Saturday Mom Confession #16

I let my Goobs watch Shaun of the Dead.  They've been wandering around the house doing impressions of Shaun's zombie impression ever since. 

I don't think there's really much left to say about that, so I'll go on to confess that I stole JellyMan's book while he was away at drama rehearsal and I don't plan on returning it until after I've finished it, even though it's 'Salem's Lot and I've read it at least twice already. 

Shame on me.

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I have another confession to make, but it has nothing to do with my lack of mothering skills.  Today I'm participating in:

and I'm supposed to write a new post telling you why I chose to submit Far From Wordless Wednesday. Well, I don't want to make a new post.  So there.  But I'll tell you why I chose to submit Far From Wordless Wednesday - it neatly sums up my perspective of the entire month of October.  Here's hoping November is better for morale!

For Today's Breakfast . . .

. . . I'll be eating my hat.

Remember when I boldly (and publicly) announced my intentions to keep The Goobs away from computers until they are finished with Calculus?  It was a great plan, right?  Well, Anemone went and messed it up by asking for a cooking blog.  Who am I to refuse such a reasonable, educational request?  Especially when the lovely daughter of Tressays, KitCat, signed up.  She and Anemone are a couple of cuties.  Go read their cooking dessert blog for me, okay?

Kids in the Kitchen

And just forget I ever said anything about computers and calculus.  "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men Gang aft agley," and all that.  

Spelling

I hated spelling tests when I was a kid, and I bet you did, too.  You remember why, right?  First the teacher would say the word.  Then she would say it again.  Then she would say a sentence including the word.  Then she'd repeat the sentence.  Then she'd say the word again.  And again.  And just when I thought we might possibly be able to move on to the next word, some rat bastard kid would put his hand up and say, "Would you repeat that, please?" so she'd say it AGAIN.  (If you were that rat bastard kid, don't tell me, okay?  I will ban you from my blog.  I'm not kidding.)  And you remember how she liked to d-r-a-a-a-a-g that word out just as long as she possibly could.  She savored it.  It made me want to just jump down her throat and rip that word out of there so we could move on to some other excruciatingly dull subject.  Social studies, for instance, or maybe square dancing.  Anything but spelling. 

You know what's really bizarre?  People had this crazy idea that I liked spelling just because I made A's on my spelling tests.  I made A's in social studies and square dancing, too, but nobody ever accused me of liking them.  I suppose it's because we weren't allowed to speak during tests, so my true feelings were never expressed properly, though you'd think my sighing in despair while gripping the sides of my desk until my knuckles turned white might have clued them in.

Anyway.

When we started homeschooling I was bound and determined that none of us was ever going to have a day ruined by a spelling test.  (Spelling can be learned from osmosis, right?  Right?)  I made good on that promise until 2005, when I read The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise-Bauer  (Actually, I read The Well-Trained Mind in 2004, but it took me until 2005 to be convinced of the need for a spelling program.)  I gave JellyMan the first three Spelling Workout books, and he took off with them.  It was his easiest (hence his favorite) subject.  I couldn't see that he was getting anything out of it, but it certainly wasn't hurting him so I let it go and used those extra minutes to practice reading with Anemone.  

A year later, I decided it was time for Anemone to start Spelling Workout.  I gave Anemone an initial spelling test to see where she was - I don't remember which book or lesson it was from, but it had to have been from one of the first three Spelling Workout books.  This testing experience made such a lasting impression on me that I still have it tucked away in my homeschool files, and I'm going to share it with you now. 

• iche 
• sine
• wispre
• thicking
• thrade
• rufe
• huney
• fone
• streamm
• shuvule
• foreth
• wroge
• scean
• lauge
• choeay
• therteen
• aneywone

So much for learning spelling by osmosis!  Anemone started Spelling Workout A and scored very well on just about every spelling test thereafter, but her actual writing was full of mistakes.  So here I was with one kid who could spell anything and didn't need a program, and one kid who could make an A on a spelling test and then turn around and spell the same words incorrectly in a writing assignment.  My frustration overflowed into Donna Young's old homeschool forums on March 12, 2006:

We are using Spelling Workout. There are 36 lessons in each book, and each lesson is four pages long. One page is a little article about some generic topic using some of the lesson's spelling words. Three pages are full of little exercises. Book C, lesson one has exercises titled: Syllables, Puzzle, Rhyming Words, Proofreading, and Writing a Descriptive Paragraph.  My son would knock out a whole book in a week if I let him. My daughter does one page a day, and also writes her words once a day.  We test on Fridays.  My kids hate the writing assignments.  I don't blame them - the topics are lame. They do enough writing in other areas that I feel comfortable skipping most of them.

The jury is still out on whether or not this program is beneficial - my son is a natural speller and doesn't need the extra practice to begin with, and my daughter still misspells an alarming number of words, even though she makes a 100% on nearly every spelling test.

Well, nobody ever said homeschooling would be easy.  We limped along with Spelling Workout for a few years; JellyMan got through book F and Anemone got about halfway through book D before we called it quits.  I felt guilty about it at first, but eventually we got so wrapped up in Latin that I forgot all about spelling.  And Anemone's spelling errors became less and less frequent, and now she spells words like "immediately" and "bipartisan" without blinking an eye.  (I would be dishonest if I didn't mention that she also spells words like "anywere" and "accually" occasionally, but she's getting better.)  Who says spelling can't be learned by osmosis? 

I suppose there was no real reason to post any of this - thanks for listening, though.

Anemone's First Moulage Assignment

Library Shelf #4

Sorry I haven't been posting lately; we've been dealing with sick kids and West Virginian weddings, and the first blog post after a break always kicks my butt so I've been putting it off.  But when we returned from our trip I saw the big stack of library books we forgot to drop off before we left, so I'll tell you what will be costing me $10 in fines later this afternoon.

• Bloom's Notes: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; Harold Bloom, ed.
• The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookie Cookies and Other Galactic Recipes; Robin Davis
• Poe's Children: The New Horror: An Anthology; Peter Straub; ed.
• Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic; Elizabeth Little
• The Book of Beasts; John May and Michael Marten
• Amphigorey; Edward Gorey
• Knitted Gifts: Irresistible Projects to Make and Give; Ann Budd
• Signatures of Grace: Catholic Writers on the Sacraments; Thomas Grady and Paula Huston, eds.
• Beowulf on the Beach; Jack Murnighan
• Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident; Eoin Colfer
• The Gates; John Connolly
• The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds; John Yow *

By the way, I read a terrific book while I was up in Wild and Wonderful West Virginia.  It was called Empire Falls by Richard Russo.  I've read two of his other novels, Straight Man and Nobody's Fool, and enjoyed them, but I had never seen Empire Falls.  Of course that's the one that won the Pulitzer - how do I miss these things?  Anyway.  Go read it.  You won't be sorry.

* Oops.  Found these library books upstairs:

• Christian Reflections; C. S. Lewis
• Tree and Leaf; J. R. R. Tolkien

Far From Wordless Wednesday

I dropped my external hard drive a while back, and my heart is still bleeding over it.  Stealing my own pictures from Four Squares and mindlessly playing with Poladroid helped to get me through the worst of the mental anguish, but I still lie awake nights and sigh over that picture of my Goobs that didn't make the blog because JellyMan was wearing boxer shorts and a jester hat and Anemone had chocolate in her hair.  Not that I would ever be ashamed of chocolate smeared, half nekkid Goobers.  No, sir.  It's just that those chocolate smeared, half nekkid Goobers would string me up by my toes and use me for a dart board if I ever dared post a picture like that.  Jeez, just writing about a picture like that subjects me to enough drama to make my eyes bleed.

"Mom!  How could you?  You're ruining my life!  I wanted to be a Supreme Court justice, and now nobody will nominate me because it's in print that I was photographed in boxers and a jester hat!"

"Mom!  How could you?  You're ruining my life!  I had chocolate in my hair!  That's so boring!  Why couldn't you tell them I was wearing boxers and a jester hat?"

Anyway.  Now the hard drive in my practically new (I haven't even spilled anything in the keyboard yet!) desktop has crashed, which means that I've lost every digital picture I've ever taken.  Again.  Except for these:

 

 

 

These were in an email I sent to myself a few months ago.  This particular email also contained a recipe for "Swiss & Mater" pie, a knitting stitch pattern, and this lovely haiku:

The bird poo in my
hair feels better than the cow
poo in my sneaker.

I must have written that haiku about JellyMan because, as you know, girls don't work the farm.

It's Still Wednesday.

Five Ways to Upset a Goober

1.  Refuse to accept your Goober's sloppy math paper.

2.  Accept your Goober's neat math paper and grade it, but don't mark the page.  Hand the page back to your Goober and say, "You missed seven.  I'm not telling you which ones."

3.  Repeat until they are all correct.

4.  Allow a Goober to practice piano while you are in the shower.  Take your sweet, sweet time and listen to said Goober mess around on the piano instead of practice.  Walk in and say, "Okay, Goober, it's time to practice piano now," and reset the timer.

5.  Eat the last jar of yogurt.

Your Goober will not thank you for any of this, but you, dear reader, will feel much better.  You might even find the strength to fight another day.

And the Fun Begins

I've been trying not to think about our upcoming move to Honolulu.  Not because I'm sad about moving, but because I don't want to jinx anything!  Orders are fragile things - you never know when they'll be rescinded because the powers that be have decided that they need you more somewhere else.  And while Hawaii has never been very high up on my list of cool places to live, there are worse places to be stationed!  The Man is in one of those career fields that does Army support, so we are eligible for the crappy Air Force assignments AND the crappy Army assigments.  That's a lot of crap to worry about.  So Hawaii is perfectly okay with me, but I've been trying not to get too attached to the idea because I might really end up at Fort Irwin, California instead.  That would be . . . crappy.

It seems that I can start getting used to the idea of Hawaii now, though, because we are in the midst of our overseas medical clearance.  The Man just dragged us to the base dental clinic so they could evaluate our dental health.  What a lousy morning that was.  I caused an administrative nightmare by refusing to give out my Goobs' social security numbers.  I was a pencil pusher for the military medical system during my four years in the United States Air Force, so I knew that it would be a pain.  I also knew that it can be overcome.  Unfortunately, the gal in charge of the records hadn't learned that lesson yet.  Now she knows, but I don't think she'll look back with misty eyes on the day she learned how to improvise within the belly of the beast. 

Once we got over that little hump, I had to stand by and let the dentist evaluate my Goobs' dental health.  I went first to show them that they wouldn't actually die, no matter what it felt like at the time.  See, military dentists evaluate your dental health by roughly shoving large metal sticks into your mouth and banging around with excessive force.  If you manage not to scream and choke out the dental assistant, your dental health is just fine and you're fit for duty.  They're not quite as rough on civilians, and they make even more of an effort with children, but it was still such a traumatic experience for my Goobs that we had to go out for ice cream afterwards.

(Oh, the stories I could tell you about military dentists.  Perhaps another time.)

Now we get to look forward to our appointment over at the main clinic - we'll be poked and prodded and inspected and asked prying, insulting questions, all to find out if we are healthy enough to live in HONOLULU, HAWAII.  Ridiculous.  The medical facilities available there are ten times better than what's offered at our present location.  What a waste of time.

But it means that we might actually be moving in February!  Woo-hoo!

This is a blog post.

The Man has been nagging me for new blog content for the past week now.  (Has it really been a week since I posted?  Jeez.  I'm such a slacker.)  At first he said, "If you're not using your blog, you should quit paying umpteen dollars a month for it."  That conversation didn't go very well, so he switched tactics.  "You're going to lose all your readers if you don't post something on your blog."  I ignored him, because my readers and I are tight.  (Maybe they're even glad  that I shut the hell up for a while.)  Finally The Man came to me and said, "Please write something on your blog.  I like to read it.  I am your biggest fan, you know.  Please write something.  Please, baby, please.  I'll fold the laundry." 

"I'll fold the laundry," he said. 

Those are the magic words!

And this is a blog post.