Night With the Geek Family

Last night after dinner, GH said, "Hey, kids, it's science time!" They all crowded around him, excited, because science time with Daddy usually means blowing up fireworks in the front yard or using his air cannon to shoot tennis balls across the yard. Not last night. Last night GH wanted to teach them how a DVD player works. He did not seek my opinion before starting. I did not give it, either, since GH does not look kindly on unasked for advice. In fact, he visibly bristles, sets his jaw, and gets a faraway look in his eyes. Meaning he wishes I was far away. After eleven years of marriage, I have learned a thing or two.

I was fine with them helping Daddy take apart the old DVD player; it didn't work and I was going to throw it away. Might as well let them learn a bit about electronics, right? It was GH's technique that didn't go over so great. GH launched into a discussion about the history of binary code and the difference between transistors and resistors, gesturing incomprehensibly at the DVD player. First MOS walked away, sucking his thumb and staring blankly into space. Then GG2 wormed her way off GH's lap and brought me a book to read. GG1 held on until the bitter end, enduring GH's long-winded lecture on soldering techniques. Even she gave up eventually, retreating under the school room table with a doll and a cardboard box.

Finally, it was just GH, sitting cross-legged on the floor, a partially deconstructed DVD player on his lap and a bewildered look on his face. "What happened? Was that boring? I thought they were really in to it," he said.

At this point I gave him advice. I could tell he needed it. But I gave it gently: "Sweetie, your oldest child is seven. Give them some pliers and let them rip the thing apart. Enough with the lectures. None of them can even type, let alone understand binary."

He sighed, shrugged, and got his plier. "Kids? Anybody want to use these pliers and rip up the DVD player?" Cheers emanated from the various corners of the living room where the children had retreated when science time became too onerous. All three of them crowded around him, reaching for the pliers with smiles on their faces. GG3, of course, was not a part of this endeavor. She sat with me and we played peek a boo and patty cake.

For thirty minutes, the children gleefully wielded the pliers, ripping apart the DVD player, while GH offered helpful tips like: "That's a diode, sweetheart. Very good, son, you just pulled the transistor off. Way to go, honey! You really yanked hard on that capacitor!" So science time was redeemed and the children learned something. Not sure what...maybe it was only how much fun pliers are.

Mother's Only Son

Here is MOS, sucker punching his dad. One of his favorite activities, he does know that sucker punching his sisters or his mother is unacceptable. So he saves them all up for Daddy when he gets home. Daddy loves coming home.

I knew I wanted at least one daughter; God saw fit to give me three, for which I am eternally and utterly grateful. I love my daughters, their drama, their sweetness, their gentle spirits, the fits that they pitch...my girls are challenging and delightful and I love every day that I spend with them. 

God also, however, saw fit to give me MOS. I wasn't too sure about the whole boy thing, having two daughters already and really wanting a third....but there on the ultrasound, WHAM! a boy. GH was more shocked than I was; he thought he could only produce girl babies. 

When MOS was born, he looked like a potato. His looks have improved. Fortunately.

In appearance, this child resembles his father. In attitude, behavior, strength of personality, and temper...yeah, definitely his mother. My mother says he is a lot more confident than I was at his age; I guess that's good but confidence in my son equals strong-willed dynamics that threaten to send me to the loony bin weekly. Sometimes daily. And before he could talk, well, hourly. But I guess it's what I deserve...I was uncooperative, stubborn, resistant to authority, bossy, and generally temperamental.  I shouldn't have said "was," I guess...I should have said "am persistently." It stands to reason that I would produce a difficult child.

Lots of moms that have boys say things like "He is so sweet. His hugs melt my heart. He gives such sweet kisses and says, "I wuv you, Mommy.'" I roll my eyes (sometimes just in my brain, not in real life) and wish that I had a boy like that. Because MOS most definitely is not sweet, he does not willingly hug or kiss me, and he rarely says "I wuv you, Mommy." Instead, he says "Me mad at you. Me angry wif you." A lot.

MOS throws, kicks, hits, bites, swings, whacks things with sticks, flings, stomps, wallops, whops, flushes, pillages, and generally wrecks everything. However, he is usually cheerful and willing to go along with whatever games his big sisters have come up with, up to and including Kitty, Princess, and Cheetah. Guess which one MOS gets to be!?!?

He will on occasion sit on my lap and proffer his cheek for me to kiss. Hugs are only for bedtime and given with a resigned air. Sometimes, after I pray with him, tell him that he is fearfully and wonderfully made and that Mommy and Daddy love him very much, he responds, "You best mommy whole wide world." So I am happy with that...not a bad compliment coming from a two year old.

But he does love his Baby.

Maybe it's just boys in general, or maybe only boys like my son...but he is such a contradictory creature. On the one hand, he needs me desperately, fiercely, constantly....and then he turns and wallops me with a plastic bat, screaming wildly as he pretends to cut me in half. The constant push and pull of his personality is very tiring, but I know that he needs me to be firm, to be strong, and most importantly, to not break. It is challenging, most days, to stand up to the onslaught of his personality and activity level. I guess if he was my only child it would be easier, but I have three girls, too, and they need me also. Or maybe it would be a lot harder if he was my only child. Too much attention might be bad for him and make him even more tyrannical than he already is. 

I do know that I am glad that I am such a tough woman; if I was wimpy I wouldn't have made it past his first birthday. He will be a strong man, that's for sure. I just want to harness all his power and strength and determination for good. God has a definite purpose and plan for this son of mine; I pray daily for the ability to raise him up properly so that he will fulfill whatever wonderful destiny God has created for him. I know also that God has equipped me to raise this boy. Maybe that's why MOS has such a dynamic personality; if he was a bit milder, I might overlook him in the midst of swirling daughters that dominate our house. But MOS will never be overlooked, never be ignored, and most importantly, never be forgotten. Plus, he's already scarred most of us with a stick or rock, so we've got those marks to stay with us forever.

Look what I can do!

I got a new camera. A Canon EOS Rebel T2i DSLR with this lens: 50mm f/1.8 Oh, my friends, it is fine. Fine indeed. Prepare to be overwhelmed with all the pictures I will be posting. Of my children, of course, since I apparently can't take pictures of animals very well, as evidenced by my shoddy camera work vis a vis my cat. Which I will spare you. 

Enough with the chit chat, on to the pictures. I in no way consider myself a competent photographer. However, I do not let that stop me from taking oodles of pictures. And you, my friends, get to reap the consequences of my happy shutter finger.

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis?

Please, sir, we are hungry. So very hungry.

I will tolerate this intrusion into my personal space no more.

Rowr! Phht! Phht!

Thanks ever so much. Because I could never have looked ridiculous all on my own.

I hope you brought pizza. 

These are not the droids you are looking for.

You will do whatever I say. You are powerless to resist me.

I control my parents with these eyes. 

The tongue acts like a rudder. Gives me good directional control.

It's good to be the baby.

Most of these shots are SOOC (straight out of camera). I do not have Photoshop, nor is it in the budget for the immediate future since I spent all the aforementioned budget on my camera. I do a bit of cropping and whatnot in the iPhoto software that came on my computer, but nothing very fancy. However, I am very pleased with these pics, especially considering that I've had the camera for 24 hours. Hopefully I'll get better, but I'm happy so far. I might have a problem, though; I've already taken 212 pictures. 

The Frozen Tundra

As some of you weather buffs might remember, we had what shall hereafter be referred to as "The Making of the Frozen Tundra of Central Mississippi" last week. Well, not really. Nothing terrible happened, but those newscasters sure ate up some good broadcasting time with their dire predictions. Me and GG3 were a bit fed up and she gnawed on the TV remote to demonstrate her considerable ire:

We went outside, after considerable bundling up, to investigate all the damage, and GOOD LORD, the icicles are huge! Enormous! How have we survived this natural disaster unscathed? Oh, wait, those are wimpy little icicles hanging off the kids' playhouse. Ok, moving on.

How will we survive under the weight of all this ice? The force it is exerting on this tree branch is incredible! Surely the forest will crumble in just a moment! Huh? Oh, it's a spindly mimosa branch and the mighty ice is only about an inch long. I took this pic using the macro setting on my camera. So maybe they're even less than an inch. Okey dokey. Next weather disaster:

Argh! The devastation! The indignity of it all! However will we dig ourselves out from under the mighty avalanche of ice? Well, there's a fence panel in the back for perspective. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving.  

All of our food stores have been laid to waste by the mighty breath of winter! We have no food! All is lost! Oh, wait, those are just nandina berries and those suckers can survive anything, even the ravages of children. 

Oh, look, over there! Something truly terrifying! Guard your children's eyes, because what you will see next is sure to chill you to your very core! It is a veritable monster, the Two Headed Abominable Snow Mom! Run! Run! While you still can! Horrors!

She wields a mighty stick! Also, I think she has a baby strapped to her chest! Alas! She has procreated! Another generation of Snow Monsters will soon be loose in the world among us! Flee! Flee! Save yourselves! 

I am sorry you had to witness this atrocity. I will never post another unflattering picture of myself on this blog again. 

I lied! 

Love,

The Abominable Snow Mom

Birthday Blitzkreig

It was GG2's fifth birthday on January 1, so we honored her with a Pepto Bismol pink birthday because pink is her signature color. Her daddy bought her pink roses and I made her pink cupcakes and pink ice cream cone cupcakes. The theme was Nauseating Hello Kitty and was roundly loved by the children, although MOS did pull the party favors apart and shred Hello Kitty's visage into a million pieces. I did not mind.

 

There was also a banner. I spared you a picture of it. You're welcome.

"Well bless my stars, is all this for little ol' me? I do declare, I'm as pleased as punch!" (gag)

She was so thrilled with the #5 candle that I figure I coulda just bought a bunch of those and not endured the torture that is the Hello Kitty universe (brought to you by the sadists at Sanrio).

I thought all my pics were fuzzy through the LCD screen on the back of my camera, so I suggested we move outside to take pics of GG2 and her loving parents. 

Very cute, but still fuzzy.

When it was GH's turn to take pics, he remarked, "Some kid licked the lens of your camera. That's why the pictures are fuzzy. Here, let me clean it." Sigh. So the one of me and GG2 is clear, while the others have a haze about them. I bet you thought it was all the sugar from those cupcakes, huh?

Then the next weekend, Nana and Pops came up to our house to celebrate GG2's birthday, again, since Pops had to work on New Year's. Of course, Nana had to outdo herself and create a masterpiece of cakery....I present: Barbie on Ice (or blue jello jiggler)

Impressive, ain't it? Yep, it's all edible. The trees are waffle cones covered in icing, the snowmen are icing...the cake was a whopping two layers, separated by a tasty filling of blueberry. Delicious and attractive! Two adjectives that are quite appealing. Martha Stewart would be proud, Nana.

The reindeer is not edible; he is a clay creation made by GG1 last year for Nana at Christmas. Nana cleverly remembered him and stuck him on the icing hill to watch Barbie as she performed a skating extravaganza for our fete.  

I leave you, friends and family, adrift on a sea of icing, envisioning your own resplendent Barbie cake that I know you really want, deep down, as the sun sets in the west and my children hang upside down from the ceiling fans, giddy with sugar and alive with the promise that we have two more birthdays to get through in the next two months. I cannot believe that I did not spread these children's birthdays out a bit more. Until next time, I bid you, Adieu.

A Gray Home Schooling Day

What do you do when you have a gray home schooling day? For me, these days usually start off just fine. On Sunday nights I make out my schedule for the week; I have a planner and write out a general idea of what we're doing every day. There's plenty of room for flexibility but I do have specific goals in mind for each week. I am only home schooling GG1 right now; GG2 is in preschool three mornings a week. However, when she is home with us in the mornings, I do a few subjects with her also, but those don't require any planning. I put all the books together on a shelf, organize any papers, extra materials, etc. I am, in a word, prepared.

But all the preparedness in the world doesn't help when gray home schooling days emerge. Sometimes the days are caused by tiredness; if the baby is up several times at night, then I am tired and run down and don't want to be constructive the next day. Or, as is so often the case, two or more of them are up in the night. If I calculated the exact amount of sleep I get on a regular basis I would probably run away from home. I try not to be realistic about how much sleep I actually get. Also, GG1 is finally reading chapter books; she has been staying up late to finish reading the past few nights, so she is sometimes tired the next day.

At any rate, if one or more of us is tired, the grayness sets in. It starts off innocently enough; I get out the Children's Bible and say, "Pick a story for Mommy to read, please." We always start off with Bible time. But then I hear things like, "I don't like that one," or "We read that one yesterday." Here it comes, just a bit of gray, perhaps I can head it off.

After Bible, we always do the dreaded handwriting; some days it's fine, but on gray days it's torture. GG1 stabs her pencil into her paper, twists her hair, hangs upside down off her chair, anything to avoid actually putting her pencil onto the paper and forming a word. Those of you with older children will perhaps laugh at my pain right now; I know it gets worse than handwriting but for us, handwriting pretty much sucks our will to live.

Math can be a saving subject or a killing one. If the stars are aligned and a crow flies at midnight, we'll zip through the worksheet or math game and move on to history. But if handwriting went poorly and the grayness has swept in like a mighty tide, choking the light out of our home school day, math goes badly. Very badly. And I don't like home school that goes badly--that's one of the reasons I love home school. I don't have to fight my child to learn. I am free to step away or close the books for the day and do something else. But on gray days, even the prospect of making it through the morning is daunting.

What is my solution for a gray day, you might ask? Well, for starters, I just have to get over myself, get over my goals, get over my wishes and most importantly, make sure that I continue to move forward and keep trying. Karen Andreola, a faithful practitioner of the Charlotte Mason method of home schooling, writes in her A Charlotte Mason Companion that "We may not reach our ideals, but it is our fervent, faithful reaching towards them that matters greatly" (51). In other words, I remind myself frequently that a gray home school day does not mean the end of my home school experience. In fact, we can have several bad days and it doesn't mean anything.  It doesn't mean that I am a bad mom, or a bad home schooler, or that my children need the structure of "real" school, or even that I am unqualified to teach them. It simply means that I need to pray more, think more, and most importantly, keep loving my children through the grayness.

To quote Karen Andreola again, I completely agree with her when she says, "Children's horizons of thought need to be wider than their workbooks" (25). So perhaps a gray day is nothing more than too narrow horizons. With that in mind, my first impulse is to turn on the TV and give myself a break, a mental time out, while the kids stare blindly at the screen. However, I almost always resist its siren call and never turn it on during the home school day, especially not on a day that we are struggling. TV for us is like poison; cranky kids, cranky mom, gray, gray, gray day. How do I broaden their horizons, especially on a day when they are not cooperative or I am tired, and not use the TV?

First we go outside. Even if it's raining. Or cold. Or whatever. We suit up if it's cold, boots on if it's raining, swimsuits on if it's hot. All of us troop out the door, baby included, and take a look-see. Nature and fresh air do wonders for my brain and thought processes, so out we go. We usually find something interesting to do.

Even if it's something unconventional. This pic was from last summer, but you get the idea. I'll drag a laundry hamper and a sheet outside and they'll make a plane and runway out of it. Or turn the kiddie pool upside down and they're turtles. Granted, I have young children, so I don't think these ideas apply to older kids, but just going outside improves my mood a ton. I think a dose of Ye Olde Blue Sky (or gray) is a grand panacea. I'll take books outside, a big bowl of pretzels (see previous post for outside snacking), and sippies of water. Sometimes they'll want to be read to, sometimes they won't. But at least we're accomplishing my goal of broadening their horizons, even if those horizons only go as far as the swing-set in the backyard. If the weather just does not permit us to be outside for long, we'll head back in, grateful to be warm and dry, and make a tent under the dining room table. Or we'll get out every pillow and blanket in the house and turn the living room into a rumpus room. And pray we don't need stitches.

And before I know it, things are looking better. We might not get a lick of work done that day, but at least it's not as gray any longer. In fact, it might be positively sunny, even if it's still raining.

Maybe we all do more growing on gray days.

Swan Lake? Or Ugly Duckling?

It was Parents' Night at ballet a few weeks ago; GH and I attended dutifully, albeit reluctantly. You see, GG1 had an unfortunate experience in ballet when she was three; we ended up pulling her out of ballet but she told everyone she got kicked out. Yep, super-dee-duper when you have to explain to people at the grocery store that your kid didn't get forcibly ejected from Tiny Tots, no matter what she says. 

Off we went to Parents' Night, expecting to be horribly embarassed. You know, those parents. The ones whose kids pick their noses the whole time or cry uncontrollably or even worse, squat on their parents' laps the whole time, their rears poking into the air, a visible symbol of their parents' wasted tuition money and shattered dreams.

There's GG1 on the far right and GG2, the youngest dancer in the class. She's so tiny compared to the other, older children. However, as we were pleasantly surprised to discover, she can hang with the best of 'em.

The warm-up part of class was cute; I was reminded yet again of how old my spine is compared to theirs. Also, my tail bone is weeping just looking at this picture.

The stretching! The limberness! I think GH actually shuddered during this move. He couldn't do this when he was their age, let alone now.

Here I began to realize that maybe my girls weren't going to embarrass the family name. They really looked just like all the other girls! Hallelujah! A shred of normalcy! The sun of sameness began to break through the clouds of weird that normally cover GG1 everywhere she goes! Maybe our kids were gonna be okay!

When they started these painful-looking rockings, GH and I clasped hands, and perhaps even nursed small dreams of success. Our girls were BALLERINAS! I realize that this is not dancing, not even close, but the fact that GG1 could warm up with others and not freak out was no small feat. This is the kid who failed to sing in either her 3 year old or 4 year old Christmas programs and sat out every year of Bible School except last year. And even then she only moved her lips.

GH let out an involuntary groan of pain when he saw the girls doing this move..."How do they do that?" he whispered, his aged back kinking up at the thought of such stretches.

At the barre, GG2 added a bit of pizzazz to her moves. The barre was also taller than she is, so I figure she did pretty good to even hold on to the thing.

Then they lined up in front of the mirror and did a sort of dance. I say sort of because at this age, to even get kids to line up together is a major accomplishment. Their teacher is absolutely amazing...Mrs. Jessica Brock, you are Super Woman! 

She was patient and consistent, no easy feats when dealing with one four year old and seven seven year olds. There were even two kids absent, so Mrs. Jessica has a big class to manage. I didn't get a pic of Mrs. Jessica; you'll just have to imagine how beautiful she is and how insanely jealous you would be if you could see her in her leotard, tights, and cute dancing cover up thing. The woman maintains this sense of poise and composure even when straightening out a little girl's feet or adjusting another's arms for the 100th time. I swear that she said "heels together, toes out, backs straight" a million times and she never lost her cool. I rode horses all through high school and lemme tell you, it takes a special kind of personality to teach kids a lesson that requires physical precision. Many an instructor gave up on me, hissing through clenched teeth, "What is WRONG with you? Why can't you do this?" Maybe if Mrs. Jessica, paragon of patience that she is, had taught me, I coulda gone to the Olympics. Not really, but Mrs. Jessica is an awesome ballet teacher.

They did this cute walk thing while holding a present; again, I was a bit nervous because GG1 was the last to go but that girl walked and held her present up high! Awesome!

Good job, girls, good job. Your parents were very proud of you. Next stop: Spring Recital. And you'd better dance it because Mommy and Daddy had to sell some stock to buy your costumes.