Smashed Botatoes

One of R's greatest hits of funny toddlerisms is The Banana Story.

Last year, two years ago, I forget. R was eating a banana and he said "When I was little I used to say 'blalalala' for 'banana.' Now I'm a big boy and I can say it right! Bawana!" He said it with such confidence! The girls and I fell out, and continued to fall out with each retelling.

The hilarious Rowanisms have become more sparse as he has become more verbally proficient. That's to be expected, and I'm glad of his proficiency...but sometimes when he says something correctly my brain fills in with how he used to say it and I
feel a little nostalgic for the old days.

He hit us with at new one tonight. We had mashed potatoes for dinner. We all love mashed potatoes (a starchy carrier for butter and salt--what's not to love!) but since we try to make healthy choices, we don't have it often.

He was excited to see mashed potatoes on his plate. He said "I love smashed botatoes! I used to say it wrong. I said 'mashed botatoes.' Now I say it right! Smashed botatoes!" His conviction was enviable. No one wanted to squash it.

We all fell out. He wondered why we were laughing. We said we loved mashed potatoes too. How I love (and appreciate) that my girls are able to hold off on being "right," and let their little brother have his moment. He dishes it out to them all day long. How easy (and maybe gratifying) it would be for either of them to smack him down in moments like these. But they don't. Their reward is a private laugh with their dad and me.

He'll figure it out. He figured out "banana."

Mill Creek Restoration Project Follow Up

This sample had to incubate for 48 hours. She's attempting to count the pink, blue and purple specks.

Working at 95% Capacity

(the title refers to me--I think the kids are doing fine with downtime!)

You will have to forgive the bullet point  style update.  It's the best I can do right now!

What we've been up to (just the highlights!):

Latin--Visual Latin for T.  She loves it.  Latin 100 (a first year high school) course for C through Lone Pine Classical School for C.  She loves it.  Two thirds of my children now speak to me in Latin.  I have very little idea of what they're saying, and it cracks them up.  We just borrowed from the library some hilarious books, the only title I can remember at this hour is Cattus Petasatus. I confess that the humor is lost on me, but I have a deep appreciation for the enthusiasm.  C is carrying a high A average.  She has every expectation of being inducted into the National Latin Honor Society when she becomes eligible after this semester.  She would very much love to attend the Latin Convention (in Colorado) in the spring.

The girls are also studying for two national mythology exams.  The Medusa Mythology Exam for C, and the National Mythology Exam for T.  Both tests are in the spring.

C is stoked about NaNoWriMo coming up in November.

Both girls are taking a writing class with a local writer, John Overbeck.  That's going swimmingly.

Math suddenly makes sense to T She's rocking through Singapore 4 at a shocking rate.  After years of pulling teeth with her and math, I'm enormously grateful for this breakthrough.  Singapore math is funny.  It's challenging.  They say on their website that most American students starting the program test into it a grade back from their assigned grade level.  That puts T in the right spot for grade level...but she's so bright...with this new thing she's got going on, I feel like she's really hitting her potential.  Thank goodness!

C took the year off from formal math last year.  Her (high school level) chemistry class was so math intensive and homework intensive that I felt like it was in her best interest to reserve her time for something other than more math (ie- Terry Pratchett novels!) so I let her off the hook.  This year she's back in formal math with Art of Problem Solving Pre-Algebra.  Unlike Latin, this is something we do together.  Honestly, we're finding it maddening.  The text book goes from "yeah, duh," to "what??" in the span of a sentence.  I maintain hope that once we acclimate to the style, it will go more quickly.  Much of it is review from Singapore 6 (which she did 2 years ago.)  Initially I had expected to blow through this book by the holidays, and then hit Algebra 1 second semester (and maybe doing that online with an actual math teacher,) but at the rate we're going, I'm not so sure.

History at Our House with Mr. Powell continues to be a hit.  Ancient history this year. 

Water quality is our main science focus this year.  Last week we took the Orsanco REACH  tour.  It was phenomenal--even the weather cooperated!  Basically, we went out on the Ohio River, learned about river ecology, took and analyzed water samples, learned about fish, went back to shore, collected macroinvertebrate samples, analyzed those...and (shockingly!) determined the water quality on the Ohio to be good!  To be fair, the weather had been dry for two weeks.  We learned about the combined sewage overflow situation in Cincinnati.  Basically, our wastewater treatment infrastructure is horribly outdated.  Everytime it rains we dump raw sewage into the river.  We are currently researching what steps are being taken to update the sewers and how that relates to the political and economical situation in our city.  Homeschooling bright kids is not for the faint of heart.

This week we (with a group of homeschoolers, facilitated by me) are collecting and analyzing samples on the Mill Creek (our home watershed.)  I am so impressed with the educational program put out by the Mill Creek Restoration Project!  Apparently they have some fantastic donors.  At this moment I have a mobile field lab in crates and boxes in my living room, ready to take to the testing location tomorrow morning.  It is comprehensive.  And free.  And they use the data we collect.  This is real science, and I am so, so grateful that its available to us!

So, those are the big things.  Things I didn't mention are the fabulous moccasins T just made.  And the crazy rainbow cake C just made (from scratch, and she even cleaned the kitchen!) And probably some other things like pen pal letters, technological proficiency as demonstrated by a tutorial C wrote about how to post files to yahoo groups (complete with screen shots,) medicinal herbal teas made by T...and I don't even know what else.  I'm too busy doing it to document it.

And this.  I'll mention this.  The boy...the boy has been reading some sight words for a while.  Now he's decoding.  He sounded out "sassafras" the other day.

I say all this not to brag.  I don't want to boast.  That's rude, and its no way to win or keep friends.  I've tried (with success and failure) for some time to fly under the radar with regards to what goes on in our homeschooling life.  I speak vaguely.  I tell the funny stories.  I don't often tell the stories about how I go up to tell C to turn off the light and GO TO BED at 12:30, and she says "but Mom, I'm reading history!  Doesn't that count for something!  Here, look at this book!  It's hilarious. I just love how they abuse the 'end of chapter' questions!"  (It was A Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, if you're interested.  I saw it for the first time in the wee hours the other day.  She likes to keep her library selections under wraps until she decides if they're worth sharing.)  Upon quick examination, the book does "abuse" and poke fun at the boring comprehension questions that follow each chapter in a typical textbook...but she checked it out discreetly...and her analysis of it and her succinct description belies her age.  THAT'S OK! But it's the kind of thing that I haven't really shared publicly until now.

I'm thinking maybe it's ok to be a little more public about the crazy intellectual stuff my kids do.  Maybe even, it's more than ok.  Maybe I should.

Monongahela 2011

I think I might could be able to move to West Virginia.  I don't think I would ever tire of the natural beauty of the mountains.

We camped at a dispersed site along this road in Canaan Valley Wilderness. True story: Just after daybreak, a pack of dogs chased a bear through our camp. I certainly heard the ruckus, but by the time I had the tent unzipped, they were gone. I got the details from the dog handler later that morning. We packed up and moved to a State Park campground!

We swam in the headwaters of the Potomac River. The water was clean and cold. This time I remembered to bring our goggles, so we spied on the large mouth, gar, and other assorted fishies hiding in the rocks (we also identified some macroinvertebrates and determined the water quality to be excellent!)

I'm so sure this looks like an album cover...I just can't figure out which one.

I read once that heaven is a collection of good memories. This is one of them.

My Girl Kicks Butt...

...even when her sparring partner is a grown man!

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

I've thought about this article off and on. Today it came up in a discussion on Facebook, and it turns out I do have an opinion (imagine that!)

I think the premise is fundamentally flawed. The premise is that having a kid on the couch (grown or otherwise) reflects a parenting failure.

I think that's wrong. People use therapy differently than what they used to. These days, mental healthcare has lost a lot of the stigma it used to carry, and more and more, people are using it as a tool to become more self actualized. The patients the author describes are not looking to correct any wrong doing, they're just looking to go further. In past generations, young people took the happiness issue, the fulfillment issue, to their spiritual leaders. Or they volunteered. Or did mission work. Or joined the Peace Corps. These days, they take it to the couch.

The idea that parents alone should produce self actualized adults is ludicrous to me. How could any one (or two) people provide everything another person needs??

Why on earth would we want them to?

In my opinion, instead of holding onto the old paradigm, the one where it's all the mother's fault (whether she had screwed up royally or subtly--by doing everything "right,") the author could have/should have recognized the limits to her scope of practice and recommended something other than therapy to her new generation of unhappy clients.

That would have been an article worth reading.

Atlantic article

How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

Just an interesting article...not sure I have any cogent thoughts....