2007 May « Like I Have Time For This?

Archive for May, 2007

More about high school.

God, I hated high school.

My post a couple of days ago got a couple of other homeschoolin’ mamas writing about high school (click here and here to read what others are writing on high school), and it’s got me thinking and reminiscing. My 20-year reunion is coming up this year (no, I’m not going!) so I guess that’s another reason I’ve been thinking about high school. And everything I can remember about it just reaffirms my descision to homeschool all the way through to college.

As far as I’m concerned, one of the greatest gifts I could ever give my children is a Get-Out-Of-High-School-Free-Card. And I intend to.

I went to high school in a wealthy town at a school that had the best of everything in terms of funding, equipment, sports programs, art, music, all that shit, and it still sucked. For one thing, the teachers weren’t all that great. Many of them just didn’t give a shit anymore. Most of them had their own problems and their own agendas. Only a scant few actually seemed to teach for the joy of it.

One of my English teachers spent half the class period flirting with the boys in the room. Constant flirting. She was notorious for it. Apparently, she’d been left at the altar on her wedding day and never really got over it. So she spent her time flaunting the fact that she was the youngest teacher in the Whole School and flirting with the male students. (The cute male students, that is.)

Once she yelled at me for something that was a pure misunderstanding and when I tried to explain the misunderstanding to her, she hollered at me some more and then pulled one of those Are You Having Problems At Home things on me. (Yes, I was having problems at home. But that didn’t have anything to do with the current misunderstanding between her and me. And she certainly had no way of solving my particular problems at home.)

I wish I could accurately describe to you how incredibly frustrating it was to have this ridiculous woman pulling her little ABC-After-School-Special trump card on me for what was such a miniscule misunderstanding. After 3 years of watching this woman flirt with the wealthy teenagers in the classroom, and watching her fumble her way through basic literature I’d already read over the summer, I’d had enough.

So, to get back at her, I went home and told my mother the whole story, especially the part about when the teacher asked if there were any problems at home.

And it was like I’d loaded a cannon and lit the fuse.

My mother REALLY did not like school officials nosing around our business. The next day, she went into the school guidance office to meet with that teacher and some guidance counsellor, and well…it apparently wasn’t very pretty. I had set my Problem-At-Home on my teacher and it felt JUST FINE. That teacher spent the following day’s lunch period apologizing to me. No joke. A 45-minute apology. If I hadn’t been so damned hungry, it would have been perfect.

Another teacher I had seemed pretty good, except for his little drug problem, that is. This guy was actually one of our class advisors. One night at a basketball game, I’d forgotten to bring some raffle tickets for some fundraiser or another. One of the other class advisors asked this teacher to drive me to my house to get them. No problem, right? WRONG!

The guy was completely strung out on some drug. He couldn’t talk, could barely walk, was unable to get the key into the ignition without my help, almost got us killed on the very short ride to my house, and then proceeded to drive his car in tight repetitive circles outside the front of my house while I was inside getting the tickets. In the five minutes it took me to get the tickets and get back outside, he’d forgotten all about me (or maybe just gotten bored) and driven off, not to be seen again for the rest of the night.

I managed to get a ride back to the school from one of the guards in the gatehouse at the entrance to our townhome complex, and when I got back into the school and handed my tickets to the advisor, I collapsed into a hysterical crying fit right there on the gym floor. I told the advisor what had happened, and after asking if I was hurt and I said no, she just sort of took my raffle tickets and wandered off to do the raffle without saying anything else.

That following Monday morning, the stoned teacher walked up to me at my locker with a big grin on his face. “Hey, man. Sorry about that ride home the other night,” he said and then, still grinning and without waiting for a reply, he sauntered off down the hall to start teaching his first class of the day.

He’s dead now, by the way. He died of a “heart attack” about ten years ago.

I could go on and on just about teachers, but you get the idea. Not a whole lot of quality learning was happening at my school. And it was (and still is) one of the TOP schools in the region. The vast majority of students there go on to college and the drop out rate is quite small. But even with those stats, it was no day in the park being there every day.

I guess that’s enough for now. Maybe next post, I’ll tell you about the stalker I had during senior year. THAT was really fun.

What about you? How was high school for you? I mean…how was it REALLY?

Mind games of the very young.

Published May 11, 2007 Parenting , Snippets 6 Comments

Here’s a little game the girls used to play while driving in the car:

6-year-old to 3-year-old: “Hey! Look over there out the window! A unicorn! Look!”

3-year-old, craning her neck eagerly: “Where? WHERE?”

6-year-old: “Tut! It just turned invisible! Oh well.”

A few minutes later….

3-year-old to 6-year-old: “Look! I see horses!”

6-year-old: “Where? WHERE?”

3-year-old: “Tut! They turned in-wis-able! All gone.”

They did this to each other for MONTHS. Eventually it stopped, but I just wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. And now you won’t either.

A day at the beach

Published May 10, 2007 Parenting 7 Comments

Ahhhh…the beach. Or if you’re from where I’m from, you call it the SHORE. As in: we’re goin’ Down the Shore today.

There’s nothing finer than a pre-season, free-parking, not-too-hot-yet day down the shore, especially when it’s the first time your kids are seeing the ocean. My 6-year-old went to the shore once as an infant, but she didn’t really remember it. My 4-year-old had never been to the ocean at all.

Since it was their first time and all, we wanted to make sure we gave them the FULL Goin’-Down-The-Shore Experience, so the first thing we did was stop for Dunkin’ Donuts because that’s what you always do first on your way down the shore. Once we were sufficiently sugared up, we proceeded to find the most congested route that had the most expensive tolls and lots of elaborate road-construction areas to take us to the shore. This provided ample time for the girls to get in as many “Are We There Yet’s” as their little hearts desired.

Eventually we did make it down the shore, though, and the drive was worth every whine:

The sun was out, the surf was up, and the kids were overjoyed. My 4-year-old was a bit reticent at first, but pretty soon she did make it down to the water’s edge to test out various theories of temperature she’s got running through her head at any given moment, and sure enough:

Yep, that’s cold, but it’s also GREAT!

We spent maybe 10 minutes down by the surf, letting the girls romp. Pretty soon, they’d lost all their fear:

Here in the photo above, we see two powerful forces of nature about to collide. Who do you think is gonna win this one?

Yep, you guessed it: the ocean wins. At this point, my 4-year-old made the most important discovery of her little life so far: There are things out there more powerful than her. Believe me, she was NOT happy about it.

Here…go see Mommy.

Drenched and shocked into tears, she staggered back up to me where I gave her one of those hugs you give to your kids when they desperately need a hug, but are so dirty you don’t want to get any of it on you — you know, the distant-arm-reach-while-murmuring “you’re okay” pat on the back.

After that, we got her changed into some dry clothes and then went up to the boardwalk to purchase an incredibly expensive lunch, and my 4-year-old managed to hurt herself by sliding down through the seat gap in a picnic table onto the cement flooring underneath it. I had turned my back for less than a second to take a plate of hotdogs from my husband who was paying (through the teeth) for the food and down she went. Shocked again, and stuck under a picnic table, she sobbed helplessly and cried out: YOU WEREN’T WATCHING ME MOMMY!!! True, at that particular milisecond, I had not been watching, but of course, everyone else on the midway at that moment had seen every shocking detail.

I managed to get her out from underneath the picnic table and sat down with her in my lap only to discover that she’d fallen on someone’s half-eaten, dropped-into-the-dirt-below-the-table, giant piece of lollipop. It had stuck to her back and when I sat her down and hugged her, the filthy lollipop transferred itself from her back to my arm. So there I was, with sticky dirty candy stuck to me, my 4-year-old sobbing in my lap, the clothes I’d just changed her into completely ruined, and I thought to myself: Ah, now this is really being down-the-shore!

We managed to get cleaned up and found a place to sit and eat. And about an hour and four bathroom trips later, we were done eating. We went back down to the beach area and played in the sand for a while:

but the weather was turning colder, so we walked the boardwalk for a while and let my 6-year-old learn valuable lessons about losing money to the game vendors on the midway. We did finally find a game where everyone was a winner and the girls each won an inflatable Nemo. Pretty cool. We also saw this guy feeding seagulls:

Pretty cool.

After all that, it was time to go home. I don’t think we actually did talk about oceans or currents or shells or anything particularly academic, but it was a great day. We’ll be doing that again real soon!

High school cafeterias

Published May 9, 2007 Homeschooling , Stuff I Think About When I Should Be Sleeping 5 Comments

I picked up Empire Falls by Richard Russo at the library last week, and I was struck by this passage today:

When Mr. Meyer asked Tick is she could live with [eating her lunch alone in the empty cafeteria after it closed so that she could make room for art in her class schedule] she wondered, as she so often did, at the strange world adults seemed to inhabit. Did they all suffer from some sort of collective amnesia? You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know that he’d been the kind of fat kid everybody made fun of and that lunch had surely been a torment to him. He’d either gravitated naturally to the leper table or sat by himself at a table designed for sixteen, a target for all the kids over-crowding the cool tables, the tables that were identified as cool by who had a right to sit at them, codes established the first day of school, the rules clear to everyone, no need for color coding. You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know he’d spent all his high school years getting hit in the back of the head with all manner of throwable food, yet here he was worried that Tick was going to miss out on the important “socialization” aspects of a good secondary education. (pp.74-75)

This seems to be a universal high school experience. All of us, at some point, have existed on some level of this particular social spectrum: the high school cafeteria. Was there ever any place more vapid and horrible?

Back when I was in high school, I avoided the lunch room simply by hanging out in the smoking area. I’d dive into the sandwich line, grab a dry, tasteless tuna salad on hard roll and a little carton of milk and then head outside. I’d scarf down the food and then sit and smoke, and if I had no one to talk to, I could pull off that “aloof smoker reading a book” thing and manage not to look too strange. Of course, it took twenty years to kick the cigarette habit, but at least I survived high school, right?

When people who don’t homeschool find out that I do homeschool, there’s always that small off-beat moment of silence where you can practically smell their opinions and preconceived notions about me suddenly CHANGE and they’re clamoring to find some way to RELATE to me, and it’s almost comical. Then they find out I’m actually planning on doing this bizarre educational thing, like, ~~FOREVER~~ all the way through high school, and they really don’t know what to do with me.

Sometimes, while watching them sputter, I wish I could ask them, so where exactly did you sit in the high school cafeteria?

We’re taking the day off and going to the beach today. Oh, I guess we’ll spend some time talking about oceans and fish and shells and currents and dunes and gulls, so it won’t be a complete day off from educational exploits. For lunch, we’ll get some pizza on a boardwalk somewhere. That’s what homeschooling looks like sometimes, and I gotta tell you, it sure beats getting slapped in the head with some asshole’s soggy fish filets during 7th period lunch hour.

Call me crazy if you want.

It lives!

Published May 8, 2007 Country Living 5 Comments

Took some pictures of the cat yesterday. She did something amazing enough to actually warrant photographs — she moved. Here, check it out. In these three shots below, she’s actually chasing something:

Okay, yeah, I know, in this last shot, it looks like she’s stopping for a little bathroom break, but I assure you, that was nothing more than the landing of a pretty cool pounce. So get your mind out of the potty, okay?

Of course, I had to break up the chase a few minutes later because she wasn’t paying attention and kept pouncing closer and closer to the very busy road that runs by our house, and I just didn’t want to deal with a SQUASHED cat.

After all that heavy exercise and excitement, she made her way back up to the porch. See, here she comes:

And settled down for a bit of rest:

Those 5 minutes of exertion really took it out of her. I don’t know how she managed to stay awake long enough to make it up to the porch.

Oh look:

Now she’s not talking to me. Hmph!

One of the lesser known holidays.

Published May 7, 2007 Parenting , Snippets 5 Comments

This morning, my 4-year-old charged into my bedroom shouting: “Mommy! Mommy! Guess what day it is Mommy!”

“What day is it?” I asked.

“It’s UNDERWEAR Day!” she shouted and then did a little happy dance and ran back out of the room to find a pair of underwear.

It’s one of the lesser known holidays, I guess. Sort of like Grandparents Day, or the National Day of Prayer, or National Think About Walruses Day. If Hallmark and Pampers got together on this Underwear Day thing, they’d make a killing.

So, from our house to yours, on this wonderous important holiday, we wish you a very, very Happy Underwear Day.

Yesterday, they brought me flowers.

Published May 6, 2007 Country Living , Parenting , Photos 2 Comments

Another unexpected guest.

Published May 5, 2007 Country Living , Parenting 4 Comments

Well, we had another visitor yesterday:

I checked my field guide, and I’m pretty sure that’s a woodchuck. He came rambling up from the back field and across the yard right as we were finishing up math this morning and trotted on around the side of the house. I grabbed my camera and told the girls to stay put. Then I sneaked out the door and around the corner and managed to snap this shot.

You’ll notice in the shadows at the upper left of the photo, our old cat is half-napping under the bush. Not only is she a wimp, she’s a lazy wimp at that. Nice to know she’s on patrol, isn’t it?

Not that the woodchuck stayed long, mind you.

Less than a minute after I took this picture, my 4-year-old came charging around the house from the back to help me. (Apparently, the words “stay put” are secret code for: follow me as loudly as possible. Who knew?) The woodchuck startled and turned to dash away, and of course body-slammed right into my dozing cat who leapt two feet into the air yowling, and then the two animals scattered, with my 4-year-old giving good-old-fashioned gleeful chase.

I haven’t seen the woodchuck since, but the cat’s back. She’s scarred for life and hiding in the mudroom, but at least my woodchuck problem’s taken care of. FOREVER.

I wish I could capture 4-year-old energy in a jar. It would be clean and pure and more powerful than any other energy source we’ve ever come up with. And it would make every one just feel good. We could cleanse the earth of all impurities and solve our energy crisis all at once. And we’d be laughing so hard that we’d forget what we were all pissed off about all the time, and there would be world peace.

Oh, how I wish.

A good day.

Published May 4, 2007 Homeschooling 6 Comments

That’s what yesterday was. A good day.

We spent a couple hours at the library where my 6-year-old is enrolled in a Homeschoolers Story Hour. There’s a woman at our new library who comes up with all sorts of cool things for the homeschooling community, like the Story Hour in which she finds great living books to read and then does a craft. Everyone just loves her. While my 6-year-old was in her class, my 4-year-old played with all the Neat Stuff in the children’s area: puzzles, computer games, puppets in the incredibly cool puppet theater. And books, of course. Lots of books. She likes to reinvent the Dewey decimal system whenever possible.

While my girls were thus occupied, I picked out books for next week and chatted quite a bit with some other moms in our new homeschool club. Believe it or not, I’m usually Really Shy but by some cruel freak of nature my shyness exhibits itself by making me talk incessantly about strange things to people I’m just meeting and then later on, I remember it and I cringe, and wish I wasn’t such an idiot.

(You don’t believe me? Just click around the archives here for a while and you’ll see what I mean.)

Anyway, the point is, yesterday none of that happened when I was talking to all these new homeschoolin’ mamas in this new group we’ve joined. I just talked to them and it was cool.

After the library, we went and got some lunch. And by some utter miracle I was completely UNABLE to find a McDonalds ANYWHERE so we went to Subway instead and got their healthier fare with only a minimal fuss from the girls. We took our sandwiches to the large local park right across the street from the library and spent two hours playing in the mild spring weather. More of the homeschoolin’ mamas were there, and one of the ladies lent me an extra lawn chair and we sat in a circle and chatted the afternoon away while the kids played.

After that, we drove home exhausted and went inside and read library books while eating cookies. Then the girls played outside some more and then they watched their favorite TV shows. While they were doing that, I sat down and finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I sat and read for an entire HOUR. Undisturbed. Imagine it, people.

After that, the girls played outside some more and then we had dinner and then they played outside some more.

And it was just a damned good day.

After the past few weeks of broken well pumps, bad colds, and wild birthday party stuff, and all that on top of a 2,000 mile move during the hardest winter I’ve seen in ten years, I needed a day like that.

Maybe this East Coast thing is gonna work out after all.

Ask RegularMom!

Published May 3, 2007 Country Living , Homeschooling 3 Comments

Dear RegularMom,

Our homeschool is just about to embark upon an exciting new science project: building an ant farm! We’re on a tight budget and can’t afford any fancy kits, so we’re building our own, and we wanted to ask if you had any recommendations as to what the best food items for them might be? We know that you run a FABULOUS homeschool CHOCK FULL of incredible science experiments, so we felt we just couldn’t begin without getting your insightful opinion.

With many thanks,

The D’s

_____________________

Dear Mrs. D:

Thanks so much for your email. I’m always glad to hear that other homeschool families are simply FILLING their days with intriguing science experiments. The word out there these days would make it seem as if none of us could even SPELL the word ’science’ but you and I both know better, don’t we?

As to your upcoming foray into the world of ant farms, may I say that your question could not be MORE timely? Here at our charming house in the country, we just recently delved into ant farming ourselves, and I must say that we met with wild success, probably all because of what we offered them for food.

Here’s exactly what we fed our busy little buggers:

Now, Mrs. D, don’t be fooled by the packaging, or by the words QUICK KILL FORMULA. Let me tell you, we left these little discs out all over the place and our ants simply THRIVED!

Within days, our meager ant community had outgrown the small confined area of our kitchen we had demarcated for our ant farm project, and they had to spread out to other extended areas of the house, which they did with remarkable speed, agility, and organization. It was a bit startling to see how well they took to the stuff, and how quickly they adapted the little white discs into the infrastructure of the ant farm itself. I believe I saw at least one disc with a tiny sign posted on it that read: “Wed Nite: Queenies Nite!” and “Thurs Nite: Larva eat free!”

This stuff isn’t just food for ants, it’s BRAIN food for ants. I can’t recommend it enough for your successful ant farm project. Run out and buy a couple of boxes today and see if I’m right!

Thanks so much again for your fantabulous email! And do send pictures of your ant farm if you get the chance.

Warmest regards,

RegularMom

PS: Got a question for RegularMom? Send her an email today: regular_mom at yahoo dot com

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Like I Have Time For This?

Archive for May, 2007

More about high school.

Mind games of the very young.

A day at the beach

High school cafeterias

It lives!

One of the lesser known holidays.

Yesterday, they brought me flowers.

Another unexpected guest.

A good day.

Ask RegularMom!

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