I'm Glad To See Twenty-Eleven

The holidays arrived - even though I was wishing someone would dump the last half of December off the calendar - and departed with much ado in our household.

Being predictably myself, though, I have managed to pull a few positive things out of a pretty miserable month.

The Most Surprising Thing literally showed up on my door step smack in the middle of our annual Christmas Eve celebration. It was my brother, fresh from a whirlwind 17-hr flight and 24-hrs of travel from Korea. And as fast and unexpectedly as he arrived, he's on with his tomorrow after flying all day today back to his temporary home abroad. His unexpected visit made for a very fun and memorable Christmas and New Years...and hectic. Definitely hectic.

The Most Enjoyable Scheduled Event happened mid-December at my knitting club meeting. I've been trying to pull off a local knitting club with some success. For our last meeting of the year, I planned a small Christmas celebration with decorations and snacks and music. There are such a nice bunch of people that attend and they were all able to make it for the party. A motley crew, but it's so nice to spend time with others who make the time and effort to be somewhere.

And finally, the Most Awesome Thing was the arrival of the household's first teenager :-) She is lovely...even first thing in the morning just before opening her birthday gift. I simply cannot call her The Girl Child anymore, especially since she is taller than I am. She will need to be Miss K from now on.

Other excitement included a New Year's Eve family challenge of skill, smarts and silliness in which yours truly emerged victorious...with a trophy. It was a team trophy, but a trophy that I can claim and my brothers can't. I'm not sure that something like that has ever occurred before. Pictures forthcoming....after the engraving of the trophy. Told you it was real.

So onward into 2011. Today was gloomy and grey outside. We had some gloomy on the inside as well. I think just post-holiday greyishness. It was a welcome quiet day after such a busy couple of weeks. Although I feel the pressure to make a resolution, I've decided against it. I have a list of things to focus on instead.

Happy New Year. I hope the spring-ish feelings of renewal and refreshment take hold here in the A house as well as with the one or two of you who happen to pop by here.

~Mrs. A.

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October's Book Club

I've been going to a book club for a bunch of months now. I kinda like it. Not too surprising considering that I've always been a reader...

I was a bit scared to go as I've not ever been a terrible intellectual, philosophical sort of girl. Oh, how I wish the deeper meaning, the prevailing theme, the irony, the archetype would all jump out at me and I would make really intelligent sounding conclusions about that which I have just read. Sadly, not gonna happen.

I just get sucked into the story. And I've learned that I truly do enjoy a good, gripping story.

Book Club started when a few of us started to frequent a certain coffee shop a little too often. A once-a-month excuse was born.

Book Club is 'led' by a very cool, really smart homeschooling mom who got tired of her stuffy book club...so she started her own! She invited people she enjoys spending time with, who enjoy reading. Attendance leans toward being homeschooler heavy, but that just makes me love it all the more. There are no rules or required reading lists. There are suggestions and sometimes themes. And this cool, smart homeschooling mom who 'leads' our group has a knack for asking questions that inspire discussion and - this is big - helps me to see all those things things my high school English teacher wished he didn't have to point out to me.

This month we 'discussed' The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. A couple of us had wanted to read it to see what all the hype was about. It's a simple mystery and I couldn't figure out why it had to be such a thick book...but then I figured it took that long to get interested enough in the edgy female antagonist to feel the need to follow her story in books #2 and #3. I'll read the rest of the series, I think. The writing style is very easy to power through. The gritty, raw bits - presented in a very matter of fact way - turned off a couple of the more conservative in the group.

We came away from our coffee and chatting this month with a theme: mythology. I'm going to try out Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad. I haven't picked up an Atwood book since high school...and that was under duress. Hopefully I've matured since then. We'll see. Others suggested included God's Behaving Badly, Marie Phillips; American Gods, Neil Gaiman and The Stolen Child, Keith Donahue. I'm inspired - especially about the Keith Donahue book - and look forward to wading in.

Some suggestions from the group follow. I'd not try to make sense of it as we tend to be a little scattered in our discussion. I love it!!

• Genesis by Benard Beckett -a modern Brave New World?
• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde - technically, this meets the requirements of some people's definition of a romance
• The Girl With the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw - apparently the final sentence clinches this book as a favourite for many
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Triskellion by Wil Peterson - suggested when asked for a 'quirky' book
• A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Towes - a more modern 'coming of age' story, perhaps.

I'm off to start the Penelopiad,

~Mrs. A

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Mondays...

This Fall, Mondays are particularly busy. I think today was fairly typical in scheduling, but it was better than many of my typical Mondays of late. I think I might be getting my Monday-act together...

After everyone has been fed and watered and we shovel up the weekend clutter it's usually around 9a.m. Monday mornings give us only an hour or so for any bookwork we want to accomplish. It's not too difficult to get the kids to hit the books on Mondays. I have them start with their journals. The Girl Child writes copious amounts - her biographer is going to have lots to sift through! The Boy Child, not so much. He's more matter of fact. 'Required' journal writing for The Boy amounts to a sentence per 'grade' so he's up to 6 sentences per journal entry. And that's a very loose definition of 'sentence' I'm using.

At 11a.m. I start getting the afternoon set up. The kids are sent to grab themselves a snack and then they pack another for later. I prepare lunch for Mr. A and myself and set it aside. French books and skating things are gathered and packed into the car. Today I dressed for a run and dug out my iPod. We left the house at 11:45.

My very good friend has taken it upon herself to teach a group of homeschoolers - her two included - French this school year. She's gone to a huge amount of work to plan weekly lessons for 5 families of kids, ages 8 through 15. The kids spend an hour and a half doing games and activities, vocab and dialogue. The focus is on spending time speaking the language which is awesome for my two-kid crew. The Boy and The Girl are quite well versed in their vocab, writing and reading skills. The speaking-out-loud has been a bone of contention in our past school years.

Today was the first Monday I snuck away from the other moms at French. I went for a miserable little run. I haven't run since the summer, really, so I was speaking fairly sternly with myself about the degree of laziness and depression that was taking over. I went for half an hour, 'running' for 3 minutes then walking for 1. Once I was done, I was glad I had done it. It's amazing how long improved cardiovascular fitness can hang on. I never thought I'd get 6 intervals completed today. I zipped home to change my muddy, wet running pants. While there, I constructed lunch for Mr. A and delivered it to his basement office (he's programming today and tends to focus in on his work and forgets altogether about regular bodily routines like caloric intake) before heading back to pick up the kids.

After French, we trek over to the local rink and spend an hour skating. The local homeschoolers have sort of dominated the 'Parent & Tot' time slot for the past few years. It was a quiet takeover...beginning years ago when the children blended in with those every-other-day kindergartners. Today there were 15 homeschoolers plus a bunch of moms on the ice.

Once we're home things depend on The Boy Child's hockey schedule. If he plays early, at 4:30p.m., we usually relax and snack before heading out the door at 4:15p.m. There are beefits to living in the rink's backyard! Today he played late, at 5:30p.m., so we had time to focus on some geography for a half hour before snacking and re-packing the hockey bag. I cleaned the kitchen and The Girl made pizza crust which we left in the warm oven to rise while we were at the rink.

At home, after hockey, I focus on getting some sort of food on the table fairly immediately. The low blood sugar is pretty apparent by this time on Monday. It's nice when we sit down to eat. Everyone knows that their responsibilities have been taken care of for the day. Relax mode starts to kick in. I like hearing about the kids' day - even though I've been there for most of it. I find it terribly interesting how different our experiences are even though we share the same space and activities.

We had a nice family evening culminating in apple crisp before bedtime. I'm watching the results of the local election and will head off to bed shortly. Hopefully next Monday will go as smoothly as today. Methinks if I keep up with weekend laundry and regular meal planning like a good, responsible grown up, I shouldn't have any problems.

~Mrs. A.

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