I like weird stuff. I don’t mean to be strange, I guess it just comes naturally. Worst of all, I’m not even the cool kind of odd – you know those funky, hip, with-it people who are iconoclast and interesting? Yeah, that’s not me.
I’m the goofy girl in middle school, humming Doctor Demento songs instead of the latest Wham! hit. I’m the fashion catastrophe who showed up to class in college with mismatched combat boots. (And I didn’t even realize until halfway through class. No one said anything because they figured it was on purpose.) Most days I’m all corners in a round hole world.
The Internet is such a boon to screwballs. Even if you are the only kook you know, there’s sure to be someone at least as strange as you out there. (And many who are way more twisted.)
Take, for instance, the Kingdom of Loathing. Here is a game (illustrated entirely by stick figures) where you can be a studded leather boxer short-wearing accordion thief and go about fighting possessed cans of asparagus and scoring piles of meat. Here is a role-playing game I can get into. I am already up to level 2 (parsley enchanter) and am building up high amounts of moxie.
The advent of blogs has also proved that everyone is pretty freaky in some way or another. That bank teller you chatted with this afternoon? She doesn’t discuss it in public, but she dresses her cats in fluffy pajamas and posts about it often. The guy who fixed your backed up septic sculpts lint figures and sells them on etsy. See? We’re all peculiar.
This is a kid who loves words. She’s starting to pick up letters, now, and a couple of months ago she got it about rhyming. Her toddler idea of a poem?
“Ooo! Ah! I gotcha!”
A week or so later, she revised it.
“Hee! Ha! I gotcha!”
I thought it was an anomaly. She’s not yet two – no way could the rhyming be on purpose. But then recently she has come up with a poem perfect for our household:
The Northwest weather you hear so much about has finally set in. Every late August into September we western Washingtonians fool ourselves into thinking that the golden days of sixty degrees and beautiful foliage (also known as “Summer’s finally here!”) will last forever. We loll. And sigh happily. We greet each other with a smile. Then the the fog and drizzle and dank of grey October sets in and everyone heads to the espresso huts. And we frown at the neighbors until spring. (That’d be June.)
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The Bear is finally pulling out of being so sick. He lost five pounds in a week and a half, which is a lot when he was 50 pounds holding a stack of books. He felt fragile and bird-like when I picked him up out of bed in the mornings. He didn’t even want to eat pizza or doughnuts.
Now he is back to doing schoolwork and piano practice. The doc benched him from swimming this month, which is fine because he’s still pretty tired. But he is well enough to be a royal pain in the keister, so I’m not worried anymore.
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After a couple of months of flaking out, I am back on the treadmill. The thing that made the biggest difference? With Moo weaned, I can use the inhaler the allergist gave me.
Wow! Did you know that it’s normal to run and be able to breathe? I had no idea what I was missing. For the first time in my life I am exercising without my airway getting thick and my chest feeling heavy. Sure, my muscles still groan and I get all sweaty and icky, but being able to get a good, deep breath while I go is amazing.
Still not seeing a huge difference body-wise. Give it time.
One of the joys of homeschooling is studying something and watching it catch fire in your kids. Sometimes they will latch on to a topic and run with it. I love that part.
Take the Bear, for example. The Princess is going through Sonlight’s Science 5 – human biology – and I have cobbled together an anatomy study for the Bear to go with it. One of the hands-on activities we’ve done is to outline his whole body on a giant roll of paper and hung it on the wall. Through the year, we will add parts to him as we study them.
Week before last we read about the respiratory system. (You can see his lungs on the wall behind the Princess in the piano video below.) There is something so funny about hearing a five year old talk about his trachea. I love it. Anyhow, he has enjoyed studying lungs and breathing a LOT.
Fast forward to today. He has been super sick with a chest cold for a week and a half, and it wasn’t getting any better. The pediatric clinic on base was booked so they told us to head for Urgent Care. (There are four hours I’ll never get back. Go on, ask me how I think federal health care will work. I dare you.)
Leave it to my son to get pneumonia to supplement his science unit. Our recent reading came in very handy as I explained to him chest x-rays, nebulizers, and germy bronchioles. Then we had an impromtu gym class when I had to pry him off of the ceiling from all the albuterol. Lastly was art class, when I hauled the colored pencils out of my bag. He scrawled, “HELP!?!” on the deposit slip I handed him. (Language Arts!)
In-depth learning on the fly. I wonder if today would count as a field trip?
What I love most about getting through five years of piano practices with the Princess is that now, finally, she is seeing the fruit of her labor. There have been plenty of bad, rotten, teary days but now she can play for her own enjoyment.
Even better is playing for the enjoyment of others. I wish I had this gift to give. A couple of weeks ago we called the retirement home and asked if she and the Bear could play for them. He was too nervous to enjoy it much, but as she walked out to applause and many warm thanks, the Princess stood a little taller. Shoulders back, eyes sparkling, she loved talking and smiling with the residents as we left. I am often proud of her and how bright she is, but it is times like then that I could pop like a water balloon and gush because she makes me that proud.
Along with Bach’s Minuet in G, she played Fur Elise. I felt like it would be kind of strange to film her playing at the retirement center, so here she is playing at home. My only video equipment is my old Kodak Easyshare camera and a tripod, so the quality is low. It sounds like magic in person, but then I’m her Mama.
In the first volume of Character Sketches, there is a unit on determination. “Determination,” it says, “is breaking down a seemingly impossible task by concentrating on achievable goals.” It then goes on to talk about the Arctic tern and the Joshua of the Old Testament.
It doesn’t say anything in there about verbose Spanish novelists.
I am trying to knock my way through the classics of literature. I don’t have any flight plan, just a vague notion that I’ve missed a lot of good books along the way. So I peruse titles and plot descriptions and mentally close my eyes and jab at the list. Sometimes I end up with a dust collector (I crashed and burned with Middlemarch), and sometimes I am surprised and delighted. (Who knew that Jane Eyre wasn’t just chick lit?)
Which is how I ended up with Don Quixote. When I pulled it out of the Rainbow Resource box, I… well, I think I sprained something. No one told me that it rivalled Les Miserables in length. No one told me that the whole funny windmills thing happens very close to the beginning of the book and there is a whooole lot of adventure after that. I kept reading and reading, enjoying myself but also measuring how many more pages I had to go because, dang, Quixote kept on blundering along. And on. And. On.
Now that I have read every page and every footnote I can tell you this: it is hilarious. It is wise. It is full of quirkiness and sideways glances from the author. The entire book was worth it to get to know Sancho Panza. Next time I read it, I want to have a notebook and pen nearby, because it would be worth taking notes here and there.
So here I stand, hands on my hips and one foot planted firmly on the carcass of another great work conquered.
