Thursday

     Two little girls crawl into my bed every morning and sometimes a big boy.  This is my alarm clock.   It's so cozy we often push the snooze button for quite a while under all those wooly blankets.  This morning Anneke said she missed going to the art class that we had been going to for about 4 years until this year.  I told her one of the reasons we took a break for this year was that there were more kids able to go now.  If it costs $10/kid and 4 kids go, how much will Mom have to pay for all of the children to have art lessons?  10, 20,30, 40... There you go, pluttification and we're still in bed.  Then we went down and did real, serious math in our curriculum books.  Anneke had 3 pages of having to circle the cone shapes while avoiding the cubes and triangular prisms.   Sometimes you feel like you've accomplished something because 3 whole worksheets have been completed even when the material on the page could have been done by any 2 yr old with decent vision.  Of course not all the math pages are like that but this morning it made me laugh at the false sense of accomplishment.
     One of the gifts that we identified that Isaac has is being great with little kids.  So while I helped Tobin write a few verses for the song we're going to sing with all the cousins at my parents' 50th anniversary dinner next week, Isaac helped Ruby draw letters on a dry-rase card.  He does such a great job of patiently guiding her with things like that.  He will be a "nice guy"  when he grows up and doesn't have a brother pushing his buttons all day long anymore. 
     I had to drop off some things to people in the neighbourhood so the kids spent the next hour making the fastest slide on the couch with cushions, blankets, and sleeping bags.   As I walked down the street I thought about how I could create a worksheet about slope, friction reduction and velocity and challenge the kids to problem solve to find a way to move a 50 pound weight, with the greatest speed down an incline.  It sounds like education when you put it that way.   When I got back they were all still alive and having fun.  I pointed out that they had done an A-1 job of reducing friction to increase speed.  Well done, students of life.
    After lunch we went to a library presentation for homeschoolers on how to use the public library to do research.   We learned some neat tips to avoid Google burnout by using the HPL website databases like Worldbook encyclopedia, Consumer Reports, and Novelist book suggestion lists.  I was glad to learn these things but another more poignant lesson hit me on the way home.  My kids have never really liked public spaces or being put in situations where they have to mix with kids they don't know very well.   I spend a lot of energy worrying about this.  There was another little girl there who seemed so free being her spunky self and I found myself wishing my kids would show their spark in front of other people too.  Later, the mother of this girl came up to me and told me how chilled out and relaxed my kids were and how she wished her daughter would sit and listen in situations like these.   Mothers are a tightly wound bunch.  Here I was worrying about my kids shortcomings and admiring someone else's kid's strengths while that kid's mother was worrying about her kid's shortcomings and admiring my kids' strengths.  AND WE WERE LOOKING AT THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOURS IN BOTH SETS OF KIDS.   Alicia, quit worrying about your babies' perceived faults and nourish their God-given gifts!  They belong in this world for a purpose just the way they are.   The longer I live the more often I see it reinforced that a person's strengths are always also their weaknesses, it just depends on how the person uses this aspect of their character.  My kids are just like other people in this.  Who knew?
     There were lots of other little conversations, questions and answers and aha moments that happened throughout the day which is the same as every other day, but it's impossible to remember them all or write them all down if I did.  For example,  Anneke observed for the first time, that the yellow line on the road separates oncoming traffic.  I clearly remember the moment I learned that when I was a kid too.  You just never know what little things will stick with them for the rest of their lives.