Black Friday Giveaway

Picture Black Friday at your nearest mall, as seen from a helicopter. Does an image of little, tiny, scurrying critters, all illuminated by the red light of fury, come to mind?

In honor of Black Friday - and to ease the holiday shopping pain in the wallet - I'm giving away this Antworks with Red LED

(Somehow the symbolism seem entirely appropriate.)

You may enter in one of two ways:

Leave a comment here telling me how you'll use this ant farm, who will receive it, how you'll incorporate it into your homeschooling, or how you wished for an ant farm as a kid and how I'm fulfilling your lifelong desire of having an even better ant farm than you ever could have had at nine years old.

Or email me offlist at TheEclecticMom@gmail.com.

Enter by midnight CST Monday. Good luck, and happy shopping!

If you're not so lucky on Monday, you can also buy Antworks with Green and Antworks with Blue

Decisions and Changes

All these years of pretending I'm SuperMom ... well, those years are over. I just can't pretend anymore. And with my approaching-fiftyish age (yikes!), I guess I need to admit that I just can't handle it. It. "It" being all those things that I can't handle. How's that for circular reasoning?

A couple of days ago I sent an innocent email to another homeschooling mom who asked me to tell her a little about myself, presumably to get to know me somewhat virtually and maybe make a bit of a connection. Well (cough), I think I scared the poor woman off when I started listing all the things I'm into, and frankly, I kind of scared myself. (Okay, it's not what you're thinking ... I'm not "into" anything kinky or illegal - at least not anymore. Hey, I'm a mom now.)

I was trying to give her a picture of who I was, since I have my fingers in so many pies (and that's not completely a figure of speech - just look at my butt lately). After the long list of things I volunteer for and take on, I was exhausted. What I mean is, I was exhausted just reading about them, never mind having to actually do them. I realized just how stretched I am. How I'm not doing any favors for myself, my kids, my husband, or my family.

I know there are plenty of other moms who accomplish a whole lot more than I ever will, and there are those who'll do so with a smile and a bounce in their step. But, like I said, I'm not SuperMom (be sure to say that with a booming, echoing voice). I just can't handle it like lots of other folks.

So now I'm trying to figure out the balance that works for me. I'm not quite sure what that looks like yet, but I know that I have to say "no" a lot more often. I need to figure out how to balance the needs of my kids, my husband, and my parents, along my own interests and needs. After that comes the needs of the world around me (and gosh, aren't there just a butt load of those?) and I get to pick those that I feel a connection to.

The bottom line is, I have to make some changes and some decisions. I need to volunteer to do less, and make the time that I devote to volunteering really count. I need to devote much of my energy to facilitating the education of my children, making sure they get raised up to be reasonably independent and responsible adults. I need to be committed to making my home a place where my husband and family feel nurtured and loved.

I need to do the things that make me feel whole and valuable. That's the one that's my sticking point. What do I give up? I enjoy everything I do, but I'm terribly inefficient and can't seem to manage everything I want to do. So that means I must give up something, or maybe several somethings.

You'll see some changes here on this blog. Heck, you've already seen them ... I've been virtually silent for the last several weeks. I've spent that time caring for aging parents, sitting on the couch with my husband occasionally (well, at least once, I'm sure), getting at least twenty minutes extra sleep a night, and starting my Christmas presents (that deserves a whole 'nother blog post, the whole Christmas tradition in my family). I haven't been posting.

Actually, writing is one of those things that I do all the time. Problem is, it's all in my head. Once they come up with the Mind-O-Matic - that mind transfer thing where my thoughts magically appear on the screen - I'll be all set. Until then, I'm screwed. One of my problems is that, with menopause crashing unceremoniously into my life full force - unlike all those pleasant stories I heard about women slowly sliding into a new hormonal balance - I can't remember a damned thing. I have this absolutely fabulous blog post or article written entirely in my head, and then when I sit down at the computer to write it out, this is what I remember: "Uh, kids are good, um, sleepy tired, respect, read a good book lately, uh ..."

See? I can't make heads or tails out of it either, so I'd suggest you don't even try.

In the next few weeks (hopefully), you'll see me hammer out a new plan. One that includes posting here (although not daily), lovin' on my husband (well, you won't actually see that), writing articles, homeschooling my kids, teaching a co-op class or two, taking field trips with my kids and friends, sewing, reading, and other things that fulfill me. I'm a work in progress.

Shit, I thought by this age I'd have it all figured out.

Crap.

Sunday's Gratitude Post

When life takes over and weighs me down, this refreshes me. Even with peeling paint, pet stains, torn screens, and pencil scribbles on the wall - mere blemishes on a fundamentally glorious base, the perfect representation of my life - this view rejuvenates me.

These are the doors in my bedroom, and the tree you see just outside is actually the top of a tall oak tree, as the deck here is about fifteen feet off the ground.

I've been staring out this window quite a bit lately.

Life Happens

I've been quiet lately, as some of you may have noticed. I tend to get swept up in the cycles of life. Sometimes I'll have weeks where the world bounces joyfully along, and all is easy. Other times I struggle with my own issues and inadequacies, and it takes me a while to get out of my funk.

At still other times, life steps in and changes things. Yesterday my dad had another stroke. He's recovering, and so far he's bounced back to about 80% of his normal. I'm hopeful that he'll recover much of that 20%, but only time will reveal that.

The last couple of weeks I've been preoccupied with Halloween, H and G's trip to the Appalachian Trail, my Arms and Armor class, and various other little things. For some reason, I just wanted to turn within and shut off the world. I tend to do that from time to time, and I always emerge refreshed.

This time I emerged to family crisis. Fortunately, things seem to be working out okay, but it could have been very different. I'm grateful for what I have.

As they say, "Always blessings. Never losses."

Lying Low

What is it about having my family separated that makes me so out of sorts? DH and first-born are off on the Appalachian Trail (G's 13th birthday present), leaving the two younguns and me to hold down the fort.

I've been being a homebody while they've been gone, sorting through clutter and cleaning out the attic (yikes! digging through the decade-old rat leavings is another post in itself), and I haven't been in any frame of mind to be witty, clever, or even sensical. Thus, no blog posts.

Sorry if you've missed me. (And if you haven't, well, poopy on you.)

Plus, the boys took my camera with me, so I can't even take any embarrassing or cutesy shots of the remaining kids.

I promise I'll get back to it. They're back in town by the end of the week, so things should be back to normal, or what passes as normal, by the weekend.

Just Waaaalkin' in the Rain

Let's get something straight. When it comes to having all this homeschooling stuff figured out, I'm clueless. And lazy. And often pretty lame.

So when an activity comes up that looks like it can pass for educational, especially if it requires little or no planning or effort on my part ... well, then, that's damn near spectacular. I jump on it like a duck on a grasshopper.

Enter McKinney Roughs, a nature park about a half hour outside of town. Occasionally McKinney Roughs hosts homeschool workshops on various nature topics for a reasonable price, and one of them was slated for today.

So I loaded up the kids, raced to make it on time (as usual, we were running ten minutes behind schedule), and careened into the parking lot at 9:30 on the dot. We found several other families there that we knew, so my kids were thrilled.

There was just one weensy problem. Did you happen to hear Hurricane Rick mentioned on the news?

Hurricane Rick as seen from this NASA image on October 18th while it was still a Category 5.

Granted, Little Ricky is now a tropical depression and isn't a bit of a threat (and never was) to us here in Central Texas. But do you see those arms of rain spreading out from that storm? A few of the fingers connected to those arms made their way across our part of the state, tickling us on the back of the neck off and on this morning.

Did I mention I was lazy? Being lazy means that often I prefer to stay indoors where it's nice and dry instead of huddling under borrowed rain ponchos previously used by sticky, sweaty school kids piling out of sticky, sweaty school buses on untold numbers of sticky, sweaty field trips. But today I didn't get the option of holing up in my toasty, cozy home, however, because I'd already paid my $9 for each kid. And hey, did I mention that I'm cheap too?

Fortunately, it ended up being pretty pleasant. It sprinkled off and on and only really rained for a short while, and the temperatures were cool enough to make the ponchos not stink too much (actually, not at all, but I wasn't trying to smell them, if you get my drift). Considering that about 75% of the workshop was held outside, that lack of hurricane rain, coupled with a smidgen of learnin' and good conversation with friends, made this a delightful morning. (Oh, and the kids didn't mind missing math and writing either.)

Just to prove that there was a touch of brain building going on, I'll give you a few pictures. These all came out pretty bad, considering that they were shot in the drizzle and the humidity made everything look like it came out of a Bela Lugosi movie.

If you look really close, you might see a bunch of monarch caterpillars on the small plant on the left. It's late for monarchs to still be in caterpillar form at this date, but the drought pushed everything behind schedule.

Poor T ... we really need to have that third arm growing out of his ear removed.

Speaking of caterpillars, this toothache tree is holding a bunch of these white caterpillars, three of which you can see here. This is an awful picture, but the caterpillars blended in perfectly with the bark. The kids kept spotting more and more of them. When they were touched, they raised bright red antennae and emitted a stench, compared alternately to dirty socks, apples, and something so heinous, and yet unnamed, that it sent my oldest into dry heaves.

Speaking of critters, we happened upon two of these funnel spider webs. On one of them, the hike leader was able to trick the spider into squirting out of her funnel and checking out the vibration. The spider was smarter than we were, however, because she took one look at the stick our leader was using, high-tailed it back into her funnel, and sternly refused to emerge again. I think I heard her say, "Fool me once ..."

If you look really, really hard, you might see a few reddish legs inside the funnel.

While I was hanging back to make sure that a boy who had run behind a bush to pee actually made it back onto the trail, I missed the name of this plant. But I did hear the part about how the Redcoats in the Revolutionary War were dyed (the coats, not the soldiers) using the pigment from this plant (fungus? bug? what the heck is that white stuff?) on the cactus. Clearly, I need to read up on my British textile history. Gosh, those folks must have really wanted their clothes to be bright red enough to be seen so far away that they could be picked off like dodos on the ground.

Wide expanses of the preserve had recently been burned, not necessarily a bad thing. Like one of the hike leaders said, the burns are like the reset button on the computer, giving the ecosystem a hard reboot.

Another burned tree. It was intriguing to see how the landscape was so brilliantly green in the areas that had been burned. Nope, not a bad thing at all.

Tomorrow, back to the grind. But that's okay. At least I won't have to be anywhere at the grizzly time of 9:30. Heck, that's practically the middle of the night!

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like Pioneer Girls.

"Hold on to Your Kids"

A long time ago - oh, I don’t know, several years, I guess - I stopped reading parenting books. After all, I’d read scores of them. I figured, what was the point? Either I agreed with what they said (so why waste my time?) or what they were touting didn’t mesh with my parenting strategies (so why waste my time?). My kids were older and I was pretty comfortable with what had become my parenting style - nothing I read was likely to shake things up.

Then I decided to become an API leader. As part of that process, I had to read three books, all of which had been published since I stopped reading: Hold On to Your Kids(Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate), Attached at the Heart(Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker), and Nonviolent Communication(Marshall Rosenberg).

So far I’ve finished only one of them, Hold on to Your Kids, and - as much as I hate to admit it - I’m delighted that I was required to read it.

Hold on to Your Kids is not just another parenting book. It’s not just another attachment parenting book. It gives good, solid evidence why staying close to our children and being their “compass point” is so much better than following society’s present-day norm of allowing peers to be our children’s guide. Over the past few generations, our “norm” has flip-flopped so that now we have an entirely skewed vision of what is, indeed, normal and healthy.

Over the last not-so-many years, our society has seen a shift in who should be the center of our children’s lives. Not that long ago, parents or other guiding adults were the anchors that kept our kids centered. But in recent times, that anchor has shifted to the peer group, and that has caused all sorts of problems. The authors explain not only what the problems are but also why they occur, and they give ways to solve the problems and bring our children back to us.

Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other. When we compare peer relationships with parent relationships for what is missing, parents come out looking like saints. The results [of having peers be the guiding force] spell disaster for many children.

Although I would have heartily agreed with the book’s premise before reading it, I would not have had any solid basis on which to place that opinion. So I was thrilled to see the authors give specific reasons why my ideas are right. hehe

Bear with me while I give a long quote, because it ties right into homeschooling and the inevitable “socialization” question:

The belief is that socializing - children spending time with one another - begets socialization: the capacity for skillful and mature relating to other human beings. There is no evidence to support such an assumption, despite its popularity. If socializing with peers led to getting along and to becoming responsible members of society, the more time a child spent with her peers, the better the relating would tend to be. In actual fact, the more children spend time with one another, the less likely they are to get along and the less likely they are to fit into civil society. If we take the socialization assumption to the extreme - to orphanage children, street children, children involved in gangs - the flaw in thinking becomes obvious. If socializing were the key to socialization, gang members and street kids would be model citizens.

The book is definitely worth reading, even though it’s sometimes like wading through a bog. I wish it had been written in a more approachable tone and edited back a bit (there’s quite a bit of repetition), but it’s worth slogging through nonetheless. (Maybe “slogging” is too strong a word.) The information is important enough that in a perfect world it would be accessible to a whole bunch of people, but with its depth it probably loses a goodly number of readers. Too bad.

This is a book that you can leave on your bedside table and pick up when you can read a page or two at a time. No need to sit down and digest the whole thing at once. But I do think it’s worth the effort.

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like "Parent/Teen Breakthrough."

Zulu Warriors Right Here in Texas

My own Zulu impi warrior.

Last Friday I decided to take the boys in my co-op class all the way down to South Africa. We talked a bit about the Zulu's history and culture before jumping into our project. (Just a tiny bit, though, as the boys were eager to get to the weaponry.)

I had a bit of a different project in mind for this week ... one that included a shield as well as a spear and club - the whole package, as it were. The process wasn't quite what they were expecting, because the kids were able to do virtually all of the project themselves, so they were happily occupied weaving and gluing. All too frequently, they end up watching (and thus getting distracted) while the adults do the hands-on work after they ask for help out of frustration. This week, though, they seemed to be especially pleased by their creations, knowing that they'd done most of the work themselves.

And they didn't even have to bury them for two days under manure and pound them with stones.

This is what they were supposed to look like.

(Photo from Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

We started with tracing ...

And cutting ...

And tracing and cutting ...

And more cutting ...

And then my brilliant idea of hardening the supple Corinthian Leather using fabric stiffener.

Let's just say that trying to take a shortcut by using a blow dryer didn't do the trick.

We ended up laying them out on the back porch to dry, where they got, well, a bit stiffer.

Sometimes the help of an adult was necessary, but it was minimal.

Evan didn't mind.

He waited patiently while the helper made the holders for the center support.

One happy impi warrior heads off down the hallway to meet unsuspecting students.

Scared yet?

(Sorry, I'm not feeling too witty or clever tonight, as I think I'm coming down with S's virus from last week. So tonight it's "just the facts, ma'am.")

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like Maces, Chain Mail, and 4-Year-Old Knights.

Sunday's Gratitude Post

Tonight I'm grateful for telephones. And internet. Telephones and internet that work. For a few days we were without our phone and internet. (Miss me?) Apparently ATT had a major break in the system somewhere and the whole neighborhood was without digital power.

I'm intrigued at the progression of my emotions: first confusion, then dismay, followed closely by outrage. (How can they possibly do this to us? Don't they know that I have blogs to follow and videos of talking cats to watch and clips of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" to laugh at? What about all my loyal blog followers? How will they possibly survive without my witticismness and profoundosity?)

Funny, my emotions quickly ran to relief, at having an excuse not to check my email and keep up on my parenting lists. Then they went to apathy, with an almost palpable desire to stay disconnected from the world.

This is what my kids do for education when we don't have internet access.

So it was with mixed feelings that I came home to find my little brilliant green light blinking to say that all was right with the digital world.

Oh yay!

Oh darn.

Okay. Back to the real world.

An Odd Thing to Wish For

"Let's keep our fingers crossed," I said to my darling daughter. "Yes, let's," she agreed.

What grand goal were we wishing for? What distant dream?

That her annoying cough, which has had her hacking and wheezing all day, is actually swine flu.

No, I'm not a sadistic mother, waiting second by second until one of my children falls ill, so that I can stand over them with a gruesome grin on my face and a tumbler full of castor oil. No, I'm not a doctor wannabe, hovering day by day for one of my offspring to catch some horrible ailment that I can try my homemade remedies on.

I'm just pragmatic. If the kids get swine flu now while it's in a mild form, I won't have to worry about its later, more severe version. I won't have to decide to get them a new and untested vaccine. And if S gets it now, then perhaps she'll pass it on to H and G so that they can be over it before their trip to the Appalachian Trail next weekend.

So, all of you send us your best wishes, won't you? Wishes for fever, cough, achiness, vomiting, and diarrhea. Thanks a bunch.

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If you liked this post, you might enjoy Calling the Cat.

Inca Warriors

Last Friday we went back to the 1400s and down to South America. The Inca culture is a fascinating one to study. Unfortunately, I was only able to give kids bits and pieces of the story of the Incas, but my hope is that each of them took one small item of knowledge away.

This week we had nine boys(!), including a recent addition of a soaking-it-all-up preschooler and one eager visitor. No casualties this week!

What would homeschoolers do without hot glue?

An example of our slings and our bolas.

Some of the boys showing off their weapons.

The arsenal of the Inca included such weaponry as slings and bolas, in addition to a number of other weapons. This civilization was unbelievable with what they were able to accomplish, considering that they had no pack animals and no steel to use as tools. They crafted their phenomenal stonework - including the Inca road, which linked together about 25,000 miles of roadway - using fire, water, and wood wedges to cut the stones.

I could write for hours about the Incas, but I won't. I'd encourage you to read about them for yourself if you're so inclined.

I used a number of books to find out about the Incas, including these:

Aztec, Inca, and Maya (DK Eyewitness Books)

Machu Picchu (Unearthing Ancient Worlds)

This is one I want to read but haven't:

The Last Days of the Incas

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If you enjoyed this post, you might like Casualties: 1 ... and Counting.