Life at the W.A.C.K.O.S.

[The W*** Academy of Creative Kids Occasionally Studying]
-And otherwise driving their mother nuts, likely as not.-

Monday 8 February 2010 - Weekly Wrap-Up: Aquatic Center Edition

Posted in Homeschooling and Other Forms of Insanity

I’m not doing so well on posting Weekly Wrap-ups, am I? I even tried to condense all my missed weeks into one January Wrap-Up last week, but of course I didn’t get it finished. Either life is busy or I spend too much of my computer time on school stuff and facebook. (The correct answer would be “c, all of the above.”)

At the moment I am sitting in the bleachers at the Aquatic Center watching my kids and their cousins wrap up their own week with a night of amusement. My kids “earned” this by filling up the marble jar, and the cousins got to come along to add to the fun. (And because inquiring minds will want to know: the kids can put marbles in the jar for things like getting up on time and starting schoolwork on time. Juvenile, I know, but Fuzz loves it and it does help.) I have already eaten my sandwich and taken pictures, so now I think I’ll see whether I can’t actually get a wrap-up post written before clock, battery, and brain cells run out.

(Okay, I had barely written that when my computer gave me the one-minute warning, so now I’m at a higher altitude near an outlet. I’m lucky to get 20 minutes out of this battery anymore. Donations to the Bethany’s New Laptop Battery Fund may be sent to my Paypal account.)

(New random thought: This post would go faster if I’d stop putting down my computer and picking up my camera. Even newer random thought: Because I hate typing with my glasses on, I set them in the “fold” of my computer. Watch me close my computer and crunch my glasses and not be able to drive home.)

Okay, um… oh yes! Weekly Wrap-up! Of course I remembered!

Well. Just when I finally thought I had our schedule figured out, along come two things to throw in the proverbial monkey wrench. Thing One: Monday soccer. (Yes, indoor; this is Michigan in February; you knew that.) Spaz already plays Thursdays with a just-for-fun homeschool group; now he is also training on Mondays with a more “serious” group comprised primarily of players from our local homeschool competitive soccer team. Since there is a small chance he’ll trade in his football cleats for soccer cleats come fall, we thought he should sharpen his skills. Not that I really wanted one more thing to do.

This comes at the same time as a dramatic increase in his academic workload, thanks to Thing Two: a 5-page research paper assigned by his Friday School writing teacher. I am glad he has to do this (and we have known since September that it was coming); I’m also glad someone else is assigning it. I am not, however, looking forward to all the time and effort that will be required on his part and mine. I wish I could just let him have at it and leave it between him and his teacher, but Spaz being Spaz, I am definitely going to have to be involved. His choice of topic? JFK assassination conspiracy theories. It should be an interesting six weeks.

Our normal schedule gives Spaz a daily 35-45 minute block of time for writing, by which time he’s usually had enough. However, that isn’t going to cut it for a research paper. Not only will he need to put in more hours per week, but I also want him to be able to “keep going” on it as long as he wants or needs if he’s on a roll. I would rather set aside two whole mornings for this each week than a little chunk of time each day, so it’s back to the drawing board for a workable schedule-- and now I have to factor in the additional soccer as well. *Sigh…*

Monday we did “bookwork” in the morning, read history at lunch, and went to soccer in the afternoon. (Fuzz does schoolwork while Spaz plays. I do school stuff too, when I’m not yakking with other moms.) This was followed by Fuzz’ piano lesson and a then a little more schoolwork. In the evening, Fuzz & I went ice skating with her girls’ club. Last week had been the first time for both of us, so it is still a new venture. Spaz did a little more schoolwork while we were gone. (Evening schoolwork used to be unheard of at our house but is becoming increasingly common, as Spaz tends to wear out in the afternoons but gains a second wind after dinner. It only bothers me until I think about how much of our “school day” is spent taking breaks and playing around on the piano.)

Tuesday I had Spaz start his morning by working on his research paper, rather than the usual math, so he could work for a longer chunk of time. It meant pushing math to the afternoon, which isn’t usually optimal, but it worked out. We started by ordering some books and movies from the library, and then he was able to find and read an online article that could serve as one of his internet sources. This all seemed to take longer than it should have, but that’s par at our house. Spaz was a little more motivated than usual with his afternoon independent work, thanks to a 4pm pizza-and-movie party at the home of one of his Friday School classmates. This is the third party the middle-school class of 16 has had, and I think that is great fun. So does he. They watched The Scarlet Pimpernel, which they are reading in class. Spaz greatly enjoyed it, although he and I both realized later that watching the movie was rather a spoiler, since many of them, including Spaz, have yet to finish the book. Oops.

Wednesday was “one of those days” with Spaz. It started out well, soured quickly, got better, then ended on a very bad note… no, “note” is too small. It ended on a very bad series of dissonant pounding chords that had everyone grumpy at dinner and beyond. That may be because Spaz gets up early on Wednesdays to do breakfast with Hubz, which gives him a giant head start on his day but also means he wears out early. On the plus side, he had math done before our normal 9:45 starting time, so we were again able to devote the bulk of the morning to the research paper. He also opted to practice guitar during his morning break time rather than leaving it until later. On the minus side, he & I had a rather heated disagreement regarding the practicality of holding a cat while typing. Also on the minus side, his valiant attempt at getting all his chemistry homework done in one afternoon backfired. Let’s just say that 5 pm finds him far too brain-dead to research asbestos hazards. This was what led to the dinnertime grumpiness, after which I drove to church thinking up imaginary facebook statuses like, “Some days you want to put them on the big yellow bus. Other days, you just want to push them in front of it.” Because I am a horrible mother like that, and warped humor is how I cope.

Thursday was better. It was much like Monday except without the piano lesson and ice skating.

Oh, you want to know what we did for history this week. Of course you do. After a month in post-war Europe, Middle East, and Asia, we are back to the U.S. for a few weeks. I read aloud this week from A History of Us about McCarthyism (that made for a good discussion), Eisenhower, and such 1950’s phenomena as the first suburbs and the first McDonald’s. We also read about JFK’s inauguration and will continue with the Kennedy era next week. (This, of course, ties in nicely with Spaz’ research paper, not entirely by accident. I had encouraged, though not pushed, him to choose something that correlated with something else he was studying.) For history-related literature, Fuzz read one of the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. Very academic there, I know. We also continued listening to Red Scarf Girl on CD, which we began a couple weeks ago while learning about Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China. The story serves as a sharp contrast to the seemingly idyllic life in post-war America that we are now studying.

And that was our week, except… Friday! Spaz went to his classes as usual, while Fuzz and I went out for breakfast, ran a few errands, and then did science and art. We’re studying monotremes and marsupials this week, and Fuzz had earlier in the week done some reading and taken some notes for a report about platypi. (Yes, that really is the plural of platypus.) Today we had sort of an exploratory science day, sitting side-by-side at two computers looking up pics and info about Australian animals. For art, we deviated from the Nature Sketchbook and used a pen-&-ink illustration of an echidna (spiny anteater) from a book for our drawing model. I had to make up the step-by-step as we went along, and I must say that we both did very well. J

That wrapped up our school week. Friday evening and Saturday I spent cleaning the house in anticipation of a guys’ get-together Hubz was hosting, and then it was off to the Aquatic Center for the kids and me. And now we’re back to the beginning of this post.

Except that we’re not at the Aquatic Center anymore (no, I didn’t crunch my glasses), and in fact, it’s no longer even Saturday. You didn’t really think I’d get all this done there, did you?

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Friday 29 January 2010 - Relationships According to Spaz

Posted in Life at Our House

Five minutes into algebra re-corrections Monday (and I do mean re-corrections) and I was getting attitude. “This is crappy.” “Why do I have to write it out?” “That’s what I said before! You’re just wasting my time.”

Algebra, I like. My son, I like. (Well, most days.) The two of them together, not so much.

I calmly closed the book and handed it to him, saying, “You may finish the rest of your corrections yourself. I like to sit with you and go through this as little as possible.”

“See? That’s how you are!” came the response. “You know, it’s really bad for our relationship when you say those kinds of things!”

Well.

I just had nothing to say to that.

Actually, I did have some things to say, but none of them were very productive so I kept my mouth shut. I am getting better at that sort of thing.

Oh, the joys of mother/adolescent son relationships. Homeschooling can definitely put them to the test. But don’t even get me started on that.

“Pulling the relationship card, huh?” said my aunt when I posted this conversation on Facebook. “Smart.” Smart indeed. Although I said nothing, his comment bothered me. Darn Hubz and all his talk about relationships, anyway. He’s poisoned the kids’ minds. Relationship, bah. I don’t care about relationship; I care about right. Sad but true.

Well, not entirely true, of course. Relationship is good. It’s just that I’d rather have them hate me now and thank me when they’re thirty than like me now and hate me when they’re thirty. Or something like that. Of course, if I can have them like me now and when they’re thirty, that would be a big bonus. And most of the time, we all like each other okay, so that’s a good thing.

Sorry, I’m getting sidetracked. This might be sort of a stream-of-thought post-- or scream-of-thought, as the case may be. Whatever.

Anyway, the moment was fleeting. To show there were no hard feelings, I brought him some apple slices and cheese chunks while he did his math. I’m nice like that. (Actually, it had less to do with niceness than with wanting to avoid the after-math. Because after math comes the ravenous raiding of the pantry, which always manages to make me annoyed. I try to remember to head it off by setting halfway nutritious snacks in front of them before they actually realize they are hungry. So I have an ulterior motive, but appearing nice is a good bonus.)

Attitude was okay after that one incident; diligence was not. Ditto for Tuesday. Lack of diligence is not unusual for him, but it was worse this week. Staying on him to do what he’s supposed to be doing gets very tiring and frustrating. I gave up. Sometimes you just have to let a kid make his own bed and lie in it. I was pleasant about it, though.

“Have you noticed I’m not trying to make you do schoolwork?” I said at one point late in the afternoon. “I would like you to; you need to, but it really needs to be up to you. I’m not going to keep being on your case to get done what you already know you need to do.” It was an amicable moment, no attitude on either part. Otherwise I would not have added what I did: “Because it’s really bad for our relationship when I do that.”

Snarky, but true, and he knew it. He grinned.

He also knew that Thursday afternoon soccer was on the line. When letting a kid make his own bed and lie in it, it always helps tremendously if something is at stake, and in this case, it was the something he most looks forward to all week. Having soccer late in the week is handy like that. And while I hate the idea of forgoing something fun and profitable in order to do schoolwork, sometimes that’s the way it has to be. Life lessons and all that.

Wednesday was better. He got an early start and began kicking it into gear. We even worked on a science project together and had a most pleasant time. Still, with all the dawdling earlier in the week, it did not look as though the assignments for his Friday classes would be finished in a timely manner, which would mean staying home from soccer Thursday afternoon in order to complete them.

I hate it when that sort of thing happens. I don’t relish being mean. Spaz, to his credit, does not make me feel that way. On the rare occasion that this sort of thing has to happen, he is remarkably accepting and tends to take full responsibility. He’s a good kid in spite of everything.

Thursday morning I hit the snooze button for an hour and a half instead of the usual half-hour and rolled out of bed at 8:00. Drat. That gave me only half an hour before I needed to get the kids up, and I’d spend half of that in the shower. I like having a little more time than that before ~~going in to battle~~ starting our day together. Especially since Spaz grumbles no end when I try to get him up. He’s worse about getting out of bed than I am.

To my amazement, he was up, fully dressed, and sitting at his desk doing schoolwork. “I set my alarm and got up at six,” he said. “I did my grammar and most of my Spanish.” I was duly impressed. No, I was very impressed. Spaz does not get up early to do schoolwork. Ever. Much less two-and-a-half hours early.

He still had a big-booger assignment ahead of him: researching his ideas and picking a topic and three sub-topics for the research paper he’ll be doing for his writing class. I anticipated much frustration and whining. I also anticipated that he’d either give up partway through or try to rush through it to “get it done.” I did not want this rushed through.

He didn’t whine. He didn’t get frustrated. He didn’t give up, nor did he rush. He gave more than ample time and effort and still got it done. I was even more impressed.

It was a very peaceful morning, and that always makes me feel happy. By lunchtime, the schoolwork wasn’t entirely finished, but we made a plan to work after soccer and after dinner. It was doable.

On the way to soccer I remarked, “Did you notice that I haven’t been cranky at all today?” Fuzz was out with Hubz, so it was just the two of us in the van.

“You’re right!” he said. “You haven’t!”

“Do you think there might be a reason for that?” Surely it wouldn’t be hard to make the connection between his good attitude and cooperation and my lack of crankiness.

“Ummmm…” he ventured a guess. “You’re not having your period?”

Okay, then.

That was totally unexpected and kind of funny.

I explained my thinking. “Oh,” he said. “That makes sense.” And then we talked about the fact that really nobody else can make you cranky; you make yourself cranky. But what other people do can definitely contribute to the effort by making it more difficult to remain pleasant.

Then he grinned and put in his earbuds. Conversation over. That was okay with me.

This test, I think we passed.

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Sunday 10 January 2010 - Weekly Wrap-Up: Light and Long Edition

Posted in Homeschooling and Other Forms of Insanity

Well, I can write about our school week just past, or I can plan for our new one. Priorities, priorities. You know which I ought to do, and you can see which one I am doing instead. But only because I have wanted to join Kris’s Weekly Wrap-Up for ever-so-long, and if I don’t make myself do it now, I just won’t… again…

Like most of you, we resumed “school” this week. We made it through this traditionally rough week without killing each other, which I think is a significant accomplishment. Spaz and I did come close at lunchtime on Monday, but we decided to hug and make up instead.

We did not hit the ground running this week. I hadn’t planned to; I like to ease back into the swing of things. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except that sometimes we “ease back” for far too long. That is definitely going to be the case this time.

The plan was that we’d do math, history, and some light writing this past week, and with all the extra time afforded me by that light schedule, I’d organize and plan and prepare for our new session. I’d plan out all the history, establish a new and realistic daily schedule, make a chore schedule to replace our normal ad-lib system, establish some new expectations for certain areas and new methods for some others, rework our reward/consequence system, and…. Yeah.

The first part of the plan happened: we did math, history, and some light writing. The second part did not. Despite my good intentions, I got very little planning done, nor did I do nearly enough organizing and preparing. Because, as is always the case at our house, ‘light day” of school does not mean that we are finished with school early; it simply means that we drag things out and get half the amount of work done in twice the amount of time. Okay, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And it is SO frustrating. I anticipate this every time and try to head it off and make a plan so that it doesn’t happen again, and… it always does. We just plain have time management issues around here. I’d like to blame Spaz, and part of the fault does indeed lie with him and his dawdling, time-wasting tendencies, but the fact is that I should long ago have figured out how to keep that from blowing the whole day for everyone else. Besides, I don’t manage my time as well as I could either.

Well, enough of that. Here’s what we did Monday through Thursday:

Math- Having finished out Saxon 65 just before we went on break, Fuzz started Saxon 76 this week! The book is thicker and seems more… I don’t know, serious and junior-high-ish and just doesn’t fit with my little-girl image of Fuzz. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she was a little 4-year-old demanding that I buy her a math book (“a real one, like Spaz’ math book”) so that she could “do school” with the big kids? Math for Spaz consisted of plugging away with his algebra book, which went about the same as usual: Meh.

Writing- This can be a frustrating and time-consuming subject for Spaz --and for me when I am working with him-- so I wanted to keep it light this first week. Monday’s assignment for both kids consisted of writing a thank you note to grandparents and addressing the envelope. Spaz wrote the note to one set and Fuzz to the other, and then we all signed both. That was good enough for First Day Back.

Spaz had been given one assignment over break for his Friday School writing class, which was to write his personal testimony, and I assigned that for Tuesday and Wednesday. He did not want me to be involved and I was fine with (read “HAPPY ABOUT”) that. I did not feel like coming up with something for Thursday, so I cut him a deal: do two math lessons and you won’t have a writing assignment. (That way he could finish up his math chapter.) I think this was actually a raw deal for him, but he jumped at it. Fuzz, meanwhile, wrote in her journal one day and did Wordsmith Apprentice the other two days.

History- We managed only two days of history instead of the usual three, but that’s okay. Tuesday we skipped because Hubz and I went to lunch with a business customer and his wife, which was a nice treat for me. Wednesday Spaz was invited to do lunch with Grandma and then stay at her house until evening church, so we once again skipped history and I read science with Fuzz instead. It was a great week to be flexible with things like that.

Oh, you want to know what we did do for history. Having spent almost the entire fall learning about World War II, we this week launched into the post-war era. We read about the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the United Nations, and the formation of the nation of Israel. We’d done things a little differently than usual during our World War II unit, but we are now back to our usual practice of reading aloud together from Story of the World and supplementing with independent reading from history encyclopedias and sometimes library books. We didn’t have any of the latter this week because somebody *ahem* hadn’t been on top of ordering them. (That would be me, in case you hadn’t guessed.)

Literature- Usually the kids’ literature is history-related, but this week I allowed them to read a book of their own choice. That actually had less to do with the not-being-on-top-of-ordering-books thing and more to do with (a) the fact that they both received books for Christmas, which is mandatory at our house J, and (b) my desire to keep the week light and somewhat easy. Fuzz finished reading Little Men, while Spaz mostly read from a book about warriors given to him by his older sibs. I’d hoped he would start on the long-desired Dragons in Our Midst books I’d given him, but I guess warriors are a little more exciting than dragons.

On Friday Spaz went to his all-day program, where he has classes in art, Spanish, drama, writing, and science. Fuzz and I had breakfast out (we don’t normally do this) and ran errands, then came home and did science and art…

Science for Fuzz- Fuzz and I are doing Christian Kids Explore Biology, which is largely about animals. We’d begun the unit on birds just before break and continued with it this week. We read together about bird diets and bird bodies, and she did some independent reading from library books. The latter often provide the real “meat” of our science. We didn’t do any projects this week. CKEB’s project was dissecting owl pellets, and I’d made an earlier decision not to do that, because Fuzz would just be grossed out. We did some extra reading and talking instead. (For those familiar with CKEB- yes, we are “behind”. And no, I don’t care. As with history, I have been spending a bit longer on many things than the book’s “schedule” allows. Oh well.)

Art for Fuzz- Fuzz’ art is also animal-themed for now, because she loves animals and I love themes and we found a good drawing book on the subject, so it just works out nicely all around. She’d gone through most of the bird pages in the fall when we were studying cells and biomes for science, but there was still a loon, a heron, and an owl to choose from. Although she’d already done some similar birds, she picked the former “because it’s the next one in order”. Fuzz is like that. She made the sketch and added some of the details and will finish it up during this next week.

Wow, that was a long post for a light week. I suppose that’s fitting, since we had long days for a light week, too! This next week we’ll add in more things, and hopefully by the end of it we’ll be well-planned, well-organized, well-established, back into the swing of things, and ready to hit the ground running the following week.

(Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?)

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Tuesday 29 December 2009 - Christmas, Part Two, With Pictures Old and New

Posted in Celebrations

Note- This post and the one below were originally part of one post. Shortly after posting, I came back and split them up because (a) I can’t ever leave well enough alone, and (b) I like to pretend I have nothing better to do than sit at the computer all day. If you didn’t read the previous post, you might want to do that first. It will give a context to certain remarks in this one.

A few Christmases ago, I announced at some point during the day that I wanted the kids to pose for a picture and that no more gifts would be opened until I had gotten a good one. I really should do this every year, but I don't. Maybe I should start. Anyway, I had already let all the kids know that they should expect that again this year. So when we took our second little break from gift-opening --we do that, as we like to open just a few things at a time and spread ithe giving out over the whole day-- I let them know that when we resumed an hour or so later, a picture would be on the agenda before any gifts. One of them somehow failed to understand the meaning of the words "picture before gifts" and there was the very beginnings of an incident and I even uttered the words, "Fine! It isn't important! We don't need a picture!" And you can just imagine the tone and volume with which I said it. But the moment was fleeting and the kids, amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth, did sit down and pose for a picture.

Make that seventeen pictures, several of which turned out pretty-well-except-for-one-kid and none of which turned out to be dazzingly fabulous. Because-- and you need to know this, mothers of young children-- getting a good group picture of four kids who range from pre-teen to young adult is not a whole lot easier than getting a picture of four kids who are all under the age of twelve.

Like these kids here:

MantlePics004c-1.jpg picture by 40winkzzz

The above picture was taken eleven years ago-- not on Christmas day, but rather a few weeks before, so that I could send it out with a Christmas letter. (I used to do those back then, altough they generally ended up being New Year's letters or, more typically, mid-January letters. I am pretty sure this one actually made it out before Christmas, along with a three-months-late birth announcement, but that is neither here nor there.) The kids are posing under what my oldest had long ago dubbed our "Christmas bush"-- the little artificial tree whose size was perfect for our tiny house but was with each passing year proving more and more inadequate for our growing number of homey ornaments. It would within a couple years be replaced with a new tradition of cutting our own (live and full-size) tree.

I'm getting off topic, but that's okay. These are happy memories.

Anyway. A framed 4x6 of that picture, along with a similarly posed one from a few years earlier, graces our mantle every Christmas. I look at those pictures sometimes and the people in them, and it all seems so long ago and far away. It was a different era, a different life. Are those really my kids? And I look back somewhat longingly on those days when the kids were little and their hearts were tender and I want to think it was idyllic, but it really wasn't. It was easier in some ways, harder in others.

I remember preparing the kids that year and posing and taking the pictures all myself, because Hubz was working late. He always worked late that year and the next, trying to grow a business and later trying to hold it together, his weekly hours frequently approaching 80 and occasionally going into triple digits. It was both stressful and a pivotal time for our family, though we didn't realize the latter at the time. It was a time when it was my job to hold the family together, to keep us Christ-centered, and I dropped the ball miserably. It was the beginning of our transition from an endeavoring-to-be-Christ-centered family to a nominally "Christian" family, a situation about which I was totally oblivious at the time and remained in denial for many years but have now come to grudgingly accept... but only sometimes. And that is how we got to where we are now.

Huh. I wasn't planning on going there again, but I did. So I’ve momentarily changed lanes on you, but don't worry; I'm not going to roll into the median and crash into the guardrail. Just in case you were worried. Okay, back to happy lane.

So that was back when my oldest was eleven and my youngest was a baby. My youngest is still a baby, but now she's eleven. I don't write holiday letters anymore (for much the same reasons that I no longer blog regularly, although I quit writing the holiday letters before I even started blogging, so go figure)-- but I still occasionally like to get a picture of my kids together. Hence this year's Christmas Day photo shoot.

You may have noticed that in the above picture, all the kids are wearing cute clothes in Christmas-y colors. (If you didn't, please go back and notice.) You can do that when your kids are all little. I know better than to even try to get them to wear Christmas-y things now. I did, however, insist that Cheez wear her red & black striped stockings to match Fuzz' top and that the boys both wear their new black-with-subtle-grey-plaid-that-doesn't-show-in-the-picture-anyway hoodies. Because I may have turned into a cynic, but I am still a little OCD. And Cheez pointed out that showing her striped stockings would require wearing jeans with holes in the knees, and I was okay with that, because holey jeans were all Biz had anyway, so they would sort of match. See, I'm easy like that. (I'm really not, but I like to say I am.)

Now that I think of it, I could have had them all put on elf and santa hats. We have more than enough, and they would have done it because of that impending threat of not opening anymore presents until I got cooperation. Or maybe they wouldn't have. Actually, Biz would probably have left his presents unopened rather than switch his trademark stocking cap for an elf hat. Besides, they would have bickered over who got the one with the best ears. It's probably better that I didn't think of it.

Anyway.... that's the best one I got. The angle and the lighting aren't the best, but other than Biz' apparent lack of visual apparatus, everyone looks good. I had others that were great except for one kid, so if I ever get Photoshop I will do some head-swapping and come up with an even better picture.

Oh, you want to see them together, but I yakked too much in between so you can't. Fine. Here they are side-by-side:

MantlePics004c-1.jpg picture by 40winkzzz ChristmasDay09052cw-1.jpg picture by 40winkzzz

They’ve changed just a little, you think? In one, the eleven-year-old is holding the baby and in the other, the eleven-year-old is the baby. And they all seem somehow… bigger. And older. And more prone to wearing black. And the third one no longer needs a stuffed animal to hold so that he can keep his hands to himself, and he seems to have caught up to his older siblings in size. I guess that happens.

Granted, this year's photo lacks some of the cuteness factor of the older one, but they are still a pretty good-looking bunch of kids. And the smiles are still genuine.Actually, they are probably more genuine. We were having a good time. I think this one was taken shortly after the ones in which they were all making faces and rabbit ears and pretending to choke each other. You have to let them do that in the middle of picture-taking, no matter how old they are.

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Tuesday 29 December 2009 - Christmas, Part One

Posted in Celebrations

(Yes, I know that's a very creative title for a blogpost. I came up with it all myself, thankyouverymuch.)

Note- this post and the one above were originally one post. I split them up into two for easier reading and commenting. So if you were here earlier and are now confused, be confused no longer. It’s not you, it’s me.)

We had a nice Christmas Day at home-- peaceful, relaxed, happy, fun. Not perfect, but better than I thought it would be.

Six weeks ago I didn't even want to "do" Christmas. I wanted to take Hubz and the younger kids and go away somewhere and not even be home. I just didn't want to deal with "people" and the inevitable pushing of buttons (mine) and frayed emotions (also mine) and the resultant tears and/or blow-ups (also mine).

I know, some of you are sympathizing. I have relatives that do that to me, too.

Except that I'm not talking about "relatives". Extended family members who make you feel miserable are one thing. Family members you live with and call your own, people you have poured your heart and life into who make you feel miserable are quite another.

It's been a bit of a rough year with our older two kids. Both are making some unwise choices. Both seem to have rejected the Christian faith and values with which we tried to bring them up-- and I can't say that I blame them, because we really didn't do a very good job of it. Oh, we had good intentions, but we all know which road is paved with those. Still, we tried, and still, it hurts. One kid is still struggling, one foot in the right direction and one in the wrong. The other seems to have chosen a path, to have hardened and morphed into a person I do not feel proud to have raised. One is generally amicable but has let me know on occasion in no uncertain terms just exactly how lousy a mother I have been. The other uses no such words but seems bent on pushing my buttons with remarks, gestures, and attitudes at nearly every family occasion. I don't tend to handle it very well. I've learned to keep my cool outwardly. Inwardly, it's a different story.

That's all I'm going to say about that. And you are wondering why I have even said that much, as well you should, because we are not supposed to speak of such things in happy blogland. Ah, happy blogland, where everyone's lives are what I wish mine were. I feel unworthy of it. It is one of the reasons-- not the only reason, but one of them-- that I have more or less fallen off the blogging wagon and, despite my good intentions and feeble attempts, have never quite managed to clamber back on. Even when I have the desire to blog, it's hard to find mental or emotional energy for writing when most of it is being sucked out just by the every day act of living.

Okay, so that last line was a little overly dramatic. But it's my blog and I'll overdramatize if I want to. You'll also notice that I've meandered away a bit from --no, not meandered-- I've sharply steered this away from being the typical we-had-a-nice-Christmas post. But that's okay too, because I'm sure you are really tired of reading those anyway.

But the fact is, we did have a nice Christmas. I think we all wanted it to be, and we just made it so. And it isn't that I thought we would have a horrible one by any means. I thought that it would be mostly nice, or at least okay. But I was braced for an "incident" or two- a remark, a look, an attitude, a flaring of emotions. It didn't happen.

Okay, it barely happened. There was the thing about taking the picture. But it was fleeting and we got a picture-- okay, we got lots of pictures, but only one good one. You’ll get to see it in the next post.

So anyway. Family life over the past few years, and especially the last ten months or so, hasn't been exactly what I would have wished it to be. But we're still a family, and that matters. And we had a nice Christmas. We dug into stockings, cooked and ate and washed dishes, gave and received, took pictures, relaxed, listened to new CDs, set up the Wii Fit, played a new card game. It was fun. It will hold me for a while.

The stockings, while not elaborate, were "the best ever", according to the kids. The squeezy cheese and leftover bacon on crackers was a fun snack. The lasagne dinner made by Cheez was the perfect dish-- delicious and easy to clean up. The new Wii fit provided no small amount of recreation and laughter (the latter primarily at my expense). Five Crowns turned out to be a really enjoyable, albeit long, family game. And the gifts Hubz had made for the kids --all bookshelves this year, but as always, four different designs for four very different kids-- were a big hit as usual. But with all that, my kids' favorite part of Christmas --the part that has always been their favorite, the part I think they would retain even if it meant giving up everything else-- is still...

...Giving their gifts to us and each other. While they aren't always thrilled about spending the money, they love picking out gifts for each person and they love giving them. They practically fight over who gets to give theirs first.

So somewhere along the line we must have done something right.

It was a nice Christmas.

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Sunday 6 December 2009 - Random Happy Little Moments

Posted in Life at Our House

Sometimes I need to just stop, take a deep breath, and smell the moments.

I mean, savor the moments. Smell the roses, savor the moments. Whatever. If you knew how long it took me just to come up with that brief little introduction, you wouldn’t be picky. Be glad you didn’t have to muddle through the deep long ones that were eventually deleted.

So I need to stop and savor the moments. And sometimes I even need to stop and post the moments. What better way to savor a moment than to blog it?

But I’m not just going to blog about just any random little moments; I’m going to post random happy little moments. Not because life is all happy and wonderful, but precisely because it isn’t. Or at least it doesn’t seem so to me. Maybe it is and I just can’t see it. I am sort of that way. Far too often, I get bogged down with thinking at everything about my life that isn’t the way I want it to be and forget to look at the things that are.

So in a valiant attempt to relish and cherish the good little things in life, I now present to you, in no particular order, some “random happy little moments” of the past couple weeks.

(Without any pictures, incidentally, even though I have some, because uploading and including them would just make this take that much longer and I do want to actually get it posted. Maybe pictures later. And yeah, if you have read this blog for any length of time, you know not to hold your breath waiting.)

“Random Happy Little Moments”

*Spaz going out the door, drumsticks in hand, to practice at church for the Christmas program. Who’da thought that his spontaneous drumming on a table at church, which just happened to be noticed by the worship leader, would lead to his first “gig” (and I say that with a grin and a wink) only a few months later?

*Fuzz holding my hand on the way into the store. I love it that she still does this even at eleven. My boys wouldn’t have been caught dead holding my hand even at eight. (Cheez might have at 9 or 10 if she hadn’t always been busy holding the hands of the little ones.)

*Fuzz picking out her first little bra, or as the tag puts it, “bralet.” Meaning, of course, “a cute little bra-like thing for a cute little girl who really doesn’t quite need a bra.” Watching as she picks out a cute little froggy print bralet which is coupled with a plain white one. “I can decorate the white one with my fabric markers!” she says. I discourage this idea, but it seems important to her, and I figure when we are dealing with momentous life-defining events like a first bralet, one must tread lightly. And so the formerly plain white bralet is now graced with… a drawing of a dinosaur trying to eat a penguin. Interesting subject matter for a bra --er, bralet-- but I like it that she’s still little-girl enough to do that.

*Taking the kids to the botanical gardens to see the display of Christmas trees decorated in the themes of countries from around the world. Walking around outside with them in the “children’s garden” afterward. I love it that Spaz, even at 14, still enjoys this.

*Listening with Fuzz to the verse-put-to-song that we are supposed to be learning for our Wednesday night Kids’ Club, and working together to choreograph some motions for it to share with the group.

*Teaming up with the kids to do dishes now that our dishwasher has been rendered unusable. I wash, Spaz dries, Fuzz puts away. Why this seems like a happy moment I could not tell you. I don’t particularly enjoy doing dishes, so it must be the “teamwork” part of it.

That might be quite enough, but there are more…

*Sitting by our new wood stove fireplace insert doing spelling with Fuzz. Or grammar, or science, or just about anything else. Doing anything in front of the new wood stove is nice, because the new wood stove itself is nice.

*Spaz laying on the floor writing out the three classes of levers for his science class homework, taking pains to do so in very neat handwriting without even being told. Apparently making him redo the last assignment (which in its original form looked like it was written by a second-grader) made an impact.

*Eating lunch and listening to When My Name Was Keoko with the kids. I read this with Cheez years ago and it remains one of my favorite and most highly-recommended World War II YA novels. This time around, I was delighted to find it on CD. We have often listened to audiobooks in the van, but our new thing is listening to them at lunchtime. Sharing a story together this way makes for such pleasant lunch hours, not least of all because when everyone is listening, no one is bickering J. That is, if you don't count the kids bickering with me when I say it's time to turn it off.

*Taking the kids & their cousins to a free showing of Up at the library. Best. Kids’ movie. Ever. And did I mention that it was FREE?

*Single-handedly hanging our first outdoor Christmas lights ever --not to mention beginning my Christmas decorating at the earliest date ever-- on an unseasonably balmy December afternoon while the kids finish up schoolwork inside. (I wasn’t up on a ladder hanging lights from the gutters, just wrapping the porch posts and rails.) Better yet, having Mr. Humbug tell me it looks great and is (get this) “worth the extra electricity”.

*Taking the kids to see my nieces perform in their high school’s production of Willy Wonka and then waiting afterward with all the other adoring fans of all the other marvelous actors to give them hugs and tell them how great they did. Brushing the first snow of winter off my van afterwards with our coat sleeves and a rubber strip that long ago fell off the window, because the snow brush had not yet been put in the van.

Okay, so a few of these might be more accurately called “events” rather than “moments”. But most of them are just everyday moments, the simple stuff of life-- the stuff that is easy to let pass without notice…

*Fixing hot cider for Fuzz while she and the dog play outside in the aforementioned first snow of winter. Fuzz loves snow and was beside herself with joy and excitement. I let her hold off schoolwork until after she’d gotten her snow fix.

*Cooking eggs and corned beef hash for Spaz while he carries armloads of scrap wood in from the garage and hauls it downstairs to the new woodstove. This evokes such a warm, fuzzy feeling of old-fashioned coziness. Once I threw away the hash can I could almost have pretended we were homesteaders.

*Sitting at the table cutting paper snowflakes out of coffee filters with Fuzz while Spaz improvises Skillet and TFK songs on the piano a few feet away. (I don’t particularly care to hear Skillet and TFK themselves, but I pretty much love any of Spaz’ piano arrangements. And yes, it would evoke a far more Rockwellian scene if he were playing Christmas carols, but I’ll take whatever I can get.)

*Taping said snowflakes on the window while Fuzz and Spaz fix themselves a highly nutritious supper of macaroni and cheese… and eat it… and help Cheez with the dishes… and play on the computer… (Okay, so I spent hours hanging snowflakes. They require a lot of tape, you know, not to mention much precarious balancing on the ledge over the staircase. Okay, so I took down a few and rearranged them. And went downstairs to tweak a few and cut a few more. I’m a little obsessive that way. But they look really nice.)

And I could go on…

There is more that I could write. But I think that is enough random happy little moments for the time being. It’s enough to remind me, anyway, that while it may not always seem like a wonderful life, it is probably a pretty good one in spite of everything. And it definitely has its happy little moments.

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Friday 13 November 2009 - Oops...

Did my last post seem a little... uh... unfinished? Illogical? Not quite wrapped up? That's because it was, in fact, unfinished. I fell asleep while writing it and woke up just enough to hit 'save as draft". Or something. Obviously it wasn't the "save as draft" button I hit.

But I didn't know that until now. Because I was a good girl today and busied myself with more important things, I did not check email or blog. I had no idea that my "draft" was sitting there in plain sight for all the world to see. Well, for my 3.5 remaining readers to see, anyway.

So what's the problem? you ask. Just finish it. The problem is that today, in my ignorant bliss, I decided I was not, in fact, going to finish or publish that post. The "punch line," you see, might be considered to be in bad taste, making light of something that ought not to be made light of. Did you notice that I never came back to the part about tying in history with other subjects? Did you notice that I was leading up to Fuzz saying something and never got that far? That was the unfinished part. The as-yet unwritten part in which she made a casual but oh-so-Fuzz-like comment tying in our history studies with Spaz' animated roller-coaster escapades.

Our history studies included the Holocaust, remember? And Spaz was being the evil roller coaster engineer with his roller coaster of death. So Fuzz made this off-hand observation tying the one to the other, and it was rather funny and made great blog material-- except that it wasn't and it didn't. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that there really wasn't any way to finish the story and put in the punchline without crossing the line of poor taste. So I decided today while vacuuming downstairs that I would save that roller coaster bit to work into a possible future post and then delete the post from my draft folder.

Except that, as we have already established, it wasn't actually in my draft folder. Drat.

So I guess I won't be finishing the post. I might modify it a bit after a few days, just so that it makes a little more sense. I'll figure out some way to make a finished post out of the rollercoaster thing without including the "rest of the story".

*Sigh* This is what I get for blogging when I'm tired. So much for trying to actually get a blogpost out there. Should I give up yet?

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Thursday 12 November 2009 - It's a Roller Coaster Out There

Posted in Homeschooling and Other Forms of Insanity

This post was originally posted unfinished, because I fell asleep. I do that sometimes. It is not a good idea to hit buttons on the computer when one is falling asleep, or one might hit "publish" instead of "draft". It has now been modified and finished, sort of. You get what you pay for around here.

Spaz takes classes on Fridays, and some of them, including his science class, involve homework. That is a good thing. His class is studying physics, and one of his assignments last week was to go to a website where he could "build" a roller coaster and adjust various factors such as speed, friction, and angle until his car was able to run the entire track without coming to a stop or falling off.

Which is a noble and lofty goal, of course, but as any mother of a boy would know, it is ever so much more fun to make the car fall off.

Spaz dutifully adjusted everything in such a way as to let the car complete its run, thereby fulfilling the assignment. That took perhaps four minutes. He then spent the next twenty minutes playing with the controls and adjusting all the factors to provide for maximum spills and thrills. Especially spills.

"I am the evil roller coaster engineer!" he'd cry gleefully as the car plummeted off the track for the umpteenth time and hurtled off the screen. "I like to send people to their deaths! Ahahahahaha!" I know this sounds six-year-oldish, and indeed it is. Spaz is a perpetual child-at-heart, at the moment fourteen-going-on-seven, but someday forty-going-on-nine.

And so the animated "roller coaster of death" continued to plummet off the track and the boy continued to exult in his evilness and the girl continued to look on with interest and the mom continued to say, "We need to turn the computer off now and move on to other things," and the boy continued to say, "Just one more time, pleeeeaaaase?"

Who says physics can't be fun?

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Monday 26 October 2009 - I Guess We'll Have to Shoot Him

Posted in Homeschooling and Other Forms of Insanity

*Sigh* I don't know how on earth Mr. Bright But Unfocused And Very High Maintenance will ever survive real high school next year. And I don't know how I would ever survive an attempt to homeschool him through high school.

I guess we'll have to shoot him. It's a shame, because he's such a great kid.

That's going to end up being a facebook status update one of these days, but you read it here first. Maybe someday I'll even elaborate on it and turn my frustrations into a real blog post. For now, you just get this. Because my brain is too tired to elaborate, and besides, I am supposed to be doing school stuff right now.

Like trying to figure out a workable structure for our schooldays so that the highly motivated 11-year-old isn't getting shortchanged by the high-maintenance 14-year-old. Like trying to figure out how to help the highly unfocused 14-year-old manage his time and buckle down to work. Like trying to ensure that said 14-year-old gets in the "meaty" learning and skill-building he needs when in fact it is a challenge just to manage what seems like a bare minimum.

And when I'm finished figuring all that out, I'm going to go to Washington and solve the economic crisis.

You laugh. I cry.

Of course I wouldn't shoot my son. Despite the challenges involved in homeschooling him, he's a wonderful kid. No, much as I'd like to some days, I won't shoot him...

...but I might blow my brains out.

That would just solve everything very nicely. For me.

But no, I can't do that either. The stain would never come out of the carpet.

I am a crazy woman. Why else would I do this? What else could I be? I homeschool an attentionally-deficient adolescent because I am crazy, and I am crazy because I homeschool an attentionally-deficient adolescent.

That is about the long and short of it.

And now I must return to my futile endeavors. Thank you for reading. I shall return when I can next muster up the spare brain cells.

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Wednesday 21 October 2009 - Alright, *You* Try to Come Up With a Title for This One

Posted in Miscellaneous Musings

Wow. This blog has gotten so boring that even I don't want to read it anymore. That's kind of sad. My headblogs are really interesting, though. Too bad we're kind of missing some key steps involved in getting them from my head to this blog.

Maybe I will just abandon this blog and start a new one. That should remedy the problem, because of course, having a new blog would make me a more consistent blogger. Just like moving into a bigger house made me an excellent housekeeper, getting new shelves in the schoolroom made me an organized homeschooler, finding a new church would render me a mature and godly Christian, and of course, getting a new husband would turn me into the perfect wife.

Right. Well, I am going to switch to blogger at some point, because I have wanted to for a couple years now anyway, but I don't think now is the time. What would be the point of starting a brand new blog to neglect when I am doing perfectly well at neglecting this one? Methinks I need to begin blogging regularly again before I start anything new.

Ceasing to work 32 hours a week might help me be a more consistent blogger. That is already in process. (The ceasing to work 32 hours, I mean, not the consistent blogging. Don't get too excited.) It's a seasonal job, remember, and the season is nearly over. Work is dwindling and even if it were not, I would be cutting my hours, because I just haven't been able to devote enough time & energy to my day job. You know, the one I don't get paid for. The important one. The one I usually think I am crazy for doing but have been doing for going-on 18 years nonetheless (or 22 years, depending how you look at it). Yes, that one. And, huh... who'da thought that working 4 pm to midnight 4 nights a week would have even the remotest effect on our homeschool days? I sort of expected that it would, but I didn't realize how much.

I am rambling again, which is all I know how to do lately.

Here is another sad thing: there have been no madding hordes clamoring to know "the rest of the story" from my last post-- that is, what exactly happened a few weeks back to render my van temporarily undriveable? Apparently you are all "suffering from a deplorable lack of curiosity" (to quote a line from one of my favorite old movies). Although I can think of a few other explanations, not all of them flattering...

1. Nobody actually reads this blog anymore. Although that would be perfectly understandable, it can't be true now that I think about it, because I did actually get some comments on that post.
2. Like me, everyone reads blogs on google reader and is too ~~lazy~~ ~~forgetful~~ ~~totally enraptured by my posts~~ lazy to click over and comment. Then again, see #1, so this can't be true either.
3. Most of my blog friends are now my facebook friends as well, so they already knew what happened long before reading it here. This one gets my vote.
4. Nobody really cares. I don't really like this option, but it's quite possible.
5. Everyone figured it was pointless to ask, since my blogging history (recent and otherwise) reveals a distinct tendency to not get around to posting those rest-of-story things regardless of how many people ask. Sad but true.

Well, be that as it may. My van is once again driveable and in better shape than it was before its unfortunate run-in with odocoileus virginianus stupideus. Too bad we can't say as much for our wallets, since we had no collision or comp on the van. That wasn't my decision, but we're not going to go there now, or ever, thankyouverymuch. Besides, the same day that we received the repair bill, we received notice of a settlement ("internet purchase gone bad") that had been pending for a couple years. That was money we never expected to see again and it will be about the same amount as the van repair bill. And then there is the new unexpected high-efficiency woodburner funded almost entirely by homeowner's insurance, which we have greatly enjoyed every day since its installation and will enjoy even more when we get our rather diminished heat bills this winter. So it all works out, because God is good.

And yes, I was behind the wheel during that unfortunate run-in, and yes it was a horrible experience. thank you for asking. I pretty much bawled all the rest of the way home, partly from shock and partly out of sorrow for the poor creature. (I didn't have kids in the car, so I didn't have to get a grip.) Then I felt like bawling again when I saw what the stupid thing did to my van. Oh well. All's well that ends well.

Enough about that. Totally random fact: today is Rich Mullins' birthday. I miss that guy immensely. I mean, not that I ever knew him in the first place, so I guess what I mean is that I miss his wonderful songs and musings and concert presence and all that stuff.

Another totally random fact: My nutty bar stash has been replenished, and I ate four of them tonight. Well, you know, two 2-packs. Nutty bars are pretty much the meaning of life, you know. Especially now that Rich Mullins is gone. Hey, that was a pretty clever and spontaneous tying together of unrelated random facts!

I suppose that's enough from me tonight.

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Thursday 8 October 2009 - A Long and Winding Post...

Posted in Life at Our House

At my job, I sit in front of a computer for eight hours. So what am I doing on my night off? Um, sitting in front of a computer. Go figure.

Speaking of my job… I leave for work before the kids are done with school and now get up about the same time they do. This means I no longer have planning and prep time at the end of our school days or in the morning before the kids got up. I miss that. So what have I not done at the computer this entire evening? You got it, school planning and prep. Go figure again.

My excuse is that, since on Thursdays we have just enough time for writing, math, and piano before leaving for soccer, the day pretty much plans itself. Of course, I could be planning for Friday or next week or the duration of our World War II unit. But then I would miss the adrenaline rush that comes from having to do it all at the last minute. Besides, wasting time on the internet is ever-so-much more fun.

This is turning into a stream-of-thought post. And you know, any sort of post would be good at this point. In case you haven’t noticed, the combination of working 32 hours a week and homeschooling (or trying to, or pretending to, or something), coupled with my tendency to get quick writing fixes on facebook, has pretty much sounded the death knell for my blog. So we could consider this life support, a valiant attempt to resuscitate the blog by simply going wherever my thoughts may lead. (Within reason, of course, thankyouverymuch.) So here I go…

Schooling and working… It’s been interesting, that’s for sure. I find that I kind of like working, but I do not like the toll it takes on the rest of life. Last week seemed especially hopeless, as I felt as though my kids spent the first 3 hours of their school days being educated (or not) by Zombie Mom, and by the time I finally kicked it into gear, we’d only have a couple hours before I had to get ready for work. I was really thinking something would have to go, and I couldn’t decide whether it would be the job or the kids. Okay, it would have been the job, or at least some of the hours. But last week was my “tired” week, too, if you know what I mean, plus there were nights I couldn’t get to sleep, plus there were other stresses going on. This week it has all seemed a little more do-able.

Working… It is kind of nice to get out while someone else (Hubz) does all the things I used to do in the evenings. (No, he doesn’t blog or facebook; I mean the other things, like fixing dinner and making sure the kids have finished their lists and getting Spaz to football practice… those sorts of things.) My job is not exciting but I kind of like it, especially now that most of my time is spent doing a photo-editing process called “green-screening” rather than the mind-numbingly monotonous data entry work for which I was hired. Plus I have discovered the existence of a whole interesting class of people called “co-workers”. Who knew?

Co-workers… One of my them, by the way, is Cheez, who was hired in as a green-screener a few weeks ago without so much as an interview. Like me (and almost all our 2^nd-shift co-workers), she is a seasonal employee, working just until mid-November. That’s okay with her, as it is a thousand times better than working for a repo agency, tracking people down and making phone calls to the former next-door neighbors of their cousins’ brothers-in-law ad nauseum, which is what she’d been doing all summer. It was, she said, “the only job in the world where the customer is not always right.” It was also, as you might guess, very unpleasant work, and it unfortunately took place in a very hostile work environment. She finally decided that a job that makes you cry even when you aren’t at work is a job not worth keeping, so now she sits in the cubicle next to mine and works on school pictures in a nice, friendly, non-threatening environment where no one gets yelled at for making mistakes. She likes it.

And I do too. Cheez being the source of much of the afore-mentioned “other stresses”, I wasn’t sure whether this would be a nice thing for me or not. After all, work was sort of a nice escape from the stresses of home, and now one of the stresses would be sitting in the next cubicle. Hmm. But you know what? It has turned out to be a nice thing. It is kind of fun to work together. And being able to share rides has been a real life-saver this past week, because...

…because I don’t have a vehicle. I mean, I do, but it isn’t drivable at the moment. That story I will save for another post, simply because I can. And you are going, But wait! The way you are going, there may never be another post! And I would say that your concern is very valid, but I am still going to save it for another post. It is all written, which greatly increases its chances of actually making it to the blog. Although you should see all the "already written but not quite finished" posts that haven't.

Okay, back on track here... where was I?

Oh yes. The undrivable van... Moments before my van was rendered incapacitated (which happened to happen on my night off work last week), I was on my way home from finishing up my editing manuscript at Pahookey Bread. That editing gig is finished now, which is nice because it is one less thing to do, and not-so-nice because it was really fun and interesting. We will see whether I am able to go any further with editing. I sure would like to. For now, though, I think two jobs is quite enough. Yes, two-- you know, the paying one and the important one.

And I think that pretty much brings me back to where I started, unless you want me to start talking about the important job. You know, that utterly insane endeavor called homeschooling. And I don’t think you want me to get started on that, because this post is already far too long. That’s kind of how it goes with this blog, I think. Famine or feast. When it rains it pours, etc…

Oh, but speaking of rain….

Ha, you thought I was going to keep going, didn’t you? Nope, I’m done.

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Wednesday 16 September 2009 - Why I Don't Edit at Home

Posted in Life at Our House

Going to work nearly full-time after 22 years as a stay-at-home mom has been a huge adjustment. Moreso because my entry into the workforce has come at the same time we are starting a new school year. On top of that, I still have the editing job to finish. (And we're not even going to talk about those unfinished home organization projects.)

The editing job is why I'm at Pahookey Bread* on my night off instead of being at home with my family. As much as I ought to be doing school planning or putting away all those still-homeless clothes (the unfortunate victims, as you may remember, of an impromptu cabinet ~~snatching~~ relocation resulting in yet another of those not-to-be-spoken-of unfinished household organization projects)... anyway, as much as I ought to be home, or at least running errands if I am going to be out, I am instead sitting here at the aforementioned coffee-&-bagel-etc shop. (*Name changed to prevent discovery of this blog by stalkers who actually look at the 373 millionth page of a g**gle search.) Because the editing must be done.

I was going to try editing at home tonight. After all, nearly everyone was gone earlier in the evening, with the lone exception being a 14-year-old boy who would be very happy to play video games downstairs while I worked upstairs. Minimal distractions, right? This could work. So I set up a little table in front of the living room window where I would be free from distractions, grabbed a chair and my laptop, and started to get set up.

Except...

The window was dirty. There was a dead bee on the sill. I could see the planter on the deck with weeds in it and it bothered me, as did the overturned kiddie picnic table that all my kids have long outgrown. There was a book on the sofa. And even though I couldn't see them, I knew the newspapers on the coffee table were messy.

(Funny how those things don't bother me most of the time. I could sit down in my comfy chair to engage in facebook or a good kakuro puzzle and I'd be totally oblivious to all of them.)

Furthermore, the dog was barking. The kid downstairs playing video games probably hadn't set the timer and would go over his alloted time if I didn't interfere. The phone was poised to ring at any second, because it always does as soon as I get involved in something. And as soon as someone walked in the door, even if they went immediately and quietly to another area of the house, my concentration would be shot.

So I'm here at Pahookey Bread.

And I'm not editing. Did you notice that? But I will. I'm good at keeping internet playtime to a minimum when I'm here, if I even engage in it at all. Normally I don't, but I just had to check in with you all.

So I did. Just to let you know I hadn't dropped off the face of the earth or anything.

Now I'm off to fetch my manuscript from its cozy folder. See ya.

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