Baby blues

I have the baby blues. No, I'm not suffering from post-partum depression. I have a case of the Lukes.

It seems like Luke was trouble even before he was born. I've never really shared it, but before we were expecting Luke, I suffered a miscarriage. I was about 8 weeks along when it happened, and although it was a very sad experience, I thanked God I still had two healthy kids. I was pretty down and out for a few weeks afterward, and I felt the only way to "get over it" was to get pregnant again. There went from being a baby, to being no baby. I wanted there to be a baby. The doctor gave us the ok, and a month after the miscarriage, I was pregnant with Luke. Then he started giving me trouble...

About 8 weeks along again, I started bleeding. I called the doctor in a panic. I was able to get an ultrasound right away, and they said the baby had a strong heartbeat. That was good news. But there was no way to predict what might happen. They called it a "threatened miscarriage" and I was put on partial bed rest. I could get up and do normal things, but nothing strenuous. That continued for a few weeks. Then, finally, it stopped. Whew.

About 2 weeks later, Gracie started kindergarten. Her third day, she had some mild, cold-like symptoms. She had no fever and felt fine, so she went to school the next day. When I picked her up that afternoon, she was covered in a lacy red rash.  I took her to the doctor, who said she had fifth-disease, a common, nothing-to-worry-about virus- unless you're in the first trimester of pregnancy. If you contract it while pregnant, the baby can A) die or B) become anemic and need blood transfusions in-utero. Awesome. Needless to say, I was now a basket case. My only hope was that I had already had it earlier in life without knowing it( you don't always get the rash), because you can only get it once. I made an appointment for blood work. I had to wait a week for the appointment, and another week for the results. It seemed like forever. When I finally got the results, they showed I had not been exposed, which means I probably had it once already.

After those weeks of freak-outs, it was fairly smooth sailing for a while. The only "problem" was that every time I went for a check-up, they told me Luke's heart rate was "a little high", but "nothing to worry about" (THEN WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME??!).

Then, at 37 weeks, so close to the finish line, it hit me: the mother of all stomach flus. All day I was sick, until finally I was dehydrated. Gracie had it too, so together we went to the ER, only to lay on the waiting room chairs for six hours. We finally got treated, and I was anxious to go home. But...Luke's heart rate was"a little high".(I know! it's always high!) So instead of letting me go home, I had to be admitted to maternity to be monitored until his heart rate went back to normal. So I laid there for another hour, with all kinds of wires. His heart rate never went down, and they finally got word from my doctor that it seemed to be normal for him. At 4 am I went home.

Needless to say, I was anxious to have this baby. The doctor recommended I be induced, because Gracie was born in 15 minutes and Caleb in 5, so they were afraid I would have Luke in the minivan if I waited it out.
So on March 31st I got all hooked up with monitors and what not, and everything was going great, until I almost died.

I'm not joking, and if you know me, you know I'm not a drama queen. Luke tried to kill me. For whatever reason, my blood pressure and heart rate dropped, and I felt like I was floating. Everything was fuzzy around the corners of my eyes- tunnel vision, and I knew without a doubt, that if I closed my eyes, it was all over.All I could think was I was going to die and Jeremiah was going to be left to raise our kids alone. I just kept praying and praying and focusing on Jeremiah, just trying to keep my eyes open. I just wanted to shut them and go to sleep. Voices were muffled. Oxygen was hooked up. Shots were given. There were about seven extra people in the room, all of whom I later realized were specialists they had called in to be on hand for whatever happened next. Finally whatever medicine they gave me kicked in, and I started to come around. They told me Luke was ready to go...but his heart rate was "a little high" (ugh!)

Later I wondered if the delivery was really as scary as I thought. We didn't talk about it for a few weeks. Then one day I asked Jeremiah if I had exaggerated it in my head. "No," he said, "you were cashing in your chips".

So here I am, almost seven months later, with my strong, beautiful, healthy (although his heart rate remains, "a little high") MONSTER. I love him to death, but the kid is a pain in the butt! All he does is cry. But not pitiful, make-you-feel-sorry cry. Demanding ,hey-lady-pick-me-up-now! cry. He is absolutely incapable of entertaining himself. In the swing...cry. In the playpen...cry. Jumper...cry. You get the idea. And he's sneaky. He tricks people. Everyone thinks he is a calm, happy baby, because whenever we are out, I'm holding him. But as soon as we get home, and I set him down, his evil twin emerges and demands my unadulterated attention.

So here I am, trying to homeschool Gracie, with a screaming baby. We started doing schoolwork in the afternoons. Gracie can play with Caleb in the morning, then after lunch it's naptime for both boys and she and I do her lessons. It looks good on paper, except Luke never sleeps. I get him in for a nap. I start with Gracie. 10 minutes into it, he's screaming. I get him back to sleep. Or sometimes I don't, and he just screams while I shout over him. Or I hold him on my lap while he grabs the books, crumples the pages, yanks my hair, smudges my glasses. Very frustrating.

I should insert here, to his credit, Luke does sleep pretty well at night, most of the time. I guess I would be a zombie if he didn't.

The only thing keeping me going at this point, is that it won't be like this forever, and I guess it's better to interrupt first grade work than something harder. My mom always says, "Don't wish it away" and I don't want to do that, but...I do dream of homeschooling my kids with no one screaming. Of reading a book without stopping six times to wipe up spit-up. Then I kiss his chubby little cheeks and he smiles his gigantic smile and feel guilty I ever felt this way.


'Cause babies don't keep.

Casualties of homeschooling

I knew when I we began homeschooling that some things would change around here. I knew I would sacrifice my free time. The time I used to read in the afternoon. The opportunity to take an uninterrupted shower. My desire to have any more children, ever. (lol) My sanity.I also knew I would have to lower my housekeeping standards. That was the hardest part for me, because I am really uptight about my house. I cannot relax until everything is cleaned up and organized. That's not to say it always is- just that I am on edge until it gets that way. It's something I need to work on anyway, as I drive everyone nuts barking out orders to clean things up. So I knew I was going to have to chill out a little. But it hasn't been easy, especially now that we are in our new house.We want to keep it nice, and we'll spend a little extra for better quality trim or paint. Toys stay in the bedrooms. No food in the living room. And don't bang the cabinets.

When we moved in the first thing we redid was the dining room. The previous owner used it as an office and it was carpeted with old, smelly, stained carpet. The white paint was dingy and dark wood trim in each corner concealed the fact that they never completed the drywall. We ripped up the horrible carpet and replaced it with laminate hardwood. We patched up the drywall and painted a cheery, mustard yellow from the Benjamin Moore colonial collection.We finished it up with soft white trim. I added cranberry curtains and accents. It is by far my favorite room. At our old house we ate in our living room, and this is like a dream come true.

It was also the ideal place to do schoolwork, so when we got started I moved everything in there and organized it in wooden cabinet I've had since we first got married. I keep the books, manipulatives, crayons, pencils, glue, markers, everything there. I wanted it to be accessible so the kids could get things out whenever they were feeling creative and make little masterpieces. I imagined Gracie as a famous illustrator one day, telling an interviewer, "My mother really nurtured my creativity...growing up, no art supplies were off limits, I was always free to express myself!" the problem is, in my fantasy, they put the supplies BACK WHERE THEY FOUND THEM. This has not been the case.

I started noticing that stacks of paper were slowly taking over my house. A little pile on the kitchen counter. A little pile on the desk. A few more sheets on the coffee table. Some papers with shapes cut out on the kitchen floor. Then I started finding chewed up crayons in the dog's bed. Before I knew it, there were papers and pencils and crayons scattered all through the house. Even in the bathroom! "Clean up your art stuff guys!" I must have said it six times a day, yet every time I turned around, there was MORE. It's just the way things are when you homeschool, I thought. I started cleaning it up myself too, but it never seemed to help.

I sat the kids down and told them they had to start asking before they got out supplies, and when they were finished, clean them up. "Ok!"...and they forgot.

Then yesterday was a particularly hectic day. Caleb was extra bad all day. I woke up with a migraine and found  him standing in the open fridge, chucking lemons and apples across the kitchen like baseballs and the dog chewing on one. While I was helping Gracie with math he got a Sharpie and colored his hands. All day was like that. We topped it all off with a last-minute trip to a masonry supply store to buy stone for our woodstove. They were trying to close and we were trying to shop and Caleb was trying to climb the samples in the showroom. We were tired and stressed and had dinner late.

I finally got the dishes done about eight and started to wash the table in my beautiful dining room. I glanced up and when I saw it I actually felt sick to my stomach. Scribble marks from one end of the wall to the other, all over my gorgeous yellow paint, up and down and curled around, darker in some places where he had pressed extra hard. He left his weapon at the scene. A lone pencil, now dull from his merciless rubbing.
"CALEB!!!"

Needless to say, his butt was mine, as are all the art supplies now. Gracie is not allowed to use them either, because she was irresponsible and left them out where Caleb could get them. They are all in a box up in a cabinet. They are not allowed to ask for them. When I decide they can color, that's when they can color. It's a pain having to retrieve them when Gracie does schoolwork or to write something down ourselves, but for now it's the only way. The piles of paper were put in recycling, except for a few exceptional ones that I saved for posterity. It's a shame it had to come to this, but I feel like I got some order back in my house. And, for the rest of the week, Luke is my favorite child.

Rowing

This past week we completed our first week of the Five in a Row curriculum. It was AWESOME! I can't believe what a difference it made. For the first week since we started it felt like we were actually learning something.


If you're not familiar with Five in a Row, it's more of a guide book than an actual curriculum. The way it works is you read the same book five days in a row, and every day you focus on a different topic gleaned from the book. This week we read "The Story About Ping" by Marjorie Flack. Ping is a little yellow duck who lives on a boat on the Yangtze River in China. One day while diving for fish he misses his master's call to board the boat. By the time he resurfaces he realizes he will be the last duck to board and will receive a spank on the back. To avoid his punishment he hides on the river bank. Soon he is cold and lonely, and almost becomes duck dinner. When he find his way back to his boat, he is the last duck again, but he has learned his lesson and accepts his spank so that he can be safe and warm with his insanely large family.

It sounds like a simple kid's story, but when you really start to peel back the layers, there is so much more to it than that. Ping must face the consequences of his decision. There's a moral/character lesson. It's set on the Yangtze River in China, so there's geography. You can study ducks for science, or buoyancy, or water. Every page is illustrated, so you can study art. Using the Five in a Row guide was like having a blindfold taken off. Instead of just reading a children's book, which I do every day, about three times a day, we were really READING it. Here's how we did it:

Monday: Literature, what that is. Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. What makes a classic? Gracie dictated her own story to me.
Tuesday: Ping's decision, using discernment. Talked about strangers, keeping secrets from parents, peer pressure
Wednesday: Illustrations- medium, viewpoint, shadowing, reflection and movement on water
Thursday: Light and reflections, refraction. Looked at different objects through a jar of water
Friday: My favorite day. Life in China, locating China on the map. Religion and government of China, food, animals. Gracie later remarked that she was really glad we live in a free country. Watched some scenes from "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness", which is about the life of missionary Gladys Aylward.(Netflix is a great resource for homeschooling!). I was really excited to tie the topic into missions. We made a "kah-mee-shee-bye"(phonetic spelling!), which is a "story box". You make picture cards, then as you tell the story you slide them through a slit in a box, making a little theater. It's actually Japanese but I couldn't find any Chinese crafts, so that led us to talk about Asia as a whole! For dinner that night we ordered Chinese take out and
(this was Jeremiah's favorite part, lol) ate on the floor like they sometimes do in China. After dinner Gracie retold us the story of Ping using her story box.

Another advantage of Five in a Row is there's more opportunity to include Caleb in what we're doing. He liked reading Ping too and helped decorate the story box. He was also surprisingly deft with chopsticks!

It was a great week, and I am sooo happy I started Five in a Row. This next week we're reading Madeline and studying France of course, and the human body(Madeline has her appendix removed). There's no French restaurant around here so I'd better find some recipes online. I'm thinking pastries...

Here's a little of our week in pictures (Gracie is a pretty good artist, if I do say so :) )