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?

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).

Not mine, his.

After a few false starts my new online store launched today, and the excitement was, I guess, infectious. The T-Bot decided that he too needed a retail operation and disappeared into his room for ages. When he came out his eyes were shining with pride as he invited me to look.

“Mommy,” he said, “I know that stores don’t have junk all over the floor, because people could trip over it and hurt themselves.”

I was very impressed. His floor was clear of the usual Legos, Transformers, miscellaneous building projects and random bits of plastic. Then I saw the bed:

OK. So he has nowhere to sleep tonight, but at least he is well on the way to making his fortune. He is going to be one rich little boy with a store where every item costs $100.

Now, why didn’t *I* think of that?

Today is the first day of school after the summer vacation and sometime during the night T-Bot’s fish Charlie died. This morning he was lying curled up on the floor of the tank, so I didn’t believe it at first because I thought dead fish were supposed to float. But, after an exploratory poke into the tank to check he wasn’t just asleep, I had to keep poking to make it look like he was moving. Because he wasn’t, and today as you know was the First Day of School. I didn’t want anything to ruin this.

Then Baby Sister wanted to feed him.

“That’s OK! (OMG OMG OMG OMG)” I said brightly, “I already fed him this morning. Anyway, he’s still asleep”.

Yes, I do lie to my kids, sometimes. Especially when it is for their own good. And sometimes even when it is for mine. (”Mommy and Daddy Chocolate”, for instance. Is deathly to children). 

This morning they were all cooperation and excitement, and I was a bunch of nerves, although I think I hid it very well. We were ten minutes early for the bus, because apparently the school bus is a magical thing. Not quite like the Magic School Bus but almost. The T-Bot has been begging to ride the yellow bus since he started kindergarten. Now he is going into 1st Grade I finally let him, despite the dire warnings from certain American friends about some sort of  Lord of the Flies type alternative reality which is supposed to exist behind those blacked-out windows.  I saw immediately what she meant when two smirking 2nd graders wandered up and proceeded to stare at my son as if he was something gross that had just fallen off the bottom of their shoe. But then, the other boy at the stop was a very very nice 5th grader, and the bus driver lady was lovely, like somebody’s Mom.  So I decided that the odds of surviving this bus trip were probably hugely in his favor. 

That, by the way, is my New School Year’s Resolution. To look on the bright side and not stress about anything until it happens. Last year I let the whole school thing drive me to distraction. And yet the T-Bot? Was eager to go to school this morning, so it can’t be all bad. 

Baby Sister went back to pre-school later, into the Pre-K class, and I had promised her that she would not be in with the Four-Year-Old going on Fourteen-Year-Old who terrorized her last year. Note to Self, stop being so trusting and quit making promises based on information gleaned from other people. Still, she seemed happy to be back, for now at least. 

So, children dispatched, I set off for my appointment with the new dermatologist. And I swear, as if touching a dead fish, sending my four year old into the devil’s lair, and putting my six year old on a school bus were not stresses enough for one day, the dermatologists clinic had vanished into thin air! 

Another Note to Self: Stop being so trusting and quit giving any credence to information doled out by Mr Google Maps.  I had even looked at the street view, and the fact that it showed a service station possibly should have been a clue, but I figured the clinic was somehow behind it.  It wasn’t. It was about 2 miles up the road but it took me a while to ascertain this, given that the telephone number I had written in my agenda was for a random lawyer’s office. 

But they were very understanding about me being so late, and let me in to see the dermatologist anyway. And he was very nice about me wasting his time, because the two moles which were bleeding when I made the appointment a month ago are not bleeding anymore. He declared me a very disappointing carrier of “common or garden moles” (His pun. Intentional? Who knows?) and sent me on my way.  

And now? I do sort of miss my children. It is almost school run time. And bus pickup time because (jumping in air pumping fist a la Tom Cruise, who by the way, looks very dorky doing it but I swear when I do it, it is graceful) someone else is going to bring my eldest home for me! I will not have to spend 30 minutes in the car line today! 

And that is reason enough to celebrate. 

“Mommy, when you met Daddy you danced together.

And you wore a pretty lady dress.

And you kissed to be married. 

Then you told Daddy you had a baby inside your tummy and he was so excited! 

And you told him my baby name would be T-Bot. 

And he liked it! 

And he was very happy…. ”

(Ten years of my pre-baby life, as summarized by the T-Bot. That’s it, no more Disney Princess books for you, boy!)

Personally, I am not into hothousing children. I am not into private tutors and extra lessons and the like, unless they are already in high school and need some individual attention or a kick on the rear end to get them into the best college or something (I imagine. Because, after all, if and when we get to that point it will be my money at stake. And already I am crossing my fingers and toes for a scholarship or a lottery win or for them to all be running profitable businesses by sixteen. Or a miracle).

And I am not into those awful workbooks you buy at the supermarket with Fun Math! and I Can Read! optimistically emblazoned across the covers. 

Sooooooooooo. At the beginning of this long, hot summer I talked about home schooling, but by that I meant fun projects and sticker books and weekly themes and the like. You know - read about dinosaurs, talk about dinosaurs, visit dinosaur bones at the museum. As it happened we managed to fill most of the last two months with random activities which did not need a theme. 

For example, Farmyard dioramas where animals graze amongst freaky enormous flowers…

…and dinosaur dioramas, notice that T-Rex has become a vegetarian?

And then, I woke up one morning last week and it hit me that there are only three weeks until school starts. And the T-Bot has forgotten how to write his numbers. 

So this week we are following a fun theme called “School at Home!”, where we sit around a table and I fabricate things for The Wictor to do while Baby Sister cuts and glues Things that Begin with A and B and C and the T-Bot works his way through a book called Fun with Math!

Seriously. I cannot think of a worst instrument of torture. I should have checked the book more thoroughly in the supermarket, but I had three children crammed into the cart and I was seduced by the fact that it had stickers. The worst thing is that the T-Bot loves math. He hates this workbook - and rightly so - because every single page involves counting up pictures and then writing the number in a box. But I am not a teacher. And so, for want of a viable alternative I make him do it, four pages a day, followed by a sentence of handwriting, and I will continue to do so until the boy can write the number 5 the right way around without searching for an example to copy. 

I make him do it. And every day I die a little inside. 

But it’s not all bad! His reward? Science. Yesterday we did science with a volcano. It was pretty cool, even if I was mean with the food coloring resulting in lava which flowed out pink. Today we launched lego men off the balcony with different types of parachutes. Kitchen towel? Not so good. Plastic bags - better. 

And Baby Sister? She is bright, quick witted, very sharp. But as far as reading goes she is definitely waiting for her time. Things that begin with B: Cat. Toothbrush. Flowers. 

First, a disclaimer. I do not have a trick for winning the Green Card Lottery. If I did, of course I would share it (for a price…). What I can do is detail the process. 

I left you here, with our little family unit all psyched up to try and get ourselves into the US. 

But what The Daddy had failed to tell me, as he was speeding through the night on the Metropolitan Line, was that the closing date  was midnight.

That very night.

And so, as he arrived, dinner was forgotten. It was probably best forgotten anyway, I am a terrible cook.

The adrenalin was flowing. We searched through our available photos. We found some acceptable shots of us, but they had foliage in the background. No recent decent shot of the T-Bot. Luckily he was not yet asleep so we threw him up against a white wall and took a hundred poses, just to be safe. He wasn’t blurry in about three of them. We tried to throw each other up against a wall but the resulting pictures were horrible, like zombies.

Then while I put T-Bot to bed, The Daddy got busy with Photoshop. 

It was approaching 11pm when we finally had our online forms completed, photos at the ready, and we were ready to Pass Go. At this moment, the US government servers, who were probably very tired and under an unprecedented onslaught from all the last-minute-hopefuls, gave up on us.

(cue frenetic music)

It took us until 11.52 to submit three simple forms, but - like a Hollywood movie where the heroes prevail 2 seconds before the bomb is to go off - we did it. 

And by the next morning, we had forgotten about it. Because, after all, we had never won before. 

(Look out for Part Three, coming soon. I apologise for feeding this in dribs and drabs, but it is still summer vacation time and I am feeling it here…)

We are at the pool, and the T-Bot (who two weeks ago refused to even put his mouth in the water, let alone his whole face, or his whole body) is showing The Daddy how he can dive for squid weights. With help. 

The Daddy throws the weights to the bottom, and the T-Bot dives down, down, down. Scoops up the weights and then sits on the bottom of the pool. Puts an arm up and waits patiently. 

Look!” says The Daddy, his eyes sparkling with pride and excitement, “He’s underwater!”

“Yes,” I call pointedly. “He’s underwater!!!!!!”

“Wow!!!” says The Daddy, all emotional (His son is becoming a man), “Underwater! Underwater!”

“Um, The Daddy!” I yell, he’s UNDERWATER!!!!! 

“Oh! SH–” 

Clearly their technique needs a little refinement. On both sides. 

Update on the Swimming Lessons.

Thursday: Did Not Go Well.

Friday: Looked like more of the same and then suddenly! Mr Justin took things up a few notches and the class was underwater, overwater, floating and kicking and things were looking better. The T-Bot came out of the session animated and excited at all he had achieved. Or it could have been that they were finally allowed to use all the floaters he had been coveting and so he had come out of his sulk. My little boy is not an easy read. 

Anyhow, one week to go and I have promised him that if he passes the course he will not have to go back. Actually if he does not pass the course he will especially not be going back because I refuse to pay another $130 if they can’t teach him right the first time. Obviously I did not tell him that. Just like the swimming school neglected to tell me that there was an exam to gain entrance to the class above, and that if he flunks I will have to pay again and again until he doesn’t.

No Sweat Play Areas

Last week we tried out all the indoor playgrounds in the vicinity. At the beginning of the week we did this because it was too hot to play outdoors. By the end of the week it was too wet. I am a big fan of indoor playgrounds, especially the ones which are free. But wait! Nothing is ever free. Here are some of our local options: 

1. Local mall.

Distance: Around 15 minutes. Time Spent: 2 hours playing, 15 minutes eating. Cost: Starbucks, $16

2. Fancier Mall in Town.

Distance: Around 30 minutes. Time Spent: 2 hours playing, half an hour eating, half an hour shopping. Cost: Fast Food, $11, Carousel, $3

3. McDonalds Playplace.

Distance: Around 5 minutes. Time Spent: 10 minutes eating, 1 hour playing. Cost: Food, $13

4. IKEA.

Distance: Around 40 minutes. Time Spent: 1 hour at Smaland drop in daycare, 30 minutes eating and watching Loony Tunes in the cafeteria, 30 minutes playing in the kids area of the store. Cost: Lunch, $19, various items of colored plastic crap for around the home: $45. 

5. Upstairs in our House.

Distance. 0 miles. Time Spent: Hours and hours. Cost: My hair, my control, my sanity at having to work out which tiny plastic bits go into which boxes when cleaning up afterwards. Also, Baby Sister stepped on a Lego and won’t stop going on about the hole in her foot. Definitely not the cheapest option. 

The Resident Magician

Yesterday I was out of the house hunting for treasures and left the kids digging up the yard with The Daddy (The Daddy is creating a mud pit which may, one day, with the addition of plants, turn into a tropical garden). The Daddy, if you give him the chance, is a true magician. I came home to a yard full of excited children all yelling at once about how they had made a pinata!! (recipe: old halloween candy, plastic supermarket bag, string), dug for treasure!! (old builders scrap and leaves discovered in the mud) and played with ice!! (entire contents of freezer ice maker dumped onto the driveway).

Then, their fun buckets full to the brim, they disappeared upstairs to play quietly and left me to some unaccustomed peace and quiet. It was very strange. I almost started to miss them. 

One of my fondest memories of childhood is of my mother, dressed in her bikini, lying on her stomach on a towel by the side of the pool. Her arms and legs skimmed the cement and her neck craned like a turtle’s as she demonstrated how to do the breaststroke. It was a floundering, impotent version of the breaststroke, born of the need to Not Put Your Face In The Water - but a method of locomotion nonetheless. By the end of the summer I was adept at it. 

My ever so patient mother spent weeks introducing me to the pool in tiny, painful steps. We had moved to New Zealand from the UK the previous winter, I was about to turn seven and I could not swim. I very dramatically could not swim. The story goes that when my parents hired the local swimming teacher, the only one in town, to come to our house for a private lesson, I screamed so hard and so loud at being forced into the water that the neighbors gathered to discuss calling the police. 

Ahh, the swimming teacher. Let’s call her Mrs Beteljuus. She was a legend around those parts. A solid, accented, lady, she came second only to the School Dental Nurse (more usually known as The Murder House) in the Horror Stakes among those of us of elementary school age. While it is true that she got results, her technique consisted mostly of holding childrens heads forcibly under the water while counting, and yelling “breathe!” in tones reminiscent of a lowing bull. She was Very, Very Scary. 

So I will for ever be grateful to my mother for saving me from Mrs Beteljuus, if only for one summer. I applied myself, learned my lessons well, and soon was bobbing along confidently, my head carefully tipped back so as not to get my face wet. My mother, with her patience and stamina,  is single-handedly responsible for my love of the water today. And I thank her.

But there was, as Baby Sister would put it, “Just One Pwoblem”. I could not bring myself to put my head under the water (and how could my mother teach me, when she had never learned herself?). I could not dive in, dive under or do the crawl. So, the next summer, I found myself shivering and clinging to the side of the school pool while Mrs Beteljuus stalked and shouted overhead. 

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This week I finally and reluctantly gave the T-Bot up to Mrs Beteljuus. Or her equivalent, Mr Justin, who does not hold childrens heads under the water even though he probably wants to. Desperately. At least in the case of my son.  Especially when my son is trying to bargain his way into using those fun floaty things instead of concentrating on the task in hand, namely Putting Your Face in the Pool. 

I signed him up for one of those two week courses. Half an hour, every day, in the hope that before he turns seven I will be able to turn my back on him without worrying about him going under and drowning. Today was Day Three and despite some serious whining and sulking, he has progressed from Inching His Way Around the Edge to Being Pushed Toward the Side, Arms Stretched In Front and Face in the Water and Coming Up By Himself. I am seriously amazed. This is the same child who, after Day One, told me that I had to get him another teacher, one who would “not make me put my face in the water”. The same child who, after every lesson, tells me he is “done and not going back”.

Yet, under all the dislike there is a glimmer of pride lurking, a real satisfaction at all he has achieved. I am sure he is looking forward to the freedom that swimming will afford him.

I know I am looking forward to the freedom that his swimming will afford me. And right now, my son? All that counts. Sorry.