My baby is 7!

Ella Simone Ross

Born: April 29, 2001
Where: Highland Hospital, Rochester, NY
Named after: Ella Fitzgerald, and “Simone” from Kay Nolte Smith’s book A Tale of the Wind
Nicknames: Baby Bunny, Ella Bunny, La
First School: Trinity Montessori
Second School: Pantops Mountain Montessori
Current School: Home school
Favorite color: Pink
Favorite toy: Snuggles, her stuffed bunny
Favorite food: Pizza or Chinese food
Best friend: Dario
Favorite subject: Logic
Second favorite subject: Reading
Favorite books: Fairy chapter book series
Loves: Dancing, singing, karate
Makes up stories when she’s asleep
Makes up songs when she’s awake
Favorite thing to do: Snuggle with her mom, dance
Favorite birthday gift: iPod

Spring Fever

Spring fever has hit us big-time this week. It's been kind of hard to be immensely productive...the beautiful weather outside keeps beckoning and I keep relenting. I keep telling myself that as long as we're making bits of progress, combined with the fact that we're pretty far ahead, it's ok. I taught Madison absolute value in about five minutes on Tuesday and David has been making progressively harder problems for her to solve and it's gone well. Absolute value is one of those things that is easy to teach initially, but apparently really trips up his college students when they have to actually use it in more complicated situations. Ella and I have been doing general multiplication work for the last month, and we decided that this was the week for her to buckle down and memorize. So she's done the 5's and the 2's this week. A bribe with a dollar for when she's done a set of 10 has totally worked.

We've been reading a nice kids' version of The Odyssey, a set of 10 illustrated books I picked up at the free book giveaway that the Rochester City School District does every year with books they're getting rid of. Madison wrote a report of sorts -- really a photo-essay -- of our trip to Boston. Madison has been working through an "Editor-in-Chief" workbook from Critical Minds and, while she doesn't love it like she loves their logic books, at least she's managing and it's self-teaching her some grammar and punctuation and capitalization. Ella has a nice logic workbook that is just a hair too advanced for her reading level, but she's stumbling through it. And her reading is going great -- what a difference from the beginning of the year! She still doesn't want to read chapter books on her own, really, but last night read about 4 picture books to me in bed.

I need to get another "Handwriting without Tears" set of cursive books, for both of them. We haven't been doing handwriting at all.

We've had Spring Fever in another way, this week, though. Ella started throwing up Monday night and while that ended around 4 on Tuesday morning, she's been mildly under the weather ever since. And last night I starting thinking I might have strep; it was a miserable night and not much better this morning. I'm going to go to the urgent care place later this morning and get a strep test to see if antibiotics should be my friend for the next 10 days. Who needs a Primary Care Physician when the urgent care is right down the street for a lot less waiting? Of course, it was rather nice of Mother Nature to hit us with this after the Boston trip and before Ella's birthday next week.

Next project: Reorganize the school room downstairs so we actually want to, you know, do some schoolwork in it.

Saturday was still in Boston

We had a marvelous Saturday in Boston.

First we went on a Duck Tour all around the city -- and in the Charles River.




Then we went to Lexington & Concord. And that was the BEST. Both girls were old enough to be interested and engaged and not get too tired. Saturday was April 19 and the 233rd anniversary of the big battle. I'd prepared the girls well for it, the ride of Paul Revere and then the battle and the Shot Heard Round the World and all that, so they had some place to put all of the information we got and see the actual places where things happened. We took a long history trolley ride (LibertyRide) through both towns.



This was good because Ella would never have hacked a long hike through Minuteman National Historic Park, she can only go so far and then she's had it...whereas Madison is Hiker Adventure Baby and can go farther than you'd imagine.

Then we saw a battle re-enactment in Lexington, the part of the day at the end where the colonials harassed the Regulars all the way back to Boston.



So, so, so cool. The girls loved the battle. Ella even decided to call David in the middle of it so that he could hear the guns booming in the background.



We wound up the day with dinner at a great inn, a family atmosphere but very nice and very colonial, with really good food: Concord's Colonial Inn.



I love this age. I would go back to Lexington and Concord with my family in...well, in a minute.

Here are some random photos from the trip.

This is the group on the steps next to Faneuil Hall.



Here is the choir singing in the Massachusetts State House.



Here they are in the Old North Church. One really cool thing is that today's "Fetch with Ruff Ruffman" had some of the kids on the Freedom Trail in Boston, including at the Old North Church right where we were. Ella called me in to the TV room, so excited. "They're on the Freedom Trail in Boston!" Don't you love when they make those wonderful connections with things that they've done?



Outside the New England Aquarium. I found the Aquarium not to be that great a deal, considering it's a 2-3-hour tops place.



The Museum of Science was a much better deal. It's an incredible place. We were there for almost 4 hours and only got to about 1/3 of it. And they had a whole room dedicated to math.



The Swan Boats in the Public Garden! Where Louis the Swan led with his trumpet and made $100!

233 years ago RIGHT THIS MINUTE

...Paul Revere was on the other side of the Charles River from me, galloping like heck toward Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams that 700 British Regulars were turning out to, among other things, arrest them.

They got away in a carriage.

And today, my beautiful girl sang an American songs repertoire there at the Old North Church with the rest of the Bach Children's Chorus.

The performance was beautiful, although it followed a miserable little presentation about the church by a college girl who looked as if the group of us was an interruption to the rest of her day, who gave her schpiel with both boredom and resentment in her eyes, and who DIDN'T EVEN MENTION that today was the anniversary of The Day. It was so awful that I'm going to write a letter.

But I digress.

The kids also sang at the Massachusetts State House this morning. That was fantastic, the acoustics were beautiful, and they also gave us a wonderful tour. The kids were in tip-top form today, aside from the fact that at both concerts someone fainted...the first one, at the Massachusetts State House, was a bona fide fainting, the poor girl in the second row toppled right down off the steps in the middle of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

This was fortunate for me only, in that I was sitting in the front, and I SHOULD have remembered to sit in the back because The Battle Hymn of the Republic never fails to set me weeping. This version is worse, in a way, because they separate the boys off to the side, and they sing one verse themselves, "I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps..." I always hear their not-yet-changed voices and think of all of the young men lost to the Civil War before they had a chance to be men, and I lose it. Well, the young lady in question fainted just as the boys had started their verse, and she saved me the embarrassment of weeping right in front of everyone where all the kids could see. After they ascertained that the girl was okay and was being seen to by a doctor, they started the song again and this time I was distracted enough that I didn't start crying.

This started out about Madison and ended up about me. Ah, well.

We went to the Boston Museum of Science for an afternoon of pure fun. The Museum of Science is FANTASTIC, we didn't even get to do half of it in three hours. I would go back in a heartbeat, it beats the pants off the New England Aquarium, which the girls and I did yesterday morning. They have a whole big great room called Mathematica, which is all about you guessed it. Marvelous.

An hour ago, I gave my exhausted kids the option of hearing The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere tonight or going right to sleep. They chose sleep. I chose blog.

Off to a Boston Duck Tour with the rest of the BCC in the morning, and then Minuteman National Historic Park tomorrow, just the three of us, in the afternoon. It's The Big Day, April 19, so there should be a lot of Minutemen running around doing re-enactments. The park stretches between Lexington and Concord.

Note from a college junior

I received a note from a local college junior today. Her writing is bad enough for me to assume that she must be a product of public school. Anyway, she is doing a project for her "Diversity" (ugh) course, which seeks to answer whether home schooled kids have opportunities for interacting with kids from other cultures blah blah blah:

...This semester my Diversity course involves my peers and I to create a Diversity Project in which we attack an issue of social justice that is present today.... I was wondering if there was anyone that I could interview on their opinion about home schooling and whether or not home schooling allows children to still gain experience in interacting with other children of different cultures.

Among other things, I wrote the following to her:

...I must register a small objection, though, to the way you phrased your question...

It sounds as though you're claiming that sending kids to their neighborhood school or a private school DOES allow children good exposure to kids of other cultures. I don't think it does. I think that in general going to school restricts kids from the proper exposure to kids from other backgrounds. Even in cases where there seems to be a diversity of cultural background in the school, kids often see other kids voluntary segregating themselves on the basis of background -- which gives kids totally the WRONG message about the way the world should be. Home schooled kids tend to interact with others on a more one-to-one basis, driving home Dr. King's message about interaction being about the content of one's character, not about the melanin percentage in one's skin or who one's ancestors were.

Ego bruised but bearing up pretty well

I went to a children's book writer's conference today. Twenty participants ripped the first page of The Frontier Team to shreds. Bruising, but good. I've spent the last hour shaping it up, and I think it's a good deal better for the whole experience.

Funny how hearing the first few paragraphs read out loud is SO different from reading it on the page. I recommend it, partly as an exercise in fortitude, but mostly as a way to find a new angle of objectivity.

So...as little as I enjoy joining groups, I think I'm going to try to join a small children's writer's group that's here in Rochester, which meets frequently so members can read each others' stuff and comment.

Madison must get glasses

We went to the optometrist yesterday, as the pediatrician's office had recommended it at Madison's evaluation in January.

Boo hiss. She not only has my color eyes, she has my eyes all through. Crap. She needs glasses. She's not too upset, fortunately, although if you ask her she'll put on a little grumping act about it.

I haven't acted at all negative about it with her, of course, but I'm very unhappy about this. I know what it's like to have crummy vision, to have had declining vision through most of my life. My corneas are too thin for lasik surgery, too. I hate waking up in the morning not being able to see. I hate fumbling for my glasses. And I'm sad she'll have to go through it, too.

My beautiful baby's beautiful eyes.

Mariposario: School Today

I have written tens of thousands of words about what educating the girls at home means to our family, but I think this photo says it all much better than I could:



Ella is reading her new book, one of "The Littles" books, and Madison is helping her with the big words. Peanut butter crackers, a book, a flat rock, the early spring sun, and a sister. What could be better?

The Gala went well

The absolute focus of my life for the last several weeks, the Bach Children's Chorus Fundraising Gala, was last night. It went well, although I have lots of things I would change if I were in charge of the way the Gala is run. I would run it like Donald Heath used to run a seminar, like carefully painting a picture, with hours of careful thought and design for every step. That's ok, though, I don't want to run it or anything. And my contributions really were important.

I would say (and Madison would agree with me) that the kids were a little off their game in the concert. But they also had a terrific 6-man a capella group called The Bow Ties who gave their own performance, and also sang Lida Rose with both the Bach and Mozart Choruses. One of the Bow Ties' songs is still running through my head: "Easter Island Head," which apparently originated with an a capella group called Throat Culture.

I want a head like the heads you see on Easter Island.

I could only find one instance of this song on YouTube, which is of a young men's group at Melbourne High School, where ever that is. It's still funny, but not nearly as funny as the version from the Bow Ties. But still worth seeing.

Anyway, the Gala is done. And now life A.G. can commence. Gotta finish up my taxes.

Chip off the old block...

That's a bad title for a wonderful morning.

I've been quiet recently because I've been VERY busy -- the girls' choir fundraising gala is on Saturday and I feel all my spare time has been going into securing and actually collecting about 60 of the 99 items we ultimately got donated. And taxes. And some clients are really pushing lately. Everything else in life seems to have been pushed to A.G. (After Gala).

Not quite everything. I had a talk to give this morning to a local Mothers of Preschoolers group (MOPS), about 40 moms who meet in a nearby church. The topic we agreed on was Preschoolers Out and About: A Five Senses Tour of Rochester. They asked me to speak back in October. So, of course, I started writing the talk at 3:45pm yesterday during the girls' karate class.

At some point, my confidence in my ability to whip together things like this at the last minute is going to back up on me and I'm going to be in Big Trouble. But not today, fortunatley. The hard part wasn't putting together the ideas, they kind of wrote themselves, all I had to do was introduce the talk with a "Why go out and about?" section (mainly cultural literacy) and "Tips for going out and about with preschoolers" (preparation, food, potty radar, etc.). Then I divided all the great places to go in Rochester into which of the five senses they emphasized. The actual ideas only took me sporadic work until 8pm. But then I realized I needed pictures, photos of the places, which expanded my 10-page Powerpoint into a 35-page Powerpoint. There I was still at 1am this morning searching through old photo files and downloading stuff from the web to insert. But it was a pretty neat thing, and I can turn it into an article too so that's double the bonus.

But I digress. This wasn't supposed to be about me, but about Madison.

The girls came along to the presentation, too, of course, happy to get Yet Another Morning Off of school. Ella helped out in the little kids' room while I gave the 45-minute presentation, but I asked Madison to work the computer, advancing the Powerpoint documents. She was honored.

And she was great!

Because not only did Madison happily sit up there in front of a roomful of women and work the computer, but she slid so naturally into helping me give the talk that I was amazed. At one point fairly early on, I asked her to confirm something I was saying about her experience with a particular place, and she elaborated on it so clearly, so articulately, and so effortlessly...the audience started murmuring with pleasure (of course they would, they're all moms).

And so we developed a kind of rhythm--when it was appropriate, I'd bring her into the presentation, she'd say a sentence or two, and then stop and advance the slide for me. She was happy to do it, and confident, and good. Really GOOD. She talked about how I pined away for Wegmans when we were in Virginia, and got the appropriate laughs from the audience. I think she experienced for the first time the Buzz that comes from an appreciative audience that is riveted by your words. It's addictive. Her participation absolutely made my presentation all the more warmly received by the audience.

When I think about it, it's not particularly shocking, as this child has been talking since she was six months old and has never been shy about it. But boy, were the two of us pleased at how well it went. I'm going to go out of my way to find more experiences where the two of us can do this together. Who knows, if the book takes off...I can see us doing the author presentations together on The Tour. (I know, I know...but one should dream big if one dreams at all, right?)

I took the girls out to lunch at Red Lobster to celebrate. I looked across the table at my beautiful daughter, and thought to myself that someday she'll be able to smile and reminisce, "I started giving talks with my mom when I was just eight years old. It was at a church on Browncroft Boulevard..." I saw in my mind's eye all of the presentations that are in her future, and all of the people who will feel the impact of her mind, and felt awed.

This little light of mine...

...I'm going to let it shine.

All of them, in the downstairs, in fact, from 8pm-9pm.

Rational Jenn and John Enright and Chris O'Donnell and I'm sure a gazillion others have saved me the trouble of having to write an actual blog post about this nonsense.

Math problem on the clock!

About six months ago, Madison started to notice when the numbers on the digital clock on the stove and on the TV were displayed in patterns that would make a math problem. Such as, 8:42 or 12:36. And Ella now does it with as much vigor as Madison, so much so that any conversation at dinner is likely to be interrupted several times with:

"MATH PROBLEM ON THE CLOCK!"

It is almost a competion of who can notice it first. And if they happen to miss the opportunity, one or more will inevitably say, "There was a math problem on the clock two minutes ago." You can see that it gets to be a nuisance around the lunch hour: 12:20, 12:21, 12:22, 12:23, 12:24, 12:25, and 12:26 all make equations with nothing additional required.

And then this morning, we were reading together for the girls' book club next week, when Ella suddenly noticed that we were on page 242 and called out, "Math problem in the BOOK!"

It might get annoying if it weren't indicative of such HEALTHY minds.

Happy birthday, Robert Frost

Robert Frost would be 134 today if he were still alive.

He's our favorite.

Madison's is The Road Not Taken. Ella says she likes them all. My favorite poem is Birches.

We're getting birches to plant this spring, from a client of mine, FastGrowingTrees.com. I hope they grow fast enough that someone can swing on them before she grows up.

I painted birches last month as I was craving spring:



I'm still craving spring. So here is Frost's "To The Thawing Wind."

To The Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Baaaaaa...?

A very strange thing happened to me yesterday evening...I discovered that some of my relatives not only do not suck, but are positively delightful, sensible people.

I had fled my crazy, hostile, narcissistic nuclear family over the course of the 1990s...I gave them the option to treat me nicely or not at all, and each of the three in turn chose not at all. Saying I fled from them means I pretty much made sure that once they had chosen that course, I had no contact with them...which meant that of course I had no contact with the rest of the extended family, either. I hadn't had much contact with THEM since the '70s and early '80s anyway, so it wasn't like it was a real value I was losing.

Well, two of my first cousins, girls who are in their late 40s (though they'll always be 18 and 19 to me) and their kids visited us last night along the way on a little trip to Niagara Falls. OH MY GOSH, it turns out they are some of the nicest, sensible, cheerful people I know.

And their kids! I didn't know what to expect, because although my cousin Linda sounded awfully nice on email, you never know how that all translates...and it often tells in the kids. They brought Linda's 14-year-old son, and Trish's 14-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. The kids...I so hoped they wouldn't be mumbling mouth-breathers, you know what I mean. The parents' real way of living usually tells in the kids...and the kids were WONDERFUL. The 14-year-old boy smiles and looks you in the eye (!!!!!) and talks about the way math is taught in schools, and comments that he really likes your paintings, and in a genuine way, not in a polite way. The girl smiles through all her braces at your daughters, and everyone participates with glee in the Egg Hunt that your daughters have set up throughout the house in anticipation of their arrival. And the 8-year-old wants to be a writer and he has Webkinz and Club Penguin accounts, they all play together SO nicely.

I don't know what to do with this information, I don't know where to put it yet, how to fit it into my world view: I may not be The White Sheep of the family after all, my parents and sister may be the black sheep. It's a disruption of a simpler view I had of life, and it's taking some time to know how to absorb it.

Free to Be She and She

Laura sent me a comment on the "Twins" photo below to the effect that she thinks that home schooling helps siblings be better friends -- and want to be more alike even to the point of dressing alike -- because they aren't exposed to the, as Laura put it, "age/grade level snobbery that would keep them from enjoying dressing alike."

I think this is so true.

I thought about it all this afternoon. I think, frankly, that being free from school frees the kids from the ugly or even not-so-ugly pressure to conform to the expectations of the lowest common denominator of that age group. It leaves them free to be exactly themselves, without in any sense being shaped by the expectations of other kids.

Take music. My kids like ALL kinds of music. Ella even likes dancing to music that David and I don't care for (rap/hip-hop). Ella's favorite varies between jazz and rock, but it's classical that really sets her on her ballet toes. She says her favorite jazz is Clifford Brown. Both girls love putting on loud Latin music. They've both been singing the Broadway songs that Madison has been learning in her musical theater class ("We Go Together" from Grease and "Clouds" from Snoopy). Both girls still like much of the better kids' music (especially SteveSongs), although things with characters (like Sesame Street) have fallen by the wayside as they've aged.

But think...if they were in school, the other kids would almost certainly think it was odd that they like all kinds of music. They'd certainly feel a pressure to drop kids' music, jazz, Latin, etc. in favor of Hannah Montana.

Take the whole boy-girl thing. Even when Madison was in first grade at the early elementary classes at the Montessori school in Charlottesville, she learned this gem:

Boys go to college to get more knowledge.
Girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

(Also chanted, of course, in the reverse.)

And even Dario (who goes to public school), who loves the girls better than cousins, wrote on Flat Dario's T-shirt:

BOYS RULE SO MUCH.

This doesn't happen with home schoolers, so far as I've seen. There certainly may be boys and girls playing in same-sex groups because interests line up, but there isn't the odd teasing "other-ness" accorded to the other sex in the same way that there is when you send your kids to be educated by other kids.

By being educated at home, the girls get to like what they like -- and who they like -- without any kind of even vague censure. And it extends to all aspects of life. No home schooler I've ever met comments on someone else's clothes or anything like that. They know there are many more important things to talk about. Like books. Or sports. Or whatever. And almost every kid I've met is not just polite about these kinds of things, but interested in the other kid's opinions.

And the sisters? Well, they get to just LIKE each other. As they've been singing, together lately (and incessantly):

"We go together
Like rama-lama-lama, ka dingity ding de dong."

And a nice photo of the girls

Madison and Ella are in a stage where they like to dress up as twinnish as possible, sometimes. They even made up a song and dance about "being twins." So Ella was thrilled when we went to Lu's Back Door last week and found these great matching dresses in just their sizes.



Obviously I'm prejudiced here, but don't they look just beautiful?

Flat Dario

In his second-grade class, the girls' friend Dario (son of Tony and Tatiana, our dear friends) is doing a project modeled after the book Flat Stanley, to help teach them geography. All of the kids in the class made cardboard representations of themselves, and mailed it to a friend or family member in another state or country. We of course were the friends. Our job was to take Flat Dario around Rochester and take photos with him. Here they are.

At the Rochester Museum & Science Center's Planetarium:


At the RMSC's garden:


At the George Eastman House:


At Kodak (where Tony used to work):


On the shore of Lake Ontario:


By Irondequoit Creek:


And, finally, in front of Dario's old house in Webster:

All this fuss...over a fish!

Madison and I worked for over an hour on helping her get the German song "Die Forelle" in somewhat working order for the Bach Children's Chorus. Somewhere in the middle, I thought we could go look up the translation of the words on the web.

It's Schubert, right? So I thought that it would be about something grand about Art or Love or Peace or something.

Nope. It's about a trout.

Yep. This:

In einem Bächlein helle, da schoss in froher Eil
Die launische Forelle vorüber wie ein Pfeil.
Ich stand an dem Gestade und sah in süsser Ruh
Des muntern Fischleins Bade im klaren Bächlein zu

Means this:

In a clear brooklet in happy haste
The impulsive trout dashed past like an arrow.
I stood on the bank and watch in sweet repose
The bath of the lively small fish in the clear brooklet.

There are five more additional paragraphs about a fisherman stirring up the brook to make it muddy. This seems to help him catch the fish:

He made the stream muddy maliciously
And I thought, his rod quivered
The fish, the fish was wriggling on it,
And I, with my blood boiling, looked at the duped

All this fuss over a freaking fish. Sheesh! I was amazed. Madison was amused. It definitely seems less intimidating now.

A much better day

Well, things can shift like magic. I had thought that part of yesterday's blahs with the kids had been due to the weather, which was rainy-icy-foggy-ick. But today it's the same weather, but all is sunny in our house. It's 12:30 and we're done, DONE, and that despite the fact that we didn't get started until 9:30...I was on the radio doing a couple of spots on a morning show and THEN I even had a nice workout at the Y (counterbalancing chrusciki effects).

Everyone did piano, karate, math, logic, history (Ancient Romans and what they had to do with Jesus's crucifixion), Writing Road to Reading words (Easter-themed), and handwriting.

I found a really nice site for practicing math facts:
http://home.indy.rr.com/lrobinson/mathfacts/mathfacts.html
It doesn't look like much but the girls really liked it; you can tailor it to practically any level for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Madison even found it a challenge to do all four at one time; she didn't always realize the proper sign for the operation, and so she got some wrong. I'm pleased to say that my little perfectionist has become more relaxed about missing answers; that is, it's no longer a tragedy when she gets a few wrong. Not that she LIKES it, of course, and she's not careless or casual about it, but it's no longer a reason for hara-kiri.

A mark of how well we did this morning was that Madison's handwriting work was copying that dreaded song "Die Forelle" for the Bach Children's Chorus that has been giving her the willies, and she was ok with it.

I told her the story of how I hate doing taxes SO MUCH that one year in order to get through all of the paperwork, I took it all to Chili's and slowly ate my way through loaded nachos as I sat there on my own sorting and completing forms. The waitresses were understanding, even amused. At the end I had a virgin pina colada to celebrate. I said that I thought that Die Forelle was enough of a mental obstacle that we could use the same principle, and gave her a small dish of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, her favorite, along with the paper, pencil, and lyrics. She smiled at me gratefully, and got to work.

And now I get to work the whole afternoon! Good thing, because clients are calling.

Overheard at the dinner table

David: Anyone know the capital of Illinois?

Ella's hand shoots up. With a knowing smile, she says: "I."