How could I not, when asked by Linda?

I just love it when friends' wives become friends in their own right. Linda has always made an effort to keep in in the loop of my college pal Matt's life, and in so doing I know probably way more about Linda than I do now about Matt. *skwunches Linda* So when she tagged me to bore you all with info about me, how could I resist? Looks like I get to tell you about myself in threes.

Joys:

1. Children. I have, and do, give up so much for these sweet young ones of mine. I do so willingly. I love to see smiles on their faces, listen to their laughter, and share their lives.
   And husband. You know why women read novels containing romance? To see unconditional, consuming, supportive, redeeming love. Like Blaine has for me, completely evident to anyone who cares to notice it. I'm so lucky.
   
2. Rare personal time. Which I often spend reading, or outside walking/jogging so as not to let my first joy interrupt my second. ;)
   
3. Food. I have to eat three times a day, I might as well freaking enjoy it, right? Nom nom.

Fears

1. Injury/death of children or husband.
   
2. Personal failure, not achieving all I can do in my life on earth.
   
3. Leaving my children motherless.

Current Obsessions:

1. Physics. It's our physics year in homeschool W00T.
   
2. Muse. It's really, really saying something when a single group comes out on top of my huge "favorite music" list and stays there as long as Muse has.
   
3. I'm sort of back to Twilight for the moment, having just completed what's available of Midnight Sun yesterday. But definitely reading in general is an obsession, and always has been.

Surprising Facts:

1. It's only the second week of school, and already I'm an hour late starting the school day. What's up with that?
   
2. I have almost no pictures or art up around my house. Took 'em down to paint, never bothered to put 'em back. I guess we'll have to call those sofas "art".
   
3. I love clogs more than any other sort of shoes. It's lucky I don't need good arch support right?

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Now playing: Duncan Sheik - In Between
via FoxyTunes

All is busy, all is busy.

Wrapping up last week:

ACADEMY: Emma had a great first week of school. She enjoys her teachers and classmates, every day she comes home wreathed in smiles. She's already learning so much—I double, triple approve of her teachers' goals and methods. Her two most time-consuming classes are going to be Global Studies and Geometry. No surprise on the math there, it's always homework-intensive. Her global studies teacher is smart and funny, and he expects a 3- or 5-paragraph essay from them almost every time they meet. He expects them to have a good question, just one, about any topic they're discussing, and to be willing to state their opinion in front of the class. He's like those make-you-think teachers we see in the prep schools in the movies, and I'm all YAY about it.

CHRISTIAN: The birthday boy turned 13 on Saturday. We had one heck of a chocolate cake, went out for pizza, he went to see Iron Man, and without shoes standing back to back he proved to be taller than his mother. That's my boy. Keep it up, Christian.

FRIENDSHIP: Sofie, a good friend from Canada, was here visiting with her grandson Kyren in tow. In the middle of going back and forth to Emma's school to drop off or retrieve her, of getting my children established in the work of their new grades and trying to recommence school, of just the craziness that is life here, it was lovely to have quiet moments (while making meals, while driving hither or yon—wherever we could grab them!) to chat. Made her read Twilight, and we talked about writing and plotting and characters and... So fun. And she gave my kids all a wonderful art lesson one day when we spent a few hours in a little campground and drew the quaking aspens and other plants/rocks/bits of wood and listened to the many cows moo over the fence. I hope her bus ride home with her bundle-of-energy goes well!

HOMESCHOOL: Ethan's in first grade, Jackson is in third grade, Libby is in sixth grade, and Christian is in seventh grade. It has changed our dynamic a bit not to have Emma here. In other words, it's a little freaky. But we had a great beginning. I've coordinated our school year schedule with Emma's so when she has her breaks and vacations we also have ours. My evil plan has already had a great effect—Libby and Christian are hopping through their math books because they know they have only six weeks to get through the first 30 lessons plus tests. No more sitting back and procrastinating! We started off with a bang.

And I've made a change in my methodology this year, regarding writing for my very young students. I've decided that it is totally enough for me that we read history and do a couple of hands-on activities (coloring, looking up a picture and printing it out for their notebook, building a model). I'm no longer going to try to make the young ones narrate history lessons and remember names like Nobuyasu and which part of Japan the feudal system was working in. Exposure is enough at that age, "perfect" comprehension only brings on frustration and makes the lesson overly long. And for Libby and Christian, I'm not forcing history write-ups in outline form anymore. A good paragraph about the page is really sufficient for me. I'm going to work more on building their short essay (like, one paragraph) writing skills than their outline skills. We'll save the narrations for science. I'm so happy about this change I can't believe it. It is appropriate to grade level, it relieves an artificial pressure I'd put on me and my young students, and it builds skills differently, but in a way I want them built. Hooray for me and changing the system. ;)

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Now playing: Gnarls Barkley - Going On
via FoxyTunes

Life Elevated

I believe (I can't remember?) that's our newish stupid state motto. An equivalent runner up in badness would have been "Life with an Altitude". Either way, it's fitting.

Our house is located within a few feet of 6000 feet above sea level. It keeps our temperatures about ten degrees cooler than Salt Lake City (~4220 feet) and the main Wasatch Mountain valley where 80% of the state's population lives, and it also brings on our autumn earlier.

Just two weeks ago I could go out at 6:30 in the morning for a jog in only a T-shirt and be fine. Now our overnight temps are hitting the high 40s, gasp, and this morning I had to wear a jacket for my jog.

*clings to summer* Don't go! Not yet!

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Now playing: Bananarama - Cruel Summer
via FoxyTunes

Home is where the hair shines

Last week was our family vacation, the one week Blaine gets off work every year. The first two days he was working on a freelance project that didn't finish on time, but that's okay; we went to Seven Peaks waterpark for not free and we had a great time. (We'd "earned" free passes to Seven Peaks last spring through a reading program, but I left the passes home so we had to pay to get in. *shoots self in foot*) But Wednesday through Saturday we went to Zion National Park (first time for me and all the kids) and we camped and we hiked and we didn't shower and we had a seriously so marvelous time, even though daytime temps were 104º. (Nighttime temps in the low 90s or high 80s.) We went through lots of sunscreen and tried to stick with shady hikes and we're barely even pink, and we saw almost everything there was to see in the area we stayed in. There was this fantastic free shuttle system and lots of stops and we hopped off wherever we wanted, always there were bathrooms and water, and then a few minutes later another shuttle would come by and we'd hop on and go to the next place we wanted to visit. After we parked our Suburban in our camping spot we didn't drive it again until it was time to leave.

For me one of the great highlights was when Blaine and the eldest four went off on a hike to Angel's Landing, an arduous thing that takes five hours round-trip and climbs up up up ending on a perilous, rail-free walk along the plateau rim.

(Here's a link to a pictoral someone else made of the hike; the picture above is what Angel's Landing looks like from below, as I saw it.)  I had been shuttling and hiking and doing this and that all around the park with the three littles, trying to kill five hours in a cool way since our campsite was unbearable midday in the 104º heat. I'd decided we'd puttered and hiked long enough and we were shuttling up canyon toward the River Walk (a lovely paved trail alongside the Virgin River, easy to walk and with plenty of places to hop off the trail and play in the shallows, and we all needed cooling off). I used my walkie-talkie as we were getting to the Big Bend shuttle stop which was a view for the Angel's Landing hike, asking where they were. Blaine said excitedly, "We're in the saddle! We just made it to the rim!" And right in my seat on the shuttle, with Macklin in my lap and Kyrie smashed up next to me, I could look out the open window in the ceiling and without even a lean in either direction see Libby in her bright red shirt waving from the rim of the plateau. I saw other arms waving too, but Libby's shirt was the one that stuck out at that distance. The timing was perfect, the position was perfect, and it made my heart smile to sit there in the shuttle and be a little part of the hike going on hundreds of feet (a thousand?) above me. (They had the camera with them, so I don't have a picture of the waving arms. Alas!)

Then Saturday, when our Zion campground reservations expired, we began the trek homeward and on a whim stayed in Fremont State Park campground, also with no showers. It was a pretty big change, daytime temps in the high 80s and nighttime temps in the high 40s, so we were all bundled up in virtually every article of clothing; but the moon was full and the stars were gorgeous and there wasn't a cloud in the sky so we left the rain fly off the tent and the full moon smiled down on our sleeping faces all night. We went to a cute little museum dedicated to the Fremont Indian people whose ancient dwellings had been discovered/destroyed by the construction of I-70, and walked through a canyon that had vast amounts of petroglyphs and pictographs, and climbed into a reproduction of a pit house. So fun.

Usually with this one summer week we go to Priest Lake in northern Idaho where B's family has two cabins on a lake. I've posted about the place before. This time we couldn't afford the gasoline it would take to drive the 800+ miles each way, so we settled for sites closer to home. At least, at the time we thought we were settling. But every day the kids were raving about how much fun the trip was and what a great time they were having. :D

And it was a great cap to the summer. Now I feel like we can go back to school in two weeks, and we haven't missed anything or forgotten to do anything important. Best of all, I'm showered and I smell good and my hair is shiny again.

Homeschool, opportunities, universities, and life

We're looking into a high school for Emma. In the beginning I had mixed feelings, divided roughly thus:

• Half of me thought, "Nooooooo!" I love homeschooling my children. My own degree was for teaching high school math and science, so I feel capable. And most of all, I love having my children around me all day—not in a stop doing math and go clean the toilets sort of way, but in an I love you and like sharing your entire life sort of way. I think of all the things she'll miss, of how she'll be a little out of the family loop, and I think, "This isn't for us at all."
  
• Half of me thought, "Yay, one less student!" As much as I love homeschool, it gets increasingly complicated as I add more students, and as the grade levels climb. It's kind of a relief to think I won't have to worry about adding in a high school curriculum.

But then I looked at it from Emma's perspective, instead of filtering it through all my financial obligations, my desire to have her at home, my anxieties; I pondered the entire opportunity as it affects/benefits Emma. This is her life. This is the beginning of the woman she'll become. This is my unutterably beloved daughter, for whom I want every benefit, every advantage, every possible good thing in life.

And then my feelings were no longer mixed. I want what she wants. I would sacrifice almost anything to give her opportunities that are good, positive, and worthy of her.

There's a private boarding high school six miles down the road in Mt. Pleasant. It's the same school where Blaine briefly worked as assistant director of admissions. The majority of the students are typical rich kid prep school students; a minority are kids who have struggled with drugs or gangs or alcohol and have a court-mandated need for heavy supervision and a strict boarding-type situation. There are several international students (Africa, Asia, Europe), and a few locals. We have several homeschooling friends who have sent their children there as day students, and the education is superior. The classes are small but rigorous, the teachers are highly educated and competent, and the facilities, for such an itty bitty place, really rock.

We're thinking ahead to college. My kiddles are very likely going to need a good university education to land the careers they want; and let's face it, my children's parents aren't wealthy enough to pay for it all. The kids are going to need scholarships, they're going to need to know how to study and how to succeed without $$$ from us. I could handle the high school academics, but this will give them opportunities to play on teams, to be involved in student government, to learn art and dance and...all the things I can't do at home, and that look great on scholarship applications.

Also compelling is: when else will she get a chance to experience the diversity of high school? College is a place to specialize. You have to choose a path and follow it and learn and get out. High school is the time to experiment with subjects and try out for a play and do all of those things that don't make the university cut. I get excited just thinking about how high Emma can soar.

So we toured the campus. (How much would I have loved this campus? Even just as a day student, how much would I have loved to have a college-like experience at 15?) We filled out reams of applications. And last week Emma was accepted. But there was still one more hurdle to clear, which we just did today: financial aid came through, substantially reducing the portion we'll pay of the [SKY HIGH] tuition.

It's pretty exciting, even if it is a totally new frontier for this homeschooling mom. I'm going to have a hard time letting her go, but I'm so excited to see where she flies.

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Now playing: Muse - Butterflies & Hurricanes
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