along for the ride

Friday night we (M, L, and I) went to BIFF (Beloit International Film Festival) to see, “At the Edge of the World.” It was a documentary on the Sea Shepherd Society, who I love, so I was excited about seeing it. It was a good documentary, and the filmmaker spoke about the creation process. They edited 330 hours of footage down to a 90 minute doc. He also offered a free blue ray DVD of the documentary to anyone who requested it. I would have liked one, but we don’t have a blue-ray player and I don’t see getting one anytime soon (unless our current player dies).

Hunter was with his grandma this weekend, so it was a rare event to get L’s attention for a whole weekend! Though we all missed Hunter, it worked out well, because L had just returned from her visit with the grandparents, so I had to make up for the time I lost with her!

We’ve been plugging away at our mystery puzzles, and finally got them finished up Friday night. We covered the puzzles up and went to bed, intending to work on trying to solve the mystery now that we had all of our clues and our crime scene assembled. Almost all assembled, that is. I came downstairs one morning earlier in the week to find Chloe chewing on a puzzle piece. It was a soggy ball of cardboard by the time I got to it—totally irreparable. We were hoping that was the only piece she had eaten. As it turned out, it was indeed the only piece she had eaten, so our puzzles were still workable.

L uncovered the puzzles this weekend to take some pictures of the completed versions and left them out on the mat, so we could work on solving them later. Before we got back to them, Lila got to them. I heard Luciana scream, “Lila, NO”! Lila trotted past the 40 or so cat toys in the room and just started grabbing and shaking the puzzle. She was dislodging and disassembling huge chunks from the puzzle and tossing pieces everywhere. She was having so much fun. L was close to having a meltdown of epic proportions. I left my kitchen chores immediately and sat down with my girl to get the puzzles back together. It took us about a half hour, but we got them back together. We decided that we’d better just work on the solution immediately, because the puzzle just wasn’t safe. We disagreed on who the criminal was. I thought it was the victim’s nephew, and she thought it was the victim’s nephew’s fiancé. As it turned out, we were both right. They were in on it together.

Saturday night was date night, and we decided to keep that low key and inexpensive. We finally got out to see Avatar. I liked the movie somewhat. If they removed the hour-long fricken battle scene, I would have enjoyed it much more. I was bored enough to have taken a little snooze during the fighting, but it was so loud it was impossible. I really wanted to see Shutter Island (as does M), but we wanted to be sure to catch Avatar 3D before it leaves town. Next time we have time and money, though, I want to see Shutter Island.

Sunday was a nice ‘stay at home day’ for us. We didn’t have to trek to Madison/Middleton for her dance this week, as her teacher had a performance. It seems strange to have a whole Sunday and not have to spend hours in the car! L picked Scrabble for our Sunday night family activity. We made it through a whole game and M only tried to cheat once! He tries to make up strange words and argue when we call him on it. We need an official Scrabble dictionary. That would help keep the game moving by eliminating arguments over what is or isn’t allowed.

L has 20 spelling/vocabulary words per week. Spelling is fairly easy for her, and she traditionally looks at her words for the week and points out how easy they are. During the week, she has to write dictionary definitions for half of the words and sentences for the other half. When I look over her work and check her sentences, her disposition is immediately obvious from the sentences she writes. Some of her sentences make me laugh, while some of them make me really happy that I homeschool and don’t have to try to explain them to a teacher! Here are a few of this week’s sentences:

I have a lot of relatives in Texas. (She has1 family--six people)

We have mice in our stove. (No, sometimes the cats stare under the stove for hours. I assume they hear mice there, so I throw food under our stove to keep them from coming out and becoming cat food. This is one of those sentences that I would not be thrilled to have to explain to a teacher!)

I'm a critic for world issues. (I'm not sure what to make of this one.)

Global warming is your fault, so now it's your problem not mine. (Ummmm, okay.)

I declare that you are my servant. (That sounds very 'capitalist'. I'm trying to raise a socialist.)

You're under arrest punk. (In addition to missing her direct address comma, I am a little concerned by the imperialistic sound of this sentence).

I consent you to use my toilet. (This sentence has some grammatical issues that we need to address, but again, the tone. WTF?)

She does a lot of memorization (brain training that will pay off massively in the future!), and I usually have her work on classical poetry (British and American, at this point). I have been excited to get her into some of the more modern poetry, and by modern, I mean poetry written in the 20th century. I like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton, though much of their poetry has more adult themes that are inappropriate for L at this age. I tried to sneak in Clifton's, "Poem in praise of menstruation", last week. She did not love it. She bitched and whined, so I gave in and switched it to a poem by the insipid William Blake. It's about a tiger, so she's happy now.