Seeking Summer

We're looking for summer. We'd settle for spring. Anything but this!

I'm not saying it's wet... well, yes. Yes, I am.

I'm saying it started raining Monday evening and did not stop until mid-morning on Wednesday.

Yes, that's about 40 hours of non-stop rain.





Yes, we'll probably appreciate it later in August, but right now it's an overdose of chorophyll. Unless you have lived in the Pacific Northwest, you may not realize that "green" is not a color. Oh no. It's a family of colors. A very large family.

I'd like to add some blue and yellow. Preferably in the sky.


Oh, and all that rain....

means more of these.

Ten Minutes from Normal

Actually, that's the title of a book by Karen Hughes, if I remember right. But it may just describe my boys, also.

As I mentioned (below) we had our last meeting of the year with our ASL teacher today. The boys each made a thank-you card. Gunnar drew a beautiful picture of the flowers in front of the school. Wyatt drew a very clever picture of himself with about 20 arms, all doing different signs. And Tate drew a really detailed picture of the little flowers, in a pot, we were bringing as a gift. Then, he added a bunch of little tiny soldiers fighting a battle around the pot, and in among the stems of the plant. Very Tate.

I asked him if he had one plastic soldier he'd be willing to part with, and his eyes lit up as he understood the idea. He selected a special, but not too special, little soldier that he hid in the flower pot. This inspired Wyatt, who wrote this:


Look carefully around the plant,
you may find a small surprise,
camoflaged, quite unseen,
and hidden from your eyes.

Cool. She loved it!

Done-Done-Da-DONE-Done-Done!

Oh, we are so very DONE DONE DONE!

We finished our history last week. (Rome fell.)
Finished our Grammar this morning. (Edit THAT.)
And the boys decided to double up on their math yesterday, so finished that today. (Tessellations "rock"!)
Met with our favorite ASL teacher this afternoon, and gave a performance of "Day by Day, a Week Goes Round" for the class of our favorite second grade teacher. The boys did a great job!

Doesn't feel as summery as I was hoping for, (so they are in the school room, playing a game on the computer rather than outside)... but we are DONE!

Grandpa and Grandma are coming to dinner and bringing pizza, so it's a party!

Great Tate

We are winding down our homeschool year...
and what a year it's been!



Tate deserves a big pat on the back for his progress in many things, so let me be a bragging mom for just a minute.

Although we are homeschooling, Tate still gets "services" from our local school (IEP). Due to his progressive hearing loss, we decided this year to begin focusing on learning Sign Language.

We're not ASL purists, given that English is his first language. (ASL - American Sign Language - is NOT just putting the same words in the same order into sign language.) The goal being to keep exposing him to an alternative way to communicate, to give him options when he can't wear his HA (like in a pool, or at night), to support what he CAN hear, and to prepare against the day he may not hear at all. (God forbid.)

So, at the beginning of the year, our teacher tested him, to see what we were beginning with. Every time she signed a word, he had four pictures to choose from to identify the sign. He scored 52 our of 130 (about 40%). He was frustrated and very unsure of himself. But...

When she tested him last week, he identified 96 out of the 130 words (about 74%)! Big improvement, especially when you realize that she had NOT been teaching from this list. He actually correctly identified several signs he has never been exposed to!

She signed "tree", which he knows, but three times... "tree, tree, tree", and he answered, "Forest". Good job. But here is one that blew me away (I was watching). The sign for school is the right hand clapping on top of the left hand, which he knows. She clapped her right hand on her left, and then spiraled it up like a miniature tornado. He immediately said, "College." Why? "Because it's school at a higher level."

Bingo! He's getting it! I am so very proud. :0)

And, the other day, he invented his own sign language joke, involving the letter B, and a bumble bee, and getting stung. Okay, so it wasn't as funny as "Bob's House", but I was impressed!

School Frustration

Ugh. Due to Tate's IEP and the services we are receiving, the school psychologist felt the need to do a bunch of testing on Tate.

As it turns out, I had planned to have both Tate and Wyatt take the Iowa Test through the local homeschool group, but Tate was too sick to go on his appointed days. So, I agreed to the testing at the school.

And I sat in the room with him through every single minute of it. And for good reason... based on personal experience I don't fully trust the school psychologist's judgment.

Most of the testing was run-of-the-mill... math problems, spelling, editing, reading and comprehension, etc. But then she decided she needed to test something else... probably Phonological Processing. She told Tate she would play a tape and he would hear a man's voice saying words, and he should repeat the words... which are broken down into (very unnatural sounding) individual sounds, "KH--AAAA--T" and he's supposed to say, "cat".

Right away I jumped in and told her that HE'S DEAF! He can't "get" that information from audio-only, he needs to see the visual cues - either see the person's face forming the sounds, or see a visual representation of what is being said. "Well," she said, "no one gets visual cues."

Does she not GET that this is an inappropriate test for a Hard of Hearing person? He can not "hear" the difference between "m" and "n". He HAS to see your face. He can't hear a lot of initial consonants. He gets the context, and his brain fills in what his ears missed. If the word is a WORD that is in a CONTEXT. She has no idea.

Tate is so smart that people consistently think he hears a lot better than he does. They have no idea how hard he is working to take what he DOES hear and arrange it into something meaningful. (When he was first diagnosed at 3 1/2, Children's Hospital ran the tests three times, because they did not believe he could have the hearing loss he does and speak/communicate as well as he does.)

Ugh! I should've brought one of those squishy ear-plugs AND a set of 'head-phone' style ear protectors... "Here, insert this into your left ear. Now put these over both ears. Now lets play the tape for you and see what YOU get."

Fortunately, I WAS THERE. She insisted on giving this test anyway. After listening to a bunch of seemingly random sounds coming from the stereo Tate gave me a look, like, "What am I supposed to do with this?" I just rolled my eyes at him.

She finally gave it up, and tried to give him the test verbally herself, but mispronounced most of the sounds. YET SHE SCORED IT ON HIS TEST. 24%.

I'm not sure she's familiar with the term "Outlier", (she would probably think I was calling her a liar), but I brought in results of the independent testing I've had done, so maybe she'll get the point. Maybe.

That's a Fact

Gunnar and I are in the school room and I'm looking at the world map on the wall.

"What're ya doin', mom?"

I point out Perth, Australia, where I have lived. He comes closer to inspect the map. Gunnar loves maps. He 'gets' how maps work, (directions, land forms, etc.) but the distances are obviously unclear to a 6 year old.

"Oh!" He points to Perth and moves his finger slowly south.

"So, you could walk a couple miles and get to the sea. And then if you sail for, oh... about 10 months," his finger continues south to Antarctica, "you could get to the Antarctic. And then you freeze."

Done.

Mr. Picky

We were eating our dinner of chicken, tortellini, veggies and oranges. Well, some of us were eating.

Tate was finished about the time I had dished up everyone else. He is my least picky eater, but then, he ate bugs as a toddler ("Hello, Poison Control...") so that may not always be an attribute.

Wyatt was getting along okay.

But Gunnar was just moving the tiny servings around on his plate and doing his usual trick of chewing each bite 700 times. (And avoiding eye contact.)

I tried to encourage him. "Good job, Gunnar, you ate two of your chicken bites!"

"Mom. I ate a lot more than that! I ate ALL but two bites."

"Gunnar, you only had four to begin with."

His math is just fine, but I'm afraid he may have a future in politics.

Outside toys and inside toys

This is an important distinction to make, with a house full of boys. For at least two reasons:

1. Once you make something an outside toy, it will rarely be allowed back in the house (too dirty).

2. I would like my house not be be mistaken for a demolition project.

So, two of the boys spent some of their own money at the store today. Tate wanted a (suction-tip) bow and arrow, and Gunnar got a little boomerang. Plastic, $2, and it actually works. Wow.

Then I hear "thunk... thunk... thunk" on the windows. Hmmm, the windows will probably stand up to Tate's assault, but why take that chance, when the window in the kitchen-to-mudroom door has already been replaced with plexi-glass (complete with a target drawn on it, in dry-erase marker that refuses to erase). So the "thunk... thunk... thunk..." has moved to the kitchen.

That will be fine until it's time to make dinner. (I have this apparently unreasonable aversion to having to dodge projectiles while I'm cooking.)

Then I hear Gunnar's little voice, "Mom, can I throw my boomerang at the door too?"

"No, honey, the boomerang is an outside toy."

Indignantly, "WHAAAAT?"

All I have to say is don't take anything for granted with boys.

As to why the door between the kitchen and the mud-room has a plexi-glass window... that's a story for another day.

P.S. The picture... not my actual kid.

FNAR

For No Apparent Reason.

It's how the Modus Operandi of boys, right? Things don't have to make sense. To you.

Last year the boys were digging a hole by the side of the garage. FNAR. They came upon a rock. A really big rock. A challenge.

We've had two big rocks dug out of the yard by a contractor with a small excavator. This rock is bigger. The boys decided to dig it out. FNAR. They succeeded in digging all around it and loosening it. They even found a chunk of 4 x 4 to use as a lever (it's a physics lesson!) and tried to pry it out, but it is about two feet down in a hole and they couldn't shift it far enough.

Kerry got worried that one of them would somehow get caught under the rock, so he put a stop to that, and they lost interest for awhile. Until today.

Today it's not a rock in a hole, it's the entrance to a mine. They have done more digging, wedged the 4 x 4 between the rock and the slope, and leaned/nailed all manner of scrap wood around it to make a sort of shelter. And then they found a piece of something they claim is charcoal and proceeded to write dire warnings all over the scrap wood.

"Do not enter!"

"Danger!"

"Watch out for the mine!"

But this is what cracks me up. They couldn't wait to bring us over to show us:

"No parents allowed!"

Because, yeah, I really wanted to climb down into a hole beside a rock. FNAR.

Two Surprises

* So we're trying to eat healthier food.

* Once in awhile I cook breakfast for dinner.

* Kerry loves sausage.


I bought a package of BOCA Breakfast "Sausage". I mean, how far wrong can you go with a product that is - in the original - made of unmentionables, fat, and seasoning?

Very far, apparently. Further than I could imagine, from the picture on the box (which actually looked like real food.)

Surprise #1: The "sausages" were AWFUL. They didn't even smell like anything when they cooked. And they were mushy and sticky.

Surprise #2: The boys were polite about it. And we didn't even have any company.

Oh, they took one little bite and refused to eat any more. So did I. I think, maybe, they were so horrified by the squishy little brown sticks I had put next to their food that they may have been (briefly) speechless. We're talking, this is a good candidate for Fear Factor, because they looked exactly like something the dog did.