This all started when I dragged everything out of the hall closet to clean it. As you can see, I didn’t get very far. My cleaning quickly turned into a game of dress up.
I am currently reading The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. It is a memoir. (I am on a memoir kick right now and have read just about everyone recently published and if I haven’t read it I am probably on the waiting list at the library for it.) Anyways, it takes place shortly after WWII in Ireland. It is about a boy whose father is Irish and his mother is German and how difficult is was to grow up in Ireland when everyone in Europe was still hating all things German. To make a bad situation worse, his father will only let the family speak Irish (which hardly anyone in Ireland speaks) or German, which no one in Ireland speaks. They are strictly forbidden from reading anything English, listening to English music or playing with children who speak English. And I thought my parents were strict!
My kid is the kid who is kicking, screaming and crying at swim lessons. Yep, that’s us. We’re the ones you look sadly at and think, “Poor thing, I’m glad my kid’s not like that.” I never thought I would have a child who was so terrified of swim lessons, but I do. He LOVES the baby pool, but he is 4 and is getting a little too big to be splashing around with the babies. He has not always been this way, though. He loved swim lessons when he was a toddler and he even liked them when he was 3 when he had to get in the pool without me. Then, there was the fateful summer (last summer), when we had a teacher who thought it would be fun to roughhouse with the kids. Liam likes to roughhouse just as much as the next kid, but he completely respects the danger factor of water and realizes that maybe the pool is not the best place to roughhouse especially with a bunch of non-swimmers. She ruined him. THANK GOD we have an awesome swim teacher this year who somehow manages to get him in the pool and then manages to drag him away from the side of the pool so that he can actually be an active participant in the lesson. (She was even bold enough to grab him by the ankles as he tried to bolt on the first day. (Yep, it’s that bad.) She was still in the pool and he was on the side. Then there is Colm who gets upset when his swim lessons are over. He loves the pool! Maybe some of it will rub off on his big brother. 🙂 We only have to do this five more times and then lessons will be over for the season. Phew!
Whether you decide to homeschool your children, send them to public, parochial or private school, families do what they do because it works best for THEIR family. Okay, now to part where I vent. I was speaking to someone today who had enrolled her ten-year old son in a cake decorating class. When they got there he was the only boy and he refused to go in. I would say that is a pretty normal reaction for a boy that age. The mom, on the other hand, got mad at her son and told him he was behaving like a public school kid. WHAT??!!! Like I said before, families choose to school their children in a way that works for THEIR family. We are lucky that we live in a time and a place where we have those choices. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT use your choice to teach your children that your way is better and those other kids are just a bunch of sorry suckers. I have no tolerance for people who teach their children to hate or in any way look down at other people.
This is why everyone needs a sibling. Today was a rainy day and since we couldn’t go play outside they spent part of their morning using these blankets to dress up as ghosts, to wrap themselves up like burritos and to wrap each other up to the point where they both would fall over giggling.
I just turned in my last assignment of the summer. Yippee! I now, officially, only have four more classes to take which I will have finished by this time next year. So now I can relax and read what I WANT to read until mid-August when classes start up again.
My shower is going to finally be clean! The people who brought us those cute little scrubbing bubbles that run around your bathtub to get it clean have outdone themselves. They have come up with something that will clean my shower for me with the touch of a button. It hangs in your shower and you push the button with the cleaning stuff in it and shoots out everywhere and cleans the walls, the door-EVERYTHING! If your shower is already clean it will keep it clean and it if is not clean it will have it clean within a month. You can even go to automaticshowercleaner.com and get a coupon. I never thought I would be so excited about a cleaning solution.
It’s a volcano..can’t you tell? Liam decided today, out of the blue, that he wanted to make a volcano today out of bread and spaghetti sauce (for the lava). I decided what the heck, let’s do it. So we pieced together a volcano and he poured the sauce on top. We then added baking soda and vinegar and…kaboom…we had ourselves a volcano. He thought it was great so made another one with more baking soda and vinegar. He was pretty impressed with the whole thing, but now my driveway smells like vinegar.
We have had so much fun this past week with our extended family from New York; my oldest brother and his family came to visit us. Liam and Colm couldn’t get enough of them and the girls were so good with them. They played Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Dragon Tales, went swimming, played hide-and-seek and read stories together. We really look forward to their visits since we don’t get to see them very often.
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Our chocolate experiment is working. I stole an idea from Family Fun magazine and we are enjoying the results. We love chocolate and we have had a lot of family members traveling recently, so we asked them to bring us back some chocolate. So far, we have chocolate from Brazil, Toronto, Spain and France. We are saving the wrappers and pinning the wrappers to a map so we can remember where they came from. I think we will also keep a chocolate journal so we can remember when we got them, who got them for us and what the chocolate tasted like.