fluently. Since I am not quite as young as I once was, I had pretty much written this off as being impossible for all the regular reasons... too old, live in an essentially monolingual country, maybe I don't have a 'gift' for languages, too old, etc. It's not that my younger self hadn't tried. I took four years of French in high school and four more years of French in college. For fun (because I had a lot of elective credits that I needed to use up to graduate), I even took intensive elementary Italian my senior year which was a two-hour, five day a week class. I never really mixed up the two languages I was learning, but did end up having some fairly bizarre tri-lingual dreams that year. It was the closest I ever came to my polyglot dreams. I take that back, the closest I ever got was on the airplane returning from the month I spent in Paris between my junior and senior years ...

The day has been fine, but sometimes there's just nothing to say. I could tell you all about elephant seals, if you really wanted to know about them, after having watched an hour long documentary about the creatures this morning with my children. Let's just say I'm glad I'm not an elephant seal, but the documentary was well done. But I'll save you from random information about elephant seals and instead just give you a link to a new article I have up.   Finding Joy at Heart of the Matter Online . Now I'll go back to snuggling with a droopy G. and using my laminator to make a math game to go with our most recent picture book.

Just when you think you have homeschooling all figured out and you can cruise along on auto-pilot, your children grow and change and your slowly come to the realization that what had worked for others is no longer working for this child. I have to admit that the near-constant problem-solving aspect of teaching my children is one of the things I really enjoy about homeschooling. I find it highly satisfying to critically look at how my children are learning and figuring out solutions to things that seem to get in their way. Since each child is an unique individual, it shouldn't be surprising that each child learns in an unique way. It also means I shouldn't be surprised when a child throws me a curve ball and I have to work on a learning problem that I've never had before. I shouldn't be, but often am, because I get it in my head that I actually know what I'm doing. My children do have a gift for keeping me humble. Because I'm sure I'm not the only one who...

It was sunny (not warm... still waiting for that) on Saturday and B. was home for the afternoon. He took advantage of the time and sun to work on his garden He had a little help. Here are some rare pictures which contain all four boys (sort of) engaged together. We actually see it as progress that one of them was hovering about the edges, even if he wasn't actually helping.

I think we have discovered a hair solution for the time being... wide, stretchy headbands. I have a lot of knit fabric in my stash, so each morning for the past three days, I look at what H. is wearing and make a new one to match. At some point, we should have enough choices that I won't need to do that anymore. Here are some photos from today, five days after surgery. The stitches and swelling are still very visible, but you can get a sense of what the surgeon was able to do. She doesn't like the stitches, she doesn't like the shaved hair, and she is much more self-conscious about how she look now than when she had the expanders in. Understandably, she is feeling a little emotionally tender these days. It's as though this surgery has allowed some walls she had built up to come tumbling down. It's a really good thing, but hard to watch your child suffer through.

You all know that I am an avid reader of mysteries, but sometimes we have our own real life mysteries here as well. Take the case of the missing soap. One of our bathrooms upstairs is the children's bathrooms, whose sink is lower than other sinks upstairs. Now, since it is the children's bathroom, it is not always pristine and things cannot always be found when they are needed. Are we the only house where things just randomly vanish, never to be seen again? This happens fairly frequently. Often the items are too big to have been taken by Borrowers , but every human in the house disavows any knowledge of the missing item. As far as they are concerned, they never even knew said item existed, so how could they have taken it? Often Mr. Nobody gets the blame and we move one, the item sometimes resurfacing at a later date and sometimes not. Early last week, when the little girls went upstairs to get ready for bed and found an entire bar of soap missing, it was classed as one of ...

I'm a little tired of surgery, so let's talk about something else, shall we? We've all been passing around a cold for the past couple of weeks and yesterday it was A.'s turn. She was feeling pretty rotten... rotten enough that she didn't feel as though she wanted to take her riding lesson. (Now you know exactly how rotten she was feeling.) Well, the stable has a 24 hour cancellation policy and the last thing I wanted to do was to pay for a lesson no one was going to take. I had a plan. TM has been coming and sitting through the girls' riding lessons for the past year for various reasons. He started out announcing he didn't like horses (or the smell) at all and gradually it all began to grow on him, though he had never been on a horse. Every so often he would express interest, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I thought this would be the perfect chance to let him try out riding. When I asked, his first reaction was to tell me he absolutely didn...