This Kid Rocks!

We joined the local homeschool "Explorers" group for an afternoon of rock wall climbing at the YMCA today. Child #3 proved that he is his father's son by climbing to the very top of the 35ft wall three times! That was more than any other kid under the age of ten in the group. We are so proud! Child #4 also tried, but got a little scared at 8ft and came down. He stopped crying after we pointed out that the belay line was just like grandad's swing. But we are proud of him for trying to climb the wall. Child #5 is too small for the safety harness, so she had to be content with climbing free style along the practice wall. She was not content and wanted to go higher.

A hole is to dig! This is the latest version of the hole in our garden. Child #2 lent a helping hand and made the hole into a full blown pit. She had plans to put a roof on the top to make a burrow for my little rodent children, but the risk of collapse is too high. It's a good thing we didn't really want a garden this spring anyway.

I had an appointment with my midwife yesterday and the baby is now in the head-down position and is ready for delivery in 8 weeks! I'm of course feeling like 8 weeks is too long to suffer with discomfort, but too short until I have another little bundle to care for...

DH had his promotion test this afternoon for Taekwondo (the boys tested last week) and he did really well. This was a high pressure test now that he is instructor level and representing the school. Plus, he was tested by high-ranking Master's while under the influence of a nasty cold. But luckily the pen movements he thought were "retest" marks ended up being smiling faces drawn by the Master on his test paper.

Their Exciting Weekend

My DH, bless his heart, took the boys and Child #2 down to Twin Firs for the weekend, leaving me with Child #5 and My Pathetic Doberman. I had a lovely relaxing weekend watching chick flicks with Child #1 and Bob the Builder with #5. But the other half of our family worked and worked some more!

Child #4, aka The Professor, practiced obnoxious gyrations of his tongue while watching himself in the mirror, much to the annoyance of his older sister. Their father came to both their rescues with an explanation that although it looks like he is making nasty weird faces in the mirror, he is actually developing the neurons in his brain and that he is at the edge of a developmental breakthrough with language... or something to that effect. And sure enough, the kid has been talking non-stop lately and using words that no four year old should use. And I'm not talking potty language here either.



Child #3 is missing something... can anyone guess? Look closely at his bike... No training wheels! He worked so hard all weekend learning how to ride a bike all by himself. He is getting so tall that we are going to have to get him a bigger bike.






DH, aka Hexus (the villain from Fern Gully that clear cuts the rainforest), spent his weekend clear cutting blackberries (among other chores). His dad came up with the new nickname. But honestly, does clear cutting invasive species to make room for native species (or pasture land for beef cattle so we won't be poisoned by downed animals in the meat industry) really compare to the plot of Fern Gully?


But where is the picture of Child #2? Well, she took all the pictures. And she would probably kill me if I posted a picture of her without her permission anyway. But a lack of pictures of her doesn't mean she is valued any less.

Holey Moley!

Child #3 dug a hole in our garden, all by himself. I was warned that it was a deep hole and I needed to keep an eye on the kids while they were playing around it. But honestly, how deep can a 5 1/2 year old dig with a five foot shovel? Until I saw a little blond head disappear down the hole, much like Alice in Wonderland, and her big brother running toward the house in a mad panic. Yes, Child #5 was stuck in the hole and needed rescuing.

Book Review: Crunchy Cons

I found, by accident, a book called: Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party) by Rod Dreher. Now how on Earth could anyone resist a title like that??? I immediately checked to see how much it cost at Amazon and then checked the online library catalog (have I mentioned how much I love the library?)...and they had it! I got it that very day! And now I am reading, reading, reading. I wish I could read and knit at the same time. Or at least answer all of Child #3's questions without losing my spot in the book... but I digress.

The bottom line is, I am so happy to find that we are not the only people in this country that vote right and live left-like. In the very first paragraph, the author shares that when he told his editor he was heading out to the organic food co-op she responded, "Ewww, that's so lefty." I get the same thing from some of my conservative friends, especially since we live in such a liberal area. I can't even take DH to the Farmer's Market without him figuratively lunging at the throats of the people there. In fact, the local town is so liberal we can't even drive through downtown without hollering "Water board 'em!" out the window at idiot protesters. But we love organic, nutrient-rich food. We also like conserving and preserving the environment! Right now, we are restoring some acreage at Twin Firs with native trees and vegetation (and using it as part of our homeschooling- hey, I'm a hip homeschooling mama).

Chapter 2 is about consumerism... He asks, "How can you be a traditional-values conservative in a society whose very economic structure is designed to separate you, your kids, and your community from those values, and each other?" He touches on how conservatives love to lecture liberal on indulging the sexual appetite, but rarely consider another of God's commandments: thou shalt not covet. Also in this chapter, he talks about television. A teacher of media theory shares his story of raising his six kids without television and how his students acted like he was doing something illegal. But even without television in his home, he still knew what was happening on TV, and he didn't waste four hours per day finding out. We don't have TV either, yet Children #1 and #2 alway knew what was happening on the popular shows, even though we didn't have TV. We do watch the shows we like, on DVD from the library, and that is enough for us. No commercials, no endless noise (unless we are watching Sponge Bob). We spend our evenings hanging out on the couch with the kids or working on the computer instead of wasting our lives. The author then says, "...the computer is TV for intellectual snobs: a time-waster for eggheads who would never throw away an evening watching cable, but who tell themselves the evening was well spent jumping around blog comment boxes..." Oh. Well. I see. I'm outta here... I have some more reading to do...

Someone's been sleeping in MY bed...

And she's still there! Little Miss Goldilocks climbed into her brother's bunk bed to take a nap yesterday. One would think that falling out of this same bed (twice) would deter her from climbing to such dangerous heights. No such luck.



I've started another new homeschooling program now that Kindergarten Language Arts has been so successful with Child #4 (and they are still getting bored for the rest of the day). This program/curriculum is called Peak With Books. It is very similar to Five in a Row (FIAR), but I know a lot of people using FIAR and I wanted to try something different instead of jumping on the bandwagon. I've never been one to follow the crowd. We read a children's book for five days straight and use it as the jumping off spot for a weeks worth of theme-based activities. For example, we will be reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom next week, starting Monday. The plot is simply the alphabet running to the top of a coconut tree until it falls over. We will be listening to music from Sing A-Z and doing alphabet based finger plays. We will be reading alphabet poetry by Shel Silverstein on Tuesday while taking a closer look at Chicka Chicka Boom Boom: an in-depth analysis of the author's writing style and a closer look at... yeah right, this is preschool we are talking about! Seriously, I will ask Child #4 why he thinks the tree fell over (the answer would be the letters made it heavy). Wednesday we will make up hand movements or a melody to go with the repeating "Chicka chicka boom boom, will there be enough room?" line in the story. And we will make our own coconut tree poster with little letters running up the trunk (it is time to use up my foam letter stickers anyway). Both Wednesday and Thursday will also have "Story Time Extensions" which is a fancy-pants way of saying we will read other books with an alphabet theme. Thursday the kids will write their own version of the book by having the letters go somewhere besides the top of a coconut tree. And Friday will be fun day, where we share (or is it steamroll?) Daddy with what we did this week! The kids will make Alphabet Soup for dinner and Coconut macaroons for dessert! All this planning took about an hour of my thinking time (while I did other things like folding laundry) and every single "story time extension" book and CD and DVD are all at the library on hold for me! Oh, I love that the library's catalog is online.

The best part of this program is that everyone from Child #3 to Child #5, a three-and-a-half year age span, will enjoy participating. I will no longer trek upstairs to see that Child #5 has filled the cup in the bathroom with expensive, all natural toothpaste. Or go downstairs to find that Child #4 has cut up Child #2's latest dragon drawing. Everyone will be together, under control, and not crying!

Tomato Staked!

Child #4 is now officially tomato staked! This is a discipline method that I have read about on message boards that got my interest... Basically, you keep your child with you at all times. The parent is the stake, the child is the growing tomato plant. To keep your tomato plant from falling over and producing rotten fruit, you stake it. My 4th little plant has been falling over lately, so I got out the twist ties and got to work! He will be released eventually. When I can trust him. Like the day he gets married and he is no longer my problem. Here is a list of his offenses in the past 48 hours:

• stealing cookies after I said no more
• lying about stealing those cookies
• removing his cars from their time-out spot without asking, which involved climging to the top of the entertainment center
  
• taking a sharp, dangerous empty can of peaches and sneaking downstairs to examine exactly how sharp the edges of a can can be-after I told him not to touch
• leaving two rolls of toilet paper in the bathtub (one per day) and soaking them so I had to throw them out
• running the water in the bathroom for so long I got suspicious
  
• misbehaving in Taekwondo
• misbehaving at the dentist
• hitting his sister for looking at his cars
• using potty talk, many times

Since he has been staked (for the last two hours), he has eaten his entire lunch without forgetting what he was doing and wandering off, he helped me clean out the entire refrigerator, and kissed the baby sister. I think he likes being staked.

Wisdom from a 5 year old

"Carrots are good for your eyes, but not if you put them in your eyes. They're only good for your eyes if you put them in your mouth."