Rain, rain, go away

With Rachel being so involved with YW camp this week, we were on the fence about whether to have the rest of the kids do a week of school without her (having all the children be on the same schedule is a big perk to homeschooling, right?) but also part of the reason I'm trying to front load the school year is because I'm nervous about having to juggle their education with my education. Rachel is much better at managing her studies on her own than, say, for example, Benjamin or Zoë, so in theory she could still complete her studies in the future if I'm having a particularly busy week, while Benjamin and Zoë definitely could not.

So we took Monday (Rachel's birthday) off and went ahead and schooled (mostly) without her today (though she was present for our morning reading and I might count her drawing classes this week as school time since the kids did some drawing lessons this afternoon as well, which we counted toward school time).

We did not get any playtime outside today because it was raining all day. And not just raining—we had a torrential downpour, with thunder and lightning and dropping tree branches. The whole nine yards. It was a terrific storm; it was dark and cloudy all day.

This was unfortunate for two reasons. First of all, as Benjamin explained to me around 10:30 this evening, it's easier for him to fall asleep if he's had a productive day.

Rachel is thirteen!?!!

It is very hard to believe that Rachel is thirteen years old now because I really do remember—like it was yesterday—bringing Rachel home from the hospital, feeling so terrified and awed, just staring at her, wriggling and grunting in her bassinet, and thinking, "What do we do now?!"

She was so itty-bitty! 

We were so clueless!

We've all done a lot of growing up over the past thirteen years so now we get to stare at this human-sized person (with a little more awe than terror now), lounging on the sofa reading or standing in her bedroom practicing her viola, and think, "What do we do now?!"

She's almost grown!

We are still so clueless!

But we've made it this far, so I suppose we just keep on going.

So, let's see. We bedazzled the birthday tree for her yesterday. Here she is standing in front of it with her cake:

Hyphen-ate

Zoë's been reading her way through The Magic Treehouse series. In the very last chapter of Dinosaurs Before Dark, the first book in the series, Jack and Annie hear their mother calling them and because she's yelling, she's stretching out their names to make them carry a long distance.

"Ja-ack!" was the way it was spelled out in the book. "An-nie!"

Zoë got to that part and faltered. "Ja-ack?" she read. "Ja-ack? Why Ja-ack?"

So I explained to her that words are often hyphenated like that when the author wants us to imagine them being drawn out, like we're yelling the name from far away. The vowel is repeated with the hyphen in between so we know to switch tones with our voice. 

"Like this," I told her, and then I sang out, "Jaaaaaa-aaaack!"

"Oh!" she said, very impressed with this new-fangled orthography. "Jaaaaa-aaack! An-nie!"

"Perfect," I told her. "Just like that. That way it sounds like their mother is calling them, right? Pretty neat."

She kept reading. The children climbed out of the treehouse so they could run home before dark. Annie turned to say goodbye to the treehouse (which is a magic treehouse, by the way (that might be a spoiler but, like, honestly...the series is called The Magic Treehouse so...chill)) and for whatever reason they chose to use the hyphenated spelling of good-bye (which...who even does that still?). 

So when she went to read Annie's farewell to the treehouse she used the little lesson on inflection that I'd just taught her. 

"Gooo-oood-byyy-yyye!" she sang out.

I just about died of cuteness overload, but I managed to stifle my laughter. 

"So," I informed her. "Some words are spelled with a hyphen normally, like, in this instance of 'good-bye.' Annie isn't hollering at the tree. She's simply saying, 'Good-bye.' And good-bye can sometimes—but isn't always—be spelled with a hyphen...and we just say it without doing anything special to our voices."

"Oh," said Zoë. "Good-bye."

"Exactly."

"So sometimes the hyphen means we get to dooo-ooo thiiii-iiis with our voices and sometimes...it doesn't?"

"Exactly. Sometimes it even means 'don't stop sounding out the word here because it's continued on the next line or page,' remember?"

"Oh, yeah. The hyphen can do three things?! That's confusing."

"That's the story of life. Let's keep reading, shall we?"

"Okay."

Life is terribly confusing, isn't it?

Buddy

Zoë came slumping down the stairs, rather suspiciously trying to hide some things from my view. So naturally I followed her.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "What do you have there?"

"Just my crown...and some scissors," she blubbered, letting the pink crochet crown and a pair of similarly pink scissors fall from her hands. I'd crocheted the crown for a little girl from long-ago, back when we lived with Grandma and Grandpa in Orem. Pink yarn for a pink-loving girl (was it for Rachel or Miriam?), buttons pulled from Grandma's button collection (my collection was in storage elsewhere).

"What...happened...?" I asked. "Did you cut it?"

"I didn't want to, but I had to, but I couldn't, so Benny did."

"I'm afraid I don't follow..."

"Benny made me!" she wailed.

"Ben-ja-miiiiin!" I hollered.

Even more thoughts on COVID

It's about time for another COVID rant, right? I feel like it's about time for another COVID rant.

Today we broke another world record with 71,670 new cases (997 new deaths). A few weeks ago Dr. Fauci suggested that the United States could see 100,000 cases per day, which seemed like an astronomical overestimation, an impossibility. Suddenly, however, hitting 100,000 cases per day seems like a very real possibility.

Georgia didn't break any personal bests today, but with 3,871 new cases and 37 new deaths, we're not exactly in great shape. Hospitals are rapidly filling up. Both hospitals in Athens are full and have begun diverting patients. Other hospitals in the state (and particularly in our area) are dangerously close to reaching their maximum care capacity.

Our Young Women group had an in-person activity yesterday, anyway—"appropriately" socially-distanced, outside, with masks optional. Rachel did not attend.

We also have a plan for returning to church: our ward will get one Sunday per month to meet and we will split into two groups (one group for those 50+ and one group for those 49 and younger). We're slated to meet for the first time next month—August 16th. It is optional; those who want to stay home (like, for example, us) still can. Also, "we will need our cleaning supplies, that we still do not have, and the weekly average of Covid infections needs to decrease for 2 weeks in a row," which seems like a rather difficult statistic to achieve.

Weekends always seem to have a lag in case reporting, so it's not like we have a smooth curve to work with; case numbers always dip on the weekends and rise during the weekdays. Our charts look like the spikes of a stegosaurus. But already they were counting cases as having "gone down" for two days. The email was sent out on July 12 and we just hit our state record for the highest number of cases recorded on July 10, with 4484 cases, and then we "went down" from there, only to quickly jump back up again after the weekend.

Solar Oven

We purchased windows for our upper floor at the beginning of May and today they finally came to install them. We are very happy about this because, if you remember, our air conditioner broke in May as well (after we'd decided to spend our money on windows) and our windows were (a) not energy efficient at all and (b) were often painted shut or screw shut and (c) if they weren't sealed shut they wouldn't stay up without being propped open and didn't have screens (which makes having windows open about impossible in the south). I don't think this upper floor had been properly aired out in decades. So now we have beautiful, functional windows (that don't at all match the outside of our house...but we have plans for that...one day...in the future).

I was also a little not happy about the timing because of how rampant the coronavirus is in our community right now and the workers showed up without masks.

But, largely, we didn't have to interact with them (and considering they were here to remove our windows entirely there was quite a lot of natural ventilation). I moved our homeschool to the basement for the day (we also replaced a few windows in our front room, which we hope will help keep it cooler as well since it doesn't have any sort of air circulation system (the other rooms that get a lot of sun at least have ceiling fans)).

For science we are studying "Earth science," which means we're also studying the solar system. Yesterday we started studying the sun and the moon and today we were supposed to do a few experiments with the sun/moon today, but I didn't gather my supplies beforehand and didn't want to go hunting through our things upstairs while the workers were here, so I decided that we'd make a solar oven instead. So that's what we did.

Here are Miriam and Benjamin working on their solar oven:

Another firefly walk

Zoë was writing stories this afternoon and although she knows how to spell a surprising number of words, there were a few she couldn't quite sound out. So she'd ask me how to spell something and then would run off and write for a while before coming to ask me how to spell something else.

Alexander, who enjoys copying the behaviour of his older siblings (which is good when it's good and bad when it's bad), started asking me how to spell words as well. He doesn't know how to spell any words, though, so he asked me how to spell every word he wanted to spell. 

"Mom, how do you spell I?" he asked. 

"I," I told him.

He ran off and scribbled on his paper for a minute and then ran back to me.

"How do you spell want?"

"W-A-N-T," I said. 

"Oh. W-A-N-T," he repeated faithfully before running off to scribble on his paper again. He was back a few seconds later with "How do you spell to?"

"T-O."

One book, two books, red book, blue book*

I started reading Where the Red Fern Grows to the children over breakfast this week (which reminds me, I need to fill out our homeschool record for the past couple of days) and they've been loving it so far, always begging for another chapter (and now, in Benjamin's case, hounding me for a pair of hounds). It's a beautiful window into a different time period, I think. It was published in 1961, which makes it 59 years old this year. However, the narrator, Billy Colman, is remembering his boyhood, fifty years previous so the kids and I calculated that it probably took place about 100 years ago (I don't recall a year being specifically mentioned in the first few chapters; we're not very deep into it yet and I haven't read it since I was in middle school (when it was one of the books for my homeschool (online) English class; I've really come full circle here)).

Anyway, Rawls describes life in the Ozarks so beautifully and he is, in my opinion, an expert on life in the Ozarks. That's where his family farm was. Like Billy (which, by the way, my kids were amazed when the kids at the schoolyard started taunting Billy by calling him "hillbilly"; they were like, "How do they know his name?!"), Rawls grew up in the Ozarks in the early 1900s. He experienced them firsthand. Like Billy, Rawls' mother was part-Cherokee and thus was given land by the US government as retribution for having, you know, stolen the land in the first place. Actually, there are a lot of similarities between Billy and Rawls. This story isn't classified as autobiographical, but Rawls drew liberally from his childhood experiences.

So, my point is, that this is probably a pretty good book to read if you want to get a feel for how a poor family in the Ozarks may have lived in the 1920s (or so). In fifty years if you want to get a feel for how a poor family in the Ozarks may have lived this would still be an authoritative (heavy on the author, perhaps, light on the authority part) take on it. Rawls experienced the Ozarks in the 1920s firsthand.

Was Rawls a perfect person? No. He was not.

Morgenmuffeln and a wild family devotional

Zoë was on a bit of a fairytale kick today (which morphed into a Disney kick). She got up and read Rapunzel to herself and for one of her many writing assignments (most of which she assigned to herself) she wrote a poem about Rapunzel from the point of view of the witch and drew a lovely picture to go along with it. We let her watch Rapunzel later in the day and then she found all of her Disney princess toys and carted them around the rest of the day, calling them her children. 

When Andrew called everyone for scriptures and prayer, Zoë lugged all her many children down the stairs and set them up on the couch with their own set of scriptures.

Andrew told her it wasn't fair for her to take up so much sitting real estate in the living room, but in the end she won the argument because she was only taking up a little bit of the couch. It's not her fault she has so many children who wanted to sit with her! 

Her argument wasn't really all that strong, but Andrew decided it wasn't a battle worth fighting. Everyone else had found alternative places to sit and Zoë was happy and ready to participate. Sometimes it's best to let a happy Zoë be. 

My mom sent me (well, me and my siblings on our family chat) a message this morning that said, "I just learned that there is a word, in German, for a person who is grumpy in the morning and doesn't like to wake up early: Morgenmuffel."*

It made everyone immediately think of Zoë. She can be a Morgenmuffel. But perhaps also a Mittagmuffel. And sometimes even a Nachtmuffel. Every day she's muff-muffelin.' We sure love our little equal-opportunity-muffel. 

Homeschool Olympics

We've been holding our own little Summer Olympics this week, having spotlighted a few countries last week. We've read What Are the Summer Olympics?, have been researching Olympic heroes, and every day we've been competing in different Olympic events (in proxy for various countries).

Benjamin did so well on his Mozambique presentation that whenever the children pick countries to compete for, Alexander passionately begs for Mozambique. "Mo-am-beet! Mo-am-beet! I want to be Mo-am-beet!" So Mozambique shows up on our roster quite a lot. But we have a pretty good global representation, I think. This Olympics was very well attended.

On Monday we had a "Balance Board Yoga" competition, where we executed a series of yoga moves with increasing difficulty and rated each other's performance. If the pose was steady, full points were awarded. If it was wobbly, a half-point might be deducted from your score. If the board touched the floor, a full-point would be deducted. If a person lost their balance and fell on the ground they'd be lucky to score any points at all. Some judges were harsher than others. A few scores were contested.

We did mountain pose (1 point), tree pose (2 points), chair pose (3 points), dancer pose (4 points), airplane pose (5 points), and elephant breath (a "moving" pose for 6 points). Poses had to be held (or, in the case of elephant breath, maintained) for ten seconds.

I won, for Belgium, with a score of 19.5.** I also came in second for Mexico, with a score of 19. Miriam's two countries came in at a tie for third with 17 points (Denmark and Egypt).