The last time Troy’s mom and stepdad had the chance to visit us, we lived in Arizona and Annalie was still a baby. So we were all excited to hear that they were planning a visit to the East coast! Last week they drove from Texas to North Carolina to visit Troy’s sister and her family, and then last weekend they drove up here to see us.

Troy was still at work when Carol and Tom arrived, but Annalie stepped in and gave them the grand tour of our house, with special focus on the new tree swing in the backyard, the pumpkin dish full of candy corn in the entryway, and the fireplace that we’d just decorated for Halloween.

While we were all in the backyard, Annalie talked Grandma into playing catch with her for a little while. Notice Annalie’s outfit?

Aunt Dana had sent a Halloween shirt with Carol to give to Annalie as a gift. Annalie loved it and immediately created this whole outfit around it, right down to the socks.

After that, Annalie felt it was important that Grandpa Tom be introduced the wonders of Netflix Instant on our TV.

Tom was properly impressed. Half of James and the Giant Peach was watched. And then we met Troy for dinner at our favorite local steakhouse. After that, we decided to go see the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial.

Tom and Carol had both been to Washington, D.C. before, but years ago. There are a bunch of big monuments here now that weren’t there on their previous visits, the 9/11 Memorial among them. When Joe visited us in April, Troy took him to see the Pentagon one evening, and they both said the Memorial there was really neat at night. They were right. We’d been there during the daytime, so I’d seen it before, but the Memorial is lovely at night with all the lights on.

I especially like this ghostly photo I got of Annalie lying on one of the benches. There is a bench for each of the victims of the crash, with their names inscribed on the ends. The name on the end of the bench Annalie is lying on is LCDR David L. Williams, USN. Because of the direction the bench is facing, I can tell you that he was in the Pentagon on 9/11. The benches facing the other direction honor the people who were on the plane.

The next day, over a delicious breakfast of sausage, Trader Joe’s Ready-to-Bake Mini Morning Buns, and Blackened Home-Fried Potatoes from Hell, we asked Carol and Tom if there was anything else in particular they wanted to see in DC. Tom said he’d like to see the Lincoln Memorial again, and Carol said she was up for whatever we wanted to see.

We decided we’d start with the Lincoln Memorial and work our way around to a couple more memorials. So after breakfast we headed downtown.

As we walked to the Lincoln Memorial, Troy was telling Annalie a little about President Lincoln and why he was such an important man in our country’s history. When we got there, he read the Gettysburg Address to her from where it’s inscribed on the wall. Then Carol impressed us all by being able to recite half of it from memory. I memorized it in 7th grade and I can only recite about the first two sentences from memory.

Of course Annalie’s favorite thing about walking around the Mall is seeing the ducks. “Aww, look at the cute little duck butts!” is what she said when we saw these guys.

We walked down to the other end of the reflecting pool where we could see another newish memorial, the World War II Memorial. It’s a big one, with tons of fountains. Fountains are always a big hit with Annalie.

It was a warm day, and Annalie was hot from all our walking around, so she asked if she could put her hands in the pool of the big fountain. There are signs around the edge asking visitors to respect the memorial and not wade or throw coins in the water…but technically it says nothing about putting your hands and arms in.

Here is Troy taking a picture with his phone…

…this picture, in fact.

I handed the camera to Troy and asked him to take a picture of me and Annalie, because I realized I wasn’t going to be in any photos if I didn’t. As he got ready to take it, Annalie said, “Get a picture of me hugging my baby sister!” She also has conversations with my stomach and if I make the mistake of replying to something she’s said, she’ll look up at me and say, “I wasn’t talking to you, Mom. I was talking to my baby sister.”

That photo of Annalie and Tom cracks me up. Carol wanted to take a picture of them by the Texas pillar, since that’s where Tom and Carol live. Annalie was being pouty for some reason, Tom’s making a weird face and grabbing Annalie by the wrist…it’s just funny. Five seconds later we told Annalie pouting girls don’t get ice cream and she cheered right up and cooperated. The piggyback ride she got from Troy didn’t hurt her mood either.

As we were walking from the WWII Memorial over to the Vietnam Memorial, we stopped to rest on one of the many benches lining the path. I took the opportunity to take a picture for the photo wall, but Annalie wasn’t very smiley.

So I told her to think of the ice cream we would be buying for her in a few minutes, and that cheered her right up.

Annalie remembered the frozen lemonade I bought for her when we went sightseeing with Joe last spring, and immediately requested the same thing. Troy and I shared a bomb pop Liberty Rocket Pop.

Ice cream breaks are so refreshing.

Troy was confused about how exactly he was supposed to use his phone for money at this ancient “pay phone” we spotted along the pathway. And Annalie posed nicely for me in this spot looking towards Constitution Gardens and the Washington Monument. Troy noted that it was kind of a unique view, because there are no other buildings in sight. You can also just see the Capitol dome to Annalie’s left.

One of my favorite things about the Vietnam Wall it that it fairly begs to be touched. It’s counterintuitive; it’s a stark wall of black granite that seems like it should be forbidding. But somehow you can’t help but run your fingers over the names. And seeing what kinds of memorial offerings people leave is always interesting. On that day I saw several letters, roses, flags, and a military beret. This can of peaches with the fork rubber-banded to it struck me as particularly sad. It was such a specific thing, it told me the person who left it must have clear memories of the person he left it in honor of.

After we walked up from the Wall, we crossed this street where we had a not-usually-seen view of the Lincoln Memorial and headed back to the minivan since the time on our meter was about to run out of time. We had just enough time left to grab hot dogs from the vendor we were parked near.

When we first parked the car, while the adults spent a half-hour feeding $8.00 in change into the meter for our two hours of parking, Annalie wandered up the hill a little ways. When she came back down she announced that she’d seen a skeleton on the ground under the trees. We all sort of went, “Okay, uh-huh, let’s go see the sights!” Then when we went back to the car, she made a beeline for the skeleton and hollered for Troy to come look at it. He walked up to her, and I was surprised when I heard him say, “Huh. I guess it’s probably a squirrel skeleton.” Annalie thought it was totally cool and asked Troy to take a picture with his phone.

After our busy Saturday of sightseeing, we decided Sunday would be a good day for hanging out at home and relaxing. Carol and Annalie potted our recently-purchased mums for us, and then they did a little crafting. Carol usually has fun craft projects ready for Annalie to do when we visit them. This time she brought a project with her, a purse plus ribbons and rosettes for Annalie to decorate the purse with.

While they were doing that, I made eggs benedict for lunch because I find that kind of thing fun.

That afternoon, because I hadn’t gotten enough cooking in with the eggs benedict, I cooked the sugar pumpkin we’d bought the day before, then roasted the pumpkin seeds. When the pumpkin had cooled enough, I mashed it and Annalie and I made pumpkin spice cake. Annalie helped me grease and flour the pan, and then I showed her how to use her finger to gently draw pictures in the flour. I learned to do this from my piano teacher’s daughters when I was a kid. (It was at their house I also ate my first bagel, natural peanut butter, string cheese, and yogurt, before any of those foods were mainstream. They shopped at a food co-op long before it was trendy.)

While the cake was cooling, we killed some time at a nearby park. Well, really it’s the playground at a church, but it’s open to the public. Annalie calls it “the wooden park” because all the play structures are made out of wood.

Unfortunately, playing at the wooden park sometimes leads to the need for splinter removal. Annalie was very brave. The lollipop I gave her to suck on while Troy tweezed her splinters out helped, I’m sure.

After pizza for dinner and pumpkin cake for dessert, we headed to bed. Early the next morning, Tom and Carol loaded their stuff into the Durango. Troy, Annalie and I all got up early to see them off. We hugged them good-bye and took the traditional last-day photo with Annalie and her grandparents. It was a great visit. We hope they get to come visit again sometime, when there will be another grandchild in the picture!

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Oh riiiiight…I need to blog our Day 7 photos. I always kinda run out of steam at the end of 7 Days, after a whole week of creativity and blogging and commenting. Also, Friday was very tiring. It’s Sunday evening and I just now feel like I’m recovering.

Anyway! On Friday, we went down to Southern Maryland, where we used to live, to go to the county fair with some friends. It was horribly hot and mercilessly sunny (it must’ve been close to 100F on the fairgrounds, with all the people and animals and equipment) so the fair wasn’t as much fun as in previous years. But at least we got to see some friends, and Annalie and I got our beloved cotton candy!

In case you’re wondering, Annalie’s camouflage t-shirt says, “I’m hiding from you” and my t-shirt says “Reality is for people who can’t handle science fiction.”

Annalie took her Day 7 self-portrait in a funhouse mirror at the fair. Crazy!

We were able to meet up with the Kunzes for a ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl before they had to leave.

Annalie liked her first time on that ride, but she wasn’t interested in going again, thank you. I wish I could have gone but being six months pregnant pretty much means you’re doomed to watch while others ride.

Though not riding means that Troy and I got to hold Ashland while Bekah rode with 4-year-old Jack. She’s almost four months old and so smiley now!

We wandered through some of the buildings and checked out the exhibits of arts and crafts and photos. I love me some fair art. It’s always amazing to me how creative people can be in all sorts of media. Annalie played a couple of games and was really bummed she didn’t win any prizes, so we were happy to find an everyone’s-a-winner fishing game for kids. She was thrilled with her teddy bear.

Can you tell from Annalie’s pink cheeks how hot it was? We didn’t last very long, partly because of the heat and partly because we drank all the water we brought and the drinks at the fair were movie-theater expensive. So after a while we bailed, picked up a couple of Annalie’s friends and went to see a movie in town. Then we had dinner with friends—which was a good way to end a hot, sweaty, day that didn’t exactly go as expected—and headed home with our extra bag of cotton candy.

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!