Halloween seems like it was so long ago. But I feel I should blog about it for the grandmas. So!

On Halloween morning, we made pumpkin-shaped pancakes with chocolate chips for eyes. No actual pumpkin was in the pancakes, though. I should have used this recipe from Zakka Life but I was lazy and just used the store-brand pancake mix and food coloring.

But they were still mighty tasty.

Pumpkin-carving time! Annalie designed her own pumpkin, as she has done every year since she was 3 1/2.

This year, she asked if she could help carve it too. So she did! She carved the eyes and nose, with a little help from Troy, and she did a great job.

Gumball supervised.

Pumpkin braaaaaaaiiiiins!

Um, Troy? Perhaps it’s time for a short break from the pumpkin-carving.

After a refreshing Twizzler and a rest in the sun, we got back to work.

Troy and I worked at carving our pumpkins. I even carved a little one for the baby, at Annalie’s request.

Kristen commented on Flickr that she loved that the baby got a punkin too. I replied that to Annalie, this baby has been a real member of the family, included in all plans and stories and holiday traditions, since way back in May when we told her that she’d be getting a baby brother or sister around Thanksgiving. She’s got big plans for them to have sisters-only secret handshakes, sleepovers, and makeover parties.

Trick-or-treating time! Annalie was a Sock Hop Sweetie this year for Halloween.

She fell in love with this costume the minute she saw it at Target, which kind of surprised me. She oohed and aahed over the various princess ones, and seriously considered a Daphne (from Scooby Doo) costume, but the minute she saw the bobby soxer pictured on the label of this one with her hair in a high ponytail and a scarf tied jauntily around her neck, she forgot them all.

She went with the one high ponytail on Friday, when we went trunk-or-treating, but for some reason on Halloween she decided she wanted two low ponytails instead. After I finished curling her hair, she surveyed herself in the full-length mirror and declared, “I look CUTE!”

I sort of dressed up as Juno for Halloween. I found an orange-and-white striped shirt on clearance a few weeks before Halloween, and I had bought myself a cheap black hoodie jacket at Old Navy, hoping it would get me through whatever cold weather we had before I had the baby so I wouldn’t have to buy an expensive maternity coat, and the costume just sort of fell into place. I really should have been wearing a short skirt over my jeans and carrying around a blue Slushie. But eh. I’m eight months pregnant and I don’t even really like Halloween all that much. Half a costume was enough.

On the way home, we saw that one of our neighbors had set all this stuff out labeled “Purple Heart donations”. I so badly wanted to sneak off with the KitchenAid mixer for a friend who had just been talking about wanting one, but Troy wouldn’t let me, even after I told him I’d make a cash donation to the veterans. He’s an upstanding citizen like that. And honestly, I probably wouldn’t have really done it. I’m an upstanding citizen too, even when people leave expensive kitchen appliances sitting out on the curb. Sigh.

We didn’t really do a whole lot of trick-or-treating. Annalie was done after going up and down two streets, so we headed back home. We lit our jack-o-lanterns and a fire in the fireplace. We ate roasted pumpkin seeds and played a board game. Occasionally some trick-or-treaters would come to the door, and Annalie would hop up to answer it, offering them the bowl with a cheerful, “Take a few, there’s plenty!” Even with her generosity, we still had a ton of candy left over. Oh darn.

From Juno, the Sock Hop Sweetie, and Captain Awesome, a belated Happy Halloween! Hope yours was as good as ours.

I guess I forgot to tell you guys, we have a tree swing now! That’s in addition to the tree rings in the video in my previous post. If you follow me on Facebook, you might have caught my recent hand-wringing about swingsets. We’ve been talking about getting Annalie a swingset since we moved here, but hadn’t really done anything about it. When we changed the calendars from September to October, I realized time was growing short if we wanted to get one before this winter, so I started researching possibilities online.

And then I went crazy. Do you have any idea how much most good wooden swingsets cost!? It’s completely ridiculous! Since we’ll be moving in a couple of years and moving the swingset wouldn’t be feasible, we didn’t want to spend that much. We looked at the cheaper metal swingsets, like the kind we had when I was a kid, but those seem so flimsy and not very entertaining compared to the neighbors’ swingset that Annalie can play on anytime. We looked on Craigslist, we found some free plans for DIY swingsets, we talked it over…and we decided maybe all we need for now is a tree swing.

We have a big chestnut tree in our backyard that we thought would do nicely for a swing, so we went to IKEA and bought a wooden swing for $15. While we were there, we decided on impulse to buy a $10 set of rings, too, since Annalie loves the rings at gymnastics so much. Troy picked up some cable and clamps, and he and Annalie got busy trimming some branches that were in the way.

While Troy trimmed extraneous limbs and took down old Christmas tree lights (the plastic was so degraded they just broke off in Troy’s hands), Annalie was gathering chestnuts and I was taking pictures and trying not to trip on all the spiny cupules. These things are what the chestnuts grow inside, and in late September-early October they fall off the tree and become trip hazards.

Oops. So much for avoiding the spiny cupules. Even though I was wearing good shoes and walking really carefully I still managed to step on one, lost my balance, and fell. Luckily, I just landed on my knee and the ground was soft. After ascertaining that I was okay, Troy asked, “And is the camera okay?” It’s really kind of amazing, considering how often Troy has seen evidence of my klutziness, that he ever bought me a nice camera. Luckily I have not done serious damage to it. Yet.

Annalie helped Troy tighten the clamps onto the cable to form loops.

Getting the cable up over the supporting branch was fun. It’s about 18 feet up, and the ladder didn’t reach. So Troy tied the loop in the cable to a long piece of bright green twine, and tied the other end of the twine to a wrench. It only took him about five tries to get the wrench over the branch for the first cable, and I think he did it in one or two tries for the second.

Then it was just a matter of threading the cables through the swing and the red plastic rings that came with it. And a test swing by the engineer, of course.

Then it was time to swing, woohoo!

Troy put the rings up the next day, and Annalie’s been using those a lot too.

I think we made the right decision. Swingset, schmingset! Give us our tree swing and rings, and we’ll all be happy.

Well, and maybe a porch swing under the deck for me to sit on. That’s next!

Our homeschooling year has officially started.

It started unofficially as soon we got home from California with Troy taking Annalie, at her request, to the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, the World War II Memorial (“You know that memorial with all the flags and fountains, that’s for a war that happened when Grandpa was a baby?”), and the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. I say, when your six-year-old asks to visit museums and national memorials, you grant her request and pat yourself on the back for getting the school year off to a good start with a kid who’s eager to learn. (Note for next year: apparently Labor Day is a good day to visit those places; Troy said even though they were all open to the public hardly anyone else was around.)

I had originally planned to start doing daily lessons with Annalie the day after Labor Day, using our new Sonlight Curriculum, the entirety of which for the whole school year is pictured above on a shelf in our dining room. But even though I had received the boxes from Sonlight a week or two before we left for California, I never got around to opening them before we left. I wanted to give them my full attention, and in the days before our trip I was too scattered with laundry and lists and emails and planning. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wait till we were back home from our trip. That’s the beauty of homeschooling, after all: I get to do things on my schedule.

Once we were back from our delightful, exhausting, jam-packed-with-friends-family-and-fun, mostly-yet-to-be-blogged two weeks, I decreed that we needed a few days to rest and ease back into real life. We caught up on our sleep, did some laundry, went to the grocery store and got back into the swing of meal-planning and -making. That Thursday was the emotional roller-coaster of Annalie’s first gymnastics class. I thought Saturday would be a good day to unpack our box of books and materials, but what with one thing and another Saturday got away from us. That seems to happen a lot with Saturdays.

Sunday morning, we went to church for the first time in weeks, thanks to all our travels at the end of summer. We spent some time relaxing at home, we ran some errands, and before I knew it the day was nearly over and we still had not opened that box.

Troy mentioned the box of books to me a couple of times over the course of the day, because he knew I’d planned to unpack everything and get myself organized that weekend. I had breezily agreed that yes, I was planning to do that, and then changed the subject, because even though it was bugging me and I knew I wanted to do it, I’ve suffered from Opposite Disease my whole life. I reminded Troy of this the last time he mentioned unpacking the school books to me—snapped at him, really, the poor guy. His only crime was knowing me and my tendency to procrastinate too well. So when he protested that he was only trying to help, I immediately apologized, hugged him, and said, “You know what? If you really want to help, could you come right now and help me clear off the dining room table so we can unpack the freaking box?” And of course he did exactly that, because he’s awesome.

After we cleared the table in about five minutes flat, I told Annalie that we were going to open the box of school books. She said, “All right! I’ve been waiting and waiting for this. Can I help!?” I told her, of course she could help, these were her books! Can you guess what happened then?

She sat at the table with us for the next hour and a half as we unpacked and went through all the books and supplies. She was particularly interested in the science and history books, but was also very excited to see that Charlotte’s Web was one of her read-aloud books, and when she recognized Put Me in the Zoo and Little Bear among her reading books. Can you guess what happened next? Because it surprised the heck out of Troy and me.

I said that I needed to go through all the books and check them off on the invoice, to make sure we weren’t missing anything. Annalie said, “I can help! I’ll read the books to you and you can check them off.”

I blinked at her. Was this the same kid who gets squirrelly if I ask her to read the “DONT WALK” sign at a street crossing, a sign that she knows perfectly well what it says? I was pretty sure it was the same kid.

I told her I would love it if she read the book titles to me, that it would be very helpful. I expected her to read two or three and then get tired. But she stuck it out and read almost every book title to me. She needed help with some of them, but she read or sounded out a good three-fourths of the book titles almost entirely on her own. She was up almost an hour past her bedtime but I didn’t care at all, because she was voluntarily reading something. Once she rubbed her eyes, and I said if she was tired we could put her to bed. She admitted she was a little tired but she wanted to keep going till we were done. Oooookay then, keep reading, kid!

She keeps doing stuff like this, insisting she can’t read and then casually reading an entire sentence somewhere before back-pedaling and insisting that she really can’t read, she just looked at the words and guessed, that’s all, honest! It’s hilarious and touching at the same time.

I’m not sure what her mental block about reading is, because she clearly has the skills to read. It’s more like she isn’t ready to read on her own, like she wants the security blanket of having someone there to read to her. We’ve reassured her many times that no matter how good she gets at reading, no matter how old she gets, that we will always happily read to her if she wants us to. We encourage her, applaud her successes, and try not to pressure her into reading more than she wants to. Because she will read when she’s ready—or, apparently, when I need help comparing the contents of a shipment against the invoice. But you know, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if she goes back to insisting that she can’t read tomorrow. And that’s okay; she’s only six years old. She has years and years of learning and reading ahead of her. It’s okay if she wants to stay a kid a little bit longer.

[Warning! Long aside about homeschooling philosophies and the benefits of delaying education ahead! I was totally planning to write a quick breezy post about our first few days of the school year and I have no idea where this came from except yes I do. I am opinionated as heck and am pretty much constitutionally incapable of not sharing my opinions with the world. Feel free to skip the next four paragraphs if you want to. You'll know it's safe to start reading again when you see photos.]

I was just talking about this with Bonnie the other day, actually. She was telling me that although she does not consider herself a wholesale follower of the Waldorf education philosophy for a variety of reasons, one of the things she does like about Waldorf is that it strongly encourages delaying formal math or reading lessons until children are at least 7 or 8 years old, until they are fully awake to the world.

This echoed a discussion I’d just been having with Sonja and Brenda about how some European countries similarly delay lessons until those ages, thinking that for younger kids playing and exploring the world is more important than an early knowledge of letters or numbers.

And you know, as someone who’s worked with all ages of kids in a variety of settings over the past 20 years, I can see the merit in that way of thinking. Preschool-aged kids vary wildly in their ability to sit still, to pay attention, to master the fine-motor skills necessary to move a pencil across the page, to grasp abstract concepts like the fact that 2+2=4 or that the letters “c-a-t” represent that furry, pointy-eared animal that purrs and meows. But by the time kids reach second grade, the playing field has leveled for most of them. The kids who were singing their ABC’s before they were potty-trained are probably still at the head of the class, but now most of the kids who were struggling to write their names in kindergarten have probably caught up to the pack and are reading and writing just fine…that is, if they weren’t labeled as “special needs” and made fun of by the other kids because they were “slow.”

This is not to say that some kids don’t have learning disabilities or other geniune special needs, because of course some of them do, and receiving specialized help is a necessity for them. But much like the probable over-diagnosis of ADHD in our culture, I’d be willing to bet that many kids who struggle early on would struggle a lot less, which would breed confidence and further academic success, if reading instruction were delayed until they were older. (Insert disclaimer here about how I’m not a professional of any kind, just someone who’s spent a lot of time with a lot of kids. Thank you for not throwing rocks at me; it would only damage your own computer monitors.)

Anyway! Pay no attention to that wild-eyed idealogue hunched over her laptop.

We started lessons using the curriculum materials on Tuesday. We’re starting off slow, since Annalie has never been in a formal classroom setting before, and only did a devotion and a couple of subjects from the lesson plan, history and reading. Today we added science to the schedule. At Annalie’s request, we did two days’ worth of science lessons, because why not? Again, that’s the beauty of homeschooling. Tomorrow we might add math, we’ll see how it goes.

Did I mention the lesson plan? The best thing about using this particular curriculum, in my opinion, is that it comes with a complete 36-week lesson plan, which will totally save me when I have a newborn in the house. That’s the main reason I decided to use a pre-packaged curriculum this year instead of going with the unschooling approach I used last year: I am having a baby smack in the middle of the school year and will need the structure. Even when I’m sleep-deprived and breastfeeding every 90 minutes and doing quadruple the usual laundry, I won’t have to worry about figuring out what we’re going to do for school. I’ll just need to open the binder to the right week and look at the plan.

One of the things we did that first day was a spelling pre-test, and Annalie aced it. She was very proud of her 100% and gold star. She specifically requested that I take a picture so she could show her grandmas what a good speller she was on her first day of school. Then she put down her dry-erase board and asked me in a serious, concerned tone, “But when is recess?” That’s my girl, keeping her priorities straight.

I wasn’t exactly worried about homeschooling this year. After all, I’ve been homeschooling Annalie her whole life. I am confident I have a broad-enough knowledge base to teach a first-grader the basics and maybe even a few frills. I have no doubt that homeschooling is the right choice for our family at this time.

It’s just that this year, it felt more official, what with having to file a Notice of Intent to Homeschool with the local school superintendent; not to mention knowing that at the end of the year I’ll need to either provide standardized test results showing that Annalie is in the top quartile of kids her age, or a letter from someone with more edumacation than I (i.e., a Master’s degree) stating that she is learning as she should. And it’s not that I have a problem with keeping the Man informed, or that I’m worried Annalie won’t learn this year. It was just unfamiliar territory, this whole curriculum thing, and it made me slightly uneasy.

But now that I’ve familiarized myself with the materials a bit, and now that we’ve done a couple of days’ worth of lessons, I’m wondering why I wasted time worrying. We will kick butt at this homeschooling thing. I’m pretty sure we could finish the school year by March, if we really wanted to. We most likely won’t, because we’re going to make time for field trips and baking and traveling (gotta take the new baby around to meet far-flung family members) and photography and hanging out with friends.

And recess, of course. We’ll always make time for recess.

p.s. New banner! This is one of my favorites. Thanks, B!