catholic homeschool weirdo mom
I did it one year and really liked it. I’m doin it again. I’m tired of fast food Facebook. It tastes great, satisfies momentarily, and leaves you wanting more vapid, empty knowledge. I’ll still be checking it, but I’m going to try to blog more meaningfully here instead of just posting a status update on Facebook.
So. National Blog Post Month. I’ll be posting every day in November.
Who’s with me?
Abby’s cover for her book, “5TH SEASON QUEST”
Click to embiggen.
Y’all liked these last time, so, here’s a few more.
Upon seeing one plate of regular and one of silver dollar:
Uppercase pancakes and lowercase pancakes!
Watching me wind yarn with a ball winder:
It’s zoetrope on your yarn!
Climbing a wrought-iron spiral staircase:
Bede! Climbing on your DNA!
After writing his name in the style and colors of Google:
BedeGleeson! Advanced Search! Language TOOOOOLS!
I was wondering, if you don’t mind, could you leave a comment? No content necessary – a simple “yo” will suffice. I’m curious how many people read me from a feed reader, or from the Livejournal feed.
I know it’s a pain in the neck. Pretty please? No pressure to be either witty or relevant, just say “hey”.
Yarn percentages notes. Faith wants a sweater with a pink body and purple sleeves. I’ve thought it out, and it would work to knit pink in the round to the armsceye, then separate front/back, knit it flat up through the raglan decreases, bind off, then pick up the sleeves in purple and knit them down, then pick up the neck in purple and knit it up.
So, we need sleeve yarn and body yarn. I’m thinking of using Knit Picks Comfy.Also, in theory this will be Faith knitting her own sweater. She made her own hat last year. I think there will be knitting fairies who come while she sleeps however.
Sleeves 40% of total
Body 60% of total
We have many more locks and gates in this house than most houses do. We’ve taken some down recently, but in the last year this would have been the house you’d see when you visited.
On our front door we have two locks. One is a sliding deadbolt set six feet up. That one is locked all the time, no exceptions. Underneath that we have a combination padlock. That one is locked whenever I leave the first floor of the house.
Moving on into the dining room you pass the stairs, where there’s a gate at the bottom. (All our gates are fully custom Gleeson jobs and are solid boards that slide in and out of place. There are rails for a gate in the doorway to the dining room, but we don’t keep that one up all the time.) So, now, in the dining room. We have rails installed behind the chairs so that babies can’t slide them out and use them to climb over the aforementioned gates. To get a chair out, you lift it up two inches over the rail bolted to the floor. Babies are highly intelligent but they tend to be a.) inexperienced and b.) weak. This thwarts them most excellently.
You’ll see the door to the kitchen there to the right. It’s also secured by two locks, the always-locked deadbolt and the unattended combination lock. In the kitchen is a door that leads to the backyard, which is also double locked, and a door to the basement, which is combination locked.
Other locks include the six foot lock to the coat closet and the lock bolting the TV to the wall. Our old CRT TV was bolted to the TV stand which was screwed into the floor, but we got one a them fancy flat screens now. Other things bolted to things include all furniture large enough to fall and crush someone, so all the bookcases are, you guessed it, bolted to the wall.
And that’s just the downstairs! I’ll cover the upstairs in a later post.
Bede, in Scrat acorn hat and enormous brown trousers, curled up with his remote to the DVD player.
What’s the Latin for that one?
Bede was pumped about the movie. Before we left, I wrote our telephone number on his back in Sharpie, just in case we got separated. You never know, and he can’t communicate well enough to convey that sort of information.
We pulled into the mall lot and he was vibrating with excitement. He saw the poster as we approached the theater and I let him break loose and go jump up and down in front of it and hum as he chanted the character names and peered through his fingers.
We were getting some looks by this point but so what. He was so happy. Most of the looks were for his unusual, ah, behaviour, but some of them were no doubt due to his clothes: a big red tee shirt, men’s trousers cinched in at the waist and rolled up, blue Crocs, all topped off with an enormous brown hat with a tan brim – his “Scrat acorn hat” he requested I knit for him.
An older woman approached us and said “Is he autistic?”
I resisted my momentary contrarian impulse to say “No” (hee hee) and smiled instead. “Yes, he’s autistic. He loves the Ice Age movies, and this is the first time he’s ever been to a theater, too.”
She said “Oh! I thought he was. I’m a substitute teacher and I just love working with autistic children.”
I smiled and started to guide Bede toward the ticket booth. She said, to Bede, “You are the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen!” and we parted ways. When we got to the line, a nice man offered to let us cut, and we bought our tickets and headed back to the theater.
The auditorium was dark and the previews were playing VERY LOUDLY when we came in. Bede was a bit taken aback by the darkness and the noise, but came in and we sat fairly close to the front. “You want some turn it down?” he asked me. I said it was loud, but it might get quieter (it did.)
He was rapt throughout, humming and bouncing a few times, but mostly quiet and still. He hid behind the seat in front of us when it was scary, or peeked through his hat. As the movie was wrapping up he said “Ice Age is The End” and smiled.
Then, we left.
Whew! Yay Bede!
Scene: Gleeson home, dining room.
Me: Hey Bede!
Bede: (skipping by) Hmmhnnnhmm!
Me: Tomorrow, you wanna see Ice Age 3?
(Bede stops short)
Me: In the movie theater?
(Bede smiles widely)
Me: With Manny?
Bede: And Ellie?
Me: Uh-huh.
Bede: And Crashandeddie?
Me: Yep.
Bede: And (hops in place) SCRAT!!
Me: Yeah!
Bede: OKAYSURE! I GETCHOO ICE AGE 3 DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS IN YOUR MOVIE THEATER!! HMMMHNNHMM!! (squeal!)
Soooo tomorrow Bede and I are going to see…
Which is finally at the dollar cinema. It will be his first time ever in a theater. Wish us well!
On January 29th, Sky Walker was arrested for assaulting his mother. She died about a week later, and he was charged with her murder. Sky is 18 years old and profoundly autistic. His competency trial was this week.
The whole thing is heartbreaking.
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2009/09/kent_state_university_professo_1.html
Where is Sky’s dad?
I keep a homeschool blog over at gleeschool.wordpress.com. It’s just notes for recordkeeping, but I thought someone might like it, so, there you are.
Aside from occasional appropriate use of I and my, Bede’s pronouns are always reversed, and his language is pretty weird. He’s internally consistent though, and he tries so very hard to communicate with us – as we try to communicate with him. Here are some recent dispatches.
Requesting grape jam on his toast:
Grape jelly your jam?
Can’t find his DVD remote:
You want find it your remote?
How I’m awakened each morning:
Wake up Mama! Open my eyes!
Dismay at Trixie’s refusal to wear a certain sweater:
Trixie wear it ON the yarn shirt!
Plaintive request:
You want it pbskids dot org on your Mama’s Dell?
Seeking kitchen entry:
You want go kitchen? Okaysure, I get you go kitchen!
Asking for ten small pieces of yarn:
You want cut with your ten yarn?
He usually gets his point across, and he’s pretty patient for a complicated Gallifreyan boy. Love him so!
I was reading the October issue of Popular Mechanics (theme: disaster preparedness! survival! which really turns my geek crank!) and I ran across this, by Glenn Reynolds – page 48.
Here’s a simple truth: It’s better to bend than to break, and it’s best to be prepared for the worst. This age-old wisdom is going by a new name in slide-rule circles: “Resilience engineering” starts with the insight that it’s smart to design and maintain systems so that they have some give. That means building technologies that offer extra capacity to handle sudden loads, plenty of warning when normal operations are beginning to break down, backup systems in case things do go wrong, diverse digital architectures so that a single bug doesn’t produce widespread failure, and decentralization so that when (not “if”) communication breaks down things don’t grind to a halt.
And that seems to me to be a perfect, perfect description of parenting an autistic child.
Sharing is Caring:
for one week, recommend / share
Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy
Today is a Site. I’m going to send you all to The Baldwin Project. It’s a fantastic collection of public domain children’s literature, all formatted nicely and so forth. It’s an invaluable resource. We use it for read-alouds all the time.
Sharing is Caring:
for one week, recommend / share
Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy
Today I’m doing all three, lucky reader!
Book: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. I sat back just now and tried to think of the one book I’ve read in the last few years that really surprised me, really stayed with me, and that was it. Heinleinesque first person military mindbender.
eBook: Little Brother (available as a free download at that link, courtesy of the author, Cory Doctorow.) This one’s near-future dystopia.
Fanfic: The Chaosverse, by earlgreytea68. Of course it’s Doctor Who, what else would it be? “And then there came a day when Rose said she was having a baby.”
Bede draws the PBS logo a lot. He changes it around and makes a whole family of P-heads. He gives the P-head a different look, like a PIXAR lamp P-head, or a Scrat P-head.
I think he would really, really like this shirt. They don’t come in kid sizes, but he’s a pretty big kid, and he likes his clothes loose. An adult small will be too big but not unwearably so. And all he’s doing is growing… This is going on his Christmas list for sure.
I wish that the primary caregiver of children who qualify for Medicaid could get Medicaid too. Maybe you could opt for either subsidized daycare or subsidized health insurance. I could get free daycare for all my kids, but I don’t, because I’m not employed outside the home. Since I’m not employed outside the home I have no way to get health insurance. See?
Even my conservative husband agrees with me, and yall, that is huge.
Sure would be nice!
via earlgreytea68
Sharing is Caring:
for one week, recommend / share
Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy
The Decemberists: The Engine Driver has been haunting me lately. It’s such an autumnal song.
I hope you enjoy it. Here are the lyrics:
I’m an engine driver
on a long run,
on a long run.
Would I were beside her:
she’s a long one,
such a long one.And if you don’t love me, let me go.
And if you don’t love me, let me go.I’m a county lineman
on the high line,
on the high line.
So will be my grandson:
there are powerlines
in our bloodlines.And if you don’t love me, let me go.
And if you don’t love me, let me go.And I am a writer,
writer of fictions,
I am the heart that you call home.
And I’ve written pages upon pages
trying to rid you from my bones,
my bones, my bones.I’m a money-lender:
I have fortunes
upon fortunes.
Take my hand for tender.
I am tortured,
ever tortured.And if you don’t love me, let me go.
And if you don’t love me, let me go.And I am a writer,
writer of fictions,
I am the heart that you call home.
And I’ve written pages upon pages
trying to rid you from my bones.
I am writer,
I am all that you have hoped of.
And I’ve written pages upon pages
trying to rid you from my bones,
my bones, my bones.And if you don’t love me, let me go.
And if you don’t love me, let me go.
I uploaded some pix from the last few weeks to flickr, including Bede and his Acorn Hat, playing in the backyard, drawing and reading in the dining room and Sean’s recent haircut.
And even a few of me!
Faith and Abby are old enough now that saying “Everything that’s still on the floor in there in 15 minutes is going in the trash” no longer seems cruel. Before, like last year, saying that elicited much stress and made me feel like the biggest jerk in the world. Now, it gets me a slightly panicked look, a cry of “ABBY! COME HELP ME!” and a hell of a lot less stuff to pick up – and no pain and anguish when I pitch it.
This face comes to me, saying “Hewwo! Tisses, Mama!” and then holds my face while she kisses me.
She’s a delightful child.
The school year is upon me! We don’t stop schoolin’ in the summer. As unschoolers we neither stop nor start the whole “formal learning” gig, but keep about the same non-pace throughout the year. However, when the conventional schools are in session, I try to get a little more nudge-schooly in my approach. I like the kids to do something measurably academic each day, and if they don’t do so themselves I nudge them into it. Hence, nudgeschooling.
I’m definitely going with Teaching Textbooks for Faith’s math. She wants to stay at grade level for math and not fall behind her friends who are schooled, and she really enjoyed the website preview for Math 4. When we can afford it we’ll be getting it, probably early October.
Abby liked it as well, but she’s a little behind Faith in math. She likes Miquon and hasn’t yet finished the whole set of books so that’s probably going to be her thing this year.
Everyone else will just tag along and do what they do with no formal plan. We’re still working through the Sonlight Core 1+2 we started in February, so I’ll pick back up with that. We all love it since it’s reading together and discussing stuff as a family. I kind of forget it’s “school”, frankly! It feels like we’re cheating. Abby’s favorite thing to do for dinner conversation is “Let’s everyone tell about the book they’re reading, and why you like it.” Love me some Sonlight.
Bede has been wearing clothes (!!) I’m still processing. I told Tabitha now he won’t be the weird naked kid, he’ll be the weird kid who wears men’s trousers belted and rolled up at the cuffs. An improvement!
My oldest son, Bede, has developed a deep and abiding passion for all things ICE AGE MOVIE. Most super especially SCRAT, the little acorn-obsessed squirrel. Bede is 6 and a half years old and is autistic, and has *never* had this sort of reaction to anything traditionally child-oriented. (His usual thing is fonts and type design.) I am also excited about this because he wants to wear clothes with ICE AGE themes and he does not usually want to wear clothes at all. (He has been naked 90% of the time for the last 3 years. No kidding!)
We are Very Very Poor. We own both movies on DVD. BUT. If anyone has any ICE AGE stuffs they want to get rid of I would love to have it. Any toys, from Happy Meal on up, any clothes (adult sizes fine too), any books… anything! I can’t pay you a single cent because I don’t have it.
A million thanks in advance. I can be reached here or at phoebe@gleeson.us
(crossposted: like whoa, sorry)
My darling husband has many sterling qualities. He is a wonderful father who reads to his children every night before bedtime. He makes excellent rigatoni.
He is a really great kisser.
But the car he drives hadn’t been cleaned since before Gloria was born in January 2008, coincidentally the last time I rode in it. I just cleaned it out though, lots of bits of paper and empty cigarette packages and old Weekly Standard magazines. Why would I undertake such an endeavour, you may ask? Why, because I will be riding in it again this very evening, thanks to two facts.
Fact the First: Under Oklahoma law, only front-seat occupants and children under 13 need wear seatbelts.
Fact the Second: My oldest child is over five feet tall and therefore big enough to sit in the front seat, even with an airbag.
Leading us to the conclusion: I will be sitting on the floor of the van, recklessly but legally unbelted, as we drive to my parents’ house for dinner. I feel like a sixteen year old, only with grey hair and no abdominal tone.
(Don’t worry, we won’t make a habit of it. It’s just one drive a week.)
I’ve recently switched to last.fm for my music moochery. I was using Pandora but I kept hitting their listening cap, and if I’m going to fork out money there had better be no ads. So far I like it fine, but I’m not sure if I like it better than Pandora. They are pretty different systems. I think Pandora may be more flexible in terms of crafting a particular station’s sound, but I don’t really know.
My music tastes aren’t very eclectic. I like The Police and bands that I think sound like them, or who remind me of them in some way. Lots of jangly melodic guitars, clever lyrics, strong percussion. So I like U2, Coldplay, Peter Gabriel, and bunches of more recent bands that honestly sort of fade together in my ears and all seem to get tagged ‘indie’, so I guess that’s what the kids are calling it nowadays.
Who do you like?
