Subtitled Sass

Luke likes to participate in the following exchange:

L: I'm hungry!
Me: What do you want to eat?
L, with a no-duh expression on his face: Food.

Last week, he discovered a different version:

L: Mama, ayudame! (Mama, help me!)
Me: Que necesitas? (What do you need?)
L, with a no-duh expression on his face: Ayuda. (Help.)

Glad to see we're teaching him how to be sassy in two languages now.

Let's Go Fly a Kite

It was a rare 60-degree February day--my heart sings a little song every time I remember that it's February now--so of course, we had to get outside in the sunshine. Having a picnic sounded like a fantastic idea until we got the the park and realized that in addition to being sunny and warm, it was also unreasonably windy. Luckily, the reason behind the park trip was to figure out how to fly a kite and toward that end, the wind was enormously helpful. We've had a penguin kite sitting in our playroom, unopened, for the past two years now and I daresay it was glad to get out and spread out its wings a bit.

Shhhh

The nice thing about living in a place with so many elementary schools that follow a year-round calendar is that there is almost always some group of children who are currently tracked out and therefore, there are almost always interesting camps available for this age group. Before we pulled Luke out of school, I sat down with our park district's most recent catalog of programs and proceeded to spend several hours writing down all the things I thought might be of interest to Luke. And then, I realized that I hadn't even looked at what was offered by local museums, libraries, private businesses, and county and state parks (which are apparently different from the parks in the park district? Who knew!) I quickly gave up on the list and put together a spreadsheet. Then, I gave up on the spreadsheet and bought an unnecessarily large desk calendar. And...then, I gave into the fact that if we tried to do it all, (a) we'd be broke and (b) we wouldn't have time to actually do school.

So now, the only things left on the calendar are the things that sounded like they'd be irresistible to Luke. A few weeks ago, he went and dissected owl pellets and found enough bones to make an almost-complete rodent skeleton. Those bones are now hanging proudly on our fridge. And this week, he's going to dinosaur camp for a few hours in the afternoons. Before leaving, he was pretty convinced that they were going to go on a real dinosaur dig and excavate an entire velociraptor skeleton. (Weston was pretty convinced there would be real, live dinosaurs there and he was not pleased when I told him that only four- and five-year-olds could go to this camp.)

I knew Luke would be excited about camp, but you know what I didn't factor in? This is nap time for West and Another Baby, which is inconvenient in some ways, but amazingly convenient in one way, which is that for the first time in five weeks, I'm enjoying the benefits of having two sleeping children and one awake-but-out-of-the-house child. The silence is delicious.

...And now, having enjoyed an entire 20 minutes of luxurious silence and by-myself-ness, it is now time to go wake/try not to wake two sleeping children, load them into the car, and go pick Luke back up. And therein lies the inconvenience. (I still think the 20 minutes were worth it!)

3 Things

Thing 1:
There is tape on my blanket. My otherwise soft, fleecy, fuzzy blanket. The thing about tape on soft, fleecy, fuzzy blankets is that it doesn't come off. Or rather, it doesn't come off without pulling a lot of the fleecy fuzziness off, which is worlds of not okay. And it's not a small piece of tape, oh, no. It's approximately half the roll of tape. And this is exactly why one should not hand a roll of tape to a five-year-old, leave the room, and trust that everything will be fine. (Everything will not.)

Thing 2:
We went to dinner today and the waiter helping us must have been brand new for the following reasons:
1. He had us repeat our drink order twice (Three waters, one Dr. Pepper.)
2. He had me point to the kids' food choice on the menu in addition to verbally ordering. (Two orders of the taco, rice, and beans--no lettuce.)
3. We ordered guacamole. He called it salad and then, it never came.
4. The kids' food had lettuce. Of course it did.
5. He asked us twice if we wanted dessert. The answer remained no both times.
6. After having us sit for another 10 minutes, he brought the check, which included guacamole.
Lucky thing we were all in a good mood because this waiter added much laughter (and yes, some frustration) to our evening.

Thing 3:
This morning, Weston suddenly got grumpy in the car because no one was waving to him. I suggested that perhaps he should wave to someone and then, they might wave back, but that made him even grumpier because he wanted to be the one who had the last wave and if he waved first, he'd have to wave at each person twice and clearly, that would be unacceptable. I've been doing this mom thing for way too long because actually, his reasoning made perfect sense to me and ever since, I've been a wee bit grumpy that people don't wave to me, either.

Making Plans

W, sounding exasperated: Mama, when are we going to get a race car?!
Me: When you save up enough money for one, I suppose.
W: No! That will take too long. I will need one hundred money for that and I can't save that much.
Me: Yes, it probably will take a long time.
W: You and Dada have money.
Me: Yes. We use our money to pay for our house and our food and our clothes and our car.
W: I am going to steal Dada's money and buy a race car!
Me: But West, if you steal our money, where would we live? How would we eat?
W: We'll live...somewhere. We'll eat things we find. I won't steal your dollars, just your moneys and we will have a race car.

Well. On the plus side, he does have some lofty goals, but I might start guarding my coins a bit more carefully around this one. (Funny thing: he doesn't like to have more than two coins at a time because he feels that it's unnecessary, so anytime he manages to find or earn more than two coins, he gives the rest to Luke. Luke is perfectly happy to take it and count it up and hoard it in his wallet. In the end, Luke does tend to buy two of everything and give one to Weston, so I guess it all evens out somehow.)

Runaway Imagination

There's something magical about the sun, isn't there?

I've mentioned a time or two just how dreary I find this month to be and how it's always the hardest one to get through. This year has seemed especially cloudy and rainy--though I'm sure I say that every year. I watch the clouds move across the sky, looking for a break in the fleecy gray blanket, finding none.

But to be fair to January, we have had some sunshine this month. Last Friday, we went to the park to meet some potential homeschooling friends and it was beautiful--warm and sunny and lovely. It had rained for an entire week beforehand, so things were a bit soggy, but we were feeling light and happy and sun-drunk that day.

Of course, the kids built large structures out of tree limbs. And of course, they delighted in the copious amounts of mud in the woods. And of course, when we returned home, I told them to please take off their muddy things at the door so they didn't track it all over the house. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found wet footprints leading down the hallway.

Me: Small Ones, why are there wet footprints on the floor?
L: Because my socks are wet.
Me: ...Why?
L: Because I got soaked all the way to my skin when I walked through the stream.
Me: Stream? What stream?
L: The stream that had a dam and led all the way to the ocean and that boy whose name I don't know walked with me through the stream and we went all the way to the ocean and then, we came back because we thought there may be sharks or salt-water crocodiles. And if it had been the Nile, there might have been Nile crocodiles, even.
Me: Oh.
W: No. There was no shark and no sea. It was a sewer, I think.

(I'm fairly confident that it was a rain drainage thing and not a sewer or a dam or a stream or an ocean, but I can't convince either of them of that.)

((Regardless of what it was, we immediately washed the clothes and the kids with an excess of soap because ew, ew, ew, ew, ew.))

The Elephant in the Room

For several months, I've been censoring what I've written about here--and perhaps, as a result, I've been writing less--because as the boys grow, their stories become more their own and less mine to share. In particular, stories involving Luke and our rather short attempt at having him in a kinda-but-not-really-traditional school. Those stories aren't mine to tell in this public space, but I think it's okay to talk about the end result of those experiences, which is that we've decided to homeschool, at least for the near future.

I see this as a one year at a time endeavor because quite honestly, if I think about a period much longer than that, it seems completely impossible. So we're doing it for the rest of this year--and let's be honest, we're doing it for next year, too, as it would be rather unfair to ask him to transition to yet another environment in six months.

When I manage to live in the Now, I can see all the good that comes from this decision. Perhaps most importantly, he is himself again. He is the Luke that we know--the funny, quirky child who delights in talking endlessly about what he knows, what he's read, what he's learned, and how he knows what he does. He has time to play and to read and to learn, all things that were being severely restricted during his time at school.

The part that made it a difficult decision is that I liked the school he was in, and more importantly, I loved his teacher. Loved her. She was absolutely fantastic--respectful to the students, communicative with the parents, open to input from us and willing to incorporate that input in meaningful ways. If I could have had my pick of Kindergarten teachers, she is the one I would have picked. And as sad as I am that she is no longer a part of his life, I am in equal measure glad that she was his teacher for the past five months because now, we know that it wasn't the teacher and it wasn't the school. There is no blame here, only admiration and respect for the teachers, the school, and the methodology they employed. Despite that admiration and respect, we had to admit that no, this wasn't working. No, he wasn't benefiting from this experience and in fact, was being harmed by it.

So here we are, gradually easing ourselves into the title, Homeschooler. (Or perhaps I'm the only one who needs to be eased into it since he has been perfectly willing to claim that title before we even started.) Here we are, working through the curriculum and figuring out which things work for us and which need to be tweaked. Here we are, making connections within the community, going to the park, building tree houses and walking through streams. Here we are, walking through the butterfly house at the museum and listening to the museum volunteer detail butterfly life cycles as we watch a brightly colored butterfly stretch out sticky wings, having just emerged from its chrysalis. (And isn't it funny that one of the last things Luke was working on at school was studying a box of flashcards about the life cycle of a butterfly?) Here we are, doing the all the same things we've always done, and yet, they're very much not the same at all.