Fall break

This week is fall break for me. The kids had their fall break weeks ago when the co-op took their fall break, but I had to wait until this week, even though there is only just a few weeks left until the end of the semester. Since I don't have school to do, I decided to take a break from bookwork for the girls so they could finish the quilts and curtains they started last summer.

Joy and Sarah are making quilts with zebra print zigzags and matching curtains. Abby and Rachel didn't need quilts because they already had nice comforters, but they needed some good curtains. I had bought the material for it but never had time to help them make them. So this was sort of a "home ec" week. We are almost finished, too--Sarah just has to finish up her quilt and then we still have to make the zebra curtains.

We also bought a new van today--a twelve passenger. Our mini-van had eight seats, but the kids keep growing taller (imagine that) and plus they always want to take their friends places. People used to ask us why we had six kids and one of my favorite answers was to say that if we had more than that, we'd have to supersize everything. I didn't think we'd be supersizing anyway! I guess I'll have to think up another answer to that question.

Anyway, this van was a very good deal. It's a Chevy Express 3500 (and yes, I had to ask my husband because I had no idea) and it's green. It's very pretty on the outside, and very plain on the inside, but there's lots of room. It doesn't have any fancy features, like cruise control or a cassette/CD player, but at least the air conditioning works. It also doesn't have power locks or windows. Timothy thinks it's so cool that you can roll down the windows without even putting in the key!

We are looking forward to taking this van on vacation next year. Lord willing, we're going to go out west and see the Grand Canyon and go to Yellowstone and all of the other neat places that are out that way. We've been north and south and east, but not west, at least no farther than Missouri. It's so big that way. I hope we get to go. I also hope I can handle the Grand Canyon, since I'm terrified of heights. The last time we went on the sky ride at Indiana Beach I spent the whole time clinging tightly to my daughter and telling her to not look down. That's the best way to convince others that you're not scared--pretend like you are trying to keep someone else from being scared. It works fairly well.

I know this blog post was a bit rambly (is rambly a word?), but hey--it's fall break. I'm resting my mind and that means taking a break from being organized. You should feel lucky I posted at all.

Happy birthday to me!

Today I am 33 years old. My family "surprised" me this morning with breakfast in bed and showered me with gifts and handmade cards. Timothy (age 7), Rachel (age 8), and Abby (age 10) all made handmade cards that said things like, "Mom, I love you, Mom. Mom, you are the best Mom ever. I love Mom. Mom loves me." (I think they like to use the word "Mom" a lot because it's easy to spell).

Rachel also gave me a present--a beautiful tea set that I had bought at a yard sale last year. It was in a gift bag wrapped up in a piece of purple cloth, an apron, and an African costume we had made for school several years ago (since obviously we didn't have any tissue paper handy).

Sarah (age 12) gave me a necklace, although Joy (age 13) said she was actually the one who had made it. Either way, it was very pretty and I wore it to church this morning. They also gave me a gift bag with some body wash and a hair clip. Sarah said, "Don't tell her the story about the hair clip." I still don't know what that is about.

Jay (age 14) gave me the most unique gift of them all. He translated "The Lord's Prayer" into Elvish and framed it. He's taught himself how to read it and has a whole dictionary of Elvish words that he's been printing out a little at a time from the Internet. I don't know if there is any practical use for knowing Elvish languages, but if there ever is a demand for an expert in the field, Jay might be the right person. I think it's cool, though, that he has shown the initiative to learn something on his own. I just wish I could give him a high school credit for it.

Erick gave me some chocolate and another hair clip, and I also received some gifts at church including fuzzy blue and green striped socks which I immediately put on. My girls are afraid that I will wear them to the Community Thanksgiving Service tonight with my dress clothes and are imploring me not to because they will "die of embarrassment." They said I'm too old to act crazy.

I've had a lovely birthday so far, and soon I will eat my pineapple upside down birthday cake that Jay made for me. I was going to make it myself but I decided I shouldn't have to make my own birthday cake.

Here is "The Lord's Prayer" in Elvish. I, for one, am glad to know that there are Christian elves.

A tough lesson

Sunday night I woke up at 2:00 a.m. to use the restroom. Upon discovering there was no toilet paper in the upstairs bathroom, I went downstairs. While headed towards the bathroom to retrieve a pack of toilet paper, I ran into a tall, shadowy form--that of my 14-year old son, Jay. He was just coming out the bathroom. At first I assumed he was there for the same reason I was, until I switched on the light and saw his schoolwork spread out over the bathroom floor. Then I understood.

See, Jay is a freshman in high school this year, and I'm doing things differently with him than I have in past years. Before, I printed out a school schedule for him like I do with my younger children, detailing what subjects he was to do each day. Way before school ever starts I look through the curriculum and figure out how many times a week each child needs to do each subject to get through their books by the end of the year.

But I didn't do that with Jay this year. I want him to learn how to be responsible and set his own schedule. I want him to be able to set his own goals, plan out what he needs to do to accomplish those goals, and follow through with those plans. And I want him to learn to do that while he's still living at home, instead of when he's away at college without the benefit of me there to breathe down his neck all day.

So this semester I gave him weekly work instead of daily. His schedule is more like a course calendar, detailing what work is due to be turned in each Monday (so that he is allowed to do work on the weekends if he so chooses). For example, he has four Algebra lessons and a test to complete each week, but it's up to him when to do those. If he wants to do a lesson every day for the first four days and then the test on Friday, I would definitely call that a wise idea. However, if he wants to do them all at the last minute, that's up to him, too--although his grades will most certainly reflect it.

I want to clarify that I do make him do school every day. After all, homeschooling law in Indiana is 180 days. If he did all of his schoolwork on Saturdays that would only be, oh, about 36 days. That's not practical nor is it legal, so we spread it out to 180. So he's not allowed to do things like get on Facebook until he's done with the school that he's planned out to do that day.

Anyway, Sunday night he was behind, and he stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finishing up his schoolwork. When he apologized for getting behind, I told him that he's the one that pays the consequences for that, not me, so he didn't need to apologize to me. When he explained that we had a busy week with our church's fall festival, I reminded him that I'm also a student and that I had all of my schoolwork turned in by Friday. I also reminded him that he spent quite a bit of time on Facebook last week.

I left him doing his school in the bathroom and went back to bed, but I was so proud of him. He could have just left his school undone and tried to bargain for extra time (not that it would have worked). He could have just not cared about his grades. But he did care--he sacrificed sleep in order to get his schoolwork done in time. A difficult lesson, to be sure, but a good one. He made a childish decision to wait until the last minute, but a very grown-up one to stay up and get it done. To me, that's what homeschooling is about--raising my children to be responsible adults who will be successful in a tough world. I love my kids so much, and I know they will do well in life.

Fall Festival--Candyland theme

We just got back from our church's annual fall festival. This year we centered it around a Candyland theme. We traced the characters from the classic Milton-Bradley boardgame onto pieces of styrofoam, cut them out with a hot knife, and painted them. We strung a grid of fishingline up high in the gym and hung all of the characters on them. We made the squares on the board out of construction paper and decorated around each of the characters. We added special touches to each one, like tying peanuts to the fake plants that decorate the sanctuary platform and putting them on each side of Grandma Nut for her nut garden. We had goodies that the children could win, such as a sandwich baggie full of DumDums for landing on Princess Lolly. The winner of each game received a bag full of candy, but all of the kids got something. We had other candy-themed games, too, like a marshmallow toss and a game where you had to throw Smarties into pop bottles (it was really hard.) We had two big bounce houses outside, and the weather was perfect. Betty did candy crafts with the kids, making cute little houses and trains out of graham crackers. We had about twenty kids that came and they really enjoyed it. I made a video of the game so you can see it. We put a lot of work into it and I was really happy with the way it turned out. We have to take it down in the next couple of days to set up for our Thankgiving dinner next Sunday, but I think I'm going to put all of the characters and decorations on the walls of the family center. They are just too beautiful to throw away.

Teaching Timothy to read

I am almost finished teaching all six of my children to read. I have used the same phonics book for my six kids that my mom used to teach me and all seven of my siblings. Professor Phonics Gives Sound Advice is a simple little book, but it's become quite a fixture at our house. We are actually on our second copy of it, as the first one disentegrated after the first two or three children.

Now that I'm on my last time through it, I'm starting to feel a little nostalgic about being finished. While I've always enjoyed the cozy times of sitting next to my kids while we sounded out words together, I'm taking care to treasure this last time as I teach phonics to my youngest son, Timothy. He's seven, and he's a smart little guy who is in 1st grade this year. He's funny, too. He loves to linger over each word and talk about it. Sometimes he takes what seems like forever and I have to prod him to just read the word and move on to the next!

Today we've been doing "Hard and Soft 'C', Mixed." This is just a glimpse how it went.

"Since--I know that word! That's like how much money you have."

"Corpse--What's a corpse? A dead body? Is it like the whole body or just the bones? Is it just one dead body? 'Cause if it is, why would it have an 's' on the end? Shouldn't that be more than one dead body?

"Cellar--Those are the people that sell stuff to people. Like in the stores, they have lots of sellers that bring stuff so that other people can buy it."

"Carpet--Why does it have a 'pit' in it? It sounds like "armpit."

"Cyclone--Hey, if you take off the 'cy' you have clone, which is what men wear!"

"Princess--If you take off the 'ss' then you have prince! Wait, is prince and princess spelled the same except for the 'ss'? Wow, that information could come in handy!"

"Cistern--if you take the 'n' off the end, you have 'sister'! Okay, well then, if you take the 'n' off the end and then take the 'c' off the beginning and stick an 's' on the beginning instead, where the 'c' used to be, then you have 'sister'!"

"Cyclops--What's a Cyclops? So he's just like a regular guy except he has an eye in his forehead? Mom, there's no such thing as monsters. He would have to be a legend."