sammiesantics

So I’ve been feverishly preparing for THE EXPERIMENT IN HOMESCHOOLING.  I’ve scoured the internet, library and Books A Million, and now I’m actually getting excited!  One book really gave me hope that this could work out and be fun all at the same time!  It basically suggests finding your child’s passion or at least their interests, and tailoring the ‘school’ to follow these interests.  Take MINECRAFT for instance!  (the video game many 9 year old boys are playing at the moment)  Apparently there is a movement (1,000 classrooms) of schools using this game in their lesson plans!  I won’t get into the details, but you can read more at minecraft.edu.  You can fashion science, math, art, architecture lessons as well as socialization, survival, cooperation and just plain creativity.  Now Turner gets plenty of Minecraft in his spare time, so we won’t be using this tool during school.  But he does love geology and space, so I’m planning to incorporate these subjects in creative ways.  Anyway,  here is a list of other activities I have planned for Turner on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays:

Field Trips of course
Chess
Card Games
Read newspaper (appropriate content)
Basic Computer Programming class for kids
Music lessons – guitar?
Science Experiments at home
Creative Writing
Typing lessons with an online program
Sewing – (looking for a teacher…anyone??)
household projects around the house with dad, and some chores for mom too 🙂  (hey, this is sounding better and better!)
Homework from hybrid school

The more traditional stuff will be handled on Tues and Thurs at the hybrid school (grammer, math, literature, art, social studies, science)

So I’m hopeful and excited!  Who wants to join me!? 🙂

I’m posting this mostly so I won’t have to make 3o phone calls to let you all know what is going on up in this crazy house! 🙂  At the same time, I’m hoping that writing about our experience might help someone else down the road.

As most of you know, Turner has always had a serious love for learning.  He was up at 5:30am every day for the first 6 years of his life, even stating once, “Mom, get up! It’s time to start our day!”  So it’s been particularly hard to watch him lose this quality over the past two years.  In third grade, while our teachers were pretty great, THE WORKSHEETS began.  Hours and hours of them….and not much else.  He’s been doing beautifully with the social part of school, the recess, lunch kind of stuff.  When PE became his favorite subject, I should have been worried.  But it wasn’t until this year that we had the most insidious combination of below average teachers, and THE WORKSHEETS!  And slowly, my child began to dislike school.  So behavior problems began to creep into the situation….”attention problems” they would say.  So I freaked out. I was sure they thought he had ADD or something?  But for 4 years at this school, we’d NEVER had a teacher even hint at this, so I was skeptical.  I remembered a neighbor mentioning a little “hybrid” homeschool and for 2 years I have been sneaking peeks at their web site.  A LOVELY little blog where the ‘teacher’ posts photos and descriptions of the average day in the life of her students.  And I fell in love.  However, I just was certain that the ‘home’ part of this equation would do me in.  And it just might.  But maybe I will blog about it, and just like Sammie’s Antics, the negative parts will disappear and cease to frighten me.

So school got worse, and I began to feel like I was taking my kid to jail, or boot camp…one of the teachers actually seemed to dislike my kid, and he began to feel it too.  It seemed he could do nothing right.  So after a hard week with her, I was again secretly coveting my little homeschool connection, and I was crying.  This is what school SHOULD be!  And I looked down and literally prayed for direction….and I swear to you,  instantly my phone rang. It was Brad, relaying yet another frustrating story from school, where he had stopped to have lunch with Turner.  The teacher had cornered him and given him an earful about Turner yet again.  (This is all a VERY long story with LOTS of fun tid bits since the beginning of the year, so I’ll spare you)

Anyway,  clearly this was a sign.  I was going to take him out.  I called the little hybrid program for the first time, and Holly the coordinator miraculously said they had an opening for January! We were in!  I took him out of school the next day so we could observe the new school, and by 3:00 we were hooked!  They have 10 students, half boys, half girls, three retired teachers and one current, goats, chickens, a garden, and a lovely little school house next to a church.  It’s quite like the Little House on the Prairie 🙂  But most importantly, IT’S A  LOVING AND CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT!  It was filled with positive images, positive feedback, and a real love of learning!  Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVED Braelinn Elementary…for the first 4 years.  But something has changed, shifted.  The love was not there this year.  And THE WORKSHEETS began in earnest.  Boys and worksheets do not mix well.

Anyway, here it is.  My hope is that this program and these wonderful people will restore my child’s love of life and learning, and my faith that I’m doing the right thing.  Wish us all luck….and by us, I mean me!

http://inmanhybridschool2.blogspot.com/

Just  a little quickie. Literally….. it took her all of three seconds to make this mess.  I decided not to take a photo of the play dough mess from earlier in the day.  This blog really helps, after the hay episode my first feeling was no longer irritation, but excitement that I had something to share with all of you 🙂

As I’m sitting here thinking of a keen title for today’s installment, it occurs to me that, well you got it from the title.  I know all you other mothers out there can relate.  The day just gets away from you, and you don’t even get the 30 seconds it takes to relieve yourself (or my favorite term, ‘make water’…thanks morgan freeman) sorry, rambling.

So the past two days have been interesting.  Luckily I did get a nice visit in with an amazing college/life friend and her lovely mother and adorable son, and then had a soul refreshing playdate today with some of ‘my girls’,  so it has not been a complete wash…but it has still been interesting. To start I had a two hour long road trip with the two kids who are now beginning to show me glimpses of this whole ‘sibling’ stuff I’ve been spared my entire life until now. Turner simply rests his arm on Sammie’s carseat and she becomes completely unglued, yada yada yada. You all know what I’m talking about.  So on top of this insanity, Turner then tells me that he really has to pee, and we are in the middle of nowhere, so I’m admittedly racing to the closest restroom, and to the end of this trip!  Enter, state patrol WOMAN!  Yeah, great you say, a woman cop…surely she will have pity on the poor mom with the trashed car, whining children, dvd player propped up between the seats, but NO my friends…she did not.  So I now have (gasp) ticket number 3 in the past year!  (caveat..I live in a town notoriously strict on traffic violations (44mph in a 35mph zone..woo hoo i’m a WILD driver) rolling through a stop sign (ok, who DOESN”T do that!? I swear I stopped, just don’t show me the cop’s video) and now 70 in a 55 (ok, that one seems a bit more legitimate until you see the state of my passengers)  So friends of mine….be prepared to cart my klan all over town when I lose my license!!! (oh and in case you are wondering, I am very sweet and very (apparently too) apologetic to all of these cops…I”m not that arguing ass who gives the cops a hard time..maybe that makes me too easy.)

So visit ensues and Sammie is a complete basket case (which is becoming more and more common lately) so we leave a bit earlier than expected, and faced with the return road trip, I decide I’d better cut it short and surprise my mom with a SLEEPOVER!  But dear Sammie is having no part of the SLEEP portion of the SLEEPOVER! Apparently, she thought it was a Curious George All Night Marathon (which as it turns out, it WAS)  So I return home on very little sleep and have a schedule playdate at my house at 11am.  Thankfully the playdate was very nice and uneventful in the meltdown department,  even though I had absolutely no food, paper plates, drinks, cups or even paper towels, as I never made it to the grocery store as planned.  Ugh. Thank God for my friends here..ladies, I could not do this without you!

So everyone leaves and Turner says he’s hungry, so I’m cooking….you know what…I don’t really care to relive this particular meltdown, so just know it was BAD.  Like, I truly thought he had finally lost his little mind.  So afterward, we are discussing the particulars..debriefing, etc.  while little Sammie has a big time destroying the entire downstairs…hence, the video.  So now that I’ve had a glass of wine, these events are starting seem more amusing…yeah, no they’re not.  Not yet.  But give me time and wish me luck!

Well, as is par for the course around here…once my children drive me to the brink, they usually stop the offending behavior, and the same holds true for the subject of this blog.  As soon as I posted the original stories, Sammie completely stopped her ‘antics’!  I couldn’t believe it, but then nothing should surprise me about parenthood anymore.  However, today she couldn’t hold out any longer as you see from the photo.  This one is a little embarrassing though, because it shows my stupidity for buying a brand new box of powdered sugar, and then returning it to the same location in the pantry!  (in my defense, it’s behind 15 other boxes of cereal, crackers, etc. )  Anyway, Turner found the mess and said that he sees the letter S in the sugar…as if she’d signed her name, just in case we had any doubt who the talented artist might be.

I suspect you may hear more from me soon 🙂

sigh

So I left Sammie alone at the table with a bowl of baked lays, a slice of apple and a juice box, and I began to clean the bathroom.  After about 10 minutes of silence, I got scared….she’s never that quiet for that long.  So I peeked around the corner and watched her diligently making….potato soup??  She was crushing the potato chips in the bowl using the apple slice, then pouring the juice from the juice box straw into the bowl, and finished by stirring the new substance around with the same apple slice.  I watched from a distance and thought, “well, she’s at the table, enjoying something quietly in a room that can be cleaned fairly easily”, so I let her be.  You are probably thinking that I should have stopped her then, right? True….so, I will spare you the photo of the next phase of her culinary experiment(it sort of looked like Linda Blair had vomited while her head was spinning)….the ‘soup’ was all over her, the chair, the table, the floor, in between the tiles of the table, in the dog food bowl, on the sliding glass doors…..etc, etc.  But hey, she was actually QUIET for 10 minutes!!! That’s something, right?

I fell asleep on the couch with Sammie, while watching, appropriately, Curious George (and interestingly enough, it was the one about snow on a mountain dessert that contains powdered sugar).  Anyway, I guess the episode must have inspired her, because the next thing I know, I’m being smacked in the head with an empty bag, which used to contain, POWDERED SUGAR!  Then I see this face…..

and my dining room

and my living room….

BUT the blog idea must be working, because instead of being exasperated, I was excited to have something to write about today 🙂

So FINALLY someone else sees the craziness that is Sammie!  Tonight she screamed BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON, BACON at the microwave (it was on, but cooking something else) so I jumped at the chance to feed her something fattening and threw two pieces of bacon in to cook.  In true Sammie fashion, as soon as I took it out, blew it off and handed it to her, she calmly looked me in the eye, shook her head and said “No”.  If she knew how to say “No thank you” she would have.  It was that calm and polite and totally designed to drive me COMPLETELY CRAZY!  Luckily, Brad was a witness to this little episode, so when I make comments about her making me nuts, he’ll know what kind of thing I’m talking about 🙂

how many flossing sticks does one baby need??

Jeez, will the winter/season o illness never end!?  Now Turner is saying he’s nauseous!  Shit, I’m still coughing from the flu, Sammie is still on antibiotics from an ear infection, and everyone I know is home with sick kids.  At least the weather has been AMAZING during the past two weeks!!  Anyway, back to the subject at hand…Sammie and her plan to destroy EVERYTHING  in her path (including my sanity)!

So by 10am today Sammie was covered in chocolate and purple paint, so by noon she was getting a bath.  She had a nice bath, and I watched some of a Sex and the City episode in the room next to the bathroom.  While I was engrossed in city life, I looked down and there was a very proud, naked Sammie!  She had gotten out of the tub all by herself…a new trick! 😉  So of course she then takes off running, wet and naked, away from me and her clothes!  She ran into one of those cheap play tents and hid from me.  She had absolutely no interest in getting dressed, so it was a bit like wrangling a ferret,  but  I managed to get her diaper, jeans and shirt in their proper place.  However, with the distraction of  naked Sammie appearing, and in my haste to get her clothes on….I forgot to pull the drain plug in the tub.  You can probably guess what happened next:  I am throwing in a load of laundry, when I hear a gentle splashing sound coming from the bathroom.  Well, little Miss Sammie, fully clothed, is BACK in the tub, again looking very proud (I can get IN the tub by myself too, Mom)

Later, while driving to a friend’s house, we picked up some fast food.  In true southern fashion, Sammie loves her some sweet tea.  So I handed her her very own little cup with a lid and straw (yes, I realize that was asking for trouble) when she took two sips and tossed the cup across the car, where miraculously the lid stayed in tact!  woo hoo!  Lucky me!  Never again Miss Sammie, never again!

Later still, while waiting for Brad to pick up something at Home Depot, the kids and I walked over and got smoothies from Smoothie King (which come in large styrofoam cups).  I was sitting in the back seat sharing my smoothie with Sammie (closely monitored this time….or so I thought) when she started to pull the straw in and out of the cup…so I’m telling her NO and trying to keep smoothie from flinging off the end of the straw when it comes out of the cup….so she puts the straw back in…all is well.  NOT.  Well, she managed to poke the straw THROUGH the cup about an inch from the bottom, so smoothie began pouring all over me, her and the car that I had thoroughly cleaned the DAY BEFORE!  So I’m holding the smoothie outside the car window, watching my $3.54 smoothie pour into the Home Depot parking lot and all down the side of my car.  Sigh.