Frost

After Rational Jenn posted an enthusiastic link to my Lightbulb Day post, I got into a little back-and-forth with one of her commenters about whether Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" is about death. I don't think so.

I sought John Enright's opinion, and he has a nice post about it on his blog at
http://john-j-enright.livejournal.com/433810.html

Update: And here, too.

What a crazy idea

Sometimes I think to myself that I'm insane to think that I can run a 1/2 time technology consulting business, 1/2 time web site publishing business, and home school my kids.

Today is one of those days.

12pm and the only education they've had is what David gave them this morning on the Birthday of the Day (Ira Gershwin).

Lightbulb Day's A-Comin'

I thought for this year I'd write up how we celebrate Lightbulb Day and post it on KidsOutAndAbout.com:

http://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/main-articles/lightbulbday.html

Who knows, maybe it'll catch on.

Concert

The girls had their first (and only, of the season) choir concert together tonight, with both the Bach Children's Chorus and the Mozart Children's Chorus performing. The Greece Choral Society, an adult choir, also sang, and it was a beautiful concert. Thoroughly enjoyable and would have been touching even were my children not in it. The girls were really gratified that our friends Tom and Susan also came; that made it particularly special to them.



The experience of having one's children in the performance is unnervingly unlike not having one's children in the performance. I'm sure David, with his nerves of steel, doesn't experience it this way at all, but for me, it's almost like I'm up there with them. Ella, in the younger chorus, had a distractingly active girl standing next to her during the performance. Well, it was as if I was there with her, up there on the risers, as Ella thought to take hold of the little girl's hand discretely to prevent her from waving it around. I was experiencing what it was like for my six-year-old to have to focus so hard not to be distracted and sing and behave properly, and then summon that little bit of extra maturity to try to calm her neighbor without drawing extra attention.

I am having a hard time explaining what this is like without making it seem like I'm living through my kids in an unhealthy way. And I won't even try to explain how proud I was of them tonight, and how happy I am that they love to do this thing that is so GOOD for them.

Anyway, after their parts were done, then I could relax and enjoy the rest of the performance in a different way.

(Yes, of course I wept. As usual. Discretely.)

Let breakfast go too long

Without enough food, Madison becomes kind of the rebellious proletariat. She goes on a self-righteous revolt against the ruling class.

Ella, on the other hand, becomes the damaged princess. She dissolves into a cut-off-the-nose-to-spite-the-face attitude whereby she's not going to eat if The Help doesn't cater to her every whim.

The Leaves are Buried Under Snow

What do you think? Should I try to scrape them out with the garden rake and put it them in the street to see if the town will still collect them?

The girls and I had raked them three weeks ago into a nice jumping pile, but then it has been always too wet to jump.

And now they're here:


Although you can't see them because they're under the snow.

Pretty sure I shouldn't leave them there until spring.

Maybe I'll solve this after I solve the burst-pipe-issue in the attic bathroom.

House photos

I know that all five of you are just dying to see how the rearranged living room and church room look. Actually, when I'm lacking energy (as I often did this week because it was so busy), I just walk over and look at the living room, or bring the laptop into the Church Room now. What Tatiana did really made a difference.

We call this the Church Room because the last owners took the covered patio that was off the back of the living room and enclosed it, using the salvaged wood and stained glass from a church that was being torn down. The TV is now in back of me. We love this room, Christian symbols and all. I hate the carpet, but as the floor underneath is just flagstone, even this carpet is pretty cold. We'll have to solve that problem before we yank it up.



Don't you think that it's somehow appropriate that a bunch of atheists should have a Church Room? And now that I put the space heater in it, it's cozy.

This is the view from the living room with my back to the fireplace, looking out to the front of the house. It is a very long living room. My dream is to have the wall to the left and the wall in front covered with bookshelves, floor to ceiling. To do it right seems to be pricey, I have to track down this Menonite guy we met in the spring who does this kind of thing and see how he prices it.



This is the view of our Rumford fireplace (original to the house). The Church Room is out the door to the left. I vow to bake bread in the upper oven this year. We'll see how that works.

Forecast

Today:

Snow.


Tomorrow:
Snow and freezing rain.

Monday:
Several inches of snow. And wind.

Tuesday:
Lake-effect snow.

Wednesday:
Cold with snow developing (developing?!).

Thursday:
Snow showers.

Welcome to Rochester! I guess it's December.

We are ready with the neat snow ruler that Tom and Susan gave us for our housewarming present last year. Only up here in the Great White North can a housewarming present be a snow ruler.



Here is a photo of our cool new handmade weather measuring instruments:

The weathervane works particularly well; that's the little thing on the right that we made with straws and some oak tag; unfortunately the arrow blends in with the background so it's hard to see in the photo. We watched it whip around yesterday as a windy period came in, then it settled down to be consistently from the northwest or west. It's pointing west-northwest in the photo. Ella has a real knack for directions; she was always able to know which direction it was pointing. They found it interesting that the arrow points *into* the wind rather than away from it.

Silent Week, Hectic Week

The day before Thanksgiving, David had taken the girls and Dario to Strong Museum:



The next day, we had a really good Thanksgiving dinner. David and Tony took Madison and Dario on an insane hike up the same waterfall we did at Conklin's Gully in October, only this time in very very cold and wet weather with wet leaves on the ground. They had a good time. I had a good time staying home and cooking in my nice warm kitchen. Tatiana had a nice time grading papers in my nice warm kitchen.

Then, of course, the squirrel ran over my cooling pumpkin pie outside my kitchen door:



But of course that could not keep us from eating around it. Tony said, "Hey, I'm Cuban. I'm honored to be eating the pie that was signed by an American squirrel." He probably wouldn't eat it if Castro signed it, though.

The bad news is that I did a taste test with two pies: using canned pumpkin, and using fresh pumpkin that I baked myself. The fresh one won hands-down. Too bad, because it's a lot more effort than opening up the $1.69 can from Libby's.

I discovered that there is nothing like having several people with discriminating taste buds tell you that the new Roasted Garlic Squash Soup you devised this year was the best thing at Thanksgiving dinner.

The next day was Madison's first of three days performing with the Bach Children's Chorus in The Nutcracker:



It was at the Eastman Theatre. It was beautiful. I cried. Of course. The administrative director of the BCC told me that parents of first-year participants cry a lot.

Before they left, Tony and Tata helped us totally rearrange the living room and the church room. We moved the TV into the church room, along with the black leather furniture. A definite improvement, and much more cozy to watch TV, especially with the space heater going.

This week, clients exploded all over me. AAAAGH! It's the holiday russh! every active and inactive client seemed to say. I NEED HER HELP NOW. The girls were happy to cede a lot of their school time to my clients. I was not happy to cede a lot of their school time to my clients. I felt guilty. But we got three cool science projects made today, all dealing with weather. We made a rain gauge that we think will work, a weathervane that definitely worked, and a wind meter that was too flimsy to work.

Today, just as I was finishing up my weekly KOA e-newsletter, Ella came in and told me that it was "raining" in the doorway of her room. Madison had just flushed the toilet right above said room. Ah, the joys of an old house. I emailed our real estate agent, who knows everyone around here,

If, hypothetically, you had a pipe burst under your attic-floor bathroom after your 8-year-old flushed the toilet, and you knew about it because the water started dripping down into your 6-year-old's room in the frame of her door and she came down and told you it was raining in her room, and you figured that the ceiling was going to have to be opened up to get at the issue...well, after you turned off the water to the toilet in question, who would you, personally, call?

She emailed me back:

Well, of course, speaking "hypothetically"...I'd go shopping & not come home until someone else had handled the problem! I'm thinking the Woodbury outlet downstate??

Then she gave me the names of a couple of plumbers. Sigh.

This weekend we have two hours of rehearsals tomorrow morning for the next concert, which is Sunday evening and (yay!) Tom and Susan will be joining us for it. Both Madison AND Ella are in this concert. Will post photos next week. We have Wigilia on Saturday afternoon, which is a traditional Polish Christmas Eve event that the Polish Society of Rochester puts on every year at the RMSC.

And now, the whole family is watching Ratatouille (that took me three tries to spell) in front of the TV with some Chinese food because I had absolutely no time to cook today. I'd better join them.

Happy Thanksgiving

The rolls are rising, the turkey is brining, Ella's tooth is loose, los Americanos are here, and my inbox has several email messages from KOA readers telling me they're thankful for my weekly newsletter. All is right with the world except for the flood in the basement from yesterday's rain, but even that can't dampen my spirits.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Patriots Crush Bills, 56-10, in our Presence

We went to our first professional football game last night, and it will probably be our last unless Patrick wants to go again in two years, for an afternoon game when it's reasonably warm out.

Even then, well, it was an experience that was fine to have, say, once.

We were with my colleague Steve and his two adult sons, one son's girlfriend, and my friend Patrick, who drove in from Cleveland for the occasion. All of us are Patriots fans, although we Rosses were really fans in an along-for-the-ride sort of way. They really get into it.

We were pretty amazed at the bad behavior of the Bills fans, and the way they shouted at our Patriots-gear-clad friends, despite the fact that we had little kids with us. We tailgated (also a new experience) for 3 (!) hours before the game. Steve brought the works: A grill, a tent, lots of food, a table, chairs, and a TV. It was a little windy, about 25-30 degrees, and a lot of people built fires in trash cans or out in the open. People were mostly drunk, very merry, and extremely messy. Steve said that the carnage left in the parking lot reminded him of third-world countries, minus actual open sewers. We reflected that we were happy that we worked with our brains, rather than being the people who were going to have to clean that up the next day. We hope they cleaned it up, that is. Pretty low-class.

The girls liked being at the game, they liked the hot chocolate, they liked talking about the rules of football, they liked meeting Patrick and interacting with Steve's family, they liked the fireworks at the beginning and singing The Star-Spangled Banner and seeing the Bills run out onto the field through a big blow-up tunnel. After that they were just pretty self-involved enduring the cold, so I think they were oblivious to all of the cursing going on around us. In our section, 339 (very high up), people were mostly merry, and so the cursing didn't have any bite to it. I think they would have noticed had people been angry. David took them home after the first quarter, which was the best thing for both him and them. There was a bit of endurance involved for him, too, and a great deal of detached gazing out at a very strange aspect of the subculture. I was amazed to discover that some people were still steadily drinking beer despite the temperature.

And then some magic happens...

Today, the girls and I went to see the Master's Thesis Defense of Hye Yon Yi, one of David's students who often babysits for the girls. Madison and Ella LOVE Hye Yon. They think she's the best babysitter EVER. David and I think she's a lovely young woman with a lot of potential, too. She invited us last week, so we went. Everyone there was much amused to see M & E there, and extremely complimentary afterward about how incredibly the girls behaved during the hour-long defense. Ella colored, but, to my surprise, Madison listened to the whole thing. She said afterward that she hadn't understood any of it, but she really was listening. I was proud.

Hye Yon's Master's Thesis was on "Turing Instabilities in a S-I-R Model." Don't know what that is? Neither did I, of course. Basically, her paper is a model of what happens mathematically in an epidemic. She took 10 cities from Mayan culture and proposed that each city has contact with exactly two other cities. Her work explored what happens mathematically to the population in terms of people susceptible to the disease but not yet sick, those sick, and those recovering from the disease. The aim was to determine under what conditions the cities are "stable" ("at equilibrium") in terms of what percentages of their populations fell into the three categories.

Here's the thing that's bothering me: I didn't get any of it. Well, ok, I got what I GOT (explained above) but I couldn't follow any of the math. Despite being married to a mathematician for lo these many years, and despite having "math awareness" above the average Jane, there was just no way in hell I was going to track with the equations on the PowerPoint slides. It occurred to me, to my chagrin, that I could probably make some sense out of a Master's Thesis in just about any subject BUT mathematics.

I really have the sense that learning math is different from learning just about anything else in our culture. And I think this is partly because most of us think this way: We understand math *up to a point*, and then, in higher math, SOME MAGIC HAPPENS that very few people understand. So they just decide not to bother.

It's the MAGIC quality of this all that is bothering me. I should know better than almost anyone that mathematics isn't magic at all, it's not confined to the realm of a few magic people who miraculously understand this stuff. It's a step-by-step acquisition of a bunch of knowledge that you have to focus on in a certain way to understand. I think that the accumulation of this knowledge is qualitatively different from most other knowledge, and that this is what makes people think it's magic. And, let me just say, it's hard.

It's worth repeating: It's hard. That's probably why I steered myself away from math and science and engineering (yes, no use trying to blame this on some kind of anti-woman culture, the fault was all mine) toward being an English major. Writing was just easier, and easier for me to be good at it. Yes, it was somewhat lazy, but it's not just that I was lazy; at the time, I didn't see anyone around me who had a good grasp of higher math, who could tell me that it really was possible to understand it with steady work. Even my father, who was a professor in the math department at one of the CUNY schools, couldn't explain calculus to me. (OK, he was actually more of an administrator, but STILL.) I imagined learning higher math not as the tortoise in Aesop's fable (which it really is), but as the hare--and, moreover, a hare who'd have to leap into a Star Trek transporter and be beamed over the finish line.

The MAGIC aspect of it all got me. I simply didn't see the path from where I was, Point A, to being a scientist. It wasn't Point B, it was Point Q. Plus, there is a cultural mystique about math that I bought into: the one about it being kind of impossible except for Superior Beings. My unstated attitude (and come on, admit it, it was yours too) was that only special people could survive being a math major, and that even for those people some magic must happen within those four years of college so that they could emerge knowing what Fourier Transforms are all about.

Living with David has of course taught me that it's not magic, that it's work, and that with good instruction anyone can learn it. This is what makes my experience this afternoon that much more frustrating. I should have been an engineer, there is no doubt about it. I would have loved it, ultimately. But I'm not an engineer, and while I COULD of course go back, that wouldn't make any sense; it would absolutely not be the best use of my time at the age of 38 when I have many other worthwhile things to accomplish.

On the other hand, I feel like I should know more math than I do, and this afternoon it was really bugging me. After living with David for so long and being fairly brainy myself, shouldn't I have picked up enough that Hye Yon's thesis defense should have made some kind of sense? The answer is easy: Duh, of course not, I haven't actually done the work. I have learned a fair amount of mathematics trivia, but not enough systematically to put it all together. And (interesting to me), I could kind of see where the gaps were in Hye Yon's presentation given what I know about math and science. But that didn't change my frustration this afternoon.

I would love to give a talk to teenagers called "And then some magic happens..." to try to bust through this mystique without giving the misimpression that higher math is easy. I want to explain that the magic is a myth, that young people shouldn't be intimidated or believe that they have to be somehow special to learn it. I want to explain that if anyone has done something, so can they, given interest and dedication to the effort of puzzling things out. Such a talk would be motivated by, but not degenerate into a wailing account of, my own having misled myself about this.

As you might guess, Madison and Ella will not be so misled. We certainly are not going to try to dictate what they end up doing as a profession--they will follow their own interests. But even if Ella becomes, say, a dancer, you can bet your life that Twinkle Toes will still know how to use a Gamma matrix.

You Can't Dry Yourself with a Wet Towel

Madison came up to me this morning and said,

"Hey, Mom, I've discovered a great new saying! At least I think it's a new saying. I've never heard it before. But I can't figure out where to use it:

"You can't dry yourself with a wet towel."

She's right! That would be a great saying!

So in what situations, my lovely literate readers, might one use the expression, "You can't dry yourself with a wet towel"? Get creative, here.

Southerners are most definitely welcome. I'll never forget Laura telling me, "Deb, your Northern-ness sticks to you like chewing gum to the cat."



In other news:

I've been a little quiet because we've had a little struggle and backtracking here at Mariposario in the last several days. David discovered over the weekend that Madison couldn't do multi-digit multiplication. She could, A YEAR ago! Damn it. I was embarrassed that I didn't know this, that we hadn't kept her up with it. (I know, if I'd been using Saxon math it wouldn't have happened, as that is so thorough and includes so much review.) And trying to get her to go back and do it has been like pulling teeth. It takes her an hour to do 6 problems, with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and lack of focus. If she'd just focus, she'd be fine, but she isn't, and she protests that she is when she's not. Ugh. I haven't gotten that much work done, we're all still working at 2pm, which is unusual for us.

I've dropped the ball a bit on the WRTR, too.

I haven't been to the gym in 2 weeks. I'm a little behind on my work, though not much, it's slowed down a little.

I haven't delivered the Girl Scout cookies yet.

It's time to regroup. I have to plan ahead more. Maybe I have to change some of my methods.

After all, you can't dry yourself with a wet towel.

Snow

It's what we came back to Rochester for, isn't it?

It's snowing. It wouldn't quite be enough to cause mass panic in Charlottesville, Virginia, although they panic at the drop of a flurry, and of course it doesn't even raise an eyebrow here in Rochester.

But it is very cozy.

Quarterly reports

Madison had her Penfield Recreation performance of "Holka Polka" this evening, in which she played both "Splenda," the sweet, if somewhat artificial, Good Witch of the South, and the evil Fairy Godmother. It was one of those 20-minute grade-school performances about which you have low expectations and then enjoy yourself when it comes together all right. She did nicely, and is, if I may say, stunningly cute and glowingly happy up on stage. We then went out to vote, during which David discovered that he had not actually registered to vote. And then we went out to dinner to celebrate Madison's performance (she chose Chili's). And then we all fell asleep at 9pm. Which means that I woke up at 11:30 and couldn't sleep, so here I am writing quarterly reports for the girls' home schooling.

We in NYS have fairly rigorous requirements. We have to submit what is called an IHIP (pronounced eye-hip)--a detailed Individualized Home Instruction Plan--and then provide detailed reports each quarter on progress, plus an annual progress wrap-up at the end of the academic year...and then every other year starting in the fourth grade, a standardized test.

I submit an IHIP each year that details my educational philosophy and plan of action with plenty of I-am-not-the-person-you-want-to-mess-with-trust-me written between the lines. In my quarterly reports, I refuse--REFUSE, I tell you--to submit a subject-hour-by-subject-hour estimate of time spent; instead I do as most of the other home schoolers around here do, which is ignore that requirement and instead write "at least 225 hours" at the top of each quarterly report. The weird thing about New York is that you submit your stuff to the school district, which then applies the letter of the law to whatever extent they feel like. (In Virginia, this was not the case...although you do submit to the superintendent of your school district, there are fewer rules and everyone abides by them...plus there, no one has the right to approve or disapprove your curriculum or how well you have documented, as long as you do the minimal reporting you need to.) We homeschoolers know which districts are the power-hungry ones around here (city of Rochester, Spencerport, and Brockport) that are interested in micromanaging you. Fortunately, although we live in Brighton, we're so far to the northeast that we're in the Penfield school district, which is known as being a bit more relaxed. The District liason recognized me right away (she even submits events to the KOA calendar) both as a semi-public figure and as a brainy type, and so I'm pretty sure she will never question what I provide.

Anyway, here I am, wide awake, writing quarterly assessments, which is somewhat pleasurable for me as a person of easy words, quick typing skills, and myriad things I could document about engaged and bright children, but which I could see would be a teeth-grinding chore for a different type of person.

Thin Mints

Ach, they are evil.

Fall Back

I love Fall Back time, and the extra hour of sleep came at a good time for us. I had been letting the kids' bedtime migrate starting from the ALCS playoffs, which was handy for things like the shows and concerts we've been seeing and participating in, but was sort of bad for home schooling -- they'd get up later, David would get to work later, we'd get started later. But because the stuff we do in the afternoons is at fixed times, we'd have to shorten the school day, so we've been getting less done. With Fall Back having happened this weekend, I can easily now put the kids to bed at 8 instead of 9, which meant that Ella got up at 6:45 this morning and we woke Madison at 7:45. So we were at it by 8:30, which I love. Thank goodness for home schooling, I can't imagine how we could get all of this accomplished if I had to rush them out the door at 7:30. We'd have to cut back or they'd be exhausted. This way they can get 9 1/2 hours of sleep. I've been reading how even elementary kids' lives are so crammed lately that they're getting less than 8 hours. Ick, I can imagine how perpetually cranky Madison would be.

Other things are also settling down. I'd been preparing for the party last week, and on this past Saturday I exhibited KOA at the Rochester Children's Book Festival. I had about 750 6-year-old KOA printed purple balloons from when I first got them made when KOA started, and so I rented an insanely big (I learned -- I'll never do that again...I'll always get two smaller ones even though it's more costly) helium tank from Party City and spent 6 hours blowing up and giving away 300-400 balloons. The kids helped, in the afternoon, after they got out of choir. The balloons were really effective, even though it seems that latex has a definite half-life, and over 1/3 of them broke or were hole-y before I even got the knot tied.

There's nothing like free balloons to get kids to drag their parents over to your booth. Madison and Ella were beyond thrilled at being the ones with all the balloons to give away, rather than being the one who wants the balloon. (I tell ya, I give these kids EXPERIENCES.) Anyway, I got a lot of signups to the KOA list, and it was also a real rush to ask parents, "Have you heard of KOA?" and often to get the answer "Oh, gosh, yes, I get the email every week, I love it, I always look forward to it, are YOU Debra Ross?" It was a lot of fun for me. And really exhausting, too. I smashed various fingers and toes in the whole helium tank escapade, and wore away bits of skin on my right index finger from tying balloons for six hours, but it was worth it.

And I can now settle in with nothing more looming that I have to prepare for. Aside from work, that is, and my kids' education. Oh, and we have to distribute and collect the money for the Girl Scout cookies that came in yesterday. And we're having a cookie booth at RIT (the troop is, I arranged it) to sell G.S. cookies on Friday.

I've actually been quite prolific on the Frontier Team book that I'm writing (with Madison, to some extent). We got delayed with the research, romping through classic children's mystery books and finding "rules for detecting" contained therein so we could reference them in our book, and we're still doing that to some extent. But I've been getting the story fairly well fleshed-out, lately, and we're about 1/3 of the way through the book. Frankly, being at the RCBF on Saturday was inspiring, in that if these people could be successful authors, there's no reason I couldn't be. And I have a built-in marketing machine, anyway, so I'm hoping I'm that much more appealing to a larger publisher. We'll see. It's been fun putting in real-life places and people in Rochester, too. And weaving good reasoning in there, both implicitly and explicitly.

Patrick

Today, my dear friend Patrick will finish up his final chemotherapy treatment for colon cancer, the 12th of 12, although it will be some time before the side effects completely release him. What a year it has been for him. The prognosis is good, I’m happy and relieved to say.

Patrick and his family actually have a lot to do with who I am as an adult. On October 19, 1991, Patrick’s little brother was in a near-fatal car accident and took 5 weeks to emerge from a coma. We were 22, Dan was 17. That was a soul-etching incident for me, and it’s the reason I am cheerful, as a rule, now. Really. We didn’t know whether Dan would live, or ever be himself again. I remember being in terrible pain about this...then, right at the depths of my despair, it occurred to me that I’d never felt as acutely alive as I had at that moment.

After that, everything was relative to that day. No matter what setbacks occurred in my life, as long as no one was terribly sick, or in the hospital, or dying, I have typically been able to keep it relatively in perspective and, mostly, not let it get me down. So, I’m usually very cheerful, unless someone I love is in physical or emotional pain, or in the hospital, or dead. (Or, also, if I find out I’ve done inadvertent harm to someone. Okay, and I get morose when I'm sick.)

I got a call on October 20, 2001. Exactly 10 years to the day after his brother’s accident, Patrick himself was in a near-fatal car accident in Michigan and took months to recover from a head injury and other injuries. The accident permanently damaged one of his optic nerves; one of those beautiful blue eyes will never be the same. The effects of the accident will probably always be with him – he gets tired more easily, for instance. And then, this spring, he was diagnosed with cancer and they removed half his colon. Christ.

See, really bad stuff happens. People die sometimes. People’s children die. There is war and oppression in the world. But my children are alive. They are healthy. They are smart. I feel almost guilty about it sometimes, when not everyone can say that. I will admit that not infrequently, I find myself beating back the fear of losing Madison and Ella to some illness, or to some accident. But even that image helps me maintain equilibrium in the face of day-to-day setbacks, because so long as that is not happening, I can’t say that it’s too bad.

I have been criticized in the past for being too cheerful, for always saying everything is good even when, technically, not everything is ideal. The accusation has been that I'm not being "real"...i.e., not showing my "real" emotions when I'm stressed, or mildly upset. On the one hand, I'm married to an ex-Presbyterian and have learned why stiff-upper-lipping it beats collapsing under pressure any day. And reason IS superior to emotion as a tool for managing life.

But, also, I think it's important to note that I'm not being phony. Life IS good, at least as long as we’re not being faced with a real tragedy. We live in a mostly free society where people can mostly accomplish what they reasonably attempt. One has the choice to focus on positive things, or dwell on negative things. So long as I'm not ignoring anything important, I choose the positive things.

Patrick has cheated death twice. His continued existence here on the planet is one of many bright spots in my life, and in the lives of a lot of other people as well. He is alive, so I am happy.

20 years

I got a note today from an old high school classmate who suddenly remembered my married name and Googled me and found my address. Seems that I'm on the "missing" list for my high school graduating class, which she saw in the invitation to our 20th high school reunion that she received a few weeks ago. Said reunion, she said, takes place the Friday after Thanksgiving. Can I go?

Wild horses couldn't drag me to this reunion, even if Madison weren't performing in the Nutcracker, even if Los Americanos weren't coming up from Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall, though. That would be interesting. I'd hope all the mean people look old.

But I didn't tell Carey any of that. I did tell her to have a great time, and to email me afterward to tell me about it.


--------------------------
(I'm up at midnight, and alternately working on a report for a California client, and blogging. Can you tell I've had too many Reeses Peanut Butter Cups? Yay Halloween.)

90 degrees in a new direction for Ella

In other words, Ella has turned the corner on reading.

I haven't said it before, but I'm saying it now. Yep. It was yesterday, October 30, 2007. She's reading. She has been able to read in some form for almost 2 years, but yesterday it seemed to click for her. She was six-and-a-half on Monday. The magic moment I've been doubting would come, as progress has been steadily incremental, oh, at 5 degrees or so.

Ella's potty-training progress when she was a toddler was quite similar to her reading, minus the 2-year effort. She had no real impetus to potty-train when she was two -- she cheerfully figured why bother, she was happy, she had it easy, it was nicer for someone else to worry about the diaper than to make the effort herself. It wasn't so much a matter of laziness as a comfort in the status quo. And then, 4 days after she turned 3, she suddenly decided that it was time, and that was it. No real effort involved, she just did it. And that seemed to be the case with reading, as well. She worked at it because I made her, for school, but she was just as happy to have someone read to her when it was an effort. And suddenly, it's no longer such an effort, so she's proud and happy to do it.

Madison was totally different. Her philosophy about reading was very like her own potty-training, too. She was not quite 2 1/2, and she wanted to do it all by herself, damn it, because the potty was there to be conquered. The same thing with reading...she was almost 6, and I'd already read the first 19 Boxcar Children books to her, and I'd told her that we weren't getting started on the next 90 books, she'd have to read them herself. And by god, she was going to do just that. And so she did...she sat down in August 2005 and just started reading, skipping any words she didn't know.

But back to Ella. She insists on reading me a whole Dr. Seuss-ish book in the morning before getting out of bed, and another before going to sleep. Yesterday it was Go, Dog. Go! and Marvin K Mooney, Will You Please Go Now? and today it was The Best Nest and Hop On Pop.

I attribute the suddenly steep slope to two things: To the Writing Road To Reading cards and method Laura introduced me to a few weeks ago, and to the fact that Ella has been singing and playing the piano so much, reading the words -- words that are conveniently broken up into syllables -- along with the music.

Or, heck, maybe it was just Her Time and it would have happened without all the work. No real way to tell. At least she has the sense that hard work pays off, which is almost as valuable as her newly-acquired skill.

Quotation marks blog

I usually try not to steal other's blog entries, but I must here. HT Rational Jenn for a link to this blog:

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
misinterpreting bad punctuation since 2005

I love this.

The Golden Compass

I see some religious homeschoolers are really getting their panties in a bunch about The Golden Compass.

http://snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

http://homeschoolbuzz.com/reviews.html?content=The-Golden-Compass--His-Dark-Materials-book-1-

It is said that Philip Pullman regards his books as the antidote to the religious messages of the Narnia series. We found the Narnia series fascinating, because the girls treated it as a fantasy series like any other; the religious parallels and messages passed them right by--they saw what happened in Narnia, and treated it as relevant only to the context of the Narnian world, not as relevant in our world.

Has anyone (from the group of the five or so of you who read this) read The Golden Compass or heard anything about it? If so, can you can give me the scoop? Adrienne? You must have an opinion. Some libraries seem to put it in Young Adult, some in the Children's section. I'm wondering if I should read it to see if it's appropriate for Madison.

One thing leads to another

After almost two weeks of letting history fall by the wayside, we were just starting some more work on ancient Sumer this morning. Because David and I have been helping the girls brush up their geography skills lately, I thought I'd point out the map yet again in the book. Then I got out our Big Big World book, and also the globe, and had them find Sumer in both. It was actually kind of tricky, for them to transfer their understanding of a simple small line sketch of the Tigris/Euphrates Rivers and the Persian Gulf and the Arabian peninsula to find where those areas were on the more complex maps. It took a little while; I was interested to see that they were not very good at it.

But then that got us started on the "seas" of that part of the world, the Mediterranean and the Black and the Caspian and the Arabian, and that led to a discussion of Italy, and then we started talking about where all of the various ancestors came from, Scotland and Italy and Poland and the Ukraine, and then looked to find all of the routes they might have taken to get to the U.S. And THEN, providentially, the mom of one of Lara's friends showed up to borrow my camera, and as it happens her parents had run from the Nazis in Austria and ended up in Argentina where Monica was brought up, so she traced that route for us, too.

Sumer? Another day.

Oh, and I must report that Ella zipped through Go, Dog. Go! this morning. She's doing much better. It makes me wish that I'd been videotaping her reading right from the start. It feels too late to start now.

Baseball

Rational Jenn wrote about sports yesterday, which prompted me to put down what I haven't had the time, what with all the Halloween and rehearsal/concert madness going on.

Although I don't follow major-league baseball religiously during the regular season, we always watch the postseason on TV in October, especially if the Red Sox are playing. I love baseball. There were only a few girls playing Little League in the 5th and 6th grades, and one of them was me. (The other was my dear, dear friend Anne, who was known as "that red-headed girl pitching for the Lions.") I was on the Panthers. I was no good for almost all of the two years I played, although in my very last at-bat in the 6th grade I hit a triple, and that was the official moment when it "clicked," and although I never played on an official team again, I was always pretty decent at pick-up games. I remember having someone pinch-run for me at my first IOS seminar in 1993 when I was in a leg brace due to the skiing accident.

Anyway, in 1991 I became a Red Sox fan when Patrick and I lived in Boston for the summer when he was reporting for the Globe. I loved, and still love, Fenway Park. 1991 was the beginning of the era of Mo Vaughn, and the beginning of my rooting for the Sox. The day after I found out I was pregnant with Ella in 2000, I had to go to Boston on business and was able to get a ticket. I sat in right field, and I bought The Baby a Red Sox T-shirt that I'll give to Ella when she's a teenager. Madison is going to Boston with the Bach Children's Chorus April 17-19, and if the Sox are playing at home I'm going to do my best get us tickets, even if we have to go out early or stay late.

Fortunately, we have the Rochester Red Wings here, the Triple-A team for the Minnesota Twins. So we go often during the summer (only $6/ticket) and always sit over third base. We don't really follow the individual players so much, because the better ones are always getting called up. But going to a game here in Rochester is so much fun. It's such a genial way to spend 3 or 4 relaxed hours on a summer afternoon with kids. The girls really got into the game this year, and positively enjoy discussing the rules and strategy. If you go on a Sunday afternoon, after the game, the kids get to go down on the field and "run the bases with Spikes," the Red Wings' mascot (I think he's an eagle). On Mother's Day and Father's Day, you go down on the outfield after the game and play catch with the free baseballs they give you.

The interesting thing is that baseball on TV has really seized Ella's attention this postseason, much more so than for Madison. She roots for the Red Sox because we do; she got to know the players, the lineups, she discussed how grumpy the Cleveland Indians' manager always looked and how much Terry Francona spit, she loves Big Papi and Manny Ramirez. While Madison would often read a book while we were all watching the game, Ella was always paying attention. A couple of nights during the ALCS and the Series, she finished dinner early and asked to go and watch the pregame show all on her own, while we were finishing up. ("Hey, Mom, Dad, come quick, James Taylor is singing the National Anthem!") The first thing she'd ask us in the morning was who won. Yesterday morning, upon finding out that the Sox had won Game 4, she said, "Well, I'm happy, but I actually wish the Rockies won last night. Because now there's no more baseball until spring.")

When Geeks Home School Their Kids

Here, Madison and Ella spontaneously decided to re-enact Raphael's "School of Athens" painting, by the shore of Skaneateles Lake.

Madison wanted to be Aristotle, and Ella didn't mind being Plato.



This was a photo from last week, but I was reminded to post it today by a conversation Madison and I had in the car on the way to their homeschool Gym and Swim class at the Y. We were listening to some kids music about math, and one of the song's lyrics posed the question, "Where would we be without math, what would the world be like?"

Madison wanted to talk about this. She proposed that math WAS EQUIVALENT TO motion, and that without motion, she couldn't exist, nor could the earth...and although she was uncertain about how it would affect the universe's existence, she knew that it would be very different than it is.

I was intrigued that she had chosen "motion" as her synonym for math. Is it that she hears David and me talking about calculus so much? Or that the math David works on and describes to her is measuring motion of various kinds? Hard to know. Fascinating. Anyway, I than proposed that perhaps math wasn't just a different word for motion, but that it is human beings' ability to quantify, and therefore is dependent on human consciousness for its existence. She liked this. She hadn't considered it before, I don't think, how math must be linked to human beings rather than being independent. And so she started to talk about what "existence" means, and how it's related to "consciousness." But then we pulled up to the Y. Sigh.

Conversations like this sometimes make me want to shout, "Look out, World! She's coming! She's only 8, but she's going to take you by storm in the not-too-distant future! And you're not ready!"

Now if I could just teach her to spell.

Party a success

We're all tired. The four of us are spaced out in front of the World Series now.

Hints on the purple ice hands:

1) Don't let the fingers freeze close together. They'll amputate much less easily on the way out of the glove.

2) The purple will stain your own hands. Wear extra gloves. I didn't. Too late by the time I realized.

I loved our ghosts so much I wished we'd made more. The backyard looked really neat.



Madison's fortune-telling went over great. I made up about 40 fortunes and they were a big hit. The parents liked them too. Here are some:

One of your parents will accuse you of something you didn’t do, and you’ll set him or her straight very politely.

You will find yourself wanting to wear something purple.

You will find yourself humming a certain song that will be difficult to get out of your head, and you may drive the rest of your family crazy as a result.

A new spirit of generosity will overwhelm you, and your parents will be surprised.

You will be overcome with the desire to help wash the dishes.

You will soon start to see patterns in numbers on digital clocks or other electronic devices.

Here is Madison in her gypsy teepee:

Halloween preparations

In this spirit of Trying to Be All My Parents Were Not, I'm helping the girls (ok, they're helping me, when the spirit moves them) prepare for the big Halloween party on Sunday. It's grown to about 25 kids.

I try to be cool. And what isn't cool, freezing cool even, about purple ice hands:




Just take nonpowdered gloves, color water purple with red and blue food coloring, fill up gloves, tie off, and pop in the freezer. When they're frozen, peel off the gloves, take your new creepy purple hands, and pop them into the orange punch. BWAAAH HA HA HA HA!!!!

That's educational, right?

Thanks, Food Network.

The Squeaky Wheel on Grease

More Grease fun! In this post I talked about my mistake in bringing the girls to Grease last month. Well, another local theater group (we have many here in Rochester, most of which have the word "theatre" in their name) has done a family-friendly version of Grease.

I brought the girls yesterday. (I know it's totally declasse but I love to get these free tickets.)

Did the group (TYKEs -- Theatre Young Kids Enjoy) pull it off? Read my review and see, if you're inclined. And tell me if you agree with my main quibble about Grease, family-friendly or not.

Squirrelly October

Turns out the squirrels that have made a nest between our second and third floors are FLYING squirrels. We cornered one in the house on Wednesday. It was adorable, and almost tame, not afraid of us at all, with the biggest eyes. It could fit in your hand. I didn't let the girls pick it up, although Greg the Squirrel Guy who came over later told us that they actually make good pets. We chased it outside, where it wandered around confusedly, blinking in the light (they're nocturnal). No wonder we've been hearing the activity at dusk. Poor thing.

So tell me he isn't the cutest:


It's almost a shame that we're trying to make him and his family homeless, although at this point I fail to see how that's going to be done effectively, in this old stone house with all kinds of crevices.

And then yesterday, when Ella and I were out in the woods part of the backyard banging nails into foamboard yellow eyes that we'd made as decorations for the Halloween party on Sunday, we came upon a dead squirrel. Actually, I started hammering into a tree at the edge of the meadow, and then she suddenly screamed incoherently and started running away. Now, Ella doesn't just scream randomly, so I ran toward her and scooped her up to find out what was wronog; it actually took her a second to point, with a trembling lip, and say, "There's...it's...there's... a dead squirrel there." And she burst into tears.

It turned out I'd almost been stepping on it. Ick.

As David pointed out later (I know, it's a little shameful of me, but I'm happy to assign The Husbandly Head the job of disposing of dead animals in the yard), the squirrel looked as though it had gone up to the Great Squirrels Nest In the Sky by having been dropped from a great height. A little flat, you know. I'm thinking the big, beautiful red-tailed hawk that Ella and I saw in one of the big pine trees in the backyard had a little accident with its breakfast; the thing hadn't been there the day before.

Must...get...back...to...Halloween...preparations...

Old photo makes us "big bucks"

Can you believe that a company in Norway wants to use this old photo of Madison in an internal training document flyer?



They found it where I'd used it as the graphics for an article about how to get kids to practice, which their old piano teacher wrote for KidsOutAndAbout.com in early 2005.

And they'll PAY us $300. Imagine.

Update: The guy just emailed me the page in the training document as it is laid out. Make sure to click on the photo below; it will take you to a large version that is worth seeing!



The graphic designer who contacted me, Tommy Knøsmoen, said to "tell Madison that there will be people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Polen, Czech Republic, Austria, and probably a few more countries that will see her when educating in negotiation."

Try THIS in elementary school and see how far you get

Madison was teaching Ella her spelling this morning and I came upon them working, in THIS position:



It seemed to work. Go figure.

Really cool field trip yesterday

The Red Jacket cider folks mentioned below offered to give us a little private tour of their processing plant, and we went to Geneva, NY yesterday. They plied us with information, food, and delicious drinks -- my idea of a perfect field trip.

I wrote it up for KidsOutAndAbout.com.

So go see the photos go here:
http://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/city-articles/RedJacket.html

Annika is Seven

Annika is seven, and she is happy.

http://thewaitandwonder.clubmom.com/thewaitandwonder/2007/10/annika-is-seven.html

And I am so lucky, lucky, LUCKY that my girls are healthy.

I almost wish there was someone to thank for this, my heart is so full of gratitude sometimes.

On the flip side, though, I am glad that there is no cruel being who whimsically zapped a sweet little blonde girl in Normal, Illinois with liver disease and a cleft palate and clubbed fingers. No one to blame, no one to fill the mind with hatred.

It's better that way.

Spontaneous Science

I got on the phone, I thought briefly, with a mom whose husband is going to do a free homeschool science class for 8-11-year-olds, only a mile down the street. I had seen the post about it, emailed Jeff to see if it was religious-based science, and he emailed me back asking me to call. It's not religious-based (they're Jews, it turns out, not fundies), and that's all I really needed to know, but his wife Leslie talked and talked and TALKED. In between various subjects, she turned me on to science experiments from Steve Spangler:
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiments/

She said that they had recently done the Ivory soap experiment, so while she was talking at me about something, I brought up that experiment on the computer (yes, I know, Bad Deb), and saw that all it involved was a bar of Ivory soap and a microwave. The girls kept looking at me with those when-are-you-going-to-get-off-the-phone-we're-tired-of-being-patient eyes, and so I went upstairs and got a bar of Ivory soap, summoned the girls, and (with a few "ohs" and "rights" to Leslie, still chattering away) put it in the microwave on High for 2 minutes. Wow, it was really cool.

Here is the experiment: http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/00000053

If you do it, make sure you watch the whole process, don't leave. We had to turn it off with 30 seconds to go, because I think our microwave is extra-powerful.

When I got off the phone we were able to discuss the history of Ivory soap and how it came to float, then talked about floating in general, then about melting and boiling points, and then it turned into a states of matter discussion.

So, for kicks, we took an ice cube and put it in a cold pot on the stove and watched it melt on high power. We timed how long it took to melt (1:28), and then to boil away completely (2:22). We then tried it again with an ice cube in an already hot pot, and found it melted and vaporized much more quickly. We talked about heat transfer, and why it melts much more quickly in a pot that is already hot. Then I had Ella hold an ice cube in her hand and time how long it took to melt (7:10).

When I asked the girls how long it would take before it boiled in Ella's hand, Madison didn't really think it through and blurted out "About an hour!" but Ella took a few moments more and said "Never. My hand isn't hot enough to make it boil." And then Madison protested that water does evaporate, and we talked about the difference between the process of evaporation and boiling.

"Why must the water cycle be driven by evaporation, and not by boiling?" I asked. For the same reason that Ella's hand could never make it boil -- if it was hot enough on earth to boil water, the earth would be a very different place.

Of course, the child who loves arguments driven by nitpicking objected. "What about in the center of the earth? It's hot enough to boil water in there." We looked up the temperature in the inner core (7000 degrees C) and the temperature in the mantle (879 degrees C). Water would boil in there, yep. "Well how FAST would an ice cube vaporize in the mantle?" A fraction of a second. "It would be even faster in the core, right?" Yes. "How much faster?" I couldn't do any better than a fraction of a fraction of a second, which is of course unsatisfying.

10-minute homeschool

I had an idea I thought I'd try for kicks today, and it turned out to be brilliant.

I devised 10-minute homeschool. Ten minutes per subject, that is. I set the alarm at the beginning of each session, and then they were fascinated to see how much they could get done in 10 minutes. If they were in the middle of something when the beeper went off, it got put away until tomorrow (or, I would have let them pick back up whatever they wanted to at the end of school, but today is a crammed gym-and-swim-then-cooking-then-horseback-riding afternoon and evening). We went from 9:45 to 12:15.

The girls loved it. Loved it, loved it. And they got a lot done, with a lot of cliffhangers that they now want to get done tomorrow. (We're in the middle of the history of ancient Sumer, and I stopped in the middle of a sentence. Whetting the appetite for more tomorrow!) Ella read her book in time to have some time left over at the end of the session. It really focused her -- other days it could take her 15 minutes what it took 8 minutes to do today. And her math, she finished that early, too, and it was PERFECT.

Madison wants to do 15-minute school tomorrow and see how different of an experience that is. Who am I to argue.

First fire

It's suddenly October. I mean actual October, not the funny 80-degree October we've been having. It's sort of rainy and 45 degrees, with that crispness in the air we so associate with autumn in Rochester. So last night we had the first fire with what we could scrounge from our backyard:



And what would the first fire be without a nice glass of Glenlivet?



Then we sent the kids to bed and fell asleep during the 11-inning Red Sox game. Good thing we didn't last until the Indians scored 7 extra runs in the top of the 11th.

So the ALCS is 1-1. Go Sox!

pi-RIT sale

We did the RIT Math Club fundraising sale on Friday. The name of the math club is "Pi-RIT" so the girls dressed up as pirates.

We got cider from Wegmans, made a great chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cooks Illustrated, and some great pumpkin bread that I've made since forever (and which is a terrific way to get both pumpkin and stone ground whole wheat flour into the kids).

I thought it would be neat to get some funky cellophane paper, a ribbon, and some cheap silk flowers that were three-to-a-bunch for 50 cents from Michael's. So for about an extra 35-40 cents, we were able to price the breads at $5 instead of $3.50. Yay, capitalism.



Here they are selling.



Unfortunately, the nice RIT kids, being, well, kids, didn't think about whether we'd have actual traffic, so the receipts didn't quite cover costs. Ah well, that just meant that they didn't have to give any to the math club, and I let them split what they made after giving me back some of the cost.

They also did a cider taste test, which was a big hit. We got cider from three different farm markets around, and had people choose which one they liked best:



They like each other. Really. Despite snarking at each other sometimes.

Clarence Thomas

Yesterday, David gave me the gift of a luxury almost unimaginable these days -- a few hours by myself to read Clarence Thomas's new book, My Grandfather's Son. Actually, he gave me the weekend so that I could catch up on some work that desperately needs catching up on, but I was at the top of the list for this book at the Penfield library and so I took some time for myself and read. (Can't think when I've done that recently, other than in snatches here and there of David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, through which I am slowly making my way in between all of the important stuff in life.)

I was disappointed with the book.

I thought perhaps Thomas was going to give us some insight into his intellectual journey from early-70s-angry-young-socialism to originalist jurisprudence. Nope. It was a personal journey from birth to Anita Hill, which some people might find inspiring in the sense that it does a pretty good job at laying out how badly white liberal guilt has served blacks, and how noninterference by government is far better than interference. Other than that, it was pretty much strict-upbringing-by-grandfather-blah-blah-blah-Anita-Hill-blah-blah-blah-God.

The book wasn't badly written, but it was not in the least interestingly written. I had hoped that Thomas's laying out of his life story might be wrapped up in penetrating commentary and perspective from his current position in life. Nope. Just pretty much a bare-bones laying out of the facts. And lots of God's will thrown in for kicks.

Ho-hum.

George and Martha

James Marshall's birthday was yesterday.

Adrienne, children's librarian extraordinaire, reminds us in this lovely post.

How could I have forgotten? We celebrated Thelonius Monk's birthday yesterday. I will have to do justice to Marshall next year.

Today's birthday is Henry Heinz, a man who looms equally important in Ella's life, in terms of influence.

Piano!

Here is Ella playing the piano in the ultimate piano-playing outfit:


It's Thelonius Monk's birthday, by the way.

Fall Fun Fotos

Yesterday, we went to Holiday Hollow, the country's only venue of its kind dedicated to celebrating Halloween. They "put the happy back in Happy Halloween," as I wrote in my review of Holiday Hollow a few years ago.

I missed Holiday Hollow when we were in Virginia. (OK, I missed ALL of Rochester.) I'm feeling particularly happy to be back here, because it's fall, which is Rochester's greatest time of year. And, I confess, I dearly love getting free tickets to all of the great places and performances around here (perhaps out of proportion to how much I should like it--maybe it's the Jersey Girl coming out in me). Organizations want the visibility, so they want me to go and review them and write about how much my kids liked the experience. Who am I to refuse?

So here are some photos from yesterday (you can click on them to make them bigger). I'll be updating my review soon, although Holiday Hollow hasn't changed all that much.







Today, it was Columbus Day and all of the local kids had off school. We did school this morning, but then in the afternoon, we went to Gro-Moore Farms which is not far from RIT. It's a typical local farm market that puts in some activities for kids on weekends in the fall. In my opinion, my kids were a little old for it, and I'm glad we didn't pay the $9 pay-one-price fee that would have let them do everything for free. I let them do the big slide and the pumpkin painting, and bought them some doughnuts and a slushie, and then let them do the free stuff. They had a good time, and I got some good photos:





Unusual for Madison, she's photographed very well the last few days. Don't you think?

22 down, 178 to go!

It's Girl Scout Cookie Time!

The girls had their big Cookie Kick-Off party last night for the Penfield Brownies/Girl Scouts. Today at 10am they were officially allowed to go out and sell.

Allowed.

There is a goal of 100 boxes per child. I have two children.

Madison wants to sell 1000 boxes. If we sell 1000 boxes, the prize is a video camera.

We went out this afternoon for an hour. We went around the block. They were happy, smiling, cute little Brownies. Only one house at which people were home refused them. We got nine people at home. 22 boxes.

And I am wiped out.

There is a new idea that Troop 835 will be doing this year, which is to offer to let them add on boxes for soldiers overseas. Boy, did that work -- half of the people decided to buy a box or two for the soldiers, too.

Let's see...we get to keep 55 cents for every box we sell. That's an hour of work I did, and Madison and Ella did, for the $12.10 our troop will get to keep. If we keep it up at 22 boxes per hour, that's only...nine more hours of this before we meet our quota.

When are we, as a culture, going to give up on all of this and just admit that it's a better use of our time to just, say, pay our own way? Heck, I'd even pay the way of other people's little Brownies if I could just opt out. Everyone knows we all hate doing this, but no one will admit it. And the girls love it. At least for the first hour. Then they start arguing about who is going to ring the doorbell and when are we going to go home because they're thirsty. And I, hungry for any excuse, am happy to hightail it home.

But, I should be grateful. David's cousin Connie was the Cookie Mom for her daughter's Brownie troop last year. And their cookie season was January! They tramped around for 30 days in January, and because they were probably the only ones brave enough to go out in the cold and snow, little Jessie sold over 500 boxes.

Anyway, if anyone wants to buy cookies (or, even better, add on one for the troops!), you can check them out at http://www.girlscoutcookies.org/meet_cookies.asp. And then email me at ross(at)axton.com. They're $3.50 per box. I will pay for shipping.

I know, I'm wimping out here.

Maybe someone has a bright entrepreneurial idea for how to sell them in bulk. If so, let me know!

One month into the 2007-2008 year

Well, this education thing seems to be working.

Math-U-See Beta is too slow for Ella. We're speeding it up by doing only 1-2 workbook pages per lesson right now. We're also starting to teach her the multiplication tables. She understands the concept of multiplication; now it's time to start the memorization.

Ella is reading much better than she was one month ago. The slope on the learning curve seems to be getting a little steeper. (And, as posted below from the other day, she's started to make the effort to read on her own.)

She's started to tell time much better. Still needs practice.

Aside from math, Madison is more in the process of learning stuff, rather than learning skills. She's pretty much nailed multi-digit multiplication, it's just a matter of getting a little more accurate (I'd say 80% of the problems she does are totally right, then 20% have arithmetic errors.) We did area/perimeter of rectangles and triangles. She liked that. Now for a review of fractions.

I'd say Madison has come farthest in the past month in music, both theory and in her ability to read notes both for piano and for singing. I thank the very rigorous demands of the Bach Children's Chorus for this, mostly. We have to practice hard, every day...I say "we" because she's still too young to do this all on her own, and it REALLY helps to have me play the piano and help her get the notes and words right, rather than only have her listening to the CD. She has her first concert on Oct 27, and they're singing Ode to Joy (she still needs to get down the German words), Simple Gifts (my favorite, FAVORITE hymn), and All Things Bright and Beautiful. I'm really grateful for this group; the girls will get to sing all of that wonderful sacred music that they would miss in school or in church. She's singing alto.

Also, the girls started piano lessons just last week with their new teacher, and already they're starting to get the sense of reading music. Their last teacher wrote out the note-letters on the page, and we had little stickers on the keyboard that showed the different key names. Now, they're being made to learn the notes, and they're doing just fine.

Ella is displaying the same learning method that Madison did about piano, although actually about six months earlier than Madison:

At first, she played by this method: Look at note. Look at note letter under note. Find note on piano. Strike it. Ignore time value of note. Look at next note. Et cetera.

Now, you can tell that Ella is actually listening to the music that she's creating, and relating the notes on the page *to the melody*, and letting the anticipation of the next note *by ear* play a large role in identifying the next key to strike, checking to see that it corresponds to the note on the page. It's an entirely different approach, and I watched Madison do this at about the time she turned 7.

I'm discovering that Madison has an uncanny ability to memorize. She's had a lot of memorization in the past month: Lots of words for the Chorus, a play for drama, and poetry for school. She's great. It's one of those effortless things for her. Cool. That should serve her well.

It's serving her well as we're writing our book, too. We've picked that back up, on Wednesdays. We're now deep into the research for the nitty gritty of it. A group of home-schooled kids find a treasure chest containing clues in the form of a list of pages and paragraphs from popular children's (mostly) mystery literature up through 1976 (Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Bobbsey Twins, The Great Brain, Encyclopedia Brown, etc). They have to hunt down the references, which turn out to be a list of Rules for Being Good Detectives. Then, once they have the list compiled, they use the rules to figure out where the treasure chest came from. So, Madison and I are now in the process of going through lots and lots of books to find good places that describe rules for detecting. We're even using My Side of the Mountain and The Swiss Family Robinson, because these guys really have to use their minds to figure out what's going on. (In our book, the kids discuss the books and what the passages mean...my theory being that this unique romp through classic kid lit will inspire contemporary readers to pick up those books.) So Madison is doing a lot of reading, which for her is simply a pleasure (hey! I'm doing this for school), and she's also able to recall specific passages from books with relative ease.

Spelling is better. Ella is good, Madison is getting better. They're liking the WRTR annotation method, it especially seems to anchor spelling in Madison's mind. We only started that this week. I'm looking forward to getting the WRTR book I ordered Sunday.

They're both liking grammar a lot, Madison particularly. They both love logic. I must get new age-appropriate logic workbooks, they're almost at the end of theirs but neither is really ready to move up a level, they just want more.

We do Spanish twice per week, and we should be doing sign language twice per week except it keeps going by the wayside.

Haven't made too much progress on history or science. Too busy doing other things. History is ancient history (literally). Science WAS the human body for the week before we went on the cruise, now it's just talking about things as they come up in the world. May try to get going on this more.

They have a cooking class on Mondays, and horseback riding on Mondays, too. Every day, they figure out how many more days until the next horseback riding class. (Wah for Columbus Day next week! No class!)

Girl Scout Cookie sales start on Saturday. Anyone who wants a box or three or ten mailed to them should let me know. Click here to meet the cookies.

Cheers for Cheerios

Today, Ella spontaneously picked up and worked her way through reading a book, alone.

It was Things That Are Most In the World by Judi Barrett, and it came as a little paperback pamphlet in our new box of Cheerios that we opened this morning.

It was laborious, but the pictures are great, and they helped. And she did it for PLEASURE. Holy cow.

She came to me with a word:

"Mommy, what does P - O - U - N - D spell?"

"Well, we know from our Writing Road to Reading cards that the OU sound has four sounds. What are they?"

She needed a little prompting, but then once she had the four sounds, she went back and applied them to the word and figured it out. And then kept reading.

I'm trying to be conservative, so maybe it's not time for serious YIPPEES, but I'm thinking this First at least deserves a toast at dinner.

Food

What took me so long to try tacos with my picky eaters?

They're fun to make, and...wonder of wonders...the girls like them. Madison loved the beef, although Ella prefers meatless tacos (tortilla, sauce, and lots of cheese).

Excuse me while I go worship at the altar of the Food Gods.

Chalk math

I have to rest up from the weekend! On Saturday, we went to Conklin's Gully in Naples, NY (at the south end of Canandaigua Lake) and by a slight mistake missed the path that was near where we parked our car; instead we climbed the *actual waterfall* up to the gulch. Good thing we've had no rain this summer, or we wouldn't have been able to do it. As it was, climbing the rocks was very slippery (both Madison and I fell in the creek) and somewhat hazardous, and quite strenuous and nerve-wracking. It started off fine:



Then got a bit harder...


And harder...



But then you found yourself in this magnificent gully where you know few people have been, and which can't be accessed from the actual path, which we didn't know existed until the way back.


It wasn't really dangerous in that if you slipped and fell, you landed about four feet below in the water with some cuts and bumps, rather than actually, say, dying. But the payoff was great, to find yourself in this awesome enclosed area with cliffs all around you. I kept telling the girls, "If you start to fall, CLOSE YOUR MOUTH," especially Madison, who is both more likely to talk on the way down, and has more to lose, in the form of actual adult teeth.

Of course, when I made my own undignified slide down the side of the rock into the water, I ignored my own advice. They promptly informed me that they wouldn't let me forget it. "Hey," I said, "They're your teeth. Do what you think best." (Maybe they can think faster than I on the way down.)

And then, yesterday, I took 2 hours to scrub the kitchen floor. It's a small-stone floor that has a lot of grout. It hides the dirt well in its crevices, but it hides a LOT of dirt well and it's hard to get out. I got fed up with all of our feet getting blacker as time went on. I kept thinking, "I'm meant for better things than to spend this time scrubbing the floor," as I was damning the previous owners. I actually didn't feel the same as I was cleaning out the entire storage room (after all, it's all OUR stuff), put in shelves, and reorganied everything. It looks fantastic, actually. But it took me the whole afternoon. And that's all a very long way of saying that in the storage room, I FOUND THE CHALK. Hence the title of this post.

This morning, we really didn't get going on school until 10:30, and we had to leave by 12:30 to get to gym-and-swim, so we didn't get a lot done. (Don't worry, Laura, we didn't skip WRTR.) I let Madison and Ella do "chalk math" instead of actual rigorous math. Madison taught Ella 6 x 4, 6 x 6, and 6 x 7.

Small personal success

It's not exactly bragging, is it, to post a comment I got from a parent who reads my KOA newsletter:

Thanks so much for publishing the link to the Randy Pausch lecture. I watched it and it really affected me. I even had a dream about it last night, complete with brick walls. My October 1 Resolution: To live a good life!

I am still getting your newsletter, even though I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the end of July. I keep subscribing because you include nuggets of wisdom and links like this one each week. They mean a lot to me. Thank you so much!

This is exactly the kind of effect I was hoping to have.