Mud, baths

The kids were being wild at lunch so we sent them outside to play. Soon Alexander and Zoë tromped up the deck steps to complain that they had gotten muddy, and they had. Their shoes were muddy (Zoë was in rain boots and Alexander was in crocs) and they had a bit of mud on their legs and hands.

"You're a bit dirty," I agreed, "But that's okay. We'll just wash you off before you come back inside the house. Where's Ben?"

"Benny is dirty, too!" Alexander told me. 

I walked to the edge of the deck so I could see into the backyard and...yup. Benjamin was dirty. Benjamin was very dirty. Our poor backyard is just a swamp right now; we've had so much rain.

Mask insanity

Today's PSA: Just because you stop caring about something doesn't mean that thing stops mattering. In other words: We are still in the middle of a pandemic.

A friend of mine posted an article about pandemic numbers rising (quite astronomically in some places) and her post has garnered 213 comments on Facebook. People fighting over whether or not masks work, whether or not masks are a political statement, whether or not masks are stripping us of our freedoms. It was a definite popcorn-muncher (as in you wanted to just pop some popcorn, sit back, and watch the entire conversation devolve into chaos).

How is this even a question at this point?

Anyway, a different friend on the other end of the mask-wearing spectrum posted a video of a a certain representative from Ohio who refuses to wear a mask because he believes "that we are all created in the image and likeness of God. That image is seen the most by our face," and thus he refuses to wear a mask. In the video he has various youngsters stick a GX-2009 gas monitor inside their masks to measure whether or not there is an acceptable level of oxygen in their masks.

Every time the monitor is placed inside the mask the alarm starts beeping and it won't quit until it is turned off manually (so it continues beeping after it's taken out of the mask and is in fresh air; it must be turned off by pressing the reset button). This is important to note. It doesn't turn off once it's back within acceptable, breathable levels. Our politician friend points out than anything less than 19.5% is considered an oxygen-depleted environment. That's true.

So this alarm will go off when it detects an oxygen-depleted environment (or an oxygen-enriched environment, which is also dangerous) and will not turn off when oxygen levels return to normal.

The alarm sounded in all three tests and when he checked back on the "peak reading" they were as follows:

First test: 17.1%
Second test: 18.1%
Third test: 17.6%

Now, I'm just going to point out an interesting fact for you. Fun facts are fun, after all.

Gotta have Hope

In the middle of writing my "School Bells" post last night, I found out that Greg Hope passed away, so the post quickly devolved into chaos. It's fine.

Greg Hope is my dad's cousin's husband, which sounds like a rather distant relation, but he's is an emotionally close relative. My dad's immediate family isn't at all tight-knit, at least not with us. His brothers tormented him when he was younger and he simply didn't end up great friends with any of them in adulthood. My aunt lives in Washington State and we used to visit with her family when we lived in British Columbia, but I haven't really spent time with anyone from her family since I was 8 or 9. My uncles all live in Utah. Some uncles have walked a path riddled with addiction and difficulty and simply live a lifestyle that is so, so foreign from my own. Others are fine people, good people. Still, if I was walking down the street and one of my uncles was walking towards me, I honestly couldn't say that any of them would recognize me. And on the off chance that they did recognize me, there is no way they would be able to guess my name. I mean, I would be shocked if they both recognized me and had my name pop into their head. It would just...like...

We're not close, is what I'm saying.

The Hopes though? They're different. They're family. 

School bells

We are getting set to open our homeschool academic year very soon (Monday is the plan, actually), which feels very strange to me as I'm seeing my Canadian friends just barely posting their end-of-the-year pictures. But, honestly, our social life is pretty bland right now and we have no plans to do any sort of fun vacation this year, so I figure we may as well get a little bit of our formal learning out of the way. We're abandoning the school calendar this year, anyway, and are embracing a year-round calendar (which is something we've missed since we said goodbye to Easley Elementary School). Plus, I think it will be nice to have the kids into a routine and feeling comfortable with their new curriculum before I begin my classes (because I'm a little nervous about that).

Our math text books arrived a couple of weeks ago and the kids were rather excited about that. I just ordered our science curriculum (it's downloadable, though, so its delivery is fairly instantaneous). Various novels have been trickling in. We just built frames for and hung up our maps (finally). I reorganized our kitchen cupboards and reclaimed an entire cabinet in the dining room for our homeschool stuff. And when our new notebooks arrived, you should have heard the children squealing with joy—so many colours, so many ruling options (wide-ruled, college-ruled, primer-ruled), so much bliss!

Zoë was thrilled with her new notebooks and was sure that her very first assignment will be the writing prompt featured on the front of her notebook. She wanted to practice writing the way she would for her notebook but she didn't want to write in her notebook because she wanted to keep it clean and fresh for kindergarten. So instead she got out some scrap paper and copied the writing verbatim and then drew a picture of a house next to it (it's a picture of Benjamin, in case you can't tell).

She writes a lot of things from her own brain as well, but I thought it was cute that she thought she would need to write the exact thing that's on the cover of her notebook.

Mysterious text messages and Medieval creations

It's 11:15 PM and a new text notification pops up on my screen. It says:

Ben H is talking to you. Ben H should absolutely not be talking to me at 11:15 PM so of course I check my phone. His text message simply says, "Keep going."

So I walk down the hall to Benjamin's room. "What are you doing, buddy?" I ask.

"Nothing," he says, doing a terrible job of hiding his phone...which, for the record, isn't technically a phone; it's an old cast-off phone that he uses as an iPod—he likes to do Duolingo on it, and enjoys listening to a pod cast before bed and then to music while he falls asleep, oh, and he can text a limited number of people on it as well. And which, for the record, is not supposed to be plugged in next to his bed but across the room from his bed.

"I'm going to have to take your phone," I tell him and he reluctantly hands it over. "You really need to go to sleep," I remind him but I still am just baffled by his message so I start asking him questions. "But what does it mean—keep going?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Who did you think you were texting?" I asked. "Because clearly you didn't think you were texting me."

"I thought I was texting Rachel and Miriam and you."

"That's exactly who you texted. But why 'Keep going'?"

"I don't know!"

"Then why send it? And why send it in the middle of the night when you know you shouldn't be on your phone?"

"I just...I didn't realize that texts sent so quickly! I thought it would be a nice message for you to wake up to in the morning. I didn't think it would go to your phone right away. I thought it would take some time!"

Fine

Years ago my mom sent me a book on childhood trauma. I...don't know where it is currently...but I'm positive I still have it. We just have moved twice since I got it and...it's...somewhere, I'm sure. Okay, I found it. In my mind it has a blue cover (it does have a blue cover), but the spine is red! So that threw me off the scent a bit. Anyway, it's called Childhood Disrupted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa and my mom sent it to me because it talks about how even if our brains can't remember our trauma, our bodies remember our trauma. Stressful events even from infancy can be kind of hardwired into our bodies and we need to learn how to cope with this hardwiring. So, she sent me this book to help Benjamin, who had a less-than-graceful opening act of his life.

But I've been thinking about this book over the past year and a half or so and I'm glad I finally found it so that I can review it a little bit and hopefully glean an idea or two.

My kids—Zoë and Benjamin, specifically—still aren't "over" Karen's death. I'm not sure death is something to get over, really. I think that longing—that clenching, tugging sensation in your heart—never goes away. I think it gets better. I think it becomes something that you can live with, something that becomes a part of you, something tolerable, familiar, and, to a certain extent, comfortable. We learn to be comfortable with our grief. Somehow we realize that in spite of always, always missing someone, we will be fine. I'm fine. Andrew is fine. But my kids aren't quite fine yet.

Family history for kids

One of the activities in the family history booklet that I made was a "Don't Eat Pete!" spin off. I made up a little board for the kids to either print out or draw pictures of their relatives and sent along a little box of candies for the kids to use as game pieces. I made up labels for the boxes of candy that said "DON'T EAT ME!" to keep the kids from immediately consuming them (it worked for my own children; I do not yet know if it worked for my other primary children). My children were, understandably, rather anxious to get to this activity so we tackled it this afternoon. 

My birthday

Thirty-five seems like a rather big birthday. I mean, at thirty you're just barely out of your twenties so that's obviously still young. Thirty-five is, like, solidly mid-thirties (hurdling toward forty)...which, honestly, is starting to sound young still. So perhaps it's not that significant after all. 

Andrew and the kids gave me plenty of time to rest today, which they're really pretty good about most days. They say they're trying to make up to me for waking me up every two hours for a solid 10+ years but honestly I think they just want screen time. Either way I get a nap so I don't mind. 

Rachel did a lot of work behind the scenes to make today special. She baked me a cake on Saturday, completely from scratch, and it smelled so good, so we were all excited to get to eat it today. 

A Father's Day Post

One of these days I will figure out how to put up the family history booklet I made for my primary kids. One of the challenges inside is to learn a hobby or trade one of your ancestors enjoyed and today as I stood balancing (for hours upon hours) between a ladder and a window frame, reglazing our windows, I thought about two of my fore-fathers. First, I thought of my Grandpa Conrad, who would climb up anything, balance on anything, and who could probably fix anything. One summer during the Great Depression he and his brothers and cousins dug a swimming hole and built a high dive, just for kicks. But the picture in the collage is of him after he'd shimmied up a pole to do some repair work to the CB radio antenna. It makes balancing on a ladder (for like eight hours!) look easy. 

Junk bugs

Have you ever wondered if you were meant to be an entomologist? Sometimes I wonder that about myself, but then I remember that there are reasons I am not an entomologist (and many of those reasons are the same reasons I didn't pursue my early dreams of becoming a veterinarian (because, honestly, who's ever heard of a vet who is afraid of dogs?)). Bugs are interesting but, like, also I've been known to call my husband to trap a cockroach or kill a spider. So...

Anyway, Rachel spotted a fluffy boi in our yard today—a cute little ball of fuzz scuttling along a leaf. It was intriguing, so we caught it to see if we could identify it.