Daley Ponderings

We are still working on renovating our new house, and thus we are still living with Jon's generous parents.  And since we are living here, we are schooling here.  But a comment from his mom gave me some insight into some non-homeschoolers' comments about homeschooling.

We usually "have school" up in our bedrooms, since that is "our" territory while we're living here.  But it is not a soundproof house, and so anything louder than "inside voices" is easily heard from downstairs.

Barbara's comment was, "It's not how I imagined it. Actually, it's how I imagined it might be if I was doing it, and that's why I figured I could never do it."

Yes, folks, homeschooling is not usually a calm, quiet, everyone sitting nicely together doing schoolwork experience.  It involves the toddler getting mad that she can't use all of the math manipulatives at once.  It involves the toddler scattering the ones she does use all over the room.  It involves the third grader who hates writing crying about his assignment and questioning (loudly and with a whiny voice) why Sonlight wants to torture the students with Diamond Notes. It involves the new reader kicking the wall when he gets stuck on a word, and wiggling around generally as he thinks about words.  It involves the preschooler begging for more math right when Mom is in the middle of explaining something to someone else.  It involves any one or more of them pushing the beds apart and spilling the covers on the floor during the course of schooltime. It involves multiple people asking for help (or otherwise interrupting) at the same time. It involves Mom losing her patience and yelling.  It involves Mom wondering if she's going insane and on the worst days crying because she doesn't feel like she's good enough.  On the very worst days, everyone cries.  On the best days, only one person cries.  (I don't think we've had a single school day yet where Joy hasn't cried about something during the course of school time.)

And yet, I would say this year is going well.  We are covering Bible, History, Language Arts, and Math.  Noah is learning to read, Jonathan is learning to write, Joy is learning to be patient, Faith is learning letters and writing and numbers.  I'm learning to keep my patience and correct calmly.  They're all (except Joy) memorizing scripture.  They remember much more math than I would have thought based on our very long summer break.    And we're getting our assignments done before noon!

So if you've ever thought, "Wow, I could never homeschool." The answer is, "You can."  If that's what you decide is what is good for your family, you can do it.  If you decide it's not for your family, don't hold up the homeschooling moms as some otherworldly beings who can manage something you never could.  There are plenty of days we wonder if we can manage it at all.  Just like any mom anywhere in any circumstance.

9/19 - Joy  has been telling me when she needs a new diaper (patting her bottom) but this day, she got out the changing pad and wipes, set up the pad on the bathroom floor, put a new diaper on top of the wipes box, lay down on the pad, and called for me.

9/20 - Noah is definitely our hands-on guy.  He asks for crafts related to what we do in school.  When we read a book about archaeology, he immediately wanted to go dig in the back yard.  He got a trowel and a sieve and a container to hold his treasures and happily dug and sifted for a long time.

~9/20 - Joy can say, "ow".

9/25 - Joy put on her own socks all by herself.  Before this, she had successfully put on mine.

9/27 - Joy says "please" to go with her sign.  It sounds like "wee".

9/27 - Sounding the same, but in a different context.  When she plays with the abacus, she says, "wee, wee, wee" as she movs the beads.  9/28 - She also "counted" "wee, wee, wee" when playing with the corners cards.

9/28 - Faith really wanted to play Corners with me, so I made up a version she can do.  (The "real" game involves finding numbers that add up to 5, 10, 15, or 20.)  We played where we had to match the color and the numeral.  Faith loved it! (More)

I was poking around the logs today, and saw that of the 500 comments that were attempted on the blog yesterday 0 of them were actual people, and the blog successfully marked all of them as spam, and didn't bother asking me to verify that.  I wonder how long that will last.

I regularly see spammers hiring programmers on some job websites that I use, and some of the code that the spammer's use is quite good, so I always need to stay on top of what they are doing.

There have been 112,572 attempted comments on this blog in the last 30 days.  And I suppose that doesn't even count the one that were blocked by the firewall that repeatedly made comments.  I don't have separated logs for those blocks, but just on a server basis.  42,837 IP addresses were blocked in the last month for making frequent comments on the blogs.

Those numbers are pretty incredible, if you think about it - they are just for one blog and server out of the millions of blogs and servers on the internet.

The Google Maps Blog shared this fun use of the maps API - see what the votes look like if different states vote different ways.  Also, see historical data.

These notes are really old, but not lost.

6/7 - Noah's first lost tooth.  Bottom left front.  It took a very long time for it to come out.  He doesn't play with it at all..

Joy was sitting on the couch.  Faith wanted to do a trick, so we asked Joy to get down.  She did it willingly, waited for Faith to do her trick, and then climbed back up, without complaining.

6/20 - Noah's right bottom front tooth came out.  He was eating a cookie.  The tooth was chocolatey, so he went to wash it off, but then the tooth went down the drain.

~6/30 Joy steps down two stairs like a big person.

8/10 - Faith can pump a swing needing only one starter push.

8/14 - Joy was having a fun time in the bath, leaning back, nearly floating on her bath, then putting her face in, over and over.

8/20 - Noah's front right upper tooth is lost.  He says, "I'm going to get money."  Jon asks, "How do you know?"  Faith pipes up, "Because Mommy is a fairy!"

All four of Joy's canines have appeared since the move.  I did not pay enough attention to note dates for them.

8/24 - Noah did the monkey bars at the playground all by himself.

8/27 - We're at the playground.  I can't hear the boys' conversation, but then I hear Noah shouting defensively, "I'm not a homo sapien!"  You might imagine that until he finished the second word I was concerned that Jonathan was talking inappropriately.  But I could not help but laugh when I heard what the accusation had been.

9/1 - We were visiting our next door neighbor's yard sale.  The lady said "hi" to us and I said, "Say, 'hi'".  Faith got all shy, and hid into me.  But then I heard from the stroller, "Hi!"  Joy said it several times!

9/6 - Faith's 4th birthday!  It was a really fun day.  We went for a walk, we went to the playground, Grammy took her out for ice cream.  They had a grand old time with balloons.  We had a dinner of pizza, pasta, and salad.  Then Faith opened her presents, and then we had cherry 'o cheese pie and ice cream with sprinkles. (Faith actually skipped the ice cream in the evening because she had had hers earlier with Grammy).  Faith's review?  "That did be the funnest birthday I ever had!"