catholic homeschool weirdo mom
Bede is reading a Bad Kitty book to Dorothy. Melt!
(I watched, quietly. Until Dorothy tried to eat Gilbert’s LEGO, there on the windowsill, and I had to ruin it all. Ain’t it always the way?)
The bagging and boxing continues unrecorded. Today got two more boxes of books.
Today is also Trixie’s seventh birthday! Happy birthday, Trixie.
Faith made her a card, which you will appreciate most if you are a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan. The brony scene is thick here.
It says “The Great and Powerful Trixie (and also Faith) wish you a Great and Powerful Birthday!
Pony Trixie is using her unicorn magic to float seven cakes around Human Trixie. Human Trixie was OVER the MOON about her card. Gonna be a tough act to follow.
I can’t remember what day it is, and simple subtraction eludes me. Anyway.
Today’s bag, modeled by the lovely Faith, who mustache you a question. It’s diapers – cloth ones, of course – which I am giving away instead of trying to sell. Trying to sell diapers makes me insane. Giving them away makes me happy. It was an easy choice.
Asteroids! Meteorites! PANIC!
Today’s bag o’ stuff. All trash today, rundown cardboard and irreparable books.
With bonus Gilbert.
But it did remind me that we need fire ladders for the new place, since it’s two story. If anyone has any recs, please do tell. They will probably be deployed by children, if that makes a difference.
I have some. But the crying baby makes it impossible to write them down. Watch this space!
Which brings me to my Lenten point: shame is not a particularly good penitential emotion for me. It’s so self-directed, selfish really, where I’m concerned. It quickly moves into a more comfortable self-deprecating mess of pity, and self-loathing. Not good! What is good? Repentance, which is other-directed. So there you go.
Look at all my plenty, that I don’t even want! Why did I get it to begin with? Why did I purchase it? To assuage some inner emptiness? Because I was bored? (likely.) Because I thought, right then, that I needed it? Things for the kids, I get because I love them and think the thing will make them happy. But mostly things just make them unhappy. They fight over things, want more things right after getting them. They agonize over getting rid of things even more than I do. And yet the things they have slowly grind into shreds of paper and tufts of polyester fur, little shards of plastic. Nobody wants the things they have – they want to want, and not to have. Sometimes they want to have, but really they want to make another child want! And they always, always want to GET.
Am I different? Not so much.
I’ll be doing this.
I have 3 bags in reserve that just got donated yesterday, and a big box of books that just went. So I get 4 days “off”.
Today’s bag:
(Trixie Gleeson added for visual interest. I’ll be keeping her.)
Today’s bag has an outgrown coat, some tee shirts, and some unused crib sheets and blankets.
I can’t draw. Like, at all. Nor do I feel called to learn how to draw. So I really don’t care what kind of pencil I use, if I use a pencil. But I married an artist, and bore him seven children, and quite a few of them are also artists.
And one of them is Very Particular about pencils. And it’s not Bede, or Abby (they don’t care.)
It’s this kid. The bigger one.
Her favorite are Dixon Ticonderogas, but they stopped manufacturing them in the US and the quality has really tanked. Off-center lead, broken lead, etc. Also they put Microban on or in them, which, no. So we’ve been looking for an alternative for quite a while, and I am happy to say she is satisfied with Palomino Prospectors from pencils.com.
It really is coming right along.
We were too sick for Mass this morning. We probably could have gone but we didn’t want to share our germs. Sean went and stood in the back… with Bede, who really, really doesn’t like to miss Mass. A far cry from the boy a year ago who never wanted to go. They went to a closer English Mass, and Sean said Bede was a bit put out by their persistent use of English. Sean said he seemed to think it was all one really long epistle. The second or third time they changed posture, Bede asked “When is it going to be the Latin, Dad?” and sighed when he was told it wasn’t a Latin Mass. Then every time they stood and sat, repeatedly, yet with no Latin, he sighed again. Afterwards he said “I like St. Damien and the Greek and the Latin, Dad.”
(Me too, Bede!)
I wrote this on Google+ but I’ll write it here too: Abby’s assessment was last week. Her official diagnosis is ADHD-PI. That’s a lot of alphabet soup to say Dreamy Creative Writer Girl. (Really Smart Dreamy Creative Writer Girl, actually. Her IQ is quite high. I don’t have numbers until I get the full assessment in the mail.) So that means we’ll be playing to her strengths and compensating for her deficits. I’m re-reading The Edison Gene. Here’s an excerpt.
I sure am tired of our endless low-level illness this winter.
Today’s adventure was visiting the parents of our future puppy! This is Cowboy.
Cowboy is a chocolate Labrador Retriever. He fathered the litter that our puppy will be selected from. Here’s a prettier shot of him from last fall:
Here’s the dam, Montana. I couldn’t get a picture of her today because the other dogs kept getting in shot.
If all goes well, they’ll produce an even-tempered black female who will join our family in April.
They were both such good dogs. Cowboy’s tail was wagging so hard and broad that I was afraid he would injure himself. His owner said he had been known to, in the past! Happy to a fault. Montana was sweet and easygoing.
We’re pretty excited!
Faith relocated several very impressive spider egg cases to the woods. They were on the house, where I really didn’t want them to hatch. But anything that eats mosquitoes is to be encouraged, so best to you, spiders!
Tomorrow the internets come to the woodsy woods, in the form of ViaSat satellite service. That was the last thing we were waiting on, so now we can MOVE. Hot dog!
Dorothy eats two cookies AT THE SAME TIME, YALL.
And Faith is doing math as well.
Not the best day here.
The teething baby – first tooth on Sunday – is unhappy, for the last four or five days. My not-quite five year old, Gloria, is in a very fragile way, emotionally. She’s difficult to understand when she’s upset, she mumbles, and she’s upset A LOT. She is also at odds with Trixie the not-quite seven year old, who can be very difficult to get along with.
Gilbert is at an impasse in math, trying to get multiplication, and I am impatient with him. As he gets less and less sure of his answers they get more and more tentative and I get more and more irritable. I stopped today before I got mad, but biting it back made me mad internally for an hour or so.
Abby is s-l-o-o-o-w at school today. She has been doing a twenty minute history assignment for about two hours. I have an appointment for an assessment for her soon. I am certain she will fit the diagnostic criteria for SCT. What will that mean for her and us? She’s my daydreamer, my girl on her own planet. I want her to be able to play to her strengths and compensate for her deficits, and a clear course of action will help her with that.
I have to pack for the move, which is okay, but the baby won’t let me. I’m a little out of sorts about that. My house is a mess and it’s not getting cleaner.
Yesterday, I was on the phone with my friend Tabitha in California and I said “…my brother Jonathan was at my parents’ house this weekend and…” and I realized I no longer need to specify which brother is doing something because now both of my other brothers died.
I fucking hate cancer.
I think that’s all.
It’s grey and cold today. The light has that unchanging quality it gets, and I can’t tell what time it is when I look outside. Earlier I was thinking it was later, and now I’m surprised it’s past 3.
This weekend we have a Trip planned. We’re going to Guthrie to visit Mark’s Drugstore, an old-fashioned drugstore with a fountain. This is due to Bede, who asked to go to a drugstore last week. Knowing he couldn’t mean the local CVS, I figured he must mean a drugstore like he’d seen in old cartoons, with a soda fountain and a lunch counter. There is no such thing in Oklahoma City, but I knew there had to be something in historic Guthrie. Guthrie is only a few miles from our new house – we’re between Guthrie and Arcadia.
Because blog posts look nicer with photos, here is Gilbert scrutinizing his pony collection.
Today we’re back to homeschool. We’ve been off for a month, a bit longer than planned. I cared for my niece’s (also homeschooled) children quite a bit in the weeks before my brother died, and was happy to be able to do so. One of the reasons we homeschool year round is to be able to take breaks when we need to for things like
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| One of the first photos of Dorothy |
and
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| One of the last photos of Troy |
Today we jumped right in, history and math. Messy and imperfect Life keeps going, you know? And we’re pretty happy with it.
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| Abaigeal the Glad |
So long 2012!
Bede went to Mass this morning with Sean, Faith and Abby while I stayed home with the other kids. He wanted to go, so of course I let him go. It was his first time at English Mass. Sean said he kept shushing people. I guess it’s noisier than the Latin Mass.
He’s very much interested in the Eucharist. Our priest wants all first communicants to make their first confession prior to receiving first communion, so that’s my plan. Loyola Press makes an Adaptive Reconciliation Kit which I’ll get. They also make an Adaptive First Communion Kit, but it is keyed to the English liturgy and largely inapplicable to the Latin.
A few weeks ago, he was loud in the sanctuary. I stood up and left with him, which he did not want, and sat down with him in the narthex. He was crying as we sat down, and I said he could go back in once he was quiet. This started a new burst of moaning and weeping, mostly incoherent, but then he pulled his face up, tears on his cheeks, and said “But Mom! Am I Catholic?”
I said he certainly was.
He quieted down rapidly and we went back in.
My Catholic boy.
New house has rooms framed!
These will become two more bedrooms, bringing the final total to five. Current bunkings planned: Faith and Abby, Bede and Gilbert, Trixie and Gloria (Dorothy older), Sean, Phoebe (Dorothy now.) That gives us an “extra” room, but with all those doors around we might be inclined to spawn more villagers, so eventually there could be more in the mix. Also, Bede may or may not make a good roommate and could end up with his own room. We will see.
