Life Learning Family

It's Come to This

2011-08-07T08:27:00.005-05:00

There is nothing anyone can do to make my mother happy.

This is the sad reality I have recently come to accept, painfully. For the past 9 months, my family has exhausted itself trying to make my mother happy. It must be part of her dementia, or how the dementia manifests itself. Before her mind started going, complaining was just not part of her personality. Now it has consumed her, she complains about everything we have done to assist her.

Mom came for a visit in November last year. She wanted to try living in her house alone, after spending almost a year living with my sister in New Mexico after my father died. Mom made it one night in her house and then wanted to stay with my family. While she was not a burden living with us, it was stressful. She needs help with everything and is not capable of entertaining herself. We are a very busy homeschooling family, so she came with us to all of our activities. This squished the kids in the back seat of the car, leading to stressful drives. Mom also took over Medium's room, which she agreed to up front but came to resent later. The kids had to be quiet in the evening when Grandma went to bed and put up with a lot of her quirks.

When she decided to move back to the area permanently, we researched Continuing Care Retirement Communities, settled on one nearly half an hour away and moved her in. Mom was placed on the Assisted Living floor. The daily list of activities was encouraging, the community is full of vibrant seniors, many of whom use walkers or wheelchairs and are engaged in their surroundings. It is also in a beautiful place with many walking paths nearby, including one right outside the facility. It seemed the perfect place.

When Mom moved in, the community was experiencing an outbreak of a stomach bug. We hadn't counted on contagious diseases being a part of her new life. It was a prolonged outbreak because it passed quickly and spread even quicker, so people had it multiple times. The facility responded appropriately, shutting down the 5th floor (the Assisted Living floor) when it became a problem keeping residents in their apartments for the required 48 hours after the last symptom. I spent 6 weeks taking my mother somewhere every day to keep her from going stir crazy. There were no activities during the outbreak, to reduce the spread of the virus. Then Mom got it. Mark picked her up that day to take her shopping or for a walk, and she had forgotten she still had diarrhea. This is how the virus spread. My entire family got it.

When the virus passed, activities started and we were hopeful that Mom would have a nice, fulfilling life. Except she couldn't remember anyone's names or the conversations she had with them to make friends. And she didn't like any of the activities that weren't exercise related. That knocked out card games, word games, crafts, movies and book discussions - all those things that help with memory function. Plus, Mom thought the exercise programs too easy. So, we had her join the fitness center where she could work at her own pace three times a week with the help of a physical therapist. After we were gone one weekend in March for the fabulous InHome Conference and Mom decided to go for a walk with another memory impaired resident in 30 degree weather and got lost, we hired someone to come take her for a walk each day.

We thought Mom would adjust and learn to love the place. She complained about being dragged to activities, she complained about having nothing to do. She could not turn on her own television to watch the Australian Open or Wimbledon, so we drove out there to turn it on for her. She would either forget how to turn on her radio or end up accidentally changing the station, and then forgot to ask for help with it, so she was miserable without her music. She wandered throughout the building. On at least two occasions, she went to the concierge in the middle of the night in her pajamas to demand to be given her morning pills.

Then she started telling everyone how much she hated the place. As the weather improved and our schedules lightened up for the summer, we began taking her to her house in Indiana for the weekends. This became the only place she was happy, which meant we took her there nearly every weekend and for a whole week in July. She told everyone she ran into how much she hated living in her CCRC and even said "I don't know why they make me live there."

I spent a month working to arrange for live-in caregivers so Mom could live in her own home. (This took longer because of three major storms that took out our power three times, caused major tree damage, house damage from our tree to the neighbor's house, a complete loss of the entire contents of two refrigerators and a standing freezer.) The caregivers can live with her on an alternating schedule, so the two of them can get some respite and days off. They have agreed to walk an hour a day with my mother, take her to the store, hairdresser, etc. Mom can be in her own home, with her own books and her own schedule.

It's been a week. And she hates it. She has all the same complaints as she had in Assisted Living. I believe, though, that she is safer and better taken care of.

I had hoped for a magic bullet. Now I know there is none. My mother does not understand what is happening to her. The only thing that would make her happy would be to have her old life back. Her life before dementia and before my father's Parkinson's. I can't do that for her and can't continue to sacrifice my family and home to try to make her happy.

Maybe with time she will come to accept where she is in life. Maybe she will rail against it until the very end.

It is beyond sad.

Good Impact

2011-05-17T22:35:00.003-05:00

I consider myself to be fortunate to have wonderful friends. I'm always learning something new from them, forever expanding my horizons and changing my way of thinking.

One friend suggested having a documentary discussion group at our weekly park days with the homeschool group. We selected the film No Impact Man, but then didn't discuss it much. We will probably talk about it more at a future park day. I'm glad I watched it. While I don't think I could go so far as to stop buying toilet paper, the film made me think about how big of an impact my family has on the environment. Yes, we regularly spill over our five recycling bins each week, but wouldn't it be better to not have all that stuff to recycle in the first place?

The movie made me think of all the ways I used to be better about reducing our waste and how far I have slipped back into the mainstream in the past few years. We used to have worms eating my garbage. We had an indoor electric composter for a while. We have had pets that eat our vegetable scraps. All those have gone by the wayside - the worms were freed when they ate too slowly, the composter died under the weight of our bread crusts and banana peels, and we are on our last rabbit. She has lived two years beyond her expected life cycle.

Between No Impact Man and the Polar Bear lecture a week or so ago, I'm going headlong on a bender about our consumption and waste. My benders are seldom pretty.

Today's target is our food. Actually, that has been a target for a few days now. We've been eating more meatless meals and less processed food. Or trying to. I decided we should be making our own bread again. Back when we had just two kids and when they were less busy, I made bread all the time. Complicated breads and simple bread machine loaves.

Today, I opted for a bread machine loaf. Yesterday I made foccacia on the grill, which got me on a roll. I found a recipe someone gave me that I had been meaning to try. When I got back from taking Small to his one hour dance class, I ran out again to get the strange ingredient - mashed potato flakes. I had a little guilt because I am capable of making my own mashed potato flakes in my dehydrator, but wanted to ride the wave of the desire to use the bread machine.

Nothing is simple or straightforward in a house with three kids, so getting the ingredients (while scoring a clearance sale on Italian sausage half off, there goes the meat reduction thing) was easy enough, but I pushed the envelope on the time factor. I asked Large to water the outside pots while encouraging Medium to practice her 4th half hour of piano for the day, and scurried off to the kitchen to put in the ingredients for the machine. But, the rain barrel was full and strangely off its cinder blocks with the spout smashed in, so Large needed more help. The phone rang and a new assignment fell on my lap. I picked up a weeping Small who was worried about me being five minutes late, did a little more cooking, had a non-text conversation with Mark, another dance class for the older two, another round-trip to the north side and came home to a sleeping house and a completed four hour bread machine cycle. This is what I found inside.

A failure to add yeast. It is a large hockey puck. Or maybe a shot put. Waste. Impact.

On the other hand, between runs to the dance center, I managed to put in a double batch of granola. I left instructions with the men of the house for completion and after discovering the bread disaster, I found this.

Breakfast! And I have my friends to thank for it.

Give and Take

2011-05-14T13:00:00.003-05:00

Ever since my Mom moved back to our area, we have been taking her to her house on the Indiana dunes every couple of weeks. This means that one or two weekends every month we lose time to spend on our house, yard, garden. It means a much longer drive to Large's dance classes at the Academy of the Joffrey downtown. It means we have to arrange for someone to take care of our menagerie. In general, it is a disruption and has added another layer of complication to our lives.

On the other hand, we get to spend time in one of the most beautiful places in the Midwest. We get to stay in a comfortable house at least twice the size of our own. We get to cook dinner in a kitchen that affords us the opportunity to see an amazing variety of birds out the window. We wash dishes while watching hummingbirds at the feeder. In summer we get to see lizards run around outside, frogs perch on the windows at night and enjoy our selves for hours on end on a deserted beach.

So, we don't complain. We are learning how to work around the disruption to our domestic routine. As long as the house is important to my mother, she should be able to keep it and visit it whenever possible. She wants to have more big family gatherings here, even if her days of cooking dinner have passed her by. She gets confused in the house, misplacing things. But she knows it is hers and it reminds her pleasantly of my father. Just after he died, it was hard for her to be in the house he built. Too many ghosts of his long decline were lingering to disturb her sleep. She focuses more now on the happy memories now that some time has passed. As do I.

It is always a big homecoming to my mom when we drive up. She thinks it has been months since she was there, when really it has just been a few weeks. She marvels at how clean everything is, forgetting my efforts to tidy up when we leave and ignoring the dead bugs everywhere. She checks on the fish, who are always happy to see her and be overfed. She asks me to build a fire. The house brings her a lot of pleasure, but also some anxiety. It's size is overwhelming, she's always looking for clues around the rooms to remember what she is supposed to be doing. She's always anxious about leaving, about getting the day and time right to leave. In a way, it's probably a relief to her to go back to her apartment, to her other home which also doesn't quite feel like home.

The kids enjoy their time there. When it rains, they read, use my father's art supplies or play wii. When it doesn't rain, they are outside exploring or on the beach. It's a magical place for them, an integral part of their childhood. They are so lucky.

Unexpected Moments

2011-05-11T10:15:00.003-05:00

This past Saturday, I had an unexpected addition to a planned visit to the Art Institute with Medium. We sometimes hit the Art Institute with Large is at his Joffrey class. Small decided at the last minute that he really, desperately wanted to come along. I suspect he just really, desperately didn't want to go with Mark and my Mom on their walk, to a plant sale and shopping at the Jewel. He pleaded his case impressively while we were hurrying to get Large to class on time and we brought him along, full of conditions.

Medium and I wanted to do the audio tour of the King, Queens and Courtiers exhibit, did he understand that? It's a half mile walk to the Art Institute from the parking garage near the Joffrey and he wasn't to complain on the walk. We were going to go to the plant sale at the Lurie Garden afterwards and he couldn't complain about that either. Yes, yes, yes, he got it.

For being only 7, Small did very well with the audio tour. No, he didn't make it to the end. Yes, much of the time it seemed like he was only interested in using the device, announcing "Done!" each time he got to the end of a segment. But he got what he could out of it. Because we were 45 minutes into it by the time we got to the Da Vinci, he was not all that impressed. And he didn't like the chicken fingers at lunch, but my fish and chips weren't all that great either.

What he loved was being with us, having his big sister explain things, hold his hand while crossing the street and gripping mine when he was afraid of the bridge going over Monroe to the Modern Wing. It was an unexpected group of happy, tender moments.

Mothers

2011-05-08T09:07:00.004-05:00

It has been six months now since my mother returned to the area. She went to stay with my sister in New Mexico after my father died, but came back for a visit and decided to stay.

At first she lived with us. That was a challenge in many ways, but we knew it was temporary. We found a Continuing Care Retirement Community for her nearby and she was placed in assisted living. While physically very active, she is declining mentally and needs help with many little every day things.

Her apartment is 25 minutes away from my home. There are many, many places she could have lived in that were closer. Some of those met her first two basic requirements: no religious affiliation and no buy-in. But her biggest requirement was to live in a place where she can walk every day the weather cooperates. Most of the winter, I bemoaned the fact that the drive to see her was longer than I wanted it to be. Now, I am grateful and believe we made the right decision.

My mom isn't one of those little old ladies who is content to walk to the duck pond and back. She wants to go for a few miles, walking nearly an hour at a stretch. Her community boarders a large park system. Her walk takes her past baseball and soccer fields, a skate park, water park and huge community park with two ponds and a creek, picnic shelters, nice hills, beautiful flowering trees and some wildlife. She loves her walks. Because I can't be there every day to walk with her, we have hired help to take her out. This walk is essential to her well being, the days she only gets to the exercise classes or the fitness center are not good days for her.

I really enjoy the days when I am able to walk with Mom, particularly now that I am not as worried about how cold she is. Sometimes we have a three generational walk with one of my kids along, most of the time it's just the two of us. We catch up on our news and then mostly walk in silence, Mom walking a step or two behind me. I think she does that to make sure there is nothing to trip on, no matter how I alter my gate, she remains a bit behind.

We saw a family of geese the other day and many nesting ducks. We also heard chorus frogs near the tennis courts. Mostly we just walked in silence and enjoyed the day. I am glad to have her living close to me.

Too Young?

2011-05-07T09:41:00.004-05:00

When we renewed our membership to the Brookfield Zoo this year, we decided to upgrade to the Supporting Member level. We did this for two reasons - dolphin show tickets add up and Medium wanted to attend the lecture series. All in all it's a great bargain and supports a wonderful organization.

Medium and I went to a lecture on polar bears the other night. I'm guessing she was the youngest in attendance, but this isn't something unusual and isn't something that bothers her. She enjoys lectures. Two polar bear experts with Polar Bears International explained how the bears live, mate, hunt and die in the wild. We learned a lot about these great animals, and a lot about how climate change is affecting their habitat and threatening their existence. We learned about trends in climate change, saw the data and the global effects of green house gas emissions.

We saw a friend on the way out, who expressed alarm that Medium may be too young to hear the dire predictions. This is the same friend whose testimonial about the lecture series prompted Medium to want to upgrade our membership level, so we were not at all offended by her genuine concern. Honestly, I knew the topic in advance, we read the blurb together and agreed we wanted to to. It never occurred to me to consider Medium to be too young.

Medium has always been an old soul. She reads voraciously - fiction appropriate for her age level and interests, non-fiction all over the map. She has many interests and pursues them at her own pace. We talked out it on the way home. We agreed that some of the images were a bit strong, after all, hunting is not pretty. We both wished we didn't know about cannibalism in the polar bear population, but that we can't just thing of them as cute cartoon animals. She knows about climate change, this child, she's read and learned much about the dire predictions for our future. I could no more shield her from this doom and gloom than I could prevent my children from playing video games. That is to say, I suppose I could shield her, but feel it would be a disservice to limit her explorations of the world around her.

We are looking forward to the next lecture night.

Xtreme Fun

2011-05-06T08:58:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, we just have too much fun.

I saw a billboard for Xtreme Trampoline on my many trips to and from St. Charles during conference planning. I thought it might be fun and went to the website, found the group rates, arranged a date, sent the call out to homeschoolers and pretty much forgot about it.

When it hit on the calendar, the kids were pretty excited. When we got there, they were in heaven. 2 hours of non-stop jumping, bouncing, flipping and playing with friends. Because they opened early for us crazy homeschoolers, we had the place all to ourselves. I'm guessing there were 40 people there, most of them knew each other. It was like a giant party. Dodge ball on trampolines! Doing flips into a foam block pool! Bouncing off the walls, literally!

Next time I am enforcing a deodorant requirement for the kids in my vehicle.

Schooly

2011-04-14T20:36:00.003-05:00

OK, so I don't have kids in school and am not really aware of the complications and issues that arise in that situation. Lately, though, I have been channeling my inner 1970's era stay-at-home mom.

The last two weeks we have had early morning field trips to programs at the College of DuPage. Early morning means we had to plan to leave by 8:45 and hit pavement by no later than 9:00. This was a major problem for my family. Significantly worse than getting to the library by 11 a.m. when it is five minutes away, although some weeks even that takes herculean effort. Thanks to homeschooling, most of the time my kids can sleep until they are no longer tired. Most days that means 12 to 13 hours after they go to bed. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. It's a healthy set-up. Upsetting the system is nearly catastrophic. Luckily, the field trips have been worth the upheaval.

We also have had our first ever report card for Large, now age 12. This came a few months ago, but was only significant to me. Large has been taking classes in ballet and jazz at the Academy of the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. He received straight A's. It was meaningless to him, the only accomplishment he feels is in his own improvement and the enjoyment he receives from his classes. He would have felt the same way about himself had he received straight C's or D's.

With my Mom, however, I have had both the call from the Principal and the Nurse's office. My mother is not a child and is not treated like one. I received a call from her Assisted Living facility telling me she was a security risk because she tried to take a walk with another resident and got lost. It felt very much like I imagine the calls to the parents who's kid punched another kid on the bus feels like. (Hey, wait. That was me in the 8th grade!) Except that in addition to breaking the rules, they were mostly concerned about my Mom's safety and well-being. I suppose that could be the same case in schools, but tend to believe it is not. The Assisted Living folks were really concerned that she could just wander off and get lost. I know it all came about because I was gone for four days and wasn't able to take her out for walks. In a school setting, probably, the whole issue would have been about the rule infraction.

When I got a call from the nurse because my mother still does not feel up to a full meal because of a head cold, it was like all the times my mother was called when one of us had thrown up at school. Except that my mother is a frail elderly adult, not a child with a stomach bug. Kids with a fever or vomiting at school are a threat to everyone else. An elderly person with a cold is primarly a threat only to herself.

Through much negotiating, with assistance from my brother and paying someone to take her for walks, we were able to secure my mother her freedom again. And now we will work out a system to get her some cold medicine to ease her discomfort. I will get her more groceries. Life will be good again, spring will come and illness will pass.

My kids will continue to get the sleep they need. They will continue to feel about themselves what they do and not take much notice of outside evaluation. They know what they are good at and what they like to do. When they were younger at park district programs, they couldn't understand why the instructor gave them candy for a correct answer. Now they just think that grown-ups are weird with school-aged kids, unless the adults are homeschooling parents.

I, on the other hand, have been reliving my nightmares of sitting outside the Principal's office preparing a passionate speech about my justifications for slugging the brute on the bus. Trust me, it was a good speech

Learning Styles

2011-04-04T08:18:00.005-05:00

As is usual on Saturdays this year, Large has ballet and jazz classes at the Academy of the Joffrey Ballet. He loves them. I have been enjoying the 3 hours of uninterrupted time to work on the InHome Conference. Three hours of being interrupted only be text messages is a wondrous thing to a busy mom.

With the conference just past a week ago, Medium and I decided to do something we had been wanting to do for some time. We went to the Art Institute, purchased an audio tour and immersed ourselves in the John Marin watercolor exhibit. We spent an enjoyable hour looking at the paintings and listening to the explanations on the headsets. We had seen the exhibit a few weeks earlier and wanted to learn more. Medium loves this sort of thing. A few weeks ago we breezed in for a quick lunchtime lecture on the Chagall windows. She was by far the youngest in the crowd and listened intently to the lecturer. She is the reason we purchased a higher level membership at the Brookfield Zoo, because the lecture series will be free for us. She reads every sign in museum exhibits.

My boys may have been interested in the audio tour, although probably not for the entire duration. They also learn a lot from museum exhibits, but in different ways. It is nice to be able to take one child, addressing their needs as individuals whenever possible. At the same time as our visit to the Art Institute, Large was pursuing his passion for dance and Small was showing his Grandma the delights of the Children's Garden at the Morton Arboretum.

We are very lucky indeed.

The Wringer

2011-02-12T13:55:00.004-06:00

My family has been through the wringer lately. And we've come out safely on the other side. I've been thinking of just how many times we have been through this wringer in the past few years, how difficult some of our more private moments have been and how we wished our lives to be different when we were in the middle of them. Yet, somehow we always come out on the other side. Worn out a bit, but dusting ourselves off and ready for more.

Whatever it has been - illness and death, adult sibling near-warfare, foundation shattering questioning of our life's path - we have come out whole, as a family. We go through it together, although sometimes in different ways and from different vantage points. We come out together.

My children experience life differently than I did at their ages. My parents shielded us from the "real" world, from disagreements and difficulties. My parents also were in a new country, with no siblings, parents or other relatives anywhere near them. Perhaps because I didn't have a model for how to deal with life on the outside of the insular family, perhaps because we homeschool and have chosen to spend the majority of our time with our children, my kids have gone through the wringer with me.

I think they are stronger for it. They understand financial distress in a real way - not just in "we can't afford that" terminology, but in an understanding of the family's debt to income ratio, our comfort level with risk, and our long range goals. They have a better understanding of old age, illness and death. Most of all, they know that the world isn't going to come to an end each time a roadblock is thrown in their path. They know they will come out of a difficult time, perhaps changed or scarred, but they will emerge on the other side. I think I was in my later 30s when I truly understood that.

Life Changes

2011-01-03T10:12:00.003-06:00

One of my New Year's Resolutions is to blog more. Along with knitting more and weaving some again. All creative pursuits that have been lacking in my life.

My mother has been living with us for a couple of months. She'll be moving into assisted living in a few weeks, but keeping her house on the lake. We love having her here, we missed her terribly when she was so far away with my sister in New Mexico.

Our homeschooling life has adjusted with Mom here. We've had a notable reduction in the amount of time I can spend with the kids. We have been more relaxed with our schedules. I have missed more of our weekly activity group meetings than I am happy with. The kids who don't do well without a bit of direction and prodding have been playing many more wii games than reading, the one who is self directed has been doing just fine.

When I haven't been finding a community for my mother to move to, handling the lease agreements, the doctor's appointments, the shopping for things she'll need in her new place, I've been distracted by doing what is possible to keep her comfortable. She doesn't like to be left alone and needs help with many basic things. She doesn't want to be, and isn't, a burden, but she does distract me from things like reading to Small, helping Medium with a new project, or directing Large to put down the controller and read something.

On the other hand, the kids have learned larger life lessons by having her live with us. Small gets to entertain her nightly with monologues about various toys or star wars story lines while we get dinner on the table. Medium and Large have helped her in numerous, respectful ways and are seeing something of old age other than cartoon grannies with canaries. And we've all learned to slow down a bit. Our speech, the pace of our lives, our decision making. It's been a good thing.

Sometimes Parenting is Hard

2010-09-20T18:08:00.005-05:00

I started out this morning thinking that homeschooling is wonderful. Small breezed through his reading today and allowed me to read three books to him without getting all squirmy. He was cute and cuddly, and now has an eagerness to become a fluent reader that he didn't have before. We've been waiting for that spark, holding off on instruction until he was ready to be instructed. Sparks are good things. Struggles are not.

Then I changed my thinking and realized that sometimes homeschooling is hard. Large and Medium were not getting along. Not getting along in a loud, angry, insulting kind of way. They could not agree on who would read the history chapter first. Why this led to an all out struggle is unclear, but it wasn't pretty.

We were going to Park Day, meeting a bunch of homeschooling families for a nice afternoon of play and parents chatting. Last week's Park Day ended with Large whining that we had not yet done history. In response to that, this brilliant parent decided we should do history first. We are on a survey course of history, the kids want to finish it to move on to more in depth study of periods that particularly interest them. I suppose we could just skip the step of finishing out the 19th and 20th centuries together, but they don't want to.

So, I decided that sometimes homeschooling is just hard. I waited for the storm to pass, they worked it out, ending in a few giggles. We read the history, discussed it and moved on with the day. Later, a friend helped me to see that this really was just a parenting issue, not a homeschooling issue. It could have been anything that set them off, they are siblings after all. And close siblings, just a bit over a year apart. They do nearly everything together and probably get sick of each other several times a day.

Sometimes families are hard. But as homeschoolers I think we tend to hold ourselves to higher standards. We aren't allowed to have bad days. We could, after all, just send the kids to school and get some time to ourselves in the middle of the day. I sometimes fantasize about the wonderful projects I could get done during the day if they weren't with me, if I wasn't driving all over the 5 county metro area to get them where they needed to be. But I would be just as unproductive if they were in school as I am with them out. And I'd miss the fights and the reconciliations. Those are some pretty important life skills.

Changes

2010-09-09T09:58:00.002-05:00

For the first time ever, I planned out our homeschooling schedule. I've been using the Homeschool Tracker for a while to capture attendance records. In the past I've had great intentions at the beginning of the year to plug in each and every activity for record keeping. But we never accomplished as much as I planned and it turned out to be a whole lot of work for me, with little benefit.

This year, though, we were faced with several time challenges. Our goals include finishing The Story of the World as our history overview for Large and Medium so they can focus on particularly interesting episodes and get into further details. They also wanted to try a more structured science program and chose Life Science from Plato learning. They want to continue reading literature together, perfect their cursive, learn to write articles and papers, build their vocabulary and progress in their math. Small, of course, wants to become a more confident reader, absorb the world around him and have fun.

With all our activities, dance and piano classes, homeschool group meetings and Roots&Shoots, it's hard to fit everything in. All three kids have a paying gig as dog walkers, Large has five hours of dance a week, Medium has three hours of dance, girl scouts and piano. Small has on hour of dance and piano.

Add to the mix my volunteer work with the wonderful InHome Conference, teaching science lab, facilitating Roots&Shoots, helping new homeschoolers find their way in our Westside House group and my need to earn significant money to pay for all this, and you get an idea of my sense of panic.

One final complication is that our login to Plato, made affordable through the Homeschool Buyers Co-Op, is active between the hours of 1 and 4 only. So, I carefully mapped the time we each could spend on each activity, overlapping where necessary, separating the kids when needed and put the schedules on nice colorful charts on the wall. It's been working for a couple days now, with some adjustments we might do OK. Most of all, the kids seem to have more play and daydream time now.

I, on the other hand, have no time. I can fit my conference work in when there is a computer free and if I can have access to my files. Our great idea is to sell books on Amazon, initially from our own stock and later from thrifting. This can be a good way to earn money, but I just don't know where I'm going to squeeze in trips to thrift stores and library sales, to the post office for shipping and computer time to track orders. I guess I'll know it when I see it.

How We Started School

2010-09-07T08:48:00.002-05:00

We began the school year with a vacation. It just seemed right, watching the neighborhood kids trudge off to school with their heavy backpacks while we were packing and preparing to go. I've never been much for following the school calendar, but do keep track of our learning days as the state requires. The August start rule seems harsh to me, and did as a child. August is still summer, schools are rarely air conditioned, the sun is shining!

We went to a YMCA family camp in the northwoods of Wisconsin. We learned and lived much more there than we would have at home with our usual schedule. It is a beautiful, quiet, secluded spot. The kids met up with old and new friends, were gone from the cabin except when hungry or at bedtime. They caught turtles, frogs, and snakes - or rather watched as other kids did the dirty work. They kayaked out on the lake and watched bald eagles soaring overhead, looking for a meal. The foraged for firewood and birch bark, learned archery, played group games, swam, jumped off the raft and got eaten alive by mosquitoes.

On the way home, we saw this handsome pink elephant not half a mile away from a similarly huge cow. Not sure what the lesson was supposed to be there, but we enjoyed it all the same.

The Art of Doing Nothing

2010-08-04T15:35:00.002-05:00

We have been mostly unscheduled this summer, for perhaps the first time ever. Large and Medium both really hoped to do an art camp and an archery camp. Small wanted to do gymnastics and needed swim lessons. I had an urge for long car trips to the Badlands and Mount Rushmore, out to the Jersey Shore and back, along the Louis and Clark trail. Unfortunately, an unplanned home improvement project cut into our funds deeply and cancelled all but the already paid for.

We've still had things on our calendar. Homeschool park days and bowling days are favorites. Dance and piano recitals. Museum visits and family reunions. And responsibility for my parents' house has brought us to the beach happily and frequently.

But mostly we are just being still. Medium has learned to act on her boredom by finding what truly interests her, which seems to be everything. Large and Small have had endless days of play with the block boys. I've developed a plan that will hopefully bring in more income so we aren't in the position of telling the kids they can't do something again.

I have memories of summers like this. But really, it was probably only for August that we lived the life of the unscheduled, unplanned. We swam competitively, with daily workouts and weekly meets. As we got older we had two workouts a day, taught swimming and coached activities. So my memory of the endless summer days of play and fun are either from before the age of 7 or from those August days between the swim team awards banquet and the start of school. Three weeks, tops.

But such sweet memories they are! I can't remember a single swim meet, they all blend together. But I can remember entire conversations I had with my best friend, hours of solitude along the creek at the edge of the meadow, reading whatever I liked, long weekends at the beach.

I hope our kids have that memory, not just of summers, but of their yearly schedule. It makes me want to pull back even more on our activities, precisely at the time when Large's dance schedule is becoming more complicated. We will still have days with nothing on board until the evening, days to follow our own interests and inquiries, evenings devoid of homework an paperwork worries.

It's hard to not sign the kids up for classes, club and activities as they come along. Some many great homeschooling parents are bring together kids in such exciting ways, that it feels like we are missing out if we don't participate in everything. Now I find us wanting to pull back not just for financial reasons, but because we want some time alone together. Homeschooling is an evolving adventure.

On the Beach

2010-06-30T17:01:00.001-05:00

We have been fortunate lately to be spending some time on the beach. The beach near my parent's house on the dunes is quiet and mostly deserted. Some days we see no one, others we have occasional joggers, walkers or see other families playing in the distance.

Most of the time we hit the beach after a days worth of errands or cleaning the house. It's a great respite, especially as I find the time spent in the house to be emotionally draining. I often bring a book and don't touch it, preferring to sit and think.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how my parents handled the job of parenting and how it is the similar or different from my own methods. The beach we handle in the same manner. The kids carry whatever it is they want on the beach, usually that is nothing. Sometimes the take a towel. I take a water bottle and my beach chair. When they were younger, they each took a bucket and shovel, or yogurt cups or something to create sandcastles with. Then they realized they needed nothing on the beach to amuse themselves.

Typically we climb over the dune, the kids running up the hill on the hot, hot sand to get to the shade at the top. Then they scamper down the stairs, dash across the sand to the water and go right in. Now that they are older, they have to wait until I'm on the beach before going in beyond knee depth. I used to be able to match their speed.

If it's windy and they can ride waves, they stay in the water a long time. I sit and watch, the water still being too cold for me to go in on all but the hottest of days. Then they come out and each do their own thing on the beach. Large lately has been creating structures out of driftwood, which is why he wanted the towel. Medium sits right on the edge making sand sculptures with the wettest of sand. Small digs holes, makes mountain shaped "lake houses" or slides down whatever ridges the latest storms have left behind. It's a magical spot where they can be and do what they want to, as unstructured or complicated as they want it to be.

My parents let us have a lot of this kind of time in my childhood. We went to this very same community, but to a different beach. We walked along the road or through the sand dunes, carrying our own stuff. Usually nothing at all, except for our teen years when we concentrated on our tans. But even at home, we had a lot of magical spots where we could go and just be with our own selves and the thoughts in our heads. They lived on five acres in a not quite yet suburban sprawl area. Even as small children, my mother would pop us out the door in the morning and expect us to come home when hungry. Or hurt, or tired. We weren't watched over as closely as parents tend to do now, and we certainly weren't scheduled to tightly, especially in our younger years.

I wish we had more opportunity for this kind of life, the magical solitude and freedom to just be. We don't live in the same kind of setting, but we seek it out and take advantage of it as best we can.

Weathering the Storm

2010-06-24T19:20:00.004-05:00

We've had some stormy weather lately. I'm not sure if it's unusually stormy, but it sure feels like it. The storms have been pretty severe as well, with lots of rain and more than a lot of wind.

Last night we had the privilege of riding out the storm in my parents' house. It's in the part of Indiana where the lake is mostly north and a little bit west. They built the house on top of a very high and steep sand dune when they were 70 years old. The the lot was available because the previous house had burned down, in no small part due to the lack of water pressure in the town's fire hydrants. My parents were risk takers.

The house is built to maximize the view. Most of the living takes place on the second floor, which puts you nearly at tree-top height as you gaze out at the lake. The entire mostly north facing side is floor to ceiling windows, the living room and library have sliding doors leading to decks. It is stunning in the spring when the dogwoods are in bloom, and in the fall when the oak leave change colors. The house is curved a bit on each side, offering a more panoramic view. This picture is looking more to the west than north.

It rained all morning yesterday, torrential downpours with flash flooding as we ran errands to maintain the house and cars. There was a break in the late afternoon, so the kids and I went to the beach. After a while, looking northwest across the lake, I saw Chicago vanish in a sea of darkness. we heard distant thunder, felt the winds kicking up and headed back to the house.

We sat down to dinner and my angle from the kitchen island was a mostly westward view of the storm marching towards us. In minutes the trees you see here were bent nearly in half, wet with rain and crippled by the wind. We watched the wind open locked windows on the south side of the house. We felt the water bashing the windows. We watched the lights flicker on and off several times before going out all together.

And then I had a chance to reflect again, as I have often done these past few years, on just how smart a man my father was. I grew up knowing of his scientific genius, witnessed his limitless skills in maintaining, designing and constructing houses, barns, room additions, etc. I was in awe of his ability to draw, photograph and sculpt. He could explain anything, and sometimes I could even understand it.

But I had also seen his failures. I had watched him calculate the exact angle and force to hit a cue ball in order to get the object ball into the correct pocket - and then seen him execute the shot and miss entirely. (This was a move named the "Grande Crewe" in the billiards room at the University of Chicago's Quadrangle Club.) I had also seen him, with my brother, cut down a tree that was threatening to fall on a neighbor's house. Again, they calculated the angle to avoid hitting the house and then proceeded to drop it right on the roof. My father was more than human.

Last night, as the lights shut off and the wind battered the house, I felt safe and like a glass in a dishwasher. I knew my Dad had put in an emergency generator to beat all emergency generators. He had foreseen his physical decline and knew he would face the end of his life with some medical equipment that would need a constant energy source. His generator is not based on a tank that needs refilling, but was hooked to the main gas line to the house. He was ultra-prepared.

So, when it failed last night, it came as no surprise to me that the variable he had failed to factor in was human maintenance after his death. The motor oil that lubricates the engine had run out. Mark was able to refill that, managing only one wasp sting, and get the thing running. My father kept a lot of things is his head. Like the knowledge of which outlets are powered by the generator in an emergency. Last summer we had to get the HVAC guy to come out and tell us which ones would be able to provide power to his bed and oxygen machine.

My father spent a couple of years trying to convince his carpenter and window installer that the windows and doors in the library were going to leak. He knew the house had settled, creating a slightly steeper slope to the deck. He could feel the air flowing under the doors when no one else did, could anticipate the rate at which the water was gaining ground. He designed the solution to the problem. But until it leaked, he couldn't convince anyone to do the work. It was an expensive job, and the leak was spectacular when it burst through.

Last night we also witnessed the next failure Dad had anticipated. The entrance to the house is a two story atrium with two sets of floor to ceiling windows stacked on top of each other, forming a bridge to the two arced halves of the house. The top center window showered water in rivulets onto the window sill and carpet on the second level and down to the slate first floor via the open spaces in the bridge. Not as spectacular as the library leak to the bedroom below, but it wont take too many more rains for that to come.

Just as my father correctly diagnosed himself with Parkinsons' Disease a few years before a neurologist could confirm it medically, he lives on in his predictions concerning his largest last masterpiece, this house. When I called the carpenter this afternoon, he choked up. The carpenter had a 12 year relationship with my father and misses his wisdom and humor. He knew exactly where the leak was before I told him, knowing it was what my father was worried about. He told me it took him a while to realize my father was a genius and that he misses him.

Last night's storm was more than just weather.

Science Lab

2010-05-26T16:17:00.002-05:00

I am going to miss my science lab while we break for the summer. We have lately been building simple machines and experimenting with them. This is a group of fun, bright and engaged kids. We've done a lot of work, they have learned a lot, even done some fancy math with me and had many laughs. Probably, being such a small group helps. They are mostly friendly with each other, but divide themselves along gender lines. I guess that's normal for 9 to 13 year olds.

We were engaged in our investigations until the weather turned nice. Then they, like everyone else, just wanted to be outside. See what I mean? Smart kids.

Field Trips!

2010-05-25T16:48:00.003-05:00

We have had a flurry of field trips recently. This picture was taken just before we boarded the Tall Ship Windy at Navy Pier. We had a thoroughly enjoyable, if chilly, sail on Lake Michigan with the Girl Scouts troop.

Privacy Week

2010-05-05T13:19:00.001-05:00

I found this video to be interesting and informative. Thought I would share.

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

Frogs and Tadpoles

2010-04-24T15:47:00.003-05:00

Small had a class at the Morton Arboretum the other day. The rest of us went along to check out the wildlife around one of the lakes. Mark met us there on his lunch break.

We took a hike down the long hill to the lake. I looked along the shoreline for frogs and saw this fine specimen sitting peacefully. It was only after Mark reached to retrieve a fallen water bottle that the frog hopped back into the water. Medium noticed some things swimming a short distance to the shore and asked if they were tadpoles. I don't know my tadpoles like I know frogs, so I said I didn't know, but doubted it. The bigger frogs haven't mated yet, the chorus frogs are only about 1 1/2 inches full grown and these things were already a couple inches long.

We then walked further along the lake. Large and I examined a egg shell and watched some geese, chatting with a friendly senior resting on a bench. Medium waited patiently, handed the 3x binoculars back to Large and said, with just a touch of attitude: "Minnows don't have legs, Mommy."

Indeed they don't. This child truly needs to be out exploring, sometimes even inside exploring. She reads every single informational sign at museum exhibits, gathers knowledge like a sponge and just never lets it go. Shortly after the tadpole triumph, she calmly explained to me and a group of schoolkids a few years younger, how the snapping turtle she had just pointed out to them and helped them to see in the murky water, catches its food. She said she read it in a Zoo Books Magazine a long time ago. Luckily, I am acquainted with the docent leading the school group and she didn't mind being upstaged by a 10 year old.

To top off that truly wonderful hour, after the snapping turtle submerged, a mink scurried across the bridge into the leaves and brush, changed it's mind when it saw Large, ran back across the bridge and along the lake on the other side. We didn't believe it could be a mink, but asked one of the naturalists, who confirmed they have mink in that location. We also looked at pictures to help our identification.

It made me a little sad that Small didn't learn that minnows don't have legs, but he heard all about it in the car on the way home.

Glorious Mud

2010-04-19T10:25:00.004-05:00

Spring has arrived and that means it's time for our Roots&Shoots group to do some amphibian monitoring. We roll logs and rocks, look under branches and debris for salamanders, keep our eyes open for frogs and toads, check the water for egg masses. It's been a much dryer spring than in past years, but that didn't stop the kids from their primary focus - playing in the mud.

It's too late for us to find salamander eggs in the water, but we might have found some frog eggs or tadpoles. Mostly, though, the kids wanted to wade in the water and squish the mud between their toes. We went home pretty muddy, but I think this kind of exploration has as great a value as studiously hunting for amphibians. We aren't exposed to the elements the way were were 50 years ago, these kids just don't get the opportunity to get dirty. They had a great time.

We did see and catch four juvenile American toads, a skull, a patch of fur, a tooth, a lot of golf balls, may apples, jack-in-the-pulpit and trillium. It was a good day, even if we did lose five of the kids on the way out of the woods. Next time I'll know the path of the stream better and ask the kids to stay out of the water until our way back. That way it will be muddy behind us instead of in front of us and we have a chance of seeing something interesting lurking on the shoreline.

Camping

2010-04-16T09:42:00.004-05:00

Every year around this time - when the sun returns to Chicago, the leaves return to the trees and people come out of their houses - our homeschooling schedule gets all shaken up.

This year we are responding by doing a summer camp schedule. Our first camp week has centered around exploring the book What Do You Stand For, which I highly recommend. Next week we'll do math, then a week of science and a week of art. This better suits our spring time attention span, which has little to do with handwriting and vocabulary and more to do with exploring big issues in wide open spaces.

Baby Blues

2010-02-10T12:59:00.005-06:00

I hope I can get today's Baby Blues comic to look right on the page. Very funny to us homeschoolers. First the kids asked how much the mom loved them and wanted to spend time with them. The dad agrees she wants to spend every minute possible with them, not realizing they are trying to convince the parents to homeschool.

My kids are going sledding this afternoon while everyone else is in school. Not quite as cool as video games, but fun none-the-less. We just have more time for fun and are able to put more fun into our days. And more ds time, more wii time, more board game and puzzle time. Not so much tv time, that's not as interesting.

Another point I find funny is that you really do need to love spending time with your own children in order to homeschool. All day, every day. A friend across the street once said to me "I don't understand you. I really enjoy when my kids go out the door in the mornings."

Getting it Back

2010-02-05T11:24:00.004-06:00

The first thing to come back as I have been working through my grief and getting accustomed to a life where my responsibilities are focused more on my children than my parents was my ability to read and respond to emails. I go through about 100 a day, with the work on the conference, my science lab, Roots&Shoots group, homeschooling support group and family group. For a while there, I couldn't even open my email unless it was from one of my siblings concerning my father's health, his death, my mother's progress, the planning of the upcoming service, the obituaries circling the globe. Slowly, I was able to read, respond and act on messages that came through. Just in the nick of time, given the conference is six weeks away!

The second thing was my organizing mojo. In my real life, I'm a stickler for loose ends being tied up and good at follow through. For the past year and a half, since my father's condition worsened in the summer of 2008, organizing anything other than my parents' life has taken the back burner. I'm glad to say that is behind me and I can multi-task organizing homeschooling, our household, finances, my mother, the conference, our increasingly complicated activity calendar and everything else life has thrown in my way.

Then my love of exercise came back. Hallelujah! While I'm advised not to get on the treadmill anymore, I can spend 45 minutes on the bike and come away feeling happy, rested and relieved. I've rediscovered my connection between wheat and inflammation and hope to get back on that treadmill very soon, or at least mix it up with the bike and the elliptical.

And now my knitting has come back! I did nothing but easy things for the past year, ever since Mark's last cabled birthday sweater was finished. Many socks, a baby hat and cardigan, lots of stockinette and ribbing. Now I'm brave enough to tackle brain-feeding knitting. I bought the yarn for this sweater vest for Mark's birthday in July and started it last week. It's been a wonderfully quick and interesting knit so far.

Hoping for my weaving mojo to kick in soon, I still have a few minutes left in each day.

Brain food

2010-01-27T12:19:00.004-06:00

I read an article last week in the Chicago Tribune about breakfast cereal and it stuck in my head. The Tribune investigation shockingly revealed that the food industry had found a way around regulations requiring more nutritious breakfast cereal by fortifying it's sugary cereal and offering more "adult" cereals. The Tribune was also amazed that children seem to prefer the sugary cereals and that consumption can be correlated to advertising on children's television programs.

I don't know if it's because we homeschool or because we don't have cable TV, but my kids have rarely eaten sugary cereal. Our allergies might also be part of it, but we've never shopped for cereal. We bought the kids cheerios when they were babies and toddlers, a perfect, portable snack. We buy puffed rice when we want to make "gooey cookies." Other than that, we don't really eat cereal. Small once had fruit loops from a breakfast buffet at a hotel. And I can recall Medium pointing to Lucky Charms and saying "That's just strange."

We don't need fast breakfast. Today the kids made pancakes together. Small regularly eats bacon. Medium makes herself an omelet or oatmeal. Large will have last nights' leftovers, a hot dog or fried eggs with no toast. Some mornings we are more pressed for time than others, most mornings they can follow their taste buds and fend for themselves. Small can microwave bacon and oatmeal on his own - he prefers steel cut oats.

It used to be that when the kids were exposed to cable TV, they would stare and stare at it, more interested in the commercials than the shows. Now they talk back at the commercials or skip channels. We don't need cable for reception and are able to watch all we want (including Spongebob) via Netflix. So, we've never had that to cut out of our budget in lean times.

I can imagine the repetitive advertising could get kids begging. But most kids are reasonable. When mine watched a lot of PBS kids, they would occasionally ask for Juicy Juice. I explained the packaging problem of individual juice boxes and the unit cost.

I don't have anything against sugary cereals, but it's never been part of our budget. Along the same lines of kid products and advertising, we did get the strangely flavored Dora and Spongebob toothpaste for a while, but we have now graduated to Aquafresh and all are happy.

Marketing to kids is here to stay. So are parents.

True Words

2010-01-15T11:00:00.001-06:00

Meet Doug

2010-01-05T12:12:00.003-06:00

Medium received a bird cage for Christmas. The poor child is allergic to every possible furry animal, but really wanted a pet who would play with her. Reptiles seemed out of the question, not only because they aren't particularly cuddly, but also because of the mold and/or heat.

So, we decided on a bird. We went to the pet store for food and toys, looked at the parakeets there and then headed off to a local shelter. This shelter is really a cat place, but they take in small animals and birds.

I'm always appalled by shelters. So many animals in one place. This was a small store front with probably 50 cats, several rabbits, gerbils, hamsters and tons of birds. Doug was found in a cage with 20 or so parakeets, all dumped by the same guy, who gave the shelter little information about them. Doug was mostly off by himself, he has a couple of bent tail feathers and was definitely the under dog of the cage. Shunned and picked on. And that made him Medium's first choice in a pet.

The shelter also had 10 or so zebra finches in one cage, a pair of conures, a macaw, several sets of African doves and more parakeets further down. The cat cages were stacked three high and birds were placed on top of them. They had one center aisle with a double row of cages and then two side aisles. The small animals lined the front, also stacked two and three high. Is it that when you run a shelter, you just can't see when you are full? Or is the need so great and the options so bad that they take in more and more animals?

All these animals came from homes. I can't imagine taking my rabbit in, saying I don't want it anymore (even though we have good allergy reasons) and turning it in, seeing the overcrowded conditions right in front of me. Maybe those people are hoarders too? Maybe the shelter has to euthanize every once in a while? Why do people buy pets in stores when there are shelters overcrowded with pets? I know the pets, particularly birds, can come sick or diseased because of the overcrowding problem. But isn't it better to take that risk than feed the breeding and pet store systems?

Doug is doing fine. A little quiet. Definitely freaked out. He's warming up to Medium, letting her take him out to play every day, although he isn't quite socialized yet. Funny, a homeschool kids socializing a bird!

Why is that?

2009-12-16T09:38:00.003-06:00

I've been talking to and corresponding with a lot of people since my father died. This has been fun in some ways, painful in others. Some of these communications make me end up wondering why we ever lost touch in the first place, others remind me of the why.

One thing I've been exposed to as a result, is an anti-homeschooling sentiment. Most of my life is spent in a supportive-of-homeschooling world. My friends are homeschoolers, or know my children and know how good homeschooling has been for us. My family is understanding and accepting. So, I don't venture out of this cocoon often, except in public places with my older kids when they "should" be in school. Our doctors, dentists, Trader Joe's, etc all know us by now. Even the kids' dance teacher was thrilled to see Medium and Large for Small's parent observation day.

But lately I've had such things as public school teacher/parents justifying to me their decision to send their kids to school. I've had people tell me it's OK for me to homeschool because I have easy, smart kids. People have asked me how the state can allow them not to be tested, how do I know they are learning, what I do to teach them, whether they ever get to leave the house. The whole gamut of homeschooling questions and insults I haven't heard since we made the decision to homeschool 8 years ago.

I'm not sure I've responded well in my grief. I'd like to issue a blanket, multiple choice response:

No, homeschooling isn't for everyone.
Yes, it's a financial hardship for me to be without a paying job. It's a decision we made after much careful consideration and have never regretted.
No, I don't lock my kids in the basement. They are out of the house doing something with other kids almost every day of the week.
I have nothing against public schools. It's an institution worth preserving for those who need it. It is an institution, however, and I want to keep my kids out of it. I pay at least $6000 a year in taxes to support the institution. We live in a good neighborhood with good schools.
Educational options are a personal decision for each family. Homeschooling works for my family. We like being together, my kids each learn differently and are free to pursue their own interests. (Oh, and yes, kids do have their own interests.)
No, I have not become a born again Christian. Nothing against any religious group, but not all homeschoolers are doing it for religious reasons.
Illinois treats homeschools as private schools, and does not impose restrictions on private schools other than attendance is taken and the same courses of study are taught - language arts, math, science, social studies - in English.

I think that may cover it. For now, at least. It's a strange world, viewed from the lenses of a fresh life change.

Watch this!

2009-12-06T20:45:00.000-06:00

Back to our regularly scheduled programming, courtesy of my sister:

What I'm thankful for

2009-11-27T11:53:00.003-06:00

Although my father's obituary has been in the newspapers all over the country, and even world wide, this one from The Regional is one of my favorites.

Here's the short list of what I'm thankful for today:

I'm thankful my father was able to hold and burp the first six of his ten grandchildren, while singing "I've been working on the railroad."

I'm thankful that he died in his sleep with pain management.

I'm thankful for John Markoff of the New York Times, who wrote a great article that has been picked up by newspapers around the world. It is somehow comforting to know that other people think my father was a great guy.

I'm thankful for my ever-supportive husband was able to drop everything when the call came in the wee hours last week.

I'm thankful that my children have such fond memories of my father.

I'm thankful that my daughter has the patience and understanding to help her grandmother set the table for Thanksgiving dinner.

I'm thankful for that neighbor of my mother's, whose name she can never remember, dashed out of his house with a jar of his homemade apple butter as a gift.

I'm thankful that my father took the time to show his special carving techniques to Mark, who spent time explaining them to Large yesterday.

Albert V. Crewe should not be remembered only as being a great scientist, artist and father, but as an influential person who worked hard to lobby for research funding and wasn't shy about expressing his rage over the lack of it. He was an intellectual who was as much a fixture in his laboratory as he was at our swim meets, the hardware store, piano and dance recitals.

Complicated Question

2009-10-30T09:25:00.004-05:00

I have often been asked lately how I am doing. It's a difficult question to answer. On the face of it so simple, but when you get right down to it, extremely complicated.

Am I really "doing," for example? What am I doing and how am I doing it? A short glance around my living room or bedroom shows that I am not doing much. Not physically anyway. Some days I don't even shower. I am usually dressed by noon, though, so maybe that is something.

The kids get to their scheduled activities. Most of the time. They see their friends, attend their classes, get their basics done most days. They could be doing more. There's that gym class I want to enroll them in, the play dates I never get around to scheduling, the allergy shots that are supposed to be twice a week and sometimes we go two weeks between, the swim team and swim lessons, museum day - all these and more I have failed to organize and do.

My three siblings and I cannot seem to have a discussion over my father's care without someone getting angry and belligerent. We can't agree on the simplest of things and some refuse to even take a part in the discussion, preferring to criticize from the sidelines. I have been unable to forge a truce or maintain the peace. On the contrary, because I am the closest, I am the target.

My mother now needs more help than ever. I am able to help her twice a week. This I can say that I "do." Writing checks, buying groceries and supplies for my father's caretakers, making her appointments, managing her calendar, listening to her fears and worries. I get to go home, to put some distance between me and my dying father. My mother is home and the love of her life, the man she has been married to for 60 years, is slowly dying before her eyes. It's no wonder she needs more help, the emotional and physical strain on her is unbearable.

And then there is my father. I can help him try to stand up, he isn't able to do this on his own anymore. But he wants to try and I can hold one side while an aide holds the other. He was a tall man, but now his legs wont straighten and he is shorter than my 5' 8" frame. Not nearly as wide, though, his body isn't tolerating much in terms of calories. I can try to interpret for him, make sure his medicines are ordered and sufficient, help the aides with their questions, distract him when he is agitated.

So, I am "doing," or at least am active. I am not, however, doing anything particularly well. It took me a long time, probably a month, to realize that my kids were no longer active and engaged in their math program and that it needed to be changed. Little is still not a good reader, he is reading things that his siblings read a full year ahead of his age.

The friends still willing to talk to me - and there are several who cannot right now because their own grief is too fresh to be cut open by mine - are probably bored out of their minds when they ask how I am. I feel I have become a lead weight in their presence. So, when I am in town, I stay inside my house and limit my outings to the kids schedule. Yesterday I took Small to dance and then went to the library to reserve the room for our science class. After those two brief encounters with the outside world of small talk and business, I was exhausted. They simple act of smiling, so natural for me normally, is draining.

So how should I answer? Fine. OK. As well as can be expected. Or just smile.

Floating

2009-10-06T22:12:00.004-05:00

I feel lately as if I am just floating in the ether. Not really a part of my life or my family's life, detached and floating. Occasionally I touch down for a moment of connection, of reality and the float up again into the amorphous space that surrounds me. Here are some of the things I have managed to touch upon:

My father calling for people from his past in the wee hours of the morning. Not frightened, often just calling "Hallo!"
My mother weeping with the understanding that her children may be saying goodbye to their father for the last time.
My siblings, laughing over a bit of family history and then brought back to reality by a sobering cough from the other room.
My completely unresponsive father when I said one day that all his children would be here the next day. Then seeing him the next day insisting on being dressed, forcing himself to stay awake until my brother made it through a storm from California at 3 a.m. He heard me.
My children enjoying their science lab while I was able to enjoy an hour with a dear friend who let me babble on and on incoherently in a Starbucks.
My doctor, two hours behind schedule, listening to my every word and telling me it was OK to let myself go while my father let himself go. But that it was not OK to only be able to sleep with the help of Tylenol p.m. Me relishing the relief from her acupuncture.
My brother complaining about the quarter mile inside the grocery store we had to walk from the meat to the wine.
The sight of my mother having her pedicure on a treat spa visit with my sister. Completely relaxed, composed and happy.
Me understanding deeply, for the first time, that Mark and I will not likely see the 60 years of marriage my parents have lived through.
The bizarre experience of all four siblings showing up at the local fitness center at the same time to sweat off the grief and anxiety. It must be genetic. We paid a guest fee for the privilege.

It goes on, these brief landings on earth to witness the world around me. Then I am back in the fog. Floating to the next touch down point. I do and do and do. But all I do is touch the surface and disappear. This can't go on forever.

But this ether can be seducing. I haven't summoned the courage for more than a cursory glance at my email in over a week. My father has been dying for seven weeks now. He managed until a week ago to have more lucid moments than not. Now he is in his own hell of incomprehension and hallucination. His brain was so important to him. And to us. He held on to it for so long and now it seems that the Parkinsons has taken the one thing left to him. His increasingly vocal worry since his diagnosis has turned into his whole life. Worry over the weather, his finances (where there is no need to worry), the condition of the house (where there is, but all fixable), his worry over my mother (again, founded in reality), his lab (long since dismantled).

We have much wind tonight and I know Dad will be shaking the bed rails, wanting to check out the damage. I had the aide move the electrical source for his bed to the outlet service by the generator - we had a minor tornado there in August and witnessed only a flicker of the lights. It will likely be a bad night for my father. And a bad night for me in the ether.

My New Heroes

2009-09-28T13:47:00.004-05:00

Six weeks since my last blog post. And that post was so full of hope for my father, hope that he just had a broken hip and would get better.

But then he acquired pneumonia in hospital and has been home in hospice care ever since. We have had days where there was much hope. Days when he has walked, used the toilet, spoken coherently. We've also had many days when he did nothing but lie in bed, hallucinating, agitated or just sleeping. It's been a roller coaster.

The worst days were when he first came home from the hospital, terribly sick with pneumonia. The hospice nurses only thought he would last a few days. My sisters flew in. We made plans, he dictated notes to all of us, repeatedly begged us to take care of our mother. We all prepared for him to die. But he didn't, he got over the pneumonia and regained some of his strength.

But now we are back to thinking he only has a short time left. Kidney failure is likely now, his body may be shutting down. He's had hallucinations, anxiety, lack of elimination. I had thought myself better prepared to deal with his death, but it still hits me like a blow to the head. Have I really had my last conversation with him? Will he only be unintelligible from now on? No one can say.

These hospice nurses are unbelievable. Our whole family has received wonderful care, advice, concern, attention. Taking on that job is a true calling. They are my new heroes. Without them we would all be somewhat adrift, relying on doctors or nurses in a hospital. Uncomfortable and unknowing. With them, my father is able to rest in the house he built on top of the tallest sand dune, look out the window at the tree tops and the lake, be as comfortable as possible in his waning days.

Today is another day when the schedule was shifted in order to take care of my parents. No registration for Girl Scouts, no grueling trip to the north side. Instead we have a trip - equally as grueling - to Indiana. I hope my kids don't resent me for this time, and don't think they do. They are sad to give up their activities, but continue with their life learning wherever we are.

Complacency

2009-08-16T22:07:00.003-05:00

Complacency is an evil thing. I've been tooling along the past year thinking things with my folks were improving and that we could continue along this path for a while. It's what I wanted to believe, what my own family needed. Complacency is why I took on the board of directors position for the InHome Conference (well, that and the sheer desperation I heard from friends who needed help), why I started teaching a physics lab for homeschoolers, why I branched out looking for new opportunities for my children.

And it's why I'm smacking myself on the forehead now. Just over a year ago, my father was admitted to the hospital. His EMS ticket read "failure to thrive." One of those medical terms like when I was pregnant with Small and the nurse told me he had a condition "incompatible with life." Last year, however, my sister and I convinced my father to have a feeding tube inserted. His Parkinson's had advanced to the point that he was malnourished and dehydrated. Without the feeding tube, he would starve to death. It wasn't hard to convince him, my mother needed him. And he wouldn't abandon my mother to her dementia. Just as last week he agreed to a partial hip replacement, after a struggle, so he could help my mother continue to have some independance.

My father's Parkinson's was diagnosed 8 years ago, but he suspected a few years prior to that. I remember him being jovial when a neurologist told him there was "nothing remarkable" about his brain. That's funny for a genius. Over time the disease has robbed him of his booming voice, his ability to move predictably, and his ability to swallow. After he had the tube inserted, he became almost robust, gathering strength and a quality of life he hadn't had before. Between that and the botox treatments he receives in his cheek, he was reading, participating in daily routines, taking care of my mother and their enormous house overlooking the lake, debating politics - this frail old man left the house to vote for Obama ("the first intelligent candidate in a long time") in Indiana, a state that really counted!

A week ago he tripped over his feet and broke his hip. It has been a week of anguish and frustration, a week of struggling to get the best care possible and a week of managing my mother. There are a lot of funny things that happened too and I'll try to share them soon, not to make fun of my mother or of dementia, but to point out that there is humor in crisis.

My father and I had what I would consider to be a strained relationship for most of our lives together. Like most people, I have felt not quite smart enough to be sharing the same space with him. Now I can see he has respected me all along, I just wasn't willing to accept his love and admiration. The strain was mainly on my side, this is an unspeakable loss. Now I stand armed at his hospital bed with his DNR and the Power of Attorney, telling everyone who walks in the room that he is not deaf and has no mental impairment. The no mental impairment part often has to be repeated, nurses and doctors just assume some level of dementia in an 82 year old who cannot speak. I hand out the spread sheet of his medication and feeding schedule, translate his concerns and worries from whispers to a roar and generally become a thorn in the side of people unable to adjust their prejudices. I am my father's daughter.

It has been an incredible strain on my own family, this past week. They have rolled with the punches, done their thing, taken time off work and play to help my father out. I've missed out on a week of their lives, and will miss some more in the weeks to come as my father becomes stronger. We have been shocked out of our complacency by this horrible disease and need to become ever more vigilant. And ever more efficient in our work to accommodate for these intermittent crises. They are only going to increase as nature takes its course for both my parents.

I am grateful, however, to be homeschooling my children and including them as active participants in my parents decline and death. Already wise, they are more aware of the world around them because of our care taking role.

Vindication

2009-08-03T13:06:00.005-05:00

A week or so ago, Medium pointed out to me that she did not know what a Twinkie tastes like. We were not in a store at the time, and I don't remember how the topic of conversation came up. My first reaction was to say "You don't want to eat a Twinkie, " but I held it. I described the taste of a Twinkie, told her that I had a boyfriend in college who had toured a Twinkie factory and told me that Twinkies never see an oven and asked her if she wanted to try one. She said she did.

The next time we were in Target, we got her a package of Twinkies. Large and Small opted for Oreos in a big cup that fits into a car's cup holder. Small is still allergic to milk and eggs and amazingly Twinkies have both listed as ingredients. Also amazingly, Oreos do not. Medium did not like the Twinkie, gave the second one to Large, who ate a bite and put the rest in the composter. I now know that a Twinkie will compost.

We try to eat health, whole foods, avoiding processed foods whenever we can. But somehow it feels like snobbery to deny something like Twinkies, particularly as I was brought up on them, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. Every lunch bag had some chemical reaction in the form of a cake inside. Zingers we discovered in High School when my brother and I had our own car and a gas card. We learned that gas stations sell food and filled up on junk until my Mom put the lid on our spending.

Junk food isn't evil, after all, and it's everywhere. My children are different enough by virtue of their homeschooling. They don't need other badges of distinction, like being denied Twinkies. They will probably never eat another one now. I remember telling Medium's Girl Scout leader that I had never been inside a Dunkin Donuts when she was wanting to take the girls to one, but wanted to clear the allergies first. I felt strange at feeling some pride at that. I have a sister who is proud of never having been in a McDonald's. It's a strange thing to be proud of. It's all wrapped up in that weird food thing we have in our family. I don't want my kids to have that.

Today we got slurpies as a special treat. Small and I have a summer cold, we didn't sleep well - when did his legs grow to the point that his toe nails can scratch my ankles when we are in the same bed? - and I had promised him a treat for skipping going out to breakfast and having to drop the other two off at the art camp in our pajamas.

I'll still cast a wary eye at junk food, chemical food. But I don't want the kids to either fear it or crave it because of my denial. The three of them had slurpies and have lived, so far, to tell the tale.

About face

2009-07-27T08:27:00.003-05:00

I promised a friend to try facebook for one week. I always thought myself too old for facebook and it seems so narcissistic. So, I'm trying it.

It is still narcissistic. And limiting to someone who tends to use a whole lot of words. It's also really fun to see what others in the world are doing, a way of quickly catching up.

But I already spend too much time on the computer! I can see this facebook thing could become a huge time suck for someone as undisciplined as me. Plus, I'm not sure I really have the hang of it, learning the lingo and how to navigate has been a challenge. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for facebook. I need to channel my inner Al Frankin.

It has been five days and the jury is still out.

New Muse, Old Muse

2009-07-22T10:19:00.004-05:00

I've started weaving again, after a long hiatus. My return to my old favorite art form was facilitated in part by my massive cleaning of the kids bedrooms. Once all the broken and unused toys, the long unread books, outgrown clothes and general junk was removed, I discovered that the boys room could really use a couple of chairs and a rug. I'm not all that into chair making, but have been saving old clothes and fabric for years, limiting myself to one giant Rubbermaid tub each for woven, knits and denim.

I took five pairs of Mark's old pants, put them in a dye bath so that each is a slightly different shade of denim blue, cut and stripped them, dressed the loom and began weaving. Dressing the room is a daunting task after three or four years off. Despite rereading my instructions, and with many interruptions, it took the better part of a week to get the warp wound and beamed. Even though I checked a few times, I managed to cross some threads in the heddle and did not admit to this until I had a good foot or two woven. Not being a perfectionist, I cut the threads and called it a design element. This left three threads loose at the back beam, so I weighted them with toys I found lying around. They look cute dangling there, don't they?

Another reason or the weaving is that I have two pairs of socks on needles, both knitted from the cuff down, both at the most boring part - past the heel and heading to the toe. All I have to look forward to is the toe and that doesn't hold enough interest. I could have just cast on another pair with different needles (I do two at a time on two circulars), but realized how ridiculous this is. So, I'm weaving when at home and knitting on the instep when I'm not. My blog has been suffering for the weaving, though. I have many, many projects lined up in my head now that I have the weaving bug back!

Getting to Know You

2009-06-30T09:40:00.003-05:00

I've been mulling over an article in this past Sunday's Chicago Tribune titled "School's Out. Now What?" My children have never been to school, so I'm not familiar with the trails and anxieties of summer. The third paragraph reads: "Summer is wonderful, but it takes time to settle in."

Really? I guess we have trouble at time adjusting the the abrupt weather changes here in Chicago. And the sudden explosion of children on the block, in the neighborhood and at our museums. But really, summer is just an extension of spring, which comes after a long winter, preceded by fall. It's just a season for us. For some of us, it's our favorite season, for others, it's before or after their favorite one.

The author interviewed a developmental therapist who worked on a TV show I've never seen, "Super-Manny." He says that kids have "very little freedom" during the school year and that "They even have to ask to go to the bathroom." Well, yes. The kids on my block are gone from between 7:30 and 8 and arrive back home between 3:30 and 4. No sleeping late because they stayed up watching a documentary, no lounging around with a book because they have a cold.

But the most disturbing part of the article for me was the description of how the siblings have lost touch with each other, have done a lot of physical and developmental growing and "In a sense, they have to get to know each other again."

If that isn't one of the strongest arguments for homeschooling, I don't know what is. The picture Mark took above on a bike ride this weekend was of Large holding back Small while he was throwing rocks into the canal. Large was protecting his little brother, he wasn't asked to do it, he just knew Small's ability to get into precarious situations and wanted to make sure he didn't slide down the rocky slope to the algae-infested water below. Our kids know each other. Sometimes they know each other too well, they know exactly which buttons to push, and also how to use their strengths to help each other out.

The article went on to explain how to get the kids to know each other again. Who older kids can read to younger kids, how they can prepare meals together, where to find those "teachable moments" to form a community with other children in the neighborhood. Honestly, do parents really need this kind of advice? I'm hoping they don't.

This Credit Free Life

2009-06-23T14:13:00.003-05:00

We've been leading a credit free life for 2 years now. We don't use credit anymore. Of course, we still have our mortgage and home equity, but we've been working at paying those off as well.

We followed most of Dave Ramsey's baby steps and were about to pay off over $20,000 in consumer debt in the first 9 months. We were very lucky to have some stocks to cash in, savings bonds lying around, a generous bonus and lots of patience. When our dryer broke, we went 2 months without. When a car died, we went 5 weeks without. Things recalibrated after a year and a half on the plan and we had 4 months in our emergency fund. Four months of basic living expenses saved just in case. I was comfortable with that cushion.

Then emergencies happened. From toilets to trees to cars to dishwashers, we are now down to less than 2 months in the emergency fund. We spent some of the money on non-emergencies (new lighting in the dining room, finishing a bathroom remodeling that began 3 years ago), but most of it was on basic items. The good news is that we used our emergency fund as a credit card, instead of piling on more debt. The bad news is that now we must work really hard to bring that balance back up. We have no more rabbits to pull out of hats and Mark's employer has announced layoffs.

On the other hand, we have that month and a half in the bank and know how to get more flowing into the emergency fund. One of our major decisions this week has been to repair the aging Volvo instead of getting a car loan for a different car. Next bonus maybe we'll plan for a new used car, but that's not until March. We'll just keep plugging along with what we have and stash more away for the future.

One Cool Idea

2009-06-18T10:10:00.001-05:00

I'll update on the big dance recital when I get a chance to breathe, but wanted to pass along something really cool right now. I'm signing up for several of these.

What's Next?

2009-06-08T13:31:00.002-05:00

OK, so in the midst of all the craziness my life has become - taking care of my non-compliant parents, the upcoming dance recital, making big decisions about whether or not to have a homeschooling conference next year, etc., etc., etc., I have to suffer through failing equipment that is supposed to make my life easier.

The dishwasher. Would cost a total of more than $400 to repair. We can replace one for nearly that. But we can't find the time to replace it or do the research to buy it.

The vacuum cleaner. Perhaps the most used appliance in the house, my trusty Miele Solaris. We've had it 8 years and this is the first major problem. I use it every day. On Saturday, I called a friend across the street hyperventilating and asking to borrow hers. She made me promise a solemn oath not to break it. She understands my pain.

The car. The Volvo with 120,000 miles on it - shouldn't it just last forever? For over a year now it's been doing this strange thing where the ABS system clicks in when accelerating, turning corners and occasionally while braking. Over the past week it's become loud. And then Saturday it was loud, refused to accelerate and showed that arrow signal that it was time to up shift, even in reverse. Transmission, you say? Likely, we dropped it off last night.

After losing the tree and shelling out a whole heck of a lot of money from the emergency fund for that and other tangential emergencies, our emergency fund is positively groaning. No longer do we have that nice cushion of 4 months living expenses saved in case Mark loses his job. Two, maybe. And we're in a recession here.

Maybe I can send Large out in his double breasted thrifted suit to look for a job? His hair is ever so slightly shorter now...

Back Home, Part Two

2009-06-04T09:00:00.006-05:00

Returning home from vacation always leaves me longing to be back on vacation. Reality has a tendency to just smack me in the face. Today I find myself wanting to see some of the friends we made at our campsite and in the state park. The Cooper's Hawk was a favorite, coming by frequently to find a meal, possibly for his young. He started the Orioles off screeching each time and then would just hang out, scanning the weedy area on the slope down to the lake for easier fare. He wasn't so easy to photograph and was majestic when the swooped through the campsite.

Reality hit in the form of a broken dishwasher.

Oh, let's not wash the morning dishes. We can just put them in the dishwasher when we get home. Except that that dishwasher, a trusty 9 year old thing with far more bells and whistles than we need, wont wash. It dies mid-cycle. All that crusted on scrambled egg had to be washed the old fashioned way. The repair guy came out one afternoon and the thing worked just fine for him. Then he left, running an empty cycle and it didn't work. Sputtered through part of the wash and stopped. Red indicator lights angrily blinking "Wash Cycle!", "Energy Saver Dry!", "Rinse Aid Empty!"

When there was no satisfactory response, it would start up again, get to another point in the cycle and start screaming at us again in it's red light way. Next morning the repair guy, Alan, came back and pronounced we need a new heater element/on board computer kit that would cost $310, in addition to the $98 I had already spent for the service call. At least our debt-free living allows us some wiggle room of cash in our emergency fund. It feels wasteful, but I think it's time to get rid of the fancy dishwasher. We bought it when Medium was a baby and I insisted we needed the anti-bacterial wash and sanitary rinse. Hot water = higher gas bills so we don't use it.

See why I'd rather spend my time with a bunch of loud geese angrily defending their many, many goslings? Even the fox snake was more fun, gobbling up caterpillars on the bike path. Gnats are impossible to photograph, but there were lots of them too.

Aside from that I have conference things to do, issues to resolve, decisions to make. All volunteer positions can get so personal, I'm learning. I have been endowed with all sorts of new responsibilities to accomplish with one hand tied behind my back because there isn't an efficient system for knowledge and responsibility transfer. No succession plan. Bad. Would never work in the business world, at least not successfully. There is no doubt that it will all work out, and I have plans to fix the system so that the whole she-bang doesn't depend solely on the dedication of a few kind-hearted souls who eventually burn out from the pressure and burden of it all. That's the plan anyway. We all know about roads paved with good intentions.

So, I took refuge in the comfort of friends and enjoyed that so very much that I organized a whole slew of park days and outings for our little homeschooling community this summer. Turns out everyone had an idea of where we could happily spend our time and all I had to do was gather the information and post it. Now that's the kind of job I like. Plus, I'm ensuring my social needs are met. Oh, and I guess the kids social needs too.

Home Again

2009-06-02T10:14:00.004-05:00

Because we can't fit all four bikes and Small's afterburner trailer on the back of the Volvo, we took two cars camping last week. This meant we could take more stuff! Here's what our stuff did on our vacation.

Some of the toys mostly stayed in the tent. Happily, they were safely in beds or in pockets when the rain came, so most of them didn't get more than damp.

Swano and Wolfie spent some time working on their laptop. The stump of this beautiful white oak was sad to see when we pulled up into our favorite spot. It affected the afternoon shade, but not enough for us to want to change spots next year.

Bobber fell in the lake within an hour of our arrival. He enjoyed hanging out with the dish gloves for a while, but ended up getting progressively wetter as the days passed and the rain came. He finally dried out on the last day.

The sketch books and pencils got a nice workout, we need to make more time for this activity in the future. We go for five days and four nights after Memorial Day, so at least one day is rained out. Sketching can be difficult in the rain.

Adjustment

2009-05-21T22:55:00.003-05:00

Mark, that great stabilizing and equalizing force in my life, the most consistent, calming and confirming husband a woman could dream of, takes a lot of pictures of plants. He can take 20 pictures of the same plant with different apertures, light, focus, until he gets what he wants. He rarely deletes what he doesn't want, however, leaving me with a folder labeled May 2009, insert-your-favorite-nature-spot-here and 53 pictures of the same bleeping Solomon seal from 9 angles.

At least it's digital, right? Before it used to be box after $20 box of prints. But when I look under May 2009 to find pictures of the defining moment of the month, I see file folders of how Mark has spent his lunch hour and early weekend morning bike rides - Arie Crown, Braidwood Savana, I&M Canal, Maple Lake, O'Hara Woods, Ted Stone, Warrenville Grove and West DuPage Woods. There is a folder for Mother's Day and a smattering of dumped, un-foldered photos that I took of my Roots&Shoots group and science lab. But not one picture of the mostly dead tree. Or the plants we are moving underneath it.

Not one shot of a wild geranium or bellflower lovingly transplanted from the woods around my childhood home when my parents moved 12 years ago. Instead, I found this fallen no swimming sign, which I hope is a signal of the future of our backyard now that the rain garden is in. We moved many a wild geranium, hyacinth and bellflower in the past week. I'm feverishly painting one wall of the garage in order to move the scorned and despised non-native hostas and ferns to the only shady place left in our yard. All the native stuff we can salvage has been moved and transplanted to other areas of the yard, but it looks dreadful. And I've spread nearly 2 cubic yards of mulch to protect what we've put in.

I just hope the apricot's enormous stump is ground down soon. That's one image I'd like to be rid of. And once the sanctioned and native Hill's Oak we plant nearby is in the ground, I'll believe our life is moving forward. It's the limbo I can't stand.

A Sad Day

2009-05-13T16:51:00.004-05:00

We are about to lose our tree. This tree is what sold me on the house, it was so magnificent and beautiful 14 years ago.

It was an overgrown apricot that never produced much fruit. The fruit it did produce was so high and so small that it was just weaponry for the squirrels to lob at us when we spent too much time in their space. The tree shaded the whole back deck, half the yard and much of the house. I used to leave Large and Small on the deck in their sandbox in the comfort of this tree while I went inside to do the dishes.

When we moved it, the tree was already cabled, holding it together in case of a storm. We've had it trimmed every year by the same company the previous owners used. The guy who comes out grew up taking care of this tree, he has admired it, held it together, trimmed it and has done all he can to keep it alive these past 5 or 6 years. Borers moved it and started killing the tree from the middle, there is no insecticide for this. Sap would come out in big globs as they did their work each summer, but we held out hope each year for just one more year.

As a fruit tree, it branched off into segments from one center point. My 80 year old neighbor, who has lived in the same house all her life, remembers that the original house owner chopped it down 50 years ago, only to have it grow back. This is a tree with staying power! The segments branched out over the deck, over my neighbors' driveway, over the addition to our house and over the back yard. The section over the neighbors driveway was the first to go, painfully cut off when nothing grew or bloomed on it. Then came parts of the sections over the back end of the house and the deck. Now the only live portions, which bloomed as beautifully as the picture taken four years ago, are the ones over the yard. These are straining against the cables, leaning on the power line. The dead portions are poised over the roof of the house. It's no longer an option to just nip off the dead bits and hope for another year. We've had our last year.

Part of the mourning of this tree is the digging up of the native (and some rare) wildflowers we planted underneath. Unfortunately, Chicago still thinks it is Bombay and we are in the midst of another monsoon.

Each time the tree was trimmed, it left a little hole in the canopy and took a while to grow back in. It was sad each year. These past few years have been like body part amputations, but we grew used to the new shape and hoped for the best. Now we will have an entirely new space in our lives, as unfamiliar and it will be unwanted.

Could it be?

2009-05-06T09:58:00.003-05:00

I am hopeful, really hopeful, that we are done with winter now. Our last frost date here is May 15, but the long range forecasts look pretty good. We did a major spruce up of our outdoors last weekend and have an inviting front porch set up right now.

I like to sit in the rocker and knit. The kids like to sit on the swing or the Adirondack chairs to read. With the birds and the gardens coming in, it's hard to concentrate on much other than the life around us.

This time of year, I have a recurring dream of owning a little place, a hobby farm, out in the middle of nowhere. In my dream we practice sustainable living, no one ever complains about the work and we are happy all the time. After this past weekend of cleaning, painting and putting in a 64 plant rain garden, I should know better. Dreams don't know better.

Beyond Ribbit

2009-04-27T11:34:00.003-05:00

We've been doing our amphibian monitoring, now that spring seems to be here and found this lovely specimen recently. It's an American toad, not the most attractive of our native species, and not particularly endangered. It does have one of my favorite calls, though. It's a long trill, lasting nearly 30 seconds. Strangely, this guy was out ahead of schedule. We heard him at night and found him in the morning. Don't these animals know we have a schedule for them, understand the temperatures they like and predict when they'll be around for us to observe? He's about a month early and the frogs I should have heard - chorus frogs, spring peepers, leopard frogs, etc. - were no where to be heard. Oh well, at least he was there.

We went on a bike ride as a family yesterday, using Small's new tag along trailer on the back of Mark's bike. It worked like a charm, mostly Small did no peddling, but got the hang of hanging out on a bike. And I saw a muskrat in the water! That was exciting. It was too windy for our warty friends, and a bit too rainy for some of those on the bikes, but we had a wonderful time.

Ta Da!

2009-04-17T11:55:00.004-05:00

Probably the only good thing about us being sick for so long was that I was finally able to finish Mark's cabled sweater. Just in time for spring to arrive! He has managed to wear it on a few cool mornings, but a nice worsted weight wool isn't going to work again until November, I should think. Luckily he has been the same size and shape for years.

It was a really fun knit - Kathy Zimmerman's Rhapsody in Tweed. My only real problem was in reading the directions. I took Mark's measurements as the finished size and produced a cabled sausage casing.

Before seaming it together - and how I hate seaming - I added this garter edging from both sides and did a three needle bind off. That way I could add a few inches and avoid doing a side seams. It made the armhole and sleeves a bit trickier but was the right decision in the end. Only another knitter would notice my mistake, and only then if looking at Mark's armpit.

I'm not so afraid of seaming now and will keep my mind open to patterns in pieces. Seamless knitting seems so much more fluid, but a busy pattern like this would wind up with a jog anyway.

Go me!

What We Are Doing

2009-04-10T13:17:00.004-05:00

Large has not left the compound in 2 straight weeks. He's barely left the couch, and then only to get to the bed. Today, however, he is reading and doing more than just whimpering, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Medium has taken a liking to pulling dandelions. This is an excellent hobby as our front patch of grass is mostly dandelions and I'm not interested in putting chemicals on it. As an added bonus, the rabbits and pig love dandelions and the carbon footprint of their meal is considerably smaller when we can forage.

Small has mostly spent his time driving everyone crazy. He's NOT sick, NOT interested in staying still and expends more energy running around the place than I would believe possible. Yesterday was nice enough that he could play outside for a couple of hours. Mostly, when he's in a quiet mode, he's been making get well cards for Large and I. These involve cutting tiny bits of paper, coloring them, gluing more little bits of paper on and presenting them with a flourish. It's very cute, very messy and a little bit wasteful.

I'm hoping that with the improvement today, much coughing but no fever and less of the sunken eyes and ghostly pallor, the kids can be convinced to play cork forts again. I had been saving corks and wanting to make something with them. The kids have taken them over, setting up forts and armies and elaborate rules of engagement.

We'll see. And maybe today is the day I will seam Mark's fabulous cabled sweater together. How I hate seaming. I made a rookie mistake in picking the size to knit (finished size versus body measurements) and had to fudge a bit to widen it. So, the seaming, which I normally hate, is even trickier than normal. Plus, it's a wool sweater just in time for spring. None of these things are as motivating as Brain Age's virus buster game! See, we really have been too sick for too long.

Tell Me Something Good

2009-04-02T18:13:00.003-05:00

I know spring is just around the corner because I can read the calendar. But it's still cold. And we are still sick. This is our second time around with the flu and this one is even longer than the last.

Aside from that we went to a funeral for a friend last weekend, I got the flu the day after. He was only 50, a gifted musician, a loving father and husband, a kind and generous man. He broke into our house one Christmas morning to feed the cats after the keys were left inside. He spent a great deal of time assembling bunk beds we took off their hands when they decided to downsize and move to a smaller place. Even after they moved, the family remained a part of our community on the block here. Now that family is smaller and our world is sadder.

What else? Oh, yes, my sister has a lump in her breast and my brother just got laid off. And a friend's husband just had lymph nodes removed.

When you are in the midst of things like this, especially with a fever thrown in, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. But spring is coming, we will get over this minor illness, the Harry Potter exhibit will be at the Museum of Science and Industry in a few short weeks, soon we will go camping for the first time with no child in diapers. I'm trying to think happy thoughts.

Not again

2009-03-27T14:15:00.004-05:00

Just when we thought we were safe. We had the upper respiratory kind of long flu in February. We had the gastro-intestinal kind of flu in March. I thought we were done.

And then came an awful cold from out of nowhere. A few days before it hit, we were hiking in the Indiana Dunes and saw actual wildflowers popping out of the ground! This cold came with complete exhaustion. No fever, but for two days Medium and Small didn't leave the bed or couch. For two days they ate nothing, drank little and slept 'round the clock.

Now they are better, a bit congested perhaps, but up and dressed for the first time in a couple of days. Large is acting cranky and has those tell-take circles under his eyes. Mostly, though, he's working hard at being in denial. Almost as hard as he pretends not to like math.

We're Throwing the Switch

2009-03-23T16:11:00.003-05:00

Last year my family participated in Earth Hour by shutting off the main electrical switch into the house. I'm sure there's a more technical term for that grey box where the fuses and such are. Everything went off and for one hour we played games by candle and camping light. Yhatzee, Medium remembers. This year we have a lot of new games to choose from.

This Saturday, March 28th. 8:30 p.m. Take a stand against climate change.

A Dream Come True

2009-03-19T10:17:00.003-05:00

We went to see the Aztec exhibit at the Field Museum on Monday. Monday is our museum day, and now that we have a commitment to facilitate a science lab in the afternoon, we push ourselves to get out of the house early and explore our chosen topic. We love the Field Museum, it's vast, interesting, wonderful. Actually, we love all the museums we belong to and our sense of a favorite changes to the one we have most recently visited.

we chose the Aztec show partly because it is leaving on April 12th and partly because we had just finished our car audio book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, which had funny references to the study of Aztecs. The exhibit was really great, full of artifacts and interesting descriptions of daily life and warfare.

As for the dream part, it happened like this: Small is only five and can't read all the descriptions. It was all a bit above his head and he tends to wander off on his own, disengaged from the family. The rest of us were engrossed with the exhibit and I needed to be mindful of where he was. This happens sometimes at museums. At one point, noticing Small had wandered to a corner and was playing an imaginary game by himself, Medium pulled him in and said "Oh look, Small! This is a vessel used to hold a potent drink and it's formed in the shape of a drunken rabbit..." going on to explain all about the drink and what drunkenness is and why it was such a funny, intriguing thing. It was a touching, family, homeschooling moment I've got stored in my memory.

Conference Recovery

2009-03-16T08:55:00.002-05:00

Before my boys fell to the gastro-intestinal virus at the InHome conference, we all had a fabulous time. My two may be the only ones who look right in this picture, but they are part of a kid-chain holding an enormous, 85 pound snake. This was one of several entertaining and informative wildlife sessions at the conference this year. At one point, while I was on the treadmill during a sprint, Mark sent me a the text "here comes the hedgehog!"

Despite screams from Large "This is the WORST conference EVER!" while lying in bed watching the Disney Channel all day (we don't get cable, so this was unusual in itself), the conference really was as good as ever. Even Large went to four fabulous sessions - lego robotics, roller coaster making, foam sword making and the reptilian wildlife session - before falling ill. Medium made it to all her sessions, striding off confidently on her own, calling or texting us when she was finished. Her favorite was the session with the resort chef, touring the kitchen, seeing how professionals prepare food. Small petered out early, at five it's a stretch for him to be in a "class" for an hour. And then he was hit the hardest with the illness. I took to calling our room the vomitorium.

My favorite part is volunteering at the Information Table as the conference opens. I love to be able to help people find their sessions in the sprawling Pheasant Run Resort. And I love seeing everyone I know, chatting with friends, catching up with acquaintances. It's stressful as the opening sessions approach - hence the treadmill - but worth the effort. Mark and I worked our schedule smartly this year so that one of us would be available each time slot just in case someone got sick. And two did. Even that wasn't so bad from my perspective - someone else had to wash all the sheets and towels!

It was a long sick, though. We were housebound from the time we returned on Sunday until Friday morning.

New Toilets

2009-03-04T15:36:00.004-06:00

Yes, I'm really writing about toilets. "But Mommy! That's so private!" Ah, well, yes. What goes on with the toilet and the body functions is private, but the toilets themselves are not.

With our bonus money this year, after funding our emergency savings (about four months of living expenses), we decided to finish our bathroom projects from a few years ago. When we started the project, we had no idea how to manage our money, funding it with a combination of credit cards, cash and home equity. And then we ran out of cash, our air conditioning broke down and we were frightened by our HELOC. So, we put it off until we had cash to compete it. Now we are ready for shower doors, a coat of paint, fixing the loose tiles, replacing the fan and replacing two aging toilets.

The toilets were my job and they came first. We wanted to go green, using as little water as possible for each flush. After much research, we settled on two Toto Aquia toilets, and purchased them from the Green Home Experts in Oak Park. Fabulous store, great customer service, wonderful products - I highly recommend it.

It's hard to imagine waxing euphoric over a toilet, isn't it? These toilets give one something to wax over. The are new and clean and shiny, which is undoubtedly part of it. But the fact that they use .9 gallons for liquid waste and 1.6 for solid is a great green boost to our consciousness. Flushing that little water is quiet! No performance problems, either.

But the best, thing and what made me fork over twice the money over a conventional toilet was this:

I live in a house of toilet slammers. Not angry toilet slammers, just unthinking slammers. This has cured them of that habit - there is no way to slam this lid. Smooth, quiet, beyond belief.

I'm easily amused.

Birthday!

2009-02-18T15:54:00.003-06:00

I just found this picture of my dad after a Google search. He's the one at the podium. My mom is seated, listening intently to his speech. Here's the description from the photo archive:

Description: middle age; suit; standing; talking at banquet, L-R A.V. Crewe, C. H. Townes, and Mrs Crewe. Dr. Crewe, Director of Argonne National Laboratory, was the speaker at the 'March' meeting banquet of the American Physical Society (APS) Wednesday evening, March 29, in the Grand Ballroom of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, Chicago.Date: March 29, 1967

My Dad was 40 when this picture was taken. Today he turned 82, a whole lifetime in between. I had just turned 3 a few days before this meeting. He was in constant demand as a speaker, traveled regularly to Japan and had yearly trips all over the world connected to his work.

His voice is mostly gone, he rarely gets above a hoarse whisper these days. Public speaking hasn't been part of his repertoire since Parkinson's' hit. A year ago he still had a voice, and was still a big man. Now his weight has stabilized, thanks largely to the g-tube that gives him his basic nutrition requirements. His physical movements are more difficult now, but his strength is good. His mind has not been affected, except for worry and anxiety, also brought on my Parkinson's.

Happy Birthday, Dad! I cherish my time with you more each day.

Volunteering

2009-02-12T19:29:00.004-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about volunteering lately. Why do some people step up to the plate and others don't? Is there some inherited volunteering gene that compels a person to do more than they can? Is there a corresponding gene that compels a person to let others do the work?

Obviously, I have a bias, as I am part of the former group. I can't even pose a question about the other half without exposing my bias. I have a no-buddy, someone who helps me to say "no" when I cannot possibly do more. I am also her no-buddy, but in true over-volunteering style, I firmly believe my efforts to stop her volunteering are called into play more, because she does more. Which leads me to think I should be doing more, and then I have to call my no-buddy to stop me.

Every year, our fabulous InHome Conference reaches the point where half the required number of volunteers are doing all the work. This year, my no-buddy (some buddies we are, right?) decided we needed to map out the jobs and create a manual for the conference. This is to be a living, breathing, ever-changing document to help new recruits and seasoned veterans perform herculean tasks to create the event that is the highlight of our kids "school" year.

I worked for years in Human Resources hiring, firing, training, contract negotiating, performing labor relations, benefit evaluations, the whole gamut of people related jobs. I worked in the corporate world. We were lean and mean in the engineering profession, or so I thought. Even more lean in the trucking industry, and a quite bit more real. But I never encountered what I have seen in the past few days.

In surveying the current volunteer population, we've found that these 37 heroes are performing the jobs of possibly twice that many. In salary situations, jobs have functions that are secondary or tertiary. In the volunteer world, there are no such luxuries. What needs to be done gets done. What wants to get done is either a need or discarded. There is no cushion, no fall back, no support staff.

I want to believe that a lack of knowledge if fueling the lack of volunteers, both for the big jobs and the small, one or two hour jobs during the conference. We don't want to scare people or guilt them into working something they aren't comfortable with. We want to be a welcoming, warm environment to newcomers and long-term homeschoolers alike. We don't want to be pushy, so we don't tell anyone what, specifically we need. This leads to the few thanklessly performing for the many. And it leads to discontent and burn-out. It happens in places like this particular conference, in homeschooling groups, in habitat restoration, in situations requiring volunteers everywhere.

So what makes people shy away from volunteering? There is the fear of the unknown. This has happened to me. I have a child with severe eczema and was sleep deprived for four and a half years. When I couldn't get a clear picture of what was required in a volunteer opportunity, I said no, fearing it was more than I could handle. There is also a feeling of inadequacy. Others have been doing it so well for so long, how could anyone else measure up? There is also a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to orchestrate the event, group, class, etc. If a Girl Scouts troop, for example, runs like clockwork for a few years, there is a belief that it will always work that way. If a support group has been a safe harbor for a generation of parents, it should just continue after those kids have fledged. But without a fresh crop of volunteers in each of these situations, this wont happen.

And then there are the people who wont volunteer no matter what. They have a stronger "no" muscle than most of the people I know. They sign up, pay their fees, do what is asked and go home. They are one tree, not part of the forest.

I don't really want to know how many of these trees there are out there, I'm too busy meeting the forest. I have no answers to the whole volunteering conundrum, but I get to widen my circle of friends and acquaintances and learn from them. My world is richer. And now that my eczema baby is sleeping through the night, I have more time.

Light Bulb Moment

2009-02-08T17:58:00.003-06:00

I had one of those rare moments of clarity recently where I just wanted to smack myself on the head. Now I'm happier with my new insight and more self-forgiving.

I like to make things hard on myself. Today I noticed something I have been walking past every day for the past five years or so. A piece of plywood painted white on one side. It's been on the landing of the stairs to the basement, by the house side door for years. Years. Hmmm, what could I use that for? Oh, I know. For the conference this year, I need to replace the message board we've been using the past few years and was thinking of a cork board with push pins. That way we could use recycled paper bits instead of sticky notes that never retain their stickiness as long as we want them to. A better system and green as a bonus! Except I don't have a cork bulletin board. Why not glue all the corks I've been saving onto the board and use that? I lay them out, determined a pattern and a border and then did a load of laundry.

In my chain reaction world, the laundry led me to want another octopus-shaped clothes dryer from Ikea. It has eight arms, each with two clothes pins attached and is perfect for hanging cloth pull ups, fleece, anything I don't want going into the dryer. It also has a face, which makes it fun for the kids to use. Mark had the kids at the zoo, so I decided to head off for a solo shopping trip - the height of luxury.

Sadly, Ikea no longer carries the octopus. The worker I asked was standing in front of a pile of framed cork boards the perfect size for my information table needs, for $4. Unbelievably, I had to wrestle with myself, weighing the pros and cons of the wasted $4 on an imported cork board with a huge carbon footprint or my spending hours gluing corks onto the scrap wood from my basement. I spent the money, picked up a few other items and headed home.

This little exercise in futility made me think of a larger one I've been spending nearly the last two years on. I've been using the Homeschool Tracker, which is a really wonderful free tool put out by some great homeschooling folks. I just needed a method of collecting attendance data to meet the state's requirements, but ended up laboriously plugging in all sorts of data each day. I typed in how long the kids did free reading, math, spelling, what science videos they watched, whether they wrote anything that day, the history curriculum, etc. Each book was entered as a resource and then checked off as having been read. My kids read a lot of books. It became a job in itself. I was diligent, purposeful.

Earlier this year I had my kids take over their schedules, believing this to be a life skill they should master (as I am struggling to master). So, during our almost daily planning meeting, we schedule what needs to be done, when we need to leave, etc and at the end of the day the kids write down what books they have read, what science projects they have done, etc. They are keeping track of their lives. I would then take their planner and copy this information into the Homeschool Tracker.

Double work. I like the format of the Homeschool Tracker, it translates everything into school format. The tracker lists their activities as "assignments" and gives them a check mark for having "completed" something. I printed the information monthly into a binder for a while and then fell behind and would print it out in great bunches. I enjoyed the possibility of having something to show doubting friends and relatives what my children have accomplished, how hard they work, how far they have come.

The fatal flaw in this thinking, of course, is that no one has ever asked for proof that my children are learning anything. They are smart kids, easy kids. They love to learn, spend hours reading, ask for museum memberships for their birthdays. I have no doubters in my life. But I still felt I needed something to prove to some nebulous someone that we are productive. The problem with this is that the only people who would ask for anything resembling proof would be people who don't know my children. State superintendents perhaps, truant officers maybe? And these are exactly the kinds of folks I would never present my nicely labeled binders! Too much information, they would find something wrong with it. All they get is what is required by law, attendance records and a letter of compliance signed by Mark and me.

So, it turns out the only person I was keeping these records for was myself. But even I wasn't reading the stuff. I printed it, punched holes and put it in the three ring binders. There, all done. It should have been a big clue to me how pointless the exercise was when my laptop blew up and I lost all of school year 2007 - 2008's records. But it wasn't.

I don't need to prove to myself that my children are learning, I witness their learning in all its glory each and every day. Some day we will need high school transcripts, I suppose. But Medium and Large are only 9 and 10 now. By the time we need transcripts, they will be able to control what information is recorded in any tracking system on their own.

So, just yesterday I printed out attendance records year to date on each of my three monsters, put them in a folder with our letter of compliance and stashed it by the front door. I have at hand whatever anyone could need, in the unlikely event someone asks for it.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with all those corks. Small used to play with them like blocks. I could drill a hole in them lengthwise and make a sun shade for our front porch, I could make them into trivets if we ever needed more trivets, or coasters, or ....

Obsessions

2009-02-03T08:03:00.004-06:00

I've been thinking a lot about obsessions lately. Obsessing about it, even. Not compulsions, not addictive behavior, but the kind of intense interest in something that compels you to focus on little else.

Large has been obsessive about stop animation for the last few days. Brought on by the Flip digital video camera they received for Christmas and a desire to make movies with his Lego guys, he took 400 pictures of Lego scenes and has been working with Scratch to get them into a movie. It's slow going, he's figuring it all out himself. It's highly frustrating at times, but he gets a special joy when he figures something out - even when it means the past few hours worth of work was for naught - and rushes to tell me about it.

Medium has been obsessively baking for a couple of months. While this has the obvious negative effect on our collective waistlines, it's really a wonderful kitchen chemistry project. In fact, it has led to a request that we study chemistry. And the chain reaction searching through the library system and homeschooling resources to find suitable chemistry experiments for my clan. She wakes up in the morning and huddles with the cookbook her aunt gave her for Christmas. Hmm, muffins? Scones? Coconut cream cake? She's learned a lot about substitutions as she makes things our milk and egg allergic Small can eat, and how the different properties of these substitutes affect the outcome.

Small has been obsessed with all things knights and castles. He recently turned 5 (already!) and received many new knights and weapons of mass destruction from the middle ages. We have this set up in the living room, drawing in the older children to his world of imaginative play. His Nintendo DS has been in the car since Friday, probably not good for the device, but he has been unwilling to go out and get it. No need when you have a world full of guys with cross bows, axes, a catapult and siege tower to storm the castle.

As for me, my obsession runs along more predictable lines. I've started a new sweater for Mark. It's an interesting pattern full of cables, no two rows are alike. A fun knit, although I can tell the sleeves are going to be boring with just one mini-cable repeat running the length.

And I've been setting up grow boxes in the basement to reduce our rabbits' carbon footprint. I made them with LED puck lights inside of plastic tubs that came with baby wipes when the older two were babies. The lettuce and herbs are planted in yogurt cups and the water comes from the discharge from the house humidifyer. Very green. I have actual sprouts and plant to clear a shelf, put rope lights on there and grow it all in the basement. It's pretty cool and I hope it works. Now that we've cleaned out the basement and have room to use it as an actual, functioning part of the house, I'm filling it with a cool weather garden.

These healthy obsessions spark our collective desire to continue learning, to expand our horizons and stretch ourselves through frustration and disappointment to mastery of skills we value as individuals. It's a really good life.

Slip Sliding Away

2009-01-23T09:22:00.004-06:00

The winter is half over. The kids and I love winter, love snow and all the winter activities surrounding snow. We do not, however, love cold. And this winter it seems like every weekend has been too cold to enjoy the great, snowy outdoors. This weekend will be no exception. So, it's likely we'll miss the dog sledding demonstration at the Morton Arboretum.

We been enjoying skating with homeschool friends in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. Likely, the people set it up for the adults to skate around on their lunch hours, or the smattering of preschool aged kids. Before Christmas, our homeschooling groups descended on the place, making it a happy family atmosphere. Being January, less people turned out this week - they are sick, the schedules got full, they are tired of winter. We still had a great time, my wall hugging children are getting more confident and are performing fewer Jim Carey like moves on the ice.

We just want a couple of above 20 degree weekends with snow before it's all over. We'd like to cross country ski, snowshoe, sled and hike. We're taking our snowshoes to the dunes today, hoping for a bit of fun.

House Presents

2009-01-19T11:02:00.003-06:00

I like to give our house presents for Christmas each year. Sometimes, like this year, we get necessary things like a set of tires. This was our first cash only Christmas, so we're pretty pleased the house could receive gifts as well. Along with the tires, we got a device to stream Netflix movies in to our TV without needing a disc. It's made by Roku, specifically for Netflix, although it will be able to take Amazon movies once Amazon is ready. This has been a great gift. We do still get three movies from Netflix at a time, but often they are not what we want to watch before bed. Or, as in the case of the Mr. Magoo series, they are languishing, unwatched, but unwilling to be returned.

So, say it's a pledge drive on PBS - and when, really, isn't it a pledge drive on PBS? It's 8:30, everyone is ready to watch something, but there's nothing on. We really only watch PBS, we choose not to get cable for more channels of stuff we don't want to watch. We have three Netflix discs at home - a 2 1/2 hour ballet, an orchestral performance, and Mr. Magoo. We click on the Roku, see what's in the queue, pick one and watch it. If the Internet is wonky, as it has been recently, sometimes it pauses to retrieve it again. And sometimes, strangely, the picture is distorted or the soundtrack isn't coordinated with the pictures. We need to figure out these problems, but we've been able to watch alternate shows instead. And when the kids had the flu last week, they camped out with Nature programs. Great present for the house.

Our second house gift was a polymer clay oven. I wont bore everyone with the details of the combination of coupons that made this unnecessary item worthwhile, it was a spectacular deal. And the kids really love it. At least Medium and Small do. They make new creations every few days. Medium even has a box with many small compartments to store her creatures
in. Here's a picture of her teeny tiny horse collection:

None of these are more than an inch big. She also has more teensy weensy animals and food items (cupcakes and sandwiches with eyes, that sort of thing).

Large had thus far only had one foray into the kitchen to work with the polymer clay and cook something up. This is his creation, which has left me speechless:

Allergic Change

2009-01-15T09:54:00.004-06:00

We went to the allergist for skin testing yesterday. Large has been allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, legumes and peas for his 10 years. We gave him frozen peas as a teething baby, but in the past year or two he's been developing hives from peas.

Allergy testing is always just a snapshot in time. The good news is that his current snapshot indicates no allergies to tree nuts. This frees up a lot of foods "made in a facility" and some vegetarian options. He is also not allergic to soy, although he doesn't like it. And not allergic to pinto beans. There was no little vial with the essence of garbanzo, navy, black or kidney beans. I don't need a doctor's diagnosis to know he is allergic to garbanzo and/or fava beans, though. That sent him to the ER in anaphylactic shock a few years ago.

On a scale of zero to 4+, Large tested 0 for all the tree nuts. He tested 3+ for peas and 4+ for peanuts. So, it's a mixed bag. We could have gotten a blood test, not as reliable as the skin test but improving, for lentils, but it seemed silly to go for just one allergen. They didn't have the other beans either. We'll try them slowly, adding beans is important to the environmentalist in me.

We won't add nuts unless Medium's test on Monday comes back with the same tree nut free results. She's had some mild reactions to nuts, but has never been tested. We've just avoided everything with her.

Small, I believe, is too small to go through the testing. It is really barbaric. Pricking the skin with an allergen and then being unable to scratch it for 10 minutes. Nearly 24 hours later, Large's peanut spot still has an angry red bump. And Small is the perfect example of the problems with allergy testing in children. A year ago he couldn't eat wheat without breaking out in a rash, cranberries made his eyes water and itch, eggs made him vomit. Now he still can't have eggs, although his reaction is a face rash. And his milk reaction is a bit more severe in that his rash goes to other spots of his body along with his face. But he doesn't' have the almost instant full body rash reaction to milk anymore. Small has always had skin issues, not anaphylaxis issues. None of our children, however, have had peanuts.

I'm not quite holding my breath for more mixed good news on Monday. As the older two get more independent, it's more important that they understand what they are and are not allergic to. It's important that they let go of some of their fear of foods and try new things with confidence. And it's important for me to let go of policing their food intake, to transfer the monitoring to them.

I Get It

2009-01-12T08:27:00.003-06:00

Only now do I understand. I've knitted 8 or 9 pairs of socks in the past year or two, happily giving them away to people who oohed and aahed over them. (Never knit something for someone who doesn't appreciate hand knits.) And then I read somewhere that a knitter really should knit every other project of so for themselves. What a concept! I decided to try it and these were the result.

Now I find myself looking in the clean laundry baskets, digging for the socks. They could have been a row or two longer to make them absolutely perfect, but the fit of hand kit socks is a real treat. No seams, no tightness, just the right amount of hug on both ankles - despite one being significantly wider than the other. I want to fill my sock drawer with hand knits! Save the store boughts for the gym.

Planning

2009-01-07T14:19:00.006-06:00

I think one of my more important jobs as a parent is to help my children understand how to use their time. Not in the manner I learned, which was to create endless to-do lists of tasks that couldn't be accomplished in one day. The longer the list, the more important I felt. Until the end of the day, that is, when I felt like a complete failure. Keeping with my goal of finding the flow of balance in my life, I'm working to get the kids to take over their own schedules.

Each morning we have a family daily planning meeting. Sometimes it's short, sometimes long. Today we went over what needed to be done by when in order to take a trip to the Field Museum. Small woke everyone up in the night, so we didn't really get rolling until 10:30 or so. Working with the time schedule and priorities, we determined we needed to get our homeschooling and accountable kids tasks done by 12:30 to get to the museum by 1 to leave by 3 and not hit traffic on the way to the gym. That would leave time for playing with friends before dinner when we got home. It was an aggressive schedule and we didn't make it. That, in itself, was a lesson.

Yesterday I made up planner pages for Medium and Large, took them to Office Depot and had spiral bound books made. We've been working with a planner page for a while and came upon one we can life with. The first section is for homeschooling: reading, spelling, vocabulary, writing, math, science, history, art and music. Not very unschool-y, I know, but the kids choose their reading, math topics, science topics, history selection based on what we've read in The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child, Volume 2: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance, Revised Edition ... the World: History for the Classical Child), art and music. They asked for spelling and vocabulary. The second section is for Accountable Kids, the program we use to keep our house and life in order. Next is a section for exercise - they chose what to do and write it in. Then comes activities and classes with the time we need to leave and an Extra section for things like play dates. We are pretty pleased with how it's working so far, and are keeping ourselves open to tweaking it in the future.

It's been a struggle for me to learn to manage my time as an adult. I've never had a good notion of how long something takes to accomplish. I think it should take half an hour to install a ceiling fan, when it takes the better part of a day. This past weekend I never imagined I would have my basement overhaul project 75% complete in just two days, it seemed it would take an overwhelming year of weekends.

I've been working through the The Life Organizer: A Woman's Guide to a Mindful Yearbook by Jennifer Louden. It isn't a planner in the traditional sense of filling out blocks of time, you still use a calendar for that. The book's purpose is to prompt you to focus on what is important to you. It poses questions for each month and week to guide you through to your goals. My favorite weekly circle to fill in is "Let Go Of." I'm not through to that point yet, but am looking forward to it!

Ambitions

2009-01-06T14:42:00.001-06:00

Maybe mine are just not big enough, or not as clearly articulated. This video shows a project beyond belief in it's scope and beauty. Get a cup of coffee and enjoy.

Balance

2009-01-05T18:06:00.003-06:00

It took me forever to come up with a new year's resolution this year. I like to do just one or two, make it attainable. Yes, I could resolve to lose weight. I've been losing weight all my life and it's a bit old and boring after nearly 45 years. I could resolve to save more money, get a job, quit coffee, do something virtuous. Last year I resolved to do something creative each and every day, even for a few minutes. That worked and has helped me to be happy. There were just a few weeks this summer when my Dad was in the hospital that I couldn't do anything but tread water.

So, I've decided that my resolution this year is to achieve balance in my life. Balance my parents and my children, my husband, my house, my interests and my passions. It's a tall order, it's going to take a lot of baby steps, many false starts to find the right path.

Yes, my parents need me. They need me to be there once or twice a week, to check on them, make sure their medicines, appointments, house arrangements, etc. are all in order. But do they really need all of me? Do I need to spend a full 8 or 10 hours with them twice a week? How about shorter visits with and without the kids, hurricanes of activity surrounding my father's off times when he naps and my mother's daily hour and a half long trips to the grocery store.

Yes, my children need me, but not all of me. Yes, they need to learn, but they do better most of the time without me. With Medium and Large, at least, I need to set parameters and walk away. Small needs to become a strong reader, then he'll be fine on his own too. They are on their way to becoming life long learners, I don't want to mess that up with too much structure. I usually impose structure as a result of my own worry or panic over their progress. I need to let go.

Other people need me, too. But mostly, I need them. It's time to nurture my relationships - with Mark, with my friends and family. These past six months I've been more of a dead weight in the mix, I need to create space to live with them.

Today, we went out to my parents'. I arranged their calendar, actually hanging it on the wall. Made sure their appointments were on it, asked their aide to go over the calendar with my mother every day, called various doctors to get the appointment dates and times correct. When the dentist office called because Mom wasn't there, and asked her to come in at 3:30, I said we had to leave at 2. Instead of bagging my workout again, for the fifty third straight time, because someone else needed me, I made it a priority. And, unbelievably, the world did not fall apart. Mom was able to reschedule for a few mornings out when the aide could be with my father. It felt selfish to put myself first, but I'll get over that.

Probably these aren't baby steps for me. They are big steps. It's as if I worked long and hard to become my own self, achieved that for a good 20 years and then had it all swept away from me when my parents declined. A dear friend, who is caring for her mother heroically through many worse health problems, said once "My life is not my life anymore." I need my life to be mine as well as my parents' and my children's. I need it all to mesh just a little bit better than it has been.

Somewhat handmade Christmas

2008-12-31T13:04:00.005-06:00

Now that everyone has opened their gifts, I can share my handiwork. The cabled mittens on the left went to my sister-in-law. It was a really fun pattern from Ravelry, quick and easy to knit. The socks went to my brother-in-law, my usual 3x1 rib pattern. Stretchy and functional. The yarn is Opal, purchased at my weaving shop before it closed this summer. Very fun knits, those two.

And then I violated one of the Yar n Harlot's rules of holiday knitting. I knit for someone who doesn't appreciate handmade things. Actually, my sister's daughter may very well appreciate the little bundles of joy I gave her in the form of a bunny and a monkey, but my sister did not. Lesson learned. Ordinary plastic stuff is better. The monkey was a really fun thing to knit as well, although next time I'll do the smaller version to shorten the boredom of the arms and legs. The pattern came from Blue Moon and featured an afterthought heel for the mouth and butt. Much fun.

And then came the fleece pajamas for my kids. This was extremely difficult as I'm not good at sewing and the kids are with me all the time. One of the few drawbacks of homeschooling is that you can't sneak in a handmade gift too easily. But I kicked them out of the house or banished them to other rooms to get them done. And now they are matching, except for the dots I put inside as labels to help in the laundry folding.

All in all, I've had a very creative year. It was one of my resolutions last year to do something creative each day. And except for the few weeks surrounding my father's hospitalization and major life change, I managed to do just that. I feel better for it and hope to keep up the habit in the years to come. All told, I knit seven pairs of socks (and I'm on the 8th), a hat and gloves, mittens, a lace scarf, a failed sweater for Mark, a bunny and a monkey. Need to update my Ravelry notebook, which is really handy for notes. That and I sewed the Halloween costumes, pants for Small, the pjs, and did some paper crafting. It's really healthy to keep the creative juices flowing.

Crazy Weather

2008-12-30T07:35:00.004-06:00

We've had some really wild and crazy Christmas weather. It was a weather stress week for us. First, the Sunday before Christmas was -8 degrees. It warmed up to -5. The house temperature was 64 degrees and the furnace struggled to keep up. Then it just quit. The hugely expensive furnace that cause us to redefine our relationship with credit a mere two years ago. Not heating. Luckily, I had signed up for the service plan the last time it stopped and we had a guy here at 7 p.m. on a Sunday to fix it for only $65. He showed Mark how to hit a button on the electrical panel when it's windy and it stops again. Our front door and many windows had a thick layer of ice on them.

Then we tried to get to East Peoria for Mark's family's celebration on the Tuesday. It had warmed up to the 20s and was snowing in the morning, but was supposed to end by early afternoon. We watched the radar as it remained stubbornly showing snow and decided to head out anyway. I guess Blagoevich has siphoned off all the snow plow money as I55 was almost a parking lot. It took us an hour to get to Weber Road (about 20 miles) when we decided to turn around.

We started again on Wednesday, the roads were clear south of the Chicago Metro area, but it was extremely windy. The central part of the state had already experienced an ice storm, parking lots were skating rinks. It was warmer, so some snow and ice was melting, but it froze overnight. We made it, but it took much longer than usual. New DS games helped to entertain the kids in the back seat.

Thursday morning was clear and sunny, not a problem making it to Indiana for my family's celebration. That night, as we slept, it started to rain. Mark got up early on Boxing Day, Friday, for a Starbucks run, I fell back asleep, dreaming of good coffee. He came back in a half hour later and said the roads were closed except for emergencies and everything was a sheet of ice. I said "Starbucks is an emergency" and them came to reality as I drank my tepid warm water they call coffee and watched news coverage of trucks spinning on the ice. The news coverage was sobering, but reality didn't truly hit until I learned my brother in law was sitting on the side of the highway waiting for a tow truck for my father's SUV. The first tow truck spun out while on the way to get him, he said the roadside was just littered with SUVs and pick up trucks in the ditch.

And then it started to warm up and melt. This was the view out of our hotel window. We spent the whole morning in front of the fire, knitting, playing, running around - ours were the only children in the place.

We went out to lunch in the rain. It rained and rained and rained. Boxing Day was on hold. My sister's rental Hummer slid down the sand dune on the way to the grocery store. She gave us word that the town had salted and she felt we could make it up. The driveway was clear. I had spread 50 pounds of salt before everyone else arrived and chipped away at the ice. The brothers-in-law and grown nephews cleared it completely while we were there. The town does not believe in salt, it's not good for the vegetation. They had never seen ice like this before, a layer of sand over an inch of ice makes even the sturdiest of four wheel drives wobbly. We tried, but couldn't make it up the sand dune leading to their driveway.

It rained and then it fogged. Freaky fog, really dense patches. We drove back to the hotel slowly and slept to the sound of more rain. Saturday morning, on the now successful Starbucks run, Mark fell in the parking lot that had become a swimming pool and was soaked to the skin. It poured all day. We came home to a flooded back yard, but at that point were too weather weary to snap a photo. This one is from today.

Because it was in the sixties on Saturday, all our snow melted. On top of that we had two inches of rain. With the giant addition next door a few years ago and the new giant addition behind us, our available land to soak up rain has turned into concrete and is flowing into our back yard. Our sump pump is going every few minutes, and has been for four days now.

I'm looking forward to a few days of drying out. Sunshine, no snow, no rain, no salt, no weather.

Learning Science

2008-12-20T09:08:00.003-06:00

I meant to respond to a post on one of my homeschooling yahoo groups about science classes, but never got around to it. Now the thread is probably long gone, but I've been thinking about how we learn science ever since. The author of the post was looking to organize a science class for homeschoolers and was wondering what other parents were looking for.

I've been through many stages of worry over science for my kids. And the more I've watched them, the more I've come to realize that all one needs to learn science is an inquisitive mind and the opportunity to follow through on interests - i.e. a parent who can facilitate their investigations. Maybe I just have easy kids, after all, they ask for museum memberships for their birthdays and Christmas. Or, more likely (as "easy" never pops in my head when am looking for an adjective for my three), they are learning in a natural way.

An example. We went to the Field Museum a while back and spent 2 1/2 hours in the Evolving Planet exhibit. Small is very into dinosaurs. Medium and Large pushed every button, read everything that interested them, talked to the docents, had a great time. That lead to checking books out of the library and watching the excellent 9 hour PBS series Evolution. When I asked if they wanted to watch an episode one night last week, Large said "We're watching evolution all the time." He got the message. Very cool.

The same thing happened with our study of the human body. As my Dad's Parkinson's' and Mom's dementia progressed rapidly this summer, they were naturally inquisitive about how and why it was happening. More books from the library, more DVDs from Netflix, a wonderful CD ROM series, also from the library, and they now know more about the body than I could hope to remember.

Science may be in their blood, but I have to believe it is in every child's blood. My father is a renowned physicist, my brother has a PhD in Physics and is working in particle charged optics, Mark has a BS in Physics and MS in Nuclear Engineering. All three of them will tell you they were bored to tears in science class. My father learned more watching his grandmother's soap bubbles, my brother learned more at my father's knee and my husband learned more by following his interests to what I have called, on occasion, an obsessive end. A few museum memberships and a willing parental tour guide are all a child needs.

As teenagers they may head off to community college for the nitty-gritty paper and pencil work, and the nearly impossible to do at home lab work. Classes can be a soothing balm for worried parents, I've been down that road a few times. We feel inadequate in our ability to teach them "all they need to know" particularly in Math and Science.

For now, I've let go of the control/panic button. I've learned to do less teaching and more orchestrating, we are all happier for it. Museum memberships last a whole year and are cheaper than classes for three kids. They have the interest and need only the nourishment of their curiosity.

Socks!

2008-12-15T17:31:00.001-06:00

For the knitters out there, and I know you are out there, here's a funny, short movie to take your mind off your holiday knitting stress.

And now, back to the Christmas knitting.

That was cold

2008-12-10T17:44:00.003-06:00

Really, really cold. We took our Roots & Shoots group out to work at the Ted Stone Forest, one of the many Cook County Forest Preserves. We've been working there for over a year now, it's our on-going, long term project serving the environment. The boys (and my girl) truly enjoy cutting down invasive brush, freeing space for majestic oaks and a widening prairie. They love using real saws and loppers, aren't quite as excited about dragging that cut brush to the pile, but generally work hard and have a good time.

And then there are the hot dogs. This work day it was in the high teens, which was fine as long as we were moving. But after an hour or so, the kids were ravenous and the little fire had been heating nicely. It was much too windy to burn any of the big brush piles. I had 8 boys, 3 adults (it's good to have a high ratio with saws and things in the midst) and 32 hot dogs. Some of the boys brought their own hot dogs, so the count is really higher. Those hot dogs vanished. One fashioned a nice trident hot dog roaster with his pocket knife, and ate three at once. Others used the much more efficient grill, or single ended sticks.

Then came the marshmallows. Into the "oven of doom" as one hilarious boy kept calling it. Sticky, black, brown yummy marshmallows. That was our only real injury, marshmallows in the hair. And it mainly happened to my children, those of the long hair tendencies.

It was another beautiful day. But standing around the fire, I felt my age. And lost feeling in my toes (double socked!) and fingers (ski gloves!). Walking back to the car, I could barely grip the walking stick I brought along for stability. Kids don't feel the cold the same way we do.

See, it isn't all knitting around here!

Shameless Plug

2008-12-07T09:03:00.007-06:00

If you're in town this week, or near Oak Park, please head over to Pleasant Home (at the corner of Pleasant and Home). This wonderful old house is holding it's annual artisans sale with some of the proceeds going to the upkeep, restoration and maintenance of this historic treasure. I have a few silly things in the sale, but there are many, more serious artists involved.

The sale starts with an open house on Sunday, December 7th from 1 to 4 and runs all the following week. You can visit an historic landmark and finish off your holiday shopping in one fell swoop!

Big-ish News

2008-12-06T14:47:00.004-06:00

We interrupt the gift knitting marathon for an announcement. The other night at dinner, we had to bring out the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED at the dinner table was such a staple of my youth and early adulthood, I am elated the kids have reached the point where we could continue this tradition. The word we looked up - hobbledehoy - is pictured, our OED is the teeny-tiny print kind that required a magnifying glass. I remember looking up words without glasses as a kid. Now that was a long time ago.

Judging by my history, one of our children will now learn to swear emphatically and use this skill during long discussions of foreign policy. The resulting door slam wont be as effective as in my youth because of the distance between the bedrooms and the dining room, but that is just a small matter.

Almost done with the last knitted gift! I'll have to post pictures after the holidays.

Un-Ravelry

2008-11-20T18:56:00.008-06:00

You've got to watch this! Found it blogging around:

Louie

2008-11-19T21:30:00.003-06:00

Mark works with a guy named Louis. Whenever he pages us at 3 in the morning, or 3 in the afternoon on a birthday or takes Mark away from a family/holiday dinner, I break out in song. This song. Listen to it, it's worth it.

Now it turns out that after working 8 days straight, 12 hours with a one hour commute each way, Louis is trying to take away our Thanksgiving. Turns out also, he looks and acts nothing like the hot seventies guys on the album cover. His last name is half a mile long, he's short, overweight and, well, nothing like the Louie of my imagination.

I've had many men in my bedroom courtesy of Mark's pager. Gary, famously, on the fourth of July at 5 in the morning. Lately, Dave, who had the riot act read to him when he called at 7 a.m. the other day (you really don't' expect me to wake him up when the JUST got to bed, do you?). Louie has always been there for me. I can rally and sing "She was black, as the night, Louie was whiter than white..." and feel better.

Now I want him dead. Or at least mutilated.

So many blogs, so little time

2008-11-18T19:51:00.003-06:00

Lately, I've been adding and adding to my blog reading list. I can no longer read blogs in the morning. Despite getting up at 6:30 when Mark comes home, I have no time. Confession: the past few nights, I've not gotten up as Mark came in. Small has been waking each night at 1 or 2 crying for his Daddy. "But I need Daddy every night AND every day."

Still, my blogs are too many and too wonderful. I have my list of homeschooling blogs, my knitting blogs, my crafting blogs. There are too many projects, too many wonderful things to read about. Have you seen this fabulous collection of patters, for example, at Twist Collective? Or these great projects at Whip Up? Not to mention a homeschooling project at Paper Dali? I need to stop clicking through my blogs, adding to my read list and actually do some of these things.

Then again, maybe I should just clean my house and prepare for Thanksgiving. Or get on with my spelling program.

Now that's smart

2008-11-17T17:00:00.002-06:00

We went to the Museum of Science and Industry today to see the Smart Home exhibit. We were also remarkably smart about parking, taking a tip from friends and finding the free lot. Free parking. Of course, it's all the way at the end of the museum, by the Omnimax theater, but that's also where the exhibit was.

We were all impressed with the exhibit, and the tour guide was impressed with the five homeschooled kids in my little group. Actively engaged kids, listening, answering questions, asking them too. I know two of my three really took a lot away from our tour, wanting to do things differently in our own home. Not just the compact fluorescent light bulbs, but rethinking how we fix and replace older items in our home. It's probably easier just to start all over, but we'll be re-tooling our home improvement efforts differently from now on.

We also saw the space exhibit, the circus exhibit with the really fun screen of bubbles that can be moved around with your hands, and all the wonderful Christmas trees. Christmas, already! It snowed a bit outside and on the hour and half-hour, inside as well.

Another great museum trip.

Museum Day

2008-11-13T08:51:00.003-06:00

Hah! Here's my picture from yesterday. Can't upload pictures from the faster upstairs computer sometimes. I wanted the picture to show that, occasionally, I really can knit with no problems. This is one of two toys I'm making for my niece for Christmas, there is little worry that my sister will read my blog and spoil the surprise.

With Mark's work schedule being nuts, I try to get the kids out of the house in the mornings so he can sleep. Yesterday we went to the Field Museum for the first time in, probably, three years. Large and Medium wanted a membership for their birthday in August, we just got around to doing that yesterday.

They have made a quantum leap in how they enjoy museums. Maybe they are just at that time of life when it is the most interesting. We went through the Evolving Plant exhibit, a permanent one, but new to us. It's the one with the dinosaurs. Small is really into dinosaurs lately, but was a bit frightened of the bones. The exhibit is great. Full of wonderful interactive bits, little movies explaining all sorts of things, touching things, reading things, looking things. I think they designed it to appeal to every possible learning style.

The kids were enthralled. They actually spoke with the volunteer docents, questioning, wondering. They read everything that interested them, watched the little movies, followed the time line, they were engaged the whole time. We had been there about an hour and a half when I was worried their interest was fading, but I was wrong. Before the dinosaur portion there was a short movie explaining a mass extinction that paved the way for the beasts. Afterwards there was another movie explaining the dinosaur extinction. These movies were projected on big screens in a separate room area with benches. When we got to the second movie, it was already playing, but we sat down to wait it out until the beginning of the loop. Large turned his back and covered his ears, not wanting to hear the end before the beginning. And then he sat for the whole six minutes, absorbing.

Of course, I didn't have my camera, so we don't have pictures of them with the apatasourus or with Lucy. Except for my cell phone pictures, which I'm not able to get off my cell phone. We'll be back. They wanted to go to another exhibit after 2 1/2 hours in the Evolving Planet, but they were hungry and wanted to see their Dad more.

While we were there, a high school field trip group was running around with clipboards and worksheets to fill out. They couldn't just look at what they wanted to, they had to answer questions. We joked about that and I threatened to give them a worksheet next time. Eye rolls all around, it was a funny moment.

Knitting Woes

2008-11-12T17:25:00.004-06:00

Blogger wont let me put a picture in. Sigh. It kind of goes well with the problems I'm having on the knitting front lately.

I don't normally knit things that require seaming. I'm not good at it and don't enjoy it. But, it's a useful skill to have, so I did up a pattern for Mark's birthday. He got me the book for my birthday and I repaid the favor by giving him a box of yarn for his. He prefers cotton, but I may just have to sneak in some wool sometime soon.

The pattern - Arthur's Field of Dreams from The Natural Knitter, had problems. First the chart was wrong for the basket weave. Then there was the small problem of a stitch put on a safely pin in the middle of the v-neck and never resolved. I wove that in. Then came the horrible realization that, despite following the directions to the letter to get the lovely decreases in the v-neck, the front was a good three inches longer than the back. The final blow came when to make the increases work perfectly on the sleeves, I would have had to have been married to an orangutan.

Yes, I did a swatch. Yes, my gauge, both stitch and row, was right on. I ripped back the long bits, decreased rather inelegantly, blocked it on election night to measurements. I checked and rechecked the measurements as the thing dried on the dining room table and a card table in the living room. Then I did a couple of new to me techniques - nothing like a little something new to make me happy - a three needle bind off in the shoulders and an i-cord bind off at the back of the neck. And I seamed the whole thing up, threw it on Mark as he was headed out the door to work and realized the sweater was gargantuan. Big on me, even. I used Knit Picks Shine Worsted, which is a combination of cotton and a plant fibre called Modal. Huh. It's heavy. And the sweater stretched after blocking.

So, now I'm faced with the prospect of steeking it. I can't just throw it out and wont use the yarn again. It's big all over. I'll rework the neckline, which is very sloppy from the stretched yarn, to an i-cord bind off all around and than I'll steek. Yikes, machine seaming and cutting my knitting? Ravelry has saved my butt again, but I do hope to talk to someone who's done it first.

The kids have been witness to my trials and tribulations with this sweater. I'd like to think they are learning to roll with the changes life throws at you. Instead, I fear they may be learning a few words muttered under my breath not fit for their delicate (ha!) ears.

Discovery

2008-11-07T19:22:00.008-06:00

Three things I discovered, or rather, rediscovered today.

Still can't talk about it. I had hoped that by now, three full days after the elections, I could get through a conversation about it without tears leaking from my eyes. Nope, no can do. The emotions are still too raw, I'm still in the unbelieving stage. Did we really elect a smart, capable, inspiring leader? Oh, here I go again...

Being with my husband, even in public, for more than a few minutes at a time restores my soul. Mark is off on his, sadly, annual outage, where he is gone for 15 hour stretches six days a week. Today we juggled things to be home in time to sleep enough to join our Roots&Shoots group at the Ted Stone Forest Preserve. Chopping down invasive brush restored his soul, being in the same general vicinity of him restored mine.

Delivered pizza is better than grocery store pizza. No explanation needed. Thanks, Mark, for working the outage night shift and giving us the extra cash to splurge. I'm fighting every urge not to analyze where that $15.95 should have gone.

Life is good.

Imagine

2008-11-06T20:12:00.001-06:00

Imagine this. Except that for the people there it went on for 57 minutes, from 10:00 p.m. when it was called until 10:57 when Obama spoke. Friends say it was unbelievable love and uphoria.

Oh, What a Night

2008-11-06T08:28:00.004-06:00

I feel like, for the first time, my American has voted and been counted. It's an end and a beginning, we will never be the same again.

With Mark's work schedule, we couldn't possibly head down to Grant Park. I would have been in charge of the three kids on my own, would have ended up carrying Small the whole time and, well, it would have been just too hard. I regret now that I didn't' splurge like my friend Kim and stay a night in a hotel, witnessing it without the long drive home.

We watched the coverage on primitive, cable-less TV and on two computers, connecting with Mark by phone. I didn't start crying until Obama won Ohio, then I was just weeping uncontrollably. The kids were enthralled, cheering. Medium and Large went into the voting booth with me, loving the touch screen, participating at their level. They felt a part of it.

Here's a funny bit from Letterman about the coverage:

Yesterday we went downtown to Orchestra Hall for a concert and a quick trip to the Art Institute, bordering Grant Park. Clean up was still in progress. Road closures, sidewalk chalk remnants of the celebration, garbage cleared. When we drove home we passed the remaining TV crews parked along Columbus Drive - huge trucks, satellites and equipment. It was fascinating and the city was still in a friendly, happy mood. I'm glad we went.

It's still pinch me time. I'm proud of my elderly parents getting to their polling place in Indiana. My father unstable on his feet, my mother just unstable. They voted, they made a difference.

Creative Overload

2008-11-02T11:23:00.004-06:00

Wow, this was one hard to carve pumpkin! Lots of little lines, curvy lines. But I was pleased with how it came out. And it made lots of grown-ups smile as they waited for their kids to get their goodies. I am hoping those smiles are ones of approval, ones of support. Only two days left, the anxiety is killing me.

And then there were my Super Mario kids. Mario, Luigi and fire Mario. I should really learn not to buy the cheapest fabric possible for these things, but I couldn't see forking over significant money for something they would be wearing just a few times. You may notice only Small, Fire Mario, got the side pockets. They were way too complicated with this slippery fabric to do six of them.

The reaction to my kids' costumes was best from the teenage set. They would answer the door to pass out goodies and get rave reviews on their costumes. they were just brimming from ear to ear.

I have to say I behaved myself pretty well for the holiday. I only complained to a few close friends about how it is my least favorite holiday, didn't hover over my allergic children or repeat endlessly that they shouldn't eat anything until we've read the label. Small announced to his Uncle Bill "I'd like to have a piece of candy, but can't have any milk, eggs or nuts!" No need for hovering anymore. They get it and have moved on.

Man Cold

2008-10-26T19:21:00.002-05:00

The two youngest "men" of the house have a cold. The oldest has never seen this video, first sent to me by Kim. Enjoy.

No, YOU Can't

2008-10-21T20:02:00.001-05:00

Ok, so I was really looking for another (kind, sweet) video to post, but came across this hillarious one. It's two minutes out of your live. Watch. Laugh. Remember who you want to vote for.

Life and Art

2008-10-20T14:45:00.005-05:00

So, we were messing around with art the other day at a library nearby. Lots of tissue paper, lots of glue, scissors, you get the idea. I was helping Small, following directions and making a tissue paper collage with boring circle and petal flowers. Medium and Large, on the other hand, were carefully crafting yellow cone flowers, obedient plant, compass plant, cardinal flowers - anything but boring daisy like flora. We were using a little art skills textbook, and true homeschoolers they are, they took what the needed and did what they wanted. Really beautiful creations!

And on an even more positive note, I haven't had any pain in 48 hours now. I'm cautiously optimistic that the corner has been turned, the super-duper antibiotic has done it's job and life will now return to what we call normal.

Frontline

2008-10-14T22:21:00.005-05:00

Did you watch Frontline on PBS? OK, if you didn't, you must. It's a two hour time commitment, grab your knitting and cancel something else. It's important, do it with your kids. Here's the link.

Large and Medium were riveted. At least for the first hour, then it got past nine and they are fighting off a cold, and zzzzz. Small was too busy celebrating his recent, if tardy, potty training victory over "liquid waste" (as I recently saw a sign in a public restroom name it). They focused their attention, asked questions and listened to John McCain's story without the automatic, knee-jerk reaction we all have become accustomed to. Wait, that was me. I mean, so did I.

The program was a balanced portrayal of the two men who could potentially be responsible for leading our nation out of crisis. If all politics is personal, it's make or break time for our family. The next four years will transform our children into college-bound teenagers at precisely the time our income will be limited by our age and desire to shift gears. We opened our insurance open enrollment materials today and discovered Mark cannot retire at 55 as planned in less than 300 days. Instead, we must wait three more long years to get the 80% covered retiree health. (I do suspect those three years, if in his current position, will take more years off his life than paying a higher premium for "the remainder" will cost, but I digress.) Against my better judgement, I opened my 401(k) statement from a previous employer today and saw a 30% drop. And that was before October.

I don't know many families for whom this is not make or break time. Or individuals for that matter. My retired and ailing parents, my single friends, my friends with children and mortgages suddenly beyond their reach, my friends who want to buy houses, my husband's siblings and cousins. Perhaps even my own well-off siblings, but I don't know their situations well enough and suspect their political slant is different than mine.

Watch Frontline with your kids. They get so much of their political opinions from listening to us old folks, they don't have the background. They need their own background. Naive, innocent, loved and loving, our three children could not, for instance, understand why Obama's advisers would say Americans weren't ready for a black president. Our formal history study is still in the ancients, but the community they live in and the more recent history they understand did not prepare them for this statement. But, Mommy, he's the better man.

All I remember from the elections of my youth are loud, raucous arguments between my sister, who had recently learned to swear, and my father at the dinner table. More often than not, one of them would storm off in tears. It wasn't often my father, he didn't do tears until my mother had open heart surgery 6 years ago. I hope my children remember more than this, hope they remember a quest for truth and an earnest regard for the future.

Chapter 2, In Which our Health Care System Shines

2008-10-13T00:04:00.005-05:00

This picture was taken 2 1/2 weeks ago, which was when my pain started. Mark and I keep ibuprofen in the glove box of each car for emergencies. I woke up with a little headache, but though I had just slept funny. We went off apple picking. It was an oppressively sunny day, hot in the sun, not so bad in the shade. Apple trees, primed for picking apples, don't provide much shade. We bagged a bushel of apples.

I took the ibuprofen on the way home. It took the edge off. The pain was on the left side of my head, behind my ear. When we got home, I separated the big from the small apples - big for drying and apple butter making and small for eating. I took them to the basement, the kids and I headed to my parents for the weekend. Mark was on 12-plus hour shifts and needed his sleep. Those apples are still unprocessed.

I woke up Saturday morning with a headache, but the bed in my parent's spare room is so old and uncomfortable, and the pillows so unwelcoming, I am used to waking up achy there. By the second morning, however, I knew there was a problem. I borrowed the neck pillow I bought my mother for her birthday, heated it the microwave and got relief for a while. Mark went off duty Monday morning and we drove home just as my jaw was starting to ache.

Monday night, two Mondays ago now, I had such pain I thought it impossible to bear. Little did I know how much is possible to bear. I took prescription strength Motrin. By that Tuesday morning, after discussing it with close friends and my sister who had been through a root canal, I decided that was the problem. Searing, unrelenting pain. I searched for homeopathic or natural remedy advice, only to find the most sane said "drink whiskey until there is no more pain, and then keep drinking so the pain will not return." I called my dentist and scheduled an appointment for the next day at the same time that Small was to have his cavity filled, Medium was getting her teeth cleaned and Large was getting a cleaning and a retainer check.

I don't drink whiskey and it seemed like a whole lot of wine would only provide me with temporary relief at great cost, so I took a vicodin I had lying around from something or other. And Mark got me clove oil, which did nothing, and anbesol, which seemed to help. Armed with those two, I went to bed. Nothing but psychotic dreams, the mildest of which involved our poor birds leg falling off in my hands, the many others involved death and destruction of all of my loved ones. I forced myself to stay awake, and still had no relief from the pain.

The next afternoon, I counted the hours, we went to the dentist. We took up four chairs of a six or seven chair office. I begged them to remove my teeth. Not a tooth problem, not TMJ as I had in my college days. My dentist performed a very thorough exam and then decided it could be an infection of the bone behind my ear - he probed and prodded there and in my mouth. I had a lump behind my ear that felt warm and extended down to my neck. Or it could be a stress response.

Who doesn't have stress? I liked the stress answer, although a root canal would have meant an end to the pain. I immediately called Mark to give him the "good" news and then called my doctor's office to schedule a tuina massage and see if I could be squeezed in for acupuncture. Thursday morning, massage. Later a cancellation gave me an acupuncture appointment. The dentist told me to take three ibuprofen and two acetaminophen at the same time - same thing my sister told me. That provided relief for a half hour or so at a time. The rest of the time I had radiating, agonizing pain - throbbing and stabbing.

Thursday. By the time the doctor saw me - I hadn't taken the pain stuff because I wanted to be able to describe it - I was in tears. I've spoken to her about my life long hopes and dreams, my constant struggle with my weight, my poor Small's life-inhibiting eczema, my other children's allergies. I've never cried. I had the massage, which took the edge off and then the accupuncture. I felt OK enough afterwards to run an errand. And then I spent the rest of the day on the couch with heat packs on.

In the midst of this, Mark's beloved Uncle Bill died in Wisconsin. Although he was 95 and had some ailments, it was a surprise to us all. We dropped everything - including my Roots&Shoots group, some community commitments and other dates - to get up to Wisconsin and support his remaining children, their children and the rest of our family.

That Friday morning I was up at 4 or so with my pain. It really is beyond words - soaring from the back of my jaw outwards, pulsating, hot, sharp and pointy. I've shattered an ankle and had a 9 1/2 pound baby without an epidural - neither of those compare to this pain. I thought there was no way I could make the trip. And then in the next instant I realized there was no way I couldn't. I couldn't trust myself home alone not to just kill myself. It was suicidal thought provoking pain. With no end in sight.

My doctor put me on the first antibiotic when I called on our way to the funeral, which helped take the edge off. By Saturday and Sunday, I had a full hour or two with minimal pain. I also had much distraction with family and a beautiful funeral service. But I also napped, took my pain combo more frequently than advised and applied heat whenever we were back at the room.

By Monday I called again my doctor to say the pain was increasing after a break. My doctor asked me to see an ENT, who provided me with two diagnoses different from mastoiditis, without even examining me. He walked into the room behind me and said "It's not mastoiditis, who told you it was that?" His first words. Then he pronounced it TMJ. When I protested that I had TMJ in the past, it only confirmed his diagnosis. I said I didn't grind my teeth and that the pain was no where comparable. He said I had to go on a two week course of ibuprofen to reduce the inflammation, or it could be Trigeminal neuralgia (Tic Doloureux) , but that he couldn't know for two weeks. Incredulously, I asked him if he expected me to go through two more weeks of this pain. He, literally, patted me on the shoulder and said I was grinding my teeth at night and needed a mouth guard.

Went home, scheduled another dentist appointment. My doctor called, I told her what transpired at the ENT, she prescribed me a stronger antibiotic. The man hadn't even given me a CT scan, which is a bit surprising, as it would have been covered by insurance. None of my symptoms matched with TMJ or Tic Doloreux. The second antibiotic took more pain away. My dentist confirmed I have no evidence of grinding my teeth and none of the hallmarks of TMJ.

It's been 6 days on that antibiotic. I still have several hours of pain a day, but they are spread out. I still have the lump behind my ear, cannot have anything too hot or too cold. I went through ten days of constant, tormenting, suicidal pain and lived to see the other side. Tomorrow I will call to see if we should switch antibiotics again to knock it out completely.

I've learned that our health care system is not about keeping the insured well. It's about passing the buck, making snap decisions and trying to fit round pegs into square holes. My own doctor is outside the health care system. She's out of network, out of pocket. She schedules 45 minute appointments with her patients and regularly runs behind. I'm lucky to have her. Broke, but lucky.

This guy wants to be president?

2008-10-08T15:33:00.001-05:00

I'm still not well enough for any wordy blogging. Here's a great, short video.

Ramblings of an overstretched woman

2008-09-26T17:51:00.003-05:00

My time lately has been so full of worry and action concerning the older people in my life, that I've been joyously reminded of the younger folk in jolts and starts. I'm constantly thinking, worrying. Should my father see a urologist/oncologist at a world class medical center in Chicago for his self-diagnosed prostate cancer, or wait for continued care when he moves to New Mexico at the end of November? Will my mother remember to pick up his prescriptions at Osco? Will she remember to eat lunch?

And then I'm thrust into my other life. The life of children, happily homeschooled children who can spend a Friday at Daley Plaza flying their Roots&Shoots peace dove, head to Millennium Park for a good soak at the Crown Fountain and generally have a wonderfully exhausting day. My other life, where if I forget to pay attention to my four and a half year old for a minute, another homeschooling Mom has my back. Where my kids can learn about all the countries in the world by watching a flag ceremony at noon on a school-day Friday and wonder at the enormity of it all. Where they can discuss peace and war one second, slide down a Picasso sculpture the next and be the only group represented with a kid-made peace dove - isn't she beautiful???

Then I go back to my worries, returning phone calls I would have been loathe to make in a previous era. Order my father's g-tube food, change an appointment, help my mother understand where things are in her own home. I got stung by a yellow jacket, as did Small, which rendered my right index finger useless for four days. That woke me to a different reality - a life without knitting.

While the finger was healing, I witnessed a ceremony for our fabulous girl scout troop. Something for which I have no responsibility other than dropping her off and schlepping other kids around to a boys club at the same time. Middle had missed the previous week where they troop decided what to do at the ceremony, yet performed beautifully when a piece of paper was thrust in her hands for her to read. 50 plus happy homeschooled children outside out a beautiful Tuesday morning. Celebrating their lives, building on one another's strengths, learning from their weaknesses.

And then one of the mom's cars got booted. Bam! Another reality check. I alternated between glee that it wasn't my car - I've had bad ticket luck in this particular location - and worry for my friend. Turned out to be an administrative error, but took hours to fix. There's nothing like a disabled vehicle to ruin the moment. I drove a child home for my friend and worried about both my initial reaction and her dismay. What does my joy over not being booted mean? Why was it such a happy thing to see my own vehicle missed - because I would have had no idea how to make it home? Or simply because it was something bad that wasn't happening to me.

When my parents move in a few months, all the daily worries and details will fall to my sister. Part of me should feel the relief I felt over the boot man not hitting my car - he hit the two behind me. But I don't. Control freak that I am, I'd rather have them next to me - surely I'm more nurturing, more capable, more willing to help. But it has nothing to do with me and everything to do with them. My parents need to be close to an offspring - closer than the hour and a half it took me to get there last week. They want to be in a natural setting, free of the unsightliness of neighbor's houses (since 1961 they have lived without this nuisance). They want to be near my doctor brother-in-law. They need to move off the too steep for an ambulance sand dune. They are moving away to die peacefully.

I could not do my care taking, not from near or afar as I soon will, if I were not homeschooling. We are planning a long car trip - full of interesting historic stops and educational moments to visit them. There are many ways to get to New Mexico from Chicago, we plan on taking every route possible over the next few years. In our already over 100,000 miles on the odometer cars. I'm grateful for my children grounding me, that I have the other end of the candle to care for as well.

The stuff we keep

2008-09-17T10:05:00.003-05:00

I spent a couple more hours yesterday going through things from the basement. In particular, there was a full banker's box of my papers. It's funny what we keep at different times in our lives and what seems so easy to toss later. Sort of paring down our history as our lives become more interesting.

Here are a few things I kept:

a certificate stating I had crossed the international date line in 1970. It was given by Japan Air Lines, filled out in my father's hand.
my high school diploma and various awards.
my final divorce decree from my first marriage.
my first journal. It probably has only a few pages written on, but it has a lock and I couldn't read it.
Some loose class photos.

This was a giant box, full of performance appraisals from my first jobs, salary history, tons of paperwork from my first marriage. Yikes, what bad karma keeping all that stuff. I pared it down to one small stack, shredded some and put the rest in the recycling. Then I moved on to the next one.

One of the worst things about having a basement is that it's always available for storage. We have a horrible habit of putting things in the basement as a halfway point between wanting to keep it and wanting to toss it. Slowly, the basement fills until we are faced with a crisis of some kind or reach a breaking point with the clutter. We've just had a combination of the two and I'm on a mission. If it has no use or meaning to me, it's gone.

That International Date Line certificate has meaning to me now. As my father is nearing the end of his life, I find myself wanting to hold on to things that were his or that he gave to me. I remember that flight to Tokyo well. But I had always believed myself to be five years old on that trip, not six. I remember Dave and I racing up and down the airplane aisle, giggling, looking out windows. It was a 22 hour flight, a long time for a five and six year old to sit still. I remember a spiral staircase led upstairs to a place where people were drinking highballs and such. We went up and down that staircase a hundred times, I imagine. I remember a very large man choking on a breakfast sausage. I don't remember anyone scolding us or telling us not to do something. Sometimes my memory is kind to me.

My parents took kids aged 5, 6, 9 and 14 across the ocean for a month. I would be paralyzed with fear over the planning and execution of such a trip. It's hard to imagine them doing anything of the sort now, in their current condition.

That's why I kept the certificate. In another 10 years, it may go into the recycling bin as well.

Water, water everywhere

2008-09-16T17:19:00.006-05:00

This was my backyard on Saturday afternoon. We don't normally have lake front property. It rose higher than this on Sunday, but by then my energy for taking pictures had waned. I took the picture to show my father and mother, whom we visited on Saturday. It was a crazy thing to do and we were lucky to get home. But my brother was in town and we had spent all morning wondering if we would get water in the basement.

We decided to wonder about it from afar. My brother lives in California and at best we only see him a few times a year. When my parents move in a few months, we will see him even less. My parents live on top of a sand dune and do not get water in their house. They are on the lake. Between the end of the sand dunes and the highway, there is a ecologically significant bog. This bog, normally a wet place, spilled over the road. We muddled through and had a good visit, watching the continual rain, visiting, laughing, planning our parents move, talking about their health, etc.

It was torrential rain on the way home. Most of Friday night and Saturday it rained non-stop. Thunder showers, they called it. Not violent storms, but a heck of a lot of rain. Saturday night it was raining hard, especially at 65 miles per hour. But we were lucky to get home. 80/94 was closed just east of my parents' exit and we were headed west. By Sunday it was closed further west and I could not get out there as planned. I had to reschedule my father's appointment with his neurologist.

Our basement had a little river running through it. Not a lot of water, just enough to be an annoyance and make us sweep it into the sump pit. We spent most of Saturday morning preparing for the flooding, picking up laundry, moving cardboard boxes and relocating important stuff to higher ground. Or so we thought. When the water came in, it was a steady stream, causing us to rediscover items that could be damaged. Eventually there was very little higher ground left.

Now, we had cats for the first 12 years we lived in this house. Three of them. Elderly cats the last five years of their lives. One of them never quite did his business in the litter box, although in his younger days, he was close. We haven't had water in our basement for 10 years. Which, sadly, means the floor hasn't been washed in 10 years. Oh my, this made for a smelly situation on Sunday. Lugging stuff, sweeping the water with a push broom, discarding wet stuff. We filled four garbage cans and had lots of recycling. Most of what we lost were items we should have thrown out ten years ago but didn't. Boxes and paper bags of books, 30 year old magazines, ancient financial records. Most of the garbage we tossed wasn't even wet, it was just garbage. I'm trying to look at it all as a further opportunity to declutter. Today I filled another giant bag of garbage and a banker's box of recycling.

Unfortunately, Large has a gastro-intestinal thing as a result of the basement cleaning. We weren't totally focused on washing hands, I guess. And he didn't. He's been not eating more than a couple slices of toast for two days now.

I now am instituting a firm no cardboard rule for the basement. If it's not in plastic, it can't go down. Appliance boxes can be kept for one year, the date on the outside of the box with the receipt attached. Otherwise there is no point to keeping them. I'm in full tossing mode. Look out. When we flood in another 10 years, we will have nothing to worry about.

Anniversaries

2008-09-11T09:14:00.004-05:00

I passed my blogaversary with no Internet access, which seems a little appropriate. I had a chance to reflect on how much I enjoy blogging and how much it has changed my life. Mark says I blog about the things that keep me up at night. And it's true I'm sleeping better. Blogging is good for the soul.

Another anniversary today. September 11th.

Yesterday the kids and I took a hike in one of our favorite forest preserves. As we were heading down the wide main path, Large and Medium started talking about 9-11. They had watched a Brain Pop about it. They have no memories, which is to be expected because they had just turned two and three. All my anxiety over warping them by having the TV on, showing the planes crash in over and over again was for nothing. They don't remember how distraught and depressed I became, how I put them in a morning out program at a nearby church. I told them how they witnessed it on TV and how concerned I was about it.

They asked what we did that day. We bought shoes. It's what we were planning to do. The shoe store was right along the train line in a neighboring town. It's not there anymore, but they had a horse carousel for the kids to ride and you could look out the windows to see the trains. The trains that day were full of folks coming home from work downtown. The city was evacuating, sure that another plan was heading for the Sears Tower. The people were jammed like sardines, the doors opened and they all piled off, dazed. It was 11 o'clock in the morning, a bright and beautiful day. Train after train came in as we tried on shoes. Light up or not? Ties or Velcro? Mundane decisions made impossible.

It amazed me to realize on our hike yesterday that my children are learning about 9-11 as history. In an unschooly way, they learned it on their own by clicking what interested them on Brain Pop. And, typical for the unschooly way, they remembered everything about that segment. It sparked them to ask questions because they knew they were alive but didn't remember it. I'm so relieved I climbed out of my depression that time and reversed my decision to put them in school!

Old does not equal Stupid

2008-09-08T12:03:00.003-05:00

I have been shocked and appalled by the treatment my father has received from his local medical team, but have needed to calm down a bit before writing about it. The medical professionals in Valparaiso, Indiana seem to believe that all old people have some form of mental impairment. It wont be long before my peers are the old folks in this country and we really need to do something about this prevailing attitude.

It ranges from doctors who assume my father is deaf and demented and don't speak to him, to nurses who pat his shoulder like a toddler and say "there, there," to candy-stripers who insist he is confused and doesn't know where he is going. Everyone calls him Albert or, even worse, Al, when his entire adult life (since he got his PhD at the age of 22) he has been called Dr. Crewe.

I've taken to interrupting his local neurologist by stating "My father is not deaf and he has no cognitive impairment." What I really want to say is "My father is smarter now than you could ever hope to have been. Without his pioneering work in the field of electron microscopy, the entire field of medical imaging would not have been possible and you would not have a career."

At the large medical centers where he and my mother both still receive treatment - the University of Chicago Hospitals and Rush - they are treated with utmost respect. No infantalizing, no sweet talking, no first names. There is no underlying assumption that they have diminished mental capacity. Even my mother, who has dementia, is treated as an adult. Many Parkinson's' patients do eventually develop dementia, probably most of them, but it is not right to assume a patient is demented before treating them.

Our children are our future, and they are learning so much from our interactions with the medical team and with our parents. They understand that Granddad may not be able to speak well enough some days to hear him or may not be able to walk on his own, but know that he is a wise, functioning person. They understand that Grandma's brain functions differently from their own, but that with a little help she can be a whole person. They learned this weekend from their Great Uncle Bill, who turned 95, that their grandparents will continue to decline, but will also continue to have a quality of life and love for their family.

Unfortunately, my parents live in a place were the Beverly Hillbillies are practicing medicine. One doctor impressed my sister and I by stating he had performed 10,000 g-tube placement surgeries. My father did the math and felt he was a quack. Of course, it turned out my father was right - the doctor tried to have him undergo an entire new procedure to replace a 50 cent part that had warn out. The infectious disease doctor never asked about my father's prostate while diagnosing a frequent urination problem. The neurologist refused to contact one of the leading Parkinson's' experts in the country, my father's doctor at Rush, to discuss medicine dosage, so my father and I came up with his medication plan on our own. The list goes on and on.

I saw a t-shirt that says "I haven't always been old, but I have never been stupid." My father would never wear it, but I might just be forced to use that line one day.

Gearing Up

2008-08-29T08:10:00.004-05:00

We're heading out to Indiana today to visit my parents. Public schools started on Tuesday, so we officially did as well. This will be the first of our weekly visits to my parents while the kids have "school" to do.

This fall will test my ability to balance the needs of my children with the needs of my parents in ways I cannot even fathom. I'm not sure what it will even look like. On the plate for today is a lot of computer work - their math, science and vocabulary web curricula. I'm hoping to put one on my Mom's computer and one on my Dad's laptop. Only the laptop has sound, however, which is essential for vocabulary and science. Our own laptop died a fiery death over the summer. Other than that, they have a lot of reading. And then maybe we'll go to the beach, although I suspect the waves will again be too high for swimming.

And I need to brace myself for my father's current thinking over the proposed move to New Mexico, his current worries about his health and progress, his worries over my mother's health. I don't ever remember having such long conversations one on one with my father, he's always been remote. It has been a great adjustment to me to have him trust me with administrative things involving his care, and to purposefully sit and talk together.

I also need to brace myself for my mother's potential anger and confusion over our being there. She called yesterday because she didn't know how to order my father's food. We had all discussed this on Monday and the order was placed to receive the food today. She's forgotten and probably called at the request of one of the aides while my father was napping. She was angry I had done it already. It must be difficult to have responsibility taken from you, although I sense some relief from her as well.

Each visit is surrounded by two days of insomnia. One for the preparation, one for the return. It's better than sleeping there, however. Then I just lie awake all night listening for my father to get up and hoping he won't fall.

The kids have been troopers through this all. When I am exasperated over my mother's inability to remember something said a minute ago, Middle says "Remember, that's just the way her brain works, Mommy." When I need to spend time talking to my Dad or helping my Mom, Large and Medium take care of Small, entertaining him without being asked. They are likely learning enough just by experiencing their grandparents' decline and don't need me to schedule out things for them to do while we are there. That's the Life Learning part of our family.

Brain Games

2008-08-19T10:24:00.003-05:00

Watching my mother's onward march towards complete, debilitating dementia is a horrifying experience. It's painful to see what she is going through, more painful to know how much worse it's going to get, beyond any pain scale to know that it will kill her. It's also a little terrifying to think of the implications on my own future. Dementia is not always inherited, but there are no good treatments or cures.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do, I bought a book. It's a book of daily math exercises called Train Your Brain, written by the same guy who founded the Kumon workbooks for kids. I took the pre-tests yesterday, that was a little unnerving. Then I did Day 1. 100 simple arithmetic problems, nothing greater than the number 20, no division, multiplying single digits only. It took me 2 minutes and 54 seconds. It took Mark less than a minute. I'm not even on the chart for good brain functioning according to the book! Today I shaved an entire second off my time, so that made me feel better.

Before my father was hospitalized at the end of June, his Parkinson's was progressing and he was suffering greatly from malnutrition and dehydration. Failure to thrive was the code on the ambulance sheets. At one point he told my sister that we should feel free to have both he and my mother undergo cognitive testing if we felt there was a need. That morning he had failed to easily divide in his head 24,836 by 127. I can't even remember what 7 times 6 is and he is worried about dividing five digits by three. Of course, now that he has regular hydration and calories through his tube, his brain is functioning just fine. Mine will never function as well and I'm nearly 40 years behind him.

Just my imagination

2008-08-15T17:30:00.003-05:00

I read in the paper today that inflation is running at 5 or 6 percent for the year. So, it wasn't just my imagination running away with me? It really is a vast right wing conspiracy to keep us living right on the edge, paycheck to paycheck?

July was a three paycheck month for us. We were looking forward to catching up with the emergency fund. We keep robbing Peter (emergency fund) to pay Paul (checking account) when the G.M. (giant mortgage) is due. We were going to give some more to Peter to accommodate the new driveway we've been putting our neighbors off from doing for three years running, prepare for Christmas and for my parent's imminent relocation, so I can visit them in their waning. That didn't so much happen.

Instead, July's three paycheck month left us gasping for air in August as the checking account dwindled almost to zero before the paycheck hit. The instantly, POOF, the paycheck was gone to pay for the G.M. We have dance class to pay for next week - a bargain at 5 hours a week, 8 weeks and only $400. We get a generous discount for multiple classes, and this is the only paid activity we have. Everything else is going to center around Girl Scouts and Roots&Shoots. Those are both low cost activities. I'm going to have to call the dance teacher and tell her we want to register but are worried about the check. Or we'll have to rob Peter again. Poor Peter doesn't have much left to give.

Gas prices, food prices, everything has gone up. We're not buying packaged foods and rarely eat out. We're reduced to rice and canned chicken (allergic to beans) dinners and eggs once a week (although Small is allergic to eggs and gets lunch meat instead). Pasta another night. Gone are the days of a nice leg of lamb for our Uncle Bill.

And we make a good salary! It makes me wonder how lower income folks manage. Credit, likely. When Large overloaded the washing machine last week and burned out the motor, I was looking at 7 months of laundromat experiences. The machine will run medium loads now, so it just means more frequent laundry until the bonus comes (March) and we can replace it. Hopefully the rest of the summer will remain cool and we wont have to fix that leak in the AC that's projected to cost $1500. But honestly, it all makes me reconsider the 2 gallons of gas it costs me to get to Girl Scouts and back each week.

Somehow I feel better knowing it's not my individual fault. I haven't misbudgeted or misspent - although I did buy several frivolous $3 t-shirts off the clearance rack at Target. It's the economy, stupid.

No cable, no cry

2008-08-08T18:47:00.001-05:00

We don't get cable, so I don't have really strong opinions about this guy. But I see him yelling on the TV at the health club occasionally and am aware of him.

Stupid Parent Tricks

2008-08-07T10:23:00.005-05:00

I took Medium to the beach the other day. Large and Small were beached out from the day before and chose to stay at my parent's house. I keep telling these kids that they are lucky to have grandparents who live on the beach. At least we have a nice place to go and time to swim when we are there helping out. Didn't have my camera, so this is an old picture.

We went to the more private of the private beaches in their community. The one where you can't usually see another soul. This beach has a more gradual drop off than the other beach and the waves didn't seem as high as they had been the week before. Medium loves being pushed ashore by the waves, jumping them and swimming through them. I remember doing the same things on the same beach as a child. All this led me to the decision that she could go beyond the drop off, but not above her waist in the water, which would be too far out for me to help her. She wasn't' all that interested in getting deeper, the waves were up to her neck when they crashed in. She just likes to be a foot or so offshore, splashing in.

I pointed out a helicopter up the beach from us - is that east or north? The lake confuses me there, as a Chicagoan the lake is always east. In Indiana, all that changes. I thought it had been painted to look like Nemo. As it slowly made its way down the coast, I saw it was just a coast guard helicopter. Then we saw an Indiana DNR helicopter, patrolling farther off shore. In all, we saw three helicopters going slowly back and forth. After we had been there about an hour, we saw a man on a dune buggy, slowly driving along. I don't think I had ever seen a dune buggy kind of thing on this beach, but again, no alarms were raised. Medium was playing in the sand, the dune buggy went way down the other direction - south or west, practically to the steel mill.

About half an hour later, he drove back and stopped his buggy. Medium was in the water, playing. He said "I guess you know about rip currents." Yes, I do, but the waves didn't seem as bad today. Have there been rip currents spotted? I had spent time researching rip currents after someone drowned a few weeks ago and felt confident I could spot one. Yes, was the answer. Oh. And there are so many patrols today - three helicopters and you driving on the beach. He was wearing a state park uniform. "Yes, we're looking for a body. A drowning off Porter Beach."

Chills. Serious hair standing on end kind of chills all over my body. I stood up to get us going. Porter Beach is likely less than a mile up the end of this private beach, it's another private beach adjoining the State Park. The state park beach was closed to swimming because of rip currents. There are no warning systems for private beaches.

So, a new rule for our family. If we can see waves from the kitchen window, we call the state park before heading to the beach. If that beach is closed for swimming, we don't swim. We aren't a real rule oriented kind of family, but this one seems necessary.