It has taken me years to come to grips that my small little family cannot handle holidays, birthdays, or any major special occasions. Shorty especially has a very hard time with birthday parties, especially birthday parties the way they are traditionally held in Miami, huge affairs with loud music, a billion people (everyone brings a cousin, sister, boyfriend and/or neighbor), tons of food and a zillion things going on, persistent and with no place to pause or collect yourself. Mom with her ADD and grandma with her sensory issues also have a hard time with big affairs. Shorty is a child and has meltdowns; the older folks just get really anxious and take it out on each other by nagging, irritability, etc.

I like big parties. I like lots of people, good food, music. Even though our family is small, I’ve tried for the past few years to have fairly elaborate Thanksgivings, Christmases, Mother’s Days, etc. Invariably, perhaps it’s the anticipation of the event that gets to be too much for people, but they tend to go horribly awry. I think it’s just that they all have issues with days being special, aka out of the ordinary with lots of new variables. They get so anxious and worked up over a day being outside the norm that frustration tolerances get to be an all-time low.

So the past few years, I’ve tried to find new ways to make special days enjoyable for myself in non-traditional ways, and hopefully it is still enjoyable for the other folks, too. For example, this year, I didn’t make a big fuss over my own birthday, and I declined to have anyone over for cake or any kind of celebration. Instead I bought us a keylime pie (my favorite!) didn’t blow out any candles or anything, but Shorty and I stayed home and pigged out all day, playing board games, coloring, gardening, watching a Discovery channel marathon, and with him teaching me to play his new video games that he’d gotten for Christmas. It was very outside the box, but we had SO much fun all day long, and it was literally the most peaceful birthday I’ve had in a decade. (I think he felt bad that it wasn’t a bigger deal; he was the one who insisted on the keylime pie – he doesn’t like it, but he knowsi t’s my favorite. Hee.)

My mom used to spend hundreds of dollars throwing Shorty huge birthday celebrations with every single person we know attending, and he’d have meltdowns at every single one, so about three years ago, I started suggesting that instead of spending money on that, we take him somewhere interesting. We live 3 and a half hours away from Orlando, so typically it’s either a theme park, or his favorite hotel, or the NASCAR complex in Daytona, or something like that. These tend to turn out MUCH better than huge birthday parties and build happy memories instead of stress. Instead of paying for huge parties no one enjoys, everyone chips in and contributes to a simple weekend vacation. Outside the box, but still fun.

This year for Shorty’s birthday, we visited Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort in Kissimmee, FL with two other homeschooling families and good friends of ours. We LOVE Fort Wilderness; it’s probably the most comfortable camping ground I’ve ever seen and the campgrounds are so pretty. The three of our families had between us 4 little boys, all of them good friends with Shorty. We camped out, and the boys had a sleepover in our tent the night before Shorty’s birthday, so they all woke up together, had breakfast outdoors, etc. Then Shorty and I visited Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Not my favorite theme park, but Disney has a special promotion going on now that anyone can get in for free on the day of their birthday to any theme park, so I gave him the choice of what theme park to visit. (This was, in retrospect, a mistake – his OCD kicked in, and he agonized for weeks about which park to go to, up until the day before we drove up, and even then I’m not sure he totally enjoyed himself out of fear that he’d chosen the “wrong” park – I think I should’ve just picked a park myself and let him choose only if he’d asked to.)

So to make a long story… er… not as long, here are the pictures from our visit to Disney’s Hollywood Studios a few weeks ago!

disney in february

We had a lot of fun. Shorty held it together pretty well all weekend. He did get stressed out and have a big meltdown on the drive home – I think it had just all dogpiled on him all weekend long – but we had a fantastic time the other 3 days. There are ways I think I could’ve done things slightly differently to minimize stress even more at no additional effort, though. The point is, what I’ve taken away from all of this is that when you live with a person with special needs who reacts to stressors and stimuli in very different ways, it’s important to see things from their point of view and try to find ways to make special occasions enjoyable for EVERYONE, not just having business as usual regardless of how difficult it is for the spectrum individual, and continually trying to make the square peg fit into a round hole. I’m fine tuning this, but I think this year it’s a real focus for me, and hopefully it’ll continue to impact our family in positive ways.

CurrClick is one of my favorite downloadable homeschool and educational resource sites, not the least of which because if you sign up for their weekly email newsletter, they will send you a weekly notice of a great and usually seasonally relevant freebie download. This week’s is a 15-page packet of Lent activities, including a Lent tree and 50 simple ideas to celebrate Lent – even if you’re not Roman Catholic – as well as online links to hymns, activities, devotions and more. It’s a nice, simple way to remember the importance of Easter/ Resurrection Day as a seasonal celebration instead of a holiday that kind of springs up out of nowhere.  You don’t have to be Roman Catholic to celebrate Lent or use it as a 40-day period for spiritual reflection. It can be found here for free downloading and printing.

I have no idea why I initially started this garden, except that it was my desire that I have some excuse to make Shorty go outside at least once a day and enjoy the fresh air, natural surroundings, and sunshine for extended periods of time, and I think gardening is a good and fun activity for kids to engage in because it lets them see the fruits of their labor – literally!

Shorty wasn’t into the idea of gardening at first and thought it was “too much work” and “boring,” but I persisted because he really does just spend way too much time indoors and playing video games. And over the last few weeks, he’s really gotten into it – he’s gotten all involved in the drama of the garden, organizing where things go, checking soil moisture, deciding what to plant… especially now that we are apparently at war with a voracious slug or two, and now asks all kinds of questions about it and gets all into the plotting and care for it. Today he suggested a garden gnome or possibly a birdbath. I like both these ideas.

Charlotte Mason, the educator on whom I base most of my pedagogical and homeschooling approaches, encouraged kids to garden and spend as much time outside as possible, and that educators should encourage the child’s natural curiosity and relationship-building with the great outdoors whenever possible. This was especially true, she thought, if the child lived in an inner city and didn’t have regular access to fresh air and sunshine. (She was a neat lady, a gentle innovator, and way, way ahead of her time.) I hesitate with anything that would turn this into an academic endeavor; however, I do consider this educational because he is learning how to garden, which helps with his fine and large motor delays as well as attention issues while building self-confidence. He is also learning all about soil composition, plant biology, and ecosystem interdependence. We are trying to stick to organic gardening and having long discussions about the environment, too. It’s nice time that we spend together outside and learning and just having fun.

We don’t have much space – we do this in the courtyard of our apartment row in a side part of the yard which leads to the back alley and the dumpsters. I know, not very back-to-nature. The soil here, as it is in a lot of Miami, is too sandy and rocky to grow much in except native plants (see our happy little lemon tree below for proof) so I decided to implement ideas from the book The Square Foot Garden. That book advocates building 4′x4′ raised beds and planting one square foot at a time; it’s a very successful method, but I don’t have the tools or knowledge or space to make things like that, and their system is very flexible,so I just got the same amount of square footage in separate smaller containers. Works just as well! Anyone can do this on any scale, all you need is some pots, some seeds, a little water, and a sunny spot, indoors or out. I know a lady who has a whole miniature fruit orchard in containers on her 15th story condo porch! LOL

Recently (with my tax refund, hee) I purchased a simple little table and chairs set at the Mart of Wal, in which to sit and enjoy our garden. Shorty, being autistic, is loathe to try anything new and strongly reacted against doing studies or reading out there, in fact, he doesn’t really seem to get the idea of just enjoying the garden instead of “doing something in it,” but I am intending to start having lunch out there a few times a week, and maybe work our way up to reading outdoors, and eventually doing whole lessons out there. Why not? Anyway, here are pictures from today. Enjoy!

Oh, oh, first of all – I know some of y’all are looking for ways to make some extra cash and whatnot, so if you live in the US and you have a digital camera, I recommend checking out FastSnap.

Basically, they are the middle man between freelance digital photographers (that’s you) and people who want fast, cheap digital photography of outdoor properties,such as buildings or cars, usually insurance agents, contractors or real estate agents for their listings. Picture quality doesn’t have to be stellar, just large and clear, i.e., better than a camera phone. The photos have to be turned in on your specified turnaround time, and taken during weekday daylight hours, i.e., no night time shots and no weekends. The majority of the time you do not need to contact the property owner – just drive by, take the picture and be on your way, and you get to set your own rates and they don’t charge you any fees to work for them or evaluate your work in any way. They only allow 10 people to work per zip code, but you can work as many zip codes as you want, so if yours is filled already, try some neighboring ones. I make about $15-$30 per job, and they literally take me under 5 minutes. Work is not constant but pretty steady, always at least more than enough to cover gas money for my gas-guzzling SUV all month and usually more, I’ve never had to drive more than 5 miles, and I just take the pictures when I’m out on my ordinary errands so it actually doesn’t take any extra time. They pay you by monthly check and they’ve always paid like clockwork for me.

ANYWAY to the real reason I am making this update.

Shorty and I have a horrible pest in our little container garden. I don’t know what it is, I suspect it’s a night slug or something up at the crack of dawn, also it is clearly evil, because it is EATING ALL MY LEAFY PLANTS. It has so far decimated 100% of our green beans down to just the stalks, 50% of our spinach, and 75% of our lettuce, all in the span of 4 days. It has tried, but apparently didn’t like as much, the broccoli, though those leaves have big nasty holes, too.

It’s not a bird because you can see its creepy little munch marks all around the remaining leaves. It didn’t touch the onions, the carrots, the corn, any of my herbs, even the leafy ones like the curly parsley, and didn’t touch the thicker leaves of our strawberries. Wasn’t interested in the flowers at all. It has also not discovered our lemon tree (which has 3 little wee lemons growing on it, Shorty is very excited). Also, I tend to think this is some kind of creepy crawly or slug with limited mobility, because we have a large and thriving spinach plant growing in a container 5 feet away that is in pristine condition. Thus far. D:

Conversely, it has ONLY attacked the plants growing in the little black tubs I have, not the terracotta or thicker plastic planters, I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.

I don’t want to contribute pesticides to the environment and we are growing these to eat, so I am trying to not just spray it with Bug-B-Gone or whatever. I have planted marigolds which are natural insect repellents, and I bought an “eco-friendly leaf wash” that was supposed to be an insect repellent, too. It seemed to have salvaged the sole remaining lettuce plants that I transplanted into the larger container yesterday, but did nothing for my remaining green beans, which were down to the stalks this morning despite spraying. Depressing!

Any ideas/ help? TIA!

First of all, I just want to give a shout-out to Miss Monti of Our Crosstimbers homeschooling blog because she has created some absolutely gorgeous notebooking pages for studying individual countries. There’s lots of space for the information the child is required to gather so the notebooking can be as complicated or as simple as your child can handle and the pages can be used with very young children as well as advanced students. Monti has been kind enough to share her work for FREE so please go here to download the pages and don’t forget to leave her some comment love for all her hard work! I am saving this to my hard drive for sure, for future use!!!

Secondly, I got this info from my local homeschooling support group – everyone knows the popular pop music guru trio, the Jonas Brothers, are a huge Grammy-nominated music sensation. My kid is a big fan. What you may not know is that the Jonases are dedicated homeschoolers and the Jonas brothers have all been homeschooled, or so they say. In actuality, the Jonas brothers attended a correspondence school they did while on the road. I think, but am not entirely sure, that it’s Clonlara, an accredited school which has a lot of flexible special programs for child celebrities in California. I personally don’t consider this homeschooling, but satellite schooling.

Nevertheless, Denise Jonas, their mom, bills herself as a dedicated homeschooler (even though it appears she did not do any of the children’s actual schooling herself – but I could be wrong) and at the very least they appear to be vocally supportive of the homeschool community, which isn’t something you see every day from celebrities of that caliber, so I’m passing this info along:

Rebecca Kochenderfer, Senior Editor of Homeschool.com and author of Homeschooling for Success and Homeschooling and Loving It is hosting an exclusive interview with The Jonas Brothers for homeschoolers and their families.

They are dedicated homeschoolers and have offered to do a special interview just for homeschoolers on February 19th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific (12:00 p.m. Mountain, 1:00 p.m. Central, 2:00 p.m. Eastern). As you can imagine, the Brothers are extremely busy right now having just performed at the Grammy’s and getting ready to launch their new 3D movie, so they will be available only for the first 10 minutes of the interview. Then callers will have 20 minutes to speak with Denise Jonas, their mother, to find out more details about how and why they homeschooled and some personal details about the Brother’s life. So moms and dads, you’ll want to be a part of this conference call.

Here’s how it works:

1) To listen to the show from your computer, go here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/homeschoolradio/.

2) To post questions in the chat room during the live show, go here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/UserChat.aspx? HostUserURL=HomeschoolRadio/.

You can find out more information about the conference call and register for it at www.homeschoolcom/. Let other homeschoolers know about this exclusive homeschooler call.

Make of that what you will. I may check it out and will report back with my findings. I may even ask a question or two.

Courtesy of HomeschoolMate, but anyone with kids who like to color, or like animals, or nature studies, can use this.

This is a wonderful free bird coloring book (51 pages) that includes questions for students to engage in further research for each bird species. The coloring book contains a picture for children to color for 50 species.

You can download the coloring book here: Free Bird Coloring Book. I also recommend that you visit the site for plenty of teacher/parent resources, a bird glossary, and bird games and word searches.

The main site is here: Cornell Lab of Ornithology Teacher Resources. The lessons are designed for use by kids between the fourth and eighth grades, but you can easily use the resources and adapt them for any grade.

In addition, you can also download a free 50 page of bird notebooking pages from CurrClickhere.

I don’t know how much we’ll use of this. I am considering starting to learn about birdwatching with Shorty, since there are many rare and beautiful birds who make South Florida their home throughout various times of the year, and thought this was a good place to start.

I have so much going on that I’m just going to post the goings-on as a +/- list.

+ Tonight Shorty and I start an ages-8-and-up aikido class at the local rec center together. It’s only twice a week and it’s 5 minutes away and I actually get real exercise out of it, instead of me sitting around watching. I’ve never taken a martial arts class in my life, but I have convinced myself I will rock at it. Oh, yes.

- We tried to enroll in this class last week, but the rec center has some bizarre hardcore rule I didn’t know about, about how you have to bring a birth certificate for any kid wanting to take classes with an age requirement. Y’all, my kid is 5′4″ and his voice is changing. He is quite clearly not a 7-year-old, okay???? But because of my interrupting the registrar’s valuable Facebook browsing time “insurance liability”, they wouldn’t even let him sit in the class and watch. Rude!

+ Between this and the twice weekly at-home yoga, and the weekly nature walks on Friday or Saturday, I will now be getting physical activity 5 times a week. I am in pretty terrible shape health-wise – muscles are weak, stamina is nil, knees are starting to hurt from stiffness due to the sedentary nature of my job, etc. It isn’t so much about weight loss – I am okay with the size I am – I would just like to be able to, say, run a block without getting winded and not wake up all stiff and in pain.

- I just realized I owe my library something like $5 billion. I really need to stop checking 85 things out at once. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. I always forget to renew and/or return stuff on time. Maybe I can go Make The Big Eyes at the librarian; she knows me and we talk all the time, so keep your fingers crossed that she’ll at least reduce that to a more manageable $2 billion or something.

+ In concert with this, I am determined that Shorty spend more time in the fresh air and sunshine than he currently is. As such, we have started a little veggie container garden he’s gotten really excited about. So far we have spinach, green beans, 2 kinds of lettuce, carrots, broccoli, and green and yellow peppers growing. I hope to add more soon. Shorty also asked me to get a lemon tree so he could make home-grown lemonade. Hee. Of course this is the ghetto, and our containers are decorated with spray paint and old car tires someone left behind our building. What? Urban chic? … no? Oh, well.

+ Yesterday I started the application process for financial aid, so that I could start working on my second Bachelor’s degree in the fall. I’m leaning strongly toward accounting/ business administration. I have a long-range plan that I’ll save for another post.

- I am wicked nervous about being a student again and worry I won’t be able to handle it, time-management wise.

+ Here, have some incredible pictures. Nick Brandt’s African Wildlife Portraits. They’re portraits, not documentative photographs like most wildlife photography, and I promise you they and this UK artist will blow your mind.

- The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is the worst, most destructive, poorly thought-out piece of legislation I have EVER seen, and I’m including No Child Left Behind in that. Here is the lowdown on why this is pretty much the worst idea ever. But! There is a glimmer of light. I’ve written to my local Congressmen; have you?

+ Speaking of which, have any of you guys ever sold stuff or set up shop on Etsy? I am an artsy craftsy person, I crochet, do digital photography, and make jewelry, but my real, secret love is this weird… thing. I can’t even explain it. It’s… wall art, I guess you could call it? I take hats (mostly straw hats but I am considering moving to other mediums) and decorate them and then people hang them up on their walls as decoration.

Here is an example of one I just did for a neighbor.

I do all kinds of things on them, though. Birds and feathers and ribbons and silk flowers and stuff, depending on what the mood strikes me. They’re all different. I give them away as gifts and people keep telling me I should sell them. I don’t want to do eBay because I wouldn’t make any money, but I don’t know what I would charge for these, and I am not sure if Etsy is a good starting point before I think about anything as time-consuming as craft shows (of which there aren’t many – this is Miami, and nothing happens here, ever). But I don’t want to spend hours and hours working on it for nothing. Thoughts/ advice would be appreciated.

+++++I AM GOING TO DISNEYWORLD THIS WEEKEND. Three days and two nights camping with 4 other families from our homeschool group. We are renting a car, driving up to Orlando Saturday morning, going to the Magic Kingdom Sunday and coming back Monday night. And according to the national weather service, the weather is supposed to be PERFECT – no rain at all, and in the upper 70s all three days! Huzzah!