I love fall and winter in the US. It’s an exciting time of year, involving three straight months of anticipation and celebrations, beginning with Halloween.

For us, everything started with last weekend, when Baby Sister and Wictors’ school had their Fall Festival at a nearby park. Have I told you before how much I love their school? Almost all the teachers and staff were there, on a Saturday, patiently manning the stalls and supervising activities. There were train rides and a Bouncy Castle and popcorn and candy floss and in deference to the loud influx of Europeans they have had this year, hardly any candy (although someone did point out to me somewhat disapprovingly that there was a lollipop pull). Baby Sister found a group of Princesses to join and they hung out like mini teenagers at the mall, getting their hair sprayed pink and their faces painted together. Meanwhile The T-Bot ran around all the games, delighting in each plastic bug or orange pencil he won. The Wictor was happy to hang out in the playground and I was happy to let him because phew!

As we left, Baby Sister did the rounds of her teachers, past and present, gathering hugs. For a while there it did feel like we were part of a big, happy community.

Which brings us to tonight, Halloween night, an evening of high excitement. The Wictor and Baby Sister were already strung out on sugar when I picked them up from school, and despite a couple of hours of cooling off time in front of the TV (Charlie and Lola, if you must ask), by the time we had finished dinner and changed them into their costumes they were so out of control that The Daddy abandoned his plans to take them Trick or Treating. Which meant that the job of keeping them out from under the wheels of passing cars fell to me.

We did the same as last year - visited about 10 houses on our block before calling it a night. They were actually very good, held hands and tried to remember to be polite and say Thank You. This may or may not have had something to do with my threatening a return home and early bedtime if they did not comply.

(Ha! the Daddy! He knows Nothing!)

We then spent the next two hours running excitedly between the lounge (now strewn with candy wrappers) and the door, servicing the stream of Trick or Treaters. Yes, strewn with candy wrappers. I am no killjoy.

Let me tell you now about some of our more memorable Trick or Treaters. There was the circa 16 year old dressed as a Naughty Nurse, who met my eye as she gouged two great handfuls of candy out of my outstretched bowl. Another 16 year old came by herself, sans disguise, and didn’t even pause her cellphone conversation to say thank you. By far the strangest visitor was the woman in her 40s who, after her children had chosen candy, stopped me as I tried to take the bowl away. “Please, Trick or Treat!” she said, and then, picking through the bowl, “Ooh! I like this one. And this one”. Confused, I didn’t say anything.

There were plenty of rude teenagers and a smattering of cute little kids too. And then we had a surprise Halloween visitor. He barged into the house and ran around scaring the heck out of Baby Sister, who proceeded to take the roof off with her wailing. After The Daddy calmed her down she was happy to come outdoors and pet Rambo. He thankfully was very friendly and had a tag on his collar with his name and phone number. And once his owner had come by to pick him up, it was bedtime.

And now it’s my bedtime too.

PS We brushed our teeth very carefully.

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We were standing in line at a checkout yesterday morning when the man in front, who had been studying us out of the corner of his eye for quite a while, suddenly turned to us and addressed the T-Bot:

“Hey,” he said, not unkindly. “Can you count?”

In the last few weeks we have fielded all manner of questions born out of curiosity but usually these are in the vein of “Why aren’t you in school?”, “What school do you go to?”, “School out today?”.  To actually be tested on our eddy-cayshun is a new experience.

“Yes,” answered the T-Bot, puzzled. “I can count”.

And just now, as I was uploading 152 photos from the camera to the computer, I found the proof:

We sometimes give our eldest our one and only and extremely indispensable camera, and just let him go to town. The results are usually variable, with one or two excellent shots, some quite good ones, and others that just leave us scratching our heads. He is probably not the next Cartier-Bresson, although may be taking inspiration from Man Ray.

There was the time he took photo after photo of our 1980s era recessed ceiling lights:

Which is probably on a par with the time he took 53 different photographs of his feet. Granted, from slightly different angles. I can’t find them now. Do you think I might have deleted them?

There are plenty of successes though. Hanging on our guest bedroom wall we have an abstract which is actually a T-Bot self portrait. Of the inside of his mouth. And this time we did get some, ermmm… interesting portraits:

But I also found exactly 32 photos of mess, which I am obviously not going to post here because then you will know just what a tip my house has become. If you want to get an idea of the scale of the problem, try here .

I can’t believe how homeschooling has changed our family for the better. I can’t believe that I just wrote that last sentence either, but it is true. We are all so much more relaxed and happy. Starting with timetables -  there is no more scrambling in the morning to be ready for the school bus and I don’t feel I have to be strict about bedtime either, worried about how tiredness could affect the T-Bot’s performance the next day.

But obviously that is not the whole story. Mainly we are no longer on tenterhooks. Will he be upset going to school? Will he come home with accusing notes from the teacher today, detailing how he refused to work, neglected to work, was sent to the principal’s office? Notes full of undertones about how he is lazy, unmotivated? Will he climb off the school bus with his little hands balled into fists, angry? Will he wail all the way home, unattended, until he finally reaches a safe place where someone will give him a hug? Or worse, arrive home his face shuttered, eyes blank?

That is all I will say about before. We are now firmly in after and everything is OK. Home schooling would not even have been a possibility for me if the T-Bot was not a joy to have around the house. After a few short weeks at home he is calm, serene. When I tell him it is time for school, he sighs.  “Oh maaaaan!, not spelling! You know I don’t like spelling!”. But he sits and he cooperates (mostly … he is after all, a six year old boy and a little quiet resistance should always be expected… ), as we sound our way through words, even though it seems like torture to him.

The T-Bot is having trouble mastering spelling. He has no such troubles with math, or reading or science. His bedtime reading right now is an adult book, “The Human Body” and he has chosen to study in depth the chapter on pregnancy and birth. Thankfully, conception is not included. Let’s leave those explanations until he is seven.

Today we discussed ultrasounds and I showed him the first ever photos I ever saw of him, 20 weeks before he was born. In First Grade the school part of homeschooling should take up about an hour a day but between the struggle with spelling and all the extra research we have been doing we usually overrun by hours.

I have had my moments of panic, and they take me by surprise because panic is not really my thing. The problem is not with the homeschooling as such, it is with the impact it has had on my time. Hours a day which would previously have been mine to spend working, doing housework and running errands are now no longer there for the taking. I struggle to keep downstairs tidy while upstairs almost every single toy my children own is on the floor. Every evening I clear a path to their beds with my foot. There are piles of laundry in every nook and cranny and some usually sitting waiting in the washing machine. We have three Apple remotes and all of them are lost. Every day The Wictor asks for his favorite show on Apple TV and I lose another 10 minutes looking searching fruitlessly for those remotes before giving up.

But then the family rallies around. Today The Daddy arrived home to find me angrily pulling clothes out of the washing machine and immediately left with Baby Sister on a mercy dash to the supermarket for licorice, ice cream and fruit cobbler. When they returned, Baby Sister gave me big hugs and then all three children went off quietly into the yard to play. They play together so well these days. They have become a team. Somehow the washing got finished, the dinner got cooked. Bathtime and Bedtime passed smoothly and I decided to give myself the evening off. So really, all’s right with the world.

And then the change in the T-Bot makes it all worthwhile. This afternoon I asked him if he was happy. Usually this question would be met with a shrug, but he gave me a big grin and said simply

“Yes. You are taking good care of me”.

Could a parent ask for more?

Disclaimer: I wrote this quite a few days ago and meant to post it, but then I got an uneasy feeling and asked The Daddy to proof read it first. He promptly declared that it made no sense whatsoever and what was I thinking. Once I had finished yelling at him for being so rude, not reading properly and all manner of other failings, I rewrote it, but I have to admit that it is still downright confusing.

Never mind. The days are passing and the Time Fairy still has not made an appearance to grant me the Gift of More Time, which means that another blog post will not be forthcoming in the near future. So I figured I would just post this anyway. Someone, somewhere might make sense of it. The key is to remember that Baby Sister speaks Native Texan, while her poor mother sounds more like Peter Jackson on helium ***.

You probably had to be there. Sigh. But look up! I did include a pretty picture!

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Baby Sister: “Mommy, the library at school is where they get the books for all the centers in the classroom”

The Mommy: “(OMG, what are they teaching her at school?) The sinners? It’s where they get the books for the sinners?”

Baby Sister: “No Mommy, they get the books from the library and put them in the centers in each classroom!”

The Mommy: ” The? Oh! They get the library books and put them in the centers!”

Baby Sister: “No! The centers! The centers!”

The Mommy: “You mean the senners? Mommy says centers, and you says senners. Right?”

Baby Sister: “Mommy! You’re saying it all wrong! I don’t mean that! You have to listen!”

The Mommy: “Sinners”

Baby Sister: “No!”

The Mommy: “Senners”

Baby Sister: “No!”

The Mommy: “Sennnnerrrrs”

Baby Sister: “No! No! No!”

The Mommy: “Saynnnnerrrrrs? Seeernnerrrs? ”

Baby Sister: “Yes, Mommy! That’s right! They put them in the centers!”

The Mommy: “That’s what I said. They take the books and put them in the centers.

Baby Sister: ” No Mommy! Centers! Santa is the man what comes at Christmas!”

(***I said “sounds like” ! I did not say “looks like” !)

This is the post I have put off over and over because I was unsure of what, exactly, to write.

Then a few people caught my passing reference on Twitter to homeschooling the T-Bot and I received requests for information.

So, yes. I am now homeschooling the T-Bot. The problem with writing about it is, I am still not quite sure why. I mean, obviously I am aware of the events which eventually led us to pull him out of school overnight. But that was just the climax of a very stressful school year-plus-six-weeks, where everything and anything seemed to go horribly wrong for him.

I have gone around and around and around thinking about this. Just over a year ago I sent the school a happy, outgoing, confident little boy who was very excited about starting kindergarten. A little socially immature and not quite there with language, a little excitable, but generally well behaved in both home and social environments. To cut a long story short, that is not the child they handed back to my care at the end of every school day.

I hoped things would go well this year. The T-Bot was back to his normal self over the long summer vacation and was excited at the prospect of making new friends. Instead, he became doubly anxious, at home as at school, and everything just, for want of a better phrase, blew up.

I can’t assign blame. There are too many factors to consider. Consider a child already prone to anxiety, a large, impersonal school environment with an extreme emphasis on independence from a young age, a strict “zero-tolerance” policy, daily teasing and minor bullying, subtle lingering problems with language, cultural differences, immaturity, boredom with those interminable worksheets, a fear of tests and failure, an intense longing to fit in combined with an almost total lack of guile (he tripped me so it must be cool to trip him…. oh, I got caught), being a six year old, being a boy.

One thing I do know. These problems are mostly environmental. And that calls for a change of environment.

I am just sorry I didn’t do it earlier. Why didn’t I? Because truly, I didn’t want to homeschool. With my last child just starting in the preschool system, I was *this* far away from getting my independence. From next year I would have been able to work, uninterrupted, all day, every weekday, rather than carving out time here and there and mostly after 9pm.

I have been having brief pity parties. My life expectations changed overnight so I think I am entitled. But then I have also been in awe of the T-Bot and how, in a fun and relaxed learning environment, he is so motivated to learn. That’s all I am asking him to do, is learn, the best way he knows how. I am not ordering him to memorize 20 meaningless phonograms, complete two graded tests a week, fill in worksheet after worksheet with drawings of eight things next to the number eight or three things next to the number three, walk around our house two steps behind me with his hands behind his back. Jump through any No Child Left Behind style hoops at all. I do ask him to sit still, concentrate on what we are doing, listen to and follow the instructions. I do ask him to read and write about things that interest him. I do ask him to look at math patterns and how numbers are interrelated until it clicks and he has one of those “wow” moments. I ask him to look at word patterns the same way (did any of us truly learn to spell “work” by memorizing that when -or is preceded by w it can sound like -er ??) . I do ask him to do worksheets, in 5 minute bursts, emphasizing all the way that it will not take long. And when we have finished all this, as a treat, I let him do science experiments.

In the end, I guess, the reason for homeschooling the T-Bot turns out to be very simple. The local public school was unable to teach him in an appropriately stress-free environment.

At the time we removed him from school I was halfway through reading Richard Lavoie’s The Motivation Breakthrough. It was the book which gave me the courage to finally make the break with the public school system. Not because the book advocates that - far from it - but because the solutions in the book require some flexibility and ingenuity from both educators and parents. And how can I ask that of an elementary teacher already feeling the weight of the required standardized testing? How can I ask that of a system which has no provisions for seeing past mediocre test results to my sons real and very apparent abilities,  a system with an authoritarian bent which prefers to repeatedly punish minor transgressions rather than take a good hard look at making school fun so that children are interested and engaged?

I have been reading other books too. About boys and why they are failing in ever greater numbers, being given questionable diagnoses in ever greater numbers. Being drugged in ever greater numbers. I think everybody with a boy - no matter what his character - should read at least one of these. The Minds of Boys is a good one but there is plenty of choice.

I know there are people out there who will read this and think I am an apologist for my child, probably just a lazy boy with disciplinary issues. Obviously these are people who know far more about my child than I do. Let me just say this. There are children that fit in fine in a public school environment. And then there are those who don’t. I just feel fortunate that, like it or not, I have the opportunity to create the appropriate learning environment for my son. I am confident about his future now, because it is in my hands.

And truly, we have all breathed a sigh of relief.

Mama Ginger Tree tagged me for a meme, and although I am not always a great fan of memes, this is a really nice one. You are to choose the sixth photo from your sixth album and post it along with a description or the story behind it. I was not the only one a little puzzled by this, but then Mama Ginger Tree (being a very intelligent being) explained that you could use virtual photo albums from your computer.   Ahhh!! I get it now. Thank you Mama Ginger Tree.

(See how I managed to get three links to her blog into that paragraph? That’s because I like her).

I decided to use the kind of arbitrary “events” that iPhoto sorts photos into, apparently by date and/or some kind of smart photo analysis, who knows.

Problem is, The Daddy has imported a lot of our older digital photos into iPhoto, so that the sixth photo of our sixth album turned out to be this:

A shot no doubt taken for posterity in the days when we people working on sorting out the Year 2000 issue thought we were pretty cool and saviors of the earth. Or something. That is the sign on screen for one of our Y2K test databases. It was called Y2KITE, but we never called it that, preferring to replace the K with a SH. It is displayed on my after hours support laptop, meaning the photo was probably taken at 2 or 4am, or some other ungodly hour of the morning when a job would typically choose to fall over.

Anyhooo, no one in their right mind would be interested in that, so I decided to cheat and begin with the moment I started having children. This is, after all, strictly and unashamedly a Mommy Blog. Having counted up six albums and to the sixth photo, this is what I came up with:

The T-Bot, aged 3 weeks. He had a bad case of facial eczema not long before this photo was taken and still looked like an extra on Star Trek. But that’s OK. My husband happens to like Star Trek**.

Quite fitting that the sixth photo should land on the T-Bot and not, say, on a shot from the Dover-Calais ferry or our (at the time) new apartment. Since the T-Bot will no doubt be the subject of my next post. Given that I am seeing a lot of him these days.

In the meantime, I am going to tag… oh goodness. As my 2.4 readers know, I have been on blogging semi-hiatus for a while, and that includes reading and commenting on other blogs. Did anybody tag Marinka already? Do you think she would play along, what with her being such a big enormous award-winning blogger and all? I would also like to tag the following people, who will not know me because mostly I am a very rapid lurker:  Parisienne Mais Presque, texasholly, Flotsam. There. That’s 4. Along with the two extras already given by Mama Ginger Tree  that makes 6.

We’ll just say she stole them from me.

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(**He would probably want me to clarify here that he only likes certain Star Trek series like for example not the one with the gloopy music and sentimental story lines, and also not certain other ones. Really! It’s all just a load of people running around with Play Doh on their faces and who can keep track?

Oh, I just realized I might be mixing up Star Trek with Battlestar Galactica which is also on a space ship or vessel or whatever you want to call it. Although I seem to remember there is less Playdoh and more posing and deep significant silences in this one. Please, no hate mail…

Damn, was I actually thinking of Star Wars? I should just shut up now).

There has been a disturbing trend in my neighborhood recently.

It’s quite horrific really.

There has been an outbreak of shirtless, rollerblading thirty-something men.

At first, I thought it was the same one, but no, I have started looking at their faces and they are all different.

You know and I know that it wouldn’t be so bad (in fact, it would be great!) if they all looked like this:

…Unfortunately they all look like they think they look like this.

And they don’t.

Just call me shallow.