This Week in Home Education

Amphibians

GeekBaby requested to learn about amphibians. One of the drawbacks of being a biologist is your field is irreparably broad… and I'm more of a deep biologist than a natural philosopher. While I could pick out almost every amphibian from a much larger group of animals, I actually had to look up amphibians so I could describe them accurately. Knowing what they are and being able to explain it coherently at the level of preschool natural philosophy are two very different things.

This experience has brought the significant flaws in my childhood education to the mental front, and I suspect I won't be able to rest until I've blogged about it. Sadly, those same flaws tend to inhibit substantial blogging, so there's rather a line.

But we talked about how amphibians need to live at least part of their lives in water, that their skin tends to be slimy, and looked at some pictures of different species.

This one is definitely the weirdest. It's actually why I qualified my ability to pick the amphibians out of a crowd – I suspect I would have confused it with a type of worm.

From here, the discussion branched two different ways.

Fetal Development

GeekBaby expressed a wish that he could be an amphibian, so he could have a tail and grow out of it, like a frog. So I told him he did have a tail once! But he grew out of it while he was still in my tummy. Then we pulled up the From Conception to Birth TED talk, to watch the amazing video of development in utero.

GeekBaby liked the video very much, but wasn't so impressed with Alexander Tsiaras who gave the talk. We followed this up with some other illustrations of development at 20 weeks, and he observed that Tindómiel had already outgrown her tail.

Geography

Amphibians also led us to a discussion of where they lived. This and Wikipedia's picture of the leaf green tree frog took us to Australia. We don't have a globe, so I searched the Internet for a good world map coloring page. Sadly, one doesn't seem to exist, at least not on the Internet. I finally settled for one that was blurry when blown to full page size, and missing Antartica, but at least it was blank and reasonably detailed.

I had hoped to keep him occupied with coloring the world so I could clean, but he elected to just color Australia and save the rest for anther day. *sigh*

Reading & Writing

A few days later, we sat down to play with the whiteboard slate. He is still too inattentive for reading and I refuse to push, lest I turn him off, but he can copy his name very credibly!

My mother also reports he enjoys writing his letters with the Mead debossed learn to write tablets. I'll have to pick some of those up.

Geek Lessons

We pulled out my copy of D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths and started reading it to him. I'm getting a little desperate to populate his imagination with something meatier than PBSKids.org, and thought this might work nicely.. especially given his current love affair with The Lord of the Rings.

The result? Well, he likes saying Ginnungagap. He can't quite get it all out on his own, but he repeats it with absolute relish.

More Geography

We talked some about the places Norse myth originated, and pointed them out (roughly) on his map of the world. Now he can find and name Iceland… if he's feeling cooperative.

One of the things I love about these little learning sessions at home is how efficient they are. I don't think we spent more than a couple hours on these topics and I'm certainly not 'organized' for teaching. But he remembers them. (If he's feeling cooperative!) It's just like feeding him. Some things I have coax him to try, and others he gobbles, but it all nourishes.

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7 Quick Takes – Baby Edition

1. Baby is still alive in there. We got to see and hear the heartbeat. I’d feel better about this if it weren’t the established pattern of miscarrying post-heartbeat. (Your risk is supposed to drop significantly once you’ve heard the heartbeat.) So please, keep praying.

2. I’ll add an ultrasound picture later, but for now I can say with about 70% certainty, this baby is not twins. I made a flippant remark about having twins right around the time of conception, and I’ve been wondering whether this baby is twins ever since. But since most twins have dual amniotic sacs, and there was only one in the ultrasound, the ground has been narrowed to the slim possibility of identical twins sharing a sac.

I think I would rather like the twins. Make up for lost time, so to speak. mab might remember me blithely opining once in her dorm room “oh, I want four kids, minimum.” I had no experience with small children then, of course.

3. Then again, I’m actually quite good with babies and small children. It would be nice to get to exercise those talents again.

4. I have next to no morning sickness to speak of yet. This is driving me to the brink of madness. I always have morning sickness. Horrible, awful morning sickness that lasts all pregnancy. It only stops when I miscarry or give birth. Not having it is freaking me out.

5. It is amazing how relevant Calvin & Hobbes still is. It’s even more relevant today that it was when it was first published.

6. I made English muffins yesterday. They did not survive to see my 3:30 pm doctor’s appointment. That good, especially toasted and slathered with strawberry freezer jam. And they’re so easy! Unlike bagels, which take too much effort to make myself when I can buy decent ones for about $3 a half dozen, there is no reason to ever buy an English muffin again.

I also made kaiser rolls for dinner, but Joe doesn’t have a recipe up for those. My recipe is pretty good, I should blog it sometime.

7. Superversive is going to put out an ebook of some of his (best, imo) essays on writing fantasy! I am so excited about this that I can hardly sit still. The only thing that would make it better is if I could get a hardback with that nice dragon on the cover to sit on my bookshelf.

His essay on superversion should really be in this book, but it isn’t listed. I’ll just link it again, shall I?

Where I Write

I get these gaps in my blogging. Either I’m sick and lying comatose on the couch while my child demolishes the orderly home it took me months to create. Or I’m doing something else. I haven’t been (too) sick lately, so it’s all been something else.

I just get the need to do something. It doesn’t always matter what. In this last longish gap, I’ve made a skirt that fits, turned a queen down comforter into two twin minicomforters, instituted a regular preschool session on the days I’m at home with GeekBaby, read books, finally figured out the breviary, learned to pour beeswax candles, plotted mischief, and done my usual work here and in the lab. I like to be busy doing things, and I always have too many projects in various stages, all of them running at once.

But writing is never, ever one of them. Because writing isn’t doing something. Writing is just sitting, staring impotently at the screen, and occasionally growling softly.

If you thought that was funny, I didn’t write it. It was part of my usual internal running monologue and it popped up while I was halfway up two flights of stairs. I popped into an empty lab and borrowed a sharpie to scribble it down so I wouldn’t forget it.

My house is drowning in such scraps of paper. See?

Although, this room is also part of the problem. My space for writing is right now a combination of storage area and federal disaster area. FEMA doesn’t cover additional bookshelves, sadly. We need them. We have books stacked two deep on every shelf, and we still have stacks and stacks on the floor. (That’s what comes from frequenting the $10 a back Houston library sale even once!) Part of this mess this house is twice the square footage of our old apartment, and we just don’t have enough furniture. But, really, we just aren’t naturally tidy people. Behold my shame.

I have a hard time writing on computers. It’s easier to get something out on real paper with a real pen. Once I have something, and it doesn’t always need to be very much, I can sit down at a keyboard and produce something.

Since my upstairs game room is a disaster area, here’s where I do most of my work.

See, part of my house is clean!! I actually like working at a large table like this. We have grand plans for the game room upstairs that involve the removal of the giant cardboard pirate ship and the conversion of a scavenged dry erase board into a table similar to the Emissary, only without the dropped interior and $$$$ pricetag. A table perfect for homework, gaming, work, and other projects (sewing, quilting, etc.) that want a large flat surface. (Himself and I have lots of madly dreamt up projects like this.)

And here’s where I read. Books: the entire set of Liturgical Mysteries by Mark Schweizer, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible (New Testement), the Steve Jobs autobiography, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Lamb’s Supper, Crust and Crumb, Home Comforts, Jesus of Nazareth Part II, another Bible (NAB), the three Magnificats for March and April, and Sheep In A Jeep. You can also see my embroidery frame and lapstand. I have Teresa Wentzler’s Peacock Tapestry up on it now, but I haven’t worked on it since before Christmas.

This collection is actually a little on the small side, and it’s unusually free of Girl Genius, but I wasn’t going to stage it. Books naturally migrate here, and ever once in a while I go through and try to put them back in their homes. This usually involves evicting squatters. Have I mentioned we need more bookshelves?

And this is where I code. This is where I really miss the upstairs game room. The books here are Learn Cocoa on the Mac, Beginning iOS5 Development, and Knight and Dragon. I’m not sure why Knight and Dragon is there. I’ll have to make sure it gets put away during morning clean up. Yes, I code at a little red IKEA kids table. I don’t sit in the chairs though.

They do hold my weight though. Those IKEA kids chairs are boss.

(I was originally going to participate in Jen’s writing spaces link up, but I guess it’s too late now. I kept forgetting to take the pictures. Plus, I’m neither a real writer, nor organized in any significant way. So I probably don’t count.)

 

Germinating Stories

I had the oddest thing happen to me.

I’ve had the idea for a story floating around for years and years. Longer than I really remember. It was a children’s story, something like 13 Clocks or The Phantom Tollbooth, but also different. It involved a truly atrocious pun that got my wrist slapped by Mike when I told it to him. But the idea was fun. While I never let it go, I never wrote on it either. I just couldn’t get the hero started down the road. The only things I could think of had been done before, and they didn’t quite fit anyway. So I let it alone in the dark.

And while driving to work, I realized how my hero got involved in the story. And as soon as I realized what happened to him, the story changed. The pun vanished, the hero grew up, the whole plot mutated into something completely different.

It was such an intense experience that I actually forgot I was driving to the bus depot and drove all the way downtown instead. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was insight, not invention, and both terrifying and exhilarating. I don’t yet dare write any of it down, it feels rather like if I do, I am stepping off the edge of the world.