Homeschool High School Blog Carnival for May

 

Do you ever have those days when you feel like you got exactly three-quarters of nothing done all day?

That would be me today.  Blame it on a fussy baby (who is feeling better as the day goes on) and lifting a too-heavy pot of chicken stock too early. (It sure didn't seem like it would weigh as much as the baby! But I guess chicken stock in a pot distributes differently than "baby" does.)

Anyway, I was supposed to host today's Homeschool High School Carnival, but with all the new baby-ness around here, I shot off a plea for help and Theresa at Lapaz Farm graciously stepped in to host in my place.  

The theme this month is A Day in the Life of a Homeschooled Teen.  I'm planning on checking it out... as soon as life cooperates!

Seven Quick Takes Recovery Edition

 


One
I've had two quick takes written for the past two weeks, and that's been about the extent of my ability to think coherently. Otherwise I've been nursing, trying to get everybody (including me and my husband) fed, and reading books on my Kindle I'm never going to remember because I'm too tired.  Oh, and watching Food Network.  Will I ever be able to put together a brunch like Bobby Flay? Probably not. Especially since my older kids have started deducting points for plating.  But maybe I'd get more help with dinner prep if I started by shouting, "Allez cuisine!"?

Two
So this C-section recovery.  Definitely better than the last one, but not without its bumps.  Thankfully, the incision closed this time, and I only had to deal with a surface skin infection caused by candida (yeast)... and um, a cold given to me by the boys, who all came down with it, too. (Actually, in reviewing my old blog this all seems eerily similar to Chipmunk's birth, who incidentally also looks a heck of a lot like Blue in baby pictures. {Scroll down to see the baby. Otherwise you're going to wonder why I linked you to a bunch of pictures of autumn trees.}  And on the other hand, we didn't just have a giant tree come down and nobody is working on our roof. And the twins are a lot older. But still, oddly enough, throwing mud.)   Sure, I'd like to be dealing with nothing (including, ahem, no mud), but to be honest, it really isn't much.  We took a few precautions this time: I asked for staples, not sutures, and my doctor made the incision in a different place. Apparently all four of my past C-sections were done one on top of the other, which made for quite a bit of scar tissue.  When my brain is working a little better (i.e., when I have readjusted to living on very little sleep), I'd like to write a post about preparing for and recovering from C-sections.  At this point, I know of people who have had as many C-sections as I have (5) but I don't personally know anyone who has had this many.  Not that I have the preparing-and-recovery thing all figured out, but the list of common recovery "issues" is pretty familiar at this point.

Three

And I also want to thank everyone who prayed for us and left such nice comments here on the blog and on facebook.  Childbirth tends to stir up a lot of old fears. To be honest, I think having my C-section at noon on Good Friday turned out to be a great source of strength.  It's pretty easy in that situation to just focus on the fact that you feel like you can't breathe because the spinal has paralyzed you up to the bottom of your lungs and also that it really seems like someone has been pressing down on you with their full weight for about an hour and that oxygen mask and the curtain and the blanket they forgot about and have put half over your face are all making you hideously claustrophobic.  But knowing that it was Good Friday made it easier to deal with because that suffering (and really, the actual C-section is not like being in labor... the real suffering from the C-section comes during the recovery, which is sort of the exact opposite of labor)... could be united with a cause, the cause of the Church.  And of course, I know that the Church's cause is always there, not just on Good Friday, but some of us need to be hit on the head with a hammer in order to remember anything.  So, you know, Good Friday! As a cradle Catholic, even one who didn't get much catechesis, Good Friday is still pretty hard to forget.

I mean, even if I was halfway through my gluten-free hospital "pot roast" before it occurred to me that I was eating meat. 

Four

Pause for a cute baby picture.

 
He's 4 weeks old today yesterday.  

Five

Since I've been trawling my old blog again to remind myself of what life is like with very small people, I thought I would also try to scare up my first Seven Quick Takes posts, like Jen did today.  My first Quick Takes post was mainly about pancakes and glitter glue.  In my second Quick Takes post, I whine about not being able to serve my kids cold cereal and chicken nuggets anymore.  I had a good chuckle about that one, especially considering that before this baby was born, I stocked up on convenience items, like... bread. (Ok, so I did buy cereal, too, but it was Erewhon gluten-free puffed rice.)  My gluten-free self feels like giving my younger non-gluten-free self a smack upside the head.  But there's also a cute story about "smudge" so it's not all whining.

Six

The Easter I missed. (This picture makes me smile.  It's also about as good as it got.)

Seven

And a garden update. It figures that the year we decide to join a CSA is also the year when we are inundated with spring greens.  So now we are really inundated with spring greens, since that's mostly what we're getting in our CSA box.  Why did we sign up for a CSA and plant a garden, you may be wondering. Because with a new baby, we weren't sure how much garden we could do.  Turns out that with this slow, cold, wet spring, we managed to get in a decent spring garden anyway... although whether the broccoli and cabbage survive the onslaught of cabbage white caterpillars is anybody's guess. 

 The little baby Savoy cabbages that I overwintered as an experiment turned out pretty well, on the other hand.  We got about a diaper box full, which I am guessing is close to a bushel? The only problem is that they don't store like full size cabbages.  I had Andy and my mom stick them in the garage fridge, and now they have gone from looking like big green roses to looking like wilty green... cabbage leaves.  I think we should have stored them in produce bags or ziplocs with paper towels. Believe it or not, Andy did not have to time to make sauerkraut right then and I wasn't feeling up to it.

See Jen for a lot more quick takes!
 



 

Announcing...

John Martin Boord, 7 lbs 12 oz, born at 12:39 PM on March 29.

(Of course, this is the only post I'll make with his real name.  From this point forth I'll call him "Blue".  Because that's what Leo wanted to name him.  He was pretty emphatic about it, too.)

(Oh, and we're calling him "John Martin" not just John.)

(Or, well, "Blue".  Maybe he'll grow up to play guitar?)

But here he is with the hat off... showing off all his hair!

And in disguise as a garden gnome...

 (On the way home from the hospital.)

One week old now!

 I'm still in that 2 week C-section recovery period, but doing all right.  There are always a few hurdles to jump (or maybe "jump" is not the best word I could use considering that I have only recently progressed to being able to roll off the couch without a helping hand), but the first week is always the most difficult.  Fortunately my mom has been here since I came home from the hospital, and it always amazes me how she seems to be able to keep up with the laundry. I am trying to get her to move in.  We have enough room for a mother-in-law house out back. 

Mount TBR Reading Challenge Progress

 

It's Holy Thursday, and we have spent the day trying to wrap up some loose ends before the baby is born tomorrow.  (It always seems surreal to me when I say things like that.)  Of course, being a nerd, one of my loose ends has to do with keeping track of the books I've been reading, and stuffing my Kindle with titles to bring to the hospital.  (I may or may not read them, of course, but I feel better having a lot of books with me than leaving them at home because I know I will be swimming in painkillers and unable to do more than watch Food Network for endless hours.  Because that is what I do in the hospital.  Anyway, having the books with me feels like optimism, and possibly a security blanket.)

Recently there was a March checkpoint posted on the Mount TBR Reading Challenge at My Reader's Block, and since we're about to run out of March, I thought I should post my stats.

I've read four (yes, a whole four) books from the TBR pile with which I began the year.  Good thing I was a weenie to begin with and only signed up for the Pike's Peak level of 12 books from my stack. That means I'm actually a third of the way to my goal.  I did begin the year with good intentions but was waylaid somewhere in February by the siren song of new books.

Here's the list of books I've read this year from my TBR stack:

The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times Fieldwork: A Novel
  Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
  The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850

 By far my favorite was Endurance, but I did not feel like I wasted my time reading any of these titles.  (You can read what I thought about these books here and here.)  

Bev also wanted to know which book had been on our TBR pile the longest.  I think that distinction goes to The Resilient Gardener.  It took me a few runs over the course of an entire year to finally make it through the book, but I was glad I did.  Lots of good information for serious gardeners.  

 

Preparing for Baby and Finishing a School Year

Finishing This School Year

Obviously I have no idea how April will turn out, but I've tried to make a few preparations.  A couple of babies ago I wrote a pair of posts about preparing for a new baby by planning to unschool and setting up a learning-conducive environment.   (Also, I found this post from when Leo was born.  Good grief, my kids have grown!  But back to the point.)  In retrospect, those posts sound pretty confident, but I'm not sure all of my preparations worked out exactly as planned.  Although to be fair, I'm not sure what preparations would have worked out "exactly as planned" upon bringing a newborn into a house with a 4 year old and 22 month old twins -- not to mention an 8 and a 10 year old!  

The recovery from that C-section went pretty well.  I know this because I was trying to start "school" with everyone when Chipmunk was about a month old.  (My current response to that post, of course, is, What were you, insane??? But I know why I was trying to do all that Montessori with the little guys.  It's because little guys left to themselves for a long period of time = even more insanity than trying to start school with a 4 week old.  Especially with the twins. In that post, I think I casually mention that one of the twins -- not yet two -- had covered himself in black grease from the grill, but I have to tell you, I remember that day, and covered in black grease does not begin to describe the mess that boy made of himself or how long it took to clean him up. Or maybe I'm remembering a different day, because I know he got into that grease pit more than once.)   

Anyway, maybe I'm just older and more tired or maybe it really is the benefit of experience, but I've stopped trying to make really complicated preparations.  I don't have any Montessori trays out now because the shelves in the kitchen aren't going to be done by the time I go into the hospital, but also because I know that nobody will be able to keep up with them and they'll end up scattered to the nine winds.  My two eldest children are old enough now that they'll just keep going with what they were doing on their own (and April is Camp NaNoWriMo anyway), and the middle set of boys have grown enough that they can often keep themselves occupied with Lego and audio books.  But considering that we are still in the midst of a school year -- and one that has been somewhat mediocre, although not terrible -- I don't really want to declare this year done and over now, at the end of March.  Which, you know, is a possibility, at least for the younger kids. 

So I am making a few preparations, mostly toward keeping the environment learning-oriented.  This time that has taken the form of:

• Lego Education: Simple Machines

The prices for Lego education kits are a lot higher than I was expecting! But I know the boys will get a lot of use out of them, so we decided to invest.  This kit will not go upstairs, however.  It will be part of "school", and as such will sit on one of those unfinished kitchen shelves to be worked on at the kitchen table.  The thing here is that my mom is coming to help for a couple of weeks (thank goodness!).  As an engineer, she is not adverse to helping boys with Legos, so I'm taking advantage of her.  (She doesn't know this yet, of course.) 

• A long list of audio books available on Audible.  

Andy took the kids out to shop for Easter clothes and shoes on Saturday (no, you can't have him), so I spent some time searching through Audible's Kid's Classics subcategory and making up a list of titles aimed at George and the twins.  Some of them are a little more complicated than others (like Kidnapped) making them more appropriate for George, whom I have a hard time keeping supplied with audio.  This way I don't have to spend time searching... and I can just hand the list off to somebody else and they can purchase and download the book(s) for me.

• Some new art supplies for the youngest ones

We need new playdough, crayons, and do-a-dot markers.  That might keep some people busy for about five minutes.

• Book baskets

I need to get the big kids to help me put out our Easter and spring picture books, and then I need to see about making book bins for each of the three boys who are on the verge of reading.  What I've noticed is that they've come to rely so much on audio books that they don't pick up physical books all that often.  I think that independent practice with books freely chosen is really key in learning how to read.  (At least it seemed so for my older kids.)  So, although I'm happy that they like listening to books, I really want to encourage them to put the iPad down occasionally.

Book baskets in progress.  Plus a rubber snake. The Joy of Cooking is not in anybody's basket; it's just on the coffee table.

 

 I've fallen down miserably on the freezer cooking to prepare for baby, and the house may or may not be somewhat in order by the time I go in for my C-section.  But books are a lot more important than food, aren't they?





 

 

Week in Review: Habemus Papam and Beyond

So here's another "weekly" review which really covers two weeks.  Two "we're wrapping things up because life has given us a deadline" sort of weeks.  My C-section is officially scheduled for Good Friday at noon.  (I know.)  However, I had contractions that woke me up the other night and kept me up for an hour or so with their regularity... and also I think this breech baby was trying to put his feet through the bottom of my stomach.  Anyway, we're officially "off" now for Holy Week and waiting on baby... all except for the teenagers, who will have to wrap up some Latin and some Algebra next week.    

Habemus Papam!

Although we aren't doing a papal lapbook or notebook or doing much written work of any kind as we spend these last few weeks getting the house cleaned and everything prepared for the baby, we did watch the beginning of the Conclave and we were watching the Wednesday Pope Francis was elected.  I had popped in on the EWTN live cam around lunch time to make sure everything was working, and Chipmunk (pictured above) came and sat next to me while I finished my lunch and watched the camera for a good half an hour while nothing was even happening.  Then, as time for voting and smoke came closer, he ran upstairs to play with his brothers and Gareth brought Leo downstairs because Leo had had one of those huge explosive diapers that happens every once in a great while and necessitates an entire change of clothes.

So I whisked Leo away into the bedroom to get him cleaned up, and Gareth sat down at the kitchen table with the laptop and the EWTN cam with commentary in Italian, and about a minute later he said, "There's smoke! I think it's white!"

At that point I had a thoroughly naked and wiggly toddler on my hands, but I stopped and said, "No, really???"

Because did anybody expect white smoke that fast? 

Anyway, Leo escaped and I ran out to see for myself, and sure enough, my teenage son was not colorblind, and the smoke was white.  Poor Chipmunk, who had been watching nothing (in Italian) for so long had missed it! We called him and the rest of the boys and Katydid and turned on EWTN... and waited and waited... and waited...

(It looked a little like this:)

 Blurriness and all.  (And no, don't ask me what George is doing over by the piano.  I think he was just too excited to sit down.)

Chipmunk preferred to keep watching the proceedings on the computer, but we had to ask him to mute the Italian commentary because with the Italian and the English going simultaneously it just sounded like a big vaguely Romance-ish jumble.  

Katydid (who took these photos with my phone) also took videos of the television in which one can hear the Eng-Italian-ish commentary along with our own conversations about what would be a good name for the Pope, etc.  About fifteen minutes before the Pope appeared on the balcony, we were discussing whether or not there had ever been a Pope Francis.  And then there was! Katydid said it must have been the Holy Spirit.

When Andy came home, he told us that he had watched the smoke at an Ethiopian restaurant where they kept threatening to change the channel for soccer, and then he'd listened to the rest on the radio while driving back to work.

Over the course of the week I tried to keep up with the information coming out about our new Pope so I could share it with the kids.  We've done a lot of discussing at the dinner table.  Gareth and Katydid had fencing on the night that EWTN aired the Installation Mass, so I was really the only one who watched most of it.  But we talked about his homily later.

Hermit Crabs

The hermit crabs have been trading shells at night.  They make a tremendous racket, and one of them lost his shell and didn't gain a new one and died.  The boys buried him in the backyard and conducted a funeral.  Their little statue of St. Therese then migrated from their room to a place by the hermit crabs' tank, along with a number of Sharpie decorated wooden crosses, the crucifix from the Mass kit, and a number of holy cards. 

Since then the boys have been keeping track of which shells are in use and which aren't.  I've seen a few Lego hermit crabs and beach scenes around the house, and some hermit crab drawings, too.   


A Little Shameless Bragging

Last year from April to October, Katydid participated in the American Birding Association's Young Birder of the Year Contest.  (David Sibley was one of the judges.  If you know birds, you know what this means.)  This week they announced the results! Katydid received third place in the Writing category for the 10-13 age range.   Now she's psyched up for the beginning of the next contest in a few weeks, when she'll compete in the 14-18 year old age range.  

And the Routine...

I gave up on trying to focus on schoolwork for the past two weeks.  In addition to all the Papal events -- which were much more important anyway -- we finally got some nice spring-like weather, and I suddenly realized how close the baby's birth is getting.  Therefore, everyone was assigned an extra chore every day in addition to their regular chores.  Mostly this is so the upstairs playroom can be cleaned in anticipation of the boys sleeping up there when my mom comes to help and needs to sleep in their room. All the Legos are up there, and they're generally scattered all over the floor.


So instead we tucked in the schoolwork where it would fit.  This is basically what the boys worked on:

• Handwriting for the twins and Chipmunk, almost every day.  Handwriting is a priority for them because they find it difficult and being unable to write is slowing them down in other areas, like math.  (Well, not so much Chipmunk, but he's decided he wants to write, too, which is a good thing.)
• Huck finished his Faith and Freedom reader.  Dennis is beginning to apply his phonics knowledge to books he looks at independently and words he sees in his environment.  Last night he sat down and read off months of the year from some calendars I was looking at.  I'm holding my breath that reading is just going to "click" soon for him, the way it did for Gareth and Katydid.
• Easy Read and Saxon 5/4 for George.  Because we started 5/4 in October and we have sometimes gone slowly, George is currently on Lesson 49.  He got hung up a bit this week on multiplication problems like 45 x 6 that require carrying, but with a little extra practice I think he's got it figured out.  We're just going to keep plugging at the reading and the math. 
• I handed off the First Communion Catechism to Andy to do with George and the twins at night before bedtime reading.  That way they'll be able to keep their preparation going while I'm in the hospital and recovering.  First Confession is April 5, and First Communion is May 3.
• Read-alouds have kept up, but alas, not our morning time (beyond prayers anyway).  Still reading Swallowdale to George and the twins and Beatrix Potter to Chipmunk.  I downloaded another Redwall book to the iPad, and the boys have been listening to it and building their own version of Redwall Abbey out of Legos. 

High School
  The teenagers had an "exam" week.  (An explanation of our "exams" with examples is included in this post about our general approach to high school.)  I just wrote out the questions by hand.  Gareth chose to write about good business practices, the Interregnum period and the election of the new Pope, and The Scarlet Pimpernel (a comparison of the novel to the miniseries we watched.) Katydid wrote a description of what life was like for French settlers in Quebec in the 1600's (as presented in Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather), the Interregnum period and the election of the new Pope, and a list and description of planets and major features of the solar system (which she just finished reading about in A Friendly Guide to the Universe.)

And I have an Algebra quiz to grade for both of them.

So that's about it for our "Winter Term", such as it has been.  I have some plans to get us through to the end of the year... and if I have a chance I'd like to write some of them down so I don't forget I had them... but I think that probably depends on a little one who likes to wake me up in the middle of the night.


 

Reading Review: mid March

My reading has slowed down since mid-February.  Since my last review, I've finished four books, but I have a few others in progress.


Yes, Chef: A Memoir
An easy read from when I was still getting over my bronchitis.  Marcus Samuelsson makes frequent appearances on Chopped, the Food Network show we are apparently addicted to.  Born in Ethiopia and adopted by a Swedish family, Samuelsson tells the story of his life in a forthright and honest way, not glossing over mistakes he's made too much.  He also had a refreshingly happy childhood and maintained a good relationship with his parents and sisters as adults. He talks about race in the kitchens of high-end restaurants from a different perspective: an Ethiopian born-Swede-turned-American citizen, and while he is not ignorant of our problems, he has some good things to say about the US.
 
Swallows and Amazons  
This book falls under the category "Books Everybody Has Read But Me."  I don't know how I missed this book with my older kids, but I'm happy to have read it aloud (finally) to my younger boys.  In The Wilder Life: My Adventures of the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, she says that one of the things that made her love the Little House books so much as a girl and as an adult was their "thinginess": the descriptions of all the little "things" they used, the small things of everyday life.  What I liked best about Swallows and Amazons was its "thinginess" -- the descriptions of the sailboats and sailing with all their wonderful, strange words like thwart; the lists of what the children packed in their knapsacks to eat; the way Mate Susan made her fires; the cormorants on Cormorant Island.  My boys loved living vicariously through children who were actually allowed to live on their own, if only for a time, but I think I enjoyed the book just as much as they did. (And if you have any suggestions for other "thingy" books written for adults, let me know, because mostly I find them in children's literature.)  We're on to the second book in the series, Swallowdale, now.

  God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church 

Andy and I both read God's Choice after Pope Benedict retired.  It definitely illuminated the period of the interregnum, conclave, and the election of Pope Francis for me... and also made me wish I had read it much earlier, while Pope Benedict was still Pope.  I picked up Witness to Hope, George Weigel's biography of Pope John Paul II, at the same time, but it's so intimidatingly large that I keep eyeing it on the shelf and not starting it.


  Clean Cuisine: An 8-Week Anti-Inflammatory Nutrition Program that Will Change the Way You Age, Look & Feel

One of my reading goals for this year was not to read so many diet and health related books, but this one appeared on my radar when I was looking around for a few more pieces to the dietary puzzle after a period of steroids and antibiotics set me back a bit.  The authors, a husband and wife team who have been managing her MS without symptoms through diet for years, advocate a plant-based, "real/whole foods" diet with very limited dairy and restricted animal protein (not vegetarian or vegan), but lots of seafood and Omega-3 oils.  What I found refreshing, though, was their emphasis on trying to add foods (lots of fruits and vegetables) to a diet rather handing out a long list of foods to avoid.  I've been wondering lately if part of the reason people often feel better when they give up grains and start to eat paleo is because they often end up eating a lot more vegetables to take the place of those grains.  Anyway, although I'm not as saturated-fat and animal protein phobic as the authors, I do think that this book is worth a read if you're dealing with any autoimmune condition such as asthma, allergies, celiac disease (you'll need to eliminate the gluteny suggestions, though), arthritis, etc.  And the recipes in the back are really good.  

Books in Progress:

Consoling the Heart of Jesus, by Fr. Michael Gaitley
The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family, by Jim Minick
In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden