Happy Anniversary

On our first day of our anniversary, my Smoochie-Man gave to me, 1 very contented family. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Outback, Merlin and ice cream…Living the good life, baby. 

On the second day of my anniversary, I give to my Smoochie-Man, 2 freshly bathed dog. Don’t they look happy…and far less stinky.  Not quite as exciting as the theatre, but it’s the thought that counts, right?  Well, that and the fresh scent of a house with two clean dogs when my Hubby walks in the door.

After 12 years of marriage and 16 years of sharing my life, my sweet husband has giving me many things.  From my first opal necklace, to my latest diamond necklace…From our first apartment to our current lovely home…from those lean baby years to our full and happy present.  I look forward to sharing the next 12 (and 16) years with you my Sweetheart.

12 years of sweet things that my Darling has done for me.

1. He leaves a sweatshirt on my seat in the car when packing up from camping.  He knows me so well.

2. We’ve created two beautiful children and a wonderful family together.  He needed my help with that one.

3. 3 words…Chicken Cordon Bleu

4. He always takes care of things like tires and such to make me feel safe. I always know he’ll keep me safe.

5. He makes my son squeal like a girl by pulling his toes off. 

6.  He eats Noodles & CO because I can…even though he’s sick of it.

7. He takes me to see Harry Potter for my anniversary even though it’s his anniversary too. Smooch!

8.  He tolerates my wonky healthy stuff.

9.  Cuddling up with him on a Saturday morning is never dull…I originally meant because he calls the kids in and hides from them, but other thoughts do come to mind. ; )

10.  He steals crab from me to give to my daughter…and then tries to create crab from thin air to give to me to make up for his thievery.

11. He put up with me giving a homebirth to my sweet boy.

12. He promised me that life with him would be a circus…and it has been. : )

Here’s to sharing the rest of our lives together in this circus.  Wanna cram in that little clown car and make out?  I love you.

Why?

At lunch today, the kids split a bit of lemonade.  The Fairy poured two glasses perfectly equal.  I then told the Hero to choose his cup.  For some bizarre reason I added a comment of ‘that way you can choose the one with more’.   Both kids looked at me like I was an alien.  “Is that WHY you have one of us pour and one of us choose?”  They were clearly offended. I tried to explain that this is such a basic parenting  tool that I just do it out of habit, and that, yes…it is so to teach children to share and so that one child doesn’t get to cut a bigger piece and chose it selfishly. Now, they really think I’ve lost my mind.

You see, the Fairy and the Hero both have such generous hearts that this idea never crossed their mind.  During a recent Costco trip, the Hero insisted that we gather an extra sample of everything  we he and I sampled for our sadly, absent Fairy.  He couldn’t fathom that she wouldn’t get some of what he gets.  The Fairy is always doing similar things.  They truly would never dream of cutting themselves the big piece of the pie.  Now I’m another story.  Excuse me while I wipe the pie crust crumbs from the keyboard.  Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone I snuck it! ; )

The Lego theory of reading

Boys are late readers.  You hear it everywhere.  They often lag behind girls and frequently take a single leap to becoming a obsessive readers about the time they become flutent readers…about the time they learn to read.  They don’t read “Dick and Jane”.  They wait until they are ready to read Louis L’Amore or Lord of the Rings.  Of course, all children walk their own path and ‘your mileage may vary’, but this is what we hear so often in homeschool chatter.

I’ve found the cure to delayed reading…Lego magazine.  Lego Jr to be exact.  The Hero is Lego obsessed.  His every waking moment is spent talking about, thinking about and playing with Legos.  2 months ago I ordered him Lego Jr magazine.  He’s been asking daily “how many days left”.  It’s been worse than Christmas. 

FINALLY, it came!  He happily looked through it and insisited that I read it.  After days with it, he figured out that the tattered magazine was Lego JR…and not just Lego Club.  I thought I could pull a fast one on him and order the Jr which seems to be less violent than the actual Lego Club magazine.  Nope. He figured it out. So he starts with a round of ” Please, please PLEEEZEEE order the Lego Club magazine”.  I’m not thrilled about it but say “maybe for your 7th birthday”.  Not quite what he had in mind.  Then, in a moment of brilliance, I tell him that if he could read the Lego Jr magazine, then I would be more interested in ordering Lego Club. All this happened during a drive to Boulder.  For the remaining 20 min to Boulder and the entire drive back home, the Hero sat in the back enthrawlled with reading his magazine aloud.   So much nicer than forcing the boy to read ‘the cat sat on the mat’. 

Thanks Legos.

Happy Un-iversary

What’s a little thievery among old friends and bloggers.  Happy Anniversary to Colleen and Gregory.  She had this lovely quote on her blog…and I decided to take this opportunity to wish my wonderful hubby a Happy Un-iversary

Unto us, all our days are love’s anniversaries, each one

In turn hath ripened something of our happiness.

Robert Bridges

I thought this was a lovely quote.  It is especially fitting in my world because I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist.  Less than perfect days are often just an annoyance. I feel that I’ve grown through much of this in these last years and am much better at seeing each day as a part of the journey.  Rough spots lead to sweet. 

It is also a good reminder that love isn’t built on big events and lavish gifts. A life of love is built on just that…a life of love. Daily love. Sweet moments. Giggles over dirty dishes. Flirting through the boring parts.  Cuddling during the quiet.  The more we flirt, the more we giggle, the more we cuddle the more we love.  The more we flirt and cuddle…well, I’ll keep that behind closed doors.

To my Sweetheart, thank you for sharing each day with me and growing our family and world in love.   I love you deeply!

Ann

Money math

 Ahhh, Kids and money. They go together like a wop bob a loo bop.  Nothing teaches math more quickly than money. 

Bright and early this morning, this Hero climbed up on my lap with a catalog full of his current favorite toys.  Their prices are all listed and he starts telling me how much money he needs to buy each page of toys.  He’s doing it in his head and each time came up with the wrong answer.  That is beside the point though. 

I’ve been talking to the kids a lot recently about how mistakes equal learning. If you never make a mistake, you aren’t learning. You are taking an easy path.  If you stretch your wings, mistakes are inevitable.

So while he kept coming up with the wrong answers, we worked together to find the right answer.  He had a great understanding of all the concepts such as taking away 3 from 13 so you can add ten and then re-add the 3 back in…or that if he took one set of 12 + 14 and another set of 12 + 14 that he could add that sum to itself to save steps.  Really advanced ideas. I love the way children learn math. It has so little to do with numbers and so much to do with great ideas, complex concepts.

In the end, we figured out that most of his mistakes were perfect kindy mistakes.  18 + 3 = 22 because he forgot to count the 20, ie 18, 19, 21 22…Just skipping that 0.  Or addition mistakes 8 + 4 = 11 type stuff.  The grander concepts, the higher level thinking was all right on track.  Heck, he even took some paths to his answers that made me go ‘hmmmm’.  He his ideas were solid.  Memorization of facts comes in time. Heck, that’s what calculators are for.  But to watch the Hero’s 6 yo brain wrapping around big thoughts makes my brain happy.

What’s our goal?

I’ve been asking this question recently. I’ve always asked myself. Incessantly. Constantly. Obsessively even.  I’ve decided to share the love.  I asked my sweet hubby what his goals were for the kids yesterday.  Pretty simple.  Study the Donner Party for our possible road trip over Donner Pass this summer and improve the kids swimming skills.   Easy peesy. 

Today, I asked the kids their goals for the day.  The Fairy wanted to work on her Young Chautauqua performance and Choir homework.  Since she’s been working so hard on handwriting and since we read for over an hour last night, I decided to forgo those things.  I added some multiplication practice to the list via times attack and a rousing game of King of the Mountain.

Young Chautauqua is this great program where children research a historical figure and create a monologue as that figure. The Fairy chose Annie Oakley.  The challenge with Annie Oakley is that she is so legendary, that it’s hard to find the truth behind the legend.  Following the advice of a past YC family, we’ve chosen one spine as our resource.  It’s quick to point out legends vs facts.  Problem is, its an adult book and requires a fair amount of my time to keep her on track.  It’s good but tough to squeeze in while the Hero sits in the background begging for someone to play.   We’re getting there but the great thing is she’s starting to take some initiative and dive into the big book. I hadn’t expected this and was holding her back without knowing it.  How often do I do this as a parent? As a teacher?  Hopefully less with time.

The choir is for Options, our lovely one day a week enrichment program.  The choir teacher is an angel on earth and the children love her. They can do things for her that baffle the mind.  Harmonies and songs with multiple parts singing at the same time.

Ah, and King of the Mountain. I just made it up. Darn, I love doing this stuff. It’s flash cards and not much more. The kids stand on the floor each doing flashcards at their level.  For each answer they get right, they move up one step.  Today the Hero won and the Fairy was a bit frustrated, but the sweetness of the Hero shone thorough.  He started calling out ridiculous answers.  We both knew he knew the answer.  But he wanted his sister to be where he was.  Of course, I had to give the ‘adult answer’ of ‘nobody wants to win because you hold back’ and ‘always do your best’, but inside I was tickled at what a sweet boy he was. He knew his sister was frustrated and he wanted to ease her frustration and have her join the fun again. 

For his goals, the Hero wanted to do a timed test.  This is a new idea for the Hero.  He’s watched the Fairy work on these but now it’s his turn.    He was so excited to be a big boy homeschooler doing timed tests and insisted on doing 2 timed tests, one addition and one subtraction.  We started on minus 1 and 0.  After all, he is just in Kindy and he finished all of them on time. He was beaming.   Honey, if you love timed tests we can do them all the time!

Of course, I added his daily reading practice to his goal list for the day.  As we sat down to do his reading I realized that he is well on the path. I felt it more than anything;  an ease, an understanding, a lack of strain or force.  He’s still working on bob books and not quite to Lord of the Rings, but the path, while not flat, is now at least paved.  It was my turn to beam.  Two kids on the reading path.  What more could a homeschooling mom want?

Now if only my goals were so simple.  A perfect balance of  happiness, work, play, school, effort, rest, peace, intensity.  At least I can say that I’m meeting my families goals and I guess that since my goals are really all about meeting their needs that my ginormous list of goals didn’t need to be so ginormous after all.

Glorious Winter Day

I got to see myself as a child today.  Really. In real life.  It was time travel.  Must have been. 

I took the kids roller blading on our great bike path. It was a beautiful winter day. Warm, sunny.   So roller blading and biking was the order of the day.  The Hero is getting so good on his bike, but he still likes to stop and chatter. The Fairy on the other hand wants to feel the wind on her face and fly as fast as she can on her wheels. 

At one point, we stopped at one of our city’s sweet art displays. This is a platform with a sign that says ‘Gather people to equal the weight of 50 infants or xyz butterflies’…and basically the art sculpture would move.  Of course xyz was a number. But as a mommy and birth junkie, I knew how much babies weighed and had no clue what butterflies weigh.  The fairy and I assumed 50 8 pound babies and came up with 400 pounds. Between the Fairy, Hero and myself, we figured we had about 235 of those pounds.  So, we stalked anybody walking past and asked them to join us in our quest to  reach 400 pounds.  Not too hard we thought.  We did have two people join us.  They clearly weighed more than the 165 pounds we needed.  No movement.  We grabbed a few more folks.  Still no movement. Finally, with one more rollerblader, it moved. We had to jump up and down and think heavy, but it moved. Very exciting.  We enjoyed our adventure, our gathering of community and our mini math lesson.  Tomorrow I think we’ll figure out how much the artist thinks an infant weighs.  Thank goodness it wasn’t my infant. Ouch!

With happy hearts at our accomplishment, we headed back to the car.  I felt a woosh of time travel when I saw the fairy blading like a long, leggy deer.  Bell bottom jeans, a 70’s inspired shirt and a grace and confidence that I remember from my young ‘wheelie’ days. Only difference is my wheels were quads.  She definitely looked cooler in her blades.

Reading and Spelling (finally a new post)

Yesterday I was lucky enough to spend the day with some lovely friends.  I asked the boy reading question. You know the one…We’re reading Bob Books, but where do we go from here?  The Hero is bored out of his mind, he is not ready for the next step and he couldn’t care less about Daisy Meadow and her Rainbow Fairy books that were my secret weapon when teaching the Fairy.

Mama Kathleen says ‘He’s fine. He’s doing way more than my son was at that age.  If you give him some space he’ll make a leap eventually’.  I knew I could count on her for that.  Thanks! 

Mama Kris offered some lovely practical ideas. Some old Dolch word readers which are designed so much better than most of the early reader crap in our modern world. And, the idea that she read a page with her new reading son, then has him re-read the page. Brilliant.  Well, the hero was not real convinced.  Wish me luck. We’ll see how it goes.

Mama Blimes is asking about my spelling plan that I’ve been raving about.  I figure I’ll type it here so that when I forget to use it, I can be reminded.  How smart is that? 

My spelling plan. I’m using the Sitton Spelling ‘No Excuses’ list which Blimes herself suggested I use.  I started at the beginning with the K list, moved through 1,2,3,4, 5 and we’ve officially moved on to 6th grade words.  Can I brag? Should I get her signed up for a GATE program?  ; ) 

I followed the basic Spelling Power plan of pretesting the words each day and rotating them through. I’ve decided that 6 words is a good number for us. 5 feels wimpy. 10 too much.  But, if the words are tough I may stick with 4.  We got tripped up on a bunch of tough words for 2 weeks and I think it would have gone more smoothly with less.

Each day that we do school (no Tues), I test her on the words on the list.  Add words to take her to 6. Then have her practice the 6.  The only fancy thing I did was use a ‘week at a glance’ type notepad and jot the words on each day.   It used to have magnets but the darn thing fell apart, so now I have to magnet it to the fridge manually. How lame.  So, the idea is that each week, I end up with this on-going list of words to use as a master review.  This way I get to check comprehensive spelling. 

Then I also write the words on a post it note and leave that on the window by the kitchen sink and grill her occasionally on the words.  The main way I have her practice them is to write them each 3 times during school. Nothing fancy, Blimes and it’s the website you recommended. Don’t know how helpful this is but maybe my excitement can rub off.

Game Schooling…an ancient post

The Fairy has been under the weather and getting a massive dose of television. The Hero has been tagging along for the ride.  Try telling the 4yo he can’t watch TV while his big sister lays on the couch moaning and lapping up Cyberchase for 10 hours a day.  Talk about low tide homeschooling.  (If you aren’t familiar with the Tidal Homeschooling reference, check out lovely and wise Mrs. Wiley over at The Bonnie Glen. You’ll never look at your down days the same!)

Last night, the Fairy perked up a bit and was off cuddling with Daddy. So, I seized my opportunity to do a little school with the Hero. No way was he interested in Hooked on Pre-K Super Workbookand Bob Books, Set 1: Beginning Readers,  so I grabbed the Scrabble: Junior Edition. This is the first time we’ve played it since he ‘got’ the whole reading thing. As soon as I opened it, I realized OOPS, it does much bigger words than the CVC words we’ve been working on along with all sorts of phonograms.  Hmmmm. “Well,” I thought “we’ll give it a shot”. 

It turned out great.  In the end, the Fairy and Daddy joined us for a rousing game.  I got to put on my creative homeschool mama hat to explain the phonograms that were confusing. This is actually one of my favorite things about homeschooling.  I do so love being dramatic.  

So, there is ‘boy’ and ‘toy’ on the board so I decided to grab that phonogram and run with it. After a little story and performance (man, I should be on broadway!) we discussed how o and y are friends and they say OY! (with a good accent) and toss their hands up like a Y.  So, he was reading boy and toy.  JOY!

The hero thought this was great fun and we all enjoyed a family game.  Thankfully, the Fairy is feeling much better today and going to out and play with the BOY!  (as I turn to the Fairy reading over my shoulder and say “Get dressed and go out and play with your brother!”). 

With JOY here at Bear-A-Boo Academy,

Ann

History Connections the Fairy Way (an ancient post)

I was in a bad mood. My son was in a bad mood. The Fairy, however, was determined to have a wonderous day of school.

 It all started over breakfast while reading about Richard the Lionheart.  As usual, our breakfast history reading results in mommy’s rant about how to parent warring countries (see this post for details).  Today, however, the Fairy decided to take the high road.  “Mommy”, she says “this reminds me of the Valley of Vengance”.  The Valley of Vengance is from a book called A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears.  Very cute. Very different.  I highly suggest you read it! 

 So, in the Valley of Vengance, everyone is getting revenge on everyone else and nobody really knows why they are fighting, but nobody is willing to stop the cycle.  Yes! Thank You! My daughter is very astute to see that this is so much like our warring world in the middle ages and also today.

A bit later, I swoop down to find Greensleeves perfomed on youtube. It was also mentioned in the The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 2: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance, Revised Edition … the World: History for the Classical Child) about Richard (we’re on first name basis by now).  The Fairy remembers that Richard’s friend (Blondel or something like that) supposedly sang the song at towers and dungeouns all over Europe to find his friend. And when Richard sang back, he knew that he’s found his imprisoned friend.  So, we go find lyrics.  For 20 minutes The Fairy and I belt out Greensleeves at the top of our lunges. She was still singing it that night while cleaning the playroom.

Later in the day, the Fairy picks up a junior version of Robin Hood (A Stepping Stone Book).  Instantly, she jumps up and insists I read it.  In the very first paragraph it mentions Richard the Lionheart. ‘Yes, Grasshopper, you learn well!’.  With her curiousity peaked, she sits and reads the whole book. 

 At bedtime, she starts discussing the robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.  She thinks Robin Hood is a great guy.  Or course, I have to bring up the ethical issues of robbing from the rich as well as the problems with the fudal system.  “HEY!” she says “You taught us about that last fall in co-op”.  Why yes, Yes I did!  ‘Oh Grasshopper, you learn so well’! 

Ahh, what a perfect day filled with perfect connections.  Just one more connection though…this one is out of context, but not to be forgotten.  We’ve just finished a book about puffins being returned to an island where they had become extinct.  This took place on an island off of Maine.  So, while eating dinner, the Fairy points to her map placemat and says “Hey, There’s Maine. That’s where the puffins are”. Yep-a roonie!  Thanks to Shelley for a reminder to go buy Puffin cereal. What a yummy connection. 

Making connections at Bear-A-Boo Academy,

 Ann