What We're Learning, 1st Edition...

My friend over at Grateful for Grace is starting a new link-up called "What We're Learning." It's fun to read her list, which has both silly & serious, and then to go and read the stuff people have blogged and linked up with. (clearly, grammar is not on my WWL list today!) Being a good friend, I can't resist joining the party.

We're learning lots of things at our house this week.....

....algebra. Solving for x and all that. Side-by-side white boards on the couch, student and teacher, working through the problems in the book. Together. We've turned math from something that used to involve shouting and crying and fussing and frustration (from both the teacher and the student, sadly) to something that we collaborate on, our mutual enemy and together we team up and conquer this stuff. It's amazing, really.

....the alphabet. Yes, The Adventurer is still learning the basics. That each little scribble has a name and makes a particular sound (or two or three....). That if you string enough scribbles (letters) together, they make words. His penmanship is fantastic, and he can perfectly print every single letter. We're working on recall, and I'm confident he'll get it. Soon. I hope. And, no, the irony of teaching & learning both algebra & the alphabet is not lost on me.

....context clues. The Artist is reading a free version of Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the Kindle, and the formatting is sometimes off just a bit, so that some words show up as nothing but upside down question marks and fractions and dots. He asked me about it the first time he encountered this oddity, and I helped him decipher what that word was meant to be, and then he mentioned that this funny mix of symbols shows up here & there and what should he do? I explained to him about poor editing jobs and told him he'd just have to guess based on what word he thinks best fits in the empty space. He hasn't asked again, so I guess he's getting it.

....the necessity of giving things a fair shake. This one's me. I was all set to boycott the movie The Hunger Games, as I hadn't read the book and had no desire at all to read or see anything that involves kids sent into an arena to fight to the death. None. It just seemed too horrific. But The Chemist looked me in the eye with that gaze that means, "I'm having trouble recognizing you right now..." and asked me what was my biggest criticism of those who blindly boycotted Harry Potter. Silence. He waited. I said I'd download the book and he grinned. Because my biggest complaint is that people would boycott a book they'd not even done the courtesy of reading.

Read it. Decide for yourself if it is okay for you & yours. But do not just judge it based on what someone else tells you to believe about it; do not just latch onto one aspect of a book, any book, and declare it inappropriate until you've read the whole of it and can decide for yourself.

So I borrowed book one from the library, finished it in one gulp and immediately bought a 3-in-1 version for the Kindle so I could keep going, and just this morning I finished the epilogue. I'm still sorting out whether the horrors in the series are the sort of thing I need to shield my boys from, or throw the light on full force. I've already acknowledged that mostly my boys won't be terribly undone, like their mom, at the scenes of psychological warfare; the scenes that twist a knife in my gut as I ache for Katniss will, I think, ricochet around my boys without inflicting any damage. I'm still deciding for sure, though.

....to let them grow up. This ties in with that last one, as I search my heart and soul and the hearts of my boys, or what they let me see of them, to decide when to offer them The Hunger Games. It comes in small doses, as I convince The Chemist that our oldest son, 14.5 yrs old, is old enough to walk to tennis lessons alone. Even if we both see the same small boy who never wanted to leave our sides, reality stares back at me, at us, in a teenager thrilled to be granted this tiny freedom. It's hard to pretend he's still a little boy when I have to look up into his eyes.

....to cook. Okay, I know how to cook, more or less. But we're doing a group class with some friends of ours, here at my house, once a week. Every week I go onto Jamie Oliver's Home Cooking website and print off a recipe and matching skill sheets. Each week my kitchen fills with 4 kids learning to chop and slice and peel and muddle & bang their way around a kitchen, learning to cook. Then they eat and laugh and goof off and I smile to know we're giving them skills that will last them through life. More of that growing up bit.

Not much on the silly side from me this week, but I'm sure my friend over at GfG won't mind. Someone has to be serious sometimes. Not sure I'll manage to link up every week, but I'll try. Go and read her stories and the rest; they're much funnier than mine.

We've got learning to get back to.

Some Changes, And Some Vacation Pics

I realize I've been absent more than present lately, but I've been battling some serious writer's block these days. I feel less and less like I have anything worth saying, or rather, anything that I haven't already said. For a time there I blogged 6 days a week, and while I didn't maintain that pace the entire 5 years I've been blogging that's still an awful lot that I've already covered here.

I no longer see Brazil through the eyes of a newly arrived small town Texas girl, and so the things that would likely still be interesting to my readers simply don't jump out and grab my attention the way they once did. For me, it's old news that I can't flush toilet paper down the toilet. That I can buy pineapple that already has the shell (skin? husk?) removed, and it's still cheaper than pineapple in the US.

Our lives have settled into normal, and posting pictures of the boys in the swimming pool is only cute the first 100 times, ya know? Yet that is how we spend our days -- school work, swimming, Legos & video games. Not a lot of stuff to talk about there.

I don't cook with recipes, so I can't post any great food ideas for you. The Mendon Foodie would laugh her head off if I tried, anyway, even if my food doesn't contain nasty cream-of- soups. Plus I only cook about 5 things really, I just mix & match. My kitchen routine is like those travel ensembles you used to be able to buy. You know the ones, the two or three bottoms + two or three tops and the idea was you mixed & matched what piece you wore together so that you could pack light but still not wear the same three outfits over & over again. My food is like that. A handful of main dishes, a handful of veggies/sides, and I mix them up so my family doesn't realize they're eating only 5 meals over and over and over again. So, a food blog is out.

I am starting to quilt and sew. But I'm only starting and while I'm sure I'll share here about my projects as I go, I don't have nearly enough talent to do tutorials or anything like that. Plus I don't want to limit myself to any one thing like that, really. Heck, just look at this post -- I titled it "changes & vacation pics" and so far I've talked about everything but. Time to get on topic....

Changes. The Writer finishes up 8th grade in a few months and the high school years loom ahead of us. I have always thought I'd home school all the way through; The Chemist has always wanted the boys to go to public school for high school. Being still in Brazil, neither of us gets what we want and instead we'll be using an on-line program for supplemental course work for 9th grade and then eventually switching to their full diploma program. This will allow The Writer to graduate from a Texas high school, with a class rank and everything, which may or may not help us as we try to convince colleges that our time in Brazil really was "temporary absence with intent to return to Texas" even though it's lasted, or will have by then, longer than the "usually 5 years or less." The thought of our Texan boys not being able to have in-state tuition when they attend Texas universities just sort of makes me sick and seems entirely unfair, so we're doing what we can to establish that we really do have every intent, and always have, of returning to Texas when our time in Brazil is over.

What that means for me.....a supervisory role, more of school counselor/advisor than teacher. Strange. Different. I'm not sure yet if it will be a comfortable role or not. But already we are looking ahead to adding The Artist to the on-line program as well, sometime in his middle school years. He finishes 5th grade this year and I'd not consider giving up teaching him but the program we've found seems like a really good one, the changing legal scene here in Brazil kind of worries me sometimes, and The Adventurer requires loads & loads & loads of one-on-one attention as I sort out the best way to get information into his head so that it stays there. Delegating the older boys instruction seems a logical way to address all of those issues and so starting in August or September we'll be doing something I never envisioned...using on-line school and text books for everything instead of the fun real books we've always used.

This coincides with some changes that our heretofore favorite curriculum company is making; changes I don't agree with, can't support, and wish to have no part of. It makes the parting easier, though it's not easy to leave behind a community that has supported me through many ups & downs in my life.

Moving on to the more fun topic of vacation pictures (and thank you for bearing with me as I ramble my way through this post....). We just returned from a few days back in Paraty, one of our favorite spots because it encompasses all the beauty of Brazil in one tiny little city. My dad & his family were here visiting; it was my dad's third visit but the first for his wife & their boys. I think everyone enjoyed themselves, I hope.

Here are some of the pictures they took -- in typical "this could only happen to me" fashion I managed to take a camera w/o batteries and had to spend the first while charging batteries, so took no photos of my own.

Dad & Me
He's not mad, he just doesn't smile for the camera.
At least, I hope that's it.
Also, The Adventurer nearly went over that ledge later, the one in the right on the photo.
One can never relax when he's around!

The Artist, doing what he does.
Every beach trip I end up with him in the sand building sand castles.
I so love this boy.  

The Adventurer, jumping into his father's arms.
Yes, that rock is shoulder high to The Chemist.
Yes, that water is waist deep.
Yes, it really is more than an arm's reach away.
The boy has no fear. Like I said, one can never relax. 

The Boys.
Left to Right: Artist, Writer, C1, C2 and Adventurer. 

typical beach scene in Brazil.
I think the yellow chairs with Skol emblem (a beer) will forever represent the beach to me.

Big waves at Praia Meio, at Trindad, a fishing village just south of Paraty.
That's The Writer in the foam; the big boys enjoyed jumping, body surfing & otherwise
being swamped by the huge waves out there. 

the four big boys -- The Writer, The Artist, C1 & C2.
I haven't checked with Dad yet for nicknames for their boys, so....

and us. 

I leave you with this, and promise to get back in the saddle and start writing regularly again now that I have apparently found my voice once more.