Mary P. on our county homeschooling list just posted about a cool timeline game called Chronology. “Where does this card fit into the timeline? Place 10 events in order to win the game!”
Sounds fun! Thanks, Mary!
Google shows it at a bunch of sites—here’s one. Educational Learning Games
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Wonderboy was sitting on my lap this morning when Rose tried to pick him up. He, being quite comfy at the moment, yowled at her and squirmed away.
She shrugged. “I know, I know,” she told him. “Mom’s your favorite character.”
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Just a little recordkeeping here…
June 24, hospital outpatient clinic visit. Arrived at 1:15 for a 1:15 appointment. Taken to exam room at 3 p.m., saw doctor around 3:20. We adore this particular doctor and I know the long delay was not his fault. Just the nature of the outpatient clinic. I’m pretty sure the appointment times are established in a parallel dimension in which the laws governing the passage of time bear no connection to those in our own dimension. Just a theory. I could be mistaken.
July 5, different hospital, pediatric surgeon’s office. Arrived at 1 p.m. for 1:15 appointment. Was informed by jovial secretary that there had been an “oversight”—the doctor wouldn’t be in until 2. “Oversight” is, of course, a synonym for “really big scheduling mistake I, the secretary, made but would prefer not to cop to.” I know this because I heard her murmur the truth to another patient whom she seemed to know very well. We, being new patients at this practice, were not privy to the inner circle of truth regarding clerical screw-ups. As for the doctor “coming in at 2,” that translates to “entering the building at 2:25” in actual Earth time. But I’m sure he was on time according to the clock in that other dimension I was talking about.
July 12, back to the first hospital. Different doctor (also a guy we really like), different department. Neurosurgery this time. Arrived at 11:00 for an 11:00 appointment. Shown to exam room at 11:25, visited by doctor at 12:10.
During the past two months, I’ve racked up over a dozen hours of waiting time in various medical offices. Shouldn’t there be some kind of “frequent waiter” policy that earns you, say, a $20 deduction from the hospital bill for every X minutes spent in the waiting room? Ooh, and double points for wait time in the actual exam rooms, because it is so doggone hard to keep a toddler occupied in one of those tiny little semi-sterile spaces in which the most interesting objects are the sharps container and the biohazard wastebasket.
At the very least I think you should get a card that permits you to cut to the front of the line in the hospital cafeteria. And free pudding. Yeah.
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A suggestion passed along by my friend Sarah B., quoted here with her permission:
“Anthony at teacher’s edition had a great idea for our timeline. We bought strips of brightly coloured paper which allowed us to make a comparative time line of ancient history for the different continents – yellow was Asia, Blue was Europe, Red was Africa etc which allowed us to see really clearly what was going on in the other continents when the pyramids were being build in Egypt, for example. It really helped clarify things for me because obviously we tend to learn in a linear way – Sumer then Egypt then Greece etc etc, but this really allowed us to see the way the whole world was developing at any given time.
“And it’s a lovely bright addition to our wall.”
Here’s a site that sells printable timeline figures—my kids love exploring the CD-rom, hunting for their heroes.
A while back I wrote about how Jane was unwittingly honing her spelling skills while crushing me at iSketch. This time it’s Rose, who will be seven in August. She wanted her own email account and has been gleefully firing off five or six notes a day to me, Scott, and Jane.
Dear Mommy I am more afraid of flies than lions.
She wants to do it all on her own: I mustn’t look over her shoulder. After a day or two, she disclosed to me her method for figuring out how to spell words she doesn’t know: she looks through books until she finds the word she wants.
“When I find it, I copy it down,” she explained.
I asked how long it takes her to find the words she wants. She isn’t using a dictionary for this; she is turning to her favorite novels and picture books.
She shrugged as if the question was hardly worth considering. “I just think of a story with the word in it and I find that page.”
Scott:
•Little Children by Tom Perrotta (Scott says I should read this next)
•The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell (he has been reading bits and pieces to me—fascinating)
Me:
•The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge
•Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis (for the umpteenth time)
•1984 by George Orwell (for the first time, surprisingly)
Jane:
•Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw
•Math for Smarty Pants by Marilyn Burns (tattered, dogeared, one of her favorite books)
Rose:
•the Samantha & Josefina books (and apparently she can’t decide which one to be today…she showed me a slip of paper on which she had written “Samfina” and “Josemantha,” her attempt, evidently, to satisify both role-playing impulses at once)
Scott to the girls:
•Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotsen
Me to Rose at quiet time:
•The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Me to Beanie at naptime:
•Brave Georgie Goat by Denis Roche
Me to all three girls:
•The Wheel on the School by Meindert de Jong (still)
•A Life of Our Lord for Children by Marigold Hunt
And on audio:
•(Jane) Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
•(all girls) Irish Folk Tales by Sharon Kennedy
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People have been writing to ask where I’ve been lately. Waiting rooms, mainly.
In May I wrote about the roller coaster spring we were having—well, ha. Turns out that was just the kiddie-park ride. Wonderboy was just warming up for the big loop-de-loop. Nosebleeds, thrush, my little adventure with a tick…small potatoes. I’ll see your tick bite and raise you pneumonia, mom…
But that’s jumping ahead. First there was the skull fracture. (Sometimes I can’t even believe I type sentences like that one. I remember a time when the too-close clipping of infant Jane’s fingernails seemed high tragedy.) Wonderboy is walking all over the place, hooray! But his protective arm reflexes are poor, oh no! When he tumbles, as toddlers do, he sometimes hits his head. One of those times, the physics (so our neurosurgeon informed me) were perfect to crack his skull. A small crack. A linear crack, the simplest kind. Don’t worry, the neurosurgeon informed me. It’ll heal on its own, happens all the time.
Ohhhhhhkay.
A few days later, I’m changing Wonderboy’s diaper and oh no. Can’t believe my eyes. I could swear his hernia is back. This would be the hernia that was surgically repaired over a year ago. Less than a 1% recurrence rate, according to Google. Which means OF COURSE it’s back.
One all-day ER visit later, the hernia has been temporarily reduced (it pops back out the next morning) and—surprise—a precautionary chest x-ray (since he also had a fever) reveals that he has pneumonia. Triple whammy!
By this point, it’s early June and we have already canceled our long-awaited trip to New York to celebrate Jane’s 10th birthday with her best friends. This decision, while crushingly disappointing, turns out to have been a blessing, because otherwise we would have been sitting on the Jersey Turnpike with a baby with a mysteriously recurring hernia and, oh yeah, pneumonia.
The chaos of the next few days causes us to also cancel a long-awaited visit from two terrific teenage girls, daughters of friends of mine. This is a huge blow. We had all sorts of fun Virginia sightseeing planned. But the painful decision turns out to be a wise one, because that week too was filled with back-and-forths to various area hospitals. (You don’t even want to get me started on the insurance/out-of-network hospital mess.) Was that just last week? No, wait, it was the week before last. Right.
So where are we now. The pneumonia is gone, hooray. The swelling from the head injury has mostly gone down. But the hernia is well and truly back. There’s another surgery on the immediate horizon. A second procedure will be performed at the same time, because unfortunately the skin around Wonderboy’s protruding coccyx is beginning to break down. We knew the tailbone would probably need to be removed someday but we were hoping it could wait until he was a little older (and fatter). Right now surgery is scheduled for mid-July.
I’m writing a book in my head in the waiting rooms. At this point I could write a book ABOUT waiting rooms. Except I’d much rather write about Wonderboy and his sisters. And roller coaster rides.
P.S. If you’ve emailed me lately and I haven’t answered yet, all of the above is why! I’m slowly getting caught back up, though. Really!
It’s been over a month since I posted my plea for help with my search for a long lost, fondly remembered story tape about the King of the Raisins. No one responded, and I had just about given up on ever tracking it down. And then this morning the wonderful Lesley Austin posted this comment:
I think I may know this one as I heard this story once. Could it be Jay O’Callahan? We have another of his stories “Raspberries” and have SO enjoyed everything of his we have come across. I can imagine him saying what you wrote.
Lesley, hoorah for you, you did it! I visited Jay O’Callahan’s website and sure enough, there was a “Raisins” story on one of his CDs. I wrote him a note, and he wrote right back to say his was indeed the story I remember. I am thrilled!
Just this morning, Scott was quoting my favorite line from this story. Scott has never heard the tape; like my kids, he only knows the tale from my patchy reminiscences. But as I wrote last month, the bits I remember are inextricably woven into our family vocabulary. Wonderboy woke up a nasty cold this morning, and his nose is, um, disgusting, to put it bluntly. When Scott walked into the kitchen, the Boy beamed at him through the goop and tottered toward his daddy for a wrestle. Scott scarcely flinched at the affront to his shirt (ew) but I heard him mutter, “Horrible, horrible! But I like you anyway.”
So far, ours has been a spring of swoops and dives. Giant up-swoop: Wonderboy is walking! Really and truly walking, all over the house, sometimes clapping for himself as he goes. He can’t get up onto his feet by himself yet, but if you stand him up he takes off like a little wind-up toy. He is walking for the sheer joy of motion, not as a way of getting somewhere, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. It is all about the going (which of course I can’t help seeing as a metaphor for our philosophy of education: it’s about process, not product). I wish I could upload video here; I wish everyone could see this eager boy trucking along, he who had to wait seventeen months for mobility. He is a Wonder-of-wonders-boy.
Little down-swoop: He is a boy who scared his mother silly by having a major nosebleed in the middle of a nap one day last week. I went to get him up and aaaaahhhhh! He was lying there drenched in blood. Now you know that given Jane’s history our first thought, whenever there is unusual bleeding involved with one of our children, is going to be ‘low platelets?’ So of course we had to take him in for a blood test, which I am thrilled to say came back perfectly normal. The nosebleed seems to have been merely a change-of-season dryness thing. Whew.
Then three days later I discovered the Boy had a mouthful of sores. Thrush. Ugh. Enough said. (But he’s doing better now, thanks.)
So that was two unplanned doctor visits in the space of a week. A few days later I found a tick happily dining on my stomach. ::::shudder:::: When we pulled him out, his head remained stuck tight. Ugh ugh ugh. I wound up having to go to the doctor on Saturday morning to have it dug out. Not exactly the way I’d planned to start the day of our (big upswoop coming) 11th anniversary. But you know, it sort of fit the ‘so ridiculous you have to laugh’ motif we’ve got woven through this marriage. As a couple, Scott and I seem to be a magnet for misadventures. Somehow we don’t mind, because we love a good story. And you don’t get good story if the roller coaster stays flat. It’s got to swoop.