the sleppys

We had been packing all week. Dad made a checklist of all we needed including sleeping bags, camp stove, cooking utensils dry foods, cloth napkins. We packed it all in The Charles Daniels (our van) on Friday night, so on Saturday morning, we just had to put our boots on and brush our teeth… after eating.

At eight o’clock, we reached the gate of the National Park. The water levels were the lowest that we’d seen them. The dry season was afoot in the Everglades. Birds that we hadn’t seen all summer long were flying about, concentrated in pools of water along the park’s main road, picking what mosquito larvae was left. A small alligator, four footer, relaxed by itself in one of the pools.

The Anhinga Trail was busy with people as it is extremely inviting during the dry season. The parking lot was at 80% capacity (in the summers, it’s at 10%). We met with the children’s maternal grandfather and participated in the ranger-led walk. Of the ten children (12 and under) in a party of 30, our two boys asked the most questions. They stayed close to the ranger the whole time, listening intently.

After the walk, the children’s paternal grandmother met with us to walk the Gumbo Limbo Trail, which is adjacent to Anhinga. It is a different habitat, made of hardwood trees (Gumbo Limbo), ferns, and palms.

We drove to Long Pine Key where we had sandwiches and chips at the picnic area. Grandma made cupcakes at her house and brought them over to sing “Happy Birthday.” We presented Ty with his presents. I took a nap on the Everglades ground. The boys took a walk to the pond while the girls cleaned up.

After we said our goodbyes we drove to the campground and set up our tent. It wasn’t even three o’clock, yet the sun cast long shadows on the pineland. The boys went off to look firewood. The girls stayed by the tent to prepare a dinner of kernel corn, potatoes, and ham. At twilight, we packed into the van again to drive over to Anhinga Trail.

It was dark. We were the only ones there. The sky was clear. To the northeast, there was an orange glow of the city, but the lights didn’t take over the stars much. We saw two shooting stars and two satellites. Thankfully there wasn’t a whole lot of alligator action because the sky distracted us with all its gems.

We were about to pile back into the van when Dad asked if we wanted to hike the Gumbo Limbo trail. “Okay, let’s do it,” was my response. We all still had our flashlights on and walked it rather swiftly. Every once in a while, however, we would give instructions to place the light toward the belly and make it pitch black again.

We made it safely to the campground where the children brushed their teeth and went to sleep in the tent while Dad and I talked while sitting near the fire.

I’m sorry for not having posted in such a long time. I’ve been working on a Christmas/New Year’s entry, but it’s coming around very slowly. We are still home schooling, so that takes up a lot of time.

The three older children are earning money doing their chores. I’m not really sure of how much they are making for each chore, but they seem to be happy taking a few pennies or a nickel and dropping it into their own banks. A couple of weeks ago, Ty earned enough money to buy himself a cheeseburger. Dad took him on some errands, and the final destination was Burger King, where Ty paid for his own burger and asked for a receipt. He is now saving for a brand new toy (after tithing, of course).

We are almost through with the first nine weeks of our school year. For lack of time and laziness in creativity, I’m listing their accomplishments as yet.

Math~
Ty: Adds and subtracts, with regrouping, four-digit numbers, including money.
Kyle: writes numbers to 150, adds and subtracts using a number line, adds and subtracts without a number line (mental math) to sums of 12.

English~
Ty: Reads “The Magic Treehouse” books, spells second grade high frequency words
Kyle: reads “Frog and Toad,” spells Dolch words

History~
Both children read and listen to stories about Norse gods, English and Irish legends, and the Old Testament.

Life Science~
Ty: Notes the differences between invertebrates and chordates, the differences between the five chordate orders, hypothesizes on special features’ functions (whiskers, beaks, shells)
Kyle: Differentiates between living and non-living things, plants and animals, names parts of a tree and knows their functions

German~
Both children count, recite the alphabet, name body parts, months, days of the week, family members by relationship, and rooms in the house
Ty: writes
Kyle: listens and recites

Art~
Both children work on line compositions and projects on positive and negative shapes.

Handwork~
Ty: knits rows of 12 stitches.

Penmanship~
Ty: practices lower case letters, Dolch words, proper nouns in history
Kyle: practices capital letters, Dolch words

Piano~
Ty: plays harmonies, triads, staccato, and dotted quarter notes in C, F, and G Majors
Kyle: plays Middle C position melodies

Everyday, we journal, study mathematics, English, and German. The boys alternate days to practice piano or do their penmanship assignments. Each fortnight, we study a new Block subject (Art, Science, Handwork, Legends).

On Wednesday, the 15th, Ty lost his third tooth. Kyle pulled it out of his mouth, actually. It was wiggling and wobbling, and it apparently was bothering both Ty and Kyle. So Kyle pulled it out.

We couldn’t get the Tooth Fairy to come by that night because she didn’t have enough notice. She doesn’t bring cash to the Sleppy children. She brings toys, so she needs at least a few hours’ notice. On Thursday night, she traded Ty’s tooth for an Irish “D” tin whistle. It came in a package with an instruction book that contains musical notation and tablature to play popular melodies.

Ty started playing it immediately. I frustrated him when I offered to teach him. He followed the instruction book well enough to learn to play all of the tunes.

On Wednesday, a week after Ty lost his tooth, I started practicing my violin. I asked Ty if he wanted to play with me. We played Mozart’s “Ah, vous dirai-je Maman” several times for practice. The next day, we practiced some more of the same, but I played some harmony on the violin. We also played “Au Claire de la Lune” and a German folk song, both from the instruction book. And today, Friday… well, we haven’t played yet,  but I hope that we can get some practicing done this weekend.

Playing together is helping him with his breathing into the whistle. When he first started learning it, he’d breathe hard to make the sounds, but the whistle plays a higher octave if it’s played that way. It took him a couple of days to get the breathing steady where he wasn’t playing higher octaves. Also, he’s not separating his tones as he was at the beginning. Most tones in the music are quarter notes, and it doesn’t sound too badly if he separates them. He still has to be reminded to hold the half notes, but once he gets warmed up, the longer notes sound pretty good.

Ty sometimes sits around the house and makes up tunes for himself. He doesn’t write them down or bother to remember them.

I found the dog with her snout in my bag. She didn’t get to a lot of the chocolate. Looks like she just smooshed it around my journal, my hairbrush, and my keys. It’s my fault, of course, for leaving my bag open in the music room, where I usually keep it  during the day. She knows she did wrong. She went straight to her crate with that guilty look.

Talon really really really looks like she wants to walk. She doesn’t want it badly enough, however,  because if she did, she’d be walking already. It’s just mind over matter. I take her down the corridor in the mornings, and she prefers to walk instead of crawl until I let go. Then she stands in thought for a few moments and prefers crawling. She has made attempts, real attempts, to walk. The last time, she walked to the coffee table, wobbled a little and fell forward, hitting her lip on the table leg. She didn’t hit it hard, and she didn’t cry. I don’t think that it was enough for her to stop trying.

Talon and Kendall fight over toys and food. I’ll give a piece of zweiback toast to Kendall, and she looks like she’s considering taking it. Talon just takes it. Kendall yells and gets mad. I give another one to Kendall, but she doesn’t want that one. She wants the original one that I gave her. It’s the same way with toys. Talon will be playing with a Little People person or a building block, and Kendall will snatch it from her hands. Talon is still where another toy will console and entertain her, but I don’t know how long that’ll last.

Ty has started learning knots. His first know is a bowline. He can’t do it without the help of the illustrations in the book. He learned the clove hitch, but still needs help from the book. I tell him that he should learn these things because he’ll be running errands for us in town when we move to the country. He’ll need to tie his horse to the posts in a way that he can untie the horse but the horse can’t untie itself. And he won’t have a book to help him along. That motivates him, knowing that he’ll have a horse and go into town by himself (or with a buddy).

One of my piano moms gave me about a hundred books that she doesn’t need anymore. She has two boys who are out of college who read and learned from these books. They are great books. Though I’m not a fan of coloring books in general, the coloring books that she did give me were of epic images: castles, Columbus’ voyage, Pilgrims, Civil War, Native Americans. And there were snippets of information that went along with each image, i.e. biographies.

The Saturday before Mother’s Day, Ty played his first piano recital. His hair was tied back like Daddy’s. He wore a dark blue polo, black jeans, and his WTSHTF boots. As his teacher, I introduced him. He did not seem nervous at all, perhaps because it was his first public performance or because he is just a cool kid. He was the first student to play, which gave him the advantage. Ty walked up to the bench, squirmed a little to get centered, and began playing “The Swing,” a 16 measure piece written by the author of his lesson book. The audience clapped when he finished. He squirmed a little more to get centered to play an adaptation of Carl von Weber’s “Hunting Chorus,” which is in a different key. He did play a little too fast during one of the eighth note slurs, but only his parents and teacher noticed (having heard his practicing for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks). When he got to the ending, he played softer as the music directed with the dynamic notation. And softer. And softer. And he lifted his hands up above his head (to let the audience know that he was finished). He smiled at them, jumped of the bench, and bowed twice — to the left and to the right. He just kind of stood there, watching their watching him. A man motioned him to go over and collect his little music note trophy. Ty looked at it, smiled, and lifted it a little while looking at the audience… in a surprised, humble way. And he sat down.

“I got a flag trophy,” he told the girl who sat another seat over. The boy who sat directly next to him was at the piano, playing his two pieces.

After the recital, Ty saw that his three grandparents were there along with one of his uncles. We had lemonade and chocolate chip cookies with the other participants and their families.

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.

Ty sat at the table and worked on math problems. Kyle and Taylor sat on the couch and read. Talon and Kendall napped. I swept the floor and listened to Glenn Beck on the radio:

“They claim that we’re out to destroy the Earth. They say that all we want to do is kill the Earth. I don’t want to kill the Earth. Do you? Do you want to destroy Planet Earth?”

Ty answered him, “No. You should never kill the Earth.” He looked up at me, “Mommy, only volcanoes want to kill the Earth.”

Dear Birthday Boy,

It was six years ago, a Thursday, that the skies were cloudy, grey, and the air was cool, crisp, like Christmas. I wore one of Dad’s long sleeved tie-dyes to the hospital, not sure which one because he has two dozen. We didn’t know your gender. We had some names picked out. We were excited about our first baby. Twelve and a half hours later, we beheld you. Blue skin, blue face, blue mouth. Screaming as if someone had pissed you off.

This morning, you woke up before we did. You and Kyle started a conversation that was loud enough to tell you two to “SHhh!” You had a good day of adventures and surpsrises. Dad and I got you birthday cards. You received an analog wrist watch that you had to put on immediately. The babies were asleep most of the morning, so you got to play outside in the muggy, hot air with Kyle and Taylor instead of babysitting while I washed diapers.

When Daddy got home, he took the three of you out to take a look at the race cars that are in town. You came home wearing hats from the race team’s sponsor. You watched “Peep and the Big Wide World,” and ate cake for lunch. In fact, you decorated your own cake. It was supposed to be a dinosaur cake, but you didn’t bring me any dinosaurs. There was a donkey, a kangaroo, a pig, and… okay, there was one ankylosaur. You opened up your remaining gifts which were a Lightning McQueen wall clock (you really like to tell time) and a building set toy thing … You made a car out of it with Daddy’s help.

Just this evening, we sat around Daddy’s computer and watched the space shuttle Endeavor launch. A few seconds afterward, we were all outside watching the darn thing in the sky, right between two houses across the street! Bright orange flames from the rocket boosters, it was spectacular. You were excited to see it. Taylor got so excited that she ran too fast down the driveway and fell.

So Happy Birthday, Ty. Tomorrow, we are hosting a get-together, and you’ll see your friends and get to eat cake again. I’d like to add that you didn’t do any homeschooling today.

Love,

Mom

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.