Category Archives: Management

About doing and coordinating

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From an e-mail I recently sent:

At home our current issues are self-control and deciding whether my not-planning-enough-ahead absolves certain poor behaviors, and, if so, how much.

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We’ve started school now, and the kids love it so far.  The challenging thing there is figuring out the right amount of stuff to fill each slot, and denying myself (so completely) to stay on-track with the schedule God game me to balance the children.

They love the regular change of activity and increased interaction with Mama.  I grow weary of my continual-on, but am trying to think less of me.

It’s a slow process, but Lord-willing I’ll mature.

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Adjusting

Now I’m using my new laptop.

Just now I’m actually using in the children’s room, with the illuminated keyboard (*yes* it’s everything I hoped!).

Starting to input my library, starting with the books I want to pack away– so that I can reclaim the playroom as a tangible mark of my progress.

I’m going soon to have to decide how much poetry to hang on to, and where to put it. For me it’s always been more about browsing than anything purposeful, so till now I’ve always kept it out, knowing it will be out of mind as soon as it’s out of sight…

Had a successful visit to FMN’s 1/2-off children’s sale.  Got a stack of historical novels that (once these kids are asleep) I plan to divide by years of the cycling 4-years of history plan.

I also picked up a number of YA and folktales for my own purposes, and I’m less sure how best to use/access them.  I’ll tackle that one once the school books are entered and packed away.

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A Blessing of Provision

Natasha got her first glasses less than 6 month ago.

Back at that appointment the eye doctor said to watch her and bring her back in 6 months if we noticed her vision deteriorating.

I ranked at this idea for a number of reasons.  First, it just seemed like a way to get extra business, so there was an automatic conflict of interest.  Second I wasn’t sure I could notice “a deterioration of her vision.”

Well, I did.

She started squinting about a month ago, and then sitting on the chair in fron of the movie rather than on the couch.

I called and made a new appointment.

She needs new lenses.

But (and this was the part I didn’t know to expect) our insurance will cover the cost of the new lenses because the replacement/correction is happening less than 6-months later.

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We have a Name

Untangling Elementary School

For Elisha we call it Untangling Preschool.

I’d been trying to decide on a name for our homeschool that both wasn’t cliché and that Jay could agree with.

I wanted to have something I could put on a little ID card for each of the girls, and to back up my request for a teacher’s discount, if they wouldn’t take my word for it–though this latter issue seems less-applicable so far; no one has asked for an ID yet.

So this was fun– being both a name and an image and an action.  Not to mention sort of my trademark (in a small way).

Anyway, it’s fun to have an identity of sorts for this growing project called school.

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Getting Ready for Homeschool, 2009

We’ve just about finished ordering everything for school this fall.

The girls are very excited.  They’ve asked if we can start early.

Elisha has no clue, and I’m cool with that.  I’ve found a pre-school workbook (50-cents) that we’ll save for him for next year when, as a 4-year-old, he’ll actually be able to do something with it.

For now I expect he’ll do preschool stuff in whatever room we’re working in or else go play/read to himself like he already does when the girls are ignoring him.

At this time we’re planning to use the Tapestry of Grace curriculum with the Well-Trained Mind as another resource for a sort of classical approach in our organizing structure.

Other than Language Arts (Melody’s still learning how to read, and I’ll be requiring more handwriting from Natasha this year) I expect the girls will be using the same teaching time as a class of two.

Jay picked out the Science and thinks he may want to teach the math, and I am wrestling again with how many “extracurriculars” to include.

And by this I do not yet mean any outside-the-home extras.  I mean non-core stuff like Spanish/French, drawing, and musical instruments.  I have resources for any and all of these, I just have to learn where they’d belong.

I have a measure of ability and enjoyment in all of these, and would like to share them with my kids (not a little because that would give me more time with them too), but I know that they could wait, too.

I have a funny little list in my homeschool notebook (apparently reading is such a *given* it didn’t even make the list):

Important to Mother

  • Writing and speaking coherently
  • Understanding, loving music

Important to Daddy

  • Math
  • Science

Important Because They’re Important

  • Study of the Word
  • Study of History

See as Beneficial (if we can fit them in)

  • Foreign language
  • Drawing
  • Musical instrument

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And that’s the outline of where we’re starting from this year.

I made a little chart to compare what “year” we’d be at for each of the kids’ schooling, and how old they’d be for each pass through the material.

Tapestry of Grace, if you didn’t follow the link, follows a 4-year cycle through history, repeating three times over the 12 traditional years of school, increasing in depth as the children mature.  The progression of time is the organizing structure for the curriculum, with a focus on philosophies and personalities and how they shaped history.

After making the chart I realized I’d be 45 by the time Elisha finished high school (yes, with this system I’d expect to be teaching them through high school), and I felt like writing a letter to my 45-year-old self, begging me to remember I’m not making any of these plans out of any imagined certainty or revealed wisdom, but only doing the best I can do with the understanding I currently have.

You see, anytime I see such farsighted “certainty” (Hi, I’ve decided what I’m going to do for the next 15 years), I get uncomfortable, but at the same time I can only make decisions based on the information I have now.

So here I go.

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The Straight Life

I am the regular lawn-mower at our house.

I used to think of it was a man-job, and didn’t really consider doing until my mom asked, somewhat scandalized, why I let Jay keep mowing the lawn when it attacks his allergies so badly.

He had this whole system of putting on long pants, tucking his cuffs into his socks, etc.  Then he still had to shower as soon as her finished if he didn’t want his eyes and skin to be itching horribly afterward.

Honestly, it never entered my mind, and I was happy to take over once I actually noticed.

It’s proven very nice for me too.  I am able to gift Jay with something important to him– a nice-looking lawn, and I get both necessary exercise and time to myself with my iPod (we always use hearing protection, and that goes a long way to putting me in my own little world).

Weekend before last I was mowing along listening to the playlist I have for one of my novels (I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve always loved ordering my music in a sort of home-made soundtrack for the stories in my head), and I came upon a dog-bomb I’d missed in my pre-mow sweep.

Thankful I’d seen it before I mowed it, I stopped the mower and found a shovel to clean up.  As I bent to collect the wad, a Kenny G song reached the vocalist part:

I was thinkin’ that I’d always be lonely but God came up with someone like you… Just to think I had made up my mind love was over…

And I had to laugh, of course.

In a perfect world, this is what all that romanticism leads to: the straight life.  The world where you push a mower once or twice a week all summer and pick up dog poop.

And God knows I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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On-the-road Entertainment

I can nearly recite all of Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child, except for the bit about his journey to the Limpopo.

My favorite bit is, The next day, when there was nothing left of the equinoxes (for the procession had proceeded according to precedent)…

I had the entertainment of reciting long chucks of it to my kids while we waited in line at Sam’s Club last week (I’ll admit I was watching the other choppers to see if they noticed my impressive feat), and the delight of having Natasha correct my accuracy on a few points and recite with me until she was sure I’d gotten back into the way of it.

They all prefer to listen, and I like the idea that I’m “normalizing” for them the acquisition of large amounts of material.  We aren’t making an effort now, but come August, I hope to line up a system of regular memorization.

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Made Me Think

I seem to be much more productive at home on the days I write and/or am working on my novel in other ways (music, problem-solving).

Is that because I’m actually home, or is it because “creative energy” is buoying me through less-creative things as well?

I don’t know.

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What kind of nonsense…

Natasha received a delightful word-toy that allows kids to build their own sentences out of phrases (parts of speech color-coded, for the most part).

What I now need to figure out is how to teach the difference between sentances that are nonsense because of content, and sentances that have no sense because they don’t contain a noun or a verb.

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The Adventure

Let’s see… I’m not sure If I can make this short or interesting, but there were enough details that I felt the need to write them down.

Last Monday Jay left early in the morning, and after he left I read an e-mail from my mother that she and my dad had driven to Anchorage because my uncle being treated for cancer had caught pneumonia.

It was -40° and there was a serious question of whether this would be the last good-bye.

The next day I had to get NJ to her 6-year-old well-child check-up early, and at the doctor’s office explained to the 6- and 4-year-old the concept of cancer and the possibility this beloved uncle could die soon.

Melody at once said, “I want to see him before he dies.”  And as soon as she said it I knew I felt the same way.

We left the next morning– Tuesday– as soon as we had ourselves collected and the dog dropped and the boarder’s.  The daylight driving was uneventful, but as we entered twilight the weather descended and I was driving with little and no road markers (because of the fresh snow), wind, and blowing snow.

It was yucky, but we made it to town and met everyone at the hospital for a nice visit before making our way to the house we were staying at.  Before we left Fairbanks I knew that the antibiotics and fluids Providence gave him had pulled my uncle back to a semblance of normal, but still felt we were to go.

The next day, Wednesday, the weather in Anchorage was nutsy: freezing rain, icy streets, wind blowing emptied garbage cans all over the residential roads.

Mom and Dad went out early to figure out what was going on with Uncle A’s release, and the children and I hung about in a structureless mush until Dad came back and brought us all with him back to the hospital for a last game of Memory before Uncle A went home.  Forecast that night was for ANC to reach 65 degrees on Thursday.

Our Hostess offered to let us stay another night: the roads were still awful, and though some of them were drying out we knew that driving north we’d reach some point when they froze again, and then God help us.

Dad left on an experimental drive to pick up some things and while he was gone I checked the weather report for Friday.  It looked worse than what we were already in.  I voiced the opinion that if we were going to leave today or tomorrow the odds looked better for today.  Dad agreed when he got back and we packed the cars, the kids, and headed out.

The younger two were with mom and dad, and Natasha is very good at being quiet when told, so I could focus my attention on seeing through the crazy, wet snow blowing down.

We were creeping along a corner when I felt my back wheels turning to catch up with the front.  I remember turning into the skid and registering enough correction to slid into the snowbank nose-first rather than sideways.  We were fully off the road, and the first thing I noticed was a state trooper pulling up behind us with his lights going.

I felt a little disoriented (though not from the slide– more from the mental effort of staying on the road up to this point), and Natasha had some loose stuff tumble onto her, but otherwise we were fine.  The trooper said I was doing everything right; it was just too slippery on the road.  He radioed for a wrecker, and it arrived relatively quickly, considering we were in the middle of nowhere…

The truck pulled my car out of the snowbank and that was all it needed.  Nothing was wrong with it, and I was quite content to let Dad drive it the rest of the way to Tapper Creek.  An hour before we got there we stopped at a gas station to call ahead and found they had two rooms available and one had a queen bed and two twin-sized beds.  Mom reserved it and said we were on our way.  We arrived 2 minutes before their scheduled closing-time of 10:00p.m.

With Natasha on the couch and Elisha in the porta-crib he’s used in ANC, everyone had a bed and slept well.

We left when it was light, with Dad still driving my car, and when the roads started drying out we traded back.

The rest of the trip was without incident, other than we passed a handful of other vehicles off the road.

Oh yes, that was the bit I left out.  Moving on again from where my car was released from the snowbank, we were down to about 15MPH.  Half and hour down the road we passed a truck on its side.  Our adventure could have been a lot messier than it was.

While we were waiting for the wrecker Natasha watched the Trooper’s lights and observed matter-of-factly, “God told that man to stop and help us.  Just like in Bible times!”  “That’s because he’s the same God as was in Bible times,” I answered.  “He doesn’t change!”  And she was so delighted it spilled over in giggles.