Not June Cleaver
Not June Cleaver: age 46
Ward Cleaver: age 45
Simon: ds age 12
Alvin: ds age 10
Theodore: ds age 9
Jerry: Betta fish, age unknown
Albert (as in Gator mascot): hermit crab, age unknown
Tiger (as in Tiger Woods): hermit crab, age unknown
I'm not atheist. I'm not agnostic. If you figure out what I am, please tell me. Be nice.
Read more about me here.* * * * *
These Go To Eleven
NIGEL: All the way up. You’re on ten on your guitar, where can you go from there? Where?
MARTY: I don’t know.
NIGEL: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
MARTY: Put it up to eleven.
NIGEL: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
MARTY: Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
NIGEL: These go to eleven.Curious about the title of this blog? Here's a link to a video clip of one of my favorite scenes in "This Is Spinal Tap"
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Changes
What I really want to know is how this:
Became this:
And how I ever survived those days when I had 3 in diapers.
My baby turned 8 on Wednesday. It hardly seems possible.
R.I.P. Tiger Woods
No, not THAT Tiger Woods, our hermit crab Tiger Woods.
I was giving Simon crap about not giving his hermit crabs water and food the other night. He finally got off his butt and did, but he came to me and said, “Mom, Tiger’s not moving.” Sometimes Tiger is shy, so I was hoping he was just not in the mood to move. I went to his cage and picked him up and as I was lifting his shell out of the cage, he flopped out of it into his newly filled water dish. Dead.
Poor Simon. His face just went white. And Oh.My.God. what a smell! Aaaaack.
So I did what any good mom would do, I called my husband down to take care of it. LOL!
We had Tiger for almost a year. We got him after Albert, who is still alive. Simon came to me last night and said he couldn’t get the image of Tiger falling out of his shell out of his mind. He said it scared him so much. Poor thing. I know what it is like to dwell on things that bother you. It’s a tough lesson, and there is nothing I can do to help him with this. I told him to try to remember Tiger in his shell when he thinks of him.
Rest in peace, Tiger. (he’s the one on the left in the picture)
Herbies – The Love Bug
My nine year old, Alvin, is sitting on our bed watching some program on Discovery or some other normal cable station. I’m in the bathroom getting ready for bed.
Alvin: Mom, what’s herbies?
Mom: Huh?
Alvin: There’s a doctor on TV talking about herbies.
Mom: It’s a virus. There are all sorts of drugs advertised on TV.
Up next, erectile dysfunction. (pun intended)
Oooh I can’t wait to see what sort of search hits I’ll get now.
What would I be doing if I never had kids?
What would I be doing if I never had kids?
This is my entry for the Thinking Homeschoolers Essay. Since I’m usually too busy to think, I haven’t participated yet, but today is different.
This subject came up on the day my oldest child turned 11.
My parenting journey has been a difficult one, but I cannot imagine life without my children.
Parenting was not something I always imagined doing. In fact, one of my sisters and I had a little “no kids” pact. We had a bond between us. She held on to her no kids ideal. I did not. And I can’t even say why I changed my mind. I was 33 when I had my first child. I wasn’t driven to have children, but I was also afraid NOT to have them. I guess I felt like the regret of not having them would be harder to deal with than the regret of having them. Sometimes I look at my childfree sister and envy her life. But probably more often I do not envy her. My children are as much a source of joy as they are pain. They are most certainly a source of pride.
One thing I do not regret is giving up my career. After seventeen years, I called it quits. My youngest was almost 4, my oldest was 6. That was 4 ½ years ago and I have never looked back. Yes, I miss the income. It was nothing to sneeze at, it was half. And I bitch unmercifully about spending money now. It is a small price to pay for the joy of being here with my children and watching them grow.
There is no way I could ever say what I would be doing now if I never had kids. They have changed my life forever. Some days I think it is changed for the better, some days I think it is changed for the worse. That is just the nature of parenting. Before kids, I really had nothing to be proud of. A career, yes. But I wasn’t passionate about it, nor about anything else. Now I am passionate about being the best parent I can be to my three boys.
Happy Birthday Simon!
Dangerous Things
A little side conversation has started in my last post where Debra at From Skilled Hands posted a link to a TED video about 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.
One of the 5 things is drive a car. That is the only one in the list that I (partially) disagreed with. Feel free to read why here.
Anyway, Debra’s response was something about not letting her kids drive tractors until they could reach the pedals and I just had to post this picture for her. I’m thinking this isn’t exactly what she meant.
You see, I’m paranoid about my kids’ safety, but apparently my concern is a little uneven!
Another Boy Thing
Awhile back, I posted an entry titled “He’s a Godsend” about my baby, Theodore, and how God (or whatever that supernatural being might be or not be) must have had a special plan for him. I took it down a couple of weeks ago, along with a related post about “inviable pregnancies” because they were a little too personal. I also realized that there are a lot of people out there who went through similar situations with different outcomes, and I felt bad about that.
Anyway, all this boy talk has me wanting to see that incredible picture of Theodore enjoying life, so I’m posting it here on its own with no story, the picture says everything:
Girls Rule?
Thank you JJ for posting a great link in my comments on my Should Boys Be Homeschooled post. You realize that a link like that consumes me, right? And I just had so much time to spend clicking through on the various articles! 
JJ posted a link to an organization called the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. There are a variety of articles and opinions on the subject of gender in education, but this article by Margaret Wente, was particularly interesting. Wente notes that there has been a complete reversal in higher education over the past 25 years. Apparently, females now outnumber males in college, law school and medical school.
No wonder the hottest topic in education is how to help the boys. The remedies suggested range from more boy-friendly books (Surprise! Boys are interested in cowboys and cars) to more recess (Surprise! Boys have a hard time sitting still) and more male role models (Guess what! Boys admire hockey stars).
To the average parent, this may seem like a stunning statement of the obvious. But in education, it’s an earthquake. An entire generation of educational theory has been rooted in the notion that boys and girls are the same, and that gender is socially constructed. Worse, social critics such as Christine Hoff Summers (The War Against Boys) have argued persuasively that schools tend to pathologize normal boy behaviour — in other words, to treat boys as defective girls.
That last sentence really resonated with me, but this article is 5 years old. Has anything changed? Apparently the “earthquake” wasn’t big enough. In my personal experience, and in my observations of others, very little has changed to “accommodate” gender differences in education. I can’t find an accurate number to quote (lucky for me I just blog and don’t get paid to write).
The good news is, I don’t have to. I have taken matters into my own hands, so to speak. No longer do I have to hear the teacher say, “He was supposed to be doing worksheets, but I found him under his desk making pig noises.” No longer do I have to sit in meetings with all the Big Scary School People (do we EVER get over the inferiority complex that schools instill in us?), hearing that maybe drugs would help (no, they are not allowed to say that, but they did).
Now, we celebrate boys. We do whatever we can to foster that creativity and allow that creative energy. And YES, it drives me nuts! I am a girl. I grew up in a family of 6 girls raised by my mother. This is all foreign to me, but I embrace it. Boys are different, like it or not. Not better or worse, just different.
By the way, none of my boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, not even the one making the pig noises. His pediatrician said no way, my psychologist sister said no way, and I said no way. Turns out he couldn’t read the worksheets, so he would do other things instead.
Pile of Boys (revisited)
For those of you who doubted me (or perhaps don’t have boys!), here we go again with the pile of boys. This phenomenon does not seem to be limited to just homeschooled boys though. This is a mixed crew (except that coincidentally, 2 out of the 5 Level 4 boys are homeschooled, and if you look at all levels, 3 out of 11 are homeschooled).
Oh yeah, and just to get my little brag in, Theodore won First Place All Around again at this meet.
Here he is, with 7 medals around his neck (2 – 4th, 1 – 2nd, and 4 – 1st (including 1st Place All Around)). You’d think he’d have the biggest smile on his face! You know why he doesn’t? He didn’t get a TROPHY, only medals. For some reason, at this meet the trophies were only given to teams, not individuals. Their team got one, but to him that doesn’t count. He’s really mad about it and wants us to go to the trophy store and buy him one.
He asked me tonight if I thought he would go to the Olympics someday. I said that was pretty far in the future and perhaps we should just focus on finishing up Level 4 first.
(Updated 1/6/08 to fix/add photos)
Men are from Mars
As the 6th girl in a family of 6 girls, sometimes I marvel at the things boys do.
We went to Great Wolf Lodge this week for a couple of days with our homeschool group. This is how boys say goodbye to each other:
You might think this is a novelty, or something they just chose to do this once. But no. The pile of boys is a regular occurrence with this crew. It seems weird to me — or is it just that I am from Venus?
Brag Brag Brag
Remember when I posted this about Theodore making the boys’ gymnastics team? Well, he had his first competitive meet this weekend, and for his level and age group, he won
FIRST PLACE ALL AROUND!!
I couldn’t be more proud of him.
