lbrokaw’s blog

I take the younger two kids to pre-school  library storytime on Mondays, and this last time they had a really neat project that can be done by the younger crowd.  You need:   a sugar cookie on a stick (stick not necessary, but it is cute),  a tablespoon of white frosting, a yellow or orange M&M and a large standard size marshmallow  --  and a pair of scissors.  Spread cookie with frosting, put M&M at center and then using scissors, cut the marshmallow into 5 "circles"  --  Of course, being a squishy object the circles will come out more like ovals, which is all the better.  Then place the 5 ovals evenly around the M&M on the cookie, and you'll have a lovely daisy.  They really do turn out cute. 

Oh, and in Reader's Digest this month I came across a website called StickK.com which is a free service that helps you keep your resolutions by offering to force you to put up a stake which will be donated to charity, or an anti-charity  (you choose a cause you personally hate) if you don't keep your goal.  I went ahead and signed up to try to lose a pound a week and wagered some money on it  -- not a lot, but enough to keep me mindful of what I put in my mouth.   If it works for the whole time I will be very pleased and will get my money back. 

I heard back about the library job;  mostly more details of the position and the compensation; and I talked to the principal and found that it *is* a requirement for staff to send their children to the school.  The salary is about half of what I could make as a Librarian I substitute in the public library and the hours are 9-5, so I'd never see my kids except for the commute and an hour or so before bed and if you take the job compensation before taxes and subtract the tuition for three kids minus the small tuition break for staff, I'd about break even.  If you include the taxes, tithe, gas for commute, wardrobe, extra money for dining out because I'd be too tired to cook meals, it would be a loss of several thousand dollars;  plus, I'd hardly ever see my children, they'd not see each other much and they would never be home during daylight hours for most of the year. If it were a 9-3 job, paying a bit more, I'd be tempted, but really it wouldn't be a good fit for the moment.  

The things that intrigue me about a "real" school are the extra stuff:  speech meets, plays, book clubs, etc.  Otherwise I'm quite happy homeschooling and with three children there is plenty of social interplay and we can even play a good round of three or four square, too. 

The other day we decided last minute to attend the school play at Benjamin's school.  The play's  title was completely unfamiliar and I wasn't expecting much, though it being a Christian school I knew it would be appropriate for children, however  About two minutes into the first scene I got the funniest feeling I knew the play, and then five minutes in I was sure of it, but it wasn't quite the same.  It reminded me very much of "Hello Dolly"  --  but in the following scenes no matchmaker was to be found.  At intermission I checked out the program and sure enough, "On the Razzle," the name of the play was the English version of the original German play which both "The Matchmaker" and "Hello Dolly" were based upon.  Gone was the music and instead it was rife with spoonerisms and puns and other wordplay, most of which went directly over the heads of anyone under the age of fourteen, and some of which went over mine as the amateur dramatists tended to rush their lines occasionally.  The script can be read in part at "google books" and was cleaned up a little for production at a Christian school, but it was enjoyable.

Having a nice weekend here.  Benjamin did his jog-a-thon fund raiser at school, and I even joined in for several of  the laps, as did Rose.  In her dress shoes and velour dress she ran the whole time with the kindergartners, then proceeded to run with the first and second graders as well.  Her motivation?  Well, after the initial couple laps it was the occasional promise of a ride in a wheelbarrow decorated with pink feathers around the track  --  a provision for the younger grades who were tiring.  For every series of 20 laps they were allowed to take two of them as wheelbarrow passengers.  After the jog-a-thon Benjamin ducked out to attend T-Ball practice, then back to school for the school-wide barbecue and staff/parent baseball game.  The kids and I played four square instead, and Rose attempted to fly and fortunately ending up completely unhurt despite a fall of 10 feet.  Her intended goal was to slide down a pole, but she missed -- that after skinning both knees.  She slept fairly well last night.

The kids are doing crafts today --  a paint by numbers seashore scene for the two older.  For Rose we pulled out a sand art set, a sticker surface with built in stencils.  She did a pretty good job finishing the scene. 

Oh, and the title phrase.  We did get our refund direct deposited the other day.  No sign of any stimulus check, but not really holding my breath. 

Since May is just about here, I thought I'd send one out in April.  Here things are going fairly well.  No news on any library jobs.  Homeschooling continues to progress.  We're up to Pocahontas and Jamestown and I learned for the first time that Mary Queen of Scots and Bloody Mary are two completely different people, though related.  Bloody Mary was Elizabeth I's older half-sister.  Mary Queen of Scots was a cousin, the daughter of the King of Scotland whom Elizabeth I had killed when there was possible evidence she was after England's throne.  MQOS was the mother of James I, who succeed Elizabeth to the throne.

The weather up here made history last week  --   we got the latest snow in recorded history in the Seattle area at SEATAC on April 18th and 19th.  The benefits are that it extended the tulip season, we got to play in the snow and my procrastination in setting out our veggie garden this year was rewarded.   I planted it this weekend instead and now have to find a way to battle the slugs and save the strawberries and lettuce.  There was a cool blog that mentioned that slugs get a shock when they touch copper, so rings of pennies around plants will keep them at bay.  We certainly have enough old pennies to do the job.  If the rain holds off, I'll have the kids do it this afternoon.

One more garden-y type of thing.  Ever since I watched an ER episode about 14 years ago where Carol Hathaway helps a lady save her worms from freezing I have been really interested in worm composting.  We haven't really had a good set-up for it and I honestly haven't gotten around to it.  It has a bit of the feeling of having a pet and being responsible for another living creature, so while I thought it would be cool and loved the idea of turning waste into good soil quickly, I hadn't done it.  Fast forward to this house, where there really isn't a garbage disposal  - there is one, but its location doesn't work out, and there is a big yard with a little "compost bin."   I've been taking our food scraps and peelings and having the kids dump them in there.  Imagine my delight when I turned the pile today and found my own private colony of happy little worms, composting away!  They are doing a fabulous job, and I don't have to do a thing but keep adding food scraps.  The bin has open sides, so the finished compost spills out the bottom.  I did have to remove an opportunistic raspberry bush or two that had decided the compost pile was their home, but otherwise things are going well.

For the last several years I have been using a cool "free" program to do our federal taxes called taxact  --   fortunately we've lived in states that didn't require state income taxes to be filed, so the free federal forms worked out nicely and I tended to download it in January and had filed by February and got a refund in March.  With our move and rental of our old house and owning two houses the paperwork was a little more complicated this year so just completed everything now.  Hopefully I have postage and can mail it out today.  In Austin the local IRS office was local  --  here the mailing address is out of state. 

Homeschool this week is studying the 1500's and Reformation and Tulip Mania  --   a pretty interesting economic bubble situation where people were paying the equivalent of $40,000 for one tulip bulb, and two weeks later it was only worth $1.  I also watched the Disney film "So Dear to My Heart" with the kids this week.  It was even a bit historically relevant  --   had an animated Christopher Columbus, which we studied 3 weeks ago, and a Robert the Bruce, which we studied 6 weeks ago.  And an animated lamb, which was cute.   I'd never seen a picture of Burl Ives before.  I pictured him older.

In other news there is a very vague possibility that there might be a job opening in September that might work out for me.  Uncommital enough?   I had lunch with a friend that moved from Austin up here and works at a private school.  She introduced me around and I  met the principal and took a tour with the children, and I was introduced as the "librarian" from her old school and there was much interest on the part of the principal and asked me about my degree.  There is going to be an opening for a librarian at that school.  And if I wanted to send the kids there, it would be a 30% discount.  However, I relly don't think I want to send them there. For one thing, the math program is the same, but instead of working one year ahead, they are on grade level, so it would be a repeat for the two older kids.  The kids don't study ancient history at all, just social studies.  Possibly I could send the older two to Benjamin's school. 

In any case, while I could post a strong case of being experienced, my last paid employment wast 9 years ago and I don't have a teacher's certificate and I have no idea of the salary or the job requirements  -- and getting a teaching certificate in Washington State looks like a major pain.  If working full time barely covers private school tuition I'm really not sure it would be worth it, as I know they'll learn more homeschooling, and I'd definitely see them more if they aren't in school for 6 hours every day.

The party went well.  We had a 50% "yes" rate on the RSVP's, making a total of 6 kids, including my 3. Not too bad a turnout for Easter weekend -- and everyone there really liked Benjamin.  I didn't want to deliberately exclude anyone, but wasn't quite in the mood to invite the entire Kindergarten class. Thanks to Oriental Trading Company we had some nice "bat" party favors, stuffed beanies, key chains and rubber bats.  We played a version of Blind Man's Bluff/Marco Polo  called Bat and Moth that used echolocation for a blind bat to find a sighted moth -- the rest of the kids got to be "trees."  I hid the rubber bats in the living room -- squeeed between pillow cushions, etc.  They were dark so they hid pretty well, unlike the eggs we hid on Sunday :)

We played with balloons, had cake with a bat freehanded by me, ice cream, fruit and pizza -- and since we were a smallish group we got the good stuff: Papa John's.  They opened presents and we watched "Stellaluna" --   much less a production than I've done in the past.  I've put on some pretty elaborate themed parties before involving paper mache and stations and treasure hunts, etc.  I liked the calmer feel this time, and the smaller number of kids, even without the "wow" factor.  But, since children barely remember parties after a year or so, much nicer to just relax.

And Stanley.  If you have ever come across the book "Flat Stanley" you will recognize him as a little boy who was smooshed flat by a blackboard, who was perfectly fine after, but flat as a sheet of paper who has several adventures.  Apparently it is a stock second-grader activity these days to send out a "Flat Stanley" doll to a penpal.  Jeannine has two, a friend from Texas, and a second-cousin we met at a family reunion who lives in Tenessee --   so within a few days we had not one, but two Flat Stanley visitors that we are to give a tour of the Seattle Area and send back a picture and a note, and the flat Stanley.  We haven't made it to the Space Needle yet, but we did stop for chowder at Ivar's Seafood Bar where both Stanleys "Kept Clam" ;)

Well, the mice are gone.  David needed to get something from the pool box, so we checked to see if the baby mice were still there.  They weren't.  Apparently mama mouse decided a box where the food was removed and her babies were knocked out of the nest wasn't that great of a home after all. 

Very glad there weren't five baby mouse corpses we were responsible for, at least.

Benjamin is having a "bat" party this Saturday.  Yes, just a bat party, not Batman or anything.  The kids got interested in them because of a book on CD I chose called "Silverwing"  by a man of the last name of Oppel.  We're on the sequel now called "Sunwing" -- and it is much darker.  In it there is a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats who live under a bridge.  I can only imagine they are refering to Austin, which hosts the largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in a specially constructed bridge for the purpose.  Now bats are being sent to bomb places in South America, and the northern bats who were attached to bombs that didn't explode are trying to make their way North, and the families of those bats who were sent to South America are making their way South.  I don't know quite how it will end, but the kids are hooked.

Oh, and my addiction.  I watched the latest Episode of Lost --   yes, I admit I watch, but it isn't really an addiction.  I wasn't quite ready for the dead character to have died, so I was theorizing a way for him to be alive and looking for a place to post it that didn't require registration to yet another community.  Someone at a site called yahooanswers.com happened to ask the question "Is Jin Dead"  so I found a great place to post my ideas.  I am a yahoo member already so could go ahead.  And lo and behold, I found a place where people were asking reference questions  and they really wanted to know the answer.  The vast majority are not worth responding to -- either they have a political or social agenda or were kids trying you to do their homework for them, but there were some genuine fun to research questions.  I loved working at the reference desk, and would answer people's questions for free, and I got a little involved in doing it.  They have a ratings system, like Amazon, and the asker choosing you best answer gains you points.  I got up to level 2, but had better stop or it will really drain away my time.  However, it is fun, and I'm learning.  Did you know a South African ratel  (aka honey badger) is able to suffer puff adder bites with no harm, and the Ratel is also a South African military vehicle.  Anyway, I'd better get off to bed. 

I've really meant to post here for the last couple weeks, so this will be a little longish I'm afraid, to make up for lost time.  First, I have discovered that my children all find the movie Pinocchio deeply disturbing. Rose wasn't feeling very well the other day and insisted on choosing her own this time, rather than letting me do it.  Pinocchio was duly selected and we started it, with giggles as Jimmeny was elected the "conscience"    --  now there is a word you don't find yourself writing every day.  All went swimmingly until the boy-puppet's first temptation by Honest John and his accomplice.  Jimmeny extricated said puppet from the problem, and a collective sigh of relief passed over the children  -- but when two minutes later, he got himself embroiled in another situation with the same two individuals when he should have known better, my eight year old had to leave the room and my four year old stood in front of the screen and sobbed.  My little boy, now six, was less troubled.  So we fast forwarded to the puppet show under the care of Stromboli.  Somehow the captivity and imprisonment of Pinocchio wasn't as much an issue.  It was only when, after his rescue by the blue fairy and being told that was his final chance to be good, when he fell in again with Honest John and decided to listen again to the bad advice that the sobs redoubled.  We fast-forwarded to the land of the little boys who get turned into donkeys and the crying continued, so I removed the film, briefly recounted the ending and we decided on something a little less stressful.  

For his school, my son is collecting "Box Tops for Education," and there is a classroom competition.  I had only before noticed them on cereal boxes, but no, on further research, one can find them on ziplock bags, cake mixes and even Tampax products.  Who knew?  Since we tend to by generic, I didn't find all that many in my pantry, but have lately been buying Kix and Cheerios exclusively, so we'll have a few by mid-April, when the drive is over.

We have somewhere in the range of two to seven pets!  One is "Baby," who lives in our refrigerator --  a sourdough starter.  And one is "Sluggy-Bug," a small black slug who lives in a peanut butter jar, outside.  My eldest daughter noted they aren't very exciting, and when I mentioned that we'd probably get a dog sometime  -- she said, "No, it's okay, Sluggy-Bug can climb trees with us --   a dog couldn't do that."  (They've made a little harness for the peanut butter jar and haul him up with them into the trees)  We also discovered a nest of b5 aby mice in our pool/garden box outside.  I'd left a bag of birdseed there, and the other day saw a mouse, so David  kindly offered to move the bag out and set a trap.  However, moving the bag revealed 5 baby, hairless, newborn mice -- so we didn't quite have the heart to set the traps for the mom.  Internet research proved that caring for baby mice was quite labor intensive, besides feedings, they need help on an hourly basis to "go potty."  Since all of our children are well past that stage, we weren't eager to take it on.  So we now have some baby mice on the same basis as Pharoah's daughter had Moses --   we have them, but the real mom is doing all the work.  We also removed most of the food, just left the stuff that had spilled out, so not sure if the mom will hang out there, or if they'll survive.  However, I don't plan to investigate the situation closely.  When they're grown up in a month or so, we'll sweep up the rest of the  food and set traps so they don't plan on setting up house.

We received a game for Christmas this year called "Settlers of Catan," and broke it out to play the other night.  It has a hexagonal, variable game board that snaps together like a puzzle and can have four players or teams of players.  We played it with the older two kids while Rose did something else.  Reading children make life so much easier;  the number and quality of games you can play as a  family rises dramatically.  Anyway, the game is vaguely like a mix of risk and monopoly.  Instead of money, you collect resources, wool, grain, ore, bricks, or wood, on each turn.  Each turn you can turn your resources into roads, settlements, or cities,  or a "development card" thereby increasing your chances of getting even more resources next turn.  Settlements and Cities, and some of the development cards are worth "Victory Points" --  and when a player reaches 10 of these, the game is over.  Each area of the board: pasture, woods, mines, clayfields, farms; yields a resource and has a number on it.  If you have a settlement bordering that resource, whenever anyone rolls that number, you get a resource card.  There is also a thief, so when anyone rolls a seven, they can steal a resource card from another player.  Also, when the thief is deployed, anyone who has more than 7 resource cards has to turn half of them back to the bank  --  which encourages you to build, rather than hoard resources.  Player to player trading is encouraged as well.  We've played twice as a family and it is quite addictive. 

We went skiing last weekend, and it definitely went better than last time.  We took the older two kids.  Benjamin went to full day ski school.  Well... not quite full day, as there was a car accident on the pass on the way there.  It wasn't a fatality, thank goodness,  though the rumors passed along  by the waiting line of cars thought it was.  It took a full 2 hours to be cleared away and for the road to be opened.  Several potential skiers turned their cars around and headed home.  Plus, there was almost no cell phone coverage.  Fortunately the ski school held our reservation and we got Benjamin to class around 10am.  Not having to wait for rentals meant the first run or two down went well.  Jeannine hasn't been skiing in a year, and she was a beginner on a very easy slope.  Washington's runs are a bit more challenging.  After much trial and error, and lunch and a few tears, David left to do the backside of the mountain and Jeannine and I were in line for the "Daisy" lift, the one major green slope.  We got into it at 2:45, and it was a bit crowded, so we got to the front at 2:55, leaving us 5 minutes to take the lift and get back down the slope to pick up Ben at 3 pm.  Oh, and Jeannine's runs down the mountain had been averaging 20 minutes to that point.  Nevertheless, after waiting 10 minutes in line, we decided to try it out.  And, at the top, I had an inspiration.  Jeannine's main problems were slowing down/ stopping/ and feeling out of control.  She had turning down pretty well, but didn't have the feel for where to initiate a turn.  So, I let her go first, and let her hold the end of one of my ski poles.  I suggested the fastest route down, and I provided the braking for both of us, and we made it down in a record 11 minutes. Benjamin wasn't feeling too keen on skiing after ski school, but we made him do one real run with David, and he liked it! So we stayed until 6.