Mariposa Academy Homeschool

I haven’t posted in a while. Let’s start with the life stuff. Adrian was laid off about two weeks ago. It’s not as bad as it sounds– he has his job until Jan. 15th, and as long as he stays until then he will get a severance payment of 3 months’ salary. We also have our health insurance until April 30th, which is super-important considering that I am due on April 9th.

He is looking for a job and there are possibilities out there. We are, of course, economizing, but I’m not worried we’ll be living under a bridge anytime soon. He actually went to NYC for interviews on Tuesday. He thinks one of the companies he interviewed with will make him an offer. It’s a well known company, and he got a great feeling about it from the interview. It seems like an environment he would really enjoy. The only problem is that the salary they offer will probably be substantially less than what we’re hoping for. While I am all for living more simply, it’s the biggest understatement in the world to say that NYC housing is expensive. I’m worried that all we’d be able to afford is a 900 sq. ft. 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom apartment with a coin-op laundry room in the basement and an hour’s commute into midtown. I know we’d be miserable with that. We certainly don’t need luxury, but we need someplace bigger, with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a shorter commute, and our own washer/dryer. I usually do about two loads of laundry a day, and of course that will increase exponentially with a baby, even if we use a diaper service instead of washing the dipes ourselves. As God is my witness, I’ll never use a basement laundry room again!! [/Scarlett O’Hara]

Maybe we can make it work, though. Maybe if Adrian can stay until Jan. 15th and get his severance, we can use that to pay down some of our ridiculous debt, and thus free up some money each month, which could go to rent. In any case, I’m just counting chickens at this point. He hasn’t gotten an offer.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and asking questions about Zeke lately. He has certain quirks that have always struck me as not within the realm of “normal,” age-appropriate behaviors. Basically, I’ve had a gut feeling for a long time that something is just not right. I have looked at checklists for various autism spectrum disorders, and he doesn’t seem to fit any of those profiles. The closest thing is maybe a sensory processing disorder, but even that is not really him. I don’t know what it is, but I just feel in my gut that it’s something, that all his quirks, his verbal apraxia, his hair-trigger frustration threshold, his tantrums, his refusal to have anything to do with the potty, must be connected somehow and that if I could figure out what it is then I could learn how to deal with it.

I asked his speech therapist how I can get Zeke evaluated through the school system, and she is going to let me know what the procedure is. A friend of mine also gave me the URL of a private pediatric therapy practice. I don’t know whether out insurance would cover that, so I’d rather go through the school system, but however we end up doing it we’re going to get him evaluated.

Speaking of Zeke, he started running a fever last night. He was up every 20 minutes because he felt so miserable, which of course meant that I was up every 20 minutes. It was like having a newborn again. I am really not firing on all cylinders today. He is only a tiny bit warm now, and acting fine. Hopefully it will pass quickly and none of us will catch it. We missed speech therapy today, which is especially sucky since we missed both sessions last week, and he did not say a single word during Tuesday’s session. We also missed going to the park with a neighbor and her grandson.

Onto more school-related stuff. As relaxed as we are, there are certain things that I really want to get done every day or almost every day, and it just wasn’t happening. I found myself continually saying, for instance, “We really need to do math today,” and not actually doing it (at least not in a structured way) for days and days. So I decided to write up a daily routine. Not a schedule, with set-in-stone times, but more a list of lessons/activities in the order I want to do them and about how long we’ll spend on each one. We started on Monday, and even though we woke up late that morning, it went very smoothly. It was great– we got a lot done, yet did not feel rushed or pressured.

Tuesday, though, it all went to hell. We didn’t follow our routine at all. Yet, the kids did a lot of stuff on their own and it was still a satisfying, successful homeschooling day. They wrote and drew and read and played, and Llani did quite a bit of sewing. That gave me the idea of having on days and off days. I think what we’ll do is follow a planned routine on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and have Tuesday and Thursday as free days. I think that will work very well.

Remember how much Llani loved math and how well the Miquon program was working for us? All of a sudden she has been balking at doing math lessons, and saying that math is boring. She can’t tell me why, and I can’t figure out why. Maybe it’s because she’s been doing basic addition and subtraction for quite a while. We’re going to move on to multiplication, and hopefully that will spark her interest again.

Yesterday I bought two books: Table For Eight by Meagan Francis, and Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld. I’ve only skimmed through them so far, but I think I’m really going to get a lot out of them.

I noticed a theme that threads through both books, a theme that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately, about the way we raise our children in the present American society. I’m generalizing, of course, but judging from my experience, these generalizations are pretty representative of the mainstream.

“Generations ago, it was generally expected that children would share bedrooms,” Meagan Francis writes in Table, “but now some people seem to regard it as a mild form of child abuse!”

In Hold On, Gordon Neufeld quotes a mother as saying, “As a child I was endlessly fascinated by the clay I would dig out of a ditch near our home. I loved the feel of it; I loved molding it into shapes or just kneading it in my hands. And yet, I can’t get my six-year-old son to play on his own, unless it’s with the computer or Nintendo or video games.”

I know parents who are adamant that their children will never share a bedroom. Parents who move into McMansions when they have their second child because their 3-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home “just isn’t big enough” for a family of four. Among people I know, it’s not uncommon for children to have a playroom in addition to their bedroom. And these aren’t necessarily fabulously wealthy families, either. When I was a child, a room created just for playing in and storing toys in was something I imagined existed in mansions and castles– certainly not in the average working- or middle-class home. But somewhere along the line, playrooms became normal, almost expected.

Another idea that has become normalized within just a generation is “kids’ food.” Sure, when I was young, we had Spaghetti-Os, TV Dinners, and sugar cereal. The Happy Meal came into existence during my childhood, as did Chicken McNuggets. But no one expected kids to eat McNuggets and Spaghetti-Os for dinner on a regular basis. Our dinners were family dinners; we ate, for the most part, whatever the grownups ate. These days, though, there seems to be a notion that kids need to eat some sort of special diet made up primarily of pizza, chicken nuggets, boxed mac-n-cheese, and French fries. Not only are more and more kids eating foods that are different from their parents’ supper fare, but they’re eating completely separate suppers. It’s not uncommon for parents to feed the kids a meal of nuggets and fries, and then sit down an hour or two later to have their own grown-up meal of, well, regular food.

I don’t want to sound like one of those people who walked 10 miles uphill (both ways!) through the snow to school in cardboard shoes, but I feel like we’ve lost something very precious in the way we raise our children. Today’s kids have an almost unimaginable wealth of material goods. Their own bedrooms, playrooms, tons of toys, gaming systems, TVs. They often lack less tangible benefits, however, that are just as important (more important, if you ask me) as the material things they do have.

They don’t get to squish creekbed clay through their fingers and observe tadpoles on lazy afternoons. They don’t sit at the dinner table with their whole family, discussing the day’s events or listening to their parents talk about the goings-on of the world. While they are tech-savvy before they can tie their shoes (and don’t get me wrong; that’s a wonderful thing!), they don’t learn to bake bread, sew hems, build bookshelves, fix an engine, or knit sweaters because people generally don’t do those things anymore– we go to the store or hire a professional. They’re so busy playing competitive team sports that they hardly have enough free time to toss a ball around with a parent or friend. They can watch Nickelodeon or play video games whenever they want, but how often do they sit down and watch a movie or play a board game with their whole family?

I do sound like one of those cardboard-shoes people, don’t I? I’m not a Luddite. I don’t want to live on a commune. I don’t want to give up my computer, my cellphone, or my TiVo. I love that my kids are following in their father’s geeky footsteps and playing World of Warcraft. And of course, I don’t want to hearken back to the “good old days,” because those days were really only good if you were white, straight, male, Christian, and middle-class. But I believe that it’s possible to enjoy the benefits of the modern world without giving up the values, the family life, and the skills of the previous generations. That’s my challenge in raising my own kids.

I want to put up a FAQ section on this website. If you have any questions about homeschooling in general, or about how we homeschool in our family, please ask away. No names will be used in the FAQ section. I also might edit questions or combine two similar/related questions into one.

a girl!

Ok, first, y’all HAVE TO check out this post by Melissa Wiley. It’s exactly what I’m dealing with, what I have been dealing with for as long as I have been homeschooling. It’s like what I wrote yesterday on the Secular Charlotte Mason Yahoo group:

It’s so easy to get caught up in following a certain
method or philosophy, be it CM or anything else. We’re so concerned
with doing it the “right” way according to CM or WTM or whatever–
and then we realize that while we might be doing exactly what the
“expert” recommends, we’re losing sight of what the particular child
needs. I can’t tell y’all the number of times I read up on a
particular hsing philosophy that made sooo much sense to me, and said
“This is it! Wow, this is amazing, everything in this book is so
right on, this is how we should be homeschooling!” And of course once
I put it into practice some parts worked well and some parts just did
not work at all. You have to pick and choose what works for you, for
each of your kids, for your lifestyle.

Lately I’ve been describing myself as an eclectic homeschooler with unschoolish tendencies. Maybe I should start saying that I’m a tidal homeschooler.

Since I’m quoting myself today, I’ll also include my Facebook blog entry from last night:

Maybe it is hormones, maybe it is weaning off the Zoloft, but I have been crying off and on tonight because I just learned some very disappointing news about the hospital where I’m supposed to deliver. This is what they say on their website:

Our Maternity Center includes 12 recently renovated private labor/delivery/recovery (LDR) suites designed to make mother, baby and family feel at home. Each suite includes a rocking chair, large private bath, CD, DVD/VCR player and a place for a guest to stay overnight.

Now LDR, as far as I have always heard, means that you stay in the same room before (labor), during (delivery), and after (recovery) the actual birth. And frankly, I thought that was the way all hospitals did things these days, at least here in the first world. But I was told by two friends that at CMC-Main (the only hospital where my midwives deliver) that you give birth in one room and then are wheeled into another room afterward. WTF? How on earth is that beneficial for mother or baby? When I have just given birth, the last thing I want is to have to move into a different room. I just want to rest, nurse and bond with my baby, and not have a single soul bother me.

I also heard that the rooms are really small, that they don’t have tubs, and that the showers are reminiscent of eighth-grade gym class.

I don’t know if this is a really crappy facility, or if this is pretty much standard and I was just spoiled by the amazing birthing center where I had my first two babies. I was in a beautiful room with soft lighting and a real queen-size bed– not a hospital bed. At night Adrian and I were able to sleep in the bed with our newborn between us. I labored in a big jacuzzi, with Adrian sitting in there with me. Not only do they not have a jacuzzi at CMC, but they don’t even have a bathtub at all?!

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I can do. There is no birthing center here in Charlotte. There are very few midwives, and most of them are working within an OB practice as opposed to a midwifery practice. Because I don’t drive, I can only go to those practices that I can get to via bus, so that eliminates a lot of the choices. Adrian is strongly against us having a homebirth, and to tell the truth I don’t really want a homebirth either. In theory I would do it, but in practice I would need a new, bigger, cleaner, cat-free home before I’d be willing to birth a baby in it. Not to mention that our insurance would not cover a homebirth.

I feel so trapped.

Adrian says not to worry. He says we won’t be living in Charlotte by the time this baby is born. I hope he’s right, but if he really thinks we’ll move that soon, we’d better get our butts in gear and fix up this apartment.

I haven’t talked about that on here, have I? In a nutshell, Adrian is looking for jobs in Boston and NYC, and if he gets a good offer, we’re going to move. I think the reason I haven’t posted that here is because I haven’t told my family yet. But trust me, they don’t read this blog anyway. Mark my words, no one will say a thing to me about leaving Charlotte.

My preference is for Boston. As much as I love NYC and it is home to me, I also love Boston and would love a smaller, more manageable city. There is no way we could afford to live in the middle of either city. In NY, living on the outskirts would probably mean at least an hour commute into midtown, and living in a small apartment with (oh, the horrors!) a basement laundry room instead of our own washer and dryer. Living on the outskirts of Boston could enable us to have a single-family home with a yard, and have a thirty-minute commute into downtown. Adrian thinks, though, that he will find a job in NY before he finds one in Boston, simply because he has friends in NY that recommend him for positions and tell him when something good opens up. Either city would be better than here, of course. I just wish I could bring all my Charlotte friends with me to wherever we end up.

So yeah… I hope he’s right and that I get to have my baby either in the wonderful birthing center where I had my first two kids, with the same fantastic midwife that delivered my first two… or I will have my baby in Boston at an awesome birth center like this one, with a great Boston-area midwife.

Speaking of this pregnancy, I just have three more days until I find out whether this baby is a boy or a girl. I cannot wait! It’s funny; with Zekey and Llani I didn’t want at all to find out the sex. I was adamant about being surprised at the birth. But this time I feel completely the opposite way. Part of it, don’t laugh, is all about the knitting. I have two absolutely adorable patterns, one for a dress and one for a sweater, I’d like to use if I have a girl. Part of it is that after all our angst over picking a boy’s name, I would love to know that we’re getting to use the one we chose, which I absolutely love. And part of it is, I guess, the usual stuff– finding out the baby’s sex and calling it by name will make it feel closer and more real for all of us.

Three. more. days.