Back to homeschooling

Chebbles is an extraordinarily curious child, and school hems her in to a disturbing degree.

She is not allowed to read materials that are beyond a first grade level, even though she tests at 100% comprehension of fifth grade literature with an eighth grade reading efficiency (191 words/minute, for those keeping score at home). She just wants to have access to more interesting literature and resource materials.

Her spelling words this week include "do" and "note." To entertain herself as I went through the obligatory homework review, she wrote "extraordinary" in the margins and included a plea for more interesting spelling words.

When I follow up with the teacher, then the principal, then the director of curriculum, they come back with the same accusation: "You're pushing her."

If they really knew Chebbles, they'd know would never respond to "pushing," even if I tried.

She just wants to have the access and freedom to research the larger topics (history, science, art) that interest her. And in a first grade classroom setting these things aren't just not taught, but they are not allowed. There is a certain order in which material is taught -- never mind if Chebbles is sitting in her chair for half the day, waiting for the other students to catch up to her.

There are strange boundaries that fascinate me within this system. For example, after Chebbles' teacher gave her a reading comprehension test that placed her in a third grade reading group ("N," for those who understand these matters), she said, "She's probably higher than that, but if I wanted to give her another test, I'd have to borrow the materials from a third grade teacher." The way she said it was as though the third grade teacher's classroom was on Mars.

Perhaps the final straw for me was when Chebbles came home from school and said, "Math is HARD."

She had never voiced that before. In fact, the math she was doing at home with me was Saxon 2-100. That's about the middle of second grade. And she was whizzing through it. The only reason we didn't head into third grade is that I stopped homeschooling her and sent her to school, where she promptly regressed to the level of all the other girls in her class... go figure.

I set a bunch of second grade subtraction problems in front of her last night and she sneered and said, "I can't do THESE!? Math is HARD!" then she picked up her pencil and finished them in 8 minutes.

So much for her math mantra.

I am not bitter, just wiser now about the limits of school. Perhaps Montessori schools, or some other private schools, would be different, but for this particular child at this point in her life, the best way for her to receive an education, and to not deaden the raging curiosity that she has for all of life, is one-on-one instruction.

It hurts my heart to think that she'll be missing recess, and lunch, and her buddies from the After School Care program. But it's more upsetting to think that she's going to shut down and concede to the mind-numbing limits placed on her.

I'm planning to have her finish out the school year, so she can solidify some of the friendships she's making. She'll be in Girl Scouts with some of these girls, as well as swim team.

And her homeschooling friends miss her -- already there was a cheer when I told them that Chebbles would be back next year. We have a lot of park days and pottery classes to catch up on.

Homeschooling is a hell of a lot of work, and we will butt heads and we will have hard days. But when we homeschooled, she was soaring.

In a public school setting, she is told not to go too high, for fear she'll bump her head on some imaginary ceiling. But when she's given the reins, she flies so high, all on her own, it's extraordinary.

Bargains

There is something incredibly soothing to me about bringing down our grocery bills.

Right now at Safeway, for example, I can buy several bottles of salad dressing -- a staple in our home -- for $0.19 each. I haven't yet gone in for the kill, but I'm enjoying the anticipation of this purchase. I learned from my new favorite website, The Frugal Find, the art of "stacking" manufacturer's coupons with in-store coupons so that I can pay significantly less for our groceries than I once did. And it's a fantastic high.

Hub-D and I, over the years, would sit and look at our monthly budget and wonder how in the world we were spending $1500 each month on groceries. Now that I've reined that spending in, I can see exactly how it would happen. A splurge at Costco, a trip to Whole Foods that included sushi purchases, alcohol purchases plus our actual staples at Trader Joe's plus some flitting around at the farmer's market amounted to $1500.

I'm also ashamed of how much food ultimately went to waste of those purchases. I would sometimes engage in speculative grocery shopping, such as, "I've always MEANT to learn how to cook beans from scratch," then grabbing a bag of them spontaneously. Years later I would come across those expired beans and experience a moment of irritation with the woman who purchased them.

But somewhere in the last several months, a very significant gong went off inside of my head. This gong hit me on a lot of levels -- it had to do with turning 40, with having another miscarriage, with buying a new house in a very different neighborhood, with my inability to assert myself when the chips are down, with passing judgement unfairly -- and as I've reassessed so many aspects of my life, it is taking control of our grocery shopping that has become my strengthening elixir.

At some point, amidst all of this change, I looked around our house and realized, "I am in charge of feeding a child/children for the next sixteen years." Then I resolved, "I am going to kick ass at this."

So I fired up The Frugal Find, and then I borrowed a few books from the library written by women who call themselves The Coupon Mom and The Coupon Queen, and I devoured the information therein.

With help from FlyLady, I'd already learned some basics about meal planning, so that's been my starting point. And our closest grocery store is now Safeway, so I've started centering our meals around food that I can purchase either there or Trader Joe's.

I'm shoring up the shopping so tightly, I'd estimate our spending is down to about $500/month, and I think we can drill it down even tighter.

Costco is still an Achilles Heel for us -- I stood in the aisle last week, calculating whether their Morningstar Sausages are indeed a bargain, and I was able to determine with my newly math-fueled brain than NO! They are not! If I use coupons at Safeway, I can get this product for less, and in a more convenient package. Then I realized we are spending $100 on our annual membership. What the heck? Our membership there encourages me to waste money, plus I end up throwing away silly meatballs I purchased because I momentarily liked the sample. Then I pay an additional $100 for my folly?

Perhaps now that all of the girls are potty trained, I can let Costco go. I was romanced by their $0.19/unit diapers and their vastly superior wipes for years. But we are in a new era. This is 2012, the year I stopped taking it on the chin. In so, so many ways.

So for now, the most outward sign of my large internal change is the big stack of coupons in my fist and the determined look in my eye as I coast through the aisles of Safeway. Plus, the manager of Trader Joe's has consented to accept my oatmeal coupon.

Character and Happiness

God, as I understand the concept today, lives at the reservoir.

We have a reservoir down the road where I can run or walk the 3 mile trail, away from traffic and the gargantuan hills of our neighborhood.

And as soon as I start wondering if I'm crazy, or whether I'm wrong, or just who the hell do I think I AM, there is some power -- and here I'm calling it God -- that puts the right person in front of me on the trail.

It's happened three times in the last two weeks that, as I'm furrowing my forehead and getting dark in my thoughts, I hear someone call out my name. It's been three different friends, from three different parts of my life -- and it seemed to me to be the perfect person at that moment.

Today was the third incident, when I saw my friend M.. 

When I related my fears to M. regarding Chebbles' mind-numbing lessons at school, she gave me the precise right word to describe why it's important for children to be challenged, to face failure, to have to struggle a little through their academic lives -- "It's a matter of character," she said.

And that's exactly it. That's what we're going for.

I believe that without a properly developed character, a person cannot be happy. I first heard of this concept from Dr. Christine Carter, and I love the theories she espouses in Raising Happiness. Her newsletter is here.

Without having to WORK for adulation, and struggle for the prizes they receive, children eventually become depressed, waiting for gold stars to be lavished upon them for... nothing. 

Ask anyone who is in a position to hire kids in their early 20's -- there are vast numbers of these people cropping up, looking for jobs with an undeserved entitled air to them.

And that's another way to sum up my frustration with Chebbles' education. Right now she's enjoying a rip-roarin' time at recess with a bunch of chums. Then she just goes inside and aces a few worksheets, gets praise, then sits at her desk waiting for the fun ride home on the school bus -- so she can come home and read things that actually interest her.

This is a girl who, at dinner last night, said, "Mom, you're 40, and I'm 6, so that means you were 34 when I was born!"

(To be honest, I usually need a pen for that kind of calculation.) 

And at school she's being told to answer "6 - 2" and "6 - 4" again, and again, and again in her class. She is not allowed to take on more challenging work for fear that other parents will be offended that their children were not selected for the more challenging work, as I understand it.

So I needed M. to tell me the word I've been searching for -- I'm no expert, but I'm willing to guess that long-term life happiness is directly connected to being a person of good character -- happiness is related to surmounting challenge. Sure, we can have a nice, good time playing on the flat surfaces of life -- but the lasting joy comes from the vistas -- and we can't find a vista if we don't climb a mountain.

I feel like my child's mountain climbing gear is muddied from our homeschooling lessons and adventures, but now it's just sitting in the corner of the schoolroom while she waits for everyone else to learn to walk.

Educational quandary

Hub-D and I are wondering what to do about Chebbles' second grade year.

The results from her first grade year so far are mixed.

First, she loves school. She wants to go on the early bus, even though it means she just reads a book (today it was "James and the Giant Peach") and waits for her class to begin. She adores everything about school: recess, lunch, playing tag with the boys on the playground.

She hates it when I pull her out for classes or appointments, because she's afraid she's going to miss something. She adores school so much.

But on the other hand, she has learned almost nothing in the month she's been there. The materials are very simplistic for her -- her spelling words are "she" and "hill" and "ate."

She's regressed in her math knowledge. In December she was adding 47 + 22 + 108 and now she's looking at 4-1 and wondering, really? That's my whole math lesson?

On one hand, she's six.

On the other hand, she tested yesterday with the reading efficiency of an 8th grader (191 words/minute). She scored 100% in a 5th grade reading comprehension exam yesterday as well. She stayed up late last night to finish reading "Tales From Africa," a book for much older children, and she was thrilled by the stories.

If she stays at school, she's eventually going to forget how to learn, forget what a challenge is, how to fail.

Hub-D and I met with her teacher, principal, and school psychologist on Monday to ask (beg) that she be given differentiated assignments -- something that would be at least a little challenging for her.

The push-back we got was amazing. Absolutely no differentiated work of any kind will be forthcoming. We should just let her be a "whole child." They truly think something is wrong with us that we want Chebbles to work on something that would be interesting to her.

This educational system is going to morph her already extant perfectionism into a monster. She will eventually eschew anything that looks difficult because she's terrified of not mastering it immediately. Not to mention the social pressure she'll have to "fit in" and do the same "work" as everyone else.

The only alternative that seems viable is to return to homeschooling so that she is allowed (yes, ALLOWED, she is not permitted to read James and the Giant Peach in her reading time in the classroom because it's above grade level) to read things that interest her.

She wants to know so much, and she learns so quickly when presented with information that is new to her. But the chances of her learning anything "new" are bleak in a classroom setting.

But she loves school.

Ugh.

I know what it looks like

If you never met my child, or weren't paying much attention to her while she silently finished reading a book behind you, you would think I was a crazy Tiger Mom.

Harp lessons?

Homeschooling?

Extra science AND math lessons?

But let me tell you what life with Chebbles is like: It is being that guy who is charge of heaping coal from the tender into the engine of, let's say, Gordon. And you never have enough coal.

When Chebbles was an infant, my mother told me that the baby reminded her of "Johnny" the robot from the movie with Ally Sheedy, who kept saying "MORE DATA. MORE DATA. MORE DATA."

So what happened first? Chebbles' fierce intellect or my desperate search for additional data for her?

How do I explain that Chebbles is not happy unless she's learning? And it has to be something new?

Last night while I drove her all the way down to the university for her special math program, she transformed from a different girl -- effervescent rather than pissy -- as she sloughed off the effects of being told to "focus" on the busywork she received at her desk in the public school classroom. She read her animal encyclopedia and hollered out facts for my enjoyment during the drive.

Once we arrived, she skipped, and balanced on the walls, and held my hand and asked if she could learn Russian -- then decided that instead she'd like to make her own language, and began teaching it to me.

It looks like I'm driving my kid toward early graduation, to premature exposure to a wide range of academic subjects.

But I beg you, please notice who's behind the wheel.

The cat who lived

I had a third miscarriage last week.

This one died on the same day of gestation that my last miscarriage did: 8W6D. Her heart stopped beating that morning. I went for my 9 week ultrasound, and instead of the thrumming little chest I'd enjoyed in the ultrasounds in the previous weeks, there was just a floating body.

It looked perfect, other than having no heartbeat. The little head and arms and legs, sweet little embryonic proportions. It was rather tough to transition from "Hooray, I'm going to have a fourth child at age 40!" to "Looks like this is it, gang."

Last Friday I had a D&C. The experience was vastly better than the D&C I'd had in December 2006, owing to the incredible bedside manner of the OB I have now. I cried, the nurses were understanding. One told me that her daughter had just miscarried her first baby.

But I confess that although I dearly wanted the pregnancy to continue, to welcome another daughter (and I'm sure it was, judging by the acne she gave me and track record) there are silver linings, if not a uterine one.

I have my energy back, I'm no longer throwing up bile every day. I am no longer lurking around in the background, clutching my Salt and Vinegar Pringles and stevia-sweetened soda on ice. I have energy for my family, for jumping on the trampoline, to train for the half-marathon I'm running in December, for homeschooling and household management, for discipline and FlyLady-inspired cleaning sessions.

Yes I wanted that baby, and I'll think of her forever, but I discovered something in the midst of my grief with this miscarriage. For me, something happens when I get pregnant -- my arms grow a little longer to hold a potential new baby, my heart opens up just that much wider, to allow for another little being. And if the baby dies, my arms are STILL longer and my heart is that much wider -- this pregnancy may not have been in vain. I've discovered space and accommodation for more giving and love in my life.

I took the girls over to the Moraga Pear Festival on Saturday, hopped into an ARF mobile adoption van and promptly adopted the kitten who liked the girls the most. This black kitten had been licking at their fingers through the cage bars, eager to sniff and bat at their hands. When I held him, his purr was instantaneous and loud, even when the girls petted him (in Birdy's case, rather ham-handedly).

There I was, still bleeding, still dizzy from the aftereffects of the anesthetic and deep in grief over my lost baby, but I was able to redirect it into this ridiculously fuzzy cat who desperately needed a home.

The kitten, Rehnquist, has made himself absolutely at home. (Of course he was named after the Supreme Court Justice.) He's gorgeous and affectionate. In addition to his kitten chow, he eats any kind of food he finds on the ground -- hooray! And he follows us everywhere. He lets Birdy carry him around, even though she does it badly. He's fantastic.

If we hadn't come along, he'd still be in a cage. And because we adopted him, the ARF staff can save another cat from the local kill shelter. We made room, because I found I had room in my home and my heart -- room I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't been pregnant for those six exciting weeks that ended in devastation.

I think about Rehnquist's gestation. If there had been an ultrasound of him in his mama cat's belly, his heart would have beaten and beaten. He lived all the way from conception to gestation, he was born and he breathed and now he erupts with the most magnificent purr. Because he is alive.

My baby is not alive, she died last week. Her heart wasn't built for growing. But this kitten's heart is just fine. He is sleeping at the base of my chair right now, with his head resting on his paw, waiting for me to just look at him, to have any excuse to blink his green eyes at me and start thrumming along at my heels.

Visiting Oma in the 1990's-2000's

I would have been flying all day -- first from Boston, then later from San Francisco, and the sky would be lit up with sunset when my plane finally began circling, dipping through the clouds, landing at that miniature airport.

Oma would be wearing her red coat.

Oma was very particular as to which months I should come visit her. She forbade visits during the hottest months, so most of the summer was not a possibility. And not the coldest, iciest months, so the depths of Indiana winters remain a mystery to me.

So it would be an idyllic day in spring or fall when the plane would fly down from O'Hare and drop me into the LAF airfield. As my plane would taxi in toward the little facility, I could see the red coat as she stood peering (fruitlessly, mostly, owing to her macular degeneration) out the large plate glass windows of the arrival gate.

Among the colorful trees, the lit-up sky, then the dark confines of the airport, that was the color that woke me up, and almost always made me cry -- either as I approached the airport, or as my plane departed a few days later.

In later years, she wore a tiny gold guardian angel on the lapel of the red jacket -- I had given it to her after she had been told she was going to die from liver cancer, only to discover that she simply had an infection related to a scratch she had on her leg (an infection that became much worse than necessary because she couldn't see it was getting bad). She lived for more than 10 years after that "death sentence" and I liked to kid her about it.

When the plane landed, they would just pop open the door and affix a little stairway to the side of the plane. My luggage would be waiting for me on a little cart at the bottom of the stairs -- there were usually about a dozen fellow passengers, most of whom were on Purdue-related business.

And I would head into the airport and drop the luggage next to her and hug that woman.

I'd put Oma's smell up against 99% of grandmothers out there -- it was, I believe, a combination of a clear green apple-scented glycerin soap she used, a dash of some variety of 4711, and lurking in her hair would be a cookie-baking smell.

She always baked cookies right before I arrived. It had been established by the time I was 10 what my favorite cookies were, and they were manufactured for me all the way up until her death, when she insisted on a friend baking them for me -- faithful to her recipe -- after she had gone completely blind and was relatively infirm.

Those cookies were oatmeal/butterscotch chip. And she used some citrus zest in most of her cookies, which gave them a perfect little zing. There would be a bag of them waiting for me when we arrived at Apartment 1318 at Westminster Village Retirement Community -- one on top of the fridge, and (jackpot!) one inside the freezer as well. Throughout the weekend of my visit, I would have my hands in that bag after and between every meal. If there were any left by the time I left, they would be packed in my luggage, ostensibly to share with my friends.

Oma was the absolute master in making me feel special. From the moment I was at her side, she would be telling me that, repeatedly. "You are so special, do you know how special you are? Be careful with yourself, with your body, because you are very, very special."

Really, thank goodness for grandparents who make you feel like you might possibly be the second coming of The Messiah, even when you're screwing up at work and another man has just broken up with you, and you haven't slept well for a long time. Because at Oma's retirement community, where I'd stay in a guest room within the facility, I slept like a rock.

"How did you sleep?" she'd ask when I'd pop back into Apartment 1318 the first morning after my arrival. My hair would be wet, I might have even gone running on the flat gravel roads that lead into the cornfields surrounding Westminster Village before I came to see her. Oma's apartment would smell like oatmeal and cookies, and dish soap and general goodness, and we would sit together at her folding table while I ate breakfast, and I'd read her Ann Landers.

After I read the query submitted to Ann Landers, we'd both sit back and think what advice WE would proffer to this poor soul. Both Oma and I were blessed with/suffered from a high moral ground and a certain amount of pitiless judgement. So many of these characters would get raked over our collected coals. About half the time, we'd agree with Ann's assessment. But Ann got softer over the years, and more noncommittal in her answers. Really, it lacked satisfaction.

We'd then find out what the people in For Better or For Worse were up to. We were vociferously opposed to Elizabeth's college boyfriend, Eric, who had that infuriating dimple. We were immensely relieved when she finally took up with Anthony again, after he was dumped by that snotty French Canadian he'd married.

Then after gabbing over breakfast and washing up her white porcelain dishes, we'd find her red coat again and head out into the Lafayette day.

I'd hold onto the crook of her arm, owing to her blindness, and in our wool coats, with the little angel gleaming from her lapel, we'd be unstoppable.