Christmas Break

Merry Christmas! Like much of the world, we're wrapping presents, preparing holiday treats, and seeing family and friends more than usual. It's a good time of year.

I spent a couple of hours today wrapping the presents that I've accumulated for the past half year or so. With ten people scheduled to be around the Christmas tree on the morning of December 25th, our present unwrapping scene will last for a while. We insist on the presents being opened one at a time so that the gift and the giver can be properly acknowledged. Even if it is better to give than to receive, the giver should nevertheless hear a word or two of thanks!

We didn't spend a lot on presents, but then we never do. Christmas doesn't seem very fun if we overspend on it.

A little crow

Almost two months ago, I mentioned that I was starting to change my eating habits so that I could lose some weight.

I'm quite pleased. This is a healthy rate of weight loss, and I've still eaten dessert (just less of it). I snack less and in much smaller amounts, and I tend to not take seconds at dinner anymore. I'm also better at exercising some (20-30 minutes on a stationary recumbent bicycle) most days. I'm also slowly weaning my 18-month-old, which might affect things a bit, although I'm not sure which direction.

Nothing tastes as good as feeling comfortable in my clothes.

I highly recommend the book The Diet Trap Solution: Train Your Brain to Lose Weight and Keep It Off for Good by Dr. Judith Beck.

Autism Advance

Good news from the field of autism research today! For the first time, they've been able to link a neurotransmitter in the human brain to autistic behavior. Thank you, Harvard.

The neurotransmitter in question is GABA, an inhibitory transmitter. I bet some supplement makers are about to make a lot of money.

Life

Last week, Colorado was horrified when a lone, unstable-appearing man, who used marijuana and had other hints of less-than-prosocial behavior in his past, attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Before I discuss this any further, I'm going to share a recent, raw tragedy. My younger sister, 19 weeks pregnant, went on vacation this week to another country. Yesterday, we found out that she was bleeding heavily. They had to give her several blood transfusions. The pregnancy ended. My sister is now physically recovering, but her emotional recovery will no doubt take a very long time.

I view the act of intentionally aborting unborn children for convenience to be heinous. I abhor Planned Parenthood's unique focus on providing that "service" to mothers who don't like the timing of when they got pregnant. (Please, get an IUD (females) or more permanent birth control (everyone) if you don't want children.)

All that said, I whole-heartedly condemn the shootings by Robert Dear in Colorado Springs. Pro-life means being against taking life in general. There are valid arguments for and against abortion, and those offering abortions (hopefully) typically don't consider themselves to be ending a life. (I think they're scientific illiterates for holding that belief, but I don't consider them intentional murderers.) Also, abortion is legal. Dear wasn't justified. At all. I reject any rhetoric that would claim he was.

Yesterday, we saw a jihadist couple leave their baby with grandma then go shoot up a holiday party, hoping to video-tape it for some repulsive purpose. They are part of a religion that claims to abhor taking innocent life, but apparently their working definition of "innocent" is much different than we in the USA are accustomed to viewing that word. I absolutely reject any rhetoric that defines as fair targets for violence those who are civilians on the ground that they reject Islamic supremacy. I applaud Muslims who also reject such rhetoric, and I wish there were more of them.

Snow Day!

Our exchange student is so excited that our part of Colorado is being hit by a blizzard right now because the schools have been closed for tomorrow. She literally danced for joy when she found out. She does like school and is a diligent, intelligent student. But snow days are just fun!

My children won't get a snow day from their usual homeschool studies, though. It will be too cold--high wind chill expected--for them to go outside during the morning, so they might as well be kept busy learning. They like to learn. For their recreational reading, they more often than not pick non-fiction books. At their age, I was a bookworm who read all kinds of historical fiction and fantasy. My home life was quite stressful, and I escaped into books, often wonderful books that taught me much and gave me a lot of hope. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that my children don't feel the need to escape their lives the way I did.

Baby Tears

My oldest child was born less than 2 weeks before the cutoff that would have put her in school a year later. She was socially immature and had never attended preschool. The local school district, apparently in a bid to up their enrollment, had switched to offering only full-day kindergarten. When I considered how hard it would be on my daughter to go to school all-day as an immature 4-year-old, deciding to homeschool her instead was a nearly automatic choice. I did put her in a part-time program offered by the school district to homeschoolers, and that was a good choice for her. She had some school friends and a terrific music teacher.

A year or two later, a local friend told me how her daughter came home from kindergarten each day and cried from weariness. She wished in retrospect that she hadn't sent her child to full-day kindergarten.

Last night, another friend, in a school district which does have half-day kindergarten, said that her young first grader is worn out by her day-long schedule and that she wishes she could homeschool her children.

What is wrong with our system that we send children just leaving toddlerhood into an academic environment where they are worn out and sad at the end? Every weekday? Finland, a favorite educational ideal in recent years, doesn't do that. Young children are done after a morning of school.

Young homeschooled children are fortunate in that they can rest enough and play more, as befits their physical needs and mental development. I'm not opposed to rigor in academics. Dd11 is reading Ivanhoe (definitely difficult for her), working through a high-school level grammar text, and studying German and Latin. My idea of an exciting acquisition to our home library is McGraw-Hill's Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. But she is 11 and able to tackle difficult tasks for longer periods. Her day should be more challenging than that of a much younger child.

Psychologists vs Faith (in something bigger than psychology)

The religion-hating media voices are delighted with a recent study, one article even declaring, "religious kids are jerks" (really, that's in the title). Here's a link to the study: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01167-7

To sum up, 1000 children from 6 different countries were asked to help distribute stickers to classmates by an authority figure; religious kids gave an average of 3 stickers away, while non-religious kids gave an average of 4 stickers away. They were also surveyed as to whether and how a person should be punished for intentionally shoving or bumping another person; religious children were less tolerant of the shoving and more supportive of punishments for the shover.

The study shows its bias by declaring that religious kids are more selfish and punitive. Imagine if the findings had been the reverse. We'd have the media trumpeting that religious kids are more likely to try to curry favor with teachers and classmates (i.e., insecure, needy, and obsequious due to thinking there's a supreme being out there who they should please) as well as more tolerant of bullying by others. 

Religious people can't win these days. The psychologists really do hate them. As does anyone who would label a kid a "jerk" over a difference of one worthless sticker.

Addiction

I'm reading a very interesting book right now. It's called The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease. Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist with a past of drug addiction, argues that addiction is a normal process of the brain and is no more a disease than is falling love. Apparently, on a brain scan, addiction and falling in love look alike. He says,

Then why should we reject the disease model?
The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn't want to call the excitement we fell when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each  rewarding experience builds it own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That's true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal [the author's term for delay discounting], both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain....So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function.
(p. 163)

Some of his evidence for not treating addiction like disease is that people can get over substance abuse without medication--since when do 12-step programs cure cancer? If programs that address thoughts and habits can overcome addiction, then it's not a physical disease the way we usually think of it. 75% of US soldiers using heroin during the Vietnam war came home and kicked the habit once they were back in their usual opportunity-rich environments. Merely changing a person's outward circumstances doesn't heal a "disease."

Also, behavior addictions are often just as severe as substance addictions. Video gaming young men in Asia come to mind. Pornography addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction, hoarding, compulsive shopping, binge eating, etc. Nearly anything that gives us temporary pleasure can take over our lives, it would seem.

How to beat addiction, according to Lewis? First, protect children from too much adversity early in their development. The more trauma they experience, the more likely they are to grow up and find solace in negative behaviors that give temporary feelings of relief. Second, "redirect" the biology of desire; simple repression is less effective because we get fatigued repressing our desires. People need a long-term perspective that gives them motivation to seek longer-term goals. "Humans need to be able to see their own lives progressing, moving, from a meaningful past to a viable future. They need to see themselves as going somewhere, as characters in a narrative, as making sense. In addiction the relentless preoccupation with immediate rewards carves a small burrow out of the potential richness of time." People need a personal, emotion-saturated story with bigger goals than just short-term satisfaction of an appetite. Cognitive behavioral methods can help people explore their choices and examine and modify their personal beliefs, but they're not enough to beat out desire. Instead, harness the power of desire to serve more ultimately rewarding goals.

One painful conclusion--which the author probably never intended to convey--that I reached from this book is that addicts don't love others enough. The heartbroken family members who cry "You just don't care about us enough to change!" might be right. Is it the addicts' fault that they don't love enough? Are they damaged from traumatic childhood experiences? Should we blame our materialistic, individualistic society that devalues loving service to family and community? What religious beliefs help or hinder the processes of becoming addicted and recovering from addiction?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Eating Well

After five children, would you believe that I weigh more than I want to? Haha. I'm an American woman. I've almost always weighed more than I want to. A 2008 study said that 3/4 of the women in the USA have "disordered eating." We simply have so much food available. Food makes us temporarily happy, and it's nearly everywhere.

I am 5'6" and weigh 180 lbs. Not super dangerous health-wise, but not particularly great, either. I would like to fit in my clothes easily--a challenge for most of my life since I was bullied in fifth grade and stopped trying to play with other kids at recess--and be a healthy weight in order to have our last planned child.

Recently I read an extremely helpful book by Judith S. Beck which applied cognitive behavioral therapy to eating-related behavior, i.e., diets. The four fundamental principles were:

1. Remind yourself frequently of the advantages of your planned weight loss and how great you'll feel.
2. Sit down when you eat; pay attention to what you eat and savor every bite.
3. Give yourself lots of credit for each time that you stick to your eating plan.
4. Practice portion control.

Other helpful principles included not having unrealistic eating plans, bodies don't care that it's a holiday (extra calories are still extra calories), remembering that hard situations will pass, distract yourself from off-plan eating with things that you really like to do, your happiness and health are more important than the wishes of a person pressing unneeded food on you in a social setting, eating because of stress doesn't make the stressor go away plus it adds more stress in the form of guilt and extra weight, and making an eating mistake doesn't warrant making lots more mistakes for the rest of the day.

Sitting down when I eat has been a big area for improvement for me. Fixing food for my family means I'm frequently in the kitchen, tasting and satisfying hunger with little snacks while preparing food. Also, our kitchen table is small, so during lunch, I often end up sitting at the computer desk to eat, which results in my eating absent-mindedly while I read news, email, and Facebook. I have ceased eating at the computer in the past week. It's hard not to give in sometimes to my old habit, but it's a good change that I'll keep.

Mindfulness

I recently attended a presentation on mindfulness, a subject I've been intrigued by for a couple of years due to its recent use in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy. According to the speaker, the three central principles of mindfulness are "Presence," "Compassion," and "Acceptance." By "Presence," he meant being focused in the moment. "Compassion" means kindness toward all. "Acceptance" means embracing suffering and accepting reality while not judging others or one's self. He also talked about meditation, viewing one's thoughts and feelings as though a distant observer, periodic solitude, and diminishing one's worldly ambition.

He led us through a bit of deep breathing and being quiet. He shared a few anecdotes and his own thoughts, but he didn't seem to be interested in sharing any one else's insights. I appreciated some of the information he presented and the chance to think through some ideas without my little children underfoot. I did find his presentation more self-centered than I would have expected from someone who makes his living teaching mindfulness to others, and that was distracting.

One audience member objected to the instruction to be non-judgmental, arguing that judgment is a valuable attribute of being human. I agree with that objection for two reasons. 1) The term "non-judgmental" currently carries the connotation of condemning judgment, which is contradictory and negative; mindfulness is about presence, not avoidance and repression. 2) From what I've read of mindfulness--at least when used therapeutically--it's not so much that one turns off judgment as chooses to delay it while observing and accepting what is. I believe that, instead of wasting effort trying to turn off judgment, it's essential to focus on being humble, for keeping in mind one's own limited knowledge makes it easier to stay judgment while seeking new insights about the thoughts and feelings of ourselves and others.

Brazen

Today in the checkout line at the grocery store, I happily waved the DVD cover of the recently released Jurassic World, which I was buying for my husband as a surprise. He loves the Jurassic Park movies. The customer just in front of me told me and the cashier that she had already seen the movie. She said that she has a friend who downloads the movies off the internet while they're still in the theater, that the downloaded versions are of really good quality, and that her friend only charges $5 per movie.

Yeah.

That there's called piracy, lady. And you have no shame at all about funding and benefiting from it.

Scandinavia, Socialism, and a Surgeon

Despite the media giants being dead-set on Hillary Clinton being the next president (I remember them already burnishing her public image 20 years ago when she was a president's wife who clearly wanted to be much more), some of my Democrat friends are quite excited about Bernie Sanders. He seems to be promising a lot of "free" stuff.*

From Wikipedia:

A self-described democratic socialist, Sanders favors policies similar to those of social democratic parties in Europe, particularly those instituted by the Nordic countries.

All this Scandinavia-dreaming strikes me as rather racist. The same policies, when attempted elsewhere, rarely work out well (Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, China when communist, Italy, Greece, etc.), but fans of democratic socialism keep longing to be like Scandinavia. What they're really saying--but don't realize it--is that they want the USA to be Scandinavian. Sorry to invoke Hitler and his Nazi crew, but they would no doubt feel a bit vindicated by the continuing adulation of the Nordic people.

I think I'm most favorably impressed by Ben Carson. As a man with a scientific background, he seems to be the only candidate aware of how numerical and physical realities get in the way of ideologies making good on their promises. Any experienced doctor knows that no matter how good your intentions, mortal weaknesses mean your patient might not benefit from your ministrations. Also, after what our foreign policy has been for the last long while, I'd love to see a "do no harm" approach in the White House. At the very least, we should be focusing on not doing harm to our allies.

* Nothing provided by the government is really free, is it? Unless we plan to repudiate some of our national debt down the road, which would be pathetic considering the size of our economy. From what I can see, the Tea Party movement exists because some people (but rarely politicians) quite rationally think that the federal and local government should rein in spending so that we don't overtax producers and eventually sink in a Greece-style debt quagmire. The US federal government is up to nearly 18.5 trillion USD in debt, and almost nobody in politics or media wants to mention it anymore.

Homeschool update

Here's what the girls are doing most school days--

Dd11:

- Story of the World – mom reads a lesson aloud

- Warriner's Grammar - 1 exercise (often done verbally to Mom)

- Spelling Workout - 1 p

- Ivanhoe (read 5 p)

- Copywork (5 lines of Ivanhoe)

- Memorization: “Verily! Allah does not like arrogance.”

            — Koran 31:18

- Outline 2 paragraphs from World Book: “Abu Bakr”

- Math – 2 p (She is working on-level in math now. Last year, she was behind, but she caught up over the summer. She usually misses 0-2 problems per lesson and can correct them when shown the error.)

- Religion – ½ p

- German Study – 2 p Tierisch Lyrisch w/ 2 words looked up

- Latin Study (2 columns from Artes Latinae)

- Music Practice (7 minutes, 2 instruments)

- PE/Tabata

- Astronomy pictures – 1 p

Dd8:

- Story of the World – mom reads a lesson aloud

- First Language Lessons – 1 lesson

- Reading from language arts textbook & narration to Mom (last story was about Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer)

- Math – 2 p (She is working one grade-level ahead. She could go faster but prefers not to.)

- Religion – ½ p

- German Study – 1 p Teddybär Geschichten w/ 1 word looked up

- Spelling – 1 p

- Music Practice (6 minutes, 2 instruments)

- PE/Tabata

- Astronomy pictures – 1 p

Dd5:

- Story of the World – mom reads a lesson aloud

- Reading lesson

- Practice printing 1 letter

- Math – 2 p

- Religion – 1 verse Book of Mormon

- German study – a bit of the German workbook obtained from the mother of our German exchange student

- Music Practice (3 minutes, 1 instrument)

- PE/Tabata

Fridays often include logic, typing, and astronomy lessons with the occasional field trip.

The oldest two can read, so they often work independently. Everybody usually finishes everything within 3.5 hours. They're making steady progress and still have time for all kinds of enrichment, socialization, and the amusements of children. Things are basically going well.

Baking soda in the washer

Why did I not hear of putting baking soda in with my laundry until a few weeks ago? I was visiting a sister, and I noticed that she had no laundry detergent. There was just a box of baking soda and a small bottle of something pleasant smelling sitting by her clothes washer. I used some of each, hoping they were what I was supposed to use to clean my clothes, and my clothes were surprisingly clean and soft afterward.

Now I use baking soda all the time in our wash. I do add a little regular laundry detergent because it's hard to shake my conviction that one should use soap to wash clothes. It's probably a bit more expensive than using laundry detergent alone, but why pay less only to have clothes that don't get as clean?

Second Amendment Defense

In the wake of another shooting rampage in a "gun-free" zone, I am pleased that only three of my Facebook friends thus far have chimed in to support more gun controls.

Two--possibly all three--work in places where they have government-funded armed guards protecting them all day while at work. One is a diplomat who not only has Marines guarding him at work (the Marines technically are there to protect the classified information, which the State Department, from top to bottom, protects so assiduously...yes, there was a criticism of H. Clinton implicit in that...yet everyone knows that the Marines are going to try to protect the diplomats, too) but also has USG-funded security that also looks after his home and family's safety. The second works at a public library that has a visible security presence. And the third works in health care; many health care establishments have armed guards, too, but I don't know for a fact that he works at one with guards.

Do they not see, from their protected places, that the world really has many dangerous places? If other people feel like they are are at an elevated risk of being victims of violent crime but cannot afford to hired armed guards, they should be able to bear defensive weapons.

My strong opinion is that we need a change in mental health commitment laws to make it easier to commit and treat people with brain issues before they crack in homicidal ways. If we're going to change our laws over the acts of a madman, the change should affect madmen and madwomen first. Also, there should be a stigma attached to acts that contribute to damaging one's brain: harmful drug use, alcohol abuse, daytime talk TV (think I'm joking? remember Jerry Springer's guests?), and avoiding therapy when disorders first start to become apparent. If football can decline in popularity over concussions, then we surely we can make it so that people are more stigmatized for refusing therapy than they are for getting help for mental illness.

We also need to stigmatize the media for over-hyping and giving fame to murderers. I find it promising that Chris Mintz is showing up so much on my Facebook feed this morning. All hail the hero! (And forget the anti-heroes forever.)

Capitalism Defense

One never hears of a nation facing famine that experiences a resultant flowering of black-market co-ops.

Capitalism organically flows out of normal human desires to enjoy life to the highest degree possible, and it doesn't need the might of the government to force it into being. Unlike socialism or communism.

Capitalism is the enshrinement of "thou shalt not steal." Someone works to create or bring about something. Then they get to keep it. Thus the motivation to work is protected, and more work and creativity will typically ensue.

If a person tries to steal from another in a free market system, the law should step in to prevent theft. The law can also can be used to prevent force or tyranny from distorting the freedom that should be inherent in a free market (mafia, monopolies, etc.).

The free market is not a free-for-all. Regulations to protect basic human health and property are good. Regulations that protect one noisy or well-connected group from its competitors, however, are government-backed monopolies, and black markets can be expected to grow up wherever such regulations have been put into place.

A capitalist system can have a social safety net, but it must be minimal. The net should not be one that rewards an idle person with a more enjoyable life than a worker, or the system will eventually implode as too many opt to be more idle (i.e., "go John Galt"). A hardworking culture can keep that implosion at bay for a couple of generations (see Scandinavia and Germany).

Not an inventor

I am weary of all the fawning attention Ahmed in Irving, Texas has been receiving.

1) He didn't invent a clock. He took apart a clock and rearranged it inside a small case. He brought it to school for no official reason. It looks like a small timer for a bomb similar to the fake ones they make for movies sometimes. He did this on the school day right after a publicized bomb scare on September 11 at a high school in Plano, which is in the same metro area as Irving.

Here's a post where someone identified the clock that Ahmed rearranged. http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/

2) Texas law makes it illegal to have a "hoax bomb," not just a bomb. Even though his project had no explosives, if he meant to frighten people with it, he ran afoul of the law.

Here's the penal code section pertaining to hoax bombs. http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/txstatutes/PE/10/46/46.08

3) Ahmed's father appears to be a bit of a publicity hound. As a resident of Colorado, I remember very well the balloon boy hoax, and the Ahmed situation reminds me of it.

Math delay

Dd8 has been done with her homeschool studies early nearly every day for the past few weeks, while dd10 struggles to get through with her work before lunch and the drive to their charter school. Dd10 doesn't have that many more subjects, and I let her do her grammar exercises verbally most days. I think dd10 spends so much longer on her work because math facts just don't come as easily to her as they do to dd8; she seems to spend a lot of time sighing while sitting over her open math book.

Over lunch today I asked her if she sits over her math sometimes without doing it, and dd10 replied that she often looks off into space. I have challenged her to change that habit so that she doesn't let herself stare into space until after she has finished the problem she is currently doing. A little mental down time is fine, but taking it in the middle of a problem makes it so she essentially starts the problem all over after her stare break.

Hopefully, she can make this small behavior change so that her math lesson doesn't fill all the available time in the morning.

Ads and Joy

A friend lamented today that her one-year-old daughter finds joy in everything, while her six-year-old boy finds joy in nothing. She wondered what the world is doing that it steals happiness away from little children so quickly.

She is a very involved mother who takes her children many fun and interesting places. I suspect a main culprit in causing her son's joylessness is advertising.

The purpose of advertising is to make us aware of a product and hopefully desire to obtain that product. How do the creators of advertising manufacture in us a desire to obtain the product, though? If we, the targeted audience, are content with our lives, we are unlikely to disturb ourselves to go out and get the product. What would be the point? We're already happy! So advertisers--sometimes knowingly, sometimes not--frequently present to us messages aimed to diminish our feelings of well-being. Then we're more receptive to the idea of seeking to get our happiness and contentment back by buying their product, which they promise us will make us feel better!

If you want happy children, minimize their contact with ads. Advertisers don't love your children; they see them as market share.

Taiwan (well, food from there)

Studying Taiwan was fun, but the end of the summer was so full of back-to-school events that we really didn't do have time for much besides eating Taiwanese food, which was a mixture of Filipino and Chinese foods.

We ate steamed buns, potstickers, three-cup-chicken, shaved ice desserts, and various stir fry dishes. We ate out at a Chinese restaurant run by a man from Taiwan. We drank grass jelly and basil seed drinks.

Our exchange student from Germany thought it was odd but fun that during her first month here she learned so much about Taiwanese food. I pointed out to her that any food made in America by Americans is technically American food! After all, hamburgers and hot dogs? German-American food, actually. Hamburgers even get their name from the German city of Hamburg.

Hypocrisy

In Luke 12, Jesus addressed hypocrisy, the practice of pretending to be holy while hiding great sin. This is what he said:

2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.
3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

I have three words to say in connection with those verses, and then I shall restrain myself, for this is a family-friendly blog. They are "Ashley Madison hacked."

Carnival of Homeschooling: Yes, Summer is Really Ending Already

Welcome to the Carnival of Homeschooling for August!

It's been summer. Supposedly a period of lazy, hot days of doing nothing much, right? Um, yeah.

Besides welcoming an exchange student from Germany into our home, finishing up math curriculum from last year, and tutoring a teenager in math, we've also been learning about other countries all summer. Right now, we're learning about Taiwan (the grass jelly drink is not going over well, but rice is an eternal favorite in this house). You can read a bit about our less-than-successful trip to observe competitive table tennis at my last post, "Taiwan, Table Tennis, and Toddlers."

What are you doing this summer? Better do it fast, because summer is about over. The teenager I tutor starts school tomorrow. My children are starting the new school year on Monday. The exchange student starts public school next Wednesday.

Did you know that exchange students must attend a regular brick-and-mortar, full-time school? That's one thing the Cates of Why Homeschool found out upon agreeing to host a Japanese exchange student this year, and now they are diving into the experience of being public school parents. Read about it at their Carnival submission, "We are finally going to experience public school."

Mama Laws, who is introducing her new blog, did summer schooling in math and reading with her children. She posts about it in "Mama Laws."

I am intrigued by the Star Wars math and language arts workbooks that Mama Laws mentions. I'll be looking those up on Amazon once I finish posting the Carnival. Coincidentally, last night I finished a project that seems similar to those workbooks. The boy I tutor in math is obsessed with Spider-Man and genetic engineering, so I wrote him a short story in which Spidey goes up against genetically-altered dinosaurs. My daughters helped me illustrate the story, and in each chapter I utilized an algebra concept that the boy has struggled with. It turned out rather well. I think it qualifies as fan fiction, so I'm going to make it available at this Google Docs link for anyone who'd like to download and enjoy it!

Carol at Journey & Destination submitted a beautiful and inspiring post entitled "Culture of Character." Using many quotes from Charlotte Mason, it meditates on the formation of character and helping our children develop the ability to serve others.

That's it for this month's carnival! Thanks to those who submitted, and I hope to see many more submissions in future carnivals because I look at them all and learn much from them.

Taiwan, Table Tennis, and Toddlers

We are now learning about Taiwan. We went to an Asian market and bought mochi (yes, it's Japanese, but now it's Taiwanese, too), frozen rolls for steaming, fried shallots (apparently rather fundamental as a food topping in Taiwan), 100 lbs of rice, and various other Taiwanese treats.

A popular sport in Taiwan is table tennis, i.e., ping pong. An internet search turned up a local place where people get together to play ping pong in an organized fashion. We went to check it out, hoping that not only would we see good table tennis being played, but that we might be able to play a little, too. Sadly, all the tables were occupied, and dd3 began to cry. Oops. The organizer hurried over and asked us to take her out to the hallway to prevent her from distracting the players, which we did, but then she melted down entirely as only a toddler can. So much for any thoughts we might have been entertaining of becoming competitive ping pong players. I guess it's for the best. We don't even own our own ping pong table.

Homeschool Carnival coming in just a few days!

Please submit posts to the August homeschooling carnival, which I'll be posting in just a few days.

Here are the instructions on how to do it:

You can send in up to three posts about homeschooling via with an email to: CarnivalOfHomeschooling@gmail.com

Please include:

 Title of Post(s)
 URL of Post(s)
 Name of Blog
 URL of Blog
 Brief summary of the post(s)

Please send in the entries by August 10th at 6:00 PM PST.

Peace of Peru

We've been learning about Peru for the past week or two. Today a little Peruvian-American girl presented me with a carton of alfajores (sandwich cookies filled with dulce de leche) and informed me that yesterday she and her family were celebrating "the Peace of Peru." It turns out that yesterday and the day before were the Peruvian Independence Days, or Fiestas Patrias! What a fortuitous coincidence.

I'm going to make more alfajores tomorrow with another Peruvian-American friend. We're also going to drink some Inka Cola, a bright yellow beverage that is supposedly super-sweet. My kids should enjoy tomorrow.

Learning about France

I think I gained weight in just the past two weeks. Curse you, tasty French food!

Here are some of the things we did to learn about France this summer:

• Learned about life in France from my niece, who recently returned from an LDS mission in France and Belgium.
• Set up a playdate for my daughter with a French friend from school.
• Did some ballet, taught by my talented sister who majored in dance long ago.
• Listened to French impressionistic music while viewing slides of French Impressionists' art and painting at the kitchen table.
• Went to a French bistro and ate croissants and snails. Dd10, dd8, and dd5 all ate the escargot and liked it.
• Read and watched Madeline books/shows.
• Read library books about France. You Wouldn't Want to Be an Aristocrat in the French Revolution!: A Horrible Time in Paris You'd Rather Avoid was a favorite of the older girls.
• Ate a lot of Nutella and some French cheeses.
• Watched non-fiction videos on Amazon Prime about children living in France.
• Invited a college student to dinner so she could tell us about her recent study abroad experience in France and show us her souvenirs.
• Made or bought, then ate apple galette, ratatouille, macarons (not to be confused with macaroons), croque monsieur sandwiches, French bread and baguettes, quiche, chocolate sandwiches (yes, pieces of bread with chocolate between), and several rich dishes seasoned with garlic and herbes de provence.
• Watched Phantom of the Opera, Aristocats, and Ratatouille.

Macaron cookies. Not sufficiently cylindrical, unfortunately. 

I feel fortunate to have many relatives and acquaintances who can help me teach my children about other countries. Traveling abroad with a large family is prohibitively expensive, so I appreciate everyone that helps fill our home-bound summer country studies with authentic experiences related to those countries. 

I also greatly appreciate the food bloggers and recipe posters and reviewers who make it possible for me to cook Yemeni, French, Lithuanian, Peruvian, and Taiwanese dishes almost immediately.

Learning about Lithuania

We recently finished learning about Lithuania for 2 weeks. Among other things, we did the following:

• Invited over a friend from church who served as a missionary in Lithuania. She showed us her souvenirs and pictures, wore traditional Lithuanian clothing, and read part of a Lithuanian children's book to us. We baked aguonu sausainiukai--which are poppyseed cookies--ahead of time so we could eat them with her.
• Made bracelets and necklaces out of wood, shell, and amber beads.
• Cooked lots of Lithuanian food, including cold beet soup, beet potato salad, cepelinai (blimp shaped potato dumplings filled with meat), and kugelis (a VERY tasty baked dish made of potato, egg, bacon, and milk).
• Played a little basketball because it's a favorite sport in Lithuania.
• Celebrated the Lithuanian midsummer day by making flower wreaths and putting them into the water (see the previous post).
• Ate a lot of thickened yogurt (it should have really been sour cream, but that was just too fattening for me).
• Watched versions of the folktale about Jūratė and Kastytis. It is about a mermaid sea queen who lives in a castle made of amber underwater; when she falls in love with a mortal fisherman, a jealous thunder god blasts her castle into bits, and that is why amber washes up on the coast of the Baltic Sea.

What fun we had. :) Now we're onto a fortnight or so of studying France. French food is so good, though, that I might squeeze in an extra day or two on France.

This post will be in the July 2015 Carnival of Homeschooling.

Joninės

Happy St. John's Day! This is the midsummer folk festival celebrated in Lithuania right after the summer solstice. We are studying Lithuania right now, so my oldest daughter gathered grass and flowers from the yard, and we all made wreaths. The girls wore them to a park where they launched the wreaths onto the surface of a duck pond.

Joninės wreaths

Yemen Fortnight

We are finished with our fortnight of studying Yemen. Among other things, we did the following to learn about life there:

• Ate mangoes, saltah (national dish of Yemen, eaten with a condiment made of ground fenugreek), honey, dates, yogurt, cardamom rice, etc.
• Listened to Yemeni music on YouTube
• Watched a movie on Yemen from Amazon and learned about Socotra (like the Galapagos islands as to remoteness and unique flora and fauna, but located in the Indian Sea) from YouTube videos
• Visited a spice store and did a scavenger hunt for spices used in Yemeni cuisine (fenugreek, pepper, coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, etc.)
• Bought some frankincense incense sticks and burned part of one
• Toasted spices and ground them with a mortar and pestle to make hawaij, a Yemeni spice mixture
• Cooked several dishes using hawaij as the seasoning
• Recited poetry to each other (poetry evenings are a common evening entertainment in Yemen)
• Learned about oil exploration at the Hunt energy exhibit in the Perot Science Museum in Dallas, Texas (petroleum is Yemen's primary export and approximately 25% of its GDP)
• Imitated the Yemeni sport of camel jumping by having my kids and their cousins run and jump over each other's backs
• Learned about social issues such as child brides and the current civil war in Yemen (we visited friends and family for a week, often sleeping on cots or the floor, so we could show the children what life is like for a displaced person fleeing civil war)
• Learned how to say "Good appetite!" in Arabic: bil-hanā' wa ash-shifā'

Yemeni Food

While Yemen is not a wealthy country, its cuisine benefits from its location near India. They make heavy use of coriander, cumin, and cardamom. Some of the Yemeni recipes we've been eating this week have been delicious. My husband--a Midwesterner who kindly tolerates all my cooking experiments even though he would just as soon eat pizza, lasagna, and deli meat sandwiches all the time--really liked the cardamom rice I prepared yesterday. He would actually like me to make it again, which is a rare request coming from him.

If you're looking for Yemeni recipes, I recommend the website Queen of Sheba Yemeni Foods. It's in English and has clear instructions and helpful photos for many Yemeni recipes. Besides the cardamom rice, our family has enjoyed hawaij (a Yemeni spice mixture which we toasted and ground ourselves), banana milk (banana, milk, a little sugar, and almond+vanilla flavoring all in the blender) and a rose lemon drink (basically lemonade with a little red food coloring and some rose water).

Yemen and Girls

As I posted before, we're learning about Yemen right now. I have five daughters, and nearly everything I find about life for girls in Yemen makes me very sad.

The disparity in education between boys and girls in Yemen is possibly the worst in the world, according to this 2007 article. One of the barriers to education for girls is the lack of female teachers (male relatives don't want their girls taught by male teachers); although there are projects aimed at increasing the numbers of female teachers, there aren't remotely enough yet. Technology could help with the teacher-gender issue, but in Yemen, they are woefully behind at actually implementing new technology. According to this 2013 article, only young government employees in Yemen really utilized computers at work while the older employees persisted in using only paper, and a mere 15% of the country had access to the internet.

Then there is the abominable practice of marrying off young girls, which Yemen refuses to make illegal even though it periodically results in deaths of the poor girls from foreseeable internal injuries. Approximately half of Yemeni girls are married off before turning 18. Their consent is not required by the law; their fathers can simply give them away as wives, often to much older men. Death at childbirth is the primary cause of death for women of reproductive age in Yemen, and women typically cannot receive even emergency medical care at medical centers without authorization from their male guardians (usually their husbands). As if all that weren't bad enough, one strain of Sunni Islam practiced in Yemen promotes female genital mutilation as a religious obligation.

On top of all the above, half of Yemen lives in great poverty and there is currently armed conflict between a Saudi-led coalition of Sunni countries and Iran-backed (i.e., Shiite) Houthi rebels, which has further allowed an Al-Qaeda offshoot to gain territory and influence in Yemen.

When I hear feminists' complaints about "manspreading" on public transportation, I just want to throw something sometimes. Like an atlas. At their desks and opened to maps of places other than Europe or the "Anglosphere." I'm appalled that they waste the energy of their movement on New York subway trivialities when there are places like Yemen.

Welcome to summer 2015!

It's summer! The girls' school is out, so we're not doing "normal school" until the middle of August.

The summer school curriculum is our usual (third summer now) of learning all about countries plus math and maybe religion or music a couple days each week.

These are the countries we are learning about this summer:
1) Yemen
2) Lithuania
3) France
4) Peru
5) Taiwan (dd5 wanted to do China, but I have a rule that we can't repeat countries within five years; as Taiwan's status is hotly debated, the choice of Taiwan can satisfy both her desire to learn about China again and my rule)

xyAlgebra

For the last few months, I've been tutoring a smart--but very behind in math--teenage boy with ADHD. By the end of his geometry class, he was fairly confidently using the formulas he'd been learning and had improved a lot in his testing. Then the second semester came, and his class began precalculus. Thus far, it's been all algebra (albeit at a precalculus level), and he is abysmal at algebra.

Thanks to ADHD and being promoted in math for years without really being forced to get his algebra (or even sometimes arithmetic) foundations solid, he's been like a person forced to do a triathlon who still just doggy-paddles. Yes, sometimes he gets through the water, but it's only with incredible effort, and sometimes, despite lots of effort, he just goes under.

Until I proved to him a few months ago why two negatives make a positive, he didn't believe it and certainly didn't apply it correctly. Yet he is supposed to be doing long division of polynomials. Sigh. At least his multiplication facts are solid; otherwise, I'd despair. He mastered those through the video game Timez Attack.

Now that school is almost out, I've got him working independently on algebra basics for the next month. I found several algebra programs online that looked promising--interesting videos and visuals, interactive problem sets, etc.--and tested them on him one afternoon. Without fail, he spaced out during all the videos. The only program that forced him to pay attention and learn something is a free, downloadable one called "xyAlgebra." It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is a great program. A retired professor created it and gives it away for free. While one needs a computer to use it, one doesn't need the internet, which means no YouTube/FB/email distractions for the user. Very good for kids with attention issues! It gets good reviews from others who've tried it, and I found myself "trying it out" for nearly 2 hours the night I downloaded it. It's a solid, engaging (because it goes nowhere till you hit the right buttons, and the "right buttons" change) program.

Yesterday, I had the tutee start working on it at my house to make sure that he didn't have any problems with it. I let him listen to music of his choice while he worked, and he made it through the first 20 lessons (out of 375 total) in an hour. I have high hopes that this will be the tool that helps him finally lay down a solid foundation in algebra. He's supposed to do 20 lessons a day, so we'll see where he is in a month. And if the learning sticks.

Reciprocals

Dd10 is about halfway through her fifth grade math book. She has been learning to multiply and divide fractions. As she started her math lesson today, she asked, "What's a reprotocal?"

"Oh, a reciprocal!" I said excitedly. "Let me show you."

I put her in a standing position directly in front of me saying, "Stand up straight. You're a fraction."

Then I had her lie down on the floor and grabbed her feet firmly. Next I started to lift her into an upside-down position. She's still a foot shorter than me, so I mostly succeeded. Then I said, "Now you're a reciprocal!" She and I shared a good laugh.

Sometimes I really, really love homeschooling.

To aerate or not to aerate

We have lived in our current home for three winters. Now it's spring, and it's time to take care of the grass. Last summer, we finally got our sprinklers operational, so now we have lots of grass. And for some reason, the yard in front and back is bumpy. Apparently, the partial solution to that problem is to aerate our lawn, i.e., pull out plugs of dirt that look like very large goose turds and let them break down on the lawn.

My husband doesn't think aeration will do much good. He was pulling up webpages about "hydroseeding" last night. It involves spraying a slurry of fertilizer and seed onto bare ground to get an even cover of grass. It sounds expensive.

I figure aeration can't do much harm. I'll spend $30 on a manual plug aerator and give myself a few blisters using it to treat the really bumpy areas of our yard. Here's hoping it evens out the lawn a bit!

Happy Mother's Day!

Love it, hate it, tomorrow is still a good day to remember that no matter how problematic our family relationships might sometimes be, we owe our lives to our mothers. If my mom knew of this blog's existence, I'd wish her a happy Mother's Day in this post. Instead, I'll just call her after church and talk for a while. I think she'd prefer that anyhow.

Speaking of church, my eight-year-old daughter might be giving a talk in Primary (the LDS children's organization) tomorrow. I was informed of that possibility 2 hours ago, so I quickly drafted a talk for her. The given theme is "Jesus Christ went about doing good." Here's the talk:

Why do we talk so much about following Jesus Christ? Because he saved us from death and from sin, and he showed us the way to live!
How did Jesus live?
He did what Heavenly Father wanted and didn’t break any commandments.
He taught people what to do so that they could become like him.
He healed sick people.
He was kind to people who were being bullied.
He was friendly to everyone.
He gave everyone the gift of resurrection.
He suffered for our sins so that we can repent and live with Him and Heavenly Father in the Celestial Kingdom.
He was nice to his mother—which is worth pointing out on Mother’s Day!
Jesus was the best person who ever lived on the Earth.
In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Happy Mother's Day to all women who mother!

Story of the World, Volume 1 timeline

We're done reading volume 1 of Susan Wise Bauer's The Story of the World. It was the second time we read it, and this time through we made a timeline of the most important events and people. It took me over a year to make the yarn, cardboard, and paper framework. Crafty, I'm not. But my kids don't seem to care. Here's a picture of how our ancient world timeline turned out:

Every time my children go downstairs, this is over their heads.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the red dragon in the lower right...that is actually Alexander the Great riding his horse Bucephalus. Dd8 is currently obsessed with dragons.

Sixteen

My experience is that little children very much want to belong to their parents. From the time they start crawling, there is an invisible rubber band connecting them to their mother or father, and when it gets stretched too far, they go looking for the missing parent. As they get older, they understand that their parents can be gone for a while and then come back. But they still tend to prefer being with parents to not.

Around age eight or so, most children have started to spend more time doing their own thing. For my children, this typically means reading, playing outdoors away from the patio door, drawing, or making an art store (so that I can pay them real money for artwork they made with craft supplies that I bought...children are such hopeful entrepreneurs).

Then adolescence hits, and they start being able to reason as well as adults, even though their executive function and impulse control are still developing. 

I remember an occasion when the judge I clerked for interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl in his chambers during a custody dispute. He explained to her that he was the ultimate decision maker, but that due to her age he was willing to hear her input on which parent she should live with and why. No, she wasn't an adult, and he made that clear; however, he also accepted that she was close to adulthood and deserved to be treated accordingly. In the end, he decided to have her live primarily with the parent that she wanted to live with.

When I was fourteen, my mother signed me up for a college class one summer and bought me a city bus pass. Then she basically turned me loose to study and go around town on my own for two months. When I was nearly seventeen, she let me go to college full-time. Yes, the university was only three miles away from her house, but I lived in on-campus housing. Both of those experiences promoted my ability to function in the adult world, and I'm grateful for the appropriate levels of freedom she granted me as a teenager.

While doing yard work recently, I was sad to overhear a neighbor boy matter-of-factly tell a visitor how he was allowed to bike on just a few of the streets in the immediate vicinity. It sounded like he never leaves our neighborhood on his own, not even to just grab a slushee at a convenience store. I believe the boy is fifteen or sixteen years old. His homeschooling parents subscribe to a very "protective" (i.e., isolating) way of bringing up their children. Don't the parents realize that part of their job is to prepare their children to be adults? No matter what they do, their children will age. Whether the children mature into adults capable of doing their own shopping and independent living seems to be at risk. 

Sixteen year old people are able to drive and/or marry in much of the world, so it disturbs me to see this neighbor boy being restricted as though he were a much younger child. I've never seen any sign of criminal or bad behavior in him that would justify the near imprisonment he lives in. 

ITBS results

Dd10's Iowa Test of Basic Skills results are back. Her composite score was 96th percentile. It's about what one would expect for a bright child who has never tested as "gifted."

Her math computation subsection--the lowest--was 50% (i.e., about half of fifth-graders do better than she did at basic arithmetic); it's the only section she didn't finish, which wasn't surprising due to her longstanding mental block on math facts. She knows her math facts, but she doesn't know them quickly, so under pressure it's easy to make mistakes.

All of her other subsection scores were middle or high range, so I'm pleased. The test results appear to accurately reflect her abilities and knowledge as observed by me during homeschool time. Now to deliver those results to our school district's homeschool office, and we're done with testing her until 7th grade. :)

Footie pajama fix

When a person has five children of the same gender in a row, "passing clothes down" is an integral part of the parental job of providing sufficient clothing. Especially when it comes to the babies and toddlers, who really don't care what they're wearing unless they're on a dress-up-like-a-princess kick.

Footy pajamas are a popular item in our home, but they always wear out first on the bottom of the feet. Then the little toes stick through, making the children uncomfortable. I came up with a fairly quick way to get another couple of years out of footy pajamas when that happens. Here is how:

See the hole at the toes? Not fun to wear.

Turn the pajama foot inside out and place over base a piece of cloth that covers it entirely. 

Pin the cloth to the bottom of the pajama foot.

Sew it on. It doesn't have to look great because it'll be inside the footy.

Trim off excess fabric.

Turn right-side out and trim up anything that needs it. Done!

Nearing the School Year's End

In 1.5 months the children's charter school, which they attend part-time, will let out for the summer. That is usually about when we also end our school year. Our main accomplishments for the school year thus far are as follows:

As a family, we are nearly done reading Volume 1 of the The Story of the World; Attila the Hun just died of a nosebleed. In about a month, we will be done with the biology videos, worksheets, and webpages I searched out to make up a life science course for the older two girls. My husband is taking the older children out on bike rides now that the weather is warming up.

Dd10 has made good progress in beginning Latin, understanding German in comic books (Asterix and Obelisk in German), playing a song or two on the piano and trumpet, memorizing the Goethe poem "Der Erlkönig," making key word outlines of paragraphs and fleshing them out again, memorizing math facts and learning to manipulate fractions, typing, basic logic, and reading the Bible (she finished the New Testament and is now reading the Old Testament...that should keep her busy for a few years...). She is only halfway through her Math 5 book, so she will get to work on that all summer. We did her standardized testing a week ago and are waiting on the results.

Dd8 is ahead in math by half a year, reads chapter books about dragons for long periods of time, and has legible--if unlovely--print and cursive skills. She finished reading the Book of Mormon. She doesn't really like to do copywork--English or German--but a little bit each day is making a difference. She can play a tremolo on our Filipino banduria, an instrument similar to the mandolin.

Dd5 is doing beginning phonics. She can read some words on her own but is not yet "a reader."

Our primary schoolwork goals for the rest of the year are as follows:

• Finish biology
• Finish history and make the timeline for the past year's history look good
• Get as much math done as possible
• Help dd5 become "a reader"
• Enjoy spring!

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This post is part of the 471st Carnival of Homeschooling posted at http://everybedofroses.blogspot.com/2015/05/carnival-of-homeschooling-for-may-472.html.

Pot Protest

Here in Colorado, a majority of the voting populace has approved a little libertarian experiment: legal marijuana for recreational use.

I hate it.

I drive my children to school and pass a billboard showing a lovely birthday cake and marijuana leaves and reminding everyone that they must be 21 years old in order to partake. Talk about setting up a "forbidden fruit" scenario. My husband saw another billboard that showed a pretty outdoor scene, but it wasn't clear what the ad was about; once he got closer, he could read that it was a reminder that only private, not public, use of marijuana is allowed.

Today in the thrift store aisle, an employee loudly complained to another co-worker about how a female in his life doesn't appreciate him smoking "the janga" and argued that pot is no worse than tobacco.

My children read billboards and go to the thrift store with me. They see all the green "plus" signs for the medical marijuana dispensaries, sometimes with sign wavers dancing in front to draw in customers (there can't possibly be enough people getting non-recreational health benefits from pot for so many dispensaries to stay in business). Children, including mine, are very impressionable, and this legalization experiment is bad for them. It normalizes the use of an herb that does terrible things to adolescents while making it extraordinarily easy to obtain.

A new book, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults, has a sobering (to those who aren't high, at least) chapter on marijuana, which discusses how THC concentrations in pot have more than doubled since the 1980s. Here are some quotes from that chapter:

THC disrupts the development of neural pathways. In an adolescent brain that is still laying down white matter and wiring itself together, such disruptions are far more harmful than if they were taking place in an adult brain....

In the past five years, several studies have shown that verbal IQ especially is decreased in people who have smoked daily starting before age seventeen, compared with people who smoked at a later age....

One of the largest studies followed tens of thousands of young Swedish soldiers for more than a decade. The heaviest users--that is, those who said they had used marijuana more than fifty times--were six times as likely to develop schizophrenia as those who had never smoked pot....

Another little-known fact is that levels of two abrasive compounds in marijuana smoke, tar and carbon monoxide, are three to five times greater in cannabis consumers than tobacco users. Smoking five marijuana cigarettes is equal to smoking a full pack of tobacco cigarettes, according to the American Lung Association. Marijuana smoke, which users inhale and try to hold in their lungs for as long as possible, also contains 50 to 70 percent more cancer-causing chemicals than cigarette smoke contains....

Teenagers are especially vulnerable to the drug because they are at a critical stage in the development of two of the most sophisticated parts of their brains--the frontal and prefrontal cortext--and these are precisely the parts most affected by marijuana.

Despite the research showing the harm done by marijuana, users of it refuse to accept that there could be anything wrong with their beloved plants. The fact that a few seizure-prone children are helped by marijuana oil doesn't make all the other documented problems go away. Perhaps they've never met someone with schizophrenia, but I have a close family member suffering from it (probably unconnected with drugs), which means all her family--especially her children--suffers, too; it's easy for me to despise a "recreational" substance that increases the number of schizophrenics in this world. There's nothing fun about a mother who is unable to care for herself or her family properly due to that particular mental illness.

Pot advocates remind me of the vociferous defenders of pit bulls that show up in website comment sections whenever a little old lady has been mauled to death yet again. (Interestingly, the only marijuana grower I know of has a pit bull. I wonder how large the overlap in the population of pit bull owners and marijuana fanatics is.)

It's discouraging to see how many adults are so enamored of their weed that they would flood communities with it despite the proven risks to young people. If your state has a movement to legalize pot, fight it now until the backers give up and move to a state that has already lost that fight. It's probably too late for Colorado, but you don't have to follow in our miss-steps.

Bossy vs. inspiring

A friend just posted the following quote on Facebook:

“I want every little girl who [is told] they’re bossy to be told instead, “You have leadership skills.”                         — Sheryl Sandberg

She and Sheryl Sandberg both mean well, I know, but I'm going to quibble because I think this sentiment is wrong and ultimately harmful to girls.

"Bossy" is used negatively as a descriptor of someone who is trying to be domineering, to "boss" other people around, i.e., get them to do what he/she wants. "Bossy" is used as a label for people we perceive to hold a desire to have and exercise power over us. That's never going to be a popular term in a nation that values freedom as highly as the USA does.

Leadership, on the other hand, is widely understood to include the ability to inspire others and to get their buy-in on carrying out a plan. While that is power of a sort, it is quite different than being domineering.

Instead of merely being "the boss" on the top of a hierarchy, an effective leader motivates others to work with her to pursue a common vision of their own volition, not just because they've been ordered to do so. Bossy people, ironically, often counter-productively evoke passive-aggressive behavior from their subordinates.

Anyone who can talk can give orders--I present my three-year-old toddler as evidence of that--but only a good leader can make it so that other people want to do what the leader says. If a girl is acting in such a way as to result in others wanting to call her "bossy," odds are good that she's trying to order others around in a way that is rubbing them wrong.  Instead of being told that already she has leadership skills, the girl needs to be taught actual leadership skills--including communication skills, motivation skills, delegating, positivity, being proactive, trustworthiness, creativity, giving effective feedback and seeking feedback, resourcefulness, being well-informed, responsibility, flexibility, commitment (follow-through), and self-confidence (the humble, well-founded sort of confidence, not arrogance)--so that her inclination to head up successful teams can someday be realized.

Spring break

The local schools just had spring break, so we did, too. Minimal daily schoolwork--math, music, religion, PE, and astronomy--was still assigned here at home, but I let the children have more free time to play at the park and be with friends. They also spent a lot of time reading. Dragon fever has hit my two oldest, thanks to the Wings of Fire series.

One thing we didn't do was go to places that would be crowded due to it being spring break! The science museum and the indoor swimming pool can wait until nearly everyone else is back in school, thank you. :)

Spring Break Schedule

Self-published!

To help my oldest child learn her math facts, I have written two adventure stories. One teaches addition facts in the context of traveling to different parts of the world. The second, which I just finished, teaches multiplication facts in the context of traveling through time and space (but only on Earth). My daughters are assisting me with the task of illustrating them.

To share the stories with a wider audience, we are "self-publishing" them on Amazon.com. I just uploaded the first book this afternoon. It is called Adding Adventure to Life. The book is about as cheap as it can be ($0.99 for the first one), but it's so fun to see one's own nom de plume in print! (I used a pseudonym because my children are still young, and I want to protect their privacy.) Maybe by summer, we'll have earned enough to go out for ice cream. :)

Here's the link to the book if you are interested in seeing what a self-published e-book looks like on Amazon.com. Or if you feel like donating to an ice cream fund. Either one works.

Refurbishing a blue loft bed

We have a blue and natural wood colored loft bed that looks like this:

Particle board with paper thin veneer

The veneer is attractive, but it is also super thin. After some children had put stickers and clear tape on various parts of it--"but we're decorating, Mommy!"--and I eventually removed them, there were several spots where the blond particle board underneath showed. Not pretty.

I decided to try using a dark blue permanent marker to cover over the ugly areas, but that was less than lovely because the marker's tip always went outside the patch area and got on the undamaged veneer.  So I took a paper towel and soaked it with rubbing alcohol. Right after I colored a damaged spot, I went over it and the surrounding veneer with the alcohol-soaked paper towel. It looked so good that I did the same thing with a regular brown marker on the natural wood parts, and I ended up with a lovely, quick refurbishment job. Under normal room light, the furniture looks nearly new!

Update: I put a 60 watt reading lamp in the recessed area, and I'm sorry to say that my fix doesn't look so good under strong light. Oh, well. It's still much better than it was before I pulled out the markers.

Exchange Students

It used to be when I heard "exchange student," I had all sorts of happy images in my mind of curious, friendly, adventurous teenagers who were eager to learn about a new place and culture. Now that I've served as an emergency/temporary host for one, my mental images have changed. Now I mostly just see "a foreign teenager," and potentially a less-than-pleasant one at that.

Admittedly, I didn't see the best example of an exchange student. This one was eventually sent home for being involved in breaking some of the exchange program's rules. Two of her closest friends were also sent home. It's such a shame that they squandered their scholarship program experience for the sake of one evening of foolishness.

I was disheartened to see a high level of self-absorption, tech-dependency, and materialism in some of the exchange student teenagers. Why travel to another country to spend all one's free time talking and texting on the phone to friends? Friends that are almost all other exchange students? Also, while we middle-class American families may seem quite rich compared to the average in some countries, that doesn't mean we have the funds to go out to eat all the time and buy lots of name-brand clothes at the mall shops.

If there are any future exchange students reading this, may I share a little advice:

1) If you don't want to abide by the rules of your exchange program, please don't come. You're taking someone else's place in the program.
2) If you're not curious about learning all you can during your short ten months in a new city and home, please don't come. What's the point?
3) If you are going to spend all your free time either shopping or hunched over your tablet or smart phone, please don't come. You can shop and play on your phone at home.

If you do want to keep rules, learn a lot, and become acquainted with new places and people from all kinds of backgrounds, I hope I can someday host one of you. :) I'd love for our family to have a more positive hosting experience.

Inclined?

We have had an exchange student staying with us temporarily (since before Christmas, actually, but that's fodder for another blog post...), and she is flying home next week. For a last Colorado hurrah, I took her, a couple of friends, and dd10 up the Manitou Springs Incline. Two thousand feet up an irregular staircase, covered in snow and slush in places where the sun doesn't shine enough. And we made it! It took two hours, but we did it. Here's the view from the top:

Manitou Springs Incline looking down from the top

Walking down the Barr Trail (if one goes up it far enough, one gets to the top of Pike's Peak) back to the car was harder than anticipated due to slushy, slippery conditions. It took us two more hours. But it was still a safer choice for us than going back down the Incline due to the Incline's steepness and slipperiness. I bought the exchange student and dd10 T-shirts in the gift shop by the parking lot to commemorate their accomplishment.

Under contract

We are selling a house. It's the one we moved from a while back. It is stressful selling a house, even a starter home. Today we signed a contract with a buyer. Now maybe I can be less preoccupied about house-selling and spend fewer wakeful hours thinking about it when I'd much rather be asleep.

Homeschool Carnival

The Carnival of Homeschooling for the month of February is up here. The carnival recently switched from being weekly to being monthly, so there are a lot of submissions. Enjoy!

Fine line

My maternal grandmother died last week, and I was just at her funeral yesterday. She had a good, full life, and we celebrated it as a large extended family, glad that she could be reunited with my grandfather, who passed away 8 years ago.

Today my mother called to talk for a while. She started worrying aloud that the the workers at the hospice care had shortened her mother's life by giving her too much in the way of sedatives and pain killers.

Here's the thing. My grandmother was 96 years old and had severe Alzheimer's. She broke her hip in a very painful way a week before she died. She had been eating less and weighed approximately 75 lbs. when she died.

What could the hospice workers have done differently? She was clearly in decline and in great pain. I'm sure they knew that the pain killers would likely speed up the date of the my grandmother's passing, but is it humane to deny her the pain killers for that reason only?

I feel for hospice workers and family members who must make decisions about pain relief for someone near death. They walk a difficult path, treading a fine line between acting in a way that could shorten a life and permitting a person to suffer great pain. I pray they may always act with wisdom and charity, for even an ancient grandmother is valuable and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

Subtracting Negative Numbers

Dd10 and dd7 are starting to learn about negative numbers. Not because we've reached them in their math books. (Although, actually we have. Many of the "temperature" problems they do in their math worktexts require them to find differences between positive and negative numbers. It's sneaky, BJU Press, but I love it!) They overhear me talking about negative numbers during tutoring sessions with the teenage boy I tutor.

On Friday, I spent nearly an hour trying to help him see and internalize why subtracting a negative number is the same thing as adding the absolute value of that number. No matter how I approached it, he seemed to view it as some kind of mathematical black magic and not based on reason or reality. There are many ways of explaining why 3-(-2)=5 (this blog post has a few good ones), but nothing seemed to convince him. This is a big problem because he is currently working on line equations at school and has to be able to calculate the slope of a line when given two points on the line. It's difficult to correctly calculate "rise over run" if you can't properly find the differences between x- and y-coordinates that aren't all positive.

The last explanation I tried seemed to work. He is comfortable with the definition of zero and with the algebraic rule "If a = b, then a + c = b + c." So I showed him a brief version of this proof:
______________________________________________
x - x = 0                    (0 is always what we get if
                                 we subtract a number from itself)

(-x) - (-x) = 0            (ditto above)

                       Now add x to both sides of the second
                       equation, which we can do because of
                       the rule "if a = b, then a + c = b + c."

(-x) - (-x) + x = 0 + x

Which, because of the commutative property of addition (order of addition doesn't matter), is the same as...

x + (-x) - (-x) = 0 + x

Which simplifies to...

x - x - (-x) = 0 + x

Which simplifies to...

0 - (-x) = 0 + x

Which is the same as...

- (-x) = x
------------------------------------------------------------
And there you have it. Two negatives make a positive.

He now believes it and is properly applying it.

Boarding School Dragons

My children have been reading books about dragons recently. And sculpting and drawing dragons. Oh, and frequently dressing up like dragons.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the two oldest to a game store--the kind with D&D dice and books, little known board games from Germany (why do Germans make up so many board games?), and battle figurines--where we browsed for a long while. Then they started asking if they could play Dungeons and Dragons. They're a little young for such a complex game, so I found them a simpler role playing game instruction .pdf available for free. Dd10 read a bit of it, and then they stopped talking about playing D&D.

But the idea hadn't left them. They just didn't want to play someone else's game. They have now made up their own game. They call it Boarding School Dragons. It has a game board that began as only 6 pieces of paper that they had drawn on to form their playing surface. They have since expanded it to be double that size; I think they were influenced by this Horrible Histories video comparing Alexander the Great's military campaigns to an ever-growing Risk-like game. They have made their own game pieces, their own gold (paper) coins, and who knows what else. They made up all their rules*, and at the end of each session dd10 has to record what is going on in the game so they can pick it up again the next day.

Boarding School Dragons

It is amusing to see them--dd10, dd7, and dd5--so earnestly involved in creating and playing their game. It is also gratifying to me, for they happily entertain themselves after the schoolwork is done and when they could be watching videos instead.

* Dd7 hates to lose games. When they play store-bought games, she sometimes stops playing when she does poorly. I suspect she is tweaking the rules while they play to allow herself to get the outcomes she wants and the other two children let her because they are all having so much fun.