Seymour Salmon Day

The fabulous marine science classroom, complete with touch tanks.
This is about 1/5 of the class, which was one of two groups we homeschoolers were split into today. We are privileged to know a lot of homeschoolers.

Marine animals, with a little Northwest Rat tossed in.

Yes we are amusing. You may laugh at us now.

We hiked to a tidal creek where we were privileged to watch Chum Salmon spawning. Our little monkeys, imminently comfortable in the woods, took to the tree for a better look. Imagine their surprise when our Naturalist asked them to climb down!

On our way home, we stopped by Minter Creek because we knew the salmon were also running there. They were thick and still in the water, and you could clearly watch them spawn and then wander about after they were done, just waiting for the cycle to be over. (Do click– it’s impressive, even this late in the season.)

Lil Bit of Baking

I am really looking forward to Christmas being over.

I am not sick of Christmas decor or music, not stressed out by the gifts (much) but I can feel SAD creeping in. Unlike last year, I am not without electricity or warmth, and this year I have last year’s depression episode to warn me. I am seeing the crankiness and carb-loading for what it is. I will win. It doesn’t make much sense to me anyway, because I LIKE the changes in the seasons. I LIKE the dark, and I know it’s transitory. But my body, whoo boy, my body doesn’t like it. The spectrum light bulbs really do help, but they don’t fix it.

But anyway, I associate Christmas with the Solstice, and I will love it love it love it when the days begin to lengthen again.

Today my pasty white children and I baked pumpkin bread and roasted pumpkin seeds. They actually ate their healthy dinner of sauteed chicken and wild rice pilaf. I suppose having pumpkin bread considered as a vegetable side dish will help speed matters along there.

~G~ drew out an artistic design for her big blank wall in her room. I think it’s fabulous, and if we can pull it off, she’ll have a rockin accent wall. I am definitely going to support her in this endeavor.

Speaking of ~G~, massive trauma today. Her surviving crab is hanging out of his shell. I hear Monty Python as I type this, regrettably, but I do have to note he’s not dead yet. So he’s either dying or he’s molting. In the spirit of optimism, we returned him to his dark coconut shell house and shored him up with food and water. She got two crabs from Santa last year, and she has really taken very good care of them. One passed this summer,and she buried it under a rose bush. It would be most unfortunate to lose Flower so close to his birthday. She’s planned a party for him, complete with wrapped gifts tucked under the tree. She made him a stocking out of felt and and has it hanging alongside ours. I feel terrible for her, really do.

Self Portrait Challenge: Patterns

patterns are inherited

Blueberry

~N~ is improving drastically. He spent the entirety of yesterday looking and acting normally. The rapport between the children continued until the evening, when he started being really annoying to his sister, and she finally started screaming back. I noticed then (around supper time) that few hives were returning and his eye was red again. I dosed him with benadryl, and proof positive that the reaction is abating in total, he went to sleep quickly. I have noticed in massive reactions like this, the benadryl doesn’t help them sleep if it’s so busy fighting the hives.

Speaking of ~N~, who I call “Blueberry” after his pretty eyes, we spent some time yesterday at the Blueberry farm. It made for an odd Lunch-with-friends because we neither lunched nor spent much time with them, but we saw TheGreenMama and B and barely missed Mackattack. Blueberries rock, man. We all decided we had to stock for the winter, like NOW. As far as I know we all plan to go back as well. (I am musing now whether I should just pack the car while the children sleep so we can get it out of the way.)

The children were extremely excited to go berry picking, and they refused to believe I meant another farm besides Terry’s. We would have left an hour earlier had they not been making arts and crafts projects to give their favorite farmer. Unfortunately as we entered Puyallup, they both realized they’d left them.

After the farm, where we picked 6 pounds of blueberries together, G spent the afternoon making bendie people for their castle and treehouse. They took this class from the Freelance Mama one year ago on an MDC campout–One YEAR!– and have shown little interest in it since. Now G cranked out 7 of them in three hours, very specific to the pattern FM showed them. Kids and their minds amaze me. She made an entire cast of little people based on a story she had written in her head about a farmer and his son who turned out to be a uper hero. She then had to create a supervillain, of course.

Our art project for the day

I shudder to think where I’d be without my friends

They’ve been particularly kind to me this week in my transportation-less and resulting mentally fragile condition.

Mack came for Lunch with Friends Wednesday again, and bolstered my spirits there while we listened to the toddler mariachi band. Again. Her little boy is so eloquent he makes my kids look like slow talkers, and they’re definitely not.

Nikay brought me down (so not fair, so not fair, so my travellin’ turn) some visitation and tomato starts (enough to share with the rest of you South Sounders btw). We played with beads yesterday while the children enjoyed the company of like-aged homeys. Nikay is dipping a toe into the crazy-ass real estate market here and she’s probably, for the first time, as frazzled as I am because of her exposure to the morass they call “the market” in Puget Sound. I have much compassion for her new found affection for their cabin in the woods.

Today, The Green Mama came to visit in her own new found freedom as her dd’s schedule has suddenly been freed into “Yay! Friends! We can DO things!” We traded kitchen gadgets, war stories and bean recipes. And yes, played with Beads. We also chatted about homeschooling, which is always a favorite past time of mine.

I have been obsessed with my beads lately. It’s been a long standing love of mine, and I do mean LOVE, but I haven’t been producing anything for years. Suddenly, BAM! I am back in the swing of things, stringing beads and feeling the inspiration. It’s been a joy. I think planning Snaygirl’s mother blessing and searching for just the perfect beads for her labor necklace must have turned a switch back ON.

I finally finished the Brazilian Goddess’ earrings and felt like I owed her a little interest, so I strung a matching bracelet. The beads are freshwater pearls, garnets and fused cobalt glass works.

Unable to be with her, I made Dalicious a labor gift of her own, also of freshwater pearls and charms, with a goddess anchor.

9-11 in music class

5/2007: transcribed from homeschooling board. I can’t believe I didn’t include it in the blog when it was happening. This will be disjointed.

G has been enjoying her ancillary classes with the school district, but last week she was in the back seat telling me about her day when she asked me if there were really two towers in NY that were knocked down by a plane.

Frankly, I was really pissed off. I have done what I can to somewhat shield the kids from the gory details of all that. I won’t shirk from it forever, but dd is SIX YEARS OLD. This is a music class for first graders. The song they were learning was apparently inspired by the events, (*Eagles: There’s a Hole in the World Tonight) but I firmly question the necessity of that in first grade.

Now that I have completely calmed down, I want to confront the teacher but I am not sure what to say. I know I will ask her exactly what she taught them about that day, because *I* need to know, but beyond that….

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It gets better!

Music Teacher didn’t tell me the name of the song*, I heard G singing it, and it’s one of my favorite songs.

Apparently there was an assembly yesterday at 2.15 where she was supposed to sing it with her class and the 4th grade class. Of course, no one told me that when I picked her up from PE at 2.10. I only found out there was an assembly at all because when I dropped her for music (she has music + pe on Thursday) the teacher was in the gym, not the music room, “working on seating for the assembly. G, you can sit over there.”

So….. if G was supposed to be in an assembly, someone should have damn told me. I asked then “should I leave her? is there going to be a music class today?” and the teacher kind of tersely said “yes there will be a music class” so I left G there. But after PE, G came right out the same door where some parents had gathered for the assembly. I took her away, completely clueless as to what she was missing.

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It’s not the song that bothers me; it’s that Graham a. was taught something politically AGE inappropriate and then B. was prevented from performing something she’d rehearsed and anticipated.

I would not have held her back, but I wasn’t able to support her either because I didn’t know about it.

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[In a nutshell, some friends online suggested that I was expecting too much from a public school district, and that since I released my child to their care, they would not see anything wrong with any exposure they gave her.]

But you’re right about me too, as a homeschooler I wanted to avoid all this horseshit, and here I am dealing with it anyway.

I am going to allow her to go through the December break, and then she’s coming back home. I will tell her (truthfully) that’s it is the end of the semester and (not so truthfully) that class is all done. Our financial situation has improved again and I can send her to something private or join a homeschool choir that I recently discovered.

This has been a surprising learning experience for me. I find myself agreeing with the (perceived, never stated) attitude of the PSD that she should be in or out altogether. They’ve never done anything aside from this issue to make us uncomfortable or to make us feel unwelcome, but I feel like she is so conspicuous and I want to make commitments to our own community, like the WashNFL.
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This is the pic my dd drew after the class dh and I were upset about. I have been cleaning my desk off today and I found it.

At least, in her vision, there was a ladder for the people to escape.