I know I haven't posted in 100 years...

I am really busy, and limiting my computer time...so just be glad for me. I have enough work at the computer to use up all my free time (after kids are in bed and before I am in bed), so I don't have time to blog about all the fun things we did during the months of July and August. Anyway, while I'm not blogging...I had to post this funny "Bitter Homeschooler's Wishlist" because I'd say that I might officially relate to it's tone and I've only been homeschooling for two years! I put colored text for the ones that I most thrilled at...

The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List

by Deborah Markus, from Secular Homeschooling, Issue #1, Fall 2007

Please stop asking us if it's legal. If it is — and it is — it's insulting to imply that we're criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?

2 Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we've got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3 Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.

4 Don't assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.

5 If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a "reality" show, the above goes double.

6 Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You're probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you've ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

7 We don't look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they're in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we're doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

8 Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.

9 Stop assuming that if we're religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

10 We didn't go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

11 Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn't have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don't need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can't teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there's a reason I'm so reluctant to send my child to school.

12 If my kid's only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he'd learn in school, please understand that you're calling me an idiot. Don't act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

13 Stop assuming that because the word "home" is right there in "homeschool," we never leave the house. We're the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it's crowded and icky.

14 Stop assuming that because the word "school" is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we're into the "school" side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don't have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.

15 Stop asking, "But what about the Prom?" Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don't get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I'm one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.

16 Don't ask my kid if she wouldn't rather go to school unless you don't mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn't rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.

17 Stop saying, "Oh, I could never homeschool!" Even if you think it's some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you're horrified. One of these days, I won't bother disagreeing with you any more.

18 If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you're allowed to ask how we'll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can't, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn't possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.

19 Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child's teacher as well as her parent. I don't see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.

20 Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he's homeschooled. It's not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.

21 Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she's homeschooled.

22 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.

23 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.

24 Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won't get because they don't go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.

25 Here's a thought: If you can't say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

Hahahahaha. That was good. Okay, so now...I had to break my computer rule (reinstated today, I was getting loose with it) in order to post this. I have a few days off, just a logo design tonight and then I have Friday with no work before Saturday brings more work...so maybe I'll get a real post in on Friday!

Group camping at Lake Silvia State Park...

We had our annual camping trip with some of our very favorite families the weekend after we went camping on the coast...yes...in eleven days, we slept away from home eight!

So it was us, the Reynolds (Sommer and Ben), the McDonald's (Mimi and John) and the McMullins (Kerry and Jeff). In the past we've camped with a bigger group, but Kerry and Jeff live out of state now, and we rarely get to see them, so we wanted a less diluted group so we had more quality time with them. I'm so glad! It was so much fun to get the kids together and visit each night around the campfire.
So...group camping is the way to go. I literally don't enjoy regular campsites very well after being spoiled by group camps...if you haven't ever reserved a group site...you should! We have camped at the group sites at Scenic Beach, Twanoh, Penrose and now Lake Silvia state parks. Group sites are usually very removed from the regular sites, so the kids can roam and we don't feel we have to hawk over them or monitor their noise or where they go. Usually we have our own toilet and one big food prep and eating area, with a campfire that is removed significantly from the tents. We get lots and lots and lots of space between tents and I just LOVE group camping.
That out of the way, Lake Sylvia was amazing. It is gorgeous there! We all had a great time swimming, it's a good fishing lake, we had some rafts to roam the lake in and the kids were obsessed with the salamanders that were plentiful.

We didn't get a group picture, but here's a close call on the kids...Sam M., Alice, Ruby, Sam Mc., Jensen Mc., Kesley R., Mia Mc., Lizzy M. and Eden R. We really had thirteen kiddos in our group, so that's missing four kids.

One night, the girls decided to sneak off to Aberdeen to see Eclipse (again...Kerry was the only one who had not seen it yet). We helped the boys get through bedtime prep and S'mores and off we went. It was a twenty minute drive. We were seated just in time for previews, when...THE POWER WENT OUT! Apparently there was an accident and it took the power. People were really dramatic about it and we just wanted our money back. Thankfully we didn't have to wait forever, we were on our disappointed way in no time. On our way back we decided to stop at Ross...I needed panties for Alice (had to burn her only pair) and kill a little more time. We were in very, very desperate camping shape by this time (I can't believe I'm posting these pictures).

Bee slept really well on the trip! I was so grateful! We couldn't bring the trailer so we were all in one tent, and she had to sleep in a bouncy seat, and she did so well!
'
Alice spotted a snake and Ruby caught it. Thrilled does not do justice for how Ruby felt about this snake. Okay, so we brought it home. Really, we did. She named it lemonade and she hardly put it down on the camping trip. It eats live fish. It sleeps in her room (for now).

There were a LOT of salamanders, and at one point we had eight of them humanely in captivity. He, he. I think they are kind of gross and kind of cute, but the kids LOVED them. We returned them all to their homes before we drove out.

Courtney, Chanelle and Denman...

One of my dearest friends from 7-12th grades, Courtney Craft (now Hertz) invited just the girls up for a night at she and her husband's summer home. Her husband was working at home, and so we enjoyed a great afternoon, evening, morning and afternoon catching up! It is so fun to feel so comfortable with an old friend, like no time had passed. I was hands full with Bee (common theme this summer) so I didn't really take any pictures, but here are a few...Alice was taught how to ride a bike with no trainers by Chanelle, Courtney's oldest. Chanelle and Alice really hit it off and Ruby had fun keeping up with them. Little Denman was just playing along side.


The house is in a community with a lake, so we got to go swimming, which was fun (no pics). Courtney, thanks for having us!

Bee's knees...

Betsey is being fondly called "Bee's Knees" by Chris and the girls. I have a friend who regularly uses this cliche, so I asked her why the saying, "It's the bee's knees" exists. After doing some research, I confirmed what she said, which is that bees store the pollen they collect in sacs on their legs that are like knees. Hence, the bee's knees being a place of great importance. So if you are "the bee's knees", you are in more familiar terminology, "the bomb."



Our Betsey is definitely the bee's knees. She is also FOUR MONTHS OLD! She is delightful, and there are some things that I won't remember she was doing a year from now. Bear with me...
Betsey blows bubbles with her lips all day. She is our "spit queen", and is definitely teething. She now has added to her bubble blowing, that kind of car vrooming noise you can make when you blow air through closed lips and the lips vibrate...it makes a lot of spit go a lot of places.
Betsey came into this world sucking, and she hasn't given up. Ironically, as much as she loves the binkie, she can't keep it in her mouth to save her life. I love it when I'm holding her while holding the binkie in her mouth and she holds my hand with both of hers.

If you look at Betsey and she looks back, she will reward you with the biggest toothlessiest smile, and she won't stop unless you do first. She loves to smile!

The below pic in my opinion captures all that resembles me in Betsey. She really does look like me, I need to scan some pics to prove it...
I love how Betsey has had one food source in her life, but if she's hungry and it's taking me a second to get perfectly ready for her, she will turn to her fist and suck ferociously. She is my only baby ever to latch perfectly on to random body parts and suck so hard that it really hurts. She latched onto Ruby's arm once like that! Bee...food comes from one place...well, thankfully sometimes it comes from a bottle too, because no baby of mine has ever taken a bottle and you do, and I really appreciate that!

Betsey can roll from her tummy onto her back! This has complicated things a little bit, because sometimes she does this when she's trying to go to sleep and that's no good, because she sleeps on her tummy! She's really close to rolling over the other way too, but she needs to get that arm out of her way in order to pull it off.

I love the baby panting that precedes a full on cry. The eyebrows furrow, the breathy panting begins and you know that if you don't stop whatever is bugging her, she will cry.

Betsey really trusts her sisters. I am amazed sometimes, watching them jostle her around and put her down in weird places that she isn't scared silly in their arms!
Betsey has one happy place if she's tired. You have to hold her like you are nursing her, tummy to tummy, and she buries her head in your elbow and sucks away on her binkie, her eyes immediately rolling back.

Now, if she wants to sleep...it's her bed she wants. As hard as I try to get her to sleep with her head on my shoulder, it never happens. No more moving her from sleeping at the breast to sleeping on my shoulder. I just have to lay her in her bed, and then she settles back into sleep.

If there were a Pierce Family Slogan, it would have something to do with cuddles. Chris is a cuddler and the girls have both learned to cuddle, and it is really normal for anyone just to request some cuddles, which pretty much trumps all other activities. So far, Betsey isn't a cuddler. She's got her bobble head a bobbling at all times...cuddles require abandonment of the use of neck muscles, BETSEY! She is definitely going to have to enroll in the University of Cuddles soon, I'll give her eight more months.

Betsey is always surprised. Alice appropriately calls it, "eyes wide open". Her eyebrows are up and her eyes are wide open for sure, almost all the time.

Betsey is an amazing sleeper. She still sleeps from around 8PM until like 5 or 6AM. Then she goes back down until 9AM or so. I don't know what sleepless nights are with her! THANK YOU!
Betsey likes to be held. A lot. She usually pants if we try to put her in the bouncy seat. There are three possible options other than arms at this point. She likes the bouncy seat pretty well...she slept in it when we were camping. The Bumbo is new on the scene and she will sit there maybe 10 minutes or so. Then there's the swing that we bought for her that she has NEVER liked. The panting always turns into a cry if you go for the swing.

Betsey likes me the best. This is a bonus to breastfeeding. I'm the prettiest, nicest, loveliest person on her planet, and I love it!
Going along with her sucking talent, she is managing to get her thumb in her mouth these days, and given that the binkie isn't working out that well, I'd like to see her take to that more and be done with the bink. Betsey will sometimes suck her fingers that are longer and get them in so far that she gags.

Betsey has nails akin to Lee Press Ons. I just hate cutting them. You'd think that I would be motivated by the fact that she is a scratcher. She doesn't scratch her own face, no. She scratches me...like when I'm holding her binkie in, she holds my hand with hers and incessantly scratches. If I am holding her on my lap and she's facing forward, my arm will be under her armpits, and she will get her hands on my arm and scratch and scratch. Hard.

Betsey likes to pull hair. If she can't get at someone else's head, she'll actually reach to the back of her head and grab on her own hair and pull.

It is an adventure having another baby! After two recent camping trips, I'm adjusting to my new reality of not really enjoying a vacation for myself. I just really forgot what it was like not to do what I want to do on a vacation, or even an outing. I still have fun, it's just not the same. Chris and I have to take turns sitting things out, and when I took the girls to a spray park the other day, I was in the shade with the baby...not in my swimsuit running around in the water like I would have done last summer. It's just different, and I'm adjusting to it again.

Cloth diapering is going well, but I'm not sold on the service. I think I'm ready to buy diapers and just launder them myself. We've been using disposables on camping weekends and will do so in Colorado for a week and in McCall, etc. The way that the service handles the way they bill for diapers, I have been paying for the diapers that we don't use, and it bugs me. I really only use like 30 diapers a week, and I think I could save money and not overwhelm me too much to just launder my own prefolds. I'm just not a girl who can hang with paying for 30 diapers that I didn't use...even if that is only a difference of a few dollars. It just bugs me. I find myself overusing diapers so that they were used in some way, so that it doesn't bug me...but it still does! Then I think about money. I didn't embark on cloth diapering with that as my goal, I just wanted to contribute less to the landfills. However, I just paid $70 for another month of diaper service, and thought, "I could just pay that once for some diapers and be done paying!" We'll see. More laundry. Blech.

Can I say (not that anyone is still reading) that I really do love having a private blog, because I'm pretty sure some one would want to kidnap Betsey if they read this...and they'd have an instruction manual to do so effectively just from this one post!

Nice weather, weekend fun...

It took awhile to warm up in the PNW this year. We had a very warm winter (record warm) and a really wet, long spring. We got out for a couple of hours as a family a few weeks ago and played together at a local park we like. It's nice to get outdoors! Ruby's quite the frisbee thrower and catcher!

7 year old for hire...

Here's Ruby holding my friend Julie's baby. She made that hat, her first little knit beanie ever and wanted to give it to baby Maycie. So sweet!!!

Ruby is a little businesswoman. Sad for her that she's only 7, and the only place for her to set up shop is in her bedroom where there's not much foot traffic. She comes up with "a work" and she trains Alice and dictates a pretty rigorous schedule of "work", and then I will go up to her room to patronize her business and if I act at all like we are pretending, she's super disillusioned and reminds me that this is real work, not pretend. Hmmmmmm. Very confusing for me.

She wanted to sell her toys, so we did that. Then she wanted to sell baked goods, so we did that. The next idea was to sing for money on the street in front of our house. I just laughed. So now she wants to clean other people's houses. I told her to start at home, because it is illegal for a girl her age to clean other people's houses for money.

"People we know," she said.

She has started a hair salon in her room (I was definitely excited about lots of hair brushing), a vet clinic, a restaurant, etc. Her complaint is that she's "at work" waiting for her "real customers" and lo and behold...no one comes with their real animals to the 7 year old, self-taught veterinarian! I had to call my friend down the street once and give her five dollars to go buy every toy Ruby had for sale, because she was set up with no advertising, no signs and no customers...not to mention only a handful of really undesirable toys for sale. So I think we'll start the process of opening a new business together this summer and continue on into the school year. You know, write a plan, set some goals, make an investment, determine a target client and sell something.

She made two books today to sell to Alice. One about princesses and one about Mickey Mouse...she hates both of those things, but she was smart enough to know that in order to sell something, she'd have to target a buyer.

So...any bright ideas? She could make something and sell it...soap was suggested. Please comment with your ideas!

Olympic National Park Camping...

We were so excited when Chris' sister and her family were coming from New Mexico for a week! They were coming to spend time with Matt's (Chris' sister's husband) side of the family (we get to see them in Colorado every year and they hadn't seen some of Matt's family for three years) but we were able to squeeze some weekend camping and Matt's brother and his family joined us as well. The trip was originally for us and my folks, so it was a big, extended-extended family weekend.

We camped at Kalaloch Campground in the Olympic National Park, which is right on the beach. It was rainy the first night, day and night. I pretty much wanted to go home, but THANKFULLY the sun came out and we saw the sun the rest of the time.

The Olympic National Park is pretty amazing. There is so much diversity, from the coast to the depths of a rain forest. We really enjoyed the ocean at low-tide! We saw lots of star fish, hermit crabs and sea urchins. There is a beach on the coast called Ruby Beach, so of course we went there! One thing I learned during this trip is that I can't really wear a baby and a fifteen pound camera set up. I didn't take any of the below pictures, and generally just left my camera in the truck. I would have loved a pic of Ruby in front of a Ruby Beach sign, but when we were leaving, the baby had fallen asleep and we didn't want to risk waking her.

Almost everyone got to go rafting on the Hoh River for an afternoon, which I hear was beautiful. I have a lot of video taken by Teresa, so I'll have to look through them and post one or two of that adventure.
We hiked through a massive forest of old vine maple trees. I think these trees have inspired some of the tree-like monsters you see in movies...they were just so mossy and drapey and immense. They were definitely a little creepy.
We were so lucky to have such a nice time with family! I wish I had taken pictures, because I don't have any of my parents! I did have my camera on the outing to the vine maples, but they weren't with us then. So...the Olympics are amazing. It would take a week to really do justice to the park and see it all...you'd have to move your camp several times. It's just too big to do from one location! One day we'll go back with older children!