A Prayer Request

I've been struggling for about a year.  If you know me in real life you may have noticed that I've been more withdrawn and almost completely absent from social media.  You should know that these are bad signs for extroverted me. I need help.  My family needs help.  Please pray for us.

For almost a year I have been pretty depressed (I've had ups and downs, but lots of downs) and feel like I've just barely been surviving.  For example, this school year it's been hard (and almost impossible some days) to just get out of bed to start school before 10am.  I've started seeing a professional counselor.  Please pray that I'll have strength.

My depression is rooted in stress and exhaustion over our abysmal financial situation.  Hubby needs more employment.  Please pray that he'll be able to find the jobs that will be best for our family.  Please pray that he'll have mental clarity so he won't be overwhelmed and discouraged by the process.

I love Hubby.  He's my best friend.  But right now we're not doing so great.  We've disappointed each other.  We've gone through (and came out together stronger on the other side) some hard trials in the past.  We can get through this one, but not without the help of our Father in Heaven. Please pray for us.

I'm grateful for the blessings that we've received over these many years and am grateful for the wonderful people that have tried to buoy us up.  If you want to help us now, please don't put money anonymously in our mailbox or drop off new appliances on our doorstep. Such gifts only make me feel worse because I am so freakin' sick and tired of being a charity case, and we need more long-term solutions that will give us dignity.

If you want to help, then instead please give Hubby encouragement in his job searching.  Offer to proof-read his resume or cover letters.  Send job leads his way.  If you live near us, contact him if your middle/high school student needs tutoring in Social Studies or if you're interested in learning how to do ballroom/Latin dance.  You could also support my small side business or send your friends my way if they're looking for a piano teacher.  If you belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, please put our names on your temple's prayer roll.  Fast for us.

But above all, just remember us in your prayers.  Thank you!

See You in the New Year!

I'm taking a small blogging break. This will be the last post to go up until January.

Merry Christmas!

Goodbyes Are So Hard

One of my best friends moved to Texas. (It should be noted that this isn't the first close friend of mine to pack up her adorable children and move all the way to Texas in recent years!)

Before her and her family left, she randomly brought me this orchid.  It's tall and gorgeous, just like her.  When it inevitably dies (I've got a black thumb!) that means I'm going to be extra sad.

We have a funny story about the start of our friendship.  When it was my family's turn to clean the church building early on a Saturday morning, I sent all the kiddos and Hubby and stayed home with baby Quartus.  Friend and her husband were also assigned to clean the church that morning.  Apparently my girls really loved working with them, and Tertius already knew Friend because she was his Nursery teacher.

A little while later, I had all the kids with me at Walmart and we ended up in line near Friend and her husband.  My kids kept waving to them and telling me that they knew them.  I recognized them from church but I HATE running into people that I know when I'm shopping.  If I see someone that I know, I will literally duck down a different aisle.  There are only a few people that I don't do this for.  I know, I'm a nutcase.  So anyway, I pretended that I didn't see them and acted like I was very distracted and busy.  She thought I was either really weird or really rude.  Maybe both.

Eventually, I was called to serve in Nursery so we got to know each other a little.

When Quartus turned one, we had a big birthday party at our house and invited a ton of people.  Friend and her husband came and when they left, she thanked me for inviting them.  I said something stupid like, "Of course!  We basically invited everybody."

Later it hit me how ridiculous that sounded.  I'm so awkward!  Basically it sounded like, "You aren't special.  I was just trying to find warm bodies to fill space."  The truth was that in Nursery Quartus really gravitated toward her and I was really enjoying getting to know her, too.

I immediately texted her, explained, and invited them over for dinner.  That first dinner turned into many dinners and game nights.

For me, though, the connection between our two families didn't really cement until the day that I asked on social media if any of my friends would be interested in doing a regular babysitting exchange.  Her husband was the only person to respond with serious interest.  This was amazing to me considering we had 4 kids and they only had one baby.  And for a while, we used them more than they used us.  But they were so generous and kind.  They love our kids.  Friend and I got closer and I became a pseudo-aunt to her (now 3 total) children.

I will always cherish the memories of music class together, family dinners, and girls nights sans children.

A couple days before they left I took the two girls for the whole day so Friend could get some last packing and cleaning done. I picked them up early in the morning and we went to the zoo and played at my house. I fed them dinner one last time before dropping them back to their mommy.

Then that night we said our goodbyes. I cried buckets the whole way home.

I miss my friend, but thanks to the wonders of technology, we can still talk and keep involved with each others' lives (Love the Marco Polo app!) So saying goodbye to the kiddos was the hardest. Even though I can see videos of them and vice versa, it's not the same. They also have (real) family still in this area so they'll conceivably visit once in a while. But it's hard for little kids to maintain meaningful relationships with adults that aren't a part of their everyday life.

Despite all this sadness though, I am so excited for Friend and her family! This was such a positive opportunity for them and I can't wait to hear about all their adventures and new friends they make there.

To Texas: stop taking my friends!
To Friends: I love you and wish you all the best!

"Our children can either learn it from us or learn it from the streets."

Hubby posted this hilarious status on his Facebook.  Had to share it here!

"Shirley doesn't want to teach our youngest how to play the piano yet, because she believes he's too young to start. Unsatisfied, it appears the boy has started to teach himself. We've thus had to have another of those hard realizations that our children can either learn something from us or learn it from the streets."

 The thought of someone skulking around in a back alley, secretly learning piano reminded me of this classic Studio C sketch.

Kid-Run Newspaper

As everyone woke up and came out to the living room, we were greeted by this on a small table:

Apparently the girls created a newspaper.  There were enough copies for all of us.  The paper of course started with front page "news."

Inside is a comic (see detail below), an advice column, community calendar, and a Sudoku puzzle.

The comic is called Cruddy Kid.  

You'll notice that there was only a place holder and request for the advice column.  Obviously, they intend to publish another edition.  Right next to the newspapers was this box and index cards so we could write our questions.

The final page was a quiz.

I look forward to seeing what they put in the next edition!  These kids are so freakin' creative!

Lego Robot Nerds

 As I've said before, we're a Lego-loving family, especially my middle two kids.  I'm also trying to encourage coding skills (the kids play a programming logic board game called Code Master and they're doing things on Scratch.)

A few years ago Secundus took two semesters of a Lego WeDo class.  She LOVED the classes but I didn't love the location.  The next year I decided to instead just buy the WeDo 2.0 kit so she could do it at home and also teach Tertius.  Buying the kit was comparable to paying for a one semester class for one student! (Thankfully our charter school purchased it for us and we can keep it as long as we're enrolled.)

This year Secundus decided she was way too advanced for WeDo and was ready to move on to Mindstorms.  This year I really wanted to scale back the number of classes/number of times we leave the house during regular school hours (for my own sanity!)  So I really didn't want to sign her up for a Mindstorms class.  However, when I saw that purchasing the kit was more than $400 I about choked!  At the end of the year we would probably have enough school funds left to buy it, but I was going to make her wait for now.  Secundus was bummed to say the least.

But thankfully the school came to the rescue! Our school has a garage where they collect all of the school supplies, textbooks, science kits, and the like when families dis-enroll or are otherwise finished with them.  Since the school already owns these items, they are available for free for any other family that wants to use them.  In the past we could ask our supervising teacher to go to the garage and pick up things for us, but we had no way of knowing what was available and you were lucky if your teacher was willing to take the time to drive out there and search.  In the past year, though, the school has made great strides in making it more accessible to all families!  Now we can search the online database, place a reservation, and then have it mailed to us (if our teacher is unable or unwilling to go get it.)  It's so awesome!  I reserved so many things this summer!  I found lots of necessary curriculum that I was planning to purchase, books that are nice to have, plus a ton of fun things that I knew my kids would appreciate.

So the point of all that is to say that I was able to get Mindstorms EV3 and the older version of Mindstorms for FREE from our school garage!

Today during science time the boys chose to do WeDo, with Tertius acting as Quartus' teacher, and the girls did Mindstorms together.  It made my heart so happy to see them excitedly working together on their projects!

Pen Stealer

"Here, Mommy, you can have this."

"Thanks, but why?" (This is a random pen I had given Quartus to keep in his doctor kit so he could pretend to write prescriptions.)

"In case [Secundus] steals your pens again!"

When I helped the girls clean their bedroom, we found no fewer than 3 pencils that belonged to Tertius and 5 pens that belonged to me. Additionally, when we cleaned out everyone's school baskets at the beginning of the school year, there was a handful of pens and pencils that did not belong to Secundus at the bottom of her basket. 

Quartus is so sweet! He's so kind to help me deal with the official family pen thief. 😝

Homeschooling Means...#36

...when your friend, who loves children's books more than you, purges her massive collection, she might generously gift two full boxes to you!

Thank you so much, friend!!

(This series is meant to be mostly lighthearted and fun.  Some may be serious, but most will be silly, braggy, or of the keepin'-it-real variety.  No homeschool is the same.  And some of these things could be said by public school parents.  This is just to highlight MY experience with MY homeschool and MY children.  Enjoy these little insights into our life and feel free to share your own "Homeschooling means..." in the comments!)

Collaborative Fiction Writing

Primus loves to do Google Hangouts with a group of her friends. I think she's the youngest in this group so I'm thankful they haven't decided yet that she's too immature. They're good kids!

I'm also thankful that one of the girls' parents is very involved on their general chat page so there's lots of adult supervision in the conversation. I also get notifications so I can see when the girls are talking. 

Their general chat page is full of memes and silliness mostly. The page that I find the most interesting is their collaborative fiction story. They just all contribute to it when they have time. You can see in the screen shot above that this morning "Friend A" added some things.  When it's regular text, then that is regular story text or point-of-view notes. The stuff in parenthesis are side notes to each other.

To my knowledge, they don't have an agreed-upon outline for the story or character development. These girls like to create characters for themselves that belong in the already established worlds they love such as Big Hero 6, Voltron, Gravity Falls, Rise of the Guardians, Teen Titans, and Young Justice. So the stories they work on together are fan-fiction. The current story is Big Hero 6. They'll work on the same one for weeks until they grow tired of it and someone suggests a new one.

Primus tells me that they have a big list of their fan-fic characters. Every time they start a new story, if it's one they had worked on in the past, they pick new characters from the list and start fresh. It sounds like these plots never really reach a conclusion. The girls are just having fun exercising their creativity. This is a natural extension of the imaginative play they did with their dolls just a few years ago. 

I think it's so cool! The girl that I would guess is the ring-leader of the group self published a full novel a while back and Primus is always working on her own fantasy stories. Like the advice I read years ago and keep telling Hubby, who's an aspiring fiction writer himself, "Writers Write." You've got to be constantly writing something. Exercise those writing muscles, even if it's not on the book that you're hoping to publish one day.

Maybe my daughter will be a published author one day. And maybe this will just be a fun way for her to connect with her friends and will never lead to anything else. Either way, it's a good thing!

First Talk

Despite our many demands that she stop growing up, Primus is now 12.  She's serving in her first ever church calling as Beehive President and gave her first Sacrament Meeting talk.  She did a great job!

When she was preparing for her talk, we emphasized to her that she needed to shoot for as close to five minutes long as she could (and to talk slowly.)  She stressed about that for a little while (when you've only given 2 minute talks in Primary and in the Primary program, 5 minutes seems impossibly long!) but thankfully wasn't nervous about speaking in front of the whole congregation.

She wrote it on her own, with a handful of rewrites over the course of two weeks to keep adding to the length.  And then the night before she presented it, we listened to her practice and only made one suggestion for a small change.  She was so proud of herself!  Below I've included her entire talk.

Today I was asked to talk about being honest and true.  I based my talk on one that Sister Ann M. Dibb, second counselor in the Young Women General Presidency gave in the April 2011 General Conference.  It was titled, I Believe in Being Honest and True.  In this she said, "being true to our beliefs-even when doing so isn't popular, easy, or fun-keeps us safely on the path that leads to eternal life with our Heavenly Father."  When I read that sentence, I thought about a situation in one of the books that I read.  The Sisters Grimm, book 4, Once Upon a Crime.

In this book, Sabrina Grimm decides to leave the family business because so many people hate her family.  But after one encounter with a huge robot bent on destroying the Grimm family, and destroying the city in the process, she realizes that if she doesn't help her family there will be world destruction and she will never have the happy family she has always wanted.  So her family isn't popular and it wasn't easy or fun to stand beside them.  But that's what she needed to do to keep herself, her sister, and everyone she cared about safe, but also to keep on the path to a happy family life.

This situation is very similar to the story of Esther.  In the story of Ester, the king is going to destroy her people, the Jews.  Like Sabrina, it would have been easier for both of them to not do anything but they both chose to risk their life for their beliefs, their family, and in Esther's case, her people.

For me, being honest means not to lie and to never hide secrets from your parents.  My mom would tell us, "if someone tells you a secret and says not to tell you parents, you tell me and your father immediately." She would also teach us, "if someone says they were sent by me to pick you up and you don't know them, ask them what the password is."  The password she would tell them made us kids sure that they were safe and that they were telling the truth.

Sister Ann M. Dibb shared a story, "A man...went one evening to steal corn from a neighbor's field.  He took his little boy with him to sit on the fence and to keep a lookout, so as to give a warning in case anyone should come along.  The man jumped over the fence with a large bag on his arm, and before commencing to take the corn he looked all around, first one way and then the other, and not seeing any person, he was just about to fill his bag.  Then the boy called out, 'Father, there is one way you haven't look yet!...You forgot to look up.'" This story reminds us that our Heavenly Father always knows, and we are ultimately accountable to him.

The first line in the Thirteenth Article of Faith says, "We believe in being honest and true." This means we will try our best at being honest, and true.  The Ninth Commandment states: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." That means we will always tell the truth even if it will get someone you care for in trouble.

Imagine yourself in a situation like this.  You and your friends are hanging out at lunch and one of them starts a fight.  You somehow get involved and you get a black eye.  A teacher comes and stops the fight but takes you and the friend to the principal's office.  She asks who started the fight and your friend says that they didn't.  Then she asks you.  What would you do?  Telling the truth would get your friend in trouble but lying would not be right.  Some of us might face problems like this more than others.  It will always be best to be honest and tell the truth.

Being honest and true can be hard sometimes, but it's worth it in the end.  If we follow the prophets words we are being honest and true to our religion.  When I'm being honest and true I feel like I'm getting closer to Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.  I believe that being honest and true will bring us great rewards in heaven and that we will be happy in the day of judgement.

I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Kindergarten Geography

Last year Quartus studied map skills with Beginning Geography grade K-2 by Evan Moor, just like all my other kids did during Kindergarten.  I highly recommend it!

At the end of the book, it has some great worksheets of each continent with animals and their habitats.  When my little one is done with the whole workbook, then I photocopy these maps, put them in a 3 prong folder, and then we pull  The Big Book of Animals by DK Publishing off the shelf.

 

Quartus looks at one of the continent map worksheets, chooses an animal, then finds it's name and habitat in the map key.

Then he finds that habitat in the book.  There's one or two full color pages for each region.  I love that it doesn't just have a generic "forest" page, for example.  There are sections for North American Forests, Central American Rain Forests, South American Rain Forests, African Rain Forests, Madagascan Rain Forests, European Deciduous Forests, European Coniferous Forests, and Asian Tropical Forests.  This makes the book ideal for this activity.

Next, I have him read all the animal names on the page.

Once he chooses one of the animals that he likes, he has to draw it "near it's friend" from the same habitat on the map.

While he draws, I read the description of the animal he chose out loud and/or teach additional tidbits that I know.

Finally, he writes the name of the animal right next to it.

 I love this activity because it has so much educational value and provides opportunity to practice things from different subjects!

• review map skills (compass directions, map key)
• learn continent names and location on world map
• use table of contents to find specific pages
• review what makes habitats different from each other/why certain animals thrive in certain places
• practice drawing skills
• reading
• writing

Homeschooling Means...#35

...sitting on mom's lap to do geography. And yes, we're both still in pajamas.

(This series is meant to be mostly lighthearted and fun.  Some may be serious, but most will be silly, braggy, or of the keepin'-it-real variety.  No homeschool is the same.  And some of these things could be said by public school parents.  This is just to highlight MY experience with MY homeschool and MY children.  Enjoy these little insights into our life and feel free to share your own "Homeschooling means..." in the comments!)

Musical Theater

I love attending musical theater!  I had the opportunity to see Bye Bye Birdie with my mother-in-law and it was great!

I'm thankful that my mother-in-law also loves musicals and often generously brings me along.

I'm thankful that my mother-in-law has friends who also love musicals. We got the Bye Bye Birdie tickets because some friends of hers were unable to go at the last minute and offered them to us.

I'm thankful that we have friends in theater. Back when we were newly married and had extra time and money, the only times Hubby was interested in going to a play was if his best friend was in it.  We saw Fiddler on the Roof, Ragtime, Oklahoma, plus a couple non-musicals.  This friend and his wife have also generously taken my kiddos to a few children's productions.

I'm thankful that my kids enjoy performing in musical theater and that we found a good class for them.

Unless you count the couple of musical presentations that I did as a youth with my church, I've never performed in any theater productions.  But I sure enjoy watching the fruit of others' labors!

No More Shaving

One day a few years ago I was sitting on the floor in the Nursery at church, playing with one of the 3 year olds.  I was wearing a knee-length skirt and had my bare legs stretched out in front of me.  This innocent angel asked me, "Why do you have hair on your legs?"  My reply was, "Because I'm a mammal."  This prompted giggles from the other ladies in the room and a follow-up question of, "What's a mammal?" from my little friend. 

I had decided a few years before this incident that I was done with buying into our culture's obsession with female hairlessness.  Shaving was never something that I enjoyed doing or was totally convinced was worth it.  Sure, silky smooth legs feel amazing between clean bed sheets, but is that fleeting feeling (stubble! grrr!) worth the time, money, and risk of cuts and infection?  For me, the answer was often "no." 

Then in college I took a Women's History class.  One section was spent studying old advertising, and I realized that there was a whole billion-dollar "beauty" industry that made more money when it could convince me that I wasn't beautiful the way God made me.  That made me sick.  (And don't even get me started on the absurd double standard that a man with his natural body hair is fine but a woman with her natural body hair is disgusting!) This was big in convincing me to ditch my makeup (another thing that I didn't do because I enjoyed it) and razor for good.  I've talked about this before in this post.

It did take me a while longer to ignore social pressure and quit being embarrassed about choosing to let my body hair grow the way it was designed to. 

If you're a woman (or man) who loves to be hairless for whatever reason, then that's fine.  You do you.  My point is that both are valid options. 

Here's some good articles on the subject, written by people that are more knowledgeable and eloquent than myself:

Who decided women should shave their legs and underarms? by Cecil Adams

Letting your hair down by Denise Winterman

Why I Will Never Shave My Legs Again by Suzanne Weiss

"The Office" Humor, Brought to You by Dr. Seuss