"We Didn't Do It"

We traveled to Utah this week for a cousin's wedding.  Where we discovered that while Colorado seems to be experiencing a cooler summer than usual, Utah is decidedly not.  And also that Utah has way more doughnut places than Colorado.  At least our part of Colorado.  Why are there more doughnut places everywhere we go than at home?  And that Fionn truly believes that thinking about chocolate will help a person get to sleep.  Because "If I think of chocolate then I think of eating it and it is so good that I just faint."

On our first morning at the hotel, Kris and I decided to go on a walk while the kids went down to breakfast. Except most of the kids were not even conscious at this point, just Liam and Fionn.  So we sent them to their older siblings' hotel room, shook a couple of said older siblings awake and went merrily on our way. Shortly after leaving the hotel I received a fairly cryptic text message from Amik that said "We did not do it." Honestly, Amik doesn't like to waste a lot of words especially when texting and so his messages are frequently somewhat cryptic, I think I asked him what he hadn't done, put the phone back in my pocket and continued on my way.  We were already on our way back to the hotel when I looked at my phone again and saw Amik's response "I think someone pulled the fire alarm."  Only then did it register that we had been listening to emergency sirens for the past 20 minutes or so.

Amik's need to assure us of his innocence probably stems from an incident when he was 4 or 5 and most assuredly did do it.  We were playing in the gym of Kris's middle school on a snowy weekend when suddenly the school fire alarm began to blare throughout the empty-but-for-us building,  accompanied by blinding strobe lights.  Amik freely admitted at that time to being the culprit, explaining with a shrug of his shoulders that he "just wanted to see what would happen."  Well, what would happen is that his younger siblings would cry hysterically and run to their parents in fear, while his older siblings would all cover their ears and cringe at the deafening noise and his father would make a desperate dash across the school to dig through his secretary's desk in search of the number to call and cancel the alarm before a fire truck really did show up.  Probably, all in all, a way better show than Amik ever expected.  He, by the way, was the only one who remained completely calm, quietly observing the results of his little experiment.

Back to Utah and the much more recent past: we arrived back at the hotel to find several police cars and fire trucks out front, but inside everyone seemed to be going ahead  with their free breakfast, no longer particularly concerned by the firemen in their midst.  The only sign of Fionn's certain initial panic was that she was still clutching her lion buddy with her at  breakfast, whether for her protection or his I am not sure.     Apparently what happened was a sprinkler head in the ceiling one of the rooms broke.  How exactly this occurred depends on who you ask, but whatever transpired in room 309 before the sprinkler head became detached from the wall, what occurred after was a torrent of water and fire repellent gushing from the front door of the room, into the hallway, adjoining rooms, and pouring through walls and ceilings to the two floors below, accompanied by the the earsplitting screech of the fire alarm... at approximately 7:30 am, BTW.  Erin, directed her siblings to grab their shoes, but Fionnula stood in the center of the room crying that her shoes and in fact everything she owned, including her lion, were in the other room (ours), before Erin really needed to address this issue though the hotel staff had determined the issue and shut down the alarm.

That night Fionn was careful to pack up all her things and place them conveniently near the door in case she needed to evacuate for any reason and for the rest of our stay, there were industrial fans blowing through the hallways, which could be loud, but which also helped to relieve some of the ridiculous Utah heat... and made you feel a little like a movie star when you walked through the gauntlet of them with your hair blowing back.

Homeschooling is Scary

I wasn't homeschooled. Kris wasn't homeschooled. I was vaguely aware of one family as a kid who did homeschool.  I thought they were weird.  Then I read a book when my girls were tiny that said I didn't have to send my babies away  as soon as they turned 5.  And that seemed like a great plan to me.  I didn't want to send them anywhere.  I liked them home with me.  So when Erin turned 5 we didn't send her to school.  And we started to teach them at home to read and to add.  We read about penguins and fireworks and elephants and Australia, and it was a lot of fun.  We made play dough and watched movies and danced a lot and played weird imaginary games.  We drew a lot of pictures and went sledding in the backyard.  But despite all the fun I was having and the sheer joy I experienced in just having my kids around me, there were frequently these little nagging thoughts creeping in...was I messing them up forever?  Would they ever be able to function in society?  Could I teach Algebra?  Chemistry?  What if they wanted to know how to build a robot? What if the neighbors called the police?  What if they really did score below the 13th percentile? What if they lived in my basement forever?  How would they get into college?  Was I messing them up forever?

Last week I took Aislin to the college to take the accuplacer.  If she could prove by means of this one test on a computer that she was 'college-ready', she could register for classes at the college in the Fall.  I told Aislin not to worry.  Just be calm.  Do her best.  It wasn't that important.  If you don't pass the first time, then at least you know what the test is like now and you go home and study and come back to take it again later. No big deal.  Start classes this Fall or start classes next Fall.  There isn't really a required timeline for these things.  And I really believed everything I told her.  Except that, no matter what you tell someone, they will never really believe that it is ok to not pass a test.  No it is devastating.  So I sat in the little room outside the testing room and watched her take the test and was so nervous.  Because what if I had failed her?  What if my homeschooling had not prepared her for this day?  She wanted to take art at the college THIS fall.  Not next Fall.  And if she couldn't, it would be All. Our. Fault.  No one to blame but us, we made sure of that when we decided yeas ago to buck the system and do this all on our own.  We accepted then all the responsibility.

Homeschooling has been one big, long, complicated... experiment for us.  We have tried various things.  we have stuck with some, we have trashed others.  Sometimes we have done it one way for a long long time. Sometimes we have thrown out one idea before it has even had the chance to become a habit.  We don't have a lot of very concrete examples around us that we can turn to and say..look, now THAT obviously works.  What we do have is a very strong belief that this is the right thing for our family.  And by 'this' I mean learning at home together.  I don't mean Saxon math or Apologia science or The Story of the World.  And I don't mean classical education or unschooling or Charlotte Mason.   And that belief is what keeps us going when we are sure that we really are messing them up for life.  That belief is what keeps us going when it seems like everything is against us.  That belief is what keeps us going when nothing seems to be working. When we wonder if one child will ever learn to read or if another will ever write a coherent sentence...  or a legible one. When someone cries day after day over a math lesson.  When we wonder if it really matters if they know this or if they know that or if they have to learn this before they can learn that.  That belief is what keeps us going when we worry that they will grow up to be TOO different from everyone else.  Sometimes we just close our eyes and move forward with the faith that our children belong home with us and with one another and the rest will fall into place.

Aislin passed that test.  She will be taking Drawing 1 and Western Civ at the college this Fall.  She will continue to work on math and writing at home.  She will attend her second year of seminary.  She will work part time.  She will blog when she feels like it. She will doodle on every available scrap of paper in the house. And probably keep trying to figure out how to fix the photo at the top of my blog.  She will cook dinner sometimes and breakfast a lot and cookies even more often.  Best of all, she will still be home with me a lot.  She will still play with her little brothers and sisters and occasionally stay up way to late watching movies or playing games with her not so little brothers and sisters.  And I can breathe a small sigh of relief, because for right now, this homeschooling thing really does seem to be working.  And, so far, no one is messed up for life.

Happy Birthday Kegan and Rhys!

Well, I haven't been on here for a super long time because things got really busy here in May with graduations and farewells and buying zillions of white shirts and black socks and then in the last two weeks we put our 3 missionaries each on separate planes and sent them away.  The whole process has been exhausting, and someday I may write all about it,but that's not today.  If you do want to keep up with the missionaries you can here: http://enrightmissionaries.blogspot.com/ though.

Today I just want to commemorate Kegan and Rhys' birthday with some of my favorite pictures from over the last year.  They are cell phone pics, so forgive the quality, but so worth keeping I think.  

Happy Birthday, my boys!  See you in two years!