Snow

Really, I've had quite enough snow. Fourteen inches last night over the many, many, we've already had this month.

Here is my poor dog Luna, trying to go to the bathroom. She couldn't see the steps of the deck, so she went right on it. (Click the photos to see them larger.)

We have to get outside somehow to refill the bird feeders. The squirrels are thrilled because they can just leap right up now.

Here are views from our front and back windows. Yes, that's our deck.

I'm so jealous that my boys are flying down to Florida for a week with my mom. I want to go in the worst way now, but they are really looking forward to having some time with Grandma and Aunt D without me. Plus B is looking forward to some time alone with me at home.

I would just love opportunity to get away from all this snow. I'm glad at least the sun is out today. We'll have a few hours of the snow being absolutely beautiful before it becomes a dirty nuisance.

The boys slept over some friends’ house last night, so the snow in front of my house will be there for a while. It's nice that R is at an age where he is thrilled to be allowed to use the snow blower. We got about two years out of him before his love affair with the lawn tractor mellowed, so let's hope the snow slows down over the next couple of years. In the meantime, perhaps I will go outside and shovel a path off the deck for Luna.

I'm glad my camera is still working, despite the fact that the LCD is broken. No viewfinder, so I've been just randomly aiming and hoping for the best. No “artsy” photos this way, but at least I can still capture life. (Partly why I still haven't mailed it to be fixed: I can't live without it.)

I'm enjoying time scrapbooking while the boys are out. There are lots of things on my “to do” list that I've been ignoring, but the snow makes me so unmotivated (as if I need a reason). I suppose it's better than laying in bed watching TV all day. At least I will have a sense of accomplishment. Plus I've hardly scrapped at all lately, really, because doing anything for myself brings such guilt with it. Not today though!

Great Hollow

The boys are taking nature classes at Great Hollow through a YMCA. It's an all-day thing every Friday (from 9 till 3). Here's a photo of the group heading out this morning.

The Great Hollow Homeschool coordinator writes a blog, so I'm just going to copy what it says our class has been doing:

"In plant class we are working on a very practical level, with our focus on conservation. Components of this endeavor are three-fold: Conservation of land integrity and biodiversity, Bioregional and traditional alternatives for herbal medicines which replace overuse of endangered plants, and Place-based knowledge. The latter being the founding root of the former two components.

Our classes thus far have reflected this. The first day we studied and planted Goldenseal roots. The second day we studied Elder and made wise Elderberry Elixir to keep everyone healthy this season. The third day we took root cuttings to help propagate our existing Bloodroot, and the students scouted the proper habitat for their transplant. Very well done. The fourth day we assimilated what we have learned about these plants and their accompanying lessons by creating our own folklore stories. This was an especially challenging and rewarding class – all the stories were fantastic, and if read to a sibling or younger friend, would indeed pass along the intended wisdom in clever and enchanting ways."

The boys really love this class, but I haven't decided whether we'll continue in the spring or not. It's super expensive and an hour away, which is really taking its toll on me.

Till now I've been dropping them off and returning home, since I can't leave Luna in her crate for eight hours. So altogether it's four hours of driving every week for me, not to mention all that gas.

This is one of those examples of how Luna is really cramping my style. Ordinarily I'd have absolutely no problem enjoying six hours alone in the Danbury area of the state, but with a dog? Well this time I didn't care, and brought her along and left her in the car. I spent a wonderful morning in Target, had lunch at a favorite diner (clam chowder, salad, stuffed cabbage, pickled beets and a baked potato - yum!), and then spent some time at a nearby state park.



Luna joined me on a walk through the park, but is so testing my alpha position that it was not very enjoyable. I did manage to take some photos though. Once we got to the beach area, I was distracted taking some macro photos and she slipped out from her choke collar and was off. Argh. To say she went berserk on that beach would be an understatement. I didn't yell and scream, or engage in her attempt to play, but just stood there dispassionately till she ran it out. Eventually I made my way to a picnic table and sat down to wait.

Luckily she is still a fraidy cat about some things and when a motor boat went by she came and sat right next to me. She was a lot less resistant to follow instead of lead on the leash once she had used up some of that energy, so it worked out. And she was finally willing to eat some of the food I had brought for her since she had worked up an appetite. She didn't eat anything all day till about 2:00!

Anyhow, I put her back in the car and had 15 minutes to take some photos without her. I always enjoy taking photos, but am pretty unhappy with my camera. It's a pocket thing, that's easy to carry, and it takes great macro shots when I can get it to focus where I want, but for action shots my four year old Sony blew it away. What good is a super long zoom if the shot is always fuzzy?

I enjoyed taking all those shots though, and wish I had gotten there before all the leaves were gone.

The drive to Great Hollow is a long one, but it's beautiful, and now that the leaves are all fallen, I can see the homes, and today noticed this (click to enlarge it):

What a lovely thing to come across.

So as usual, the boys had an awesome time in their nature class, and for once, I spent the afternoon the way I wanted to.

This evening R is sleeping at a friend's house, and once E is tucked into bed, I'll be settling into my own with my husband and a movie.

Life is good.

Luna

My brother gave us our dog. Honestly, I'm really not a dog person, and could still return her without looking back. And it really annoys me that I have to be the alpha. Really. But the boys adore her and feel she is part of the family. Even if it means we can't go anywhere for more than about four hours or so, since I can't feel good about leaving her in her crate much longer than that.

Luna is now six months old (and still growing...argh). Here she is playing a game, or more accurately getting mad that we are playing a game...


Sleeping on her stinky pillow...

Checking me out from the back seat of the car...

And trying to look fierce with E. But the ears always give her away...

Happy Mother's Day

Mother's Day was wonderful. Everyone got up early to make their cards since Saturday had been such a busy day and they couldn't get to them. (I had spent several hours alone at the Scholastic book sale – ahhh.) They brought me my cards and presents in bed.Every year each of my children paint a ceramic tile for me. I look forward to the day I have enough to surround a mirror with.

I enjoyed a yummy breakfast of eggs, tater tots, bacon and english muffins, compliments of my loving spouse. They had even bought me my own 1/2 gallon of orange juice with lots of pulp, since I'm the only one who enjoys it that way.

After breakfast I dragged everyone back to our king-sized bed where we watched an episode of The Waltons. It was hard to keep B from doing anything around the house. The man needs to learn how to relax.

We all got dressed then and headed out. First stop: Sweet Claude's for ice-cream. Yum. Then we headed to Sleeping Giant State Park, where we walked the Tower Trail; a park maintained trail which leads up to a castle on the top of the mountain. B really likes the idea of hiking since he enjoyed it during our vacation, so I thought it would be fun since I had heard about the castle. I am pathetically out of shape. It took us 50 minutes to get to the top. From the top of the castle we could see all the way to Long Island Sound. Well worth it. Next time we'll do it when the park isn't so crowded though.

We took 30 minutes to get back down, practically running, since we had a dinner reservation in Southington I really wanted to make. And we did, exactly on time. We ate at Manor Inn, which is too expensive to eat at often. We were all bummed to find a special Mother's Day menu, since Chicken Parmesan wasn't on it, but the veal was just as good.

On the way home B and I got to talking and something he said reminded me of a movie I hadn't seen in a long time. So we stopped in at the video store and ended our day watching Dennis the Menace together. It was just as funny as I remembered it and the boys thought it was hilarious.

What a terrific day. I hope, if you are a mom, that your Mother's Day was as wonderful as mine.

Trouble getting my groove back

I've been home from vacation for almost a week. I still have well over a hundred emails to sort through, piles of brochures and souvenir type stuff to clean up, photographs to get onto my computer, several phone calls to make...plus I need to blog about my vacation before I forget it all. (I'm like that.)

I can't seem to scrounge up any enthusiasm for it. B had to remind me during our trip that I once told him "we don't vacation; we travel". Well I need a vacation. Or a swift kick in the butt. Actually I need a list of things to do, and my date book. I'll work on that tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's a dose of what I'm having trouble coming home from. Understandable readjustment, I think.

I'm so sick

I woke up on my birthday (Wednesday) with a horrible cold, which actually might be the flu, but either way four days later I still feel awful. I'll post something tomorrow, hopefully, or honestly, just whenever I feel like it.

Woe is me :-(

I quit my job

I'm copying this over from my other blog. I originally posted it on the other one since it is more about me than info about our unschooling family, but then I decided it's really one and the same. Plus, I know some people only read this one and would miss out. So here it is; I quit my job...

I've been freelancing for a woman for a several months now. She actually sent me home with a mac so I could work when she needs me to. It's been really wonderful to make some extra money for us, and I really do like what I do.

Recently though, my client discovered she has breast cancer. So she started farming out her work, so that she can have the next few weeks unencumbered. She gave me two jobs to work on. One for a local Chamber of Commerce, and another for a car dealership which does a weekly newspaper ad. I knew the next couple of weeks would be very full and somewhat stressful, but I felt I owed it to my client to be there for her. Plus, to be honest, all those billable hours would be really nice.

Well after several days of working on the Chamber of Commerce thing, my client added up the hours and decided it would be best to give the job back to them. Apparently even paying me at less than what she was billing, she would lose money. It was a combination of reasons, really. The customer made many changes which had not been included in the original quote, and passing the thing on further down the line meant communication was being lost; kind of like the telephone game. So I spent four hours on something before I was told that it needed to be completely redesigned, at which time I spent another four hours redesigning it. If my client had not been ill and distracted, I'm sure the information would have been passed on correctly the first time around, but that was not the case, and I spent a lot of time doing work which was wrong. So in the end she (rightly) decided it was best to give the job back to the agency and let them deal with it.

Then we have the car thing. These folks are completely unprofessional. I'm not going into the details of the whole thing, but the bottom line is they were supposed to have had the ad all approved so I could upload it to the newspaper by noon on Thursday, and Friday at 5:30 is when I was finally able to upload it.

So I told my client that I would not be able cover the car ad for her until she returned to working full time. It would make me a slave to the house on Thursdays and Fridays and wasn't fair to the boys. So Saturday morning she came and took her computer back so she could give it to someone who could cover for her.

My feelings are so mixed. Bottom line is that I made a choice to stay home and raise my children, and homeschool them, and to expect them to entertain themselves two days a week for the next several was not fair. Not to mention that we would have to cancel plans already made for those days.

I also feel frustrated that my client left feeling that I took way longer to do the work than she would have. I know this would not be the case had she been her normal self - instructions would not have been missed, and I certainly would not have had to spend the enormous amount of time I had to gathering all the files together from all the different places she had it stored. I only hope that when she is herself again that she is able to see that I am still valuable to her, and that the time I spent on all her work is justified. "If you always do your best, there is no way you can judge yourself." Man, this book rocks. It is my life preserver.

There is also a piece of me which feels proud on a couple of levels. First, I have my priorities straight. Second, I feel that car dealership and the agency who represented them really were unprofessional. I refuse to work with people who don't respect me, especially after I explained my circumstances to make sure they were okay with my time limitations.

Finally though, I am dealing with the whole money thing. It doesn't seem fair that society judges people on their worth according to their monetary worth. And that that viewpoint is so prevalent that it has rubbed off on me, even though consciously I know I what I contribute to my family is worth more than some extra money. If I could just get my husband on board with that...

Man Day

B has no real interest in football, except for the week leading into, and the day of, the Superbowl. He really does enjoy watching it every year though. For the past two years we have spent the day with friends, but this year we were not included on the guest list. I thought the kids would be way more disappointed than they were, since they got to see many of their friends there. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear B say he would have "called in sick" if we had been invited. So it actually worked out quite nicely that we were home alone for it.

I made mini pizza bagels, mozzarella sticks, buffalo wings, and we got pretzels and Doritos and Cheeze Doodles. And the boys enjoyed their ginger ale along side B's Heineken. Later we had hamburgers, macaroni and cheese - out of a box, no less - and potato salad. They were all in manly junk-food heaven. They were all so cute lounging around watching TV snuggled in with their blankets. Actually, that was for about the last hour only; before that E had been running all around chasing balloons with his sword. He sat down when the food arrived, and pretty much passed out shortly thereafter. R went to bed before it ended too; his birthday party is tomorrow and he wants good energy.

Yes, while Man Day was being celebrated and catered to, I was also preparing my house for a birthday party. Clean kitchen, arrange furniture so all the kids have seats, put up streamers and balloons, make and decorate a cake... I so lived the Suzy Homemaker stereotype today. It can sometimes be somewhat disconcerting, but today I didn't mind actually. Throwing really fun kids birthday parties is something my mother taught me to do well :-) And I do enjoy them.

Friday found us at friends' house. We hadn't spent alone-time with them in eons. And both R and E had a wonderful time. R has always enjoyed C's company in the absence of a crowd, and thought he had "really cool stuff". E loved playing house and horses with R, and came home with a bunch of stuffed animals; gifts and loans. And I enjoyed checking in with my friend too.

On Saturday during R's basketball game, E starting noticing the really cool pattern on the bottom of his new sneakers. He wondered if he could use the texture to paint when we got home. When we got there, he gathered up a bunch of textures to use and set right to work. I was very glad "he" decided to use his old sneaker bottoms instead of his new ones.

Favorites? The boot bottom, the monster truck wheels, and his own feet, (of course)! Hands were cool too. He's loved finger painting since he was about 18 months old, that kid.

I'm reading The Edison Trait. A friend recommended it to me a long time ago, and although I've picked it up, I've always put it back. I think because maybe I was in denial. Anyhow, I'm into it now, and find that I have a Discoverer with huge Dynamo tendencies. The Dynamo is the part I find so challenging. It's been a really helpful book so far, in that I now know I'm not alone in some of the things I've been feeling. I'm not even up to the "what to do for the kid" part yet. It's going to take me a while to get through this book. Hopefully I'll be able to renew it since I got it through Interlibrary loan.

I guess I'm still coming to grips with the reality of who E is, and accepting that he will always keep me on my toes. He will continue to challenge me to see things differently, and to question my perception of how this world should work. He will continue to expand my horizons. If I could just get him to stop bouncing off the walls. Occasional silence would also be incredibly welcome. But I suppose the book will help me adjust that attitude...

A Gemini Dragon Discoverer Dynamo.
Now that's a label.

Depression?

Well I must say that my vacation did wonders for my outlook on life. I had been feeling quite depressed for a while and was concerned that I was falling back into major depression, which I have suffered from in the past. I'm wondering now if it was some sort of Seasonal Affective Disorder, even though everything I find says that's a winter thing. I do tend to get into an extremely bad "funk" about the end of summer when I start feeling totally trapped in the air-conditioned house. I can't take the summer heat and it really brings me down. So perhaps it was not the vacation itself that jolted me out of this, but the weather. Who knows?

In the meantime, my self-involved whining hurt some feelings, and for that I feel very badly. I removed two entries from my blog which never should have been posted. If I had been myself and realized what I was doing, they certainly would not have made it online. It is not until I returned home from vacation and re-read them that I became aware of just how far down I was.

On the brighter side, I am feeling much better now. Autumn is my very favorite season and I feel really invigorated. Also, my blog now has a lot more readers than it did before.

I will blog about my vacation hopefully within the next few days. For now I need to concentrate on the CHN September Newsletter.

Time kid-less

The boys were invited to sleep over some friends' house last night. Despite the fact that I have a ton of things to do and a whole vacation, which we are leaving for in ten days, to plan, B and I could not resist the opportunity to go on a date. We went to the movies and saw Little Miss Sunshine. I cannot praise this movie enough. It was belly laugh funny, and the audience actually applauded at the end! Go see it immediately!

This morning it was heavenly to wake up to an empty house. B leaves for work early, so I was all alone. I have to admit that I sorely miss being alone. As I sat eating my breakfast I picked up a copy of Newsweek and read an essay by Anna Quindlen entitled "Live Alone and Like It". It's amazing how these things show up when I most need to read them. I miss having my own apartment and being alone. It's why I stay up all night after everyone has gone to bed. I need a couple of hours a day alone. An extremely difficult predicament to find oneself in when you are a homeschooling stay-at-home mom!

A Worm Hotel and the first friends to help us enjoy our new pool

B and my "2B" homeschoolers were digging in the compost pile yesterday. Overall they found about 50 worms. I suggested they immediately dump them in the strawberry patch, but fishing won out. So they created a worm hotel to keep them all happy until they are needed. Fifty worms is a lot to keep well-fed in a bucket, no matter how large that bucket is. Several dead ones were hanging out on top today. So the three of them decided that tomorrow they'd dump them all out and take inventory.

B was flattening out the ground to prepare it for our new pool. The friend of a friend gave us one for free, and boy are we psyched! It was a lot of work for B to flatten the ground, but it was well worth it.

Meanwhile back inside, I was making blueberry clafouti and blueberry pie. I stopped everyone to eat the lunch I had made, and later the dinner. I felt very housewife-ish. It was weird, although I much preferred all that baking to slinging dirt.

I also enjoyed cutting some more flowers from my cutting garden. The smell of the lilies is simply intoxicating. The whole house smells.











"Wake up Mommy and take my picture." Today started with E's experimenting with the strength of some Magz (magnets.) They are very strong and "it hurts when you leave them in your nose too long."

Today I made blueberry jam, and all the yogurt I bought yesterday evening is completely gone; the boys loved it with the fresh blueberries. We need to get some maple syrup tomorrow so we can enjoy some blueberry pancakes.

Today we also had some friends over and they enjoyed our new pool.I love visiting with these particular friends. Their mom is always so insightful. I always leave our one-on-one visits with lots to think about. I wish they weren't always so busy, or intentionally un-busy, so that we could see them more. I cherish the time we do get though.