Mission Accomplished

Succeeded in re-crowding my life, without actually becoming a walking person.  Slightly inaccurate: I am in fact doing 100% normal, un-aided walking for the amount that I actually walk. Which is very little.  But using my special powers of over-commitment, I have managed to re-fill my recently emptied life, with all new low-to-no-walking activities.  Ha.   Told you I would.

–> So I suppose it’s no surprise that my desk is covered in chaos again. Gotta tackle that one first thing tomorrow morning (yes, when I am also scheduled to instruct my children, per that whole ‘homeschooling’ thing), because the miraculously-endowed organizational system is still functioning, but it will suffocate if I don’t rescue it soon.

So that’s the update.

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Another really funny story below, but only for people who know the routine with bizarre ailments.  The rest of you go read something normal.

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Ha, so get this: Weakness in the right leg has resumed, and I’m guessing it’s doing so with relative vigor.  But I *have no idea how bad it is*, because of course the injured foot means I barely use the leg anyway.   So that’s going to make an interesting discussion with a medical professional.

(Normal people I told you not to look.  Bad normal people. No biscuit.)

Silence Update: Reduced Silence

Not writing doesn’t seem to working out so well.  Tentative return to blogging, 80% chance of unpredictability.  No change on the decrepitude front since last update. Will observe my desk is fairly clean, and very functional.  Quite pleased with that little miracle.

Time for Silence

(From this morning’s first reading).  That time is upon us again.   Hands have gone AWOL, and typing is right out.  My review of The Salvation Controversy is written and awaiting a final edit with hyperlinks, so I will get that up when I can.  (Update: It’s up!) Otherwise, we’re on blog silence.

Update 10/14/10 – hands are 98% better, so long as I take it easy on them.  Yay.  But not typing much these days, still need to limit that.  Foot, btw, is still doing its wonky thing.  See doc again Tues for new ideas.  Meanwhile, school has never been better.  No really.  Turns it out homeschooling works better if you both stay *home*, and do *school*.  Go figure.

[Editing to clarify: It was my much more sensible co-catechist who proposed we do the journals.   Needed to give credit for brilliance where it really belongs.  I was too chicken to mention it myself.]

Peeking in to say an enormous thank you to Dorian Speed, whose  Journal thing we copied wholesale with the 5th graders.  First night of class.  Went beautifully — kids had something to focus on during those first fifteen minutes of class when everyone is still trickling in, and for me as a catechist it was a privilege to have this way of connecting to each student.  Our choices for topics were:

1) What’s on your mind this week?

2) What prayer requests do you have for us?

3) What questions would you like answered this year in Religious Ed.

I will concede we’ve been spoiled — pretty much someone stacked our class with all the best kids.  (Well, okay, I looked at the roll and the other 5th grade class got some of the best kids too.)  Once again proving my end-of-year fear wrong: I always wonder how my next year’s class can possibly hold up to the standard set by the current year.  But they do.  Every time.  Man I love that job.

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H/T to Domenico Bettinelli for this happy little video:

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Upcoming on the blog:

-I owe you my review of the St. Francis DVD from Tiber River.  Draft is on my PC, waiting for me to do a final edit and stick in the necessary links.  Coming soon.

-Still reading The Salvation Controversy by Jimmy Akin. (That’s my current Catholic Company review title.)  So far it’s a recommended read, if you are the target audience.  I have a spare copy, btw, if you are local and a real-life friend and would like to borrow it.  A spare because, of course, I lost the first one, and had to order a replacement.  I assume that was all part of the Divine Will.  In a chaos-redeemed kind of way.

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Foot news: No change.  Getting about 20 min/day of walking out of it, and then it’s all over.  More or less, depending on everything else.  Have a call in to the referral lady to get an appointment with the foot guy.

–>  Discovered that my girls can be very helpful and cooperative in the grocery store when I actually need them to be.  (Well, Squeaky just likes to ride in my lap.)  So that’s nice.  Taught Aria about unit pricing.   Been a little overwhelmed other wise, and must tell you that my attention to blogging responsibilities is about representative of the rest of my life.  Ah.  Go watch that video again.

Foot update: Big Fluffy Sneakers

Apparently I had a fashion problem.

Doctor dx’d me with ‘metatarsalgia’, which is the technical term for “your foot hurts, and if it doesn’t feel better in a month, we’ll try to find out why”.    (Fair enough: ruled out a visible break or some other quickly-diagnosable ailment, and since the other choices require massively expensive and complicated testing to detect, makes sense to see if the time-n-rest cure doesn’t fix the whatever-it-is.)

Meanwhile he referred me to his shoe guy (that is, the store where my athlete-physician shops himself), who specializes in picking out big fluffy sneakers that take the pressure off whatever part of your foot tends to get pressurized.

Wow.  Magic.  Went from “No way I’m walking on this thing, BAD BAD BAD” to, “Hey, look at me, I can limp and it’s okay!”.

So maybe some more days of giant fluffy sneakers and I’ll graduate to regular walking.

Happy happy.

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(Just in time to really get my nerd-mother look fully-formed before my children turn into teenagers.  Would be tragic to miss out on the maximum adolescent-embarrassment potential.  Maybe soon I’ll develop some kind of disorder that requires me to buy all my clothes at the same shop as my doc.  Or maybe I already do that, and don’t even know it . . .)

Quiet at the Castle

In working on the homeschooling book (still working on it), I begged Karina Fabian to tell me about her experiences with homeschooling versus school-schooling.  She obliged me despite a crazy-busy spring, and this is the crux of what she shared: “I’m a better mother when my kids go to school.”

Me?  I’m a better mother when I’m not allowed to walk.

Started back to school this week, and conveniently I came down with some kind of foot-ailment on Saturday.  While awaiting diagnosis the nurse advised me to keep my weight off the thing, and I agree — what with the bit about how it only hurts when I use it, hehe.

–> Turns out I’m a better teacher and a more attentive, involved mother, when I’m not sidetracked trying to do everything else other than the heart of my vocation.

Reminds me of that twinge of dissappointment when the lights go back on after an evening power outage.   The house flips back to life with buzzing and beeping, you blow out the candles, and family members gathered by the fireplace disperse to their preferred distractions.

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These moments of forced-quiet are an illusion.  Lacking electricity, there’s no reason to think the SuperHusband and I wouldn’t assemble plenty of lower-tech conveniences and distractions.  Blessed with a permanent injury, I’d figure out how to re-mobilize and get just as busy as ever.   I score in the 99th percentile for the ability to think up new hobbies.

But for now, I’m enjoying the quiet.  In a wishing-I-could-grow-up-to-be Bill Shannon kind of way.  Incorrigible.  Utterly incorrigible.

Milkshakes all around . . .

. . . is what we get if I pull a would-have-drowned child out of the pool, and she gets an all-clear on the lung check afterwards.  Yay!  A certain mother needs to work off a  little adrenaline now . . .

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In the meantime, back-to-back interesting posts by Eric Sammons:

Just say ‘no’.  Hands down this is my number one spiritual problem (in addition to all the others).  And of course he posts these timely words just when I’m trying to goof off on the internet to unwind a little, heh.

And then, 100 things? I’ll consider it, if I get to count all my books as a single item.  Otherwise, I guess it’s 99 books and a toothbrush?  I think everything else maybe I could borrow from someone.

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Funny story about self-denial and materialism: SuperHusband and I are in the market for a new motor vehicle.  Exact nature TBD, but we’re leaning towards a commuter-mobil.  There’s about $5K difference between the car he really wants, and a less-expensive, more practical car that would (we think – haven’t test-driven yet) do everything we’d expect from the dream car.   Poor guy, he’s checking out vehicles on the internet last night, and his wife leans over and says, “$5k would build a lot of houses in Haiti.”

Or, part of a hospital?  Investigate this one, if you are looking for a worthwhile cause.  No personal connection on my part, so do your own due diligence.

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Meanwhile, a funny story from the child-not-drowning incident:

So I’m watching my preschooler from the sidelines at my local community pool, because I am one of those mothers who lifeguards her own children even when there is one lifeguard on duty and three others giving swim lessons nearby, and I see Squeaky go under.  So I walk in and pull her out — real easy, because we’re in the shallow end, and she is right next to the wide concrete staircase so it’s just step in, pick up child.  Hurray.

[Yes, my child was literally one step from where she could have stood up and been fine.  But she stepped down to where it was just over her head, panicked, and didn’t think “oh, just walk up the stairs”.]

I carry her up out of the water, do my check to make sure she’s okay (she is), and I’m standing there with her swim instructor from the previous hour’s lessons,  who had come over both because she saw the incident and because she had some papers to give me.  Then the lifeguard on duty looks over in our direction; the whole incident couldn’t have lasted ten seconds, probably more like three or five — and he didn’t see it happen.

[No fault here: there was nothing for him to hear – neither my daughter nor I made any noise through all this — and this one guy has an entire pool of swimmers to watch.  No one can physically keep their eyes on that much space and that many people simultaneously.  The best a lifeguard can do is scan continuously, and hope he sees what he needs to see when he needs to see it.]

So the poor guy sees me there standing soaking wet in my street clothes, realizes something is amiss, and comes over to speak to me.  And his brain has not connected all dots yet, so it falters on the what-happened-here process:   He kind of hestitates, then says, “Um, we’re supposed to wear swimming attire in the pool.”

I assured him I don’t *usually* swim in leather shoes.

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Have a good week.  And no combox pile-on about my lifeguard.

No news is good news on this end. Castle residents are mostly healthy, house-cleanout is progressing nicely, and VBS starts tomorrow. Violated my sewing moratorium to put together some Roman garb for myself, as the ol’ “Bible Voyage” will be wandering the Roman Empire with the Apostles.   Need to get my special-effects in order for a shipwreck on Tuesday.

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Tara Livesay has a guest post by Amie Sexton, looking at inter-racial adoption. Go read it right now.

I had much more to add, but got my finger stuck in the door on the way into Mass this morning.  Not so bad an injury, but it hampers the typing.  So you are spared my deep thoughts.  Happy Sunday.

Utterly Immersed

It’s all good.  But regular life has been trumping internet lately.  Here’s a quick rundown, in the event that I manage to finish this post before something else presents itself:

Contagious Illness Unit Study at an end? I’m hopeful.  No one has developed an illness in over a week.   We even managed to go camping over the weekend – yay!  Pretty much been a record year as far as minor-but-disruptive afflictions go.  That’s been my number one reason for internet silence; not so much a case of too-ill-to-post, as that caring for whichever family member has the latest strain of plague sucks up just that extra bit of time and energy.  So we’ve held together the larger part of normal life, but some of the extras had to give way.  Gives me lots of fodder for the homeschooling book . . .

. . . On which I am making progress. Albeit more slowly than I imagined.  But it is a much richer work for all the real-life enrichment I’ve been handed.  And very fortunately I have amassed a small group of people I can’t bear to disappoint, so it will get written.  At this point I’ve got the bulk of an outline (quite detailed), one lousy opening chapter that needs to be scrapped, and one middle-area chapter that is getting full but still has a few more salient points to cover.  (Topic: Housekeeping.  And those who know me will assure you, when I say I am writing a book about realistic expectations while homeschooling, you can be entirely confident my housekeeping chapter will not set any unobtainable standards.)

Speaking of which, I am trying to clean out the house.  Just way too much stuff.  (All good – but more of it than we have house.)  I finally figured out that all the cool things my neat, clean, clutter-free friends give as hand-me-downs?  If I want a house like theirs, that stuff is the first to hit to the road.  Luckily, such friends understand the need.  The place does look better, but still needs a lot of work.

But I’m hopeful, because wow my yard is awesome. In addition to contagious illnesses, we’ve also been doing a gardening unit study this spring.  SuperHusband built us a privacy fence, effectively giving a real back yard to our corner lot that was previously 90% front yard.  I had been working on cleaning up that front yard anyway (mostly out of love for my neighbors, who have suffered long enough looking at our debris), and then after the fence went up we put in some blueberries and figs for landscaping in front of that, and meanwhile had been making headway on vegetable gardening and general civility in what is now the back yard.  It is all very cottage-y, in an I-like-tall-grass-and-trees-the-birds-plant kind of way, but we’re pretty happy with it.  And the front yard I’m trying to keep moderately civilized.  Don’t mind the woodpile.  (A real functioning woodpile — we will burn it next winter.)  So all that to say: if I can tame the yard, perhaps I can tame the house as well.

Latin Watch: Verb conjugation is killing us.  Same story in French.  Oh, we’ll get through.  But the pace has definitely slowed to a crawl.  Mr. Boy and I were checking his homework on Verbix today, and I clicked on the Kreyol  option just to have a look-see, and we observed that conjugating is much easier in that language. Mr. Boy immediately wanted to change his course of study.  I told him not ’till he has plane tickets to Haiti .  (Hint: We have no such plans.)  And plus he’d need to know French anyway, so no getting out of it.    But I will observe that the girls are absolutely loving learning ASL, which is, it should be noted, a non-conjugating language.  I begin to see a pattern.

Concerning my own education . . . I finished the Sex Book. (This one).  Good book, recommended for those who fit the target audience.  I will get a review up here shortly.  Summary: I’m glad I signed up for it, and it’s one I’ll be keeping on the shelf for my own reference.   An interesting counterpoint has been reading Love and Control by Cardinal Suenens (The Newman Press, 1961), a find from the parish library.   I’m about halfway through.  Timeless observations, if, again, a little more theoretical than a married lady might hope.  On the other hand, one doesn’t want one’s clerics getting too terribly practical concerning the details of the workings of someone else’s sacrament.

Also culled from the parish shelves:  The Rule of Saint Benedict. Wow, you should read it.  Surely it’s on the internet somewhere.  The translation I had was very readable, quick to digest, and makes a great combo-pack of spiritual and historical insights.  And as it happened, I also brought home St. Odo of Cluny (Sheed and Ward, 1958), which is a translation of the Life of St. Odo, written by his contemporary John of Salerno.  Total page-turner.  I kid not.  One fascinating vignette after another, constantly making you wonder what zany anecdote is coming next.   Lots of pillaging norsemen and monks who are fed up with eating fish.  Just finished the segment on the armed standoff between a house of slacker-monks and the party of civil and church authorities trying to force the foundation to accept Odo as their reforming leader.   Definitely need to read the rule of St. Benedict first in order to understand the action.

That’s enough news for now. I’ll check back with that book review. Happy June.

Mater et Magistra (et other news first)

The big news first: I’m out of the hole! Yay.  I can do things like check my e-mail, or water the garden without getting out of breath.  Actually the mowed the lawn Monday, which involves more miracles than we need discuss here. (But, note to self: When in doubt, marry a man who can maintain heavy machinery.  One more reason we call him the SuperHusband.)  Was back to fighter practice yesterday after about a month off — won’t say I was 100%, but wow it sure cheers me up, getting out and trying to stab people for a little while.

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Now for our topic: Mater et Magistra magazine. My first issue arrived right when the baby was up with croup — she and I went out in the early morning hours to fetch the newspaper, and look, I’d forgotten to check the mail!  New magazine!  Which said 3-year-old immediately claimed, and for the first few hours I was okay with that.  Until she hid it in her room someplace to keep it safe.

But we eventually cleared up that little misunderstanding, and wow, I had no idea.  This is a great magazine!  Written by actual homeschooling parents (as the better homeschool magazines are), the tone is very practical and honest.  When you read an article encouraging you to respond to God’s grace, or persevere through a struggle, it is written, you discover, by a person who openly admits to dirty laundry.

The articles in this issue ran the gamut — encouragement, general practical tips, specific study ideas, and lots of reviews.  The style is Catholic Lay Intellectual — this is the place where all the catholic nerd moms gather to compare notes.   So think of articles a little longer, a little deeper, than what you find about anywhere else in the publishing-for-parents industry.

The Catholicism seems to me to be just normal catholic Christianity — I didn’t detect a particular strain to one extreme or another, other than a sincere desire to follow God.  In my opinion, a non-catholic who was comfortable with Catholic-y stuff might also enjoy the magazine.

The format is small — half-size, like a Reader’s Digest — and very reflective-feeling.  Lots of words, smallish print, no hype, a few pictures, mostly traditional artwork.  Interior is all black-and-white or black-and-special-color-for-the-unit-study-insert.  (Curiously: the color scheme and general format remind me a bit of this blog . . . I suppose if you hate this place, you might hate looking at the magazine, too.)

This is a small, low-budget production.  But a really nice magazine.  If you like to read here, or places like Darwin Catholic, Eric Sammons, or anything by Amy Wellborn, and you homeschool, you will probably like Mater et Magistra.  Highly recommended.  Maybe ask someone to give you a subscription for Mother’s Day?