Thanksgivings

Two hours left of Thanksgiving Day, my first one in forty trips around the sun that I've spent without family.  The first one in 13 without my children.  Far from feeling broken and lost, I feel strong.  Strong in mind, body, and spirit.

Strong mind.  I've learned so much this year.  Some comes straight from homeschooling my sons:  Latin declensions, geometry theorems, cellular respiration equations, Punic War details, and so much more.  Other learning is more self-directed.  I've stretched it with Scrabble games and busied it with Buddhism readings. I'm thankful for the time and ability to think, read, and write.  My mind is stronger, and for this I give thanks.

Strong body.  Post-push-up pain aside, I've gained considerable physical strength thanks to martial arts training.  I'm far more coordinated than any previous point in my life, with better balance to boot.  Excellent instruction from my instructor in Tang Soo Do, my own hard work, and encouragement from friends at the dojang all contributed.  My body is stronger, and for this I give thanks.

Strong spirit.  Emotional strain and pain forced me to look inward more intently than ever.  I sought and summoned inner resources previously unrecognized, and I found a connection to the universe that brings me a sense of wholeness.  I continue on a spiritual journey, but I've made many steps this year.  Personal struggles, support from family and friends, and dedication to truth seeking paved many stones on this path.  My spirit is stronger, and for this I give thanks.   

To all of you who have supported me during this time, thanks for sharing your strengths so mine may grow. 

Namaste. (which, for this writing, means may the strength in me recognize the strength in you, and when we recognize the strength in each other, we are one)

What We Learned Today

Here's a sampling of what the boys and I learned today.  Feel free to guess who learned what.

Complement means "that which completes something".  Compliment is something nice we say to another.
The subject complement takes a noun, adjective, or subjective pronoun.
In Spanish, there are eight articles, as opposed to the three in English.
Complementary angles are two angles which add up to 90 degrees.
Supplementary angles are two angles that add up to 180 degrees.
Tofind the area of a rectangle, multiply the length time the width.
To find the perimeter of a polygon, add up all the sides.
Aedifico (Latin) means "to build".
In "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes," Sadako contracts leukemia after exposure to radiation from an atomic bomb.
Plant cells have chloroplasts.  Animal cells don't.
How to play measure 73 through 76 in "Hopak" by Modest Mussorgsky on the piano.
It's hard to read the Encylopedia Britannica.
The pretzel with the bong (bo staff in Korean martial arts) is tricky and takes flexibility. 
How to spell "blew".
How to beat mom at "Settlers of Catan."
Trimming rear claws on kittens is harder than cutting front claws.
The letters "s" and "b" in cursive aren't really that hard.
Acorn squash makes great yeasted bread.
Kittens can  be a bit gassy.
Yellow Tail Shiraz is still okay after a week in the fridge.
Encouraging a friend is uplifting.
Refusing to unlock the house until the garbage is taken out is an effective method of delegating chores.
We can get ready for Tang Soo Do in 5 minutes.

We're really all learning all the time.  Nice to know, huh?

Getting Gauge

Knitting for gauge: Knitting a swatch with the needles and yarn you plan to use for a project to assure you are knitting the same number of stitches per inch as the pattern dictates.

I've never knit for gauge. Not once. I'm not morally opposed or inordinately lucky, just a bit lazy and not that particular. Admittedly, most of my knitting doesn't rely on gauge. Afghans and dish cloths don't need to be precisely sized, and hats and mittens can be sized by regular fitting to a convenient and somewhat-similar sized head or hand. A felted bag (a personal favorite--more on that in another post) reveals its mysteryafter a trip through the washing machine, gauge be damned, and scarves stop when they are scarf-length. Baby sweaters are likely to be grown into, which hopefully happens in season, and the one sweater knitted by me for me could be adjusted as I went. So why knit for gauge?

With this lassez-faire attitude toward knitting precisely, it seems a bit odd how much fuss I've made this year regarding curriculum planning. I spent too much time in July and August searching websites, reading reviews, and ordering books. Creating lesson plans on Homeschool Tracker Plus became my obsession as the fall approached, reducing courses into bites neither too big nor too small. With the parts determined, I attempted scheduling. I soon ditched the idea that certain subjects would happen at predictable times on particular days, instead just assigning a number of days a week for each subject with deadlines for some assignments.

Whew. I'd never attempted that level of homeschooling organization , and I must say I really hated the process. Instead of offering me peace of mind with the certainty I thought a schedule should deliver, I started dreaming about forgetting subjects (Remember those dreams from college -- going to the final exam when you'd forgotten to attend the course? That's the genre.). I woke at 2 am to ponder the necessity of daily Latin -- or of Latin at all. I was a woman possessed by the clock and the calendar, or maybe I was simply possessed.

As our first day of homeschooling for 2009/10 approached, I printed off the boys' schedules. Nice looking product but still, to my highly critical eye, full of inaccuracies. Why Tuesday to start Critical Thinking? That day was far too busy for all but the basics. What math assignment for Friday -- review or a lesson? My mind continued to race. Week two was a bit better. I made a few changes (read: simplified with assignments labeled "math" and "reading" rather than by chapter and page). Week three has been simpler yet. I've left more spots blank and allowed myself to (gasp!) cross things out that aren't happening.

A bit of slacker mom feeling nags at me, but I'm starting to relax. I can see the basic pattern of the year unfolding, but just the rough sketch. I'm altering the pattern as I go, spending longer on the factoring process my younger forgot and eliminating the Latin repetition my older doesn't need. I'm moving back to my more flexible ways, although the boys and I do like the nifty chart from the planning software, since checking off boxes is fun. However, I'm more comfortable just picking up our books and beginning with the end in mind, checking for fit along the way, making changes as we go, and delighting in the wonder of our path while keeping our eyes on our destination.

Opening Day

By 7:30 this morning, I knew delay of game was inevitable. My fantasy of an 8:30 a.m. start faded quickly as my younger and I read yet another chapter of his current favorite Avi book, one of the beloved Poppy series. My older had a late night, I mused, and he'd be a more enthused about learning after more sleep. And, after all, our schedule was light this week. Not to mention, a benefit of homeschooling is NOT being ready for the all-too-early bus.


I hit the shower by 8:00, sealing the certainty that our start would be at least a half-hour late. I woke my older after my shower, we ate breakfast together, and still we dallied. Coaxing the boys through teeth-brushing, bed-making, and dressing brought us to 9:30, although my Facebook visit probably influenced our speed for the worse.


Our start was anticlimactic, at best. No special breakfast, opening words, wishes for the new year or the like. My older helped picked a quote for our homeschool (Thoreau Academy, not that we needed a name after four years of homeschooling.). The Thoreau selection: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." After deciding on that, we moved on to geometry, Latin, handwriting, and more.

No extra innings and the rain held off -- the boys move fairly quickly through their lists, with whining kept to a minimum and limited to the younger son. To him, the best part of our opening day was the delay itself. Through a snuggle and a story, he found happiness in the common hours of our first day back to homeschooling. Sounds like success to me.

The Best Laid (Lesson) Plans

I'm definitely conflicted this time of year. Despite 16 years having passed since fall meant a return to school, fall means a fresh start. New notebooks, paper, and binders. Anticipation, both enthused and anxious about new classes. And, notably, unlike the rest of life, a beginning with a definite ending in sight.

About this time every year, I find myself surrounded by scrawled lists of curriculum plans and piles of books. I've planned in notebooks, on calenders, on computer-generated planner pages, and in my head, all with moderate initial success that diminished come October or so, where recording what we actually did took the place of planning what we would do. That's fine for my younger guy, since he generally takes us further than I would have planned, but with my older at age 12 (7th grade age), it's really not enough for either of us. I need to know that a course will get finished in the span of our school year. He needs a path to follow with signposts telling him how far he's been and how far there is to go. He needs me to make a plan.

So here I am, surrounded by the papers and the books, slowly scheduling out Geometry, Latin, Biology, and more. I'm trying out some scheduling software this time around, Homeschool Tracker Plus, and (as I was warned) the learning curve has been fairly steep. It allows homeschoolers to share lesson plans with others, which can be quite the time saver, but I'm not sure that time savings will be evident this year, given the amount of work I've put in learning how to make the program work best for me and my family. I'm not one to schedule down to the hour, and that seems to be one of the program's strengths. Right now, my favorite feature is the library function. With a swipe of my neutered Cue Cat (bar code reader turned ISBN reader), I can catalogue my books. Using the resource function, I can sort these by course as well. Hooray! It's too soon to tell if this software will meet my needs, but the latent librarian in me is deeply satisfied.

What did you learn today?

Some days I feel like we spin our wheels, making it to the end of the day intact but with little or nothing learned. This list, from a very ordinary day, is my proof for future blah days that we're all always learning.

Today, someone in the house learned:

Red cabbage juice turns magenta in the presence of an acid and blue/green in the presence of a base.
Red cabbage juice stinks.
Adding the base gradually to the acid neutralizes the acid, returning it's color to normal. More makes a basic solution (back to that blue/green!).
Sympathy to the injured child is more credible to the child when one abstains from a dissertation on the carelessness that went into obtaining the injury. Being kind again trumps being right.
To bring a gram of water from 1oo degrees C to water vapor requires 2255 J of energy, and the temperature does not change.
How to memorize more of Giga, by J.S.Bach, on piano.
How to beat the first gym leader on Pokemon Platinum.
Geysers are basically erupting pressure cookers.
"Incredulous" means full of disbelief.
Semicolons often go outside of quotation marks, unless they are within the quote itself.
Cold but not frozen shredded mozzarella can be safely warmed to room temperature in the microwave (level 2, 20 seconds).
Napoleon would not have made a good friend.
A litter box left uncleaned for 36 hours is pretty nasty.
Ruling with a five-person Directory doesn't always work, at least not in post-Revolutionary France.
It's hard to beat a Pokemon champion.
Fractions can be simplified if the denominator and numerator have a common factor.
In probability, if all outcomes are equally likely, then the probability of success is the number of successful outcomes over the number of possible outcomes.
A flame extinguishes in the water vapor from the spout of a tea kettle.
A.A. Milne felt strongly about the high quality of The Wind in the Willows, so strongly as to use appreciating it as a judge of a person's character.
Facebook comments pop up on one's homepage quite a bit before the notification occurs in one's email.
April snow in Michigan melts quickly on the pavement.
A list is an easy way to create a blog entry but feels a bit like cheating.
We're learning all the time. Whew!

Potatoes and Lesson Plans

After a week of delaying, I finally found my way to the vegetable garden which borders our back fence. Unstaked beefsteak tomato plants sprawled lazily, their fruit rotting against the earth as soon as it ripened. The grape tomatoes weathered their neglect much better, and the harvest was plenty. The beets are almost ready, as are the carrots, while the basil flowered weeks ago and has begun to seed. Greens and cucumbers are in the past, memories of our taste buds as August comes to a close

As I cleaned up the rotten tomatoes, a red potato peeked at me from the ground. I haven't planted potatoes for at least two years, so these guys are a delightful surprise this summer. A few weeks back, I stumbled upon a lone cantaloupe, another volunteer thanks to a compost pile that doesn't heat up enough to kill seeds. These finds make the weeds from the same compost pile entirely worth it. These are gifts from the earth, reminders of summers gone by. Numerous volunteer tomato plants grace the edges of the compost pile behind our garage, giving gifts freely without care from anyone.

From rich soil came surprises. Some of what I planted with purpose and planning made took root and flourished, but the some of the best came from sheer neglect. As another homeschooling "school year" begins in two days, I feel the panic to finish preparing, to find the materials that will cause the best fruit to grow in my children. I'm knee deep in lesson planning sheets (largely blank) and curriculum and rather certain that it won't all come together by Tuesday. Fortunately, the soil around here is rich, and the boys continue to grow and learn, plans completed or not. They have quite a bit in common with our surprise potatoes.