mamagames

66 Pages, or Why Blogging is a Flattering Mirror

August 1, 2012 By mamagames

Last night, I had a conversation with Leigh about my scrapbook pages for the month of July, and the conversation swirled around to blogging, and so here I am, blogging a bit again.

The conversation went something like this: I really have enjoyed making our digital scrapbook pages lately – in fact, I made sixty-six for July 2012 alone – one or two a day, with as many as seven on days that we had very special events. Leigh told me she was impressed with how much we did in July, and I told her that I really felt like we hadn’t done much, but had honestly thought that we had way too many slug-around days with the oppressive heat and humidity. But when I looked over those 66 pages amassed at the end of the month, I realized that we really had done a lot of interesting things, and that even the most sluggish days had moments of joy, or peace, or wonder.

Before FB was big, I blogged nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day when things were exciting. I used the blog as a way to keep in touch with friends and family who were far away, and also as a way to make new friends who had similar interests. Now, FB mostly fulfills those roles, so why would I keep up with the blog too?

I remember, though, that I felt like I did SO MUCH MORE in those years of daily blogging. I don’t think I did, really, beyond one or two projects that I decided to do just to join in with a blog party. Blogging is a very flattering mirror, though: reading back through it can remind me of just what we do accomplish even on our sluggiest days.

How hard can it be to keep up with a blog, and FB, and daily scrapping, and homeschooling three kids? Couldn’t be that much harder than just FB, and scrapping, and homeschooling, and wouldn’t that extra, flattering reflective surface be worth it? Let’s see.

Filed Under: meta, scrapbooks

Clinging to My Priorities

July 5, 2012 By mamagames

It’s the one time of the year when I think – yes, maybe one day I will look back and say we didn’t do enough sit-down math and handwriting worksheets, maybe we spent too many hours of our lives out exploring and enjoying ourselves. Yep, it’s end-of-the-year assessment time. I think every homeschooling family I know gets a little rattled at this time of year about whether they’ve done enough.

Don’t worry: I have clung tightly to my priorities and have been making sure the kids still get their many hours of park and/or pool time every day, plus plenty of extra time added in for cloud-watching, afternoon napping, thumb-twiddling, duct tape creating, and general deep thinking in the guise of woolgathering.

Filed Under: method madness, scrapbooks

Happy Fourth of July!

July 4, 2012 By mamagames

Picnics, parties, sprinklers, sun, games, friendship, fireworks… above all these, my favorite Fourth of July tradition is taking a picture of the two kids outside.

I love to see how they’ve changed over the years – and how they’ve stayed the same!

Filed Under: holidays, pictures, scrapbooks

Add-a-Square Blocks

July 3, 2012 By mamagames

To all my friends, collectors and lovers of esoteric educational equipment…

Have you ever seen these add-a-square blocks? I received two boxes of them recently that were being discarded from a local elementary school. I can see quite easily how to use them in similar ways to Math-U-See blocks or Cuisenaire rods, but they are different enough to be interesting to me.

I would love to know the history of these blocks (there’s no company or address listed on the boxes) and whether anyone every published any books or pamphlets of educational activities designed to be done with these blocks. The general answerer of odd questions, Google, has so far turned up empty (“add-a-square” is too general a name and comes up too often, even when searched together with other terms).

They’re delightful little hardwood squares with non-toxic paint (so says the side of the box) and we find them fascinating. So please, if you’ve seen them, or have other leads I could use to track them down, let me know!

Filed Under: good stuff, you tell me

Muffin Tin Monday for the 4th of July

July 2, 2012 By mamagames

The kids and I enjoyed a simple summer muffin tin lunch – blueberries, strawberries, blue corn chips, and a white chicken chili topped with white cheddar cheese.

KarateKid almost needs two tins now; the food in just one tin usually isn’t enough to satisfy him for lunch. I hate to abandon muffin tins – they have been so much fun over the years – but I’m not sure that filling 12 cups for my growing boy would be practical or nearly as cute! One tin holds plenty for a snack but sometimes I do still like to use them at lunchtime. What should I do?

Filed Under: muffin tin monday

Summer

July 1, 2012 By mamagames

For our family, summer means different things. A slew of birthdays and parties, the final performances of a play, a big change in routine, the tastes and sounds of a delightful new season, and the celebration and excitement of starting a new grade.

We learn year-round and so our official grades change when the academic year changes, for the purposes of filing our paperwork. It seems that every year, when July 1st rolls around, the kids (and I!) get so excited by the official new beginning that we dive into more purposeful learning for a few weeks. We’re certainly out-of-sync with the folks around us when we do this, but it’s so nice to be able to follow our own learning tides. It also gives us the feeling that by September, when our favorite parks and museums are empty again, and the weather is a little more tolerable, we’ll be ready for the tide to shift back to more time spent out and about. How do you enjoy summer?

Filed Under: method madness

Carnival of Homeschooling is Up at Home Spun Juggling

April 17, 2012 By mamagames

The Carnival of Homeschooling: The Balloon Dog Lessons is now up! Head over to find a lovely variety of homeschooling posts, including one of mine.

Filed Under: memes

Sesamoid Stress; or, The Lengths I Go To For Fashionable Footwear

April 15, 2012 By mamagames

For two weeks now, I’ve been wearing this on my right foot:

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

The story behind it is anything but simple. Three weeks ago today, I woke up with some pain and stiffness in the ball of my foot and my big toe joint. I figured this might have to do with how I slept or the changing weather – I know I’ve got some serious arthritis in my future, and I figured this might be an early taste. But as the day wore on, the pain got worse instead of better. By that night, I could hardly sleep. My foot was so sensitive that even my husband pulling the sheets across my body would wake me up, and it would take me at least an hour to get even close to dozing off again.

First thing the next morning, I went in to a walk-in clinic. Here’s where it got very frustrating: at the end of the exam, the doctor literally shrugged his shoulders at me and told me he had no idea what was wrong. He had done a standard x-ray and told me nothing was broken, and he had sent up some blood work to check for infection or possibly gout (which can be exacerbated by my blood thinner, so that was a tiny possibility) but he didn’t see any evidence for either of those. He did give me a prescription for painkillers, then sent me home to follow up in a few days if it wasn’t better.

That day and the rest of that week were pretty rotten. The pain didn’t get any better; I couldn’t go up and down stairs, so I had to catch what sleep I could on the couch. I could take painkillers every 4 hours, but only got a little relief for the middle two hours of each dose. The week is pretty much a blur of pain and exhaustion. I am so lucky that my kids are independent and loving: there were plenty of movie marathons and lots of computer games, but they kept each other company, stayed safe, clean, and fed, with only minimal input from me while their dad was at work.

Finally, that Friday morning, I got in to see a podiatrist, who told me after about 60 seconds that he was guessing it was a stress fracture of a sesamoid bone, and would do a specialized x-ray to help confirm. The x-ray showed that one of the sesamoids under my big toe is atrophic (never grew to full size) and that’s probably why it was prone to a stress fracture. The podiatrist finally gave me my life-saver: the oh-so-fashionable ortho wedge boot.

It has a huge foam heel, but the foam under the toes is quite thin The end result is that I can walk it it, putting only minimal pressure on the ball of my foot. Relief!

I did have to spend the next week mostly with my foot up, but I was getting much better sleep at night thanks to a different painkiller and some ice, and so my days were clearer too. I could spend my days chatting with friends online, reading books to the kids and playing card games with them. By the end of that week I was completely off crutches and used a cane for support, along with my trusty ortho wedge, of course.

This past week I’ve been driving again and going to more of the kids’ activities with them. I still have pain but can feel that it has improved week by week. Life is nearly back to normal… but I think matching shoes are still a couple weeks in the future! Til then, I have an adorable, clompy gait and the highest in unmatching footwear fashion.

Filed Under: illness and injury

Project Day

April 13, 2012 By mamagames

My kids participate in Navigators USA, a secular and inclusive scouting group. This year, most of the kids had some independent project to work on from October until April, with project plans that ranged from GoGoGirl’s least detailed “Eggs” to the bigger kids who had long checklists of steps they needed to complete to create their projects. Two kids made board games, one wrote a short story, another made a mask and wrote a poem, and yet another made a diorama of all the kids in the group fashioned as decorated eggs!

We had a great time participating and seeing the work our friends had done.

GoGoGirl’s project was to learn about eggs this year, and we included things like: looking at books about birds and eggs, learning to spell and write words about eggs, drawing pictures of eggs, decorating eggs, learning to cook scrambled eggs, dying eggs, making cascarones, and making pysanky.

For her presentation, she stood at the front of the room & talked with the group leaders about what she did and what she learned, and she showed a few pages of photos. She loved the chance to speak to the group!

KarateKid decided he wanted to research the wildlife of our home state. He read lots of books about wildlife in general, and these animals and the habitats we have in particular. Then he made construction paper cutouts of the animals (by tracing a computer printout) and wrote facts about the animals on the cutouts. He made a diorama, too, and when asked how he made it, he said, “Really, just a lot of hot glue!”

In the final week of his project, he even decided to write an origin story to explain how the timber rattlesnake got its rattle. I loved that little touch, because KarateKid has always been deeply drawn to mythologies of various kinds and adding this story in really made the project his.

The kids learned a lot this year – not just about their topics of interest but about time management, setting reasonable goals, and long-term planning, not to mention the careful use of glue guns!

Filed Under: navigators

One Cement Sidewalk, One Can of Condensed Milk Later

April 12, 2012 By mamagames

I’m taking the theory that a blow to the front of the head will undo a blow to the back of the head, and I’m running with it, so please don’t disillusion me here!

At our friends’ house yesterday, KarateKid tripped while playing outside and hit the back of his head on the corner of the cement sidewalk. Hard enough to hurt and make him come inside, but not hard enough to bruise, break the skin, make a lump, or even make him dizzy or give him a headache.

Still, I was keeping an eye on him. Mothers worry.

Just before bedtime last night, when I was finally starting to relax about the head injury, KarateKid was helping MechDaddy put away groceries when a can of condensed milk fell off the top of the fridge (who put it there?) and grazed KarateKid on the forehead. Hard enough to stun him, make him cry and shake for a few minutes, and give him a small goose egg, but not hard enough that a lightning-fast application of ice coupled with Phineas and Ferb on Netflix on the iPad (the ultimate in rare treats around here) couldn’t distract him.

He slept well last night, hasn’t complained about headache or any other scary symptoms today. We decided that whatever brains were jostled out of place by the sidewalk were put back into place by the condensed milk.

One cement sidewalk, one can of condensed milk later, he seems basically none the worse for wear. Mothers don’t get off so easily – I’m shaken up, and didn’t sleep last night.

Any good leads on padded suits or helmets for the less-than-graceful nine-year-old boy? How about full-body bubble wrap?

Even better, I’ll take advice on how to settle the nerves of the mother of the less-than-graceful nine-year-old boy!