Capitalism...We teach it!

The lemonade stand was the biggest hit EVER. Madison and Ella basically ran the whole show, with minimal help from me and even more minimal help from the lovely RIT Math Club reps.


It was a beautiful day, 66 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. I hadn't anticipated Ella being so able to help, but she filled up lemonade cups for three hours and added precisely four extra drops of "secret formula" (lemon juice from one of those little yellow squeezy plastic lemons) to each cup. They sold about 7 gallons of lemonade...I had to run in to the math department building to make additional lemonade three times. Good thing I also brought along a smaller extra keg.

In addition to the new "lemonade-yellow" outfit we got her at Target for the occasion, Madison also wore a "Madison Ross Class of 2021" name tag. That got a lot of notice. We did a lot of practicing of "When someone hands you money for a product you ALWAYS say 'Thank you' enthusiastically right then." Madison also decided to add "And have a nice day!" when people left.



The stand made $49.00 profit overall, after subtracting the $7.50 in supplies, which Madison fronted with her own money. You might think that translates into exactly 113 cups sold, but it doesn't...I am not sure how many people said "Keep the change!" but it was at least 15 people.

That's Madison calculating the profit, above. 60% of it ($29.40) went to the RIT Math Club, which left $19.60 for my kids. In turn, Madison split THAT 60-40 (ah, percentages! lots of math was done at this table!) leaving her with $11.64 and Ella with $7.76. "That's almost $4 per hour!" Madison said. "At this rate, I could be rich!"

Here is Madison with Kate, the Math Club rep (and Ella is blowing bubbles in the background):



The Math Club kids tried to ask me to let the girls take all of the profits ("We didn't do anything but sit here some of the time on a nice day!") but both I and David felt strongly that they should have the greater percentage, and Madison agreed with our reasoning. In the car on the way home, Madison and I had a discussion about Public Relations and why it's often more enticing for people to buy products as part of a fundraiser than just from their own needs, which in this case would be thirst (and, as Madison reminded me, because they would want to support cute little kids in their own business).

We also had a discussion of risk, in the context of why Madison should have the greater percentage of profit even though Ella worked for the same amount of time that she did. But as I pointed out, Madison assumed the risk for the endeavor...she fronted the money for the supplies, and if no one had bought lemonade, she'd be out the $7.50. So she deserves a higher percentage. (Right, Steve?)



"What are you going to buy with the money you're making?" the kids from the Math Club asked Madison. "Oh, I'm going to save it," she replied breezily. They were impressed. Turns out she's saving up for...a TV set for her room. HMMMMMM.

Anyway, they LOVED doing this. They would do it every week if they could. We're almost certainly going to do it in September. Big plans were discussed in the car on the way home. What if we sold both fresh-squeezed lemonade AND from a mix, so people could choose? Could we charge more? We'd have to charge more. Do you think people would pay $1 for the fresh-squeezed? Do you think we'd sell more of fresh-squeezed? Do you think we'd make a bigger profit with fresh-squeezed? How much are lemons at BJ's? Maybe we could sell cookies, too.

The only down side of the whole endeavor? When we got home, somehow Ella locked our new cash box with her fingernail, and we can't get it open. So it's sitting there with the girls' money in it, enticingly, on the kitchen table. The keys are locked inside.

Bist du bie mir

Madison is in the audition process for the Bach Children's Chorus, a fantastic classical music singing group here in Rochester.

Right now, she is practicing a hard German song that she has to memorize as part of an audition for the Bach Children's Chorus, which is a very professional difficult children's chorus composed of kids from 8-17. She has to memorize two songs, one a German song called Bist Du Bie Mir, and the other something in English from Handel.

She practices for 3 weeks, she makes an appointment for an individual "checkup," then practices for another week and then auditions. It totally moves me how hard she's working at this. SHE wants to do it, I'm not pushing her at all. Fortunately, she can do it as part of "school." If she gets in, one of the benefits will be that she will be able to sing the beautiful music I did as a member of a chorus. That was a really fulfilling part of school for me, and I had feared they would miss out.

We don't know if she will make it, she'll only be 8 in September and it's not like she has professional voice lessons or anything. But they say that they usually take kids that prove they can work hard and make it through the audition process. Rehearsals are every Saturday morning for 2 hours starting in September. She can always try again next year if she doesn't make it this year. They sing stuff in Latin, German, Russian, Spanish, French, etc. They travel each year, they sing with the Rochester Philharmonic, and always do the Nutcracker and Handel's Messiah at Christmas. This will be very good for her, a good way for her to make good friends who also love music. It will be nice if she has this while Ella has her dancing -- Madison is definitely not a dancer.

I'm kind of glad Bist du bie mir is in German. Because here are the words in English:

(If) you are with me
I go with joy
to death and peace.

Oh, how pleasurable
would be my end!
Your beautiful hands press
my faithful eyes close.

Don't you hate it when THIS happens...

SOMETHING is going on, 10:30-11:30 on Friday. I know this, because I wrote it on a scrap of paper, a statement from Morgan Stanley, TODAY. I wrote it sometime today. "I know I'll remember this," I said to myself. But I think I'll write it HERE, on this paper right next to me, so I can be sure to remember.

10:30-11:30 Friday, I wrote.

I have no blessed idea what this could be. Really, no idea. Whatever it is, it conflicts with what we're doing Friday morning, which is Madison is finally going to have her lemonade stand. She proposed to the RIT Math Club that she have a lemonade stand as a fundraiser for them, as a way to get on campus with plenty of customers. (You can't just plunk yourself down on the main walk and have a lemonade stand, even if you're cute and 7 and the daughter of a professor.) She's going to have the stand from 11:30-2:30, at some picnic that the club is hosting.

We got our sign materials from the Dollar Store today. Have to get a cash box and a keg. Photos forthcoming after the Big Sale!

What the heck could be happening from 10:30-11:30 on a FRIDAY morning?


Update: Turns out this is referring to a call I'm supposed to have with a client on MONDAY morning. Why I'd written Friday I've no idea.

My baby is 6...6!!!! today

Ella turns six today. How old that is! Madison turned six only 20 months ago. Here she is wearing the beautiful white dress Tatiana gave her.

We had a very low-key birthday party for her at her ballet studio. I love parties where all you have to do is get the cake and bring along your cute kid, and they do the rest. A dozen little girls tumbled, they danced, they did a craft, sang happy birthday to Ella, and ate ice cream cake. We opened the presents at home, because we try to have birthday parties not be about the presents, but about giving guests a good time.

Then we went to Chili's for dinner, where a half-dozen teenage waiters and waitresses sang and clapped "Happy Happy Birthday" to my lovely little girl.

But I think this was my favorite photo of all. The Snuggle With Daddy After Opening Presents photo.

Science Educators and Science Education

For the last four days, I've been in New York City at the Bronx Zoo for a 3-day workshop that I attended with the two education coordinators from the local zoo, the Seneca Park Zoo. Seven 3-person teams from all over the northeast attended this workshop. The sponsoring group was "SPARKS" -- "Supporting Parents in Advocacy, Research, and Knowledge in Science." Attendees were from "ISI's" -- Informal Science Institutions -- with a parent representative from the community.

I want to write about this experience but don't know quite how to organize it, mostly because it, itself was not organized well. None of us who were attending knew quite what we were attending for, what the ultimate point of this all was, other than promoting science education with parents. I went because, well, partly I really see this kind of thing as part of my job with KidsOutAndAbout.com -- one of my missions is to promote science and to spark parents' interest in their kids education, as a subset of my main mission, to promote reason in the culture. I also went as a homeschooling parent, because I had a vague expectation that perhaps they would inundate me with ideas and resources and creativity for stuff to do with kids that I hadn't thought of.

We couldn't really tell until the end of the second day that what they wanted was for us to do the exact same 2-day workshop with a bunch of parents that we were getting: Some vague stuff from the education schools about how children learn, circadian rhythms, the "multiple intelligences" idea which is just oh, so fashionable but when you look at Gardiner's premises and what he actually says (which we didn't) you can see that what he is saying is not only unprofound but untrue. Also on the morning of the second day, the instructors tried to take us from:

Structured inquiry....bad to

Guided inquiry....better to

Open-ended inquiry....the ideal, but usually not attainable

So in essence I pointed out that this is nonsense. "I have seen some of this kind of thing before," I pointed out to the group charmingly, sweeting, and pseudo-naively, "but I must say, I just can't see the point of what is being called "open inquiry." Sure, what we want is for kids to use their brain themselves and to want to do it, but that's not the same thing as is being promoted here. Kids NEED context, they NEED information, they NEED guidance. This kind of advocates throwing a kid into a situation with no preparation and then letting them get messy and dirty in whatever it is, without showing them how to focus their attention on some specific thing they could learn from. Let me tell you what the effect has been in mathematics with the way education has been promoting this exact same concept over the past 15-20 years, my husband has seen the effect close up...KIDS CAN'T DO MATH when they get to college..."

I will be proud of myself for getting the whole group so much on my side with this that the instructors are revising their presentation for that segment of the workshop. "What I'm hearing here is that people are coming to an agreement that guided inquiry is being seen as more the ideal than open-ended inquiry...is that right?" Heads nodded vigorously. "OK, we'll revisit this for the next group that we work with, in Chicago in May."

I have more to say here, but I will close with how much it struck me that

1) Science educators are so different from scientists.

2) How low their standards are both for parent involvement AND for how much scientific knowledge kids can absorb.

This fact-fact-FACT-oriented mom was appalled.

The easiest kid party ever, with the biggest payoff

We had an Easter egg hunt on Saturday, with 400 eggs and about 30 kids. It has to be the best kind of party to have ... preparation is a snap, and fun. Hosting it is a snap, and fun. It's short, only an hour, so it's not as though you're entertaining people endlessly, but everyone has a great time and then leaves to go off and do their own thing that day. They even put their candy trash in the bags and the eggs in the big box once they've opened them up. This party gives the biggest bang for the buck because it doesn't matter how many kids you have, you can always accommodate more. And it's a great way to reciprocate for having been guests at other peoples' houses, you no longer feel like you owe them one. And YOUR kids get to be the ones with the cool annual Easter egg hunt.

We did it in the freezing cold snow flurries, and every one still had a blast. It only cost me the amount of about 10 bags of candy, 2 prizes for the gold and silver egg (fancy bubble-blowers) and $15 to rent a coffee urn for the weekend.

Here's the article on KidsOutAndAbout.com that got me to do this. The lady who wrote it actually gave me all of her old eggs, so I didn't even need to go out and buy eggs. That's how the whole article got started -- she asked me if I wanted her eggs, because her own kids were too old and the eggs were cluttering up the basement.

It was great. I highly recommend it. And nowadays, all the eggs are on sale, so go out and get them and prepare for next year.

Ella's Math EXPLOSION

Ella had a math explosion last weekend, a big one. First, she showed that she has mastered the concept of multiplication. If you ask her 6 x 8, for example, she'll figure it out, somehow, counting in her head. It's fairly amazing.

Then, we decided that she was ready to be introduced to X. And by god, that child loves X. x + 4 = 12? No problem, give me one harder. x - 3 = 15? Oh, come on, I need a harder one. x - 6 = 22 ... ok, that's hard enough. Um, maybe a little too hard! Ok, it's 28. Give me another! Another! Another! When I've been giving her a set of 12 problems for school, she gets through them in 5 minutes.

X is now Ella's best friend, and has been our constant companion for a week.

I love this.

Ella and reading

I feel so privileged to have such a front-seat row to the phenomenon of Ella's learning to read.

She's right there, perched on the edge, right at the cusp of it being easy.

It's still an effort, for the most part, but five things are characterizing this new stage:

1) She knows a LOT more words by sight. Sometimes I can't tell if she knows them by sight or knows them from context; regardless, she's reading a lot faster.

2) She is sounding out words much more quickly, sometimes, as with easy ones, so quickly that it does not cause a pause in her reading; words like "mud."

3) She is starting naturally to read signs when we're out and about. They are visible to her as words rather than as symbols.

4) When there is something to be read, she often (though not usually) stops me when I start reading it for her, and says, "No, I want to read it!" For our now-7-year-old friend Dario last year, that was the hallmark of his reading -- once he had it even a little, he wanted to do it. Ella has always, since she was a baby, had the philosophy, "Well, if someone else can do it for me, why not? Comfort is important, after all." She had that attitude about hiking, too, but even that is starting to change.

5) Ella is becoming willing, even eager, to hear chapter books without pictures read aloud. She has explained to me in the past that she can't see the pictures in her head for chapter books; in this way, she is very different from Madison at the same age. But now that we're listening to a lot of books-on-CD in the car, she's even happier to hear books than music. She loves hearing snippets of the Harry Potter books that Madison is reading (she's in the middle of book 5), and Ella loves the Harry Potter movies. We're listening to Emlyn's Moon right now, a tale set in Wales.

At one-month-before-6 with Madison, we had made our way through my reading all 19 of the original Boxcar Children series, and Madison was very motivated to learn to read them on her own. She was very skeptical that she could do it, but right at this age, she started to try it and that was it, she was off to the races and has never "needed" us to read to her since. I think Ella will be chronologically a little behind Madison, but not too far. She likes the Boxcars, but she's in no way obsessed with them as Madison was.

A New Timeline

We started a new timeline last week: Western Culture, 1450-2001. It's 11 feet long, as opposed to the 115-foot long timeline we were able to have snaking through the basement of our last house. But that one had to cover 4.6 billion years of earth's history, this one just needs to cover 550 years.

The girls absolutely love the timeline, and I think it will help with the Birthday of the Day, too. Last week, we colored in 2-cm-wide strips at the top of the timeline to represent the main intellectual/historical movements: Reformation, Renaissance, Elizabethan Era, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Computer Age. We put the main American wars on there, too.

Early this morning, I started finding images of great people...past Birthdays of the Day, plus people I just thought should be on there. I have the next 14 days of B of the D too, so they can paste them on sometime during the relevant mornings. We had a terrific time doing about 10 of them this morning. We only have every 50 years marked off on the calendar, and Ella can't get her mind around estimating where, say, 1867 is on the timeline. Madison is fine, though, but I still think I might do a light bar marking every 10 years.

I'll be working on this Word document gradually, because it does take time to find the images and resize them and put the names and dates on, but anyone is welcome to the document once I have a lot of people on, if you want to do your own timeline. It will be a real handy shortcut.

I wish I could find my camera, this would make a good picture to post!

Sorry I've been absent

I've been extremely busy. I've started a computer class at RIT on Mondays and Wednesdays from 4-6. It's an advanced web database programming class, and it's hard and I'm mostly lost but still hanging on by my fingertips. Actually, the "hard" stuff isn't what's hard for me -- it's the not-knowing-how-to-log-into-the-RIT-system and do the common things that students have been doing for years by this time, like creating directories and using their special text editors and stuff like that. So it leaves me trying not to whisper to the 20-year-old next to me to say, "OK, how do you log on to this thing?" and trying to figure out whether the "create folder" is the old DOS command "md" (for "make directory"...it's not, turns out it's mkdir...these are the things that are stymieing me).

But other than the RIT system fussing, it's going relatively smoothly, even with juggling the girls' schedule.

And up until late last week, so was the rest of life.

"You know, we're really settling in here," said David on Friday morning. "Life is finally calm, and good. We're happy."

The words were still hanging in the air. like in a balloon attached to his mouth, like in a cartoon.

And then at 10:30 I got a call from my dear friend Patrick, whom I dated in college and with whom I'm still very close. He's a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I see him every few years when I have a reason to be in Cleveland. A bit over 5 years ago, he was in a horrible accident and in a coma for many days. He still has lingering physical problems from that. The call from his girlfriend in October 2001, when no one knew if he'd live or die, really sucked.

This time, the call was from Patrick, and it really sucked, too.

"I've got colon cancer," he said.

He's 37, damn it.

He sent me an email with a jpg of his colon. Amazing what the technology can do these days. I like this kind of stuff, so does he. It would be absolutely fascinating if only that thing blocking about 1/3 of his colon weren't freaking inside him.

He meets with the oncologist tomorrow, Monday. They're going to resection (i.e., take out) a big chunk of his colon very soon, then they'll know whether it's spread, what stage it's at, etc. And what are his chances.

My MD friend William sent me some statistics. If it's only Stage 2 cancer then he has a 2/3 shot at living more than 5 years. Apparently, that's really good statistics for cancer in general. On the other hand, if you're interested in, say, living more than 5 years, then it pretty much sucks. A 33% chance of NOT being alive in 5 years. Fuck.

It's a damned good thing there is no Master Puppeteer or I'd be one angry, angry person right now.

Dr. Seuss's birthday, March 2

It's Dr. Seuss's birthday. And there's nothing more fun for a parent than to hear the 7-year-old who is missing her two front teeth reading Fockth In Thockth to her younger thithter as her out-loud reading for the day.

Reading and potty-training: Connection?

When Ella was 2, she was having none of this potty-training stuff. She wasn't rude about it, or even vehement, she was just my happy little comfort-loving kid. Her attitude was: "No, thanks. Doin' just fine. Diapers are easy and convenient, I'm stickin' with what I know." No response to my mild hints like "well, when you're a Big Girl you'll learn to use the potty." She was perfectly happy to be a little girl and have someone else take care of the diaper.

Then, one day, four days after she turned three, she decided to wear underpants. And never put the diapers on again (during the day). No fanfare or anything, just a decision she made quietly.

I'm thinking the reading has been like this for her.

Ella can read. Two weeks ago, she finished Set Five of the EPS Phonics Series, reading one 16-page book per day. So what I decided was that we would start way back at the beginning, Set Two, and let her read again through the whole series.

It turned out to be a good idea. She sat down and read four of the Set Two books the first day. She knows she gets a prize when she finishes all four sets of books. But she was motivated to read so many in a day because it's now easy for her. She can remember very clearly when she read the first series -- it took her 17 days to get through the 10 books. But now...four in a day...in 15 minutes! without any struggle or difficulty. She didn't even mind reading them to herself, rather than to me...she did that for the next two days, "getting her reading done" on her own, asking me if a particular word stymied her. (The word "use" kept getting in her way.)

But what Ella has never done was made the effort to use her reading skills in real life. It's as though she lets the words from signs, from TV, from name brands written on the side of objects, just wash right over her without her trying to identify them at all. That's just something that "big kids" do, that Madison does, and Ella has never seen the need to push it, to be one of those "Big Kids" before she's ready. She knows she'll get there eventually, she has proof that it will happen in a sister who is 20 months older.

And now I'm wondering if yesterday doesn't constitute an "underpants" moment. Because she was looking at the maze game on the back of David's "Cap'n Crunch" breakfast cereal (when it's someone's birthday in our house, they get a box of sugary kiddie cereal to eat as long as it lasts), and was trying to figure it out. "Oh!" she suddenly said, startled. "That's the word START!"

I think she's starting to see the utility in this reading business after all.

Snuggle bunny is sick

We've all been so healthy for so long that I'd almost forgotten what it was like to have a sick child. Ella woke up sick yesterday, medium-fever and headache-sniffle sinus cold, which magically morphed into the vomiting kind yesterday afternoon. Work went out the window for both of them, even Madison, though I had projects to complete. So we spent the afternoon camped out on the bathroom floor -- me with my laptop on the floor trying to get some work done, Ella with my head in my lap and her body huddled in the towels and blankets placed strategically near the toilet, and Madison reading Harry Potter in the bath nearby. Everyone says how -- in a way -- cute it is when kids get sick because they get so darned snuggly and I-want-no-one-else-but-Mommy, but Ella is like that all the time and so it wasn't really anything different in that realm.

It's interesting, I'm not really inclined to go near most other people when they're sick just out of interest of not catching it myself. But there is no way I'm in the least inclined to apply the same logic to my kids. Kick the kid out of my bed because she's sick and her sleeping with me radically increases the possibility of my getting sick too? No way! She stays! If I had to choose between her getting me sick and my avoiding her when she's sick, there's no contest whatsoever. It's a visceral thing, not even a logical one. I guess it's a beneficial evolutionary instinct.

It was a great day for her to be sick, though, because we had a snowstorm and everything was canceled -- for us it was piano and soccer -- and so I sent David to work in the Subaru and we just stayed put the whole day. In the bathroom.

We had a wild night last night, though, with her awake at various points in my bed, then in her bed, more medicine required, etc. But I anticipated that so I went to bed at 9:15. She's now awake, hoarse, snuggled in my lap as I type around her. Maybe we'll even get some work done today.

I hope Madison doesn't get it.

Snuggle School

Ella gets up early, but loves to snuggle in bed with me in the mornings. Sometimes she's silent while I doze, sometimes we whisper together. This morning, I thought she was singing under her breath, so I asked her to sing me a song. Turns out she was doing math problems, designing addition problems for herself and working them out. We spent a little while counting by tens, and also experimenting with larger numbers, counting FROM the larger number up rather than starting at #1. She had kind of known this before, but I could see it really clicked for her this morning: She now has a method for doing, say, 43 + 9, and it's EASY. She wanted to do math techniques in bed for over half an hour. Who am I to argue.

Our LIW commemoration yesterday

Every day at breakfast, we talk about someone whose birthday is that day. David and I try to choose a very positive person, but if that's not possible, then we choose someone they should know about from a cultural literacy perspective. Then, around the dinner table, the girls get a nickel for each fact they remember from the morning. One of our measurements to help them orient the person in time always is, "Was he born before or after Laura Ingalls Wilder (in 1867)?"

Well, yesterday WAS Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthday, the 140th anniversary of her birth. So it was an easy one to remember. Madison got 12 nickels and Ella got 8, both all-time records.

If it's appropriate, I try to have one or more activities during the day that hearken back to the Birthday of the Day so it helps them remember who it was. Today, of course, they didn't need any help! We read from Little House in the Big Woods, we bought turnips and made them as part of our dinner (universal Yucks, including from the grownups, but maybe I didn't cook them well) and then after dinner we made Mother Wilder's doughnuts out of the Laura Ingalls Wilder cookbook...to great acclaim. Madison hypothesized that maybe life wasn't so hard after all, back then. Even with the turnips and all.


P.S. Today is William Tecumseh Sherman's birthday. I wonder what I can do in his honor...burn the dinner?

Just a squirrel on a branch

One of home schooling's beautiful moments:

Madison was in her room early in the morning, reading. I was downstairs, working.

She came into the room. "Come quick, mom, you have to see this, but be quiet and move slowly when you get to my room."

We lay on her bed with our heads at just the right angle, and we could see a squirrel outside in the freezing (FREEZING! 4 degrees!) cold, on a branch, eating a nut. His tail was curled back over the top of his back.

"I saw him digging for the nut. When he found it, he just ran up to that branch and he's been eating it ever since. I bet that nut tastes extra good, on such a cold, cold day, don't you think? At first, I thought he looked like a porcupine, because his tail was on his back like that, but then I realized he's a squirrel. Isn't he cute? Do you think he's cold? Why do you think he didn't bring it back to his nest...do you think he just wanted to eat it before any other squirrels noticed it?"

Then she stopped talking, and we watched the squirrel. Just watched, silently.

Then we went downstairs and ate breakfast. The pancakes tasted extra good, on such a cold, cold day.

A lot of work recently - mine, that is

It's been a real struggle to fit all my work in amongst all of the kids' stuff. I am working on some cool projects, which has slung me into thorough mental conflict all morning long; as the girls do their work, I can't get enough time to myself to get up any real momentum for my own stuff. I get it done, but it takes a lot longer than it would if I just had some solid minutes.

Let me also be perfectly honest about this: My work is more interesting to me than Madison's conversion of fractions into decimals, Ella's careful rendering of a cursive E, or the fact that today would be Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthday.

I love my work. But it involves a lot of keeping up with details for a lot of people, in addition to requiring a lot of thinking work on my own. And everyone needs "little fixes" on their reports. When these come in over the wire (so to speak), if I don't do them right away, then they get lost. So I try to do them right away.

So, often, too often it seems, I am putting my kids "on hold." Oh, you're done with that math? Ok, I'll look at it as soon as I'm done with this (and this and this if I can squeeze them in), why don't you start your handwriting?

And, often, too often it seems, I'm putting my clients "on hold." They understand, but no one is particularly thrilled about the "No, sorry, in the mornings after 9:15 until lunch I'm pretty taken up with the kids' work. Oh...and the afternoons? They're worse because I'm driving them all over creation to Spanish, chess, sign language, karate, dance, Brownie events, nature class, etc. How about between 12:30 and 1pm on Thursday? Or between 8:30 and 10:30pm on Wednesday? Or from 7:30-8:30am on Friday? Or I can get you on my cell when they're at karate, but I can't be in front of a computer then. Otherwise you'll just have to email me."

Yesterday, we were at their Spanish class, which they have at a friends' house in Pittsford. We went early because the other kids all had the day off of school due to excessive cold (!), and they hoped my kids could come over early and play. We were there more than 2 1/2 hours, and all that was going on in my mind when I was having a grown-up chat with Monica was how if I were in front of the computer, I'd be able to spend the time working on this and this and this, and oh geez I almost forgot THIS. And the schoolroom needs organizing, it's become a dumping ground because it's too cold to work in. And why is it that people keep wearing clothes...and then PUTTING THEM IN THE HAMPER which means they need washing. Why not wear the stuff two or three days?

At least I've been fairly successful about keeping the evenings for a nice dinner and some time with David.

But a good book, I'd kill for the time to read a good book. One that doesn't involve Harry or Hermione, not that I begrudge Ms. Rowling...there is a David Hackett Fisher history book that is calling me. Madison and I haven't worked on her chapter book in weeks. Or paint, I'd desperately love to paint. I have a wonderful photograph of Letchworth Park that I'd like to replicate in paint for the area above the fireplace in Tatiana's new house.

But the next thing that is coming up that will be when I get a stretch of time is TAXES. Have to get all my records together from last year. First I have to set up files from the move, haven't done that yet.

You know what really gets me? I know everyone will want to reassure me about this, because it sounds ridiculous from the outside, but really and truly I'm LAZY. Yes, I somehow manage to get all of this done which looks all good on paper and all. But I spend far too much time on the internet, reading other homeschooling or friends' or political blogs, time that could be spend filing or doing laundry or planning meals or even reading or painting. I can't even justify my internet time as particularly edifying, it's more a way of escaping from all of the details chasing me. I feel so guilty, thinking about how much I'd REALLY get done if I actually made the most efficient use of my time. I would rather be painting than lazily clicking through from one blog to the next, why don't I do it?

On the other hand, when I step back, I'm perfectly happy with what I've been able to accomplish in the last year. So go figure.

While you do that, I'm going back to decimals, and the way OW has two different sounds in English.

Early morning ZZZZZZ

I went to wake Madison up this morning, as it was 8:45 and she still wasn't up, and I didn't want to start a cycle where she'd be up late at night.

I snuggled in next to her.

"I love these Mommy-and-Madison moments," I began.

"Well, let's have a WHOLE LOT of them, right now," she mumbled, burrowing further under the covers.

Story writing

It is so interesting how removing just one single impediment to the production process can really open the floodgates.

Madison had a project for Brownies, to get her "Her-story" badge: She had to write and illustrate a fractured fairy tale, set in modern times. This was assigned three weeks ago, to be completed for last night's meeting.

The resistance was amazing, and this from my little story writer. For "writer," though, you should probably substitute "composer," because the mechanics of writing and spelling absolutely still get in the way of her being able to say what she wants to say. It all ends up being an extremely frustrating experience.

So I had her do the first page one day for cursive handwriting practice -- this was considerably before my revelation the other day about how she was holding the pencil incorrectly -- but it really was only a small fraction of what she wanted to say.

So at the beginning of the week, with the deadline looming, I asked her if she actually wanted to do this. Remember, a badge is involved. She said yes, then no, then changed her mind to yes. That competitive, measurement-oriented child really loves the badges. So I set her up with her computer.

So here's the thing: After working at it (not without enjoyment) for an hour, she came down and showed me what she'd done. And then she told me the rest of the story. I realized that we were either in for 10 hours of painstaking typing and spell-checking, or I could type it for her.

So she narrated "The Real Story of Cinderella." I typed. It's on 15 pages, with about 3-4 sentences per page, and it's FUNNY. Cinderella had an attitude, she never applied herself to anything except her nails and her TV shows. Her mother was worried that if she went to the ball, she'd end up married to the king's son, who was an equal space cadet, and then the kingdom would be in trouble. She thought the ball would be boring, but after everyone left of course THEN it became appealing, so she peremptorily summoned her fairy godmother out of retirement and got a carriage. The prince wasn't handsome enough for her, so she ran away from him, but fortunately found her perfect match, a man who was both rich AND handsome.

Then she illustrated each page, and was very proud of the result.

She read it out loud at the Brownie meeting last night, apparently to great acclaim. She told me in the car that she intends to write some sequels, and when we got home, she tried to sequester herself in the attic room where her computer is so she could do just that. But it was bedtime.

Guess what she'll be doing for school, today.

Graphing the lemonade stand

From Deb:

Inspired by Raymond's real-life marble business, Madison has been talking a lot about the lemonade stand she will have someday. She'd do it right now, but January in Rochester is not the most auspicious time to have a lemonade stand. She plans to do it at RIT, get sponsored by the math club there, and share half the profits with them. What self-respecting college student, she figures, wouldn't buy a quarter's worth of lemonade from a cute little blonde-haired girl?

Madison talks about the lemonade stand all the time, so I decided to make it our math project for a couple of days. I pretended she already had the stand, and had done it for two weeks. I said that I had given her $10 in quarters to start out, and then gave her the sum total of the cash drawer for each day of the two weeks of the business. From this, she first figured out her sales for each day (subtraction with decimals), then the number of glasses she'd sold each day (division), then the number of glasses she'd sold total (long addition). Then, given that it costed $.05/glass to make the lemonade, the profit (.20 x # glasses sold...and we also did it a different way, with multiplication of fractions: 4/5 of the sales was profit).

And then...she graphed total sales, sales per day, and glasses per day. She loves the graphing. And, I was stunned at this. She graphed sales per day, first, and noticed the zigzags, because some days she had more sales than others. And then, she graphed glasses sold per day, and noticed that the graph was the exact same pattern. Then, she graphed total sales, and at first expected that this graph, too, would be the same pattern. But then it was not. And then, she looked carefully at WHAT it was she was graphing, and explained perfectly why the first two graphs were the same graph, while the total sales couldn't be (specifically, it couldn't go down, she said, it always must go up, unless you spend the money in the middle of the time). Yes!

We're now graphing daily snow levels thanks to the great snow ruler our friends Tom and Susan gave us.

Sorry, Laura, but Madison likes this so much better than Saxon Math.