the sleppys

I hooked this spotted bass with a Rat-L-Trap, and Ty landed it.

Why is evolution the only “scientific” principle that needs laws to protect it?

We don’t need court cases to protect the Law of Gravity.

That footprint is perfectly human! But because humans didn’t evolve 3.6 million years ago, it clearly wasn’t human. So we’ll draw “Lucy’s” foot just as a humans’ even though we don’t have her foot bones.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/1/l_071_03.html

http://www.themoneytimes.com/node/118422

Fossils don’t come with hair. Evo-artists put the hair where they want it. They draw the nose and ears and eyes how they want them to look, always to lead the observer to believe that evolution is real. They sculpt the wax to give this animal a facial expression of wonder or concern.

Tinkerbell will get well if you clap your hands!

Science is supposed to bring truth. Evolution brings myth.

Ty’s first fish–A monster of a spotted tilapia.

Working the same spot with a Husky Jerk, Ty caught another tilapia.

Not to be upstage by my son, I worked the Husky Jerk over a ledge and landed this peacock bass.

This is how we spent the better part of our Saturday. Good times.

Ty’s birthday was on Monday, the 14th, so we went camping on Saturday, the 12th. We headed out in the morning to Everglades National Park, where else? We took hikes around the usual places and saw the usual wildlife. Many Black Vultures sat along the trails. They migrate here from the north during autumn. They are friendly, curious birds. Turkey Vultures are quite a sight to see soaring and gliding, but they are not curious but nervous and will fly away if people approach. At Royal Palm, the babies walked around, which was different because I would carry them when they were younger. Now that they are a bit older than the last time we were at Royal Palm, they were safe as long as they were holding someone’s hand.

We hiked to the Mound from Gate 15 and saw that it was covered in broom sedge. We had been seeing the sedge grow and become more established during the past seasons, but this time, it was tall. Not just the sedge but the trees were taller, too, of course. Though it is expected to see taller plants, it also is a bit disappointing to see a view blocked by them. We were standing 50 feet above the Everglades waters, but the view was covered by these plants. Eh. The wood storks and vultures were pleasant to witness as they flew low to the water, almost at our eye-level as we stood on the Mound. The boys took their usual trip around the Mound while the girls sat around and daydreamed.

We made it to Pine Glades Lake where we ate lunch and presented Ty with his birthday present: a fishing rod. The boys fished for a couple of hours, and the girls waited in the van. I was sleepy, so I napped. But that made it difficult to keep the girls entertained in the van. Eventually, they napped, too. I tried my arm at casting and fishing but caught nothing. Everyone caught nothing.

We set up camp at Long Pine Key. It was a busy weekend, the day before being Veteran’s Day. Our usual campsite was occupied as was our second-usual site. Not that we have rights to them, but it’s always reassuring to be in the same place. We found a site on the border of the forest and the Road Closed sign, and had only one neighbor. Eventually, the Road Closed signs were taken down to accommodate for the higher demand of campers.

Night fell, and the mosquitoes buzzed and bit. I put on my mosquito net because they absolutely are in love with my blood. Kendall, who has the same attractive blood, also wore hers. Still, they bit her hands and legs. Annoyed by them, she climbed into her car seat in the van and kept saying, “Skeetoos hit me. I outta here. I home.” Hot chocolate made her and everybody else feel better. The children brushed their teeth and went to bed in their tents.

Dad and I stayed up to watch the fire. There was also some commotion at the camp site about a hundred yards to the west. I’m not sure what was going on, but the Park Police showed up on foot and spoke to the campers. I was trying to pay attention to the voices, but the mosquitoes were incessant, no matter how close I sat to the fire. I crawled into my tent at about 10:30pm, which is awfully early: Dad and I usually stay up past midnight. The crowd was very different that weekend. I heard a man a few sites over shouting “HIALEAH!” which is a town northwest of Miami proper and almost directly north of the international airport, heavily populated with loud people… I think because they have to shout over the sounds of landing 747′s.

At 12:30am, I was woken up by the sounds of clanging bottles.

At 5:00am, I was woken up by a bat’s squeaks, and I stayed up, listening to nature, which included mosquito buzzing.

We had a pancake breakfast with coffee (or water, for the children) and headed back home.

The air has been so dry and clear lately that we just had to go outside for a World History lesson.

The children, the boys more so than the girls, are learning about Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Greece. Actually, the MAIN lessons this month are about Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, but the boys needed a little bit of brushing up on their other Ancient Mediterranean/Middle Eastern histories.

We were all sitting in the shade of the Front Yard Hammock, enjoying the crisp breezes, the occasional wake of vultures hundreds of feet above us, and the flittering of zebra longwing butterflies, and listening to my narration and chatter about the ancient civilizations when a big, old, mean, nasty pickup truck with a trailer hitched to it pulled up a few houses down. Three or four men got out and downloaded their “landscaping” equipment and began making horrible, loud noises that I could hardly hear my talking about the first Olympic games. So we packed it up and continued our lesson in the homeschooling room. We still heard them and their lawnmower, leafblower, and edgetrimmer because we leave the windows open.

Dad has been working on something with the Macintosh computer. Something about hard drive, terabytes, operating system, and many other words that I’ve been told are English but I don’t remember exactly…. I do recall Panther Cheetah Bobcat or something big cats like that.

I taught Taylor a few more pieces on G Major on the piano. She’s not really playing any F-sharps yet because her pieces are only do through so (and F-sharp is ti).

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

Maths ~
Ty: Grade Three Maths: Reading graphs and plotting points; probability, statistics, combination, median, range, mode; multiplication to 12, decimals, plotting decimals on a number line; multiplying two- and three-digit numbers, multiplying money and decimals, division using mental math,
Kyle: Grade Two Maths: Fact strategies for addition and subtraction, place value to 100; using a calendar, adding and subtracting time; fractions, adding fractions to make a whole, counting money, making change; addition and subtraction using mental maths.
Taylor: Kindergarten Maths: Sorting and classifying by size, color, shape; finding and continuing patterns; counting by 2′s, 5′s, and 10′s; comparing length, capacity, weight; using a clock and calendar; recognizing coins and adding money; making picture graphs and tallies, and exploring probability. She completed her entire Kindergarten Maths book and is now learning addition and subtraction from Grade One Maths.

English ~
Ty: Grammar: labeling parts of speech, simple and compound subject and predicate, identifying four types of sentences, recognizing and fixing fragments and run-ons, subject-verb agreement, singular and plural nouns. Spelling: Short and long a, e, i, o, u; ü; final double consonants, -ed and -ing endings, oi, ou, aw (in frost, talked, and caught), homophones, contractions, commonly misspelled words, spl, spr, str, c as s (spice), g as j (garage).
Kyle: Writing: forms, motives, and process, using exact nouns, lively verbs, and adjectives.
Taylor: Spelling: cvc, cvce (long first vowel with silent e as in kite and pale), some blends such as fr-, st-, and cr-.
All: Narration: Read aloud from Genesis and Exodus: Ty reads from King James, Kyle and Taylor from children’s Bibles appropriate for their ages and reading levels. Reading Comprehension: Each child answers questions about the passage he or she had just read.

Art ~
All: Drawing people in different poses using colored pencils or acrylic paint.

Phys. Ed. ~
All: Catching underhand tossed baseballs with baseball mitt. Throwing football with hikes, runs, and passes.

German ~
All: Singing children’s, folk, and Christmas songs. Listening to live narration of Der Rattenfänger von Hameln. Telling time, colors, numbers, greetings. Conjugating irregular verbs (to be, to eat) in first, second, and third persons, singular and plural.

Penmanship ~
Ty: Lowercase cursive and some upper case cursive
Kyle: All lower- and uppercase traditional manuscript
Taylor: Uppercase traditional manuscript including ampersand (&)

Music ~
Ty: Piano: Clementi Sonatina Op. 36. Theory: Question and answer phrases
Kyle: Piano: Mozart Minuet K.1. Theory: Drawing and naming notes, comparing time values
Taylor: Middle C position notes, beginnings of G major position. Plays some folk and children’s song by heart. Theory: Drawing staves, treble and bass clefs, and line and space notes. Recognizing the direction of a group of notes (up, down, and repeat); naming notes from both treble and bass clefs.
All: Singing: Solfege sight reading; English, Irish, and American children and folks songs; Christmas carols, holy and secular.

Government/Economics ~
Three branches of government, levels of government, purpose of taxes, comparing and contracting government and private industries, importance of personal property. Harvesting natural resources, manufacturing goods, trading and transporting goods. Goods versus services.

Earth and Space Science ~
Three types of rocks, decomposition cycle, rock cycle, water cycle, report on one planet other than Earth, three layers of Earth, volcanoes and earthquakes.

World Geography ~
Seven continents, four oceans, Prime Meridian, International Date Line, Equator, Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, latitude and longitude; Canadian provinces, Australian territories; named all countries and recognized their boundaries, located major rivers, lakes, seas, mountain ranges around the globe. Learned to find places using an atlas.

August 23, 2001: Second official day of home school. At 10:00am, we all took a break from maths and whatnot to prepare peanut butter sandwiches and goof off on facebook. Taylor walked to me with a white pebble in her hand and told me very calmly, “I lost a tooth.” The information didn’t really sink in, so I looked at her curiously and saw a gap in her mouth, where her tooth used to be. “Oh, Taylor! You lost your tooth!”

I texted Dear Husband about the event.

I’m not sure if it was that night or the next (we’ve learned that the Tooth Fairy doesn’t come during rainstorms, and it may or may not have been raining that evening) that we placed the tooth in the special wooden box, rested it on the sill, and said good-bye.

As usual, the Tooth Fairy left a note with instructions to brush regularly and be kind to brothers and sisters. She also brought Taylor a Schleich Eyela Elf Fairy. I’m thinking that may be what the Tooth Fairy looks like.

There’s a Brazilian Pepper that lives on the western corner of our lot. It’s an exotic that starts out as a neat little shrub but grows insanely fast into a tree with a trunk the circumference of a beach ball and dozens and dozens of branches that divide into hundreds of drumstick-width branch-lets that have thousands of blossoms and eventually fruits, the peppercorns, that fall and germinate, starting off as neat little shrubs that grow insanely fast into trees with trunks the circumference of beach balls…. That’s why these plants are under the category known as Invasive Exotics.

The Suriname Cherry is exotic, but it’s not invasive. The Strangler Fig is invasive, but it’s not exotic. The Brazilian Pepper is a menace to wilderness society and must be terminated.

So last Saturday, we started cutting it down, determined to end the reproductive cycle of that brutal, bulky, Brazilian baobab. Dad cut the limbs with the pole saw. I dragged it to the designated work space. The three older children processed it into manageable pieces with the loppers and bypass pruners. We all stopped to take a breakfast break and drink some Gatorade. Then it was back to work.

The sun wasn’t out. The sky was overcast with stratus clouds. The air was damp but not uncomfortable. We were grateful that it wasn’t hot. We did get to see a wake of vultures, both Turkey and Black, gliding above us.

As we were killing this tree, or attempting to, the neighbor’s lawn crew came by, Haitians who spend several hours in the backyard, making all kinds of high-decibel noises with their power tools. Of course, we were also making whirring noises with our God-given talents.

It started raining a little bit, light drizzling but constant, enough to get everything wet. Dad had brought down the largest, ugliest limbs from the tree, so we called it a day. I was sent with the girls to run some errands.

In the evening, while we were at home having dinner, we heard chirping in the backyard. Both Dad and I heard it simultaneously because we perked up our heads and looked toward the backyard. As soon as he could, he grabbed a flashlight and headed toward the noise. The children followed him. The noise stopped.

We both thought it was the chicks from a nest that may have been dropped when its supporting branch was cut down by the neighbor’s lawn crew (because they cut freely). I took the children back inside the house to give Dad another chance to find the chicks.

“There are chicks in the backyard.”
“What?”
“There are three chicken chicks in the yard.”
“In OUR yard?”
“Yea! As if someone stepped close enough to drop them in our side of the fence.”
“Oh Wow.”

We placed them in a bucket and showed them to the children. They were astonished to see real live fowl chicks for the first time. Kendall was the first of the children to see them, and her eyes, looking down into the bucket, were big and brown in surprise.

We suspect the Haitians for dropping off the chicks. Excuse me for being judgmental. Their culture is weird, and maybe they saw through the hedges that they hacked to anemia that we already had rabbits. What’s a few more birds? That’s the first thought that entered my mind when Dad mentioned what the chirping was.

They were placed in the spare cage and settled next to the rabbits. Dad laid out some water in a jar lid, and I propped up some wind protection and a roof over the cage.

On Sunday, they were let outside to run free a little bit, to practice catching bugs and grubs from under rocks, which weren’t many because of the constant drizzling. They scratched and pecked at the compost pile and were finally put back in the cage.

Today, Ty was out there, wearing his rain poncho, in front of the cage, playing with and handling the yardbirds. I just hope they are not roosters, but even if they are, we will all learn a thing or two about chicken culling.

Ty and Kyle both started classical piano pieces: Clementi Sonatina in C and Mozart Minuet K.1, respectively. Kyle prefers to memorize his piece and has a difficult time reading musical notation. I constantly have to remind him to look up at the music, but the piece involves his hands’ moving up and down the keyboard, which gives him a valid excuse to look at them.
Ty started playing his piece using the metronome, which he loathes. He does keep good time when I remind him, clapping along to the metronome. Like most students, he says that it confuses him. “Make it unconfuse you,” I tell him, as I tell all my students. “Play in a pattern that you don’t HEAR the metronome.” He finally understands after he plays correctly.

Taylor started playing piano and reading music. It’s interesting that even the piano teacher’s children behave like other piano students, expressing their unique strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and attention spans. She plays “Yankee Doodle” and “Old MacDonald” by heart.

Talon and Kendall regularly sit at the piano and play sweetly together. I hear them singing, “…lonely world… city boy… SOUTH DETROIT… on and on and on and on….” And the sweet playing turns into banging. Rhythmic banging, mind you, they are trained musicians!

I’ve gotten the three older children to sing in rounds, Row Row Row Your Boat. We were fairly successful but aren’t auditioning for any major competitions yet. We have tried “Carol of the Bells” a couple of times, which has shown slow but steady improvement. I think we should be ready to perform it in Christmastide.

About three times a week, the five children practice all the Christmas songs and carols that I can force them to sing in unison. Because their voices are still young, that means only about 25 minutes of singing can be expected. I try to get both holy and secular ones in the mix.

With this Occupy Wall Street nonsense going on for a month now, I often find myself thinking, I’m Occupy! ‘ing the bathroom. Or I’m Occupy! ‘ing the kitchen sink, which means that I’m washing dishes, not doing bathroom stuff.

I’m Occupy! ‘ing the living room couch, eating rice and beans, and watching these college-educated, Gen-Y ninnies on television cry about not having jobs nor pensions and still living at home with their Baby Boomer parents… from a privately owned park in downtown Manhattan.

I mean, the whole scenario is quite ridiculous if you stop to put two and two together. I then get sad that I then have to get up and Occupy! the van to drive to my jobs.