That’s what my son gave as a reason why he had muted an icky, sparkly, and very very pink My Little Pony commercial.  It’s a girl commercial.  He doesn’t want to have anything to do with girl commercials, girl toys, girl media.  Yes, folks, we are now in THAT PHASE.  Should I brace myself?  Puberty’s next, right? Humor me and respond with a confident “no,” please, for the love of all that’s holy.

Between this and his recent desire to a) take up boxing and b) become a ninja pirate pirate ninja martial artist and c) asking if I’m able to teach him how to fish, I think I can safely surmise that DS9 is really seeking male role models right now.  My dad has agreed to step up to the plate and attend Cub Scouts with him every week and be his partner this year for all CubScout activities.  I think this will be good for DS9 and also good for Grandpa. 

The only problem with this is, my family does not do camping.

I don’t actually know a lot of Cubans who are great outdoors enthusiast, so maybe it’s cultural.  Generally speaking, as a culture, we just don’t think it’s charming to “rough it.”  Maybe Cubans have done too much “roughing it” back in the old country to think it’s charming and whimsical to do it for leisure here. 

I can understand that, but I am also an exception here.  I personally love Fort Wilderness in Orlando, FL.  I have camped there once and am planning another trip with a friend of ours in November.  She and I will sleep in one tent, and the kids will sleep in another. It’ll be fabulous, and DS9 and I are very excited.  My mother claims she also once camped there. In actuality, she shelled out nearly $200 per night to stay in one of the luxury resort log cabins, complete with room service that does your dishes for you while you’re out frollicking in the resort. Hey, the cabin was next to a bunch of trees! To her, that counted as “camping.” Hee!  I suggested to my parents that they join us on our next camping trip, and they in all seriousness declared me legally insane.

So, obviously, this does present a stumbling block for my Dad in his road to being a Scouting partner.  My parents don’t know anything about the Boy Scouts. They don’t know any actual scouts besides Ds9; when I initially enrolled him, they politely but uneasily inquired if it was some “military thing for kids.”  They took him to some archery scouting event last year and conceded the Cub Scouts certainly looked like ”a very wholesome group of children.” I suppose that’s a good first step (and it convinced them that I had not, in fact, enrolled my child in some distance-learning version of military school). But when I told my dad he had to help DS9 do things like tie knots, woodwork and outdoors activities, the look he gave me can only be described as “dumbfounded.” 

But you know what, we all gotta start somewhere, right?   I think it’ll do them both good. It is a trial by fire, but Abuelo is nothing if not a man of great perseverance, so they’ll be okay together.

The point is, I need to start finding other people to be formative influences to DS9.  I see him really yearning to have an older male with which to identify. DS9’s dad (who lives in Boston) has promised to come visit at least once every three months and email him twice a week from here on out, so hopefully that will help some, too, as will the martial arts and the boxing program.  If he needs more testosterone than that, well, heck, maybe he’d really love military school! 

I’m sure DS9 will stop thinking girls are icky in a couple of years, but for now, he is doing what psychologists would deem “identity formation,” and that’s okay – it’s just something for which I have no point of reference. And I have to say: it’s not my fault. I’m not one of those “That’s a GIRL TOY!” moms at all. I’ve always let DS9 play with whatever he wants. He still sleeps with the teddy bear his dad bought him when he was 8 months old; I don’t comment on this fact. He’s 9!  And with the AS/ADHD, emotionally and socially he’s probably a couple of years younger. I figure if he gets to be 23 years old and still snuggling with “Lovey,” I’ll start to worry then .  I don’t think harping on what are “boy things” and “girl things” actually teaches a child anything other than second guessing him or herself, and being circumspect when sharing with you what he or she enjoys.  They learn modeling in other ways. Why pile on the neuroses?

So the gender identification isn’t something I’ve shoved down his throat since day 1 or anything.  He’s just very much a “boy’s boy” and I’m very much a “girl’s girl” and the older he gets, the less equipped I become as a resource.

Having caught on, though, I’ve started weaseling things into our homeschool.  DS9, I have realized, likes stories about: animals, boys his age, or both.  In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson as a read-aloud – total failure.  I loved the story and couldn’t figure out why he didn’t, until it hit me: he hated it because it’s about a little girl. Ew. 

 With all this in mind, I did hand him a copy of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the Great Illustrated Classics adaptation, and not only is he whizzing through it, but he is no longer dragging his heels at narration. In fact, he breathlessly retells in vivid detail all the things that happen in the story after each chapter (and noted disapprovingly that Crusoe had African slaves in his early life - not cool, Crusoe, not cool!)  Past that, he actually – you might want to sit down for this part – wrote a voluntary essay summation of the last chapter.  That’s right. My dyslexic, dysgraphic, hates-to-write son volunteered to write a literature essay about Mr. Crusoe’s adventures, with which he surprised me (and how).  It was a pretty good essay, even, both in content and mechanics!  I might have gloated a little when I was sure no one was looking.

I definitely want him to give the G.A. Henty books of historical fiction for boys a try. They come really highly recommended, and there is absolutely nothing pink, sparkly or overtly GIRL BOOK!!! about them, so they should be a safe bet.

I don’t normally post funnies, but this eBay auction a friend of mine sent along made me laugh until I cry:

AUCTION: LOT OF POKEMON CARDS THAT MY KIDS TRIED TO SNEAK BY ME

I really do feel her pain.  I only have one child, as opposed to her six, but he has ADHD, so I think he counts as at least 3 kids all by himself.

I’m currently working on a for-pay article about this subject in depth, so I won’t give too much away here But I did want to post a list of the software that I use in order to avoid pirating software from Microsoft, Adobe, etc., but still getting everything I need done in my home office without spending a fortune on software.  It’s also perfect for homeschoolers on a shoestring who need wordprocessing capabilities.

I should mention that I’m running a (licensed!) copy of Microsoft Windows XP. I haven’t made the leap yet to Linux and I won’t have time to explore that alternative for a long, long time – my inbound customer service job depends on my running Windows XP to function, so that’s that. But for everything else, there’s a pretty good free alternative out there.

Instead of Microsoft Office, I use OpenOffice. I absolutely love and swear by OpenOffice. It allegedly doesn’t have “all the bells and whistles” of Office, but I haven’t noticed anything missing.  Considering it easily converts all its documents to Windows-native MS Office formats such as *.doc and *.rtf, it should be enough for 99% of users. Its counterparts to Excel, Word, PowerPoint and more also look and act a lot like MS Office. It is certainly enough for me, and I’m a business owner and professional writer – two categories of people that Microsoft swears can’t live without its products.

In lieu of Adobe Photoshop, I use GIMPShop for Windows, which is an open-source and completely legal clone of Photoshop. It has slightly more limited functionalityand the Windows port is a bit buggy, but again, I do professional graphic design and my results in GIMPShop and Photoshop are indistinguishable. It looks and acts almost identically to Photoshop – and it won’t run you thousands of dollars.

If it’s vector graphics you need as a replacement for Macromedia Freehand or Adobe Illustrator, I recommend the free vector graphic program InkScape. There’s not much that Illustrator and Photoshop can do that InkScape and GIMPShop can’t, and used in conjunction, they also easily replace Macromedia Fireworks.

Kick Quicken or Peachtree to the curb with AdminsoftAccounts, which does everything those programs do, both for personal finance and small business accounting, and FREE. It’s good for both personal and small business bookkeeping and accounting and it’s very easy to use.

If you’re just looking for an alternative to MS Money, Money Manager Ex is an excellent, robust, and fully-featured personal finance software that does everything it does – for free- and then some.

Finally, the best alternative to Macromedia Dreamweaver that I’ve found for Windows is Kompozer. Like OpenSource, it’s allegedly missing some “bells and whistles” that 99% of users (even professionals) won’t notice, and it’s quite a bit less pretty, but it’s extremely robust, powerful and user-friendly as a web authoring software. This very template was customized using it.

I use my regular phone line to make outgoing faxes, and for incoming faxes, I have a free dedicated fax number from eFax.

If you’re the type who needs contact management software for free, I recommend the XemiCo Address Book for the barebones approach. For a more robust sales or contact management solution, DataHouse Contact Manager keeps track of your contact history (and then some!) too.

As for a free alternative to MS Outlook, I swear by Mozilla Thunderbird, which allows you to train it to recognize spam. I love it. If you’re looking to replace MS Project, there’s OpenWorkbench, which is also excellent and in my opinion, equally functional.

This is honestly the tip of the iceberg. Look for my published article on this subject soon!  I’ll be posting a link on my blog once it’s done.

Yes, I do realize the irony of titling a post about whether or not a formal language arts curriculum is necessary with a quote from Hamlet, thankyouverymuch. 

Today we tried the first lesson from Rod & Staff’s Building With Diligence grammar and writing textbook for the fourth grade.  I’m not sure why we did so, to be honest. I just thought I’d give it a try.  With all the reading and the cursive handwriting program we’re doing this year already,  and factoring in the fact that DS9 is an excellent speller and intuitively good at grammar and syntax, I was going to forgo a formal language arts program this year. I figured, why fix what’s not broken?

However, after giving it some more thought, I think I’ve decided I’m going to work gently through the R&S book at his pace, just because I would like to do more formal writing and language arts courses next year from Florida Virtual School and don’t want the concept of formal composition to be totally alien to him.  R&S also has fun stuff like sentence diagramming, which my little visual-kinesthetic-spatial learner will get a big kick out of.  I’m going to go at his pace and we’re going to do the exercises as time permits. It is a lot of writing and some of the assignments, I feel, are excessive, so we’re just going to wing it – do some of them orally, do only half the questions, etc. But as it stands right now, we DON’T do any copywork, so I think it will be useful to have some part of our homeschool in which DS9 has to formally plot out sentences and, eventually, paragraphs and essays.

I’m also going to have him working through a basic spelling work book, Spelling Skills: Grade 4. I’m thinking we’ll do possibly 2 to 4 pages once per week. I’m thinking Friday, since that’s our low-key day. I never thought DS9 was really “the workbook type,” but recently he has expressed to me that he enjoys workbooks, particularly colorful ones, and these are colorful. I have the math workbook from the same publisher, but that, unlike the spelling workbook, is way too flimsy to be used as a primary text. It’s good for drill and review only.

I’ve also fallen belatedly in love with StarFall.  It is a completely free online phonics and reading curriculum for toddlers on up to 3rd or 4th grade, and it’s absolutely beautiful.  I wish I’d listened to people and used this web site 2 or 3 years ago when people first started recommending it to me.  The curriculum looks excellent and complete.  Unfortunately, even its highest level is a bit below my kiddo’s level at this point, but it still has some useful things, like introduction to drama, and has some great starting points for composer studies and artist studies that I may be using soon.  It also has some fun, stress-free grammar games for my guy, so I may still be able to squeeze some use out of this web site yet. But for those of you with littler people – I really encourage you to check it out. It is a FANTASTIC free resource.

I have been very torn on the issue of language arts, to be quite honest. I know there are people whose kids have gone on to graduate from Ivy League colleges who don’t believe in teaching ANY formal language arts – just basic phonics, basic punctuation rules, lots of copywork (which doesn’t work for my dysgraphic kiddo), individualized spelling lists based on “problem words,” and dictation.  Vocabulary and grammatical sensibilities develop simply by having the child read a lot of quality literature.  The child, it is said, absorbs grammar, spelling and syntax rules the way s/he originally learned language in the first place - by “osmosis,” i.e., seeing and hearing functional, quality use of the language and then intuiting its technical rules.  

It sounds like common sense, and I wish I could trust this process. I know that the reason that DS9 is such a good speller and so good at grammar is because he reads so much. I do think that if I were self-disciplined enough to do the dictation and copywork consistently, I wouldn’t need the R&S book or the spelling workbook. But I’m not, so I do.  Also, again, I do believe that knowing how to construct a formal sentence, paragraph, and eventually, an essay are useful things if the child wants to continue formal academics at the collegiate level, so instead of forgoing a language arts curriculum altogether, I’m just going to attempt to introduce these concepts in a gentle, child-paced, child-friendly way.

In that vein, I need to post my yearly “Assigned Independent Multi-Cultural Reading List” for the year like I do every year, but I’ll leave that for a separate post. Suffice it to say, DS9 is reading through an excellent abridged version of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and when asked to narrate today’s chapter, he talked nonstop for 20 minutes. I guess that one’s a hit!

Click to read more about our curriculum experiences so far…

Today was a VERY interesting day.  I’m a person who keeps friends for a long, long time. I get attached and that’s that.  I’m still friends with people I met in junior high and high school, which was… well, it was a long time ago.   But recently I heard from my two best friends from elementary school via my myspace. I’ve known both these guys over 20 years!  The last time I talked to one of them was maybe 7 or 8 years ago, so it’s been a while since I heard from either of them.  One wrote me a really funny message detailing, in a very silly (and trademark) way, all the fond memories he had of being a proto-mallrat and spending the day with me and our other friend at the now-defunct Astroworld in Houston, as well as recalling the way that we used to torture our very flamboyant and beleaguered music teacher in the fifth grade.  Oh, Mr. Seigel. That poor, poor man. I can still recall his daily sighs of bitter, bitter resignation.

Some changes are afoot here at SPH.  I’m about to launch a whole new look for the site. I love the colorful pencils and the adorably cherubic children, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that it’s a VERY VERY buggy template.  I’ve fixed a few here and there, but there are just too many and frankly, I’m lazy.  The new one isn’t quite as colorful, but hopefully it’ll still be legible, and much more functional. 

I’m also working on the links section. I’m hoping that this will eventually grow to become a very useful resource for all parents and homeschoolers, single ones in particular.  Right now it’s a big long illegible mess. I’m considering installing some kind of link directory script instead, a la Yahoo!.   Part of this is for my own reference because I find so many great web sites and resources online that I later forget about just because I forgot to add them to my favorites or whatever.  But of course, I do intend for it to be of use to other people too. 

So without further ado – here’s my new layout for the site. Let me know what you think of the new look!  I thought this was more universally accessible to the theme of single parent homeschooling than the little frollicking cherubs. Some of us don’t have very little ones… and some of us don’t exactly have cherubs, either.

DS9 had a huge meltdown Friday afternoon, which these days are rare for him.  It went on for quite some time after I tried to talk to him about how disrespectful and rude he’d been to R’s mother during the sleepover. I think we are having some serious character issues that need addressing here. He’s almost 10 and he’s become very defiant, argumentative and disrespectful in the last few weeks.  There is nothing to do but to remind, reinforce and discuss a great deal with him.  I need to seek ways to instill some self-discipline in him; his impulse control is very low at this point.  I am going to look into some martial arts classes, perhaps, but it goes deeper than that.

He definitely needs a stronger male influence in his life at this stage, so I have asked my father to try to make time to at least spend an hour with him per week.  Perhaps at Boy Scouts?  I initially had him join that not just to provide another social outlet, but also to have him be around other boys and do “boy stuff” since I’m the girliest girly who ever girlied and know nothing about any outdoors/ fishing/ sports/ whatever, but it was disappointing to see how few dads are involved in it any more. The Cub Scouts are largely a bunch of boys with their moms tagging along these days.  I was told by the den leaders that this is the norm. Regardless, it was beneficial for him to be a part of it last year, but it wasn’t enough, and I think he needs regular contact with an adult man.  My father is a really good role model and has a lot to teach a child, and I think my dad will get a lot out of it, too.

When DS9 and I got back from his sleepover on Friday morning, we had a long discussion about respect, authority and obedience.  My mother has found my opinions on this to be outrageous; of course, she would, because she was raised (as was I) with no discipline whatsoever. This is how they both think I should be raising DS9. They have both expressed that even taking away a privilege for a week is ”abusive!” 

Needless to say, I disagree that this is beneficial for children. I think children feel very alone and unsafe when they are made to feel as though they are in control of an adult world.  (I speak from experience on this!)  A healthy respect for benign authority is a necessary part of being a functional adult.  I pointed out to my mother  (who, to her credit, is open-minded enough to at least hear me out on these issues) that an adult who defies and argues with a police officer is going to have a lot of heartache; an adult who contradicts and disrespects a boss will be fired and jobless; an adult who won’t do anything a college professor instructs them to do will fail a class; and so on.  She conceded the point, at least.  Additionally, as a Christian, I think submission to legitimately benevolent authority takes on a spiritual component – a proud, defiant, arrogant heart isn’t one that will easily experience the joy of what CS Lewis referred to as “blessed surrender,” the concession of God’s authority in one’s life.

I feel like I have to be very careful in my wording of all of this. You don’t want to teach a child to be mindlessly obedient to all adults, because predators can sense and exploit that against a child. Encouraging a child to have a certain amount of discernment and questioning toward authority is healthy and even necessary, and I do want DS9 to feel as though he can talk to me about anything, and say whatever is on his mind, but how to teach free expression without giving license to defiance is something with which I am currently struggling.

Additionally, I love and admire the fact that DS9 has an incredibly strong will and a very decisive personality. It will serve him well as an adult if properly channeled.  He has the burgeonings of strong leadership skills and he is certainly not wishy-washy. Thank God for that; there are enough wishy-washy men on this planet as it is.   He is very bright, brighter than most people around him, and I know from experience that being smarter than most people around you can lead to arrogance and pride, as well as hurtful, derisive behavior toward others, even unwittingly. 

Additionally, we have only a few short years before DS9 turns into a young man instead of a little boy. It’s just him and me right now; I don’t want him to be one of those men who was henpecked and controlled by and under the thumb of his mother his entire life. That causes emotional and spiritual dysfunction later in life.  In this vein, I try to give him independence and room for decision-making whenever possible, but – something has gone awry if he is 9 years old and yells at me every time I ask him to do something.

So I don’t want him to stop being strong and decisive; I just want him to stop using it as a weapon against me.  It is one thing to want to genuinely discuss a decision I’ve made, to which I am open; but what he does, is attempt to instigate a “discussion” as a stalling tactic, so that he can postpone obedience. In other words, his “discussions” are really just a form of defiance and disobedience, and that is not acceptable, for both my peace of mind and for his own good.  He needs to be obedient first, and ask questions later.  I gave the following example: I see there is a car coming and I ask him to step out of the middle of the road.  He starts in on “Why? I am not in the middle of the road. I’m merely on the edge of the left side. Why do I need to get out of the road? Why can’t I just stay -”  SPLAT!!!

What we’ve worked out is this:  all argumentativeness, contradiction and disrespect is totally unacceptable and will go ignored.  He is free to question anything I ask of him AFTER he has obeyed.  He can ask me anything he wants; he can tell me he thought I was completely wrong, how my opinion is illogical or even completely dumb, he can argue with me until the cows come home – AFTER he has shown me the respect of simply doing what I ask.  I think and hope that this is a good compromise for now, and will engender legitimate dialogue and trust between us. 

So there is nothing to do but discuss and reinforce these ideas until it sinks in.  DS9 is a bright and understanding and eminently rational child, so I think he will get it over time. 

I am trying to tie it in to how we do God’s will as an expression of our respect and love for him, in the same way that we do this for our parents.  Of course, the very hard truth of the matter is that I need to lead by example here.  I am reminded of the story told by Al Gore, Inventor of the Internets in his book Earth in the Balance, which I read in college.  He tells the story of how a mother approached Mahatma Gandhi and asked if he could convince her son, a big fan of his, to stop eating sugar.  Gandhi tells the mother to come back in two weeks. She does so, and he tells the child to stop eating sugar. The child gives up sugar permanently. A month later, the grateful mother comes to thank Gandhi, and is just wondering – why did she need to come back in two weeks?  Gandhi replies, “I needed the two weeks to stop eating sugar myself.”

I yell at and argue with my mother and grandmother all the time.  The Bible tells us to honor and respect our parents – it doesn’t say to do so only if they’re right, or only if they are being reasonable, or only if they’re doing things our way.   I think there is a way to honor and respect someone without agreeing to do everything they ask of you.  I do speak to my mother in really disrespectful, arrogant ways and I have no contact with my biological father.  So this is something to think about for me – what it means for me to ask my son to honor and respect his parents, if I don’t do the same.

It’s amazing how much these little people constantly teach us, I’m tellin’ ya.

I think I’ll do a week-by-week wrap-up instead of a daily blog. It’s just too much for me to keep up with at this time.

After homeschooling a full day Monday and Tuesday, I received a phone call from the mom of DS9’s best friend.  We’ll call him R.  We have known R and R’s family for several years and his mom is someone I consider a close friend and mentor. She’s a really amazing lady and I admire her a lot.  She’s been a foster mother for many years and she’s just really sweet and giving.  We haven’t seen them in forever because they live in Fort Lauderdale and we live in South Miami; it is just difficult to set aside time to see them regularly since we moved from Northwest Dade County (Hialeah Gardens on the Miramar line).  R’s Mom said she’d be in Miami on Wednesday and thought it would be fun if R could stay over on Wednesday night.  DS9 was thrilled, of course – it was his first sleepover!

I can honestly say all went really well. R was a perfect angel and a great guest.  I tried to take them to Amelia Earhart park, but apparently to discourage truancy, now that school is in session, it is only open on the weekends. That was a huge let-down as R was very excited about seeing it, but they did play in the one open playground for an hour or so, then I took them to the Mall of the Americas to play in the video arcade for a bit and wander around and look at the pet store, then we went to see Underdog.  All I will say about that is that it wasn’t as bad as it looked like it was going to be.   I didn’t realize Peter Dinklage was in it – he’s fantastic and he really underplayed what could’ve been a total caricature character.  I love Jason Lee, the voice of Underdog, on his TV show, My Name Is Earl, but he sounded exactly the same in his voice-overs for the movie as he does on his voice-overs for the show, so that was a bit jarring. I kept expecting Underdog to start talking about Joy, Crabman and all the wacky hijinks in his trailer park.   

All in all, that half of the sleepover was a huge success. The boys had a really good time together and we watched the TMNT movie off pay-per-view after dinner.   They went to sleep at 10:30PM, which is early for DS9 since he normally tosses and turns until at least an hour later than that. 

The next day, Thursday I took them to Walmart to get their “school portraits” done.  I don’t have a digital camera because I just haven’t had the finances to purchase one yet. My mother has a beautiful one that she uses maybe 3 times a year, but she doesn’t let me borrow it often.  :-/ Anyway, I have very few pictures of DS9 from the last few years ever since my last digital camera broke down, and I don’t have any yearly Sears-type portraits since 2 years ago.  So we went and took some photos. They came out very nice; I’m sure I’ll have them to post soon.

When R’s mother came to pick him up, she suggested that DS9 go along and sleep over, too. I was leery because I could see that DS9 was way overstimulated and tired from the last 36 hours, but I didn’t want to deprive him of more rare one-on-one time with another kid that really likes him, so I agreed. Well, they got stuck in traffic on the way to Fort Lauderdale and the boys ended up being in the car nearly 2 hours; by the time they got to R’s house, DS9 was totally off the charts, wouldn’t eat anything, wouldn’t stop yelling at everyone, and was just climbing the walls. He gave poor R’s mom a really, really hard time. She said he cried 3 times – not to go home, just over minor things.  I feel so bad and now DS9 does too.  She was very kind to extend the invitation and now he is afraid that he won’t be invited back; I doubt that is the case, because she was very understanding and supportive, and she really likes us both (and R loves DS9 and vice versa), but still, the evening didn’t go so well.

Friday morning, I took the Tri-Rail up to Fort Lauderdale. The station is 10 minutes away from R’s house and just 20 blocks from mine, and it only costs about $10 roundtrip for both DS9 and myself (by contrast, gas for the trip is about $18), and it goes all the way up past West Palm Beach.  The ride to the station near R’s house is approximately 40 minutes, only a few minutes more than driving, and without the hassle of traffic. The Tri-Rail is very well-policed, clean and spaciously comfortable.  It’s a very nice way to travel.   In fact, its second-to-last stop doubles as a Greyhound station, and I have figured out that it would cost under $50 for both of us to get to Orlando, and take about as long as by car (and less time as by bus – and is MUCH more comfortable), so the next time we head up there, we’re doing it that way.  

But I digress.  We got back on Friday, had a long talk about his behavior (more on this in my next post) and did some reading, handwriting and math.   The new math curriculum is marvelous and exactly at his ability level, but it is taking FOREVER for us to complete each lesson right now, just because it is just so radically different than anything else we’ve ever done that he’s really resistant to it.  We are using the Base-10 blocks that we got from another mom and those are just what my little visual-kinesthetic learner needs   Once he hits his stride with each lesson, he really enjoys the puzzles and the exercises, so I think once he gets into it, he’ll like it much more.

Saturday, I had a four-hour shift with my inbound customer service job.  The first hour, DS9 took a bubble bath He loves to just soak in bubbly, warm water and it seems to really relax him.  Conversely, he finds showers extremely unpleasant and unsettling at a sensory level, so I just have to remember to keep my bathtub very, very clean! LOL  The second hour and a half, he quietly sat by me as I took calls.  He worked on some handwriting, then worked on more of the Ed Emberley animal drawing book. He is LOVING that and I see his drawing improving by the day.  I’ll definitely be getting more of the series.   Then he vegged out at my grandma’s studio apartment next door for the remainder of my shift, and then we just had a lazy Saturday.

So that was our low-key first week back. We didn’t get everything accomplished that I had hoped we would, but that’s okay – it’s just our first week back!

I’ve decided that from now on, at least until he turns 10, I’m going to refer to my son as DS9, a.k.a. Dear Son aged 9, and not just because we’re both hopeless Trekkies and DS9 is also the acronym for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, making it a fun family in-joke. But I digress.

The literature-based WinterPromise curriculum, Animals and their World, appears to be a success.  Today was our first day of school.  We aren’t due to start officially for another week, but I figured we would start a week early, to ease back into the routine of homeschooling.  We only did a partial school day and it was already rather long; hopefully as we get used to the curriculum, it’ll pick up some speed. 

Things we did today:

- Read the assigned reading in Richard Scarry’s Best Storybook Ever together. I was afraid it would be way too ”young” for DS9, and it was – he certainly doesn’t need to go through the alphabet, seeing as he reads on a 6th or 7th grade level – but the content was charming and funny enough that we both got a kick out of it.  I don’t anticipate that we’ll spend too much time with that one, anyway.

- Read through the first lesson in The Animal Kingdom.  So far, it seems pretty child-friendly and short and sweet, too. I was a bit irritated that they suggested a specific animal encyclopedia that we didn’t have, even though we have two excellent ones.  I am just OCD enough to be bothered by that kind of thing.   The lesson was short and sweet, and reinforced by what we read in …

- The DK Animal Encyclopedia. I LOVE this book. It’s huge, and the full-color photographs are just nothing short of visually arresting and beg for further exploration, discussion and thought. Today we read about skeletons and organs, and I felt like DS9 got a lot out of it.  He asked many questions, and he also looked up several words in the dictionary of his own free will. However, I felt like there was a lot of overlap and repetition between the DK AE and “The Animal Kingdom;” if that continues to be the case, I’ll just keep the encyclopedia and drop the other (much lighter) book.

- He read a bit of Animal Defenses: How Animals Protect Themselves independently, and worked on a few pages of The Everything Kids’ Animal Puzzles book himself.  He seemed to really enjoy that.  I am very impressed with that particular title – it employs games of logic, spelling, math, and many other skills in a really fun and thematic way.

- We did two letters in A Reason for Handwriting Cursive – A and E, upper and lowercase.  He did a surprisingly nice job on them, except that, as always, he has a lot of trouble appropriately spacing the letters. In the past, before I really understood dysgraphia, I put a lot of pressure on him to do better at handwriting, and I think I am seeing some of the leftover anxiety that caused, because he really cannot tolerate being told that his handwriting is anything less than perfect.  I know it will take a great deal of loving patience to undo this and help him allow himself some help in this arena. :(

- DS9 was VERY VERY resistant to trying the new math curriculum.  I know it’s because it’s something new. I had to cajole and explain and re-explain the new format. It is completely different from anything we’ve ever done. Also, as I’ve explained in prior posts, DS9 has sensory integration dysfunction, only he is hyposensitive and needs a LOT of sensory input. This translates into, among other things, being attracted to loud, bright colors, and he disliked the fact that the curriculum is entirely black and white. He asked me to get back our old math curriculum, The Complete Book of Math, which was entirely worksheet based! I was honestly shocked, but he explained that he’d just liked the pictures and colors in that. However, once we started doing the games, he had a LOT of fun.  But we only got through half the first lesson. I was not exactly expecting to hit the ground running with this one, and this is one of the reasons I took an extra week, and I’m sure we’ll pick up some speed as time goes on. They do sell that “Complete Book of…” series at BJ’s Wholesale club for something like $5 apiece, so I may pick it up just in case, or as a supplement.

- Another thing he really enjoyed was working in Ed Emberley’s Animal Drawing Book. It’s geared for younger children (Amazon.com says it’s for 9- to 12-year-olds, but Amazon is often totally on crack with age recommendations, and this is no exception.) With his extreme fine motor delays, it seems just right for DS9. He loves to draw and it is a fond wish of mine to help him overcome his fine motor delays so that his skill catches up to his wonderful imagination.  He loved flipping through the book and said he wanted to do the whole series.    I can tell we’re going to get through this book fairly quickly, perhaps half the year, so it’s possible I’ll get another one after that.  It is a shame that we can’t use Draw Write Now, the original art offering for his grade level for WP: Animals and their World, but it is way too advanced for his skill level.

- We set up and played our new version of Zoo Tycoon.  We loved this game. The graphics are beautiful, and it is truly educational – not to mention addictive!  We started at 9:30 and were at it for nearly two hours.  It does teach so many things. DS9 was getting frustrated because he could just NOT make the grizzly bear exhibit happy and he kept running out of money.  LOL  He asked if we could play again tomorrow, and went off muttering how he could plot to raise admission prices and simultaneously make his guests happier, so I suppose it’s a success. I love the fact that it makes him think about anticipating the needs and expectations of his guests while not compromising the safety and good conditions of his animals and staff – these are all contingent on social subtleties with which Aspies often struggle.  It’s going to make a good addition to our curriculum this year, I can already tell.

- We watched the “Hot Dog!” episode of the History Channel’s series, American Eats, which we have really enjoyed so far. Besides the history lessons and celebration of the culturally amalgamate roots of American culture each episode provides, one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about this series is the way in which it makes explicit, in a non-sinister and matter-of-fact way, the calculatedness of advertising.  Young children often believe everything they hear (indeed, advertising aimed at young children banks heavily on this fact) so it has been helpful for DS9 to see the machinations and ultimate purposes of advertising campaigns.  Today we went grocery shopping, and we talked about truth in advertising, and fact vs. opinion and how it will always be the company’s opinion that theirs is the BEST PRODUCT EVER, and how it’s their marketing department’s job to convince you that this is fact. But you have to judge for yourself and take it with a grain of salt and just form your own opinions. I think it’s been a real eye-opener for both of us!

Tomorrow: we tackle music and Spanish along with everything else! And if there’s time – gasp- history! And if *I* have some spare time (haha, right!) I’m going to try to tackle making heads or tails of the free version of HomeschoolTracker. “Try” being the operative word there.

The munchkin and I have become totally addicted to the series by the History Channel called American Eats.  Described by the History Channel’s web site as follows:

American Eats is the quirky, nostalgic and often surprising look back at the history, mystery and technology behind our favorite foods. Each episode tells the story of the brilliant ideas, offbeat inventions, and daring innovators who transformed the way we eat while helping to define American culture. Along the way, we discover why it took much more than a tasty recipe for pizza to go from Italy to Lombardi´s to Domino´s delivery trucks everywhere. We learn how a backyard concoction went from pharmacy soda fountains to become the real thing or how a mystery meat became an Oscar Mayer winner! American Eats is a celebration of the foods we love and the remarkable stories behind them.

So far, we’ve seen the episodes on chocolate, pizza, canned foods, and soda. We’ve also seen More American Eats featuring the life stories of Milton Hershey, Chef Boyardee (yes, he was a real person!), the inventors of Jell-O, the grandfather of barbecue, the guy who invented nachos, and many others.  We’re really enjoying the series; the little guy thinks it’s a riot to  trace the history of products we still use today and I’m finding it an engaging, accessible way to have discussions about everything from discerning consumerism to healthy living to world history with him.  I think the entire series is available on DVD, but Amazon.com tells me it’s running at a whopping $250 or so. I advise catching it on rerun, or maybe renting it or checking it out of your local library.  In my area, the entire series is being rerun every Saturday morning at 10AM. Up this week: the history of hot dogs!

Thanks to poking about on the History Channel’s web site, I’ve added a new “This Day In History” widget to my side bars. Good times.

A few days ago, I realized that to really reap the benefits of writing full time as a job in order to stay home with my son, I was going to need a laptop computer.  I had a very reliable desktop, don’t get me wrong. It was hand-built and/or refurbished by someone with a near-100% rating on eBay, from whom I purchased it about 2 years ago for approximately $165 plus shipping, bringing the total to under $250. I had since upgraded the memory – my favorite place to do so is Crucial.com because their system and prices can’t be beat – and had also added on my old computer’s hard drive as a slave drive,  and it came with a relatively high processing speed (2.7GHz) making it a very powerful and well-equipped desktop.  I had never had even the slightest problem with it. In fact, it ran Windows XP for weeks at a time without requiring a reboot.

But it was still a desktop. I was tied to it for any reason, and if I should ever choose to go on a weekend trip, which the munchkin and I do enjoy doing once in a while, or even spend a day at my mother’s, which I also enjoy doing, I always had to leave work at home.  I dreamed of having  a nifty little laptop so that I could sit next to my son and work as he read or drew or watched TV or worked on some math problems or WHATEVER.  One of my goals this year in our homeschool is to strengthen our relationship, and I really felt that a laptop would help. It would be so useful to me for so many reasons.  Unfortunately, they are very expensive, and I had no idea how I was going to come up with the funds to purchase one any time soon. I didn’t want to get into debt, so I figured that I would put one on layaway somewhere and pay it little by little, possibly selling off Old Reliable, a.k.a. my desktop.

Well, God provided another way for me. I was “window shopping” on the computer section of Miami’s Craigslist just out of curiosity to see for how much people sold their old laptops. I found an ad by a young man who was looking to get rid of his less-than-2-year-old laptop for $350. He said it worked perfectly and that he was also “looking to trade.” I figured I had nothing to lose and emailed him that I had a desktop that had better specs than his laptop, and would he like to trade? It was a long shot, I knew, but one thing I have learned from being a Craigslist addict is that you can really get some excellent deals and a great many things for free with some persistence. I have furnished and re-decorated the vast majority of my living room with free stuff from Craigslist’s free section, and helped a recently emigrated neighbor do the same. I have also given away a bunch of stuff there, too. What goes around, comes around, and all that.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I am writing this on my new laptop. It turns out that the guy and his girlfriend had recently moved down to Miami from Atlanta, GA and were in the middle of setting up a graphic arts production studio in their penthouse. They had run out of funds, but were really hoping to purchase a powerful desktop PC to complete their studio with the funds leftover from the sale of their laptop, which was in excellent condition but was worthless for providing horsepower for a high-end graphic design studio. It was serendipity that I responded, then, because I had exactly what he needed, and they had exactly what I needed. It could not have been a more perfect chance encounter.

To top it all off, they took my business card and asked me to send them my writing and web design portfolio – they took a look at my web design web site and were very impressed with my work and want to hire me. A free laptop and more work. Amazing!

I am off to see a free screening of An Arctic Tale now over at Aventura Mall with the munchkin. It’s from the makers of March of the Penguins, so it should be good. Aventura Mall is my old stomping grounds. I used to spend every weekend there being a mallrat with Friendswith-P as a teenager  We used to have that place memorized! It’s a little different now than when we were there, but it’s still a very nice mall. I’ll type up my movie review for the film when I get back!