Category — Heads or Tails Tuesday

My mother and step-father separated my first year of college. It was a joyful occasion in many ways, life with him had not been good. In an attempt to balance the budget we converted our upstairs to an apartment and rented it out.

The first tenant was a daughter of one of my mother’s coworkers, she and her adorable little boy fit right in. When she occasionally needed help getting him to daycare or someone to watch him we were always more than willing.

As he grew and became more comfortable with my mother driving him to daycare he started interacting with her and the world around them. He loved for the car to go go go, and was always sad when they had to stop. So my mother explained traffic lights to him, how they had to stop on red; but could go on green. Pretty soon he had it down, he would wait patiently at the red light for the second it turned green and then yell, “Go car go!”

I haven’t seen them in years, and we are miles and lifetimes away from those moments, but the sound of his little voice has followed me through the years and each stop light brings a whisper of rememberance, go car go.

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The weather here as finally started to turn, nights are in the high 40’s low 50’s and days are in the 60’s and 70’s a welcome change from the brutal heat and humidity that we’ve had. I keep hoping that this change in weather will cause other changes as well. Like this perhaps…

…or like this maybe…

… heck, I’m not picky I’d even take some yellow ones, even though they were my least favorite as a kid.

Unfortunately, it has not happened yet, my trees are still looking like this…

…quite green and healthy. I really am looking forward to a prettier fall now that I live near fewer pines, any one know how to cause it to happen more quickly?

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I used to do all my grocery shopping on Wednesday afternoons after my Mother finished her half day at work and was available to watch my daughter. From the moment she could walk (11 months) it was all we could do to keep her off the stairs as I carried the bags in, so instead of opening the baby gate I passed the bags over the gate to Mom.

Unfortunately I could carry the bags up faster than she could transport them to the kitchen, so we had a little helper who would unpack them in the livingroom for us. Eventually we discovered that what she like best was to stack and build so I started bring the bags with the catfood cans up first. This was usually a pretty good way to keep her focused and out of the rest of the groceries, usually.

The following series of photos is her at just 17 months. She got to 14 cans here, her record was 18.

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Okay I confess this is photographs, not photograph, but I just couldn’t resist sharing Little Miss Totally Unafraid with you all.

Meet Lola, she’s a red tailed boa constrictor…

I really didn’t know how she would react to the idea of patting a snake, especially one so big. Miss Muffin didn’t seem to think there was anything unusual about the idea and squatted right down to get a good feel. This is Miss Muffin meeting Lola for the first time, I hope she doesn’t want to bring her home…

Other kids got bored, but not mine. We stayed right there until the music for the penguin show started up…

…and then magically Lola, the boa constrictor was forgotten. Until she got to brag to Grandma that is.

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10 Books I Love

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My first thought for this one was one of these…

Then I got to thinking about one of the photos I shared for “yellow” and knew I had a “Rhymes With Way” as well – CLAY!

We used to live in Georgia, land of red clay. We were plagued with red dust everywhere during our subdivision’s construction and I ruined more new sneakers staining them with the stuff than I care to count.

Mix this rock hard stuff with some water and you have yourself a genuine red mudslide. Add in a 3 year old and you get this…

I would have cried if she wasn’t so dang cute. I never did get all of the clay out of that precious tshirt, heck, it was all I could do to get it all off the kid.

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During the last school year, I was faced with issue of what to do with my daughter and her education. She had been passed over for admittance into the “gifted program” for reasons that seemed to change with every inquiry, and she was miserable. I had slowly moved from lunch once a month, where we were at by the end of kindergarten, to lunch once a week, to lunch three days a week, as well as being room mom, Monday and Friday fluency, and whatever else I could think of to relieve her stress.

I was so willing to do all of this because the more time I spent in the classroom the more I realized that something was just not right. The teacher honestly tried every trick in the book to corral this motley group; but they were simply too diverse in abilities and behaviors to ever really work well together. How does one teach to children with no reading skills at all, children with average reading skills, and children who read way beyond grade level? How does one person teach children who have learned to behave in a classroom setting and are intrinsically motivated to so, children who are learning to behave and can be externally motivated, and children who have no classroom behaviors and are resistant to all efforts to develop them? I can tell you that in the ten months my daughter was in first grade I never found the answers.

What I did find was the answer for us, homeschooling. It was not an easy decision, made more difficult by our summer move (another fascinating decision); but it is a decision I am happy I made. I have been able to tailor a program for my child that allows her to read at or above her current comfort level, and learn math at a pace that is comfortable for her (including actually learning all her addition and subtraction facts). I actually teach science, social studies, and geography on a regular basis, not as an after thought or something that is done only after the state competency tests have gone by. I also allow her to be creative, have fun, and take some control over what she learns and how.

So, here we are traveling through our first year of homeschooling, tackling second grade and beyond with fascination and exuberance, tripping over ourselves and our curriculum along the way. Would I make this decision again if I had to do it over, yes, yes I would.

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