Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning

This post is actually just a link to another person's blog, but the article is well written and so very important for all to be aware of. 

Please spread the word far and wide as we enter swimming season and summer fun!

The link is to Mario Vittone's blog. 

Surrounded by "School"

Maestro - motivation for several blog posts lately - has mentioned a curiosity about classroom-based education a few times over the years. It seems his primary motivation has been because of the social aspect: a mistaken notion that going to school will mean being able to talk to and interact with his friends more often. As a result, I've tried to point out where things that we're doing anyway are things that I can frequently "count" as part of our schooling. My intention is to get him to think more along the lines of a "count your blessings" mentality, as opposed to a "count your curses" mode of thinking.

One of our many "alternate" home school activities

A Letter to Our Oldest Son

Yesterday our son came home from his friend's house across the street and was clearly upset about something. The short version of the story is that he had used his Nintendo DS "for 30 seconds" while waiting for another friend to come out. His friend said that he was "obsessed" and ultimately decided to go inside. There are, of course, other details that he wanted me to consider, but in my mind that is what it boiled down to. I told him that she was right and he had been rude.

In a bit of a pre-teen huff (meaning, as he tried to leave the room and escape downstairs), he said, "(You were)... the one person I thought would back me up!"

~ ~ ~ ~

Dear Oldest,

I want to tell you thank you for being part of my life; you and your siblings are what make me mom. It is with a mother's love that I write this note to you.

Giving "Permission" to My Mom

This is a post of a story told backwards. It begins at the end... and ends at the beginning of the story. It is the story of Mini-Haha and my attempt to give the story back to my Mom.

Now on our fifth child, and having had a chance to reflect on my own childhood, I see now that children are God's way of giving us a chance for redemption. And of teaching us to laugh at ourselves. As children, we did things that hurt our parents, whether intentionally or not. Now as parents, we are no more perfect than our parents were.

The youngest photo I have access to that is digitized. About 11 or 12 here. 

One of the things I used to get so angry with my mother for was her delight in telling a story of my earliest years. We parents love to catalog the foibles and amusing events of our children's lives, don't we? Already I watch my own children and find myself telling others of this or that amusing thing that they've done. God bless them  - but I can't help it, they're so often just so funny! And in another five or ten years, we won't be laughing together over the events in question. Instead, I'll be wondering what happened while my child gets angry at me for sharing stories we'd always laughed at together in the past.

The Arrival of Mr. Magoo

Now I can fast-forward to the birth-day itself. We were a week past the "official" due date, which was not particularly cause for alarm since the baby was still very active and my weight had not dropped any. When you hit 41 weeks, they have you come in for a low-stress test and an ultrasound to check your fluid levels. I did both. The stress test was fine with a good, active baby. At the office for the ultrasound, she made her notes with an increasingly quiet countenance. She asked us to wait while she had the doctor look at the results. When she returned, she said that we needed to talk to our midwives and called them right there from the ultrasound office.

The midwife explained that we needed to return to the birthing center because "the average woman has fluid levels of 10 to 20." He continued, "We like to see a baseline number of at least 5. You have fluid levels of 3." 

The Week Before Mr. Magoo

If you read Part One of this little birth story, you know that we were suddenly in need of a last-minute doctor's appointment. This was due to the pinworms that we discovered 2-year-old Buttercup had. In looking it up, we discovered several things that amounted to a pretty good health and science lesson for our homeschooled children: 1) pinworms are spread by not washing one's hands well enough and then putting those hands in our mouths; 2) pinworms are annoying but relatively harmless; 3) they are gotten rid of by taking two pills, two weeks apart; 4) the medication needed is not "indicated" for pregnant women by the FDA.

Mr. Magoo

I'm going to add a bit of detail to Mr. Magoo's story before I forget all the crazy things that happened in a span of two weeks. In the two weeks just prior to the "official" due date of April 15th, we had several issues we were dealing with in our house... Including:

• a basement toilet (called a "flush" here in Maryland) that ran constantly (and therefore needed to be repaired immediately)
• a run of sick children - each taking turns at throwing up
• Jeff going away for a two-day business trip
• a new car that had temporary tags about to expire that needed to be renewed - down in Virginia, an hour away if there was no traffic
• having to get to a government office before they closed to renew another temporary paper, in conjunction with the temporary car tags