Oh, Yes! We Did Disney!

As of 1:20a.m. this morning, the surprise vacation is officially over. And what a vacation it was! I look forward to sharing the highlights here in the coming days. Until then, enjoy your family! We are enjoying ours!

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!?

Listen to Your Mother!

And I get to be a part of it! I'm honored to be sharing my story at the Indianapolis Listen to Your Mother show on May 2nd!

Santa -- at Warp Speed

This year's trip to the North Pole was kind of a last minute decision. On our way home for a church gathering, we swung by the mall to see if the elves were still in operation for the evening. Success! No lines, no tears, no traumatized kids or Clauses. I call that a very merry Christmas.

Thoughts about our Free-schooled family

Hi, everyone.
My name is Amy.
I used to have a blog at this address:)
Perhaps you'll forgive my long absence if you know that I've taken to homeschooling my kids this year. And that's why I'm sitting here musing on my blog again after all of this time -- to parse out a few of my pedagogical ideas, and to share the parselings with the masses:)

Here are the parselings (garnish for an idea feast:):

First, I want to be clear (primarily with myself) that I am not called to homeschool. Actually, I'm not called by God to much of anything. I'm commanded to love, a command bolstered by careful instruction and the impeccable example of an incarnate Christ. I'm gifted with certain inclinations, like reading and singing and talking about ideas. Each time I offer those gifts to God, He uses them to His purposes and my delight. From time to time, He taps me -- in His grace -- to love specific people in specific ways as opportunities arise. Sometimes He taps, and I turn away (and He goes on loving me). Sometimes He taps, and I listen and act and find myself swallowed up by the Great Love passing through me. Sometimes, I'm absolutely sure, He taps, and I'm so mired in outside noise and internal narrative that I miss the tap altogether. Taps are not callings, though. They are just rare moments of wakefulness in my spiritually sluggish days. (I love them.) A calling seems more like a point-by-point job description, and I'm just so doubtful about the prospect of such particular guidance in a faith denoting so much freedom (by virtue of the Cross).

Don't misunderstand me -- the Command is BIG. And I long to live wide-eyed so that I don't pass by anyone without loving. I want to live His command, perpetually. Instead, I seem to sleepwalk from tap to tap, perceiving such a thin fragment of all that He shares with me of His Love.

So, that lets me off the hook. Sending my kids to public school would not be a sin, or a breach of my life's called purpose. In fact, as I wrote about once, it better resembles, in many ways, a visceral exemplification of the Command.

On the other hand, I missed the reading. And I guess, in many ways, it comes down to that. During breaks, we read around 4 hours every day -- together -- and the kids read amply on their own. During school months, our reading sessions were sparse and sporadic. Something about sitting alongside one another looking at life through a common lens helps us see better eye to eye. I'm not sure why, exactly. It's sort of like existential experimentation -- testing life choices through fictional characters, and evaluating outcomes without any threat of judgement. And I do voices:) [In fact, a couple of years ago, when I was deep into The Secret Garden -- rich with all manner of British accents, from classic to cockney -- my husband pulled me aside after breakfast one Saturday with a weird, worried expression on his face. "You did something really weird last night," he stammered, looking more than a little concerned. "What?!" I asked, wondering what could possibly be weird after 8 years of sharing a bed with my crazy, up all night, hijinx, unruffled. "You talked in your sleep," he said. "That's not so weird." After all, I talk in my sleep whenever I'm worried, scared, or medicated -- which accounts for a good portion of our married life:) "You talked in your sleep," he clarified, "In a British accent. It really freaked me out." Ahhh, the many unlookedfor applications of my theater major in action!]

So we're reading, again. I like that. And I'm finally working to memorize my (stinking) multiplication tables, along with my children. And it turns out we all love history and science, if you want to call them that. Mostly, we read....together.

[Last night, Olivia talked in her sleep. More specifically, when I went in to wake her up this morning, she was muttering and crying -- actual tears -- while sleeping. I woke her, and she gasped, "Oh, mama, I had the worst dream!" and curled into my arms. "Can I tell you about it?" she asked. "Of course," I replied (of course). "I dreamed I went back to public school." Okay, so at this point, I'm beginning to formulate my application to return to public school immediately, because this nightmare is sounding very Home School Weird -- see previous posts for clarification regarding HSW. "I went back to public school, " she continued, "And the kids were mean and the teacher was mean, and I handled all of that. But then, they started a history lesson that somehow came around to Archimedes, and I just really started missing homeschool." So that's a good reason to cry -- just missing our Archimedes reading, and our laughter at his bare-bottomed excitement over buouancy, and his crazy geometric tombstone. Archimedes is a good reason to cry. I said, "Well, as of right now, your dad and I have planned to work together again next year doing our school here at home, which means there's nothing here to miss, and everything's okay. It was only a dream." I THOUGHT.....seriously, Olivia. There's no reason to worry even if we decided otherwise. There's no way Archimedes would come up in a public school history lesson.....doesn't my thinking self sound self-righteous and cynical! Now you know why I miss so many taps! It's good that, nearing forty, I'm finally getting a handle on the gap between my thinking self and my speaking self! Apparently, I'm not yet sure where my blogging self fits:)]

I realize, in some ways, that I'm risking everything -- a fact that alternately encourages me (as a risk-lover) and strikes me with motherguilt like a parasite sucking on my soul. I know that Josiah would do well with the order in a public school classroom. It's only Olivia and I who love this learning like buckshot. But he's getting along, and we are reading. In fact, he's turned out to be the most voracious book hound among us, sniffing for biographies among his favorite fare.

As to the little three -- I plan/have planned to start a kind of formal preschool-at-home with them next fall. In the meantime, they're absorbing everything the six of us do together all day with the breathtaking speed at which three three-year-old minds absorb everything. They continue to homeschool me.

I doubt this site will become a repository of reading lists and curriculum reviews anytime soon. I'm still figuring out how to feed them and bathe them while teaching them. I'm not yet aiming to chronicle them. I am, however, enjoying this leg of the journey and the freedom it affords us. And that's really the crux of this uncalled tap-life. Grace, here, means freedom. [My dad once told me, on a day when I was particularly frozen in the post-graduation paralysis of early adulthood, that I was worrying around the edges of God's grace like it was a tent. Like I thought that if I stepped too far in any direction, I would move outside the shelter and into the torrents all around us. He was right (of course). "I tend to think God's will is more like an umbrella than a tent, because of the cross. You have to carry it and open it, but it travels where you do." Whether or not you agree with my dad (and it's always wise to agree with him -- knowing that 20 years ago would have made adolescence less volatile, wouldn't it?), clearly I come by my Uncalled, Always Tapped philosophy honestly!]

That's why I'm calling us free-schooled this year. Not because it's free. The homeschool situation has done nothing to ameliorate my book-thrifting addiction! Because I'm resting on the freedom of grace in making and carrying out this risky decision. I'm clutching my umbrella, and heading, white-knuckled, into the rain.