The Inverted Family Tree

I want to tell you all about what I've been doing these past few weeks, both on the housekeeping and homeschooling fronts. Getting to the computer upstairs is harder than it might seem. We purchased a small laptop for downstairs to ease the congestion on the main computer and to allow me to access the Interwebz without leaving the main scene of action in the house. Behold!

I will tell you all about these things we have learned and discovered soon enough. For example, it is bad idea to eek out a few more days of school right before Christmas when nobody on the street is doing it and all the kids are playing outside all day long. Note to self. But sometimes a post unrelated to anything going on grabs your attention and demands to be written. This is one of those times.

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My maternal grandmother* had four children. In order for those four children to be replaced, she would need to have eight grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren.

This people math is the basics behind zero population growth theories. The idea is that you shouldn't have more children than are necessary to replace the people who already exist. Of course, proponents would probably be happy if you never reached that number. Even though I reject the philosophy behind ZPG, I was essentially raised with these ideas. My parents, for whatever reason, were very conscious about not exceeding their "limit." My brother exists, in some small part, because there were open slots available from cousins who did not exist. I am repulsed by the idea that my brother might not exist if the quota had already been filled.

My maternal grandmother had nine grandchildren, which replaces her children plus one--the open slots enabling my brother were on my father's side of the family--and it just so happens I fall exactly in the middle. There are four grandchildren older than I am and four grandchildren younger than I am. Assessing the state of our extended family as I enter the final likely years of my fertility, I am distressed. She should have sixteen great-grandchildren, but as of now, she has eleven.

My oldest four cousins produced one child between them. I have four children. My sister has three children. My brother has zero children. My youngest two cousins have three children between them. It does not seem likely that any of my cousins will have any more children. It isn't that they all suffer from infertility. There is a lot of sterilization going on here. I know because they tell me.

So here we are at eleven. We have five missing people, at a minimum, on my mother's side of the family. Our family tree is inverting.

On my father's side of the family, the situation is much the same. My paternal grandmother had 7 children which would require 14 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren to hit replacement numbers. She had 13 grandchildren--close--and thus far eleven great-grandchildren, seven of whom belong to me and my sister. Since I am one of older cousins in this group instead of in the middle, it is harder to make long term pronouncements on how many children there will eventually be. I can say that as of right now, my four oldest cousins have four children between them. Twenty-eight does not seem likely at all.

Since the concept of replacing yourself was near growing up, I have thought a lot about replacement numbers and how many children are required to achieve it. I have also wondered if I personally have an obligation--in the best sense--to have more children since no one else seems willing to do it.

I know I cannot carry the weight of my entire family. Even if I had a goal of making sure the numbers were at replacement minimums, it would be impossible. I don't have that much fertility (or energy). If I felt like we were DONE, done, I doubt I would be worried too much about it. You can only do so much.

But here I am at age 38. I will be 40 in 18 months. It feels like a deadline. As I sit here discerning my unenthusiasm for pregnancy along with all the other factors of life, I wonder if the abysmal number of children in my extended family should play any role in our decisions.

Since I am willing to love and raise a baby, despite my hatred of pregnancy, do I have any obligation to do it again in light of the fact that my cousins, as a rule, won't? Does anyone else think about these things? Am I the only one?




*My grandmother died in 1999, but I wasn't sure how to treat the verb tenses so just bear with me here.

The Immediate Book Meme

I've been thinking about this ole blog frequently and failing to visit it frequently. I have several posts bouncing in my head and yet am not managing to sit down and pound them out. And lo, MrsDarwin comes to the rescue. Here's post full of hopeful promise that I'll soon be posting regularly again.

1. What book are you reading now?

Stillwater, by Cat Hodge (It's on Grace's Kindle so it's slow going as I negotiate who gets the device on any given day.)
Ida Elisabeth, by Sigrid Undset

For the homeschool:
Jenny and the Cat Club, by Esther Averill
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (An aside: How long does it take for other people to read a longish book aloud to their kids. We've been hitting at this book since August and it feels like we are going painfully slow. Problem is I can only read about a chapter at a time before my voice gets too uncomfortable.)
Robin Hood

2. What book did you just finish?

33 Days to Morning Glory, by Michael Gaitley
Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather
Ward No. 6, by Anton Chekhov (A short story, not a book, but I say it counts.)
The Entire Collection of Frog and Toad, by Arnold Lobel.

3. What do you plan to read next?

The Rule of St. Benedict

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

Introduction to the Devout Life, by St. Francis de Sales (Argh, this book. I like it, but it always seems to get pushed aside by more pressing matters.) 

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

Leisure The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper
Elisabeth Leseur- Selected Writings
Crimson Bound, by Rosamund Hodge

6. What is your current reading trend?

Second grade readers and Life of Fred math books.

Transitions

I promise I haven't fallen off the planet here. I am having trouble getting to the computer with a keyboard. The tablet drives me mad and the upstairs computer is not convenient or is occupied. I am hoping we can get a smaller downstairs computer soon. Black Friday is coming. By the time I do get to the keyboard, it is late in the afternoon and I am staring into the abyss trying to recover from hours of 'on' time. Anyway...

On the homeschooling front, I have created a checklist template for the girls to work from. Prior to the week, I spend an hour or so putting together their tasks for the week and print it off. They work from their checklists and this is working reasonably well.

Help me understand curriculum. I ordered a few workbooks and curriculum several weeks ago. Overall I am happy with what I ordered, but I am somewhat surprised by what publishers consider a year's worth of work. The map workbooks came in and there are only twenty to thirty lessons in them. These won't last a year, not even close. The girls both love them so it will be hard to keep them down to one lesson a week.

The grammar program is only supposed to take fifteen minutes per lesson to keep it bite-sized, but you could do two or three lessons in fifteen minutes. There's just not a lot there. Grace was upset by how short the lessons are so we decided to double them up. I suspect I'll have to buy the next level up in January. Again, we both like the program, but there's not a lot there.

The only thing I bought that has close to what I expect a year's worth of curriculum to contain is the Seton math book. Am I missing something here? Even the copybooks will take strategic stretching to make them last the whole year.

Is this deschooling for all of us? Are our expectations so out of proportion that we don't feel comfortable unless we drill, drill, drill? I don't know. Right now, they have maybe an hour's worth of work to do everyday. Maybe. Is that enough? Of course with wrangling two girls, a toddler, Sam, and the endless rounds of required food, that hour's worth of work can take all morning.

Math with Grace is becoming something of a problem. She doesn't love the Fred books and tries to avoid them except when she decides she likes them and then binges through the lessons. She is frustrated with Khan because it presents problems before she knows how to solve them, but then she resents having to ask for help. She wants lessons presented and then problems to solve. But the idea that I note what she is struggling with on Khan and then have a table lesson apart from the computer was not met with enthusiasm. More deschooling? Age-appropriate boundary pushing? I don't know.

Math used to be her favorite subject and now she growls and cries about it. She is pining for a workbook like Olivia has. On one hand, I think the dynamic of struggle and understanding is good for her. On the other hand, I am not sure I should press this too hard right now as everything is changing. Maybe I should just buy her a math workbook and be done with it?

Olivia is thriving like I always suspected she would. It isn't problem free, but her issues aren't hard for me to tackle.

On the housekeeping front, my alarm clock is a failure. I just don't want to set an alarm. Maybe I should. Maybe I will set it for a more moderate 7:30. That sounds better. I can't sleep the morning away, but I also don't really want to drag myself out of bed. The morning muffin really mitigates my need to be out of bed. We will see.

I have hit a roadblock with the cleaning. I desperately need to get going on the kitchen again, but mentally I just can't seem to do it. When we finish with school and lunch and the readaloud, I just can't bring myself to go to the kitchen and clean. I need to do it. I still haven't developed a meal plan which mentally seems to hinge on finishing the kitchen.

I had such a good momentum on cleaning a month ago and then it all went to crap. A month ago, I was letting the homeschooling slide and now we have developed a much more solid routine. Related? I think so. Argh.  Still working on the transition.

Something Like a Plan

I am still trying to come to grips with a schedule.  I am still struggling to use the printer. Part of my problem is the absurdly stupid fact that the printer is out of ink and I need to change the cartridge. It is enough of a deterrent that I keep thinking I'll change it later. Stupid.

Anyway, after my panic of last week, I have all of a sudden been granted the ability to think about homeschooling in a concrete way. When I had hours and hours at work to do whatever I liked, I couldn't make my brain plan what I only had the vaguest concepts about doing. Homeschooling mothers would invite me to look at their materials and I would smile and nod and glance through it without the slightest idea of what I was looking for. Even when I was finally home from work, the whole homeschool planning thing was elusive. But now, as I begin to discover what our days will be like with me at home with them, I am suddenly able to make decisions about curriculum.

So what are we doing?

In math, both girls were working in Khan Academy until Olivia, inconveniently, finished the second grade program. However, she is definitely not ready to move on to third grade math. The basic addition and subtraction facts are not cemented in her mind yet. She understands the concepts and gets the right answers, but doesn't respond immediately and needs more drill.

Grace is working through the 5th grade level of Khan and enjoying it. She will spend hours working on math if I let her. I sometimes let her.

I think Khan is a solid program, but my basic complaint is that it grants mastery status without enough drill. If you luck out and get four or five questions right in a row on a topic, they say you have mastered it. Well, you might have or you might not have. It makes me nervous, anyway.

I looked at the Saxon Math and I honestly had to say, even if I think this might be a superior math program, I do not have the wherewithal right now to sit and whittle down eleventy billion problems a lesson into a workable number of problems for us. So maybe Saxon in the future, but not this year.

A friend has a collection of Life of Fred that she has graciously allowed me to borrow. I want both girls to work through at their own pace. Grace is less than thrilled with this idea so I am not sure how hard I am going to push it. She is deeply offended by the notion of starting at the beginning because that is what the program requires. She is also unnerved by only having a handful of questions to answer in any given lesson. I just want her to have an alternative version of math since I don't think Khan drills enough. But she so loves the Khan. So we shall see. I am going to work with Olivia through Life of Fred and then I ordered a Seton 2nd grade math workbook to give her extra practice where I don't have to sit with her. Just drill.

In reading, I am sitting with Olivia while she reads through the primary Pathway readers. I have been told that in 7th or 8th grade, they turn into anti-Catholic screeds, but the early grades are sweet stories about a family where it is normative for children to do chores and obey their parents and play with their siblings. So I like it.

With Grace, reading is a something of a discipline problem. If it's a book, she will read it to the exclusion of all life including sleep and meals. I don't have a solid program for her except to hand her an assortment of books and say, "Here, read this." And she will.

For Grammar, I decided to get Grace the Fix-It workbook from IEW. It is a program where you examine a story line-by-line so you get grammar in the real world and not just artificial sentences.

Olivia is going to use printouts from DailyGrammar.com. It is just a snippet of grammar a day to keep her in the habit. (This requires a printer.)

We have the first book of  the Memoria Press Cursive program that both girls have been hitting licks at for two years. We will now buckle down and actually work the program. I expect to have to get Book 2 in the spring. (Also need the printer because we only have one book.) In conjunction with the handwriting, I got them each an appropriate copybook. The second level book for Olivia and the Latin Cursive for Grace.

In social studies, I bought these map workbooks in Grades 2, 4, and 5 for them to practice geography and map reading.

So there we are.

My thought is that they will do math, reading, and grammar everyday and alternate handwriting and maps Monday through Thursday. I will also add some time for readalouds every day and I want them to write a little something about what we read once a week. They are also going to Grandma's on most Fridays to learn sewing and cooking.

The girls and I have talked and they have indicated that they would like a checklist to work from everyday. I need to create a template and then I will be able to actually plan weeks at a time instead of this catch-as-catch-can that has been our model these past few weeks.

Here we go.

Flailing

I was supposed to be on a schedule by now. I started the week with high hopes and my alarm set. My long term goal is 6:45, but as an interim step, I set my alarm for 7:15.

Monday morning came and the alarm sounded. I promptly hit snooze a time or two, but I was out of bed at 7:45. Not great, but not terrible. Monday proceeded decently. School happened.

Olivia was up sick on Monday night/Tuesday morning and I blew through my alarm and slept until 9am. I worked with Olivia on her subjects, but I have no idea what Grace did except not school. She had a doctor's appointment and that was the end of that day.

On Wednesday, we had a bank appointment in the morning and school was shot for the day. I did get a bunch of discount meat on sale at the grocery. Yay.

On Thursday, we had a friend over and school was shot for the day.

On Friday, the girls went to Grandma's and school was shot for the day.

We need more structure for schooling. I need to know what we are going to do before the day starts instead of just flying by the seats of our pants everyday. If I have to make them wait on me, I lose them. Sometimes they leave mentally. Sometimes I turn around and they are out playing in the street. Read-alouds have fallen right out of the day. I want to print out activities for them, but by the time I get to the computer with the printer, Marian is usually napping. The printer is right next to where she sleeps and there is not an option to move anything. Getting upstairs is harder than I thought it would be. I need to have everything printed before the day starts. I guess I should do a mass printing over the weekend to be ready for the entire week. That means I need to figure out where to keep this stuff until they need it. I need to carve out school planning time.

I have not moved forward at all in the kitchen project since I burned the skin off my hands a week ago. Not because I am waiting for my hands to heal, they are just fine. I still need to clean the stove and the closet under the stairs and the pantry. But somehow the times I think I am going to move on in the kitchen just don't seem to happen. I have achieved the level of keeping the sink and countertops relatively clean and clear, but can't seem to move to the next level yet. The kitchen floor is tragic.

I have not taken over the meal planning or cooking yet. This needs to happen. Like this weekend. I cannot function when I have to decide what to make on the spot. I need to know ahead of time otherwise we will eat spaghetti sauce out of a jar every night of the week. This means I have to carve out time to meal plan.

Laundry is behind. I have figured that two loads a day all week keeps us up-to-date with the laundry and yet I am behind on the laundry.

The alarm is helping me get out of bed before 8am, but I still haven't gotten up as early as I would like. Mostly because I am not going to bed early enough. Because? Because I am awake at night and nothing is making me go to bed. I don't think anything will ever change me feeling energetic at night and stupefied in the morning. I move so slowly in the morning. I putter around, barely thinking, and do the things that must be done, and then, before I know it, it's lunch time. It seems like as soon as I get finished with all the things that have to be done, it is time to cook another blasted meal and everything gets paused for two hours.

I have sketched out a rough draft of a schedule that I need to refine and finalize and print on card stock. Card stock means I am serious. Right? We must find a rhythm to our days. And, like it or not, I am the one who must set the tempo.

I feel like I have been dropped into a compressed timeline where regular people would have had years to develop a routine and rhythm and coping skills. I am simultaneously trying to learn to efficiently keep house and clean and manage four children and manage myself without a dictated schedule and learn how to cook and homeschool two kids at once. I don't really have years to learn this. It has to happen relatively quickly. I know it is unreasonable to expect to be an expert a month into it, but right now I am flailing.

Housecleaning Follies

I have kept it no secret that one of the reasons I was the one who was chosen to go out and earn a salary is because housecleaning is not my forte. My standards are high; my technique is amateur; my working tempo is largo. It is difficult for me to walk away unless perfection reigns. Perfection never reigns so I perpetually feel behind and substandard and spend an eon getting there.

It just so happens that late last week, I decided our microwave and stove needed thoroughly degreased and cleaned. I don't have a great before picture. Pretend this is it:

I have a history with cleaning microwaves. When I took time off of work before Marian was born, I desperately spent two hours cleaning every crevice of our microwave after I had cried bitter tears over the fact the midwife was going to see our dirty microwave. This was the sum total of my nesting activity.

I put together a cleaning solution of vinegar and dishsoap, zapped it in the microwave, and commenced with scrubbing every surface of the microwave, starting at the top. Order of operations, of course. I soaked a washcloth and worked until I needed to rinse and resoak the washcloth. Repeat until my bowl of solution was empty and then mix up some more. As I worked, I kept remarking that the vinegar was burning my hands. I would rinse my hands in some water and then soldier on.

After working for 90 solid minutes, I had to quit, but I sadly was not done. Here is the microwave in its sad, half finished condition.

The grate left soaking in the sink:

This grate vexes me. There is grease in there. I see it. It needs to be scrubbed away. It won't dissolve on its own. My fingers are too big to get in there. I know it is still dirty. I *know* it is. I don't need to spend multiple hours figuring out how to clean what I cannot reach, right? Right?

The next day and the next, I could not finish the job. Then a strange thing began to happen: my hands began to peel. I may or may not have inadvertently given my hands a chemical peel with the vinegar. My skin may have been peeling so badly that it may or may not have been referred to as "hand dandruff."

I learned my lesson. Soaking bare skin in soap and vinegar for over an hour is maybe not a good idea. I decided I needed kitchen gloves. At the grocery, I picked up a fashionable pair. On sale!

Now I could finish the job!

I scrubbed for probably another hour. Dave could smell the vinegar wafting out of the house as he drove by on the lawn mower. I broke off the lightbulb underneath as I unscrewed it to change it out. After a while, I deemed the job 'good enough.' It is not perfect. The lightbulb base needs removed and replaced. There is still grease in the grate that I cannot reach, but I will not make perfect the enemy of good. I consider the microwave finished.

Isn't it beautiful! I probably spent three hours working on it. Sigh. I never claimed efficiency, but it is clean.

So I regaled a friend with the tale of the epic microwave cleaning and she wondered exactly how much vinegar I was using. I showed her my bowl that I filled with vinegar solution multiple times in the course of the job.

After regaining her ability of speech, she told me I should just spritz it on with a spray bottle, let it rest a minute, and then wipe it up. That I shouldn't need more than a 1/4 cup of vinegar to get the job finished. Apparently using a quart of vinegar to clean a microwave is overkill. Um, oops?

And now I know.

The New Normal

It has been four weeks since I was at work. I promised myself I would not try to impose any kind of schedule for four weeks. I would not impose a bedtime. I would not set an alarm. I would not force the school planning. We would do a little math and a little reading every day.

People ask how homeschooling is going and I mumble about a soft start. My focus has been on piddling and cleaning the house.

Day by day, I have awoken without an alarm, done a bit of schooling, done a bit of cleaning, stayed up as late as I cared to, and basically done what I wanted. Wow, we need a schedule.

Oh, how I wish I was a morning person! The truth is I struggle to be functional in the morning. I wake up groggy even when I have had plenty of sleep. I have known this about myself for a long time (forever), but I had hoped it was just a remnant of sleep deprivation. It's not. I hoped coffee would fix it. It doesn't. Left to my own devices, I am dressed and ready to face the day at about 11:30am, just in time to fix lunch. The day evaporates. If I could run on my own schedule, it wouldn't be a problem, but the children need me to stop spending half the morning staring into the middle distance. I need to establish our new normal.

The first step is making myself somewhat functional in the morning. I am never going to be one to jump up at the day, but there are things I can do to ease the day into motion instead of wondering what happened to it. Through some trial and error in discovery, here are some things I need to do to make my mornings work:

1. An established bedtime. Going to sleep whenever is just pushing my day around. I need to be off the computer by 10pm to give my brain time to shut off so I can go to sleep around 11pm.
2. Set the morning alarm. Sob. I still need an alarm in the morning, but I can set it reasonably and not the crazy early of worklife. I am thinking 6:45am might be a good wake up time.
3. I need to say morning prayer before I do anything else. When I say I'll get back to it, I don't. Ever.
4. I need to get dressed before I leave my room. Pajamas are a cozy way to let the morning slide right on by. Even when I plan on showering later in the morning, I still need to get into regular clothes as soon as possible.
5. Contacts are required. There is something about having my glasses on that makes it hard for me to focus. It isn't that I can't see, although the fuzzy periphery might have something to do with it, it is that glasses signal rest time to my mind and I follow suit.
6. A time limit on the morning Internet. Due to my previous work habits, I am very capable of spending hours refreshing the Internet. I need a hard stop time and make myself abide by it.
7. Shoes. I don't feel like I can work without shoes on. The shoes need to be put on immediately after my Internet time is over.
8. Breakfast. This meal cannot be pushed to whenever. We need a time we will not pass before eating. Nobody functions well on low blood sugar and late meals. I want the breakfast prep to start around 8am. 

So those are my first goals for our new schedule. Most of them center around disciplining myself in order for the day to flow. If I am ready to go in the morning, I think the rest will be easier to tackle. The alarm will be set on Monday morning.