Listen to ME!

The Listen to Your Mother show directors asked me a few questions about motherhood to provide a little context for the approaching show. Here are a few of my answers along with the headshot that my husband took. He is the only person alive who can find and record my natural smile. I'll explain why that's Oprah's fault in another post. Why did you audition for Listen To Your Mother? My best friend sent a link to the audition that came through a school announcement, urging me to submit something. That’s the reason I applied in pragmatic terms; I love my friend, and I thought it sounded doable. More to the point, though, I think I applied because my failures are so glaringly visible (messy home, short tempers, fighting kids, etc.) and the parts of my life that shine never get noticed (wound dressing, couch cuddling, the dramatic interpretation of children’s classics, etc.). I wanted to shine. What does your day-to-day life look like? I’m trying to think of the elements of every day that are consistent, since our schedule at home whiplashes from frantic to freewheeling. Here are some constants. My youngest always wakes me with a whispered request to play the iPad for an hour before everyone else gets up. I send him off to a quiet room, while I drag myself to the coffee maker and start pulling together breakfast. What follows is either a mad dash to find enough reasonably matched shoes to cover all of our mismatched socks so that we can make it to a homeschool co-op on time OR an hour of reading to my four-year-olds while the big kids grudgingly tackle math. Then, the little guys watch Bill Nye (or something), while I sneak in a shower, and we head out for an afternoon adventure or hunker down with projects and a family book. The above elements are either peppered with music and laughter or crying and screaming, variables that color everything in between. What is the best mothering advice you’ve ever received? “Nobody’s walking around high school with her umbilical cord still attached.” That was my pediatrician’s response to my concern over three-week-old Olivia’s scabby stump, a response that eventually morphed into my mothering mantra. It turns out my diligent efforts to care for her first ever wound by bathing it daily in alcohol had actually prolonged its adhesion. I had pickled it. When our doctor announced her prognosis, I gained a perspective that I’ve resurrected again and again, reminding myself to step back, worry less, and stop interfering. When potty training hit, and poop was predictably everywhere it shouldn’t be and never where it should, I muttered, “Nobody walks around high school pooping her pants.” And when my two-year-old seemed light years away from spontaneously weaning, I chanted, “Nobody walks around high school sucking on her mama’s…” You get the idea. Stuff usually works out, and meddling just makes it take longer. What is the best mothering advice you’ve ever given? Play to your strengths. Too many of us beat ourselves up for not being someone else. I collapse under the weight of dishes and laundry precisely BECAUSE other mothers keep house so painlessly and organically. Crafts make me want to puke. I can’t stand watching my kids work a puzzle; it stresses me out! As long as I keep my eyes firmly focused on the gifts I lack, I run around failing at those things that make me great. And I am great! Great at reading aloud to my kids. Great at telling stories. Great at imagining and embarking on adventures. Great at laughing with my kids. Great at dining room dancing. I could go on and on! And so could every mother on the planet. Every mother is singularly magnificent, and so is every child. I believe that God chose me for my children (on purpose!) BECAUSE of who I am, not IN SPITE of who I am. When I try to become my friends, I fail at being exactly the mother that I was created to be. What is the greatest impact motherhood has had on your life so far? Nothing humbles like motherhood. Not even middle school. My strongest weaknesses peer back at me through the magnifying mirror of my kids’ faces. My deepest fears coalesce around their vulnerabilities. My heart, a fickle little organ I spent so many years training to be tough, stretches and snaps almost every time I stop hurrying long enough to stare at them. I am sunk! I’ve lived a few epic adventures, but only motherhood has taught me to cling, white-knuckled, to God’s grace, and only my kids have made me perfectly certain that nothing’s more powerful than LOVE. What songs are on your favorite Netflix cue? My Netflix queue looks like a theme-based unit study. It’s very homeschool-cool, situated around subject-specific biographies and documentaries. My kids will gripe to their therapists about Mama’s version of “movie night.” We do, at least, serve popcorn! Be sure to purchase tickets soon, if you're planning to attend. I'm told they're going fast!

HomeSchool Cool

I have posted ad nauseum about our oscillation from homeschool to public school and back to homeschool, covering the attendant pitfalls of HSW (HomeSchool Weird)ness. I have not, though, justly balanced the weird factor with the particular brand of wonderful that can only be designated HomeSchool Cool (HSC!), a category of awesomeness that we, as a family, trip into from time to time. Consider, for example, an afternoon misadventure at a local park, a local park with no available restrooms. Taye, of course, had a full bladder immediately upon noticing the lack of facilities, so I ushered him to the back of our minivan where, with all the discretion a four-year-old can muster, he dropped trow and began to take care of business. After he had finished, he pointed proudly to the puddle now trickling toward the parking lot's low point and announced, "I made BRAZIL!!!! Look, Mom, I pottied Brazil!" That, my friends, is HSC! Choosing THE BEST audiobook as your contribution to the Latin, Science, and Logic Club Christmas Gift Exchange -- definitely HSC. Mastering the steps at our annual, tri-county, homeschool square dance --- HSC! Lest you conflate HSC with HSW (a common misconception), please remember that HSW eventually boils down to the slippery slope of parental intensity that I still scramble to avoid -- a twitchy, self-important, ego-driven focus on performance instead of process -- a drive to measure up that entirely eclipses the joy of education. (Again, while this imbalance clearly pervades public school as well, the close quarters of family/school life make HSW a pitfall that can shake loose some anchor points of our most crucial relationships -- waters I am not proud to have tested). HSC, on the other hand, unabashedly celebrates the peculiarities of personality and a passion for learning that sometimes get muffled by the fast-flowing current of mainstream culture. And if HSC were a range of mountains, then my Olivia enjoyed her moment on Everest's peak this past weekend. Have you ever seen videos of tween girls in line for Bieber tickets, all giddy and blurry, moving too fast even for digital shutter speeds? Lock in on that image. Now, replace Justin Bieber with Dr. Christopher Perrin of Classical Academic Press, and superimpose my daughter's face on the effervescent preteen girl. Voila! My daughter's 15 minutes in the HSC spotlight. For the past two years, we have been using Classical Academic Press's Latin curricula, starting last year with Song School Latin and leaping forward to Latin For Children in the Fall of 2012. In order to get the most out of the program (and take some of the pronunciation pressure off of their grossly inadequate mother-teacher), we purchased the whole LFC package with video clips included. And twice a month we meet with a handful of other friends who join us in watching the videos and reviewing vocabulary. This all sounds rather benign and unrelated to our brush with fame unless you know that Dr. Perrin appears in every video segment, first as grammar instructor and often in goofy segments as comic relief (I'll be honest, the comic part is definitely a relief! The grammar drills are tough on this middle-aged mind!). When Olivia learned that Dr. Perrin -- in the flesh -- would be at this year's homeschool convention, she agreed to join me for a day out together, provided I would take her picture with Perrin should they happen to meet. And they did. And I did. Honestly, I'm not sure who felt more HSC last Friday, my daughter or Dr. Perrin. He was flexing his Latin declensions for a couple of maternal admirers when Olivia and I politely imposed upon him for an autograph and photo op. Perrin graciously wrote a couple of sentences in my daughter's book and posed for the above picture, but not without a little bit of classical swagger! I'm not sure what other venue carves out such a high-profile niche for someone with a Ph.D. in what? Latin, maybe? or Classical Studies? I doubt the tween crowd regularly swoons. So my daughter gets to spend a week as Queen of the Co-op (HSC at its finest) and Dr. Perrin gets an anecdote for his dinner table -- a magister honored by his loyal discipula. What could be more HomeSchool Cool than that!?

The Election

Yesterday was the election. Grinning broadly, nervous hands poised to display their photo IDs, my kids approached the poll. As they neared the door, a man (my husband) disrupted their path with bags of pretzels and an exhortation to "Vote for the jungle gym! A vote for the jungle gym is a vote for exercise!" This in spite of the fifteen crayon clad posters on notebook paper throughout our house urging us to "Vote for the Pop-up Camper!" "Pop-up Campers ROCK!" Some with fabulous artwork to boot! In conjunction with the campaign speeches from the night before and Olivia's spontaneous Halloween candy handout on Sunday, punctuated with "Vote Pop-up Camper!" and "We appreciate your vote for the Pop-up camper!", the campaign itself might have deterred a lest ardent polster, but not Josh! He was at the door in full force! The vote would have been unanimous, too, were it not for my voting booth conversion to the Jungle Gym camp. (Contrary to Josh's probable supposition, it was NOT the pretzels that swayed me -- I just wanted to mix things up....and I thought a jungle gym might be fun:).



The vote was spurred by two factors: 1. Our involvement in the whole process (campaigns, primaries, debates, etc.) of the OTHER election, and 2. The undecided Grand Prize in our family reading program. For various reasons, I put together a project (complete with a giant wall hanging of a flower whose stem we will climb toward the grand prize blossom......you should have seen what I IMAGINED it might look like!) to keep everyone excited about reading. Each family member maintains individual point breakdowns [i.e., Olivia gets 10 points for a picture book, 50 for a chapter book, etc.; Josiah gets 20 points for letter sounds, 30 for three-letter words, 100 for easy reader books, etc.; they both get 10 points for every sibling listening when they read their books (more if the book is longer); Josh and I get smaller point values for books we read to the kids, 500 points for books we read to ourselves... (which almost never happens anymore), and (this is a rider proposed by my husband, who, I think, is getting a little anxious over my project) I get 2000 points for every chapter of my dissertation that I finish. Everyone is rooting for mom, now! (Even more than before!)] We get a family fun day at 3000 points (leaf #1), a membership to something at 7000 points (leaf #2), and a grand prize that was subject to such debate that we decided to cabbage onto family election hysteria (we are a house divided, which makes for constant conversation) and vote on it, formally.



THE POP-UP CAMPER WAS VICTORIOUS! In spite of Dad's lobbying, the kids stuck to their guns and voted their consciences. So the center of the giant construction paper flower was adorned today with a picture that I found online of someone's father in front of a random pop-up camper. If I've estimated appropriately, I should be able to put $10 per week in a jar to significantly offset the cost when the point total is attained. However -- they've been reading like mad, so I'm anxious to see what the Saturday tally reveals! (Anxious in every sense of the word!.....Better start finding ways to fill that jar early, I think!).





You should have heard the victory speeches. Josiah noted that "With a pop-up camper, I would never have to be homesick!" and Olivia walked us through a series of "Can you sleep in a Jungle Gym!? (Well, maybe you can...but...) Can you cook over a fire next to a jungle gym (maybe, I guess....but....) can you take a jungle gym with you? No! And does a jungle gym have beds!? NO! Pop-up CAMPER WINS!!!!!!!!"



And then (my favorite), Josh's concession speech (which I will botch horribly, I know, but even if I got every word right, I could never capture the spirit and intensity with which it was delivered...or the uber-political hand gestures that accompanied it). "We fought a good fight...ran a good campaign for the jungle gym. I want to thank all of our supporters, my staff, and everyone who voted for the jungle gym. We congratulate the Pop-up camper on its victory. It was a well fought race. And rest assured, we will be back. This is not the end of the jungle gym." No. I'm sure it's not:)

After the vote, the tally, and the celebratory hooplah, we grabbed popcorn and watched blue and red Rorshach blotches coagualate across a giant map...as a family.

What election did you think I was talking about?

Rock of Ages VS Philosopher's Stone (Steele cage grudge match of the millenium)

I've blogged a million posts in my head this week, but nothing actually made it to the screen. This moment is one that I MUST not forget, though, so I might as well share it while I record it for posterity (and for my deplorable memory). A few weeks ago, I realized after Sunday service that we discussed a question I had never brought to my kids: "What do you know?" As a lifetime student of philosophy (with the papers to prove it!), I could have kicked myself for letting this one slip by! So, over a backyard picnic, I sprung it, ready to pounce with a little deconstruction and immaterialism (maybe little cognative science just for flavor). Here are my kids' responses, in order:



My question: "Is there anything that you KNOW, and how do you KNOW that you KNOW it?"



Olivia's reply (looking a little annoyed at the question's apparent condescention):



"You can't KNOW anything, Mom. You can only choose to believe. Everything anybody thinks they know they are really just choosing to believe. For example, I choose to believe in God because it's better, but not because I KNOW. No one can KNOW anything."



As I wound my immaterialist tail back between my legs and prepared to limp home with a weak, "Very interesting thought, Olivia. How did you know that?" (This time, a sincere question rather than a provocative one), Josiah jumped in with his reply. [Be sure to imagine his Rs as Ws and his Ss as SHs....I love the way he talks but trying to write his sweet particularities is....annoying).



Josiah's reply: "Well, I believe in God....because...if I didn't, He might not KILL me.....but He might WANT to."



Now there's a boy who's been to Sunday school! That's material I can work with! But who wants to? At this point, I was bested, laughing, and ready to dive with my kids into the waiting pumpkin pie. What great kids!

Shoot for the moon....hit the rain gutter

It is in the spirit of this post's title that I'm writing tonight. I have, for a number of reasons, avoided blogging for the past month or two. Very low on the list but still ranking in among those reasons is the impulse that continues to secure the corners of the frame within which I paint every blotchy, blurry portrait of myself -- the impulse to hit the moon.

When I was 8, hitting the moon meant creating a body-stocking diagram of the blood circulatory system for "be a part of the body day" at school. I wore a trash bag with a big red paper heart taped to the front.

When I was 13, hitting the moon meant going to the junior high formal (whatever) at my new school equipped with countless fly moves (read: Kid n' Play kickstep, Roger Rabbit, Running Man, Cabbage Patch, and that nameless grab-your-heel-jump-over-your-leg move --all in various alternating sequences -- that had to make all of the cool people notice just how much I belonged!), moves I had gleaned from TOO many hours watching Yo! MTV Raps. So,working my three tiered skirt, cropped jacket, silky turtle neck, and black flats with white clip-on bows, I hit the 7th grade cafeteria floor like a house-a-fire. I came home aglow, sweat eroding the shellac from my fully perpendicular x-y axis of bangs and side-wings into my bleary, stinging eyes and tan pantyhose running at every toe (because of the clip from the bow...and, no doubt, my very athletic dancing), fully convinced that the wide swath of space that the other, um, dancers alotted me along the side of the floor signified, for certain, my arrival at the epicenter of cool. In retrospect.....you get the idea. (Sadly, as 10 or so years has finally given me the same perspective on my college experience, I am just now realizing, as I type this, that the costume has changed but the character -- and so many of the dance moves -- have remained the same).

Now shooting for the moon means planning a full-scale archeological excavation in our backyard, complete with grid ropes and tools that culminates, instead, in a trip to the rubberized dig exhibit at the Children's Museum's Dinosphere. It means planning a 13 page art-book program-making activity (one page per species) for our outing at the symphony where we will enjoy the fully narrated Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saenn (I have no idea how to spell that name). After a few sessions of dancing the animal parts around our living room while listening to the CD, I realized that, with the concert so rapidly approaching, our DIY concert programs were not going to happen. Then Sunday came, and everyone looked at me with those "please, no symphony" eyes, and I buckled. We came home and watched ALL of Fiddler on the Roof.

Do you see the pattern?

If only my psychosis were confined to big events like symphonies and circulatory systems, but it seems that the minutae of my life also bob and wilt in font of the searing backlight of my, what would you call them? ambitions? My meal plans, my phone conversations, and, yes, my blog, also wind up like shadows on a sheet after that light hits them. I have about 500 very profound, nay, earth-transforming blog entries that I have dreamed of posting in the past two months.

But I'm writing tonight. I'm out here getting my groove on in front of the whole dance floor, paper heart plastered to my garbage bag and dig tools at the ready.

The thing is, if it weren't for the body stocking, there would have been no heart-on-a-bag. If it weren't for the archeological site, there would have been no dino dig. If it weren't for the paper programs, there would have been no hillarious interpretations of the 13 animals all over our living room (or worse! No fiddler on the roof!). And, if it weren't for Yo! MTV Raps, there would not have been a single day in the 7th grade when I felt remotely cool.

Same goes for our annual Birthday party for Abraham Lincoln (paper hats and beards are better than no hats and beards, and one day I WILL rememorize that Gettysburg address so that I can do a full-blown performance rather than a dramatic reading), our "baking days" (I don't even know where to begin to describe what my kids and I pull out of the oven --- ask my parents; they always have to eat it...and smile), our plan for getting out the door in the morning (my kids manage to get it together....with a LOT of cajoling....but frequently we only get there on time because being late would mean I would have to escort Olivia to the tardy desk at the office, and on so many days, I am not even reasonably clean).

And sentence that follows is excellent example -- I am sitting here working out an insightful yet obscure allusion to Don Quixote, but it keeps slipping through the words I come up with. Do I say something about setting out to build giants but at least walking away with a few windmills. That makes no sense at all. Do I say, "I may chase a lot of windmills, but like the book and the awesome 90s dork-band turned kids' music moguls noted, They Might be Giants, right?" (I'm partial to that one). Or Quixotic or Psychotic....how is one to know?

And if I had never tried to write that sentence, then I would never have come up with that paragraph.....okay, very bad example. But I don't think I've marred the point too severely. You see, if I didn't throw my head back, raise my voice and aim for the brightest, highest point I can imagine, I'd never get off the porch. And the rain gutter looks pretty fun from down there (just ask my kids -- I can't count the number of tennis balls, toys, and frisbees they have launched on the roof in hopes of being vaulted up to get them out of the gutters by their dad).

Thanks for not giving up on me!

Right Headed

I've never heard or read a more accurate description of my daughter's approach to reading than the one I will link here. Yes, I'm reading the homeschool blogs again.....who knows where it may lead:)

http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2007/06/understanding_t.html

Map Quest

In my search for a wall map of Africa (which is still underway), I ran across this awesome site. It's an online puzzle; you're timed while you click and drag country outlines onto the Africa map. Try it. If you're like me, you'll be surprised (and if you're like me, surprised in this case will be composed of equal parts dismay and ambition) by how much you really don't know! (Except for you, Dave, and you have an unfair advantage......being Dave. [for elaboration, see prior posts which reference my brother, superhero Geo-Political Dave]).

http://www.yourchildlearns.com/africa-map-puzzle.htm

I'll post this link to my homeschool curriculum list for future reference

Oh Whattah Night!

Do you know the word "nemesis"? My kids do, thanks to a 7th grade basketball legend passed on by my husband (the protagonist) at our 2 hour dinner tonight. TOOOOONYYYYYYY MUUUURRRRRRPHYYYYY (must growl and scowl for proper pronunciation) menaced Josh's middle school basketball career with his evil antics. I'm not actually sure who came out on top of the rivalry [at the final showdown, Tony's (TOOOONNNNYYYYY's) team won....on his birthday, and Tony apparently put up pretty good numbers of his own] but Josiah and Olivia appropriately rally around their Dad and his Schwartzenegery "You're mine. I have not forgotten," Jedi speech during a key play in their much-lauded last matchup. We listed all the nemeses we could think of after Daddy's story (apparently Olivia has a nemesis in her kindergarten class....his name is EEEEEAAAAAASSSSSSTTTOOONNNN -- don't forget to squint and scowl.) --- Luke and Darth (or is it the emperor?), TMNTs and Shredder (or is it really Crang). We talked over the roots of the term in Greek mythology and then moved on to my stories of a cross country nemesis in high school. You know, cross country never drew the crowd that basketball did in my high school....or in any high school, I'd venture. And my kids' forced interest in my painfully dramatized story about KKKAAAARRAAA WIILLLLHEEELLLMMM only served to salt that wound. But we will likely be scowling about TOOOONNYY MUUURRPHHYY for years to come. And, although I'm confident that Tony has evolved into a kind man, probably a caring father and productive member of the workforce...I think we'll hang onto that 7th grade snapshot because it's pretty fun to have a family nemesis!

Here's One I Forgot...

My kids unloaded this moment on me several weeks ago, but I thought I'd mention it. We read a crazy picture book about a couple who wins three wishes in some fairyland twist of luck, and somehow the woman winds up with a sausage stuck to her nose (if I had a nickel...). We (my mom and I) asked the kids what they would use three wishes for, and here are their responses:

Olivia: "Let Josiah go first."

Josiah: "I would wish for a toy that doesn't cut you or hurt you or break." (Good luck with that one, Josiah! Have you seen the recall list lately!?)

Olivia: "Okay, I would use my first wish to wish for wisdom to know how best to use my next two wishes." (Seriously.)
"Then, I would wish for 100 more wishes." (100:Olivia, A Zillion:Amy)
"And last, I would wish to have a baby when I grow up."

There, I wrote it. Now, when I inevitably forget to remember it, I might accidentally stumble upon it during a blog day update....Whew.

Some Sweet Things My Kids Have Said This Week

This has been a big week for sweet-isms in our house. I'd call them "unforgettable," but I have been inclined to forget the most important things lately, so I thought I'd archive them here....in nowhere...the mysterious gap in the world wide web where my blog hovers. In a world where the mouth of my life puckers almost daily against somethinger-other bitter, I thought we all might do to sample a little of this sweetness.

Here goes: Yesterday, we were standing in line at the all-you-can-eat buffet/Thanksgiving Dinner with my wonderful family-by-marriage. I struck up a conversation with a woman toting a baby (one of my favorite pasttimes...), and we talked for several minutes about our kids and the general paraphernelia of our lives. At an appropriate pause in our conversation, Olivia respectfully interjected "Excuse me." Then she floored me, "I think that you are very lucky to be talking with my Mom." Brief pause while the mother of three boys smiled and responded with polite indifference. Then Olivia finished, "because she is the very best Mama in the world." I was silenced.

Number Two: The other day in the car, Olivia and I were talking about something, I don't remember what, and I told her how happy I was that she had done or said (or maybe had not done or said....can't remember) something. Olivia said, "That's what I like best." I said, "What do you like best, Olivia?" She said, "Making you happy is my favorite thing, Mom.....and King's Island."

Third Times the Charmer: Tonight, my mom asked the kids to pray for a little girl from her church who is having extreme health difficulties. Olivia prayed their nighttime prayer tonight...mostly about Grandma's being able to smell, which she prays near tears almost every night (my mom can't smell....weird but true.) Anyway, she finished, and Josh started their new nighttime book. Then Olivia interrupted (don't you love her interruptions!? I do!), "Oh no! I forgot to pray for grandma's friend!" At which point she launched into a prayer for the little girl. After she was finished, Josiah said, "Oh daown it! (He still says about a third of his "r"S as Ws....so sweet!), I fowgot to pray for hew too!" This is BIG for Josiah. He NEVER volunteers to pray. We never push prayer. We do it, and respect their opportunities to pray whenever they feel compelled, and we offer them chances to participate in our prayers whenever they're around, but it's not something that Josiah usually does out loud. In fact, the last time he volunteered to pray, he asked if he could pray a song, which each of us does from time to time. Then, he launched into a very meditative....head bowed, eyes closed....rendition of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themesong....both verses....Amen. this time, he prayed that "Gwandma's friend would get bettew and that she would have a chance to gwow up."

I love my kids. They are two of the best people I know.

Donatello Found! (With Feet!)

...As I was saying....if you try, sometimes, you just might find....you get whatcha need!

Another great coloring page clearing house:

http://www.my-family-fun.com/Coloring-page/Coloring-page-home.htm

Coloring Pages to Print

Josiah and I are surfing the web right now, looking for printable coloring pages of Donatello and a Wookie with feet (they must have feet so that we can cut them out and play paper dolls with them....the feet are crucial). I ran across this clearinghouse of coloring printables that I thought I'd share....very helpful! (links to Chewy Chewbakah....but no Donatello....Oh well, you can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes...:)

http://www.csuzberry.com/csuzColoringLinks2.html


As always, I'll link it to the sidebar for future reference.

HMMMMMm.......

Here's an idea for a MOPS conversation starter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

Thanks for passing this along, Kimberly.

huh.

My Response to the MOPS Debaucle: Loving my Kids is a Walk to the Park

I joined MOPS (Mothers of Pre-Schoolers) this year. I remember my first invitation to join, some 4 years ago or so. A woman in the library talked about a preschool-like atmosphere for small children while mothers congregated in another room to (and these were her exact words) "discuss a topic." I bristled (visibly, I'm sure...I've never been very good at bristling on the sly) at the idea of joining a melange of women circled around buffet-style breakfast foods to "discuss a topic," and I graciously (except for the bristling part which I had no control over) declined. Years passed, and with them 8 or so more invitations to join MOPS, each of which I turned down for one pitifully contrived reason or another. Then, last year, a friend asked me to come for a free visit to a MOPS openhouse. Well, if you've even given a cursory scan to my prior posts, you know how I feel about free things. So I went. And the women were kindhearted and authentic and vulnerable and helpful and funny, and the childcare rooms were orderly and fun and well-thought-out...and....well....I joined!

So far this year, the "topics" have been limited to introductions on the first week and design and decorating on our second (because of which I have moved a couch away from a wall and plan to rehang my drapes!)...so far so good! Last week, our third week of ...topic discussing....I stayed home with two sick kids and missed a presentation/discussion starter entitled "Christianity 101." I cannot comment on the presentation at all, as I was enjoying the day with my children (illnesses notwithstanding), but I clearly missed the most hoppin MOPS day on record! More than a couple of other mothers from our group have made a point of talking with me about the scant discussion of material that they have all described as "heavy." Aside from some doctrine (dogma?) -laden talking points, the salient issue that everyone keeps mentioning is the speaker's insistence that we must, as mothers, evaluate whether or not our love for our children supersedes our love for God....hmmmmm. (I think that's a fair parsing of the point; I'll steer clear of the various illustrations he used to elucidate it since I wasn't there to take them in first hand.)

When my friend talked to me about the presentation and, in particular, this point, I must have looked.......stupid. That's the look I get when I'm processing. Here's how it works: I take in the incongruous statement (eyebrow curls downward), I try to comprehend it generously, giving full deference to the speaker and his overall intent (head tilts back, eyes widen and focus somewhere to the left of the person telling me the information), and then I formulate a response (eyes narrow, head shakes vaguely...almost imperceptibly): read, I look stupid.....worse, disinterested. WORSE, like I tacitly agree with the declaration at hand! In other words, my friend probably walked away from telling me about the speaker at MOPS believing that I was one of the following: a genuine ignoramus, not at all interested in what she had to say, or in agreement that a mother must somehow choose between her love for God and her children, which exist in some sort of artificial hierarchy!

SO, I'm clearing the air with this response, which it took me until later that evening to formulate and which it has taken me a full week to articulate in this post.

First of all (isn't it nice that I can't interrupt a several-screen post with a phrase like "first of all"?), let me say that I have NO problem with anything offensive. The MOPS presentation has, more than once been described as "mildly offensive" or at least "intrusive." I ache (probably visibly again....you know how I am....) over having missed it! I love mildly offensive, intrusive things! In fact, no real transformation in my life has ever occurred without having begun as something that I had previously labelled at least mildly offensive, and I am always hungry for another transformation (my husband is not......he's good....I on the other hand....). So I began my assessment of this idea by challenging myself with it, since it grates so dissonantly against the web of philosophy and faith upon which my mothering tenuously hangs.

The thread upon which his proposition keeps snagging is this one: any assertion that loving God and loving people are opposed to one another seems either heretical or begs a redefinition of the word LOVE as I understand it. Worship, perhaps. Honor, maybe. But loving God and loving people cannot be opposed to one another. The one contains the other, like the concept "Mother" contains "woman."

If Josh came home and asked me, "Would you like to go to the park or go for a walk this evening?" I would get that stupid look on my face. I would respond, "Why don't we walk to the park?" I know there are lots of ways to get to the park; we could ride bikes, take a car, roller skate, run -- but my favorite way remains walking. I'm best equipped for it, by both inclination and ability. ............ If someone asked me "Do you love God or your children more?" I would doubtlessly look stupid (if not mildly offended!:), and I would say that loving my children is my favorite way to love God. I know there are lots of ways of loving God -- appreciating and preserving the world He created, singing in the choir, serving meals at the Waffle House -- but I LOVE loving my children. I'm best equipped for it, by both inclination and ability. It's my favorite way to love God in much the same way that walking is my favorite way to travel to the park. The one accomplishes the other; the two do not oppose one another.

If only loving my kids and finishing my school work reconciled so easily!

Apart from the fact that the speaker directed his objectionable comment to an audience full of women who have elected to occupy themselves fully with the care and training of their children at the expense of other daytime occupational or avocational interests (which doesn't seem.....nice), I think his intentions were probably good....although I wasn't there to hear the "good" part, so I can only comment on the one or two things that made their way back to me after my kids had fully recovered.

Hooray for MOPS, though! The discussion hour last Wednesday may have been flat, but the last several days have been carbonated with its repercussions. I'm not sure what this week holds, but I for one, am hoping for something REALLY offensive.....like "The Art of Censoring Objectionable Material from Your Children's Books," or "The 2008 Election: Vote Libertarian or Don't Vote at All." I hope the art project isn't too distracting (yes there are art projects....there was tote painting....a little stamping....and I missed mug painting...I'll not comment further.) because I'm overdue for some transformative conversation! Bring it on, MOPS!!!

By the way, I think that November may be National Chemistry Month, so Carey, if you're reading this, know that I'll be thinking of you!

Light a Candle 2....the update

By the way, the nice man I spoke to when I called the Indianapolis Opera to ask about discounted tickets to the Sunday mantinee was busy...too busy to take the time to listen to and investigate my whole "That nice boy at the information desk named Patrick suggested..." ....and "we just got our days mixed up....." .....and...."Olivia has so looked forward to another Mozart Opera....." SO he interrupted me to offer us COMPLIMENTARY tickets (complimentary $95/per seat tickets!) to Sunday's matinee of The Magic Flute. We saw it!!!!! It was beautiful. We are blessed beyond measure! (Did you pick up on the fact that I love free things? Here's a motto: "Got something free? Give it to me!" Do you think there's any chance that one will end up on Lawrence Fishburn's wall? I'll keep working on it...)

Light a Candle

Adlai Stephenson said of Eleanor Roosevelt "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness" .....approximately (the quote is in a children's book CLEAR OVER in the kitchen). We read that quote yesterday after poring over about 6 books on the late first lady during an improvised unit study surrounding the movie Annie (I call it a unit study because Obsessing-over-every-vaguely-interesting-detail-related-to-anything-which-gives-us-pleasure is entirely too long a label). I turned to Olivia and gushed, "Olivia, I hope one day someone could look at my life and say something like this about me, don't you?" She answered instantly, "What are we waiting for mom? You would rather light a candle...than....swallow the night....or something." Then we both busted up laughing and went back to Eleanor (who really had a difficult childhood, and was FDR her cousin or something?).

I can't spend 20 minutes sentimentalizing about dishwashing detergent and then go to bed without telling at least mentioning the fact that my daughter, daily, lights my candle for me. Tonight we fancied up and went to see the dress rehearsal of The Magic Flute (Olivia loves the opera). She has been looking forward to this date forever (in the way that a 5 year old understands forever.....maybe in the way that any of us understand forever)....and so have I. We hurried to the performance hall, arrived early, and found out that the dress rehearsal was LAST NIGHT. It was a long drive. We spent money we should have saved. No opera. Olivia cried. I nearly cried. Poor Patrick at the information desk almost cried. After about 4 minutes of grieving and then 3 more of regrouping, I remembered Eleanor, and Olivia and I resolved that, after a quick trip to the bathroom (and 10 or so more apologies from me about my mis-schedule) we would salvage our date and light a candle instead of sitting around cursing the darkness. ("What's cursing again mom?" "Complaining or sitting around saying really bad things about your situation instead of doing something to change it." "Oh yeah; let's light a candle.") So we left the auditorium and saw a pack of sorority girls (women?) with painted faces and balloons in their hands. Needless to say we followed them for a time. Olivia thought they were clowns, and I was open to anything that would help to drag our date out of dissappointment quicksand. Then I saw a mom with four kids exiting a minivan with a purposeful look on her face. I distracted Olivia from the clown processional long enough to accost the woman, fill her in on our tragic date, and ask her what she had planned for her own kids. Her comments led us to a rehearsal of the Indianapolis Children's Choir, which we surreptitiously attended and LOVED. Then, candles lit, we left the campus. We were so close to the Indianapolis Museum of Art that, in spite of the late hour, I told Olivia we could stop before we headed home, and she jumped at that one. So I darted across a couple of lanes (sorry, Dad) and we surveyed the whole of African art in about an hour. Now, we know a good deal more about incorporating the beautiful into everyday life, and every docent in the wing knows about our Ethiopian adoption thanks to a VERY proud big sister. We both declared the evening one of our best dates ever, and we told the story of The Magic Flute (as best we could remember it.....somehow, we managed to forget how the actual flute played into the plot, but we did not forget the crazy bird man!) all the way home. She will be very tired tomorrow in school....all that candle lighting wears a body out. What a great kid.

The British Invasion ---- A Homeschool Curriculum Link

Oh how I love this BBC site! We love the primary science and math arenas, but there's so much to explore. I hope it's helpful. I know it's fun!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/

As always, I will link it to my sidebar so that it will be available forever and ever.

Homeschool vs. Public School

Perhaps I'll revise that title later; it sounds like I'm heralding a steel cage deathmatch between two opposing groups of kids. I'm not (I'm NOT). I've been revisiting a longstanding debate between myself and.....myself: me vs. me (much more boring than my aforementioned wrestling intimation....but much less ethically volatile). Where to begin.... Do I start with the sometimes glorious sometimes grueling (mostly pretty terrific) year of homeschooling my kids that I only recently wrapped up with a preschool graduation ceremony at grandma's? Or should I begin with the school supply aisle at Targ*t last month, where our public elementary school list "outed" us in front some of our favorite fellow homeschoolers?

I'll just give you my lists...the nebulous coagulations of pros and cons and what?s that I've never organized into lucid bulletpoints.....never...until NOW.

What I love about homeschooling:

1. Spending time with my kids. If you've met my kids, then I don't need to elaborate on this one. In case you haven't, imagine hours spent pretending to be....any number of real and fictional characters....while hiking in the woods....sharing grapes, water, mudpies, and knock knock jokes much funnier than the ones that actually make sense....then add my kids to the scene and you have a fairly accurate rendering of the better part of our afternoons together.

2. Learning whatever interests them....and me. As it turns out, I love science and history: two facts that completely eluded me during my years of studenting (it SHOULD be a verb). As it turns out, they love EVERYTHING, with an emphasis on all things attached to a story, song, or bug net.

3. Field trips. I've said it before (is there a more arrogant introductory clause in the English language? I seriously doubt it), I am a terrible stay-at-home mom (so I'll balance it with a little self-effacement). I require the perspective of an apple orchard, or a stage, or a creek, or a museum, or a zoo, or a factory, or a festival, or a creek (yep, there it is again, we love them that much), or a park, or a tree, or a sky, or a library to keep me from going berserk (see my previous post wherein I describe the calculation with which I anticipated conversations with visiting mormons for further elucidation of this point).

4. Scheduling and unscheduling our days. I love poring over lesson plans, unit studies, children's books, and educational theories until my eyes burn and I have no feeling in my feet only to wake up WHENEVER WE WANT TO the next day and implement the very best of what I've learned with fantastic students or drop it all and celebrate Bat Day.

5. There are a million or so other things that we loved -- enough, at least, that I thought the bulk justified an open-ended numbered point. We love the seamless continuum across which we turn our loves into our lessons and our lessons into our loves. Josh and I get to play to our strengths, and I think we are all stronger for it.

Things I don't love about homeschooling.

1. Failing, failing, perpetually failing. Here's one glaring example: I planned a year of activities geared to address each day of creation across the span of seven months(so we would spend a month loosely discussing light, one on water and the sky, one on land, dirt, rocks, sea, plants, seeds, and climates........and there it stopped. No "etc." Who knew day three was so rife with educational potential? We didn't do half of the hands on exploration that I had planned for the first three months, and after a full year we were still jostling around in day three.) Some of you more generous readers (hi, mom) are thinking "that's not failure," but I bought wall-length charts of the human skeletal and digestive systems! I organized our entire children's library by their relationship to the days of creation! I planned science experiments, display posters, and literature-based unit studies that we never even broached! I bought wall-length charts! WALL-LENGTH charts! And it turns out we just really like dirt and plants! Who knew!

2. When they love school, they love me. When they hate school, well...you get the idea. I am the one urging them to finish their projects, put away their markers...with lids...when they're finished, and stand for our closing song (oh, we HAVE a closing song, and an opening song, and transition music.....transition music planned to coincide with the relevant aspect of the day or creation we are discussing.....who can blame them for being annoyed?) And when I (also annoyed by my own anality [it OUGHT to be a noun]) failed to communicate the central idea of a lesson or the phonics concept or mathematical principle or logical structure during a given school period, I often failed, too, to love them effectively in the process. My patience waned, frustration mounted, and occasionally someone cried. It stunk. Some days, it really stunk.

3. Balancing passion and pressure. This point relates less to the time I spent with my kids, directly, and more to the interaction that I maintain with the homeschool community at large. The passion we share for enjoying and educating our children drives us together. The pressure to represent is overwhelming. And in case the nineties-rap jargon (you know how I love love love 90s rap) turned homeschool verb(al) seems confusing, I'll take a minute to unravel "represent." What's your curriculum? Is she reading? Phonics or whole language? TV or no TV? Latin yet? Music class? Art class? Ballet? Do you test? Co-op? If none of these questions resonates with you, think freshman year, "What's your major? Did you rush? Are you ready for finals?" or Fall semester, senior year: "What are you going to do when you graduate?" Or for you preacher-readers (hi, dad), "emergent or traditional? saved or baptized? gay-friendly or homo-phobic?" (as a side note, however, I need to point out that, although I referenced my father when I prefaced the religiously-oriented hot-button topics, I can't imagine that any one of these questions would cause him the slightest alarm or that he would venture into a discussion about them unless one of his kids needed a sounding board during a personal crisis....and it would have to be a crisis. He's not particularly religious, in the strictest sense, and RARELY engages "issues" of religion.....unless we make him:). Exhausting! And if it's exhausting for ME to have to represent, imagine the trickle-down effect on my kids! (Emotional Reaganomics!)

4. Which brings me to number four: homeschool weird. There, I said it. I don't think the socio-psycho-pop-cultural-iconifiers have constructed an esoteric label for this one yet, but it's a very real phenomenon. Somehow, the pressure to represent (see number 3)mingles with the overarching sense of failure (see number 1), yielding an environment in which homeschool weird is likely, if not certain, to take over. I don't buy the "lack of socialization" explanation for HSW, for a couple of reasons. First, most homeschool students have a broad and active peer group in their communities and churches. Second, I think the factors that contribute to the HSW phenomenon are so obvious and so obviously unrelated to issues of socialization that I'm surprised they are still discussed so frequently in tandem. Here's an example of the petrie dish in full effect. I have attended a number of homeschool plays, concerts, and performances at which the performance anxiety in the audience is as high or higher than that which is on stage. The sense that lines misspoken, a blip on the public school screen of parental concern, reveal some amplified failure to educate or support by parents whose days and often nights are spent thinking acrobatically of ways to educate and support their children oppresses the otherwise joy-filled atmosphere of a homeschool gathering. Which is why, in the homeschool dyad, it is quite often the parent and not the child who winds up HSW. Some families manage to skirt the issue entirely, finding a glorious middle ground between hyper-intensity and inattention that makes for remarkably close, loving, and enviably educated parents and children. And I need to point out that HSW is not an altogether pejorative term! Some of my favorite people are HSW. I, myself, am branded many different types of weird and am secretly proud of most of them. The danger, for me, that forces this point into the second category rather than the first rests on the fact that I think my personality is exactly the kind of personality that could contribute to the most damaging kind of HSW, where the kid, my kid, feels that a parent's success or failure rests squarely upon his ability to spell really tricky words or to properly assess a logical fallacy. NO BODY needs that kind of pressure. (I am seriously doubting that I'll be invited to speak at any homeschool gatherings on this topic, but it has been a part of my own deliberation, so I thought I'd pass it along).

I'm going to have to abbreviate my public school comments as it is very late, but I'm going to give it a whirl.

Things I love about public school.

1. The pledge of allegiance. I have no explanation for this one. In fact, in a rigorous, ideological debate, I'd probably fall closer to the platform of the anti-pledgers. But I love it. I love the standing up, hand-over-the-heart solemnity of the whole thing. I love feeling like I'm a part of something as big and important as "liberty and justice for all." Throw in a little "My country 'tis of thee" before we are seated, and I'm so full of the untrammelled national pride of youth (before discontent makes you say that stuff with a sneer) that I'm ready to write a treatise or run for office or something. I think you only get the corporate resonance of the language and the broad range of its application in public school (which is why we never did it in homeschool.....our thin three voices couldn't drown out my sneer.....and we already had the whole opening song ritual....it seemed like overkill).

2. THAT teacher. The one who notices and reaffirms the talents and aspirations that your parents have cultivated and encouraged since birth (or, in a couple of cases I can think of [not you, mom...parents of my friends] gifts that parents may have been completely blind to). Somehow, in the language of this teacher, this third party observer, your potential sounds true and you begin to chase it down. I love teachers who challenge and inspire individuals rather than categorically educating their students. There are tons of them! Ask your public school graduate friends, and most can name at least one.

3. School plays, field days, sports, dances (yes, dances....think of my 90s rap affinity, and you just about have the picture), academic teams, competitions, clubs (although, I never really did clubs....they didn't make sense to me without performances or competitions...I'm too much of an extra-curricular capitalist, I guess), choirs, bands, and ALL of their AWARDS days. I eat this stuff up.

4. Report cards and tests. (And right about now you're thinking I should elaborate on the phrase Public School Weird because what else would you call that?) I love knowing what's expected and then knowing where I stand. I love it.

5. The system. I love participating in a predictable system that, given time and attention, can serve your every inclination. Do you want to learn? There's a way. Do you want to do as little as possible? The system allows for that. Do you want to cross-list courses and achieve as much as possible with as little effort as you can manage? There's a system for you! The public school system is (or at least has historically been) pliable and a student with supportive parents has almost no greater ally than a predictable educational system.

Whew.

Things I don't love about public school

1. The conspiratorial folder. You are 5 or 6 or 7. You believe that your teacher loves you, has taken you into her confidence as a partner in learning and fun. You have grafted her into the thin tree in your inner nursery of trust alongside your parents and favorite grandparents and a couple of aunts, and then, WHAM, in walks another teacher, and she whips out the conspiratorial folder behind which she is most certainly scoffing at you, maligning you, mocking the class, discussing your bad habits, or berating your parents. WHATEVER she is doing, she is making a dramatic gesture of excluding you by holding up a notebook or a folder that conceals her words but not her adult-ish, whisper-masked scornful tone....sometimes it's held so carelessly that it doesn't even hide her animated, almost assuredly snide eyebrows! You feel isolated, violated, and excluded. And here's a weird thing. Some teachers are so surfeited with kid-culture that they whip out the conspiratorial folder around parents. I've seen the thing used at PTA meetings, in conferences, at orientations, all of which involve only adults. On what planet is it deemed acceptable to overtly exclude other grown ups for the purposes of whatever teacher-speak cannot be accomplished outside of the context of that impermeable folder? It's not....ever! I hated it as a kid, and I hate it now....and I hate it for my kid.

2. Lunch, recess, and student elections. After a whole decade of movies devoted almost exclusively to disassembling the tenuous social strata of public education (think Goonies, Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Can't Buy Me Love, Sixteen Candles, Lucas.......etc.), the "youth of America" remains unphased. Lunch tables are unmistakably demarkated; hallways are minefields. It's a feudal state. I'm not sure I was a serf (look at me pulling out the medieval terminology I learned in 5th grade....there's nothing I learned in public school that I didn't learn in either 5th or 6th grade....ask my parents; they'll back me up on this one). In fact, I think the problem was that I wasn't sure where I belonged. I bounced from landowner to serf to sub-aristocracy with uncomfortable ease (that's the oxymoron that could caption my entire high school career)....I never really landed, but I'm not sure that anyone ever did. Maybe if we had tackled the Molly Ringwald movies a little sooner....

3. Checkmarks, punitive writing assignments, revoked recess privileges, names on the board. I hate crap like that. Give me a good old-fashioned trip to the principle. Or demerits. Or detentions, or something. AHHHHH, the system. The system, I can handle. It's the renegade dictatorial classroom strategies that wear me thin.

4. THAT teacher. If they can build, they can also destroy. For my husband, it was an elementary school choir teacher; for my Dad, it was, first elementary PE and then a long string of English teachers; my mom had several of them in grade school; and mine was a first grade teacher. The parts that these teachers break off never grow back. And so my husband won't sing in front of people, and my father won't dance, and my mom carries around innumerable scars, and I am earnestly self-conscious and mathematically awkward. And lots of teachers break lots of kids. Just ask any of your public school graduate friends; they can almost all name at least one.

5. The heavy girl in the sparkly sneakers. I hung out on an elementary school playground with my son the other day during a kindergarten recess in the early part of the second week of school. Three girls ran over chasing some boys in an ill-defined tag game. A few steps behind, an overweight little girl tried to find her way into the game. The most vocal of the tag-players was oblivious to her presence. In fact, it was tag-player number three that the hopeful little girl was addressing. "Hey, can I play with you?" Pause, "Hey, can I play?"......Again and again, until finally #3 turned to the little overweight girl with an irritated expression and some surreptitious muttering before looking for approval to Tag leader #1, conventionally cute and well dressed, and recommencing her ambiguous role in the game. The heavy girl looked down and shifted her weight back and forth in pink, sparkly sneakers. I didn't want to cry until I saw her shoes. I've bought sparkly shoes of all kinds. One year, I was given $20 or something for my birthday, and I went to the mall...the MALL, and stretched the $20 at a sale in some boutique-y store to buy 4 sweaters. You can imagine how cool I must have felt (and, with some perspective, you can probably imagine how "cool" my sweaters must have been at 4 for $20...they had short sleeves). I just knew that my time on the periphery was over, that with these sweaters, I could break through into the mystical ring of belonging that I kept bouncing off of. Of course it didn't work, for various reasons (not the least of which were the sweaters themselves, I'm sure.....4 for $20 at the mall....short sleeves....short sleeved sweaters), but it was worse than before. I kept looking down at my meal-ticket tops expecting the situation to change...expecting to feel important like in my dreams....and the rebuffing was more painful because of my uniform.....I stared at my sweaters the way this little girl looked at her pink sparkly sneakers. And they gave her courage; she tried again, "Can I play too?" This time she called out as the #3 girl began to run away, with a vaguely sympathetic but still annoyed look of disdain on her face....off to more amorphous tag, I guess, increasingly aware of the threat that sparkly shoes posed to her own position in the tag game.....fearful, I guess, of her own not-belonging. But, wide-eyed, the heavy girl with the sparkly shoes followed, calling after her again and again the same, steady unrelenting question, "Can I play?......Can I play?".....Until finally, the teacher blew her whistle and the kids began to fall in line, the little girl shuffling to her spot, her eyes, confused, glued to her sparkly shoes. A few days later, my son and I were parked in the car line waiting to pick my daughter up from school, when I saw the little girl again, lined up with her kindergarten class on the way in from recess. They were lined up alongside a brick wall, and the little girl had both hands up in her hair, clutching strands on either side as she faced the wall, kicking it again and again with her sparkly pink shoes....fierce and bitter...while other children filed past her, until a teacher finally told her to get back in line. All of this during the second week of Kindergarten!

None of this analysis is designed to be even-handed. Not everyone experiences school, at home or elsewhere, the way I have. Not everyone listens to Pink Floyd's The Wall with their matriculating Kindergartener, assuring her that her teacher will certainly encourage and appreciate the unique and special person that God made her to be, but that the song illustrates the pull toward conformity - the insistence that children become the same, like bricks in a wall that ultimately keeps people apart - sometimes engendered by the social circumstances of school and validated by some teachers.......not her teacher of course because her teacher wants her to become the unique and special person that God created her to be......but some teachers. Our three year old danced around the house for days yelling out "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" We are, in some ways, unique. In other ways, we are not.

Stay away from Animal Planet!

You may not even have to read this blog; the title really says it all. Yes, as you've doubtlessly surmised, this entry is about Motherhood. Would you like me to elaborate? You don't have to twist MY arm (you don't even have to grab it firmly.....not even an idle arm-mangling threat will be necessary)! I'm always up for elaboration. Where to begin? How about with the Naked Mole Rat (always a popular starting point).

Our favorite show to watch as a family is called Fooled by Nature (Animal Planet, 7:30 on weeknights where we live). One of the episodes contained a segment on the Naked Mole Rat and the bizarre phenomenon of its single queen fertility dynamic. Apparently, all mole rats are born physiologically fertile; females ovulate, males.....spermulate. It seems like a friendly and pleasurable colony structure. Enter the Mother. In each mole rat colony (and they do live in underground colonies, like ants or bees), one female asserts her dominance over all of the other little mole rats through physical abuse and emotional manipulation (seriously), making all of the other little mole rats, certainly all of the little female ones, too stressed out to procreate. Indeed, her oppressive behavior halts their reproductive capacities entirely; females cease to ovulate....etc.. Here's a little blurb I've cut and pasted from an informational site online devoted to the fertility of mole rats:

The naked mole-rat lives in colonies of between 100-300 animals, but only the 'queen' reproduces, suppressing fertility in both the females and the males around her by bullying them. Dr Faulkes said: "The queen exerts her dominance over the colony by, literally, pushing the other members of the colony around. She "shoves" them to show who's boss. We believe that the stress induced in the lower-ranking animals by this behaviour affects their fertility. There appears to be a total block to puberty in almost all the non-breeding mole-rats so that their hormones are kept down and their reproductive tracts are under-developed. "Currently, we think that the behavioural interactions between the queen and the non-breeders are translated into the suppression of certain fertility hormones (luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormones). In the non-breeding females this has the effect of suppressing the ovulatory cycle, while in the non-breeding males it causes lower testosterone concentrations, and lower numbers of sperm. In most non-breeding males, sperm that are present are non-motile. "The queen also seems to exert control over the breeding males, so that concentrations of their testosterone are suppressed except when she is ready to mate." However, this stress-related block to fertility is reversible. When the queen dies, the other non-breeding, highest ranking females battle it out for dominance, with the winner rapidly becoming reproductively active.

As you can well imagine, this segment catapulted me into the gnarly brier patch of mother-guilt. Could my maternal intensity really cripple my children? Are they, in a sick irony of post-Freudi*n human drama, actually stifled by my diligence and fanatical concern? My head begins to swim as the thorns begin to snag on bits of recollection and realization: there are the violin practices, and how about when I tried to "teach" Olivia to write the letter g (or was it the number 8.....oh my gosh....it was both!), and Josiah, sweet little Josiah with his inverted pronouns yesterday! But animal planet wasn't through with me yet.

Next came this bit on the Ladybird Spider, who apparently lays a mess of eggs and then nourishes them with hundreds of nutrient-rich blobs secreted throughout her masterpiece web, which she NEVER leaves, in spite of its absolute seclusion from light and interaction with all other spider-amiable species. Finally, since her creepy, translucent brood is still just one meal shy of the strength they will require to make it in the outside world (a world, you recall, that she hasn't seen since she entered the breeding phase of her brief life-cycle), she nestles all zillion of them together beneath her spider body, wraps them in a final, fatal embrace, and they proceed to eat her until she dies. They feed off of her blood and sinews (I'm not actually sure if spiders have sinews, but if they did...). They brutally (and it WAS brutal; I saw it!) consume their still living mother. Here's a little bit that I found online about it:

Once inside her burrow the female never leaves. The male only comes out for a couple of weeks in May, during breeding time. Female ladybird spiders are dedicated to their young, laying up to 80 eggs in a cocoon and nursing them until they hatch in July or August. The mothers feed the young on regurgitated food and then they themselves become a meal for the hungry spiderlings. It takes 3 to 4 years for the spider to reach maturity.

Now for a whirlwind of self-conscious regret and grotesquely overblown isolation. Am I a Ladybird Spider? I have written or read nearly nothing that wasn't assigned to me since I started....breeding. My musical tastes in the last five years have covered the Raffi-Wiggles-Veggietales spectrum (with a little obligatory Mozart thrown in from time to time...you know, for their intellect). Rare, now, are the hours I used to share daily with Amy and Emily, Bob, Van, and Ani. I've managed to retain Rich Mullins and Patty Griffin and have picked up Sara Groves and Mindy Smith, but even so. I begin to feel my lifeblood ebbing and my sinews snapping. Exercise, HA! Showers, surreptitious. Make-up...well, I was never really a big make up wearer, but now I may never have the opportunity to give it a legitimate chance! The "honeymoon" months after Olivia's birth were especially lonesome, with Bob Barker and whatever unsuspecting Mormons that I could hijack as my only adult conversation (and hijack them I did! I had cups of water ready, the door flung wide, and two chairs cleaned off and strategically arranged whenever I spied a pair of well-dressed men toting backpacks and Bibles working our block. My mother used to call time and temperature 83 times a day just to hear a grown-up voice.....I had Price is Right and the Mormons.) They rarely had a chance to stumble through their concern for my spiritual well-being before I began my own copiously-rehearsed Welcome Mormons spiel. And after I was blacklisted by their congregation (having commandeered the afternoons of 4 "elders" over the course of several weeks), I started to keep an eye always peeled for the less recognizable Jehovah's witnesses. I bear no ill will against the Mormon religion as a whole for abandoning me during my darkest days. My husband and I still use the phrase Mormon-nice regularly (as in, she's not just nice, she's MORMON-nice....like Aretha-cool, or Beck-weird, or Mother-Theresa-Good.....see, we're inter-denominational in our hyperbole). They had to do what they had to do. But I was clearly in solipsistic despair.....suffering from what one magazine freelancer called "isolation without solitude," a perfect description.......of the LADYBIRD SPIDER. Would I end up like her, a mere shell of a formerly magnificent, vibrant creature, cannibalized by her beloved?

Perhaps I was just taking this all too personally....(hmmmmmmmm)....

I found comfort.....nay, enlightenment....where we all find it eventually, in the arm-waving admonitions of a flight attendant. As I mulled over the mole rat ladybird spider predicament, I was struck by the memory of the sharp-gesturing, impeccably-groomed stewardess on my recent flight home from visiting my brother and his family. She said, sagaciously,

Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead area. Please place the bag over your own mouth and nose before assisting children.

I realize her direction was lofted toward all hundred or so people riding on Northwest flight whatever that afternoon, but I couldn't help but think that she, my guru, my sensei, meant those words especially for me. I don't have to suffer as a Ladybird Spider or nag and destroy like a Naked Mole Rat; I just have to mother with the very best of all I have to offer, and I cannot mother if I cannot also (occasionally) breathe.

Let the Circle, be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by

Lest you think that failed 90s rap groups represent my only musical proficiency, I thought I'd throw a little bluegrass gospel into the mix....for flavor....and also because the "circle" may be the best metaphor for the most frustrating aspect of my day. In many ways, I failed my kids today by NOT breaking the circle of agitation that marked our morning and then bled across into our otherwise fun afternoon. I know, from countless prior experiences, that I am the keystone in their continuum of emotion. In other words, if I walk around in a state of aggravation, then you'd better believe I will soon have two aggravated little offspring stomping along my petty path. Conversely, if they begin the day with grimaces and I manage to meet their unhappiness with an even-keel brand of joy, they soon swing away from the dark side and begin to find the brighter edge of everything. Today, I just couldn't seem to get my circle-breaking legs underneath me. We would be well on the way to peace, I would turn my back briefly, chaos would erupt, and instead of returning their outbursts with calm positivity, I would launch into some bizarre lesson about kindness in barely-muted tones of frustration....completing the circle of stupidity instead of breaking it. Tomorrow my hope is that the bluegrass prayer will become my .....inverted....touchstone...... Let the circle be unbroken (unless it is a circle of stupidity, and then smash it, crush it, dash it to bits!), by and by, Lord, by and by.........although it messes up the meter and might throw our fiddle player off, I think my ammended rendition of the lyrics might just save the day!

Incidentally, one of the upshots that has come out of my foray into maternal mediocrity is a reminder that I thought I'd share with all 12 of my blog readers (2 of whom are, in fact, not blood relations!). We homeschooled Olivia last year and through the process discovered a number of online tools that really inspired me or increased her momentum by offering fun reinforcements of the concepts we were studying. My favorite, in the early literacy arena, is the starfall website. The kids played on starfall today while I took a shower, and I had forgotten what a smart and interesting site it is. If you have early readers or kids who are just learning to navigate the mouse/screen combination on your computer, take a minute to stop over at http://www.starfall.com/ to check out their stuff....terrific. They also sell hard copies of their materials for cheap (even by my nickel-choking standards). In short, it is the Mack Daddy of early literacy sites in my estimation (...and just in case you were beginning to doubt my 90s rap prowess....Kriss Kross'll make ya Jump! Jump!).

I'll try to post links to other helpful homeschool/early learning sites and blogs as our web surfing brings them to mind. I have found nearly everything I have used by linking to helpful sites on other people's blogs, so I hope to share the best of what I've gleaned with all (12) of you.

AND....as promised....I am including a correction: THIS, ladies and gentlement (WAY back at the top of this entry...because I don't know how to put it anywhere else) is Indiana Secretary of State TODD ROKITA....the undisputed nicest man in the whole wide world. Doesn't he look friendly? Well, he certainly is. You can learn more about him at www.in.gov/sos. I'm sure he would enjoy having you stop by the website. I know I enjoy having you stop by mine! If you didn't, my visitors would be limited to my mother, my brother Dave (because I gave him that Superhero name, I think), my Aunt Patti, and me...clicking back and forth from other websites to see if anyone has left a comment, shamelessly trying to jack up the number on my hit counter so that I look less and less pathetic every day (it's a dirty job....). That, ladies and gentlemAn, is my convoluted but sincere way of saying, thank you.

Now to the meat of my post: adoption news. There isn't any. Unfortunately, my dossier didn't arrive at CHSFS today (our adoption agency). It's been very bizarre to think that the timing in which our application is processed, down to the minute, will determine which baby is "referred" to us ("referral" is the adoption term for the photo and records provided for your perusal when the agency and the country think they have found a match for your family....it is not called a placement because, at least in international adoption, the adoptive parent/s can still refuse the referral and wait for another). In fact, I have corresponded with a woman who sent her dossier to our agency on the same day as I did (though I don't think she scarred the post office patrons quite as badly as I did when I flailed about....yes, I think I flailed...screaming "I forgot to sign the check!"....I may have even grabbed hold of someone....poor sweet woman.) It's strange to think that the speed and accuracy of our postal service will play such an integral part in the fabric of our family and our lives. If I thought the tenous web tying our lives together was random, I would be completely offput by this conglomeration of variables, but, as my Grandpa's favorite song puts it, "I know who holds tomorrow, and I know who holds my hand." He's right (the songwriter, and most generally, my grandfather), and thus we close with a nod to bluegrass gospel.....just like I planned it all along.....