The Symbolic Smoothie

I have this fantasy of my days:

I wake up, and while I enjoy my morning coffee and newspaper, my girls fix themselves breakfast and then begin their schoolwork. After the newspaper has been read and the coffee drunk, I join them, and with many a break to read or play or just relax, together we work through the approximately two or so hours of schoolwork and household chores that make up the entirety of our daily responsibilities. After that we're free as birds for the rest of the day--to the park? To the creek? To the garden to plant some beets? The girls play while I finish up etsy orders and writing jobs, and with that out of the way, perhaps we get out the art supplies, or bake some cookies. Later that afternoon, dinner prep is easy in our clean and tidy kitchen, and the girls are excited to help steam vegetables or shape bread dough into rolls to bake. When my guy gets home, he finishes dinner while I finish my mile on the treadmill, then we eat together, have a quick family clean-up time, and then do something fun before the girls go to bed and Matt and I get some time to ourselves.


This is a total fantasy. It has never happened.

The reality is this:

Today I wake up early and groggy, after not having slept well (I often don't sleep well). Over my morning coffee and newspaper, Syd whines about what she did NOT want for breakfast--not frozen waffles, not cereal with milk, not yogurt with granola, not frozen smoothie pops, not a peanut butter sandwich--while Willow, naked, drags the library books out all over the carpet and then sits down to read in a big pile.

After I finish, I clean the remains of last night's dinner off of the table (which is supposed to be Matt's job) while Syd, who has just now figured out what she'd like to eat, sets out a gigantic breakfast for herself and her sister, including four separate glasses (which I'll have to wash) of the exact same kind of juice. Even though my rule is that you must eat at a table or outside, she overturns the recycling bin, spilling paper and cardboard across the floor, and sets three glasses of juice on the overturned bin, and one on the floor. I walk by, ask her to move everything to a table, and as I am in the act of speaking to her she steps backward, knocking the glass of juice on the floor all over the floor. She then attempts to blame her sister so that she won't have to wipe it up.

When that doesn't work, Syd goes to the kitchen for the spray cleaner and comes back with the spray bottle of Murphy's Wood Soap solution that doesn't work well on sticky messes, so I offer to trade her for the vinegar spray and go to the kitchen to get it, seeing that in the middle of the kitchen floor is the empty bottle of juice, with yet another juice spill, totally abandoned, on the floor beside it.

Syd does a lousy job wiping up the messes so that both floors are still sticky when she's done, so I ask her to do it again, whereupon she throws a big fit and then does another lousy job, so now I need to steam mop both the kitchen and the living room.

During this, Will has wandered outside. I look out the window to see that she's STILL not wearing pants, so I yell for her to come back inside and get dressed. Of course, she leaves the back door open, which is currently a dangerous practice since we have five foster kittens in the house.

I ask the girls if they'd rather do schoolwork or chores first, and schoolwork is the winner, so Will works on her presidents poem (she's got them memorized up through Grover Cleveland so far) without throwing a fit, and Sydney works on putting the months of the year in order with the goal of getting them memorized. She DOES throw a fit because she doesn't like to get them wrong, but she does it, and then reads me a Bob book, and then I read to her a chapter from a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., while Will plays in her room. Will offers to read to her for a while after that, so I work for nearly an hour on a few huge etsy orders while they read together peacefully.

When I can hear that they're done reading, I tell them I'm going to take a shower, and ask them to put their books away and get started on their chores while I'm showering. Somehow, in the space of the two minutes that it takes me to undress, the girls manage to get into a giant fight and Willow, angry at her sister, announces that she's going to take a bath, then gets mad when I tell her that I'm going to shower first and she's going to do her chores.

Obviously, when I'm done with my shower, no chores have been completed--not only is their room not cleaned (something that they do every single day, so how they can wreck it every single day is beyond me, and the dishwasher not emptied, and their teeth and hair not brushed, but their toys are still all over the living room, their dishes and uneaten food from the last two meals are still all over the kitchen counters and the table that I've already cleaned off once today, their library books are still all over the floor, their schoolwork stuff that I've stacked neatly on the coffee table is somehow scattered all over (but not completed, of course), and those juice glasses are still on that overturned recycling bin, with paper scattered everywhere. Have I mentioned that everyone is supposed to clean up after themselves?

I send them to their room to spend the entire five minutes that it should take the two of them to clean it together while I clean around their messes in the living room and the kitchen, because I'll be damned if I'm going to pick up after two such capable children like a maid. Of course, such cleaning is basically ineffective, since I can't vacuum or mop with their crap all over the floor, and I can't load the dishwasher while it's still full, and I can't even throw away yesterday's newspaper since the recycling bin is overturned with juice glasses on top of it. And off course the back door is open again, so there has to be another kitten count.


I'm hungry for lunch, so I remind the girls that they need to stop playing in their room and get it cleaned, and ask if they'd like smoothies. They both say they would, so I make smoothies, dish them out, clean the blender, tell the girls that their smoothies are on the counter for them, and drink my own smoothie while doing some work on the computer.

After lunch I really want to get out and enjoy the lovely day, but I can't stand the fact that the kids still have not done the things that I've asked them to do, so I do the thing where I move my computer work to where they are and nag at them every time they stop working until even I get utterly weary of my own voice. In retaliation, the girls are doing the thing where they work as slowly and inefficiently as possible and stop working the second I stop nagging them, so their bedroom is still wrecked, the living room is still wrecked, and the dishwasher is still full. The library books do get put away, but only by ignoring the fact that it takes Willow a full hour to do so, as she stops to basically read every single book as she puts it away.

It's now 3 pm, and the day, in my opinion, is in ruins. I'm unhappy, the kids are unhappy, the house is wrecked, the etsy orders are unfilled, the schoolwork is not done, the day has not been enjoyed, and I haven't even unfolded the treadmill. I go into the kitchen to get some water and here is where I spy my breaking point:

Willow's smoothie, the smoothie that she said she'd like me to make for her, the smoothie that I did make for her, the smoothie that I set out for her and told her was ready to eat, the smoothie made in the blender that I washed, the smoothie in the glass that I'll wash later, with the straw that will likely be left somewhere for me to pick up and throw away and wipe under, the smoothie containing the expensive frozen fruit and the homemade nutella that I made yesterday, is sitting on the counter, hours later, completely untouched. Sydney's smoothie, as I discover when I go searching for it, has been partially drunk, but it's sitting out on the back deck, glass not rinsed and put in the sink, straw not thrown away, leftover smoothie not poured into a popsicle mold and put in the freezer to enjoy later.

I know, I know--I have happy, healthy, bright children who enjoy their lives. I have a lovely little house that I should enjoy keeping tidy, and a little extra income from those etsy orders and writing jobs. If I'm a crap disciplinarian and I can't keep my floors unsticky, well, that's my own fault, and if I can't get my kids to settle down to memorize their months in order or their five times table, well, they're probably better off unschooling anyway. You don't have to tell me how silly my own personal little pity party is.

Eh, maybe I'll just get my own work done and ignore the little hellions for the rest of the day while they happily raise hell, I'll walk on sticky floors, I'll eat a bowl of yogurt and granola for dinner and let Matt figure out what he can cook in a dirty kitchen with no clean dishes, then when the girls go to bed, it's margaritas and a Toddlers and Tiaras marathon on Netflix for me. And tomorrow, my fantasy of the perfect homeschooling day will certain come true, won't it?

Um...won't it?

Checkmate!

I normally don't let my kids win when we play games. In most board games, like Sorry or Monopoly, or games of chance, like War, they've got enough of a fighting chance without me throwing the game, and in other games, like Scrabble or Quirkle, we don't keep score at all, and in games of skill or logic, like chess or poker, I don't think it's reasonable for them to expect to win the majority of the time when playing adults, and instead I encourage them to focus on the pleasure of a game well played, and the etiquette of good sportsmanship. Syd still throws the occasional fit when she loses a game, and needs to be reminded that a competitive game requires an opponent with the same skill set, and a game of chance chooses its own winners, and good sportsmanship is a behavioral requirement in our family.

It's funny, then, that before Will's latest chess competition, I spent several weeks deliberately throwing games to her. Will loves to play, and has great strategy for a kid her age, but she doesn't tend to aim for checkmate, which means that she tends to lose games against kids who may be less adept players, but who focus all the strength of their young wills into mating her king. Of course Will doesn't care, because she just likes the play, but before this latest competition I wanted to gently, very gently, encourage her to play more aggressively for checkmate.

Argh, such a fine line to walk! Should I focus her at all, or just let her be? Was I sending the message that good sportsmanship means that you can't be competitive? Am I now sending the message that a game isn't fun unless you're trying to win? What message does it also send that 99.9% of the other children at these competitions are boys?

I still can't decide.

Nevertheless, for a few weeks before the competition, Will and I played chess games in which she had a special assignment: checkmate Momma! To take the dive while not make moves so ridiculous as to ruin her good strategies (which depend on logical counter-moves), I pretended that I was playing speed chess, giving myself zero time to contemplate before moving.

And it was--as chess ALWAYS is--fun!

Will has a special skill for eating away her competitor's pieces, whether or not she's gunning for checkmate, so that often her opponents with their laser focus on checkmate don't even really notice the attrition until they suddenly realize that they've basically been forced into a draw:

 How fun!

Also fun, it turns out? That elusive and long sought-after checkmate!

Will had a lot of fun in her chess competition and did well there, but without another competition on the horizon until September, we're back to our normal play. My new chess goals for Will are to encourage her to play more games with the children at her bi-monthly chess club, and to begin learning some formal opening, endgame, and piece-specific strategies that she can then have in her memory to utilize during play.

However...when I think about some of the child (and adult!) behavior that I've witnessed at chess competitions, I'm hugely grateful for my non-competitive kid, whose love of simply playing the game helps me remember to de-emphasize winning in my own life, as well.

Of course, I'm more of a work in progress on that one...

I Understand that You're Jealous of My Super Mario Bros. Coasters

It's a handmade gift that I didn't have to make myself!

It's quite pleasant to have a mother who has the patience for cross stitch.

A Big Map of Africa

Lisa over at 5 Orange Potatoes got us WAY hooked on Africam. It's a set of 24-hour webcams located at watering holes in South Africa--our favorite is located at Tembe National Elephant Park.

The first thing that I do in the morning is set up one of our laptops to the Tembe camera, where it sits all day on the living room table; the last thing that Matt does at night is shut that laptop down. In between times, birds and bats and animals of all sizes come to visit us through the camera--someone is forever and always shouting out "Giraffe!!!" or "Elephants!!!" or "Hurry, lion!", and we'll all run over to see. We've seen a lazy lion lounging on the dirt like a giant kittycat, and a baby wildebeest tromping along behind its Momma, and once, late at night after the girls had gone to bad, Matt and I totally saw two elephants have sex.

As such things always do, the Africam has inspired an educational foray into all things Africa. We checked out lots of African animal encyclopedias, because we wanted to identify the animals at the watering hole, and we checked out some children's atlases, because we wanted to see where the watering holes were located, and then, since we already know Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and thus already have a little context for Africa, I decided to go whole-hog into an Africa study.

For that, you need a map. A BIG map.

I'm forever going on about Megamaps, I know (it's because they're really GOOD!), and this is another shameless plug for their free site, since our big Africa map is a 4x4 map printed straight from their site. Willow put it together like a puzzle--

--I taped all the joints from the back side, and then we duct taped it right to the wall, because I'm from Arkansas and I duct tape EVERYTHING.

I asked Willow to color in Egypt and draw the Nile River, but she was so excited that she colored all the countries right then, matching the colors to our children's atlas:

She also drew the Nile in wrong, so we'll have to fix that tomorrow. Oops! I needed to do some fact-checking, anyway, to make sure all the countries and their borders are still accurate.

Syd had the job of painting the oceans:

 I imagine that we'll keep our big map up for at least two months (it'll be a handy ready-made project for our homeschool group's International Fair later this Spring--yay!), and I have lots of ideas of other things that we can add to it, if the girls are willing:

• Fertile Crescent and other locations from The Story of the World volume 1, which we're also studying
• all the locations from our Ancient Egypt studies
• the locations of the Africam web cams
• images of the typical animals found in various locations
• thumbnail-sized images of the picture books that we'll be reading that are set in Africa
• thumbnail-sized images of the chapter books that Willow reads that are set in Africa
• labels of all the countries (which is good handwriting copywork!)
• copies of the short book reports that the girls are beginning to learn how to do
• the Great Rift Valley, and images/info of the best finds from that area

Okay...we may have this map up longer than two months!

Chess Player, Ice Skaters

In a life in which I consider us "busy" if we have a total of two places to go in the course of one day, late winter has been a particularly busy time for us. Ice skating, gymnastics, gym days with our homeschool group--why, one day there was a homeschool Valentine's Day party AND gymnastics class AND ice skating class!

This past weekend was (I hope) the culmination, with a Saturday in which Syd and I stayed in town to run all our other errands (Spring Ice Show dress rehearsal,ballet class, Lemonade Day registration, 4-H Open House, etc.) while Will and Matt road tripped to Indianapolis for a chess tournament--

(she didn't do half-bad against this twelfth grader!)

--and then a Sunday that contained the much-anticipated, proudly performed Spring Ice Show:

This week's goal is peace and quiet: lots of Magic Tree House, some research for next's month's Science Fair, maybe a little grocery shopping, and lots and lots of sitting on the carpet putting together puzzles.

Rainbow Fairy Dress Revealed

This dress was completely Sydney's vision, with my construction to order. If you're curious, I go into much more detail about the pattern-drafting and my sewing methods in my project show-and-tell over at Crafting a Green World, but here I just want to show off the outfit that both Sydney and I worked very hard on, and that we're both pretty thrilled with in its outcome:

 

Ideally, Sydney will be modeling her Rainbow Fairy Dress in this year's Trashion/Refashion Show in our community. Otherwise/in addition, I'm sensing a spring and summer full of lots of rainbow fairy magic coming our way.

Willow's New and Improved Handwriting

Handwriting practice has been added so seamlessly to the Daily Schoolwork List (which does not get completed anywhere close to "daily," but more on that another time), that it's really a pleasure to watch the girls consistently working on it. I like to think that the kiddos take pleasure, too, in handwriting that has so steadily and vastly improved that it has to be as obvious to them as it is to me.

A dear friend, whose homeschooled son has beautiful handwriting, suggested that I show Willow examples of all the different styles of handwriting and ask her to select which she'd like to learn--it gives her ownership over the process, and allows her to learn a style that she'll find lovely. Willow's choice: the Palmer Method. It makes me crack up, because I feel like a 1950s kindergarten teacher, but Palmer handwriting really is nice.

I purchased, using my monthly homeschool budget that I fund through my paid writing and my etsy sales, Startwrite 6.0 so that I could create handwriting copywork that was consistent in method and relevant to the girls' other studies. Although the user interface is a little wonky and non-intuitive, it does have everything that you'd ever need to customize a handwriting sheet. Because Willow has formerly shown no attention to the details of letter formation or placement, and doesn't always form each letter the most efficient way, we go whole hog on her sheets--lined pages, an outline of each letter to help her stay within normal parameters, dots along each letter's path that she can aim for, arrows and numbers to remind her where and when her pencil needs to go, and a free space after each word so that she can practice:

 Syd's handwriting is pretty great, although she still likes to play fast and loose with placement on the line, and she prefers her handwriting pages with just the outline:

Even beyond the ability to customize the same page for each child, I'm loving the ability to write handwriting sheets that are relevant to what the kiddos are actually doing each day. Here, Will is writing the definition of Anastasia's Mate, a good endgame trap that she learned in chess:

And here she's writing the ingredients list for the rainbow play dough that we sell in our pumpkinbear etsy shop, to include with the order that we ship to the customer:

We've also done the names of the presidents in order (which Will is in the process of memorizing), geography labels that get cut out and pasted onto big maps that they're making (Africa, currently), short letters to the grandmas, and reading/spelling words. I like stuff that can work double-duty!

With the model, and the lines, and the arrows, and the dots, Will has a better method for completing her handwriting systematically, and although Syd finds all that information overwhelming (which is why she does without it), I think it all helps to remind Willow to slow down and write methodically. I never thought to videotape the slapdash method that she used to use to crank out her former illegible handwriting, but it's vastly different from how she works now:

Along with coloring pages and drawing lessons to practice fine motor skills in general (not to mention lots of play with power tools and taking stuff apart with screwdrivers, etc.), regular copywork practice is really, obviously working.

Yay!