Mariposa Academy Homeschool

I am drinking coffee with one sugar instead of two, and contemplating breakfast. A hard-boiled egg is the only thing I can think of to eat this morning. A whole lot of food is off-limits to me now because yesterday I failed my one-hour glucose test. This means that I have to go back next Monday for a three-hour glucose test, which absolutely sucks. I have to fast for ten hours beforehand, then drink twice as much of the nasty glucola and then sit around the lab for three hours. I’m not sure yet whether it will be easier for me to take the kids with me or ask my dad to come babysit. Probably the latter. Meanwhile, I can’t eat sugar, white flour, potatoes, or even fruit. I bought a whole box of clementines and a bag of grapefruit the other day, both of which are off-limits to me now. No fair! Hopefully everything will turn out fine with the three-hour test, but I was measuring a bit large so I am concerned.

I also found out yesterday that my iron is low. That’s not a huge surprise and not as worrying. I am supplementing and making sure to get more iron-rich foods into my diet. The only thing is that having to avoid sugar complicates things a bit. As more evidence that my midwives are more doctor-y than midwife-y, the one I saw yesterday recommended SlowFE iron tablets, and when I asked her about Floradix, she said she had never heard of it.

Today Zeke goes back to speech therapy after missing three sessions due to our vacation. I am so glad. I have to say, though, that even without those sessions, I have been noticing a marked improvement in his articulation lately. He is also more willing to talk instead of just whining.

We went to the library yesterday. Llani is still on her horse kick, so we got a couple books about horses to replace the bazillion or so that we returned. She also picked out a book about pterodactyls for Zeke, and a book about coral reefs. I think seeing the coral reefs at Greg’s house sparked that interest. I picked out Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar and a Mathstart book about subtracting two-digit numbers. I really think Living Math, math through literature and everyday life, is going to be our main math “curriculum” and if we do structured math at all, it will just be a supplement. She seems to learn better and stay interested longer this way. When we read Anno’s Magic Seeds she readily picked up multiplication and two-digit subtraction, and she enjoyed reading the book over and over. I love those Anno books, I really do.

Even though this is a homeschooling blog, I haven’t written a whole lot about homeschooling lately. Mostly that’s because we were in complete flux, what with the holidays, vacation, and trying some different methods. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever hit upon the perfect homeschooling method for us. Sometimes it seems that I try something new every couple of weeks and I explore different homeschooling methodologies and philosophies more than I actually homeschool my kids. And then other times I think, well, that’s what homeschooling is. There is no one right way, and the beauty of homeschooling is that I can constantly change and evolve and do whatever works for a particular child at a particular time. If Llani is interested in doing a unit on horses and creating a horse lapbook, does it really matter that the lapbook gets abandoned two weeks later if she has learned a lot about horses and is still eagerly reading more and more? Just because Miquon Math worked for us for a couple of months, does that mean that we have to stick with it all year? Does learning really have to follow a scope and sequence, especially in first grade? Who really cares if Llani goes from studying Ancient Egypt to studying horses, instead of studying ancient cultures in chronological order, and if she spends a week doing Rosetta Stone Spanish every single day, then drops it for two weeks, then starts writing out Spanish words to teach Zekey? She’s not learning in a conventional way, but I have no doubt that she’s learning. If there are gaps in her knowledge she can fill them in later, as long as learning is something she enjoys, not something she has to do because “it’s math time, and this is what we do for math.”

We’re back from our Florida vacation. It was good, for the most part, except that trekking around the Magic Kingdom exhausted me to tears, literally. Disney is just not a good vacation choice when you are almost seven months pregnant.

We spent a few days with my grandparents, which was fantastic, and we saw an uncle I hadn’t seen since I was 15 and an aunt I’ve seen once in almost as long. I’ll have to write one of these days about how effed up and dysfunctional my family is, such that I am not in touch with most of the relatives on my mom’s side. In any case they are both lovely, fun people and I had a great time. My uncle Greg and his partner have this incredible house that rivals the Charlotte Nature Museum. You can see pictures here. The kids loved it so much they cried when it was time to leave.

My grandparents are just so smart and loving and fun to hang out with, not to mention great hosts. They love cooking and eating so much that they have two refrigerators. Any ingredient or kitchen gadget that you could possibly need, you could find in their kitchen. Aside from our visit to Greg’s house, we mostly just hung out in their apartment, which was exactly what I needed after running around Disney. I knit most of this dress and watched quite a bit of documentary TV. My grandfather watches the History Channel all the time. I never got into the History Channel because it always seemed to be all WWII, all the time, but apparently it has changed. I’ll have to check it out and start TiVoing some stuff.

We are stuck in a baby name dilemma– Adrian prefers Luz and I prefer Matilda. He’s “fine” with Matilda Luz but not totally in love with it. His favorite is Luz Ahava. I know that if I say that I definitely want to name the baby Matilda Luz he’ll go along with it, but I don’t want him to just go along with a name and be fine with it. I want him to be crazy about it and think it’s the perfect name. He is much more laid-back about baby names than I am. I border on obsessive. I should be happy, right? Here he is, letting me take the main role in naming the baby and mostly willing to go along with whatever I choose, but I am still not satisfied because he’s saying, “Sure, sounds good,” instead of “Yes! That’s the best baby name ever! I love it! It’s absolutely perfect!”

Meanwhile, whatever this baby girl’s name is, she is sapping what little energy I have left, making my back, sides, and hips ache, and giving me heartburn all the time. It doesn’t help that I am craving the foods that give me the worst heartburn. My latest thing is virgin bloody marys. I could drink them all day long. I’m gigantic, I waddle, and I can’t believe that I have more than two months till my due date, two months in which I’ll keep growing.

Someone just alerted me that the anti-spam plug-in I recently started using wasn’t working. It was one of those “type the security word” thingies, but there was no word displayed and no field to type in a word. Weird. And dumb of me for not testing it after I installed it. Anyway, it’s gone now.

We have so much going on lately! Wednesday was our Expectant Parent Tour at the hospital. After all my hospital angst, things are looking okay. Of course, I’d rather have a tub. of course, I’d rather be in a birthing center than a regular hospital, for many reasons. But I was pleasantly surprised on the tour. The rooms are okay– not huge, but not tiny. The showers don’t look bad. They allow rooming in; you just have to tell them ahead of time that that’s what you want. And even the things I was told they take the baby away for (bath, tests) can be done in the room if you tell them that’s what you want. I really think that as long as I write up a good birth plan and am clear about things with my midwives, I will have the birth I want. I also feel confident that my midwives will be on board with my plans. They do seem pretty doctor-ish to me, but they don’t seem to be really against natural births, rooming-in, etc. Just not as gung-ho for these things as a midwife should be. I will just have to talk to them about what kind of support they will give me as I labor, what kind of pain management techniques we’ll use, etc. Especially since I won’t have a tub, which helped a lot with the pain during my first two births.

This weekend we are going to Asheville for a birthday party. We were there a year ago (same girl’s party), and it was at that time that I was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. I didn’t know what was going on with my body, I was bleeding through the weekend and I figured I was miscarrying, but we still thought there was a chance I could be pregnant. It will be nice to go back to the same place with a big pregnant belly.

Monday Llani has a dentist appointment. She is terrified of dentists. The last time she had a bad cavity, we tried our family dentists. She would not let them do anything, so they suggested a pediatric dentist, Dr. C. Llani refused to even take X-rays at Dr. C’s office. Dr. C suggested general anesthesia. The whole idea of general anesthesia scared me, so we went to another dentist that was recommended by some friends. We now call that office “the torture chamber,” and I will never take my child back there. Llani was terrified, and the staff at that office was basically bullying her into letting them work on her. Prying open her mouth, telling her she needed to be a good girl, saying that she was lying when she said the work hurt, and telling Adrian he had to hold her down harder. Frankly, I was surprised they didn’t pull out giant leather straps or a straightjacket. Of course, that visit only made her fear worse.

This time, we tried another dentist highly recommended by some friends, Dr. B. She said Dr. B seemed nicer, but she was still too scared to let them even take X-rays. Dr. B referred us to Dr. C. This time, we decided to go ahead with the general anesthesia, because it seemed like the only way to get the work done. Our thought was that once that was done with little psychological trauma, we could start fresh with a friendly check-up at Dr. B’s office. Unfortunately, Dr. C’s anesthesiologist retired, so she only does work with general anesthesia once a month, and she’s booked up till at least May. We decided to go back to Dr. B, and we talked with Llani about it a lot, and she was going to try to let him work on her. But he doesn’t want to attempt it again. He referred us to the only other pediatric dentists in Charlotte who do general anesthesia, and they are the ones we’re seeing Monday. I am really hoping that these dentists work out, because otherwise I don’t know what we’re going to do. General anesthesia seems like the only way to take care of this cavity without giving her a lifelong phobia of dentists. Having to start over with total stranger each time is certainly not helping the situation. Not to mention that sooner or later we’re simply going to run out of dentists.

So that’s Monday. Tuesday we have a meeting to request a new evaluation for Zeke on issues other than speech. I really don’t know what to expect. Tuesday is also Adrian’s last day at work, so he won’t be able to come to the meeting because he will have all kinds of employment termination stuff to take care of at work.

Thursday we are leaving for Florida. We still have to reserve a hotel, buy a suitcase, get our summer clothes from our storage locker, and probably a million other things. A few days after we come back, it will be Llani’s birthday. We’re going to have to plan her party and send out invites during our trip, because we haven’t done that yet. And then two days after that, Adrian starts his new job.

Maybe things will calm down after that.