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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

frazzly

Today we (the kids and I) had to go to the valley to go shopping. On the drive home, LT (who's far less anxious than he used to be, but who still always worries if one of his parents seems unhappy or sick) asked me if I'd had an OK day, because I seemed a little frazzly. He was certainly right. Here's why.

First, picture a Chatty Cathy-type doll. Very cute, about 45 inches tall, goldeny kind of hair and eyes, freckles. Are you picturing?

OK, now her "chatty" switch is stuck ON, got it?

And she is being SO contrary and confrontational, and she never stops asking for things she wants or arguing when you tell her no until you either punish her or blow your top a bit and yell at her, and even when she's not doing this she is JUST. CONSTANTLY. TALKING.

Now picture spending hours teaching this doll school, or riding with her in the car, or taking her through a series of stores, or cooking her dinner, or reading her a bedtime story, or all of the above, and you have my day.

The worst part is that, in the midst of my frustration, there's a lot of guilt. First, there's guilt that I could ever be annoyed with someone whom I love so wholeheartedly. And then I feel guilty that I don't pay better attention to her -- you know how you swore you would never EVER tune out ANYTHING your kids said, you would hang on every word, until they learned to talk fluently, that is? yeah -- until the annoyance threshold is breached and then I act irritated with her. It's not that we have no pleasant interactions. It's not that I don't completely and totally adore her, because I do. It's just that instead of stopping her demands/arguments right away and being consistent, I start tuning her out and wait until I am seriously irritated before I deal with the situation. It's something I need to work on, and it's a recipe for disaster on a day like today. Or at least, it's a recipe for being "frazzly".

In other news, I am finally working on a transcription job I've been waiting on for two weeks. The guy who hired me for it first gave me the audio files in the wrong format, and then couldn't find the CF card with the correct files, and then got the flu, so it's taken this long to actually have files I can work with. I started transcribing tonight and I'm taking a break right now so that I don't get a life-threatening case of carpal tunnel syndrome. (you are forbidden to notice that I am, um, typing right now. I've BEEN taking a break, I really have.) It's amazing to watch how the Lord provides; last week we got smacked with $320 in extra bills out of a blue sky, and some odds and ends of broken stuff needed fixing, and we had no idea how we'd pay for any of it. Then a guy bought a car part from T -- T had not advertised it for sale, it was just sitting in his garage unwanted -- and then I did a résumé for a guy (who was in my first-grade class) and he paid double my usual rate, and now this job finally came through, and we're going to have enough and to spare. God is truly "able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all we ask or think." yay. :)

Monday, March 14, 2005

jam, man, jam

You might be a homeschooler if:

• Your eight-year-old son gets in an argument with his sister and you overhear him saying, "Well, so be it. If that's the way you want to be..."
• The "carrot on the stick" at the end of the schoolday (for you AND the kids) is the promise of getting to make a soil/sand/soil parfait in a jar, and add worms, to see what happens.
• Your children know far more about Jane Austen and astronomy than they do about Pokemon or Saturday-morning cartoons.
• Your child sees a TV commercial for the first time at the age of five and asks you to make it stop.
• Your kids love Ramona Quimby, but they can't identify with her because she spends so much time at school.
• Your child asks you to turn off your music while he does his math, as it is "a great distraction."
• You leave the children with your husband to go to the doctor and run errands, and continually look around you, freaking out because you can't help feeling you've forgotten them somewhere.
• You no longer even know what kind of shoes are "cool".
• You forget that most people can't just take off for a family vacation without waiting for a school holiday.
• You're so used to people thinking you're some kind of freak that you don't even think about it anymore.

P.S. Kristen, I bet you thought I wouldn't do it.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Finisher Prize

Spent much of today playing with C while T and LT played Civilization III (we stayed home from church not because we are heathen rebels but because we are all sick with the same crud I've had for about a week now. Fun times.). One thing we did was a horse race. It's a complicated sort of thing -- the horses move forward in turns; for each turn, the horse's owner rolls two dice, subtracts the smaller number from the larger, and the horse moves forward the resulting number of spaces -- a "space" being a board-width on our hardwood floor. Observe my sneakiness, slipping in math like that, as if it were zucchini in a meatloaf. Anyway. C wanted to use this dollhouse stable as a finish line, and I couldn't figure out why at first:

One of the more difficult small decisions of motherhood, made over and over on the road from "accume-see" and "bop-ooo" onward: When does cuteness have to give way to correctness? Not here, not yet, anyway.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

we really know how to throw a party

(I thought about putting this entry in the photo blog, since it is rather image-intensive, but since it's more of a daily-life entry, and the photos are, um, not artistic in the slightest, I stuck it here. Sorry about the hugeness of it.)

One night maybe six years ago when T was going to be away overnight visiting a friend, I decided that I would do a lot of fun girly stuff to make his absence more endurable (up until he got a job in telecom with its requisite two-week overtime stints in fire season, we had only very rarely been apart overnight). I rented chick movies -- this was the first time I watched "You've Got Mail", which turned out later to become one of T's favorites, but oh well -- and bought Doritos (which T hates) and made myself meatloaf (ditto), and I stayed up as late as I could make myself so that I wouldn't have to lie in bed waiting to go to sleep without him. (shut up, that is NOT pathetic.) Anyway. Somehow this developed into a tradition wherein when Daddy is gone, the kids and I throw a "party". That sounds really bad, I realize that, but we're not celebrating his absence -- we're more taking our minds off it. Tonight T is at a men's retreat, so here, courtesy of The New Nikon and the fact that I'm feeling a lot better than I was, is a look into the debauchery that the mice get up to while the cat's away.

This is not for the faint of heart.

(OK, maybe it is.)

First we all played a good game of pretend. The kids had torches (flashlights) and were exploring a ruin of a castle (our house, with all the lights turned off). I was the queen, who inexplicably was still alive inside this ruin. Adventure ensued.

observe my stately mantle (made from, um, a waterproof crib sheet. C was the costume designer for this production). And if you look really closely you can see the brown paper crown on my head. (LT took this picture. He is suitably aware of the honor and trust I bestowed upon him in allowing him to use The Nikon.)


LT then made a map of an imaginary country. I am unclear as to whether this map represents the country over which I reigned. I'll have to ask him tomorrow.



Then C made cookies, almost entirely by herself, from a mix she'd been given, um, for her birthday. In September.

it's a good thing these were just for family. C still needs practice at not licking the spoon.


the finished project

Part of a traditional party is the freedom to stay up as late as we want. When the kids can't keep their eyes open any longer, they make a tent in the front room and go to sleep in it.

The sheet down the middle divides it into a room for each of them. Do you notice that their legs have to go between the chair legs? Why again is this fun??

So there you have it -- a virtual tour of our wild, wild life. I'd better hope T doesn't read this one.
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Thursday, March 10, 2005

The H word

I think pretty much every mother has this happen at some point.

Today C is just being, well, a little pill, in lots of little five-year-old ways. This is not so uncommon a thing as to really bother me, or to even be worth noting. She's distractable when it comes to schoolwork, she is obstinate about wanting enchiladas for breakfast even though I've told her those are for lunch, she continually interrupted me while I was doing my Bible reading, etc. She's being suitably punished when she needs it. The kicker, though, came when I told her to go change out of her pajamas into daytime clothes. She got as far as taking off her pajamas (and throwing them on the living-room floor), and selecting play clothes from her stack on the coffee table and carrying them into her room, but she kept coming out of her room to play, still naked. I would remind her (decreasingly gently) that she was supposed to be getting dressed, until finally I tapped her on the bottom and sent her sternly to her room to get dressed or get restriction (THE BIGGIE). On her way to her room, she muttered, "I hate you, Mommy."

Whoa.

I: "What did you say?"
She: "Nothing."
LT: "She gets over it."
I: "What? Gets over what?"
LT: "She says it sometimes. Then she kind of gets used to you again."
I: [thinking, !!!! this happens, what, often? Don't know whether to get angry or cry, so do neither, just sit and stare at the computer screen]
LT: "It'll be OK."
C: "I was joking..."

Now, like I said, I know this happens to pretty much every parent at some point. I just remember, you know, being a little older than five when I threw the "H" word at my mom. More like, I dunno, fifteen.

In the end, when she came out (dressed) and hugged me and said she really does like me, I told her that it's OK to be angry with Mommy, it's part of growing up and having to do things you don't want to do. But it's never OK to say mean things just to hurt someone, even when you're angry, and that means Mommy too.

I feel like I should have handled it far better than that. I just am not at all sure how.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Chapter Summaries

I mentioned chapter summaries a while ago and promised a post about them eventually. Here it is. :) I started this last night, but T needed the computer for a minute, and while he was using it, it froze up. Since I hadn't "saved as draft" before I handed it over to him, I lost what I'd done so far. Clever me. So I'm starting over.

First, why do we do chapter summaries? There are a lot of reasons.

• It's a simple, uniform format, easy to remember.
• It's just you and your Bible, looking into a chapter and finding out what God has to say to you in it; you're not being influenced by someone else's "take" on a passage.
• No matter how many times you've studied the chapter you can always come away with something new.
• It's suitable for virtually any age, since the results can be as long or as short, as complex or simple, as the student is prepared to make them. C, who is a young kindergartener, does one every week, as does LT. T spends hours on his, references various commentaries, and writes sometimes several pages, full of theological (and, especially now as we're doing Revelation, eschatological) insights. The friend of ours who hosts the studies and taught us the format has been doing chapter summaries for thirty-five years, has done the whole Bible more than once, and, as anyone who's read the Bible can attest, hasn't run out of new things to learn.
• Chapter summaries fit in with other study methods. You can use the Bible alone, or look at commentaries and research other scholars' opinions. The format works excellently used alongside the inductive study method taught by Precept Ministries, or without any other method at all.
• If you do it long enough, you end up with basically a simple Bible commentary, written by yourself. We've been doing summaries for eight years, although I took off a few years from mid-week studies when the kids were teeny. T has notebooks containing a summary for every chapter of every book in the New Testament, except Hebrews which I think we're doing next, as well as Genesis and Daniel. It's both a really useful resource, and an interesting look at how he's matured spiritually in that time.
• And lastly, it's the method used in our weekly small group study, and we're conformers. ;-)

Since C has her study done for tonight (Revelation 8), I'll use hers as an example, and maybe occasionally throw in some stuff from mine too. The format, as I mentioned, is simple. It goes like this:

Theme: this is basically a title for the chapter -- the main idea. (C's Rev 8 theme: "The angels and the eagle". Mine: "Only the beginning of the terrible judgments")
Key Verse: Sometimes this is the verse that the student thinks ties in best with his/her theme. Sometimes it's a verse that made you go, WHOA. Sometimes it's a verse the student chooses to memorize. Customize at will. ;-). (C didn't select a key verse this week; she generally doesn't, actually. Mine is verse 13, because it ties in with my theme.)

Teaching: This is where you break the chapter down into sections and describe, as briefly as you want, the content of each section. Some people, like T, like to make these very brief little phrases indeed. Some people, like my dad, basically paraphrase the section and write a paragraph.

(C's teaching:
Teaching:
v. 1-5: The angels with the trumpets and the one with the censer
v. 6-7: The first horn blew and made blood mixed with hail.
v. 8-9: The second angel blew its horn and something like a mountain of fire was dropped into the sea.
v. 10-11: The star was called Wormwood.
v. 12: The lights of heaven became dim.
v. 13: The eagle said, "Woe! Woe! Woe!"

Note: Her spelling is not this good. :) She writes things down as best she can figure out, and then I type it up for her so that it's easy for her to read out loud in the group. I do the same for LT, although before long he's going to start doing his own typing. The words they misspell -- and they are many, especially for C -- serve as spelling words until the next Wednesday. Two birds with one homeschooling stone.)

(My teaching:
Teaching:
v. 1-2: Silence in heaven. (What's coming must be really big.)
v. 3-5: An eighth angel offers up incense mingled with prayers, and then uses the censer to smite the earth with a few preliminary rumbles
v. 6-7: The first trumpet sounds; 1/3 of the earth and the trees, and all of the grass, are burned up in a hail of blood and fire.
v. 8-9: The second trumpet sounds; the seas are struck by a "mountain of fire", bringing death to 1/3 of all life in and on the seas
v. 10-11: The third trumpet sounds; wormwood poisons the waters of the earth
v. 12: The fourth trumpet sounds; a third of the heavenly lights go dark
v. 13: The eagle's warning: It's not over yet by a long shot.)

You get the idea on that.

And here's the part that provides the real meat of the discussion on Wednesday nights:
Meaning:

This can be anything and everything. It can be a mention of something in the chapter you'd never noticed before, or something that really moved you. It can be plain old exegetical teaching. It can be questions. It can be a basic overview of what the chapter meant to you. This is where T waxes really long and scholarly; I generally go for the "something that really moved you" -- the kids write a sentence or a paragraph telling what they thought the chapter was about, or what they think God is trying to tell us in the chapter, or, in C's case, what stuck out in the chapter for her to remember.

(C's example: "The eagle says, 'Woe! Woe! Woe! because the earth is going to be destroyed." LT's: "I think it is important that Jesus opened the seventh seal and seven angels came with trumpets, and they blew them, and things happened to the earth." It would take DAYS to type T's, so I won't, and I haven't done mine yet. But again, you get the idea.)

And then the last part, which is the most optional of all of them, since most people cover it in their "Meaning"...
Application. What does God want you specifically to take away from this chapter? How is your life going to change? Some chapters, this is really easy. Some, like these prophetic ones, not so much.

Anyway. Please pardon the long unfunny post, just wanted to share. :)

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

drama queen

Today the kids and I went for a walk with my mom. I wore capris. Warm weather is nice, but I already miss winter. Come back! Before we know it it will all be about harsh hot sun directly overhead. Nooo.

We had to stop by the grocery store, where they just installed a 25c pony ride. C wanted to ride it, but I didn't have any pocket change, so she was disappointed and had to just hug it instead. We walked back to the car (thanks to the enormous hill going up to our house, we don't usually walk into town when we go for walks; we drive down the hill and park. Yeah, we're sissies.) and as we drove up the hill, C said, in a voice dripping with wistful, nostalgic longing:

"I will never forget that horse."

C, the world's foremost five-year-old teenaged drama queen.

Wednesday, March 02, 2005

YAY

IT. IS. HERE.

pictures pictures pictures:

oh yay. Now I'll go read the manual for the next TEN HOURS. Holy cow the thing is huge.

Monday, February 28, 2005

our weekend in pictures

Well, it's 3 a.m. and I'm at the computer. I have a good reason to (still) be up -- honest I do! T was called into work at 11 p.m. because, it turns out, a power outage caused some problems with radio transmission thingamabobs, and since he works in telecommunications, radio transmission thingamabobs are his job. (You can see by my extensive use of technical terminology that his knowledge has rubbed off on me a really whole lot, can't you.) He just called and said he's heading home, so he should be here within an hour or so. I just hope he doesn't have to turn around and go back in at 6AM like usual.

We had a really nice weekend up until about four hours ago. ;-) Yesterday we went with my parents to pick oranges at their neighbor's house. She is an elderly woman whose ranch, including the orange orchard, has been in her family for a hundred years (literally, this year). She can't pick the oranges herself anymore, so it's become tradition for our extended family (and a few others we drag along each year) to go do it for her when the oranges are ripe. Here are a few of the last pictures I'll be taking with my dinosaur of a digital camera before my wonderful anniversary present arrives this week:

This picture shows not only a very good reason why I need a new digital camera, but also the view from the top of the orange tree I was picking. It's harder to stand fifteen feet up a ladder and take a picture than you might think. :)

The person who finds the smallest orange each year "wins". We're not sure exactly what the person wins -- bragging rights? The first turn in the lunch buffet? (mmm, fried chicken this year. It's a good deal for all concerned -- the neighbor gets her orange crop in and we all a lot of exercise, enough oranges to last us quite a while, and five extra pounds apiece thanks to the fantastic lunch she cooks up for us.)

Cows in the road. How often do you encounter that on the way to work?

Back at my parents' ranch, we spent some time splitting wood, because we were nearly to the point of burning our furniture at home. Here are LT and C helping my dad drive the tractor into the shed to get the splitter.

We recently made a very important discovery at my parents'. Namely that straw on a steep slope is just as good as snow for tobogganing. Visits to Grandpa's will never be the same again.

C tied her shoes by herself for the first time after dinner on Saturday. That screeching sound you heard at about 6:00 Pacific time was my daughter running around to everyone in the house (and that was a lot of people) shrieking about her accomplishment.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

new contacts. And that's just the beginning of this long ol' rambly snippety entry

I am wearing contact lenses for the first time today. It is a little freaky, but not as freaky as many people think it would be. The main thing is that the darn things don't work as well as my new glasses do. Things look just a leeeetle bit blurry. So it's just as well that I hadn't planned to spend $240 four times a year to wear contacts full-time, eh? But they'll be good enough to wear for, say, chorus concerts or fancy dates, which are pretty much the only times I ever dress up.

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Also, tonight we framed a Jack Vettriano print we've had rolled up in our closet for SIX YEARS. Because we are all efficient like that. Actually it's because we finally figured a little while ago that it probably didn't make much sense to spend $200 for custom framing for a print that cost $35 in 1999 dollars. It's called "The Singing Butler" and it is the only piece of art with which we have ever both fallen in love at first sight.



It now hangs above our FANTASTIC NEW COUCH. Because finally we have a couch worthy of having something hung over it.

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Last night I was telling LT about a restaurant that used to be in town called The Sugar Pine. It was just a little diner but I loved it and still miss it often. I told LT that for $6.31 including tax but not tip you could get a big basket of just-right crispy fries and two enormous chocolate milkshakes, served in a glass with the rest of the shake making frost on the outside of the metal canister in which it had been mixed, the best milkshakes ever made. LT protested that they couldn't be better than my milkshakes, and I told him that indeed they are way better than any milkshake I could ever make, and he said, in a very serious voice, AND I QUOTE, "Well, then they would have to be made by Jesus."

THAT'S MY BOY. Who got a chocolate milkshake when we got home.

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Also, one fun thing about five-year-olds -- or mine anyway -- is that they really believe it when you tell them that the white screen when there's no slide in the projector is a picture of a polar bear standing by an igloo in the snow. And they assure you that they can see it, see, there's the head.

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