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Wednesday, September 17, 2003

things are improving

OK, I'm feeling a little better now. I've paid bills (including a lot for lab work I had done back in May, and I barely refrained from writing snide comments on the statements, but it's not the lab's fault my insurance sucks -- seriously, I am unsure why their offices have never been car-bombed...), done my Bible study for tonight, helped LT do his Bible study for tonight, and (key to my current sense of contentment) made myself a Nescafé Frothé beverage. These are probably the be-all and end-all of cheezy instant coffee-sorta-drinks. But really, for so little effort -- no grinding, no filling, no filtering, no espresso machine screaming, no mixing, no blending, NOTHING! you just heat water and add it to powder -- you get something that tastes actually decent and gives you that nice caffeine jolt. And for only 90 calories per serving.


Also, it is actually a little bit cold in my house. This is my second-favorite day of the season -- the day when it feels too cool for shorts and bare feet in the house, and I go put on a sweatshirt and long pants and socks. My very favorite day of this season (counted as the time between Labor Day and Thanksgiving; OK, so I set up my own seasons, so sue me) is whatever day on which we build the first fire of the year. Extra bonus points if that day happens to be foggy or gray or even (bliss!) pouring down rain. Mmm, Curled-Up-With-Jane-Eyre-Under-A-Blanket-With-Hot-Beverage kind of weather. I can't wait. Summer can't last forever.

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Thursday, September 11, 2003

Ducky and Tinkertoys and an ouchy

This afternoon was a big financial day for us. We "borrowed" from T's retirement to pay off a lot of various debts we'd had sitting around. We are paying much less interest, and the interest we're paying is to ourselves, and unless my T's boss doesn't know what he's talking about, this makes our credit report look better because the retirement account loan doesn't show up on it. Who knows. It can't make it look any worse, at any rate. Now we will accomplish a few things we've been needing to do (like get new glasses for me, and fix T's truck), and by Christmas we'll be socking away a substantial amount into a savings account to pay loan origination fees etc. when we buy a house next spring or summer. We've had debt to one degree or another for the entire nine and a half years we've been married. We've been working hard to pay it down for the past five years, and it feels good to finish it off.


I still managed to have a pretty stressful afternoon sorting out all the paperwork and details involved. I wanted nothing more than just to lay in bed and vege all evening but families, you know, darnit, they need to be FED, can you believe that? They all stand around like baby birds with their beaks wide open, cheeping, looking so pitiful and helpless. So I made dinner, and then I went for a long hard fast walk. I actually had an aerobic heart rate for at least 25 continuous minutes of this 45-minute walk, and I wasn't shuffling along for the other 20 either, it just wasn't uphill all the way like the second part. I am all gleeful thinking about my body going, "calories! calories! where ARE you, calories?" and finally resorting to burning up some nasty old fat cells that have been sitting around in my thighs since before my first pregnancy. ha! gotcha! However, I'm not as thrilled about how sore my legs will be tomorrow. Oh well, it's a good trade-off. :)


Speaking of baby birds (well, I was, up there ^ ), I must show you what my daughter made out of Tinkertoys today. I must preface this by explaining that since around the beginning of our engagement ten years ago, T has called me "Ducky" and variations thereon. This explains, by the way, the fuzzy duckling in the layout, in addition to the fact that it's just plain adorable). Don't ask me why the heck he thought of that one (I have always said that it was because I had a short little haircut at the time and my unruly hair wanted to flip up in the back like a little duck tail, but he says it wasn't that). We were just out for a walk, holding hands and being all cute and lovey-dovey, and he blurted it out: "Duck-y!" in this cute little voice. Nobody who knows my husband only, say, at work, or at the VFW, would believe that he can be this silly. But he is. This led to my being called Ducky, and Coin (pronounced "Kwaa" with that nasaly French n at the end; it's what the French claim ducks say), and Quacky, and every other duck-related name you can think of, and some you can't. It never wore off and consequently my children have been exposed to this for years and probably think that everyone's mom is named after poultry. Anyway. Today my daughter made me a ducky out of Tinkertoys. Generally her Tinkertoy creations to date have been the kind of thing where you believe it's what it is supposed to be, only because she says it's what it's supposed to be. This is her first really recognizable item. Here it is:

Is that not the cutest? Can't you hear it quacking?

I think we'll see if we can make it last all year and enter it in the fair next year. LT has also made some really neat creations, like his interlocking angled gear drive:

I've no idea what is up with the green lines on the picture. My snappy unit is very old but why it should choose to freak out in the space of about five minutes between the last picture and this one is anyone's guess. At any rate, if you turn the crank on the horizontal wheel, its spines interlock with the vertical one and cause it to spin. He hasn't figured out a use for it yet -- just give him time. :)

OK, I was just going to talk about how happy I am that the weather is beginning to cool down enough that the cooler is too cold at night, but as I stood up to turn it off, I stepped on a toy train that was lurking in the shadows and tore the bottom of my foot. Um, OUCH. There are a few things that make me wish I could just let loose with a string of profanity, and injuring the bottom of my foot is one of them. OUCH. Good thing I had just taken a shower, and it was after my walk. I asked LT to bring me the bandaids (after I told him as calmly as I could, which wasn't very calmly, what I thought of his train), and C hovered over me -- "Is it a bleed? Oh, let me see. Oh dear. Oh honey. Just hold still, honey." -- as I was doctoring myself. That is why I don't let loose with the string of profanity -- because the very next time my little 3-year-old mimic damaged herself, she'd do the very same thing. She has an amazing memory capacity for speech, and gets the inflections the same and everything. It's cute (and a little amazing) when it's whole scenes from Bambi or Monsters Inc. Wouldn't be so cute if it was the aforementioned string of profanity. :-/


While I wait for T to get finished working on his buddy's truck and get his shower, I'm going to work on ivillage's book list, another idea I'm stealing from Jenn and Emily. And I'm going to moan quietly about the pain in my foot, too. OUCH.

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what a great day

I just had such a good day. It shows how petty I am, I suppose, that being able to wear clothes I hadn't been able to in the past can make me feel so happy. But there it is. Not only the "too small" jeans, either. After I got home from Bible study tonight I got out a denim dress from that same box -- a short dress with blue and white flowers embroidered on it -- feminine yet sturdy yet sexy. T had told me that he'd like it if I could wear it -- back when I couldn't even button it closed. It fit like a dream tonight. I was so pleased.


OK, I just had a call back to reality. I had to go make my washing machine behave. You know how some washers have a buzzer that goes off if the load is off-balance? This one doesn't need a buzzer, because when it is off-balance it makes as much noise as a mounted cavalry running through my linoleumed laundry room would. And of course since the laundry room is right next to both kids' rooms, and both kids are both asleep and afraid of loud noises that wake them in the night, I had to go make the darn thing shut up. T would sleep through just about anything and it even had him in there, blinking at me, asking me if I needed help. Hmm, maybe I should empty the garbage in the middle of the night, and make a lot of noise at it....


Anyway, back to my great day. Not only was there the weight loss thing, but school went really nicely, and for dinner, we had a picnic at the park in town for which I made deli sandwiches. And T and I had a big argument about something stupid last night, so we were still in the tender gentle happy make-up stage today.


The kids and I watched Return to Snowy River today, which also added to the overall mood of cheerfulness. Perhaps it is silly of me, but I really love a good pretty horse movie. Nice scenery and running horses just give me a happy little thrill. (I should start making a list of all the things I say that about!). Really. I love watching the Snowy River movies, and The Black Stallion (which is a really rare thing: a movie that is better than the book), and this version of Black Beauty that we bought from the bargain DVD bin at Wal-Mart. When I was little I was the same way (I'll have to find Phar Lap and National Velvet and see if they're as pretty as I remember them being). The dialogue can be hokey as anything, but if there's pretty scenery, nice music, and plenty of horsey eye candy, I can't help enjoying watching it. Hey, I never said I was a movie purist. Luckily I have a daughter as an excuse. :)


I'm starting to feel hungry so I'm going to get a good drink of water and go to bed before I start munching. (must forget about Cadbury bar in fridge. Must forget.)

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Tuesday, September 09, 2003

SpaceCamp

My kids are watching SpaceCamp. (note: from reading my diary you'd conclude that my children watch videos non stop since they seem to always be watching one while I type. Really, though, it's not like that -- it's just that the only times I can sit and relax and write up an entry are when they're settled quietly, and one way to do that is with a video). Until they borrowed this movie from my grandmother a few months ago (they have since returned it and re-borrowed it, by the way, must clarify lest you think I let them keep borrowed movies for years ;-), I hadn't seen it since I think 1986, on New Year's Eve. I must confess that I was totally convinced that "Daedalus" as portrayed in the movie was a real actual space station. When we watched it as a family, I told T that a boy in junior high had done a History Day project about Daedalus, but that he'd spelled the name wrong. T very diplomatically said that he was 99.9% sure, having been a space buff since grade school (which was longer ago than my grade school, let's just say that), that Daedalus was invented solely for that movie. I was not as diplomatic; I insisted, I'm afraid, that it had to be a real thing since Richard had done his project about it. Whoops. I did a lot of research online, and finally found out for sure on an astronomy newsgroup that T was right and I was wrong. I do not remember what the stakes were of our silly little bet on that topic, but I was utterly demoralized and felt like a buffoon. Not as much of a buffoon as Richard, though. He got a lot more than the spelling of the name wrong. What I have to wonder is where the heck he did any research for that project. Granted, it was eighth grade, but we had to have at least some sources.


Not, by the way, that I can claim much superiority in the area of History Day projects. I was in seventh grade that year, and my school friend and I decided to work together on a project. She would do the art, and she was really into drawing with perspective at the time, and wanted to do some kind of interior of a cathedral or something for the background art for our project. The only problem was that the topic of the project had to have something to do with "frontiers". So how to incorporate a cathedral with that? Simple, you title your display "Frontiers In Christianity." ACK. We did a good job -- we wrote a lot about the changes in religious culture from Biblical times to the present, and typed up blurbs of text and put them on little scrolls which we glued to the background. And of course the cathedral interior looked just great. :) But what a stupid idiotic name for a project. I'm surprised we didn't overhear the judges laughing about it. Maybe they were still in shock from "Deadelos."



C's doctor appointment went fine, by the way. The doctor says that the pigment loss on the side of her neck isn't anything to worry about, and that it's really common (which went along with the research I'd done online). She was more puzzled by the discoloration above her mouth, and finally concluded that it looked most like a bruise of some kind, like she was sucking a glass down over her mouth, but if it's still there next week I'm to bring her back in. C loves going to the doctor. She's been asking me at least once an hour to check the white spot on her neck, in a very serious little 3-year-old voice. She likes taking medicine too, little booger. She gets that from her dad, who used to try to drink Triaminic recreationally when he was a little boy. I, on the other hand, will generally suffer with a headache for hours before I finally give in to T's cajoling and take two aspirin. I tell him it's my anti-addictive personality -- unlike some people, I don't need to seek chemical solutions to my problems, physical or otherwise. ;-)



I was just getting a good laugh reading California's voter guide for the special election in October. Here's a quote from Larry Flynt's blurb: "California is the most progressive state in the union and I'm sure its citizens would welcome having a smut peddler who cares as their Governor." That's really funny, except that it's also true. This election is making South Florida look like a think tank in comparison. Dave Barry had a really great column about this a few weeks ago.

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Sunday, September 07, 2003

whine mope groan complain

I didn't make an entry yesterday. (I don't think. Did I? Maybe I did. I don't think so though). This is because yesterday was an unbelievably boring day. We had sort of loosely planned to maybe take the kids to the movies, T had some work to do around the house, that kind of thing. But on his way home from his astronomy do on Friday night, he noticed a problem with the brakes on our car, so he took them apart Saturday morning to examine them, and couldn't fix them right away because by the time he got the part in his hot little hands, it was time for him to leave with a friend who wanted him to go look at a car that the friend was going to buy. In the Bay Area. Which is a 3-hour drive from here. So he was gone all afternoon, and my car was unusable while he was gone. I had all these GO SOMEWHERE urges and nothing to do with them -- couldn't even walk downtown in the heat because I knew (and the kids acknowledged) that my dear kidlets would whine and moan and complain (gee, I don't know anyone who does that!) when it was time to come up our steep hill. So we stayed around the house. The kids chain-watched a few videos, we played a few games. I was not the bright sparkly inventive creative mom that I love to be; I wanted nothing more than to vege out and mope about not being able to go anywhere.


On the brighter side, today I have had a crushing sinus headache. :-D. And a stiff neck too. I did get to take about a three-hour nap after we got home from church. But everyone else is perky and jovial, and hungry, and I feel guilty for not wanting to deal with that. Someone please, slap some sense into me. I have a wonderful family and a wonderful life. Well, except for this sinus headache/stiff neck thing. But still. What's a little physical misery in the face of the wonderfulness of my life?


OK, so right now it's a lot. How lame I am...

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Friday, September 05, 2003

miscellaneous rambly thoughts

This is weird, I have just sat here literally with my fingers sitting on the keys, unable to think what to type. This is the equivalent of me not knowing what to say, which, let's face it, never happens. If I'm quiet (which I have to be from time to time) I'm either asleep, or it's the result of a serious effort of discipline. And the "diarrhea of the mouth" (what a repulsive phrase, really! ugh!) runs to email and chatting also. Fortunately, it's easier to control myself in typed electronic communication because I generally have the opportunity to think things over and delete before I send (though this certainly does not mean that I never stick my foot in it). If anyone figures out how to do that with speaking, please do let me know, I'll pay anything. :)


OK, I just had my best laugh of the day at something totally inane. My kids have this goofy video about construction equipment, and they're watching it backward, and the dirt is just magically going back up into loaders and spreading itself out before retreating bulldozers and the like. LT said it was like they were "using the force" to pick the dirt up. I am easily amused. My kids got this from me. Say what you will, it's a very handy character trait. :)


Tonight T is leading a group of local boy scouts toward their astronomy merit badges, via a three-hour observation session. It's a good time for it -- the moon is waxing gibbous, which means it will interfere just a little bit with the best seeing, but that is the best time to look at the moon itself because the "terminator" (line where it goes from light to dark) is in clear relief, which is very interesting to look at. And Mars is still putting on a good show. Astronomy is a lot like classical music, now that I think of it. To the non-fanatic, much of it seems really boring, but there are some aspects which are interesting even to people who will never in a million years get into it deeply. Not everyone would enjoy a Messier-object-finding-party that lasts all night, just as most people don't cry when they really listen hard to CPE Bach or Vivaldi or Schubert or even Gershwin (me? what?). But everyone likes to take a good close-up (relatively speaking) look at the moon, or Mars, or, say, the Ring Nebula (picture), just like everyone recognizes and probably likes, say, "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", or "Fur Elise" (which my classmates used to ask me to play on the piano thus: "Do you know that song from the McDonald's commercial?" grr), or (of course) Pachelbel's "Canon in D" (I once saw an album for sale called "Pachelbel's Greatest Hit", consisting of a dozen or so different renditions of that one song.). I don't know exactly where I was going with this concept, other than trying to use as many parentheses as humanly possible, except to say that I am in the "when you get something interesting in there, hon, call me and I'll go look at it" camp as regards my husband's astronomy fixation. I really think it's neat to look at recognizable or very-different-looking stuff. And I'm really glad that he is able to enjoy something that he's so interested in. But I am certainly not as into it as he is.


We are having a mini-party tonight. Sometimes when T is gone overnight, the kids and I will stay up late, eat junk food, bring all our pillows out in the front room and crash on the floor watching movies, build ornate castles with blocks, dance to the Cranberries, that sort of thing. That's not happening tonight but I did get us some junk food, and they are vegging out watching a video. I even ate 400 calories' worth of junk myself. (a portion of Pringles and an ice-cream sandwich). I have been doing pretty well; I am now at -15. I'm not losing as fast as I did at the beginning but realistically it's probably better for me this way. That doesn't mean I like it better. grr. It was so satisfying when it was just falling off early on. I can tell a difference, though, looking at video of myself. We were watching my son's birthday party, from April, and WOW, I was fatter. The jeans I was wearing were quite snug and now I can do that holding-them-out-in-front-of-me bit. I am still not getting out my slenderer clothes until I hit -20 or so. My memory must be a little tweaked, because other of my clothes don't seem any looser than they were. Which makes no logical sense, so I must be mis-remembering how tight they were before. Thinking positively never hurt anyone, right? :)

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Wednesday, September 03, 2003

"not much to report" -- right

Not much to report today.


You know, I always find that after I say that I think up five zillion things to say and it ends up being a really long entry.



hmm. nope. Not happening today. Really, there's not much. School went fine. (LT's writing prompt response: "The fair was fun. It is sad that the fair is over. My favorite is the 'wrestle' ride. My least favorite is the Tornado." explanation: the "wrestle" ride is actually the Indiana-Jones-decorated obstacle course sort of thing, so named by the kids because when they were on it once, three "big boys" were also on it, and they were wrestling each other, knocking into my kids, and really causing me to get in touch with my mama-bear side, if you know what I mean. grr. And the Tornado is a teenager ride which my kids would never even watch for long, let alone go on. Need I remind you that they are 3 and 7? Anyway, I promised no more posts about the fair, and besides, so far about 80% of this one is one long parenthetical statement, so I'll shut up about this now.). Other subjects also went well. LT loved his solar system quiz. It is amazing that I, being really pretty anal about spelling and grammar, can find his misspellings so adorable that I have a hard time correcting him on them. I mean, 'Plooto'? 'Joopitr' (can't duplicate the backward J)? Of course he does have to learn the correct spellings, and I have him write the missed ones over, but I make sure to keep his original papers intact so that when I look at them in five years I can sob because I'll never have a little boy who spells things so cutely again.



C did more pencil-control tracing and tried her first color-by-number. She had fun. She also totally blew away my plans for patterns and counting with Unifix cubes; I underestimated her abilities there. I'm going to have to step back and re-plan her math goals for the year, since she's pretty much met the ones I had for her, in the first two days. Not that she's excessively brilliant (although she is, aren't everyone's kids? ;-) ), just that I hadn't realized how much she already knew until we sat down and worked on it together.



In other topics...


I got the official Brush-Off from an old friend today. Last spring I started getting this desire to get in touch with some of my high school friends. It started because my class started planning its reunion. I did not want to go to that (posted about that in I think my first entry) but it did get me thinking about friends that I did want to find and get back in touch with. I ran into someone from my old crowd at the library, and we were both asking about the same person (whom we'd asked each other about every time we ran into each other for the last ten years or so) so I started with her. She has a really common name herself, but her half-brother doesn't, so I googled him, found him, emailed him, got my friend's phone number, and called her. Now, I hadn't had any relationship with this woman in ten years, almost no contact with her in that long, due to a lot of things, but we hit it off well, in spite of the differences between us (which had been what kept us from keeping the friendship going years ago, when we were less mature) and have been emailing back and forth, IMing, etc., and we're great friends again. We were glad about the way that turned out, and she and I were wondering about another of our close friends, so we googled her, and my friend emailed her. She emailed my friend back cheerfully, and expressed an interest in hearing from me, so I emailed her too, just before she went on vacation, as I found out later. She came back from vacation and emailed me to tell me she doesn't think a friendship between us would work, too much time has passed, we're too different, maybe if she had more time, etc etc etc. O-K. I'm really not bothered about it in any real way. It's not like this is a part of my life that's being taken away or ended; it never started and that's fine. I just got so glad about the success of one "reunion" that I thought another would go well too, and it didn't. Can't win 'em all.



OK, this is nuts, it's like a curse. Or a blessing. If I want to write a really long entry, all I have to do is start it with "not much to report today" and I'll go on and on filling several screens, unable to stop typing. sigh.

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Sunday, August 31, 2003

short and dull

I am not feeling terribly articulate right now so this won't be a long, scintillating post like you may be coming to expect. ;-). Just a few highlights.

• T won second place in the destruction derby last night. Woo hoo! great job.
  
• He's really sore.
  
• Some drunken jerk spilled beer all over LT's shirt during the derby. He was fully traumatized, poor little boy. At least if he's that disgusted about getting "that silly nasty stuff" spilled on him, I don't have to worry about him drinking it anytime soon...
  
• Today I returned to the fair to spend a 4-hour shift in the booth run by our local pro-life organization.
  
• It was very, very hot.
  
• No more posts about the fair till next August, I promise.
  
• I finished reading Pride and Prejudice (which I enjoyed immensely) and got right into Sense and Sensibility (which I am not loving quite as much)
  
• Somehow the scale says I have gained two pounds. I have not been very careful over the weekend but I certainly have not consumed 7000 extra calories in three days, so it must be water or something. Who knows. The human body is a really strange thing.
  

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Friday, August 29, 2003

The Fair, Part 1

Music: none, kids are watching Jonah

Mood: aaaahhhhhhh.... :)


You know how fantastic it feels when you've been uncomfortable, to get comfortable finally? Like when you've had on tight shoes and you can take them off, or when you've had to pee for ages and you finally go and then for like ten minutes afterward you're just ecstatic that you don't have to pee anymore? That is me right now. My chapped lips have Blistex, my parched throat has cold water, I'm wearing sweats and I've got my hair loosely confined and out of the way. Bliss. Mmm, and diet Coke too.


We had a nice time tonight. After the shuttle bus driver drove right by our stop without, um, stopping (this has happened the last three years -- the fair board gets a cheaper deal contracting with people from the valley for the shuttle bus, except that they hire these idiots who take three of the four days of the fair just learning where they're supposed to go. They should go back to using school buses and school bus drivers from the local school district, IMO), we drove to the fair and paid to park. We looked around at some exhibits, got some dinner (Indian fry bread, yum), and then hit the rides. Right away we discovered a shocking truth: LT is too big for kiddie rides. No more motorcycles, no more jeeps with beepy horns, no more dragon roller coasters. And of course, tonight, that left C without a riding partner for those rides. She befriended a little girl and went with her on the jeeps, and ended up holding her ears the whole time because of the incessant and loud squawking, beeping horns (I swear the guys who manage that ride must only last about two days before they're carted off to the looney bin). But she wanted the comfort and strength of her big brother with her on the motorcycles, and since he couldn't go, she didn't either. Instead the two of them had a fantastic time on this obstacle course sort of thing made to be like an Indiana Jones adventure or something. We did the obligatory Super Slide as well, and then ran into some friends of ours, M and his wife D. D and I were talking about how chicken our husbands are, and how they are afraid of scary rides. Somehow we ended up being sorta dared to go on this really wild one; my dad bought 4 tickets and put them in my hand, and off we went. This ride is hard to explain -- picture a rigid oval track, and a train sort of thing that rides around on the inside of it; when the train is on the inside of the top, it is upside down. Now picture that the oval track swivels on an axis. OK, I actually, believe it or not, found a website about it. Anyway, we went and got in line. Now, M and D are in their mid-late thirties (I think). I'm 28. We felt like absolute dotards waiting in this carnival line. We were surrounded by enough pubescent hormones to power Cleveland. And the music -- well, it's really loud. The funny thing is that ten to fifteen years ago this was the place to be. I was one of those hormone-laden teenagers not so long ago. T was taking video of us in the line, interviewing our kids and my parents and probably M as well, Geraldo-style, about us going on this ride. Very clever. Then we actually got ON the ride. OH MY GOSH. THAT is what it felt like to be 17! We laughed the whole time. I haven't done anything that crazy in a long, long time. It was a blast, really it was. I don't have the iron stomach I once did, though; I was glad that it didn't last much longer than it did. So, whether she knew it or not, was D. :)



After a Ferris wheel ride for me and LT (C didn't want to try it, so of course T stayed with her), and one more round on the obstacle course, we headed home, and as soon as was humanly possible I got into jammies-and-comfort mode. aaaahhh. :) Tomorrow is the big day for T -- the derby. After we go to the parade in the morning, the kids and I will go to briefly visit T at the area where the derby drivers take their cars to be inspected and wait for the derby; then we'll go to the fair for a while, to look at the animals and use up the rest of the kids' ride tickets; then I'll take C out to my parents' so that Mom can watch her for the evening while LT and I go back in to watch the derby. Then I get to drive back out there and pick her up. Looong day ahead....

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Killing time...

Music: When In Rome, "The Promise" (one of those songs that brings back the late 80's for me in a big way)


Mood: Expectant


We're trying to kill three hours between our return from shopping and our departure for [insert "Fanfare For The Common Man" here] the FAIR. The kids are so excited. C came into our room at about 6:30 this morning. Groggily I looked over at her and saw her holding her hair up off the buttons on the back of her nightgown. "What are you doing, sweetie?" I asked. "Please unbutton my nightgown so I can take it off and get dressed to go to the fair," was her reply. She was quite disheartened to be reminded that the fair doesn't even open until 4 in the afternoon today. LT had a similarly rude awakening. Horrors, instead of gallivanting around on fair rides all day, they had to ride in the car to the valley and behave themselves in the grocery store instead. They DID get a picnic at the park, which was back to its pleasant school-year state of desertion (ah, the benefits of home schooling). Now they have their wooden train set spread all over the floor in one half of the living room - and they haven't asked "how many minutes" for around half an hour. This is a vast improvement.



Worst moment of the day: Discovering that C's overall straps had, in spite of many explicit warnings to the contrary, managed to fall into the toilet


Best moment of the day: Probably yet to come! But so far, that nightgown-at-6:30-am bit was pretty great :)


Quote of the day: "The way [homeschoolers] learn social skills--modeling themselves after adults rather than peers--is more consistent with the way children have been socialized through most of history, Esther Baruch asserts. 'Until about a hundred years ago, the rich kids learned from adult tutors, and poor kids went to work early,' she says. 'Now, [kids in schools] model themselves after the other kids, who model themselves after tv characters--and the results of that are clear.' "
-- from a really excellent article on homeschooling in the Stanford alumni magazine

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