Mama in Pajamas

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Sitting around the kitchen table, doing school work together as a family, beginning the day at whatever hour works best, wearing pajamas and fuzzy slippers, a typical homeschooling family starts its day. I remember back when I was researching homeschooling this was one of the scenes that was repeatedly painted by homeschooling experts.

I never quite understood the appeal of sitting around past breakfast time still in pajamas. Pajamas are for sleeping and nothing else, that is, unless you're sick or you have a newborn. The thought of going past breakfast still wearing my pajamas is depressing. I can't walk to the mailbox in my pajamas. I'm not sure why, but all I know is that if I have to open the front door for any reason, I will at least put on some real pants.

Apparently, I'm strange (surprised?). It seems that wearing pajamas in public is the thing for the PTO crowd to do, particularly while dropping children off at school. It's like a scene straight out of People of Walmart. I almost feel overdressed in the morning dropping my children off while wearing jeans, a Target crewneck, and gym shoes. That's right, I didn't get the memo. I can almost hear the other moms thinking, "Who does she think she is? Wearing real clothes here like that."

So, in tribute to these moms, and dedicated to their traumatized children, I present to you, my highly-regarded, award-winning, five-star poem entitled "Mama in Pajamas."

Mama in Pajamas
by http://mamarantingnow.blogspot.com/

she drives the kids to school

with rollers in her hair

she looks like such a fool

you wish she wasn't there

she walks out of the car

with slippers on her feet

why does she walk so far

why can't she be discreet

you hope your friends can't see

maybe they're all asleep

oh, Lord please have mercy

or else you just might weep

mama in pajamas

morning, noon and bedtime

tell your shrink your traumas

of mama drama school time

Where Are My Six Hours?

You would think that homeschooling two special needs children is very time consuming, you know, with the having to be responsible for all aspects of their schooling, their mothering, and the getting them to their various appointments, and you would be correct, it is time consuming. It's not just time consuming, it completely consumes you. It can consume you to the point that you forget you even exist.

Don't get me wrong, I loved homeschooling my children. By being with them all day long for so many years, I've come to know them and understand their challenges in a way I would have never gotten to know had they been in school for six hours every day. But I digress. The point I wanted to make was that now that my children are in a "brick and mortar school," I seem to have even less time. I'm busier than I ever was before.

What happened to the extra six hours a day I was supposed to gain by placing my children in a school outside the home? It seems that I spend all my time in the car, driving two children in two separate directions, driving them to two different schools,  getting them to their schools on time, taking them to separate doctors' appointments, taking them to all their various therapies, and picking them up from school on time, just so we can hurry back home, eat dinner, and spend more time driving around to their after school activities. And this is with just two children.

So, yes, although it defies all logic, I seem to have even less time now that my children are in school.

It's the Most Wonderful Time

No, I'm not talking about vacation time or free time (not that I even know what free time is), what I'm talking about is Back to School time. This year, we didn't have a great summer filled with wonderful memories, great vacations, time at the pool, or relaxing moments in the backyard.  We actually had a pretty stressful summer that actually went by too quickly.  I barely had time to do the things that needed to be done, let alone have time to do the fun things we wanted to do this summer.  Anyway, because of the terribleness of our summer, this year, Back to School time means back to a routine, back to business, and interestingly enough it has also led to more things getting done, and less stress.

Right now we're on our third week of school, and things have gone along rather smoothly.  The key has been making sure that we all get to bed early and get up early.  This way we have been able to get our school work completed before 3:00 p.m.  Makes a lot of sense, right?  I mean most schools operate this way.  The students go to school for six hours and are usually done by 3:00 p.m.  So I figured, why not?  Why not try doing things this way.

This was actually a new idea to us because as a homeschooling family, not only do we decide how we will be educating our children, we also get to set our own daily schedule.  And when you don't have someone telling you that the children have to be in school at a specific time in the morning, it's easy to start the school work later and later each day, until you push the start time all the way to noon, and end up with a hectic afternoon schedule with tired, grumpy children trying to focus on their work while all the other children in the neighborhood are back from school.

Setting a homeschool start time early in the morning has been one of the best decisions we have made for our homeschool this year, and even though we don't get to ship our children off to school for six hours a day, Back to School time has been the most wonderful time for us.

Summer Break, Broke, Broken

With wonderful plans for my summer break, with not many of those things accomplished, and with the summer break almost to the end, I would like to know where the summer break has gone. And even with not making much of a dent on my list of things to do this summer, I have been busier this summer than any other summer before. I've even been busier this summer than I have been during the school year when we spend our days homeschooling while also getting all the other regular life things done.

Why is it that I've been busier during this summer than during the school year, and I have nothing to show for it? I wonder where the time has gone.  Sure, I've been extremely busy finishing up the homeschool year, organizing, decluttering, training for a marathon, and driving the kids all over town for their various summer camps.  Oh wait, that's right, I think it's the driving all over the place that has taken up my time this summer, and my money; have you seen the price of gas lately?

So, instead of resigning myself to a broken and broke summer break, I think that I will be spending what's left of this summer not driving my kids all over town.  I'll be on a  hammock in the backyard, reading a book, with a cold beverage in hand, trying to enjoy what's left of the summer break. But first, I will write that one down on my to-do list.

It Wasn't a Tornado

Photo courtesy of NSSL

Yesterday, hungry and exhausted after a long day of homeschooling, considering going out to dinner, we instead decided to head out to the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner.  The weather forecast was calling for severe thunder storms, but I figured that, one, the storm would not hit (it wouldn't have been the first time the forecast was wrong) or, two, that we could stay ahead of the weather, go to the store, and come back before the storm hit.

At the store it seemed like my plan was working.  It was looking like the storm was either not going to come or that we would be done shopping and back home before it struck.  Then, all of a sudden, as we were almost done at the checkout register, we saw the sky turn completely black on one side of the parking lot, while the sky was still blue in the other side, it started to rain heavily, and the wind started to blow very hard. And just as quickly as it had started, the storm stopped, the sky cleared, and the wind died down.  It was quite eerie.

We quickly loaded the groceries into the car and drove home while listening to the news reports on the car radio about a tornado warning right where we were.  We really didn't see anything strange until we were about a block from our house and found a tree that was partially blocking the road.  The neighbors were out moving the tree from the road, so I decided to turn in the other direction, and that's when we came across this tree.

Obviously, I wasn't going to get through that way, so I had to turn around and go the other way, where the neighbors were clearing the road.

Here are a few of the trees that were destroyed in our street.

And then, we have our beautiful linden tree, may it rest in peace.

 Here's another view showing how it was damaged beyond repair.

We couldn't save the tree, so we had it cut down.

This is all that's left of our tree.

We also lost some shingles off the roof, and limbs from some of the other trees in the yard.  Thankfully, that was all the damage we had.  One good thing that happened was that a toy the children had thrown on the roof and that had been stuck there for quite some time, was blown off the roof all in one piece.

Well, apparently, we had a few small tornadoes hit our area last night, and the weather service is calling for more severe weather tonight and tomorrow.

Eyes on the Prize

With spring finally here, the rains finally behind us (I think), and the beginning of summer not too far off, it’s been very hard to get the children focused on their homeschool.  Googie has been making great progress in his schoolwork all year long and only has about three or four weeks of lessons to complete.   Bubba has finally started to make some progress in his homeschool too.  But, all of a sudden, like Newton’s First Law of Motion, my children’s homeschooling motion is being acted upon by the external force of spring weather.

 

Just when they can actually see the prize: a summer filled with no school work, no cares, and endless fun; they start to dawdle, complain and waste time.  What would've taken one day to complete before the change in weather, is now taking almost a week to complete.  So, like Violet Beauregarde’s mother in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I find myself saying, “Eyes on the Prize, Violet.  Eyes on the Prize.” And when they start to complain that the work toward the end of the school year is always the hardest, I just smile and, like Willie Wonka told Violet in the movie, I  say, “Confidence is key.”

What I need is another force to act upon my inert children.  A force greater than the wonderful spring weather that we’ve been having.  I’ve tried threatening them with summer homeschool, but to them it just sounds like an empty threat.  I either need to find a way to make the threat more convincing, or I need to find something else: a different force.  The question is: what could that possibly be?

Where’s Your Pencil?

We homeschool.  We buy pencils. We buy lots and lots of pencils. We buy pencils by the case, big cases of fancy, Ticonderoga pencils, the ones that sharpen nicely, have nice strong leads that don’t break, pencils that last a long time—well theoretically they would last a long time, but I will never find out if that’s true, because once I sharpen one of these pencils, they get sucked into the black hole that I’m convinced we have in our house.  

Yes, I can always find a brand-spankin’, new pencil in the top drawer of my desk, an everlasting supply of pencils.  And all would be well if I didn’t give them to the children. 

“Googie, here is your phonics assignment for the day, and a pencil.  Go work on this in the other room.  I’ll check with you in about fifteen minutes to see how you’re doing, okay?” I say to my son as I hand him a freshly sharpened pencil and his phonics page.

“Uh, huh,” he says and quickly scampers away.  Fifteen minutes later, I go searching for him all over the house.  Surprisingly, he’s not in the other room.  Pencil, phonics page, and child have all gone AWOL.  And, no, I really didn’t expect to find him in the room, but a mom can dream, a mom can believe, a mom can hope, that her child will actually listen to her.  After another fifteen minutes of searching, I find the child hiding in the bathroom, under a blanket, in the bathtub (no, he didn’t fill the tub with water), reading a book about (his current obsession) astronomy.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Nothing”

“Where’s your phonics page?”

“I don’t know,” he says, still under the blanket.  Realizing that asking him to try to find the phonics page and the pencil would waste a few hours, I decide to go looking for them myself. Fifteen minutes later I find the phonics page under a pile of books in the family room, but the pencil is nowhere to be seen. 

 

“Fine,” I say.  “Here is your phonics page and here is another pencil.  Let’s go over to the other room to work on the page together.”  I follow him to the other room. Ha! I drag him to the other room. 

  

He decides that he wants to sit on the floor to work on his phonics page; I sit on a chair right next to him and pretend to read a book in order to make sure that he’s focused on his work.  Five minutes later I look down to check on him.  “So, how much have you gotten done?”

“I’m almost done,” he says.  I check his page and notice that he has barely started the assignment.

“Where’s your pencil?” I ask.

“What pencil?”

“The one I just gave you.”

It’s 1:00 p.m., Time to Start School

When someone asks me what a normal homeschool day is like for us, I answer, “I wish I knew.” Today, for instance, I wake up early before anyone else in the house is stirring.  I make my way into the kitchen and put the tea kettle on the stove. Waiting for the tea water to heat up, I revel in the quiet that surrounds me while the dog, curled in bed, is giving me a look that says, “You have to be kidding, I’m not moving.”

I have great hopes for this day, a day with no appointments, no long lists of things-to-do, a normal day. I sit down at the kitchen table not realizing that it would be the last time I would be sitting down for quite some time, pick up my copy of My Daily Catholic Bible, read today’s reading, check e-mail, and log into Facebook as the eight-year old pads into the kitchen and demands breakfast.  Not liking what I have to offer him for breakfast, wanting something else to eat, the eight-year old is crying, stomping, and thrashing about.  I send him back to his room, as the dog deciding to take part in the action, gets up from bed and starts to bark, demanding attention.  I coax the dog outside, the eight-year old to his room, and the whole while the teenager is still in bed blissfully unaware that morning has come.  A minute hasn’t passed before the dog is scratching at the patio door.  I let the dog back into the house just so he can follow me to the teenager’s room to help me do the impossible; wake up a teenage boy.  “Wake up, Bubba. It’s morning,” I calmly say.  

“Yes, I’m up,” he says while still in bed, under the covers, with his eyes closed.  The dog, knowing that this will not work, jumps up on the side of the bed, short, front legs up on the edge of the bed, long body stretched, hind legs still on the floor as if on tiptoe, his face reaching to lick the boy’s face.  The boy laughs and gets out of bed to pet the dog.  With his mission accomplished, the dog, tired and hungry, herds the teenager to the kitchen.  I feed the dog.  The teenager feeds himself.  The eight-year old, deciding that he’s hungry enough to eat the sugar-coated bits of sugar-bits that we actually have and not the peanut-butter-flavored bits of sugar-bits that we don’t have, sneaks back into the kitchen and politely asks for breakfast.  I help him with his breakfast.

The phone rings.  It’s the college-age son whining that he’s starving, has nothing to eat, can’t finish his homework, and has a class later in the day, in other words, I have to drive him to the grocery store.  I quickly shower, throw some clothes on, clean out the back of the minivan to make room for the groceries, and drive to his apartment. “Hi, Junior, ready to go?” I ask.

“Huh? Uh?” he answers as he follows me out to the minivan.  Groggy, slow-moving, shuffling his feet while dragging a shopping cart behind him, he slowly makes his way through the store.  Trying to be patient, I calmly follow him through the store offering useful tid-bits like, “No, you don’t have to buy 10 of those items to get the 10 for $10 price,” and “yes, half of $5.00 is $2.50.”  

Having been in the store for over one hour, my patience wearing thin, I proclaim, “Son, are we done yet?”  Did I actually just say that?  And I wonder where the kids get these witty remarks.  He gives me this look that says You talkin’ to me?  and slowly continues to pull his cart through the aisles.  Finally, after what seems like two hours, he stops with a lost look on his face and proclaims (ta da!) that he’s done.

Not having gone on a run this morning and full of energy, I make a beeline to checkout lane 21 where there is no waiting, unless you count waiting for Junior to slowly drag his grocery cart over to the lane.  He gets to the lane and watches me, uninterested, as I start to unload his groceries.  The cashier is bagging the groceries, the cart is empty, and he just stands there.  “Push the cart over here to the front so we can load the bags into the cart,” I say.

“Huh?” is his reply.  I grab the cart, pull it over to the front, and load his bagged groceries back into the cart.  I pay.  We leave the store with the newly purchased groceries and go back to his apartment, where we grab the grocery bags (thanks goodness for bags with handles), open the door to the apartment building with our feet since our hands are loaded with bags of groceries, and in one trip up the stairs we get all those groceries in the apartment.  Mission accomplished.

Back at home I realize that it’s lunch time.  We eat lunch. We pray our morning rosary and afterwards I announce, "Kids, it's 1:00 p.m., time to start school today!"

It's now 4:15 p.m. and we're diligently working on our homeschool. The phone rings.  It's Junior.  "Now what?" I think hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. Apparently, he's finally awake.  He just wanted to thank me for having taken him to the store today.

Living in a Spiral Galaxy

This astronomy fixation that Goggie is having right now has taken over our lives.  He's lugging around astronomy books like security blankets.  He takes them to tae kwon do, to the store, to music lessons, to bed, he even hides the smaller books in his coat and sneaks them into church.  Any spare time he has, he spends reading these books or drawing pictures of constellations and galaxies. For example, this is the diagram of a spiral galaxy that I mentioned in the previous post about how he couldn't find any socks.

Mom, I Can't Find Any Socks

If I want to find him, all I have to do is follow the trail of astronomy books and the space pictures he has drawn.  If that isn't enough, he has filled up our Netflix instant queue with documentaries about space. Just this evening, for fun, he was watching a special about the Moon.

In addition, for the past few months he's been begging me to add astronomy to his science curriculum, and since we're homeschooling it's actually a pretty easy thing to do.  For months, I kept resisting because he already knows enough about astronomy to teach a course on it.  Then, he found one of my homeschool catalogs and saw the following description of an astronomy course called: Exploring Creation with Astronomy:

Exploring Creation With Astronomy

Yes, you know you're a homeschooler when your children enjoy reading homeschool catalogs.  Anyway, I went ahead and ordered the course to take advantage of his interest in astronomy.  If only I could find a way for him to be as excited about math as he is about science.  Do any of you have any suggestions on how to do that?  How can I get him to beg me to add extra math to his curriculum?

Multiplication with Regrouping

Eight-year old Googie was having problems getting his math assignment completed.  The topic was multiplication with regrouping.  He had to multiply a three-digit number by a one-digit number, and regroup or "carry over" the tens place of the answer.  His assignment consisted of two sheets.  One sheet had 32 problems

and the other sheet had 8 word problems

He started to cry when I told him that this was his assignment.  "It's too hard, Mom."  So I decided to do something to get him to complete his assignment.  Part of the beauty of homeschooling is that we can adapt the assignment.  First, I turned this into a two-day assignment. Then, I rewrote the problems sideways on pieces of notebook paper.  This helped him to keep his digits in the right place value position. 

Next, instead of having him regroup the tens place digits of his answers above the numbers, I had him write them below.

This made all the difference.  He was able to complete the entire assignment without any incident.  Of course, it also helped that I fashioned a study carrel out of my cardboard cutting board to help him stay on task.

He really enjoyed this, but I don't think that I'll be getting my cutting board back.

Anyway, not only was he able to complete his math in a timely manner and with a good attitude, he was able to finish all his other subjects, plus he earned the privilege to watch a movie at the end of the day.  I would say that it was a good day.

Praying the Rosary and Laminating Holy Cards

Oh Joy!

The other day our homeschool group had a prayer group for moms. We had so much fun getting together and being silly. It wasn't until I started explaining to Hubby what we were doing that I realized how ridiculous it sounded, "Yeah, honey. We had a blast last night at the homeschooling prayer group meeting. We prayed the rosary and couldn't stop laughing because of the fun we were having. Then the teenagers went to the other room to practice singing religious songs while the moms sat in the family room laminating holy cards. Yeah, we all sat around staring at the laminator and going, 'Oooh, that is sooo cool, I need one of those.' And we weren't even drinking." Anyways, Hubby just gave me a weird look and commented on how I needed to get out more (which is what I thought I had been doing at that meeting) and Bubba just couldn't stop laughing and kept asking me about the laminating machine.

Looks like cocoons are dormant

So much for the swallowtail caterpillars. It looks like they went dormant and will not be emerging anytime soon. I guess it's something to which we can look forward next Spring. Yeah!

Great Painting

Little Googie just loves to do his paintings. Here is one of his latest paintings. When I asked him what the painting was he said that it was a little boy looking for Jesus. This is from the same little boy that thanked me the other day when I walked by him and stopped to kiss him on the head.

Swallowtail Caterpillar Update

Yes, it's true I'm the proud mother of boys! And as everyone knows, boys love bugs. Hence, my recent focus on bug photos. Here is a picture of the swallowtail butterfly coccon in Bubba's bug habitat.

Pictures of Swallowtail Caterpillars

Bubba, Hubby and I have found at least 8 swallowtail caterpillars in our garden! Just as I promised yesterday, I am uploading some photos. This is a photo of two of the swallowtail caterpillars that we found in our garden today. How exciting! We could even see them munching on the parsley. Bubba also has two in his habitat as you can see below.

Today was also our first day of school. Everything went really well. Bubba started the day with one hour of piano practice and then we all got together at 10:00 for a family Rosary and the official start of our school year. Googi was so excited to start Kindergarten and he spent some time after lessons were over looking over his school books. He particularly enjoyed his new math book and was so thrilled that he already knew most of the things in his book.