the sleppys

Dad giggles every time he hears Taylor passionately singing the Cyberchase theme.

Not saying that ALL home schoolers are lazy. We certainly are, however. I don’t like getting up early to run around the house, brushing people’s hair and making breakfast and yelling at people to brush their teeth. I don’t enjoy coming home from work, hungry and sleepy, to check homework and plan the next day’s clothes. I don’t have the energy nor the desire to make my children’s lunches the night before and nestle them in their lunchbags. By the end of the day, when we’re all back home, neither Dad nor I want to be deprogramming our children from the non-academically related information they would be acquiring from ill-mannered children in school. School didn’t suit me as a child, and it certainly doesn’t suit me as a parent.

On the other hand, we aren’t “lazy” home schoolers, really. I spend most of the summer researching our state’s education standards per grade and subject, looking through the materials that are in our private and public libraries, and, finally, drawing a general outline of what our school year will entail based on holidays and seasonal changes. On the weekends, I put in at least three hours’ of deskwork, writing in detail what each child will be learning on what day in the upcoming week. Every home school morning, I wake up, do my exercises, make breakfast, and have everyone ready to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at 8:20am. The children do three to four hours’ work before lunch with a ten to fifteen minute break.

But this past weekend, I just didn’t feel like making lesson plans. I was being lazy. I woke up early on Saturday to go to work. I came back and sewed a Link costume for the boys. The children and I spent time outside, sitting in the breeze, eating carrot bread. Monday morning was suddenly upon our household, and I had no plans for the week!

Thank goodness for comprehensive curriculum workbooks. If we were really lazy, we’d purchase thousands of dollars of prepared curricula for each of our students, but we’re too poor to be lazy. So we’ll keep writing and drawing in our composition books that we bought for a quarter a piece.

This is a list of the subjects and content that the children have mastered or completed during the first four weeks of school.

Math ~
Ty: Place value through 100s, addition and subtraction using two-digit numbers and regrouping.
Kyle: Place value through 10s, addition and subtraction through 15.
Taylor: Counting, one-to-one coordination

English ~
Boys: Narration and copywork of fables, poems, folk tales
Taylor: Beginning letter sounds,

Health ~
Boys: Nutrition, food pyramid, creating square meals; Safety, personal choices; Hygiene, hand washing, dental

Art ~
All: Horizontal, vertical, diagonal lines; Straight, curved lines; Positive, negative space; Working with primary colors

Phys. Ed. ~
All: Ballet, five positions of arms and legs; Workout DVDs

German ~
Ty: Copywork lyrics
Kyle: Narration lyrics
All: Singing children’s songs

Penmanship ~
Ty: Lowercase letter refinement, preparation for cursive
Kyle: Capital letter refinement

Music ~
Ty: Technical drills on piano; C, F, G, D major chord studies
Kyle: Technical drills on piano; Middle C position and G Major pieces
All: Scale and arpeggio solfege singing.

Handicrafts ~
Ty: Knit and purl
Kyle: Knit
Taylor: Finger crochet to make ropes

Taylor wears a pink party dress with a crinoline lining, a petticoat, a turquoise colored t-shirt that has a butterfly on it, and a crazy-quilted apron of red and yellow fabrics. She sports a diadem on her head, also turquoise, that has beads that shape flowers along the line. She faces away from me, so it looks like she’s wearing a pink skirt with a turquoise shirt.

She is barefooted, standing on a chair in front of the sink, with the back of the chair toward the sink. Turning the water on and off, adding a little bit of dish soap to the sponge, and wiping the food off our dishes and silverware with care, she cleans everything in the sink. She places the plates against the backsplash, the silverware in their container, and the cups and mixing bowls on the towel on the counter to dry.

One morning after we came back from the boys’ swim lesson, she asked permission to wash dishes, and I said, Yes. I reckoned that I would have to wash them again, but she did a good job. Later that week, she was washing dishes after lunch while Dad and I were sitting close to each other. He was a bit surprised by it and quietly asked if that was a good idea. I said, “Oh, let her. It’s good for her confidence.” She has since then dragged her chair to the sink, donned her apron, and gotten her hands wet to wash the dishes. Sometimes she asks permission, which I never negate. Sometimes she just does it without asking. I don’t mind that at all because I like the help.

When she has a hard time getting the food off, either Dad or I will show her how to use her fingers or the sponge to do the job. She hasn’t broken anything — yet, but we don’t have items that would break from falling a few inches such as thin glass. She stays away from sharps and the unique mugs and bowls that we don’t want ANYONE touching.

I love her enthusiasm. Daddy was coming home from work with rewards for the boys for being successful in their swim lessons, and they were small treats such as Clif Bars or Yoo Hoo drinks. I suspect that Taylor must have started feeling left out from those rewards, so she looked for a way to earn them. As we near the dusk of the boys’ swim lessons, I hope that she still has the motivation to continue her new job.

It becomes a chore when we begin to ask her to wash the dishes, similar to asking the boys to feed and water the animals. They do get compensated for their work. I took her to the toy store a few months ago, and she picked out the things that she would like to have. I wrote them down along with their prices. Both Ty and Kyle have earned enough to buy themselves a few things on their own lists.

Before we know it, Taylor will be washing dishes in a Snow White gown and necklaces that she will have crafted herself, using materials that she will have bought herself with her own money.

Why am I posting so frequently without a title? Because I have been putting my immediate thoughts on my facebook status and then realizing that I’m using fb as our family archives when THIS blog should be our archives!

That mentioned, I found Isis’ empty food bowl in her crate. Isis was standing over it. Taylor had given the dog her dinner. I looked more closely and found what looked like herbs in her bowl. It seems that Taylor, in her want to do things right, had sprinkled parsley on Isis’ food. (We put garlic on her food to ward of ticks). Taylor confused parsley with garlic. I thought that was really cute and sweet.

On Saturday, Ty and I made clay from salt, cornstarch, water, and food coloring. Kyle and Taylor joined us at the table, and we sculpted people, a giraffe, a rainbow, several rocks, and lots of little worms.

Taylor showed me just how messy she can get with the freshly colored clay – which isn’t too messy after all. Behind her is the art that we have been working on all week.

This is Ty’s creation. It looks to me like people sitting around a campfire with a dog. The artist agrees with the notion that they are people, but he claims that the center piece is a rainbow and not a campfire. And the dog is really a giraffe.

It was a good Saturday. The television stayed off the whole day. Things were relatively quiet. We colored and made crafts like these. When we weren’t coloring, the boys were playing with their cars, Taylor with her kitchen, and the babies with each other. I continued my work with a quilt. Dad prepared the next week’s dinners.

January 7. We woke up and greeted Taylor with a simple “Happy Birthday.” The boys were excited about giving her her present. Ty can’t keep a secret, by the way. She wasn’t quite understanding that she needed too open her gift by unwrapping it. She got the jist of it and proceeded to play with her little pink boat and prince and frog set (the frog wears a crown and is supposed to be the Frog Prince).

Instead of home schooling, I cleaned up a little and baked Taylor’s cake. I wanted to make a pink and white heart-shaped cake… *shakes head and sighs*… After putting the peanut butter into the batter, I thought, Some chocolate frosting would be awesome with the peanut butter. So I added cocoa powder to the frosting, but it turned brown. Go figure. So no pink and white cake. But at least I still had the tools to make a heart-shaped cake. Except the square pan was 8×8, and the round pan was 9″. After 2 hours of calling friends for spare powdered sugar and carefully carving corners, I successfully coated a heart-shaped cake with chocolate frosting. Meanwhile, the birthday girl was getting her feet dirty in the backyard with her brothers.
Taylor, I hope you appreciate all of this.

That evening, a cold front came through. The sky was an dark orange as the sun was setting while the gray clouds made their southeasterly way. Under the sodium lights of the industrial complexes down the main highway, I could see the tiniest water droplets swirling around in the wind.

The paternal grandmother brought dinner from our favorite barbeque joint. She arrived before I did. Dad assembled Taylor’s gift, which came with over 200 screws and took him three hours.

The children bathed and got ready for bed. We presented the cake to Taylor and sang “Happy Birthday.” She started opening her presents from Grandma.

She got a little wooden kitchen, wooden breakfast food (toast, fried egg, butter), and stainless steel pots, pans, and cooking utensils. I love that.

Happy Birthday, Taylor! Three is a magic number.

Taylor was spinning on her heel. “That’s great, Taylor! Can you spin on your toes?” And she spun on her toes like a ballerina! It was so cute. She was happy and laughing, and that got the boys to spin. I suppose the natural way to spin is on the heel first because the boys were doing it that way rather than on their toes.

Ty and Taylor both spun to the right, clockwise, on their right heels. Kyle spun the opposite direction on his left heel. He looked like he noticed that he wasn’t doing it like his siblings, and he was clumsy at his attempt to spin on the right. While Taylor’s attempt on her left was more graceful than Kyle’s attempt on his right. Ty didn’t notice the change and kept right on spinning on his right heel until he crashed into a foot locker nearby.

So I learned something about each of the older children today. Kyle prefers his left over right for some things (I wonder if he’ll be a lefty shooter like his Mommy), and perhaps that is why he has yet to decide if he wants to hold the crayon with his right or left. Taylor demonstrates a level of grace and physical aptitude beyond her years except when she’s doing everyday sorts of things such as walking down the hall or getting into her chair. She’ll fall down almost half the time. And Ty, gosh, for as intelligent as he is, he didn’t notice that the other two were changing their directions. Maybe he was just having way too much fun getting dizzy. He can be too silly and too immature for his age sometimes.

Well, I can be grateful that they weren’t growing extra arms.

A few moons ago, before the dawn of Twins, my fire fighter brother was working the day at a station close to our house and invited us over to see a rescued kitten take a look at the fire trucks. Ty and Taylor climbed inside the truck. Kyle didn’t want to do anything. Everyone was nuts about the kitten.

Sorry, that we didn’t take pictures of the kitten. Yes, Taylor is wearing Lightning McQueen shoes.
For Kyle’s birthday, Dad got a Mister Potato Head. These are some of Kyle’s creations:

We have, like, 700 more of these pictures.

Taken with a camera phone under an LED flashlight – if a little grainy.