What a long, strange spring it was here. Seriously. I think it’s the coolest, wettest spring on record. And now, here we are, approaching mid-July already, and temps are still in the 70’s and 80’s here.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I love the cool, dry air. And the garden I’ve started has loved it, too. But for most of June, it was hard to remember that it actually IS summer.

We’ve about finished all our work for the year, except for the few things we keep working on year-round, like reading. And summer math. Summer math is just fun workbooks I buy the kids and let them play at it. It’s a fun way to review, and I get a break from actually teaching math, so everyone’s happy. And we’ve got a little bit of history to finish up, but it’s no crime to just let it go, either. Both girls say they want handwriting practice this summer, so I need to come up with something on that, I guess.

We submitted all our paperwork and portfolios to the district without any hitches this year. And I’ve already gotten letters from them saying we’re good to go. So, THAT’S all done. Except I keep forgetting to go get the portfolio back. I’d better get on that….. soon….

Next year’s books have already arrived, but I won’t let anyone start yet. We need some time off, I say to them. We’ll start that in August. Mid-August.

The pool finally warmed up, and the girls swim in the afternoons now. And they help in the garden. And they argue with each other and then play nicely 15 seconds later. And they eat a lot of ice pops. And they’re doing the Summer Reading Program at the library, so we’re always popping in there for prizes and free books. Pretty good deal. There’s a little art museum right next to the library. They’ve got exhibits outside that change from time to time. We like to wander through there and see what’s out. I’m considering a membership to the museum so that we could also meander through the indoor galleries and then stop for a cool drink at the little cafe. It would add a little something extra to our library trips.

We also discovered a used bookstore in town, and once I figure out the parking situation, we’ll make that a regular stop. If I can find an ice cream parlour within walking distance of it, there’d be no stopping us.

My 8-year-old is pushing for a dog now, so she’s busy taking care of a dog stuffed animal this summer. My  6-year-old was quick to imitate her. We often take the stuffed dogs out for an evening stroll down by the creek, where there are wild raspberries and wineberries growing like mad. We pick the ripe ones that the birds missed and head on towards the little wood bridge to see if the water’s high enough for a game of Pooh Sticks. Which it usually isn’t. But it’s a pretty walk to the bridge. Sometimes there are rabbits.

If we don’t go to the creek, we hang out in the yard. Or work in the garden. Pictures of the garden are coming soon, by the way. My camera battery is recharging right now, so I can’t upload yet. But, soon, you’ll see what’s kept me away from the computer so much this spring. Other than teaching my 6-year-old to read, that is.

I seem to be catching up on some sleep these days too. I sleep till almost 8:00 and then sit with coffee for an hour before I make anyone get dressed. It was an exhausting year, I guess. And now I’m feeling very lazy. Summertime lazy.

We’ve got no real plans, no big vacations this year, but I kinda like the way it’s going so far.

Hell, I might even find the time to actually BLOG. Or something.

Let’s hear it for lazy summers.

Here’s an interesting little article on what happens to teachers who aren’t allowed in the classrooms anymore due to various accusations:

700 NYC Teachers Are Paid To Do Nothing

What I love most of all about this article is how it spins to sound as if every teacher in those little rubber rooms has been wrongfully accused.

Chances are, yes, some of them have been wrongfully accused. But then again, chances are, quite a lot of them have been rightly accused, too.

Seems to me, more and more, that the public education system really isn’t about teaching kids at all anymore.

If it ever was, that is.

Question: What do you get when you cross a stuffed pig, a bin full of Bendaroos, and a mildly bored 8-year-old who’s stuck in bed with a sore throat?

Answer: You get a moment when RegularMom is actually glad that RegularDad bought the kids Bendaroos.

Bendaroos used to rank in the RegularMom’s Top Five Least Favorite Toys Ever Given to the RegularKids. (Outranked only by Moon Sand, Lite Brite, and any dolls that come with shoes smaller than my 6-year-old’s pinky fingernail.) But then, my 8-year-old used them to create this Fabulous Artiste, and now I love every single piece. Even the ones stuck to the bottoms of my socks and melted into the carpets.

Vive les Bendaroos!

“Sweet tea,” said my 6-year-old, from the back of the van.

We were waiting for our “food” in the drive-through lane at McDonalds after karate. I looked at her in the rearview mirror. She was gazing through her window into the interior of the McDonalds window. There was a huge aluminum tub near the glass, with a cheery looking label on it that read: “Sweet tea.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sweet tea.”

We got our bags of “food” and drove off without further comment. She’d been doing this sort of thing on occasion since last fall, and each time, I just let it slide without making a big deal out of it. It had become a much more frequent thing by this spring, but still, it was better to not talk too much about it.

Lest we jinx it, or something.

That was two or three weeks ago. The beginning of her breakthrough. Each day after that one, she’d accidentally, automatically read something, at least a dozen times. A store sign, a book title, food labels, all of it began to snowball. Within a week, she was automatically figuring out suffixes and two and three syllable words. Which we haven’t even gotten to in her primer yet.

And primer? Yeah. Now she loves it. She wishes we could do two lessons a day. She counts the numbers of sentences in each story in her primer and cheers for the longer ones. She sits quietly, reads the words with a smile on her face, and eventhough she still squirms when she can’t figure it out and I have to help her, she gets through it without any tantrums.

She’s upstairs right now in bed, with a dim light and a copy of the complete collection of Dick and Jane. Once she’s blown through that, there’s the complete collection of Biscuit stories waiting on the shelf. In six months she’ll be wandering around with an apple and a copy of Black Beauty and I’ll have to tell her to stop reading when she’s walking. Or to stop reading in the dark.

I need to seriously re-think my library schedule.

What a long haul it’s been, teaching her to read this year. We struggled all winter over it, after the newness of it had worn off and it became the hardest of all her work, her only absolutely REQUIRED subject. How many mornings when we both gritted our teeth and growled at each other. And sometimes, we cried over it. She wailed for all the world to hear. I sniffled quietly alone late at night, wondering how long we’d be able to go on like that.

And with two little words at the drive-through, it all began to change.

Remember that scene in Apollo 13, near the end, when the Gary Sinise character finally figured out the re-entry plan? Remember how quiet it was, and they were all watching that Amps needle to see if it would jump into the red, and it hovered right there at the mighty edge, and that scientist guy said: “Is your computer up?” And Gary Sinise was all: “Yeah, it’s up. Did I go over?” And the scientist guy said: “I think we got it, buddy.” And then Gary Sinise sort of collapsed in an exhausted heap in the simulator, and how the trumpet-music in the background went duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH!!!!! in that uber-dramatic way?

Remember that?

Yeah… hitting the breakthrough is Just Like THAT. With the trumpet music and everything. So, if you find yourself in THAT PLACE someday, the place that you get bogged down into, when primer seems like a struggle that will NEVER FREEKING END? Hang in there. The breakthrough is coming. And it’s AWESOME.

Sweet tea, she said to me.

There’s nothing sweeter.

So, today we went and got our first evaluation done. Evaluation, you ask? Yeah, in Pennsylvania, there’s all sorts of meaningless tiresome bullshit gestapo-like rules and regulations for us crazy homeschoolers. The evaluation is only one of them. I also have to submit a portfolio of attendance, a list of books read during the year, and samples of completed work. And even before you get to this point, you also have to file a notarized affadavit at the start of the school year, informing the district of your intent to homeschool, and your planned course of study for the year. (If you missed it the first time, and want to read about Affadavit Filing Day, click here.)

All these requirements sounds like a lot, and can be a hassle, but mostly I’m finding it’s not such a big deal. One thing I’ve realized after going through this whole process is that getting the evaluation done wasn’t the hard part of getting the evaulation done. No. The hard part was actually Finding An Evaluator Who Didn’t Make Me Want To Rip My Own Eyelids Off. That was the hard part.

You see, the number one person that all the local homeschool groups I belong to recommended EVERY TIME people asked: hey, does anyone know of a good evaluator?  was this one particular woman who was so FREAKISHLY FUNDAMENTALIST that I just couldn’t imagine sitting down with her and discussing my child’s educational progress. Because, you see, we DON’T start our day with Bible readings here. We just don’t do that. It’s just not how it works here at my house. I’m not an atheist, but I’m not a Fundamentalist either. And I certainly didn’t get into this whole homeschooling gig because I believed that my kids needed a good solid foundation in Biblical Bullshit. And when I say that this woman was FREAKISHLY FUNDAMENTALIST, I mean that she was seriously FREAKISHLY FUNDAMENTALIST.

For example, when someone posted in to the message boards a question like How do you keep track of attendance, this woman responded with a post that stated that she kept track of attendance by reading a chapter out of Psalms and Proverbs every day during the school year. Because taken together, the chapters of both books equals 181, and 180 is the required number of days to attend school. THERE IS NO COINCIDENCE! she assured us. She then went on to describe the ideal portfolio, and the first subject listed in her ideal portfolio was (of course!) BIBLE study. She rambled on for a while longer and then ended her post with a substantial quote from the Book of Deuteronomy. And, reading that, I was all: Yeah. NOT for us, hon. Not in a million FREEKIN’ years.

And, on a side note, I’d just like to state that it’s really not all that hard to keep track of attendance, provided that you a) own a calendar and a pencil or pen or other writing instrument, b) know how to use said calendar, pencil, pen or writing instrument, and c) can count to 180. If you can answer yes to those three items, then all you gotta do is look at the calendar, note the date, and put a little check mark on the appropriate box in the calendar. Do that each day you and your kids sit down and do school in whatever shape doing school takes for you at your place. When you get to 180 days, you can stop and call it a year. This does not seem hard to me. Yet, at least once a month around here, someone posts in: hey, what’s the best way of keeping track of attendance?  And again, I find my fingers desperately twitching and I have to turn off the Internet, and sit on my hands for ten minutes to protect my eyelids.

As for the whole Psalms and Proverbs coincidence? Yeah. Well, I’m no theologian, but I do know that there are tons of fascinating theories regarding the endless numerical codes and patterns scattered through out all the books of the Bible. But I really honestly would like to believe that if there is any numerological significance to the number 181 with regards to the total number of chapters in Psalms and Proverbs, that it’s something more earth-shatteringly significant than God realizing that a bunch of crazy people in eastern Pennsylvania would lose the ability to reason out a simple way to get from 1 to 180 when counting up the number of days their kids learned something. I’d like to think he wasn’t forced to WASTE that highly significant 181 on something like THAT!!!

But, I digress.

So, all year long, all I knew for sure was who I DIDN’T  want evaluating us. Which is a long stretch from finding someone who I did want as an evaluator. It seemed that everyone I knew either used the Fundy, or were enrolled in a cyber charter and didn’t have to have an evaluation. Finally, I came across someone who was using a different evaluator, and having gotten a good recommendation, proceeded to email this woman and ask about her being our evaluator. She responded with some hemming and hawing about whether or not my district would accept her as a certified evaulator. I checked all the statutes and emailed her again, asssuring her that it didn’t seem like it would be a problem. And she simply never wrote back.

Almost a month went by, and I gave up on her and started looking around on the Internet, and finally I chose someone blindly because she seemed to have a professional air about her. She had a nice website that made no Biblical references at all, had no dancing cherubs or irritating blinking text, and wrote on her website about how committed she was to being An Advocate For Homeschooling. Sounded good. I emailed her and within a week, I had an appointment all set. I assembled a quick draft portfolio of what I planned on giving the district, piled the kids in the car and drove on down to her place this morning.

We sat in a little playroom with enough toys to keep my 6-year-old happy and she looked through my materials, complimented my 8-year-old on all her hard work, mentioned that my district tended to be one of the easier ones to work with, and in the end, called everything satisfactory, printed off a letter in duplicate for me to give the district and never once made any religious references whatsoever. After we were done, she offered to show the girls her baby chickens which the girls were more than happy to see. Then she brought out her white dove and let us hold the bird on our hands. Then she took us out to the backyard to see the koi pond and chicken coops. We left not long afterwards, with a dozen of the freshest eggs you could ever hope to have, and what started out as an annual chore had become a wonderful, relaxing field trip.

And now I’ve got a name up my sleeve for the next time someone posts in hey, anyone know of a good evaluator?

And life is good.

The list being, of course, the BUT-WHAT-ABOUT-THE’s. When people find out you homeschool, if they know you well enough (or even if  they don’t know you at all and they’re just THAT KIND OF PERSON) they’ll feel justified in engaging in some serious protesting and worrying and cajoling. These protestations often begin with the phrase “But what about the–”

There are quite a few BUT-WHAT-ABOUT-THE’s floating around out there. The top three I’ve come across are: 1. But what about socialization? 2. But what about the PROM? and 3. But what about the SCHOOL PLAY? The socialization horse is so dead it’s becoming a national tragedy how people won’t stop beating on it.

The prom question — yeah, that’s the big one for the high school set. It doesn’t matter how old your kid is. Your kid could be in kindergarten and just starting out with some very basic phonics and people will have already imagined the poor kid’s entire academic childhood: 12 lonely years that culminate ultimately with the Lack Of A Prom. These concerned people have then immediately determined that your kid will be SCARRED FOR LIFE IF YOU HOMESCHOOL AND SHE DOESN’T EVER GO TO A PROM.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been to a couple of proms. And they both just sucked. I don’t want to get into the details, but having survived a prom or two and lived to tell the tale, and finding it exceedly difficult to find anyone who actually looks back on their proms fondly, I just don’t see what the big deal is about the prom. Besides, homeschoolers are having proms nowadays anyway. There’s a group near here who started having proms a few years back. And apparently, the hotel that hosts the homeschool prom loves the homeschoolers because they’re all so mature and well-adjusted and polite and not interested in destroying the hotel’s property or sneaking a keg into the ballroom. So now when those horrified individuals who, upon hearing I homeschool my daughters, immediately rend their garments and gouge their eyes out with raking fingernails and moan desperately BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PROOOOOOMMMMMM?????????? I’m able to say matter-of-factly “Oh yes, we’ve got that too.”

I won’t pretend that it’s not fun to watch them struggle.

If the prom thing is covered, then the next thing to come up will undoubtedly be: But what about the school PLAY????”  This one is geared more towards the elementary grades. Apparently, I shouldn’t homeschool because I’m depriving my second grader of the essential opportunity to dress up like — oh, I don’t know — a carrot or a little carton of milk, or some other food item? Or perhaps – even worse – a Pilgrim or an Indian for that ever-popular farce we call the First Thanksgiving?

For a few years, the nay-sayers had me at the PLAY. The ubiquitous, meaningless PLAY: a piece propagandized drivel that I’d probably have to sew a costume for  (badly) if I put the kids in school. So, having successfully shut-down both the socialization and prom protestations, these people would still manage to triumph over me at that moment where I’d freeze over the issue of the school PLAY, and they’d exit the conversation victoriously – another blow against homeschooling successfully delivered.

But, not anymore.

Not too long ago, I signed the kids up for a Creative Theater class run by a local homeschool dad around here. For ten weeks, the kids got together with other kids, learned about stage direction, acting skills, and then proceeded to write their own production, rehearse it, come up with costumes for it, and then perform it for our little community of homeschoolers. The idea was to take the imaginary play that all kids like to do when they’re just jumping around in the living room, channel it, and turn it into the Real Thing. The kids got to pick what character they’d most like to play, and then as a group, they had to create a storyline that incorporated everyone’s character.

I’m happy to report that not one child opted to be a carrot. Or a Pilgrim. Mine, of course, opted to be a unicorn and a pegasus, and for 2 joyous months, it was their JOB to act like those kinds of creatures.

Here’s my little unicorn, backstage during the performance, dealing with some last minute costuming issues.

So, at last, I’m crossing another big one off the list.

But what about the PLAY, you ask?

Yeah. We got that.

Lately I find myself feeling a bit jaded when it comes to the Internet, having come across more bad than good on it lately.  And ya know… now that I think about it, it’s not that the stuff I’m running across is BAD. It’s more that it’s just MEAN. Mean in senseless, petty ways that remind me of being in middle school. Mean in ways that reassure me that homeschooling is a worthy project.

But then, someone who you know has got your back finds something like this, and posts it out where you’ll find it just when you need it most, and you feel renewed somehow, and more hopeful in spite of the gray skies and chilly rain.

Rough day?

Here ya go. This should help:

For more information about this project, visit www.playingforchange.com

So… when you think “field trip”, what places come to mind?

Zoos. Aquariums. Police and fire stations. Museums of all sorts — science, art, history, childrens. Music halls. Nature centers. Amusement parks. Orchards and farms. For older kids you could visit national monuments, historic sites, government centers and capitals. Etc, etc. etc. I could go on, but you get the idea. Places where there’s cultural enrichment, educational and inspirational opportunities. Like, if we’re studying Astronomy, it would make sense to take my kids to a planetarium, wouldn’t it? And if my child were so inspired by the day that she delved deeper into the possibility of Being an Astronomer Someday, well then… that would be fine with me.

That’s a field trip that Makes Sense to me.

But lately on the homeschooling community message boards we belong to, I’m noticing this odd trend of planning and taking the kids on field trips to places like supermarkets, and restaurants, and large retail crafting stores. At first I thought it was just some over-zealous homeschool moms who’d gotten so tired of the science museum that they’d finally said: oh to hell with it, let’s just tour the Super Walmart and have done with it. It’s so close, and then I could get my grocery shopping done while the kids were taking the tour. But then, last week, I heard one of the karate moms talking about the field trip her son’s kindergarten class had taken to a nearby supermarket.

It was pretty interesting, she said, but her eyes weren’t alight with wonder or anything. They took the kids on a tour of all the warehouses in the back, and the butcher section and everything. Then even let them use a register to ring up some items.

Oh… how nice, I said to her. Because what else does one say to a story like that?

What I wanted to ask was if the deli-counter manager had given out hairnets to the kids as souvenirs. Because you just know that’s what ALL the kids want these days. Hairnets are IN, baby. To hell with the fact that the Zoo gift shop is now stocking Webkinz, man! It’s really all about the hairnets!

And I wonder what kind of speech the store manager gave to the kids at the start. Was he all: Well, hi there, kids! And welcome to the Acme! I know you’ll love our tour today. In fact, when I was a kid not much older than you guys, I wanted to be a fireman! But then, one day, while on the run from some bigger kids from the middle school, I slipped into the back warehouse of a Woolworths, and I knew from that moment on, my future was in shelving and inventory!

Can you imagine a duller afternoon than that? Seriously? I do everything in my power to avoid going into a grocery store. And when I’m in one, all I want is to be done shopping and get the hell out. To agree to spend an afternoon in one even though I’m not currently low on milk seems not just boring, but kind of crazy.

But I’m just weird like that, I guess.

So, I guess it’s not just bored homeschool moms looking to streamline their schedules that have started this odd new trend. It’s more like homeschool communities are going out of their way to mimic the latest trends in public school field trips. And I’m all like: whatever happened to Raising the Educational Bar?

I haven’t taken the kids on one of these new-fangled field trips yet. And I seriously doubt I ever will. Because I can’t imagine saying to them: Now girls, you need to calm down and get your Latin done or else you won’t be able to go on the field trip to Dennys next week, and you’ll miss out on the inside look at Your Exciting Future Career in…

retail.

You know who you are. You cowgirls, you.  And you know you totally ROCK, don’t you?

Thanks for the reminder that I need to keep on posting. I’ve got a few things brewing, but it’s too late to get them written tonight, so until I find some spare time tomorrow, here’s a little post from the past, to tide you over.

(Fair warning: Before you click that link, make sure you’re not trying to sip your coffee or anything. You might accidentally inhale your beverage while reading.)

When PMS Strikes on Easter Weekend

Hope all your Easters were better than Reggie’s.