I Want to Do It!

I remember the days when my son would be so reliant on me.  He would ask me to make him lunch.  He would ask me to put a movie on for him.  I would have to get him glasses of water or milk.  I would have to do everything for him.  I know I've still got another little one who will be relying on me for all those things, but my older son has since moved on, and I can't even tell you when it happened.

Every time I look at him, I'm reminded of how much he's grown up.  He's gone from being my baby boy to being an independent kind of kid.  At three years old he can get himself a drink, make his own toast and sandwiches, get his own cereal with milk (with only a little mess), get himself dressed and undressed, and put on his own movies in the DVD player.  I have to wonder sometimes what he needs me for!  He's more than capable of doing just about everything on his own.  Of course, he's kind of lagging on the potty training, but with all the changes over the past year, it's not surprising with all the changes going on.  I'm sure he won't be in diapers for ever!

It's amazing, when you think about it, how fast they all grow up.  I remember when my oldest son had so many problems with speaking clearly.  I couldn't understand what he was getting at most of the time and just kind of guessed.  Sometimes I still do that when he's tired or not feeling well, but these days most of what he says is understandable.  In a way, I'm glad that he can communicate to me so clearly, but at the same time, I kind of miss the days when he was little and so dependent.  I miss the baby days.

Looking at my youngest, I can see those days in his future too.  It won't always be these moments of wanting to cuddle and love on his mommy.  He's going to grow up and become Mr. Independent too.  It's not going to be long before I turn around and wonder just when they all got to be so capable.

All around me I see these families with really advanced kids, kids who can read by the time they're two, or kids who use SAT words from toddlerhood.  I'll admit, a part of me wishes my kids had been that advanced.  That little competitive side of me wishes I had the kid of kids who would have been speaking in complete scentences at two.  I do sometimes wish that they had known all their colors, numbers, and everything else by then.  Then again, a part of me is really relieved.  I can't imagine how fast childhood would rush by if my kids did develop such a strong sense of adulthood at such a young age.  Yes, I want my kids to grow up to be successful, but they're only kids once.  Childhood goes too fast while it's here, so why would I want to rush it along anymore?

For now, I'm going to enjoy these days while I have them, even if they are filled with a three-year-old demanding he can do everything on his own.  I'll jump in and help when he accepts it, but my time with my son will have to be filled with other things.  I guess I should be greatful.  I don't have to worry about the work of taking care of him.  Instead, I can focus on the fun we can have together.  Now I just need to find a way of getting used to him wanting to do everything I used to be able to do for him.

Peanutbutter Toast!!!

Isn't it funny the way kids get picky about things?  They just have to have something a certain way and if they don't get it, there's tantrums in the future.  I can't count the number of times I've been at the store to see a kid throwing a tantrum over cookies or candy.  They want it all, and they want it right now!  I do have to sympathise with those moms.  My daughter used to be the same way.  My older son, however, isn't like that at all.

Now, I have to be honest, he has his share of demands.  He must have the food he wants or he simply will not eat.  More often than not, I can convince him that the food he wants is what the whole family is eating.  It's not really tricking him.  I just tell him how good it is and that he should try it.  He's not that picky in the long run.  He just knows what he likes and is only a little shy about having something he may not be familiar with.  However, when it's a "fend for yourself" kind of thing, he's picky, and he only wants one thing.

Peanutbutter toast, that's the demand in this house.  My older son is addicted to the stuff.  I suppose it could be worse.  Unlike cookies and candy, peanutbutter and bread are a pretty healthy combination.  He likes to have it with a glass of milk, adding another layer of healthy to the whole diet.  The only thing he's missing is fruit or veggies, which I'm sure I could convince him to have if I had some easily on hand for snacking.  I'm surprised at his healthy selection.  Even with the options in the house, like cereal with marshmellows and cookies, he would rather have peanutbutter toast for lunch!  I guess it's better than chips too.  At least his vote is for something healthy.

I don't know what it is, but more often than not, both my kids will gladly reach for healthy foods in their toddler years.  I know a lot of kids will balk the moment you say, "It's good for you!" but mine seem to see that as incentive.  It's like they know healthy things will make them feel good in the end, so they like eating them.  I'll be honest, I don't always provide them the most balanced diet.  That's something I need to work on, but at least for now they're chosing healthy options.

Kids can't just live off of peanutbutter toast, and this I know.  I'm sure complimenting the diet with classic kid favorites such as mac and cheese and hot dogs don't really help, but I hope that in my kids making healthier decisions now, they'll learn to think that way later in life.  Though those foods may not be the healthiest in the world, at least they're opting for things that aren't loaded with sugar.  Hopefully this is a trend that will keep on through the years.

For now, I'm just going to have to make a small investment in bread with my son's obsession with peanutbutter toast and peanutbutter toast sandwiches!  It's a good thing he's not allergic to peanuts!

Back in the Swing of Things

We've been back on the homeschooling pretty loosely for about two weeks now.  It's come with it's challenges, mostly because homeschooling a three-year-old is a challenge in itself, but for the most part, things have been pretty smooth.  I have to say, I'm surprised at how well my daughter can play dumb.  She's really a lot smarter than she lets on.  I know this kindergarten work is much too easy for her, yet still she persists in telling me it's a challenge.  She just doesn't like reading and phonics.

Yesterday was our math day.  We tend to spend an unbalanced amount of time in math with my daughter because it's her favorite subject.  I'm sure science will be right there with it.  There was an introduction to measuring in her work yesterday and she thought that was fun.  I can see her being my little scientist.  Then again, I'm not surprised that math and science are favorites for her.  I love math and science too!

I think it's only logical for kids to fall in love with math and science first.  Science is sort of the first lesson any child learns.  It's how they explore the world around them and get an understanding of it.  Even getting an understanding of language can be seen as science.  It's all about logic.  Since math allows further understanding of science, it only makes sense that it would follow closely.  After all, with science, we can know that there are some goldfish crackers on the table.  We can figure this out by using scientific observation skills, looks like a goldfish cracker, smells like one, tastes like one, must be one.  We can figure this out by comparing them to something we know are goldfish crackers.  Well, all we know is we've got "a lot" of them.  With math, we can count them, measure them, divide them up evenly among friends, etc.

It seems a lot of kids have delays in reading, writing, and phonics.  I suppose in some regards, it's all just another science.  You learn to break down the sounds, add those sounds together to make words, then put those into equations to make sentences.  However, when you already know perfectly well how to communicate through spoken language, why do you need to know how to read?  If you do need to read and there's someone around to do it for you, then where's the incentive to learn to do it for yourself?  Besides, reading and phonics are so much harder than math and science.  Let's face it, the English language is hard!

So, here we are, back in the saddle on the whole schooling thing.  Yesterday we flew through about thirty pages in the Spectrum Math Grade K book.  My daughter has been loving that one.  Of course, it's probably been too easy, which is why she loves it.  Today she's working on the Spectrum Phonics Grade K book.  I have to say, I really like this series.  I think I'm going to keep using Spectrum.  They may not be any formal homeschooling curriculum, but they are excellent learning tools for math, phonics, reading, and writing thus far.  Getting back into things, I didn't know where to start, but now I feel like I've got some guidance towards a more formal homeschooling system.  I just hope that this good start gives me a small base to expand on my other homeschooling activities.  At least it's an introduction of math and reading skills for that level and I can work from there.

This year isn't exactly off to a roaring start for my daughter.  It would have been much better had we jumped straight into grade two like we were originally supposed to, but at least now she's finding school fun and we're actually flying through the review material.  If we keep flying through at this rate, we'll be on grade two material before Christmas!

Adjustments: Homeschooling

Living in a more regular place has meant for a more regular homeschooling schedule.  "School" starts every morning at 9am, with an alarm going off an hour before to remind me.  We've started this year slow and simple.  My oldest gets a review of everything we've done since we've started school.  We're starting with some easy kindergarten stuff and working our way up to second grade, the grade she's supposed to be in.  Hopefully the review will go quickly and we'll be back on track in no time!

I started this whole journey off with unschooling.  There was something freeing about being able to work without books.  I loved the idea that children put in an environment rich with opportunities to learn would simply make the choice to learn.  It seemed like the easiest, most natural way to get a child to learn everything.  All I would have to do is provide plenty of opportunities.  I had all sorts of ideas on what we could do or how we might manage "lessons".  I had field trips in mind, projects, everything else.  I started the whole process with a brilliant vision.

Don't all things in life start with brilliant visions and the idea that everything will be so easy?  Isn't it frustrating when they're not as easy as they seem?  While I had great visions, I found my decision came with a lot of flaws.  For my older son, it's been easy.  As long as there are books, he's going to want to read them, or have someone read them to him.  As long as there's something to learn, he'll want to know.  When he thinks he's got it right, he'll come to me all proud and tell me all about it.  His favorite things to point out are animals, colors, and the emotions he thinks everything has based on it's expression.  I'm sure if I left plenty of things for him to learn with just lying around, he'd want to try them all!  My daughter, however, is a completely different story.  If only it were so easy with her!

When I started this whole "unschooling" thing, we were doing pretty good.  She had plenty of opportunities to learn.  I'd turn everything into a lesson, from the playground to the grocery store.  We even had a trip to the safari zoo where she had a chance to meet all kinds of animals.  We talked about everything, from what they liked to eat to where they lived.  We even pulled out maps to show her where all kinds of animals came from.  It was a chance to work on everything from science to geography, and even a little bit on her reading skills.  Things were going wonderfully.  If only they had stayed that way!

At that time, my daughter's father was deployed to Iraq.  I was stuck at home with two children in the middle of nowhere.  I didn't really know many people, and I had almost no support.  Things started wearing on me.  I just couldn't manage the way I wanted to.  I started slacking on opportunities to learn and she stopped wanting to.  Isn't it more fun to play all the time?  I had started falling apart on the unschooling, and the longer I lost ground, the harder it would be to catch up.

Until recently, I've really been fighting to get back the ground I'd lost.  I'd planned trips, but field trips cost money, something no one has much of in this economy.  I'd planned fun projects and suggested games, none of which actually interested my daughter.  I tried to pick up her lessons everywhere we went, but I was met with resistance.  "Mommy, this is so boring," she would whine at every step.  I got frustrated and I was tempted to just put her back in school.  How could I teach her if she didn't want to learn?  We tried to take things that interested her and make those into lessons.  We talked about places that the people who were important to her had been.  We tried talking about animals.  Nothing was a hit.  Everything was met with "school is so boring!"

Having moved in to our new home, we've decided to take a different turn on things.  Instead of focusing on unschooling, something I wanted so badly for my family, I decided to go a more traditional route.  My new house mate's kids were in school, so I asked my daughter if she wanted to go to school too.  Apparently not!  School is a punishment to her, or so she claims!  She wants to keep doing school at home!  Playing all day, as much as she liked it, wasn't going to get anything done, so I took more of the "school at home" kind of approach.  At the start of the school year I went out and picked up workbooks from the local office supply store and we got to work.  We're starting a review of everything we've covered with unschooling and everything we've worked on with the supplies my aunt has sent over the years.  We're working through kindergarten straight up.  After all of her former complaints that everything is too hard, I thought that was the best approach.

The results?  So far so good!  Of course, the year is still young and we've got miles to go before we sleep on this issue, but she's thrilled that the work is so incredibly easy.  She's starting to gain confidence in her own abilities, and it's a good review of basic skills that she could use some practice on.  She may know all her letters and how to write them, but it never hurts to work on technique.  She may know all her numbers, but it can't hurt to practice writing them out.  This has been so easy for her that she's decided that school is actually fun!  Perhaps we can keep this momentum up when we start getting to the harder stuff.

Better still, my older son is starting to get excited about school!  We picked up a couple preschool workbooks for him too and he's so happy to be doing school like a big kid, just like his sister.  He's always been more interested in books and "reading" than art projects and crafts, so perhaps this would be a good time to introduce arts and crafts as well.  He's in a phase where doing what his sister is doing is pretty cool.  Maybe we can keep this going the whole year through!

Now my free time (wait, I have free time?) is going to be spent on doing research on fun and inexpensive projects for the kids, things that can fit in our school format.  Since I no longer have to worry about turning everything into a lesson to teach life skills, such as reading, math, and science, I can just do some really fun arts and crafts projects that don't teach anything but creativity!  I'm actually looking forward to this school year!  For once, I'm not dreading the idea of getting my daughter to learn!  Homeschooling is fun again!

Here I was, so worried that all of this adjusting to a new home was going to be challenging.  I was worried that I'd have to spend so much time trying to figure out how to homeschool with so many kids in the house.  Unschooling was going to be a nightmare with all the unstructured time and chaos from other kids.  Lack of structure has seemed to be my biggest downfall.  In the end, this turned out to be exactly what I needed!  Looks like we're finally taking a step in the right direction!

Baxt

Small and furry, cute and cuddly, no family is ever complete without their loving pets.  It seems like they are the magic ingredient that makes near any family come together and feel complete.  While, over the past few months, our family has become quite attached to the furry friends we live with, it seems it was time for us to have our own furry companion.

A month or so ago a friend of ours was leaving our house and found a wild rabbit on the side of the road.  The poor thing had been hit by a car and was dying.  It was likely one of the rabbits from around our house that had been living in one of the bushes on the property.  Unfortunately, she wasn't healthy at all and was likely going to die soon.  We had a small funeral for our little furry friend upon her passing, and it was a sad night for bunny kind.  We moved on, hoping the best for the rest of our bunny folk friends.

A couple weeks later the yard work was being done when the same friend found a small furry animal bouncing around by the ride-on lawn mower.  The poor thing could have easily ended up in a bad way if it had chosen to hop out in front of the mower, but instead our room mate found it, caught it, and brought it in.  It was a tiny little bunny.  We were pretty certain that the mama bunny was the one who died so tragically and we figured this little guy must be lost without her.  We all came to the conclusion that we would care for the little one until it was large enough to fend for itself, and then let it go.

As things go with animals, it's so hard not to become attached.  Try as we might, the little guy kind of grew on us.  We gave him the somewhat generic name of "Benjamin Bunny", though my room mate kept insisting we call him "Thumper".  He was such a social little guy.  I was in love with him.  He loved to e held, and we worried that perhaps he would become way to friendly to handle life out in the wild.  He might try and befriend some kind of snake!  And having food on hand and easy to access, he may not take to well to having to fend for himself when he got bigger.  We decided that the best option would be to keep him as a pet, at least until we were certain he would do well in the wild.

He's still a skittish little guy, but he's become quite friendly.  He's a bit of a bugger to catch when he's out and lose, or hiding in his cage, but once he's caught, he's the sweetest little love.  He cuddles right up to you and tries to snuggle in my sleeve.  His favorite place to hang out seems to be on the bed.  He runs around in circles, trying to burrow into the pillows, then pops his little head out again.  It's so cute to watch him!  He's become a real part of the family!  I've even given him a real name.  I've started calling him "Baxt".  He's quite frequently called "Baxty" by others in the family.  I found somewhere that Baxt means "luck" in Romani.  I think it's luck that we found him before some predator did.  Chesh calls him "Baxty" because he said it's his way of calling him "lucky".  He's our little buddy for sure!

Moving On, Moving Ahead

A lot has changed since I last updated this blog.  It may seem like I've fallen off the face of the earth.  In a way, I think I have.  There's been so much chaos, so many changes that it seems hard to keep track of everything all at once.  I'm lost in the flow of things.

The biggest change is a huge step back from sustainability.  We're no longer living in the country, but in suburbia.  We're still dealing with Texas's strange and complicated weather system, but hopefully it will mean for a good growing season when we're in a better position to have our own garden.  However, it's definitely limited our potential for sustainable gardening.  It's still possible, but we'll have to talk to our new house-mates about what the possibilities are.

However, this step back from sustainability is proving to be a step forward in another sustainable living aspect.  Though it's not allowing ourselves to become a little freer from the negative impact on our environment, it is allowing us to become more financially sustainable.  By living in our current home, we've got a wonderful opportunity to pull ourselves out of debt and start working towards a debt-free life!  We're even looking forward to the idea of eventually purchasing our own home some day, possibly in this same neighborhood.  We love it here, and it could very well be a good move for our future.

Another direction that has been positively impacted is the homeschooling front.  I've busted my daughter back to kindergarten work, so she's back to things that are much too easy for her.  However, we're going to be working through to find out where she's more challenged and where she's more adept.  This way I can start off the year more tailored to her own needs.  I know she's still got some problems with reading, but hopefully I can figure out if that's her only challenge, and we should be able to get her back on track.  Living with other children on a more regular schedule has made homeschooling so much less of a challenge.  I'm actually finding it fits in the schedule and our system is starting to work out quite well.  We still need to work out a lot of the kinks, but we're getting there.

It's so nice to live with someone who wants to work towards a clean home as well.  The past couple weeks have been pretty chaotic, but we're finally starting to settle in to what needs to happen.  I'm looking forward to a cleaner home, somewhere I can feel proud to have company over!

This whole thing has been a wonderful experience, even if it comes with it's sad steps back and unhappy moments.  We're now one big, mostly happy family and I'm finding I quite like it.  We're moving from one small community to a larger one.  It's always hard moving on from a situation, but I think in this case, even with the set backs, we're moving ahead.

Converted to Flats

Everyone seems to assume flat diapers are such a challenge.  How can you get those giant squares of cloth to possibly go on a baby's bottom?  They must be folded up in some insane way.  They must be so challenging to use.  I'll admit, I was even intimidated by them at first, but I decided to give them a try.  You never know, they could be easier than they look!  I doubted it, but try everything once.

I decided to go all in.  I couldn't really afford a huge stock of diapers, so I was going to go with flats.  I didn't care if they were complicated.  They were cheap!  I could get four dozen for sixty dollars.  Even if I hated them, at least I didn't spend a small fortune.  I'd just have to suffer.  It was the only way I was going to be able to afford to convert to cloth right away.

When I got them, I was intimidated.  These things were huge!  They were far bigger than they possibly could need to be.  I hoped they shrunk down significantly in the wash, but I was a little disappointed when they didn't shrink much.  I had no idea how something so massive was supposed to fit on my little baby boy.  And people use these things on newborns?  I was shocked.

With a healthy dose of doubt, I pulled up the website.  I checked out the info they had on the "origami fold".  It looked simple enough, but I had my doubts.  Surely nothing could be that easy.  Much to my surprise, it really was!  Fold into halves, then corner to corner, roll over the center, then put it on the baby!  It was so incredibly simple!  I was able to diaper my baby in slightly more time than it took with disposables and I'd just gotten them!  How could I have had any doubts?

I have fallen in love with flat diapers!  I swear, these are the only diapers I'll use from here on out.  I'll be tempted to buy them for all my friends who cloth diaper.  I'm sold.  They're so easy and convenient!  I don't know how I ever lived without them!