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| Why is it that each week, on the day after Girl Scouts, my daughter is a slightly different kid? Is it the late night? Maybe. It's funny, though, because this slightly different Katie is an awful lot like some of the girls at the meeting. These are not girls that Katie is friends with. She doesn't seem to admire them, or even really like them. In fact, during the meetings it seems like Katie does not even notice them. But then the next day, there is an echo of these girls in my daughter's face, in her movements, and in her voice.
I suppose I ought to say that these girls are not behaving terribly. I am not shocked by their behavior. They aren't doing anything quite bad enough to get into any trouble. In fact, I can't describe how they act without sounding like a cranky old lady. Honestly, I think they are basically well brought up little girls who are playing at being cool. They put on a shallow, breezy, don't-give-a-shit attitude the way they might put on costumes from a dress-up trunk. There is a lot of hair flipping. It's not horrible, but I don't like it.
I especially don't like to see it in my odd, quirky, artistic, nerdy, imaginative, earnest, honest, just-who-she-ought-to-be baby girl!
Perhaps interacting with age-peers is overrated.
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| Like last year, we've been doing lessons most every weekday this summer. It isn't a lot of the day, about 2 hours every morning, sometimes a little less. And the lessons have been very relaxed and simple. My basic outline for each day is to have one child on the computer, allowed to select from a variety of officially educational websites, while I work with the other on some kind of math exercise and some kind of writing exercise. Then we switch. Then we go sit on the couch together and I read to them from one or more of the many books I've run across that I thought might be interesting for "school". We've been slowly making our way through Jack London's White Fang. We've also read some Tolkien (Tom couldn't remember The Scouring of The Shire), some Shakespeare adaptations, and about world religions, roly-polys, human anatomy, how telephones work, and I can't remember what all else
Note: You see, this is the portion of the blog entry where I soothe any lurking bad-Homeschool-Mama fears by enumerating all the wonderful things we've done. It is a common practice, and should not be mistaken for trying to make other Homeschool Mamas feel bad because they haven't done one or more of the things on the list. These lists always read more impressive than the real experience.
Yesterday we skipped lessons so that we could meet up with some friends and play in the park. Today I was considering skipping lessons so that I could do some cleaning before we go swimming in the afternoon. As I was telling the kids roughly what the schedule for the day is, I decided to compromise and do an hour of lessons, and then get on to cleaning.
Upon that announcement, my daughter sighed with relief and said, "I was hoping for lessons today." My jaw dropped in anstonishment, quickly followed by a desire to do a Snoopy dance.
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| I took a week off from the internet. I did this because I was becoming more compulsive about the computer, not being able to walk past it without interacting with it in some way. I don't like that. So, a little holiday to recalibrate my habits.
The funny thing is that I didn't miss the things I thought I would. I really didn't miss my email much at all, except a couple of times when not having it was inconvenient. I didn't miss Facebook at all. This surprised me, because Facebook has become my timewaster of choice lately.
I was also surprised to find that no internet did not translate into more productivity around the house. Well, maybe a bit more, but mostly I still found ways to not do the laundry. I am good at not doing the laundry.
The biggest surprise of all was what I did miss from the internet. I really, really, really missed weather.com. We don't have TV or get newspapers. I was reduced to calling the weather line. This was an unsatisfactory substitute for the forecasts that are constantly updated, broken down by hour, and fraught with misplaced accuracy that you get from weather.com.
The other website I found I could not live without is our local library's. I wasn't so much concerned with not being able to check which books were coming due, because I made sure nothing was due during my internet vacation. What I really missed was being able to browse the catalog and put random things on hold to pick up later, and, of course, to check back to see which of the random things were ready for us to pick up. It's like a little, mini-Christmas whenever I see that we have books to pick up from the library. It makes me happy, and I missed that.
But now I am back online, and I will not take my weather forecasts and library accessibility for granted.
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| Heard from Tom in the tub (sung at top volume):
I'm farting in the bathtub and I'm glad I'm not in France!
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| Katie is taking a bubble bath right now. She just called me into the bathroom. She wanted to show me A Reenactment of Odysseus and the Clapping Rocks. First she made a long channel down the center of the mountain of bubbles. Then she wound up the Altoids-tin paddle boat, and set it off between the towering bubble cliffs. Sadly, in this version, Odysseus and his men were all crushed when their paddle boat stalled halfway through the perilous passage.
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