I Can't Even Begin to Summarize the Past Three Weeks

Wow, SO MUCH has happened in the last three weeks! Buckle up, it's been a wild ride.

The first week of August was Rea's first time at Girls' Camp. I'm going to ask her to type up an account of it for her typing class this week, so we'll give it its own post. Suffice it to say, she had a wonderful time! Aunt Amy was still YW President (she got released two weeks later), so she had that point of familiarity, and Rea made good friends with some of the other girls. It was perfect and we're all so happy for her.

While she was gone, the rest of the family went to a meeting of a homeschooling group called Classical Conversations. I (Alison) first heard of this organization eight years ago when I was first looking into homeschooling. I went to their three day homeschool parent training class and their high school program sounded AMAZING. My kids were really too young for it then, and it's very expensive, but I bought their Memory Work CDs and we've been using them off-and-on ever since.

(They follow the "classical homeschooling model," which means most of what they do on the elementary level is memorizing facts that will be useful later. Doing it at home was way cheaper.)

I had sort of forgotten about the organization until a friend said she was joining it last year and ended up loving it. Over the summer, I decided that Rea and Sara most need to work on writing, language arts, and math. As I researched writing programs, I found the one that I knew was used in Classical Conversations and thought, "Huh. I wonder..." Turns out, that their program for 9-11 year olds is two hours in the afternoon once a week diagramming sentences, doing writing assignments, and practicing math facts. Bingo! And there was an open house the next week.

So we went to the open house, and I was like, "Yes. This is it." We'll meet with them every Monday after Labor Day. In the morning, the four older kids and I will be in a class with a couple of other families (8 kids per room total, and there are four rooms' worth of kids), and we'll practice the memory work, do a science demonstration, do an art project, and each kid does a presentation every week. (Yay! That will be so good!) Everyone eats lunch together, and then Rea and Sara and I will go to the afternoon class for two hours while the other kids play. There's even a preschool for Boo!

This feels like the absolutely perfect thing for us this year. It's still very expensive, but I think it's worth it. If we love it, next year Rea will start their junior high program, which leads directly into the high school program that's so cool. I would love to become a tutor for that program next year, which would offset some of the cost. They're evangelical Christian and you have to sign a faith statement to tutor with them, but I technically agree with what they said even if I know I don't agree with everything they meant, so... We'll see. Rea, Gideon, Boo, and I are very excited. Timmy and Sara are reserving judgment; there's not really anyone Timmy's age, so he's a little worried he'll be bored, and Sara's worried she won't want to keep up with the work. But hopefully it will all turn out well.

Mike's birthday was that Friday, and he and Alison went out for a celebratory dinner in honor of him finishing his master's program. We had a custom sushi meal where the chef picks the best fish he has available that day and makes whatever he's inspired to out of it. A few weeks after Mike planned it, he suddenly turned to Alison and said, "I just realized, you don't actually like shashimi [rolls that are just fish on top of rice]. What if there's a lot of things you don't like?" Alison had considered that before saying yes and had decided it would be OK. When we got there, though, it wasn't mostly shashimi. It was mostly just pieces of raw fish, no rice at all, with sauces and garnishes. Amazingly, she liked almost all of it. The chef really was amazing. It was hard to eat the whole ten courses' worth, but it was all so good! We took home some of the last roll, a hickory-smoked cream cheese roll. Mike doesn't really like cream cheese, and we were discussing the fact that Alison knew that because he doesn't like cheesecake, when they brought out the dessert: cheesecake. It was ironic, but it was actually the perfectly chosen accompaniment to the things we'd just been eating, and Mike discovered that with toasted almonds, cheesecake isn't horrible.

All in all, it was an amazing meal, and we're very grateful to Papa Mike and Grandma Sheila for watching the kids. The next day we celebrated his birthday as a family. opening presents and having a quiche and playing his new video games. It was lots of fun.

The next week, I had a bunch of doctor's appointments (everything is good), there was a RS/YW pool party and Rea learned to do a cartwheel off a diving board (see video below), and Timmy had his 8th birthday celebration with Papa Mike and Grandma Sheila, where they went out to lunch, went to the DI, and then brought the whole family to a trampoline park to jump for an hour.

Friday night Mike and Alison and Rea went to see Eric Jensen's Charley's Aunt. It was fabulous, as always. They switched Bassett to be the female housekeeper instead of the male butler, and since Bassett has a very large role in Eric Jensen's version, it was a really interesting change. Eric himself played Spettigrew and made him German, which really messed with other parts of the story and as far as we could tell was solely for the purpose of a single pun, which is such an OBT thing to do. Rea enjoyed it; she is getting old enough that we want to start including her in more grown-up things.

In between all of these fun things, the week was a mess. Saturday night (Mike's birthday), when Alison went to clean the kitchen, she shoved all the eggs from the quiche down the disposal and it stopped draining. She didn't want to interrupt Mike's video game, so she asked him to flip the switch on the disposal or whatever it is you do to fix it when he had a minute. He forgot, and we had so many leftovers that we didn't actually wash any dishes on Sunday, so it wasn't until Monday that we realized that it wasn't the disposal; the drain was actually blocked somewhere.

That meant that every day when Mike got off work, he tried different things to unblock the drain. When chemicals and a snake didn't work, he started following pipes and going in different ways; we found out that the kitchen sink and bathtub join up before heading out to the main line to the street. Trying to go in through the bathtub access didn't work, and since we'd already ordered the new bathtub for the bathroom redo, we decided to just take out the old one.

(We did talk about the bathroom redo, didn't wee? Mike has been wanting to do it for months; the bathtub has been getting progressively worse and worse at draining and they painted it before selling the house and the paint's flaking off, the toilet gets clogged all the time, and the kids are constantly damaging the sink drain. But we held off until the master's program was over. It was probably the last week of July or the first week of August when we started ordering parts: a really good toilet, a soaking tub that lets the water get 15 inches deep, and the kind of drain for the sink that you put in a laundry room or mudroom, that's made to handle the kind of messes our kids bring in. We're very excited.)

So Mike went at the old tub and realized it was cast iron, so he smashed it up with a sledgehammer and took out the pieces. Then he took apart pipes and sent the snake down there, but it still wasn't getting anything.

After multiple trips to Home Depot and plumbing stores, there was finally someone at Home Depot who agreed that the smallest head size on the 75 foot snake (that can go all the way to the street) MIGHT fit around the corner we needed it to go around, so he rented it to Mike. Mike and his dad managed to force it through, and when they pulled it back, they found a cloth face mask. We have no idea how the kids managed to get that down the bathtub drain or the kitchen sink, but after that it started working again. That was Saturday, so we were so relieved to have a sink again! (We'd done some takeout and a lot of disposable dishes that week.)

After all of that, we had intended to take another week to get everything ready for the school year, but Amy texted us Saturday and said, "My kids start school Monday; want me to start work?" And Alison promptly decided to jump into the school year with both feet.

Apparently we never explained Amy's job and our plans for this school year, even though we've been working on them all summer. Ooops. Here's the history:

We knew Mike would finish his master's program this fall, but we realized that he'd managed to make his full-time job just about perfect and he didn't want to retire and find another teaching job instead. When we discussed it, we realized that mostly we just wanted Alison to have some more help and support. We were visiting with Caitlin and Sal, who had just hired a home assistant, and they strongly urged us to do the same. We mentioned it at the next family dinner, and Amy said, "I was planning to find a job when Brooklyn starts first grade this year, but I only want to work on days when she's in school. I could do that job."

So we talked about it, did the math, and decided to cut the parts of our budget that we'd planned to cut if Mike retired, and use the money to pay Amy instead. She comes for two hours a day, right after dropping off her kids at school. First she makes the kids do their morning routine (getting dressed, brushing teeth, cleaning their rooms, doing chores). That is amazing - starting homeschool without having spent the last half hour ordering the kids around makes school go so much better! Then while we do school, she goes and cleans anything that she thinks needs cleaning. The house looks amazing and Alison has so much more energy for school that it's going really well. It is the best thing ever.

So, since Amy was coming, Alison decided to completely start school. We're doing a bit of spelling before Amy gets here (we haven't ever studied spelling in an organized fashion, so it needed to be fit in somewhere), and we review the memory work for Classical Conversations over breakfast and take the dog out. When Amy gets here, the kids go with her and Alison gets everything set up for the school day. Then the girls do an hour of math; the boys do half an hour of math and half an hour of reading each, taking turns working with Alison and on an app. After that, we  do an hour of the subject of the day: history, science, literature, etc. We are moving bedtime to 7:30pm and Rea and Sara will stay up an hour later and do language arts. After lunch, we either have a group to go to (Classical Conversations, Nature Kids, Mom's house) or they have Free Project Time, where they make proposals for projects of their choice and then work on them.

This week, we did a "math sampler" where the kids did one day each of five of the seven or so math curricula on our shelves. (What can I say? I just collect math curricula, OK?) After sampling them all, Sara decided to use Gattegno, Timmy Math Inspirations, and Gideon Life of Fred. Rea already knew she loved Beast Academy, so I didn't make her participate in the sampler. They have to stick with their chosen curriculum for at least six weeks, and then we'll reassess. They are allowed to spend part of their time practicing math skills on Prodigy, though. I'm excited to see how that goes.

I'm still in love with our history program and have it set up so it's so easy. Literature was working amazingly last year, but it wasn't a big hit this week, so we'll wait and see. I'm still fussing with the science program. I have a very hands-on, everyone-studying-the-same-thing-but-at-different-levels, cool plan I made, but while Rea and Timmy and I all love it (and I'm sure Gideon will have fun too), Sara does not enjoy science at all. I wonder if she'd be happier just reading a textbook and doing worksheets. At least then her moaning and pouting about it wouldn't stop the other kids from having fun with their activities. (And she could always join us if she wanted to.)

Anyway, that's the epic of the last few weeks. Today Mike is trying to get the bathtub put in, replacing all the pipes necessary so that it works well. Apparently the bathtub pipes were clogged with those flecks of paint, and none of the drain-clearing techniques could get them out. The sink drain was iron and corroded. And the pipes out of the bathtub were far smaller than the ones that came with the new bathtub. So hopefully replacing all of those things means the plumbing will run well from now on.

Other than that and this epic blog post, today we're hoping to have time to take apart the hammock stand in the girls' room and turn it lengthwise instead of width-wise. They have such a hard time working together to clean their room that we're going to split it into two halves. They will each have a curtain on one side of the hammock stand (they picked bedsheets from the DI), and either or both of them can let the curtains down to shut away their own part of the room. The curtains will extend from the end of the hammock stand to the side wall, leaving a narrow corridor from the door to the closet. That's all they'll have to work together to get clean; other than that, each can clean her own side. We'll see how it works, but it seems like a good idea. Having their own space appeals to both of them, and maybe it will cut down on the room-cleaning fights. (Although Alison doesn't have to deal with those anymore, hallelujah! I really hope Amy thinks the money is worth it.) They cleaned and organized their whole room this week in preparation for the change with Amy (she managed to help them get rid of more stuff, than Alison, Mike, or Grandma Julie ever has; she is amazing), so we really hope to at least start that today.

Last Sunday Alison was hypomanic, which means not sleeping, full of ideas, and not having a good grasp of what's reasonable and what's not. But she ran the ideas by the family, and some of them got approval. This room rearrangement was one of them. If it works, we may build a second hammock stand and do the same in the boys' room; Timmy is getting old enough that having his own space might appeal to him. Then, months ago, she told the kids that if Mike didn't retire at the end of his master's program they'd use the money to build a shed that could be a playhouse. It has to be five feet from other buildings or the property line, and Sunday Alison realized that we could build it directly behind the current shed in the carport, and the five feet in between could become a place for parking bikes and scooters. Then the now-empty half of the carport could turn into an outdoor schoolroom, needing just the addition of a wireless internet repeater, an extension cord, and some weatherproof cabinets (and maybe a table, if we don't repurpose one we've already got). That would get us outside more, Gideon and Boo could play in the yard while the older kids did school and get a little closer to the Forest Kindergarten of the older kids' experience, and we'd have more room. Basically this will do all the things that Alison wanted in a house without a major home remodel: separate spaces for the kids, a playroom, a schoolroom, and more outdoor living space. And maybe we can get it all done this fall!

So things are not slowing down, but it's good. We're excited for the new school year.