Northern Moments - Homeschool Blogger

I've been tagged....

Mon, 5 May 2008 10:36:00 -0500

Woo hoo....I've been tagged by Jenni in KS, who is just tired of me not posting! Here are the rules: 1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. 2. Each player answers the questions about themselves. 3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read your blog. As these rules are arbitraryily written by someone with no power...I fully plan to disregard the last one, mostly because I am lazy, and they can't do anything about it anyway. Hee hee hee. What was I doing 10 years ago: My children were 6, 4, almost 3 & 1. Which means I was probably doing laundry. We lived in Peter's Creek Alaska, and I believe I had just started selling Creative Memories, which was my first break out of "just being mom", and made for a bit of a head rush. Five Snacks I enjoy: 1. Coffee (is that a snack?) 2. Ice cream.... coffee flavored 3. Doritos...but I try not to buy them 4. Cheese 5. Jalepeno artichoke spread from Costco with rice crackers....mmmm In the Real World: I'm not too different than I present myself on my blog. I'm a bit scatterbrained. Forget to fix my hair sometimes. Not too often though...I think I am usually fairly put together, at least I start out that way...but I don't spend anytime making sure I stay put together. I love to talk, and any shyness, I had as a child has flown out the window. Things I would do if I were a billionaire: 1. Buy my husband a boat. 2. Buy more books. 3. Have a full time housekeeper. Five jobs that I have had: 1. Ice cream scooper at the Old Time Icecream Parlor at Alaskaland, an old time theme park, where we had to wear long skirts and gingham aprons, but because it was so warm in our store (interior Alaska can hit 100 in the summer...and we had no air conditioning, and a lot of machinery putting off heat) we tried to get away with wearing shorts and gingham aprons. 2. A restraunt hostess for Westours Holland America. This is when I developed my fear of tourists, but I was thrilled to find out that "tour tourists" and "B&B tourists" are entirely different. 3. Ice Cream Scooper for Baskin Robbins....this seemed like an obvious transition, but it didn't last all that long...the owner of the store kept telling us, that his shipment of normal sized shirts never showed up...and so all that he had were extra small polos. Then we noticed that all of us girls were rather large busted... very, very suspecious. On my last day there I found a stash of many different sized shirts. 4. My friends and I created our own catering company, preparing meals for a newly formed tour company, run by other friends, Northern Alaska Tour Co. NATC is now very successful. Our catering company folded. 5. During college, at Oregon State, I worked in the library inputting all the new books. 6. I'm going to list 6, because I actually believe that is all the jobs I have ever had, until my current situation of B&B owner & bookstore owner. I worked for National Bank of Alaska for 2 years in the VISA department, until Amanda made her arrival. Three of my habits: 1. I never stay on a schedule 2. I can't stop reading once I have started a book 3. I like to sneak spoonfuls of ice cream out of the fridge. (this is like the 5th time I have mentioned ice cream in my post.) Five places I have lived: 1. Fairbanks Alaska 2. Minneapolis, MN (when I was 2 while my dad was getting his PhD) then we moved back to Fairbanks. 3. Uppsala Sweden (when I was 12, while my dad was on a sabbatical) 4. Corvallis, Oregon 5. Anchorage, Alaska What do you want others to get from your blog? Whatever they want! If anyone wants to be tagged from this post, please feel free.

Life!

Sat, 3 May 2008 13:53:00 -0500

I have been meaning to purchase Blake's ticket to Battle Creek MI for Gymnastics Nationals for weeks now...really. Every night, I would think, "OK, I've got to do that tonight." But I have been busier than I have ever been in my whole life, sleep deprived, and not even home. So last night I sat down to purchase his ticket, and realized that he is leaving TOMORROW. Do I win the bad mother award? I guess I shouldn't even bother throwing that retorical question out there, as the answer is fairly obvious. We won't talk about the bad wife award which I also won, because when you wait that long to purchase a ticket, the price is not pretty. It is also fun when you log in the reservation request, then go report the horrible amount to your husband, and then upon trying to purchase it, the price somehow goes up another $100. Eeeekkkk. At least he is staying in a REALLY Cheap, and probably very NASTY hotel, which makes up for the VERY EXPENSIVE ticket, for a child who is only competing in one event, in which there is no hope that he will even qualify for finals.... opps...there goes my mind...off on meaningless tangents. OK...Now I am going to take myself, and my mind, to the store... but I better get some coffee first, because I think I need it!

Traveling....

Fri, 2 May 2008 02:32:00 -0500

For those few die-hard readers...who have been wondering where I've been, I'm back!

In the last 2 weeks, we have done 5 curriculum fairs for Pandemonium Booksellers.

We started off in Peter's Creek, a lovely 20 miles away.

Then we flew to Juneau...600 miles away.

Next to the big one in Anchorage...45 miles and an amazing TWO feet of snow, into which I flipped a whole box of books, including Susan Wise Bauer's Well Trained Mind. That makes me a very bad person.

So then the snow melted and we braved the 350 mile drive to Fairbanks, where we pitched our stuff on Monday and Tuesday, and then drove 10 hours south for the Fair in Soldotna on Wednesday, and then back home to Wasilla after the fair. Those beds in the motorhome came in really handy for everybody but Leny, who was driving.

Now I am going to bed

Things are moving!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:27:00 -0500

My house is a pile of books... beautiful curriculum everywhere! It has been really fun receiving all of it...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

We have 2 employees working for us full time now...my bookstore manager and the cafe manager. Of course, I don't have a store...so we have taken over the schoolroom. The kids do all their work on the couch anyway, so it doesn't really make that much difference. Except, I am so distracted, there isn't all that much school happening. I am trying not to feel too guilty about that. Connor was starting to really resent that I wasn't always focused on him, so Leny has started taking him everywhere with him. It has been wonderful in a multitude of ways. Amanda & Blake are quite content being independent teenagers. Delaney just kind of hangs out with me.

Speaking of Blake, he competed yesterday in Portland at the Regional Competition. We had some hope that he would qualify for Nationals, but not enough hope to actually buy the ticket. So much to his chagrin, he qualified (yeah!) but only in one event, the floor. His whole meet was marred by a giant rip he received during his first event on pommel. They bandaged and taped his hand, but that affected his performance on pommel and high-bar. Our region seems to be really s...l...o...w...in actually posting the scores somewhere, so I can see how he did in relations to others. The mom who he was with called me, but we had a bad connection, and it is just hard to collect all the details. He placed 2nd on floor with a 13.6 and didn't do to badly on vault with a 13.4. So he only gets partial bragging rights, not full! Good for the humility!

TESTING

Thu, 3 Apr 2008 10:41:00 -0500

For 4 days this week, I shuttle my kids daily, to 3 different sites, so that we can find out ~~what they don't know~~ what they know. I am actually highly opposed to testing, but I like having the $5000 a year to spend on curriculum and gymnastics that we get from our wonderful (really!) homeschool program, so my kids can suffer a bit.

The problem is, they aren't really suffering. OK, Delaney has quite a bit of angst about her self defined lack of knowledge. But I have to say she seemed rather pleased with her writing test yesterday. Today will be math. And Science on Friday. She asked "The science will just be about planets right? Because that is ALL I know."

Connor was really pleased too. He jumped in the car all pumped up, and said "We had to write a one page report about who we thought deserved to have a special stamp made. I wrote 'Ninjas. Why? Because they are Ninjas.'"

He was so pleased, I felt bad exploding with "What were you thinking! ? Arrrgghhh!" He answered, still quite pleased "I don't know, I'm a Ninja."

He also continued on about how mean the teacher was. "I was barely talking," (Connor never stops talking) "and he came and told me, if I didn't stop talking, he was going to take my test away and I would be done!"

Do you realize how many trips to the principal office, I have saved by homeschooling this child? Oh. My. Word.

Can I just say that Blake and Delaney are nicely behaved test takers. Really.

The Ninja theme, apparently fully embraced by all the other 7th grade boys at Connor's testing location, has continued since then. Last night on the way home from church, Blake ripped off his seat belt, and jumped in the back seat to try to strangle the Ninja, who had taken up residence there.

It was a peaceful moment. I did pull over.

The Ninja is still alive. Why? Because he is a Ninja.

I love testing.

Books...

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 02:12:00 -0500

I should start getting all the books I have order in the next day or two! I am soooo excited. While ordering has been fun...the actual books will be so much funner!

The metal walls are up in our bookstore and the plumbers and electricians are busy. The cement guy is sanding away, and we should end up with a cool piece of art for the floor. It is still overwhelming, but on the other hand I am really excited.

There is so much left to do...it just won't all get done.

What can I say...we are Pandemonium!

Gymnastics... again

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:56:00 -0500

I lived through Delaney's state meet! Yeah! She did fine, 4th on floor.... Last on vault...and everything else somewhere in the middle. The last place was her biggest success because she laughed while she received it, and that made me perfectly happy. I would rather have a kiddo who can laugh at herself, than a state champion any day!

There were coach Jay issues, but that whole thing has completely exhausted me, so I think I will leave it alone.

My 20th class reunion is coming up. That seemed like a huge milestone, say, 20 years ago. Now...it must not be that big of a deal, because I certainly don't feel all that old. OK...now I really sound like an old geezer.

Anyway, our class found a nice little website to set up at, which is much nicer than the very irritating Classmates.com...which actually wants me to pay to use their services! The gaul! (how do you spell that word? spell check doesn't like it.)

A wasted life

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:29:00 -0500

It has been a hard week.

On Tuesday, the man who had been Blake's gymnastics coach up until a year ago, committed suicide.

OK, well, actually he made it much more dramatic than that...he let the police do it for him.

What a legacy to leave behind for a bunch of kids to try and figure out.

Obviously it is a long story. Jay was hired by our gym back in '06, after Blake's previous coach left the gym to start his own gym. At first it seemed just great. He was a very high level coach, collegiate gymnast and all that. But anytime somebody with all that talent ends up in Wasilla Alaska, you know they are running from something.

We soon found out. On Friday, before their first meet, Jay ended up in jail with a DWI. His FIFTH DWI. Now we knew.

Things had already been going poorly with Blake and Jay before that. Blake was one of the higher level boys on the team, but we had reached the limits of our current coach long before, and there were some basic fundamental skills which had been taught incorrectly. We started seeing some favoritism. He liked the young athletes who he could form, not the older ones who were messed up. Also, Blake is a fairly well rounded individual. While he really likes gymnastics, he doesn't "live and die" for it. And that held him back. Just yesterday Delaney asked Blake "Why didn't Jay like you?" and Blake answered "Because he thought I was wasting all my 'supposed' talent, and Jay only liked you if you were a really good gymnast." That about summed it up.

Well, while Jay was in jail, the owner of our gym really reached out to him. I think he thought he could save him; talk him into seeing the light. He told him that if he could stay sober for a year, the gym would hire him back. There were a lot of parents in full support of this because of his coaching ability. I was not one of those parents. I was quite happy with Ryan, our young coach, because was willing to learn. He had learned from Jay, he learned from some of the other gym owners and so on... But when Jay came back, we accepted it. Blake really struggled. He would come home so frustrated and angry and he would take it out on anybody in his path, mostly Connor.

Leny and I pulled him out of the gym. We told him that he could go back, but he had to do it with a different attitude, because we would not have that spirit in our home. Frankly, we thought he was done.

One week later, he said he was ready to go back. And he did it right. His attitude was completely different. We talked a lot about not being able to change how others behave, only our own behavior. He seemed to embrace that for the most part.

So a year ago, we went off to Regionals in Boise Idaho. Luckily Both Jay and Ryan were along. We had 18 boys who had qualified. Jay was really stressed and revved up.

Friday morning, before the coaches meeting, he went and got drunk. Really drunk. Kicked out of the bar drunk. When Ryan found him wandering the streets, he told him that he would not be representing our gym. Jay went mental, threatening to kill Ryan, Ryan's wife, his new baby... He called the gym owners and threatened to kill them. Ryan called the police.

Jay locked himself in his hotel room and had a nice little stand off with the police. Finally he gave in, and spent the night in jail.

The next day at competition, the boys were a little shook up, but performed very well. Ryan was really shook up, but you couldn't tell it when he was with the boys, but after the sessions, he was really out of it. The boys actually did amazingly well, to the point that people were commenting. "Who are you guys?" First and second place in Levels 5, 6 & 8. We were all so embarrassed by the whole situation, that nobody said anything about our fiasco of a coach.

On Sunday morning I was having breakfast with Blake and 2 of the other boys. All the sudden I spotted Jay coming across the restaurant, towards us. He looked horrible. Normally a very good looking, well built man, the toils of two nights without sleep and a good dose of anger, were quite obvious. The boys (12 & 13 year olds) stared at him with their mouths hanging open in horror. (I almost laughed). He had 2 favors: He wanted to borrow my phone charger, and he needed someone to get his luggage from the police station, when they opened on Monday, because he was flying back. I agreed that we could do that. He wondered if he should go watch the boys that were competing that day, and thinking of the gun show going on next door, I said that it might be unsettling to the boys. He grudgingly agreed. I offered to buy him breakfast, but he declined.

Obviously, that was the end of his employment.

But Blake's other previous coach, who had opened his own gym, thought that he could handle the situation, and hired Jay. Most of the families at that gym knew nothing about what had happened at our gym. But USAG regulations are changing, and starting next year he would no longer be able to coach at meets because of his jail record. Maybe that was part of his despair.

On Tuesday he called our gym owner, very, very drunk. He thanked him and apologized for what he had done a year ago. Then he said"I just want to say goodbye." Lynn asked "What does that mean?" But Jay hung up. Lynn called the people that he lived with, and they went home. At some point, Jay must have talked to his Dad, who called the police. When the police arrived, Jay started shooting at him, and they were forced to return fire, and he is dead.

The first day it was just shocking. In a way it wasn't surprising, just shocking. As it always is with suicide, everyone questions what they could have done differently. I wondered if I should have done more. So many people had done so much for him, given him so many chances... but when it came down to it, he just couldn't handle life.

Yesterday I was in the grocery store thinking this was just something that had happened and didn't touch me when all of the sudden it just hit me that I was just so depressed and weary, that I wanted to go home and curl up in bed. I went to they gym to pick up Blake, and there was Lynn, the gym owner, sound asleep in his office with his 2 week old grandson on his chest. I guess I wasn't the only one feeling that way.

Blake is handling it like a male. Tough guy. I'm not really sure how to talk him through it. The imagery really gets to me. I picture it happening. When we had picked up Jay's luggage at the jail last year, I went through it very thoroughly before checking it on the plane, because I didn't want to be responsible for anything illegal. It was very personal in a way, and the contents, even the smokey smell, of his suitcase keep flashing back to me, tied together with his horrible, violent end. I have no idea how all the kids he coached are supposed to process this.

Obviously, we will move on just fine. We had very little in common with Jay, and yet he was very much a part of our lives, bringing us into an ugly experience that is just the kind of thing that we read about in the papers, not that happen to us.

Sigh.

http://www.frontiersman.com/articles/2008/03/26/breaking_news/doc47e9d7e344853214031962.txt

Easter...

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:53:00 -0500

We had a nice family dinner at my mom's house....

(I have to insert right now, that Picasa, which is where my SIL hosts her pictures, does not seem to get along very well with Homeschoolblogger. Just so you know.)

As I just mentioned, Monica, my SIL, took lots of cute pictures

Like these ones...Delaney, Connor, Blake and Amanda:

But I can't get homeschoolblogger to host the larger files without going all wonky on me.

So we are all little.

Here's my mom, the lovely hostess:

And Tim & Monica :

Although this version is more fun:

For some reason, Monica refrained from posting the picture of Leny sticking his tongue in my ear, so we have a nice calm picture of us:

(Thank you Monica)

We have almost finished all the chocolate. Almost. I only gained 3 pounds.

The end of the season...almost

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 11:05:00 -0500

Last weekend was the boys' state hockey tournament, in Anchorage, 4 games over 2 days. Delaney also had a meet, luckily it was in Anchorage as well. For once, I had actually looked ahead at the beginning of the season, and saw that if Connor played as a PeeWee he would have been in Fairbanks for the state tournament and Blake, as a Bantam, would have been in Soldotna, 500 miles apart (Never mind Delaney's meet in the confusion of all that.) So I moved Connor up and I LOVE having my boys play together. And then they decided that as we were winning every game as Bantam D's we should move up to Bantam C. Which was fine with me, as it is rather awkward to win games 16 to 0! And so that is what made their tournament be in Anchorage. Woo hoo!

Of course, they only won 1 of their 4 games...but that's life.

Delaney did fine. Not great, she didn't get the score she wanted, and she fell off the balance beam, but I didn't bring home a weeping mass of humanity...and that is really all I care about.

The boys on the other hand were REALLY GRUMPY. But luckily they were in Leny's vehicle for the ride home, so I didn't suffer. And that is also all I care about. (Just kidding)

Yesterday was Blake's state gymnastics meet. (Yes, he is over scheduled.) As our gym hosted it, and I am the Booster Club president, I was fairly busy. He had some weird wrist injury, that was threatening to prevent him from competing, but he got over it. (I think it was a mental issue.) He seemed to have a good meet. He is almost always a very good competitor. No matter how practice has been going, he steps up to the plate at meets. Except on high bar, but we don't talk about that. USGA (or is it USAG?) instituted a new scoring system this year for the upper levels, so we are no longer just using the "perfect 10" scoring system, so I have no context yet to understand how he actually did. For 6 events, his all around score was 72.something. His pommel routine was the best I had ever seen him. His rings got oohhhs and ahhhs. He stuck hes double full on floor . Bars...yeah...well...who needs a dismount anyway. So he qualified for regionals, on the virtue of their only being 3 level 10's in the state, and he placed 2nd at the meet. The kid he is competing against is spectacular, so 2nd is a good place.

Delaney's state meet is next weekend.

Then Blake will have Regionals in Portland OR in April. He has to go without us because we will be doing curriculum fairs. Last year, he place 2nd a regionals, but he skipped level 9 this year, so we aren't expecting that this year. And then possibly he will have Nationals in May in Michigan. Who cares about the bookstore....I would try to go to that.

OK...so my title is wrong...the season is not over... maybe in 8 years, when Delaney graduates.