Noticing Verdi had Jane Eyre (adapted) propped open a few inches from his math book, I said, “Put that away.”

“I just wanted to read a little while I was working on math,” he complained. 

Picking up where I left off, Jasper ended lunch crying because I wouldn’t fix the television. It’s unplugged on purpose. He was over it very quickly, though, and turned to the piano instead. Meanwhile the big kids were collaborating on a Lego project. Trying to refocus my energy to be more positive, I sat on the porch to meditate. The homeless guy who lives in the parking lot across the street looked at me warily. Resenting my inability to be alone no matter where I go, I closed my eyes, put my face in my hands and started grounding. Then the door opened up behind me and an angry young voice demanded to know, “WHY are you out here?”

At that point I completely lost it. I growled all the way to my bedroom, where I slammed the door and flopped down on my bed, indulging in two minutes of self-loathing.

But while I laid there, the face of the homeless guy burned in my mind’s eye. My thoughts went like this: I have a home. (It’s falling down.) It’s a cozy, colorful home, and it’s big and rambly, just like I always wanted. (But I can’t afford the use of half of it.) I have good kids, who were surely motivated only by their immaturity to deny me ten seconds of peace. (However do I teach them to care about people’s feelings?) My dog loves me. (And she has fleas.) Good music abounds at the click of a button. (And I’m addicted to it, and fail to ever make live music.) We all have clean clothes and enough food. (But not health insurance.) I should suck it up and go on with my day. (Am I calm enough to facilitate any more learning today? If they were in school, they wouldn’t be subject to their teacher’s mood swings.)

I didn’t want to be the sort of mom that lays on her bed in the middle of the day grumbling, so I got up, apologized to the kids, and tuned in to a folky radio station. Annabelle Chvostek’s Resilience came on and provided a nice outlet for expressing and accepting those parts of my life which aren’t perfect. I had a brownie. Brett called to say he does want to come over, just for five minutes, to give me stuff he found yardsaling.

When he arrived he handed me Woody Guthrie’s Grow Big Songs and a like-new pirate T-shirt for Bear. He let the kids climb all over him for a minute, then he was out the door, back to work at his house three blocks away. I think it was the way he looked at me, all full of love, that really gave me the strength to continue. I finally, earnestly felt better.

It was 3:36. Jasper volunteered to vacuum the carpet. While he (and the other kids) did that, I looked up wasps in Handbook of Nature Study, observing a nest being built on our painted shut window between the pane of glass (circa 1930) and the broken screen. There is no entry on wasps in The Handbook of Nature Study. I went to look them up on the computer, but the computer was not on. Come to think of it, neither was the air conditioner. The vacuum had stopped in the middle of Jasper’s work. Had he not turned it off? The clock was off. The phone was not working. A fuse must have blown.

I could go down into the basement and find the fuse box and turn it on. But it is a shadowy, spiderwebby basement, the sort you find under a big rambly old, falling down house. And we had plenty of books to read up here in the sun lit part of the house.

So we read. I discovered that there’s a whole earth and sky section in The Handbook. That thrilled me, because I’ve been dissatisfied with everything I look at for an earth/space science spine. But the quality of the writing and information in The Handbook is perfect. I read through the section on streams. I also read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The House That Jack Built, The Runaway Bunny, The Real Mother Goose, There’s a Monster at the End of this Book, and everything else Jasper brought to me. I read a dinosaur book to Bear, and Jasper repeated all the dinosaur names, even “euoplocephalus.” Then Jaz wanted to read the books himself, so I picked up my current library book.

The kids were shortly bored of their break and wanting to do something mom directed. I put on our Hugin the Bard CD and we all danced and sang to one of our favorite songs, Descent into Annwn. I must say, spinning a small child in your arms, curls bouncing around, smile just as wild, is probably the best pick me up ever. I was even able to ignore the sense of my modernity addiction seeping in when I told him I was too tired to continue and he pleaded, “press your power button!”

Exhausted, I made bell pepper panini for supper and we sat down to eat together. Well, some of us ate. Bear consented only to sit at the table, sniff his food, and pick at the bread. Jasper poured his berry tea all over his plate.

Afterwards, Bear cleared the table while I got Jasper ready to go for a walk. (He had long ago ditched his pants, then more recently his underpants, and at dinner, his shirt.)

We bumped into our friend Kitty en route to Brett’s house. She was excited to have just scored a new bike at a yard sale.

Inspired by the natural elements on our city street, we discussed, on the three block walk, crab apples, the likelihood of a clump of brown goo being a cowpie (and the likelihood of that in India), and how the characteristics of maple trees change over the seasons.

At Brett’s house, we all chased Sterling’s dog in the wild weeds taller than Jasper’s head. Before departing, I told Sterling to check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog sometime before midnight. We walked back and Brett climbed down into the basement, flipping whatever switch had unflipped itself down there. Meanwhile, the kids drew nature scenes and populated them with the ladybug stickers Brett had taken from his stash of things to give the kids when he feels like spoiling them a little for no reason at all.

I am rocking Jasper to sleep as I type (to pop songs on YouTube). The big kids and I will read Robin Hood and Beowulf and the poetry which is currently serving for Verdi’s memory work, before I send them to bed.   I hope you don’t mind that my recall of our evening is so vague.  This morning I took ten seconds here and there to type out our actual dialogue, but this afternoon, sans computer, I was dependent upon my own addled temporal lobe.

At 9:00 a.m., I become vaguely aware of my two-year-old saying, “my friend Mama,” and patting my head. My ears scan the house for the sound of his siblings. From the clicking, and the content of their discussion, I’m going to guess they’re at the computer using a design program to create virtual Lego structures. I keep my eyes closed and my ears open until the littlest one’s cooing, “my best friend . . . tired Mama . . . ” changes to, “I need to use da potty.” The two of us get up and stumble across the house together. Well, I stumble. He dashes. He’s been waiting to get out of bed for half an hour.

After bathroom stuff, I snag clothing for all three kids and toss it in their general directions. The clock says 9:40, so I warn, “You have twenty minutes to get food into yourself before we start schoolwork.” They negotiate with each other, staring into the fridge, until they settle on the eldest making everyone cheesy bagels.

I get myself some tea, stumble towards the bedroom, and find Bear (5) in there saying, “I meant to do that!” in perfect imitation of Secret Agent 86. (Or of Brett imitating 86 — Bear’s never seen the show.) “You meant to make Jasper cry?” I ask, as the little one is moaning on the bed and clutching a red mark on his chest. Bear observes his sibling with surprise. “Oh. No. Jasper! Jasper! I’m sorry! Are you okay?” They snuggle, kisses are exchanged, and Bear goes back to taking running leaps at the bedroom wall, banging against it, falling down near or on Jasper, and saying, “I meant to do that!”

I get dressed, snag my tea, and settle in front of the computer to read through my favorite blogs.

At 10:07, I note that the kids are not done eating. They’re actually tossing a ball around. I should seriously consider taking breakfast with them. The smell of food in the a.m. makes me feel sick, so I usually skip it. “Ten minutes, guys!”

Verdi (8) panics. “Ten minutes?! Oh no!”

I realize I have implied an empty threat, since I’m not very well going to make them stop eating when ten minutes is up. It’s awfully early in the morning for the first parenting failure of the day. I cross my fingers that this won’t be a theme.

Bear comes over to explain something to me and Jasper comes over, too. “One at a time,” I tell the 2yo, and listen to Bear. Jasper collapses and wails until it’s his turn to talk. He wants a cup of water.

“Your cup is over there.”

“No, I don’t want water.”

“Okay.”

I WANT WATER!”

“I feel frustrated when you . . .”

“No, I doooooo . . . nt want water!”

Feeling ready to scream, I head over to the computer and put on a playlist of silly stuff. I take our yoga binder with me so I can look up what we’re doing next.

As I sit down, Verdi bounds past me, shaking the entire house, shouting, “BATHROOM BATHROOM BATHROOM BATHROOM BATHROOM!” I switch the music to Bad Religion. We can do yoga to Bad Religion, right? If I can do this pose at all. I don’t think my body bends that way. And what do I do with my hands? The only problem I have with Angel Bear Yoga is that the poses are demonstrated by a panda who has typical cartoon hands — just little balls. Is he holding his hands, or does he have them on his hips? Facing which way? No matter, once I get into the pose I remember how to do it.

Now the dog is eating abandoned breakfast foods. Verdi is missing. (Still in the bathroom? Is he sick?)

Most of us do yoga. Jasper isn’t interested. It feels really good to stretch. After we finish up yoga, I set the kids at different tables with their math work. Jaz is in the living room looking through books. I open the curtain and turn off the ceiling light. Then I head in to explain Bear’s math to him. He works on it while I take Verdi orally through his textbook lesson. Jasper has started crying. I set Verdi to doing his workbook pages and check on Jasper. He wants the ceiling light back on. I weigh my options: explain about conservation ethics, or get on with our school day. Schoolday wins. (At least it’s an efficient bulb.) I turn the light back on, but he notices that there’s only a functional bulb in one socket. He’s still miserable. “The light is broken!” he cries.

I scoop him up in my arms, and say, “I think you’re still sad about having to wait your turn to talk to me.” This releases the floodgates, so that he is blubbering, telling me all about the injustice of being silenced, through wails and tears. Meanwhile Bear has finished his math and is showing me the extra pages he did. Over Jasper’s tears, I instruct Bear to get a piece of paper, write his name at the top, and make me a drawing. I tell Jasper that I love him truly and want to know everything he has to say to me, but I have two other kids, too, and everyone else is just as important. Then I wrap him up in a big playsilk. As soon as the silk is pulled tightly around him, he stops crying, so I kiss his forehead and leave him alone on the couch.

Bear has finished his drawing already, and tells me it’s a flying crossbow. I write that down for him. He copies it onto his page while I check on Verdi’s work. Verdi didn’t want to write the words ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’, which is fine with me, so he writes in the symbols. I hear him muttering, “The crocodile always eats the bigger one.”

I am feeling better, and switch the music to GreenDay. Bear’s done copying lickety-split so we put his picture on the fridge and release him to hang out with Jasper, who is wiggled out of his silk and looking much more cheerful.

It’s now 11:20. I set Bear to work on his reading, on the computer, before heading into the kitchen to find myself some sort of light breakfast. I end up making Jasper some food too, and then go to sit with Verdi to discourage further dawdling while he finishes up his math. It turns out he’s having a hard time rearranging 1074, 1704, 4071, 7401 and 7104 so that they’re listed from highest to lowest. I take dictation from him. “Which numeral next?” Though I wrote it down exactly as Verdi specified, he tells me I did it wrong.

“Look again,” I say.

He squints. “Oooh!”

“Do the numbers switch places on you?” I ask him.

He looks at me warily. “Is that a hospital sort of thing?”

“No,” I say, and kick myself for letting him read his aunt’s comic about the abuses of the psychiatric industry, Looney Bin Chronicles.

“Well, sometimes they do,” Verdi responds. “When I’m tired. Or when it’s late. Like at five o’clock.”

Then Bear calls me and asks, “Mama, can I take a break?” I walk over to see what’s up. He is having a hard time spelling sight words. I tell him, “Is is not a sight word. Sound it out.”

“Eye, ess. Oh. That’s silly. Can I still take a break?”

“No. But when you’re done with the whole lesson you can take a break for snack. I have brownies.”

He goes back to it, and I go back to Verdi, who has finished one math workbook page and is now creating a game based on it. He’s drawn cards and a grid for use in the game and has begun cutting them out. I tell him to do that when he’s done with both pages. He sets it aside reluctantly. While I eat, I wonder if Verdi is dyslexic, if math games that are obviously way below what he’s capable of doing are acceptable to play before we even start other subjects for the day, and why Bear can read so well in his phonics program and so poorly in real life. Before I know it, Verdi’s done. Bear finishes up while Verdi finishes making his math game.

Soon they’re both done, and I pass out brownies. “Hey Verdi, get your Greek flashcards out and drill while snacking.”

They have a conversation about Greek over chocolate. Verdi says, “There’s a very super funny letter in Greek that looks a bit like a whirl, and it’s name is zeta.”

Meanwhile I’ve picked up a book of Homeric hymns and am looking up Aphrodite, remembering what I’d promised in the wee hours last night. I pray, and make an offering, and then glance over at the hymn to Hestia and Hermes and say it, too, because I adore it. It’s my favorite hymn.

But I can’t linger long, because Verdi is telling me he’s done with Greek and his brownie and could he please have another brownie and/or a break from schoolwork? No, I tell him, but he can go get his Latin book. “I have to go to the bathroom!” he says, and runs away.

I check off what we’ve done so far, in our daily planner, and decide to set Bear up with his memory songs next.

After doing so, I locate Verdi, who is actually getting on with the Latin without me.

Ami calls, wondering if I want to get together, causing me to look at the calendar and realize it’s Saturday (and 12:21 already). We almost always do school on Saturday. Saturday is much more consistently schoolish than Tuesdays. I don’t know why. I hang up with Ami, explain Bear’s memory songs to him, and go to Verdi in the next room where he will hopefully be far enough away from Bear’s Latin not to get confused while working with his own Latin vocabulary.

Verdi has mysteriously forgotten every thing he knows about Latin. Also, he fails to be able to comprehend the directions. I make him read them aloud, and they suddenly, amazingly click. Imagine that: reading the directions helps one understand them. He does most of it orally while I take dictation.

Bear has by now listened to his memory songs three or four times. I loose him and call Verdi over to the computer to work on his chants (which are on a website). He chants while I look at a message board where I’m administrating a giant copywork project.

A gross smell wafts through the room. My next twenty minutes are taken up with finding the source. Finally I decide that the dog must have plumpered, because the smell is dissipating. Realizing I forgot to tell Verdi when his five minutes were up, I find him he is still working hard on his Latin. It sounds like this: “Um, nt, um, is, no, um, mus.” For those of you without a classical education, that’s not Latin. That’s stuttering.

“Go play piano, Verdi,” I tell him.

Brett calls. He says, “My plan for today is to work. My plan for tomorrow is to work. It would be nice to do something for your birthday, but it’d be nicer to have all of the bills paid.” This is true, and I hate celebrating my birthday, anyway.

The mail is delivered and it includes a blank IHIP form, from the school district. I already sent in my IHIP, all filled out, three weeks ago. I dial up the school district before remembering (again) that it’s Saturday.

Bear starts chasing kittens, so I redirect him to play with Lego, but he’s giving a running narration about it, and Verdi’s listening and keeps losing his place in the music. “Subvocalize!” I remind Bear. “Keep your eyes on the notes!” I remind Verdi.

Then I find the two-year-old, who is dramatizing Harold and the Purple Crayon, with a marker. “Not cool!” I tell him. He knows we write on paper only. I fetch him a wet washcloth so he can wipe all the marker off the wall and he spends the next twenty minutes wiping all of the walls with it, effectively creating a lavender wall.

I look at our plan book and see with despair that only half of Verdi’s subjects have been done for the day, and not the dreaded English, either. The tinkling of the piano keys is driving me up the wall. As soon as Verdi plays it well once (after twenty minutes of practice anyway), I let him stop.

It’s now 1:46. I put Green Day back on, loudly, and dance with Jasper while lunch cooks. I find it disturbing that some of the lyrics apply to me much more now than they did when I was actually an angsty teen. Clearly none of us are doing well today. Do I really want to post this as our typical day post?

Verdi is supposed to be serving lunch while I am in the bathroom, but apparently I took his brain into the bathroom with me. He wants to know, through the door, what to do about our lack of paper plates. “Use regular ones.” He wants to know how many he needs. “Count your family members.” Then he wants to know if they need silverware for pizza. “Use your best judgement, Verdi.” Then he wonders where to put the plates. I close my eyes and count to ten. “You. Know. This. Leave!” I stop to take more deep breaths. “Me alone, please.”

But then they are eating, and laughing, and fine. Verdi is enthusiastically reading Famous Men of the Middle Ages while he eats. I realize we all need a nice long breather, and some fresh veggies, probably, too. I will start recording again when we go back to schoolwork this afternoon. In the meantime, I’m going to have some celery.

That’s what Jasper told me after a day at the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse. He loved every bit of it, and was surprisingly cooperative about staying with his friends. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The kid’s been raised in a tribe, so much more so than Verdi. He has large group rhythms and structures down pat.

Making up that large group today were, in addition to our friend M., the subjects of Survive the Experience. I love hanging out with them. I got to show Graeme the coral exhibit. He was pretty sure there were fishies in there somewhere. He also checked the stalagmite exhibit for them. There were no fishies present amongst the rock formations, alas. When strange preschoolers wandered over to the loop-de-loop wanting to know how to work it, Rosemary helped them sort it out in a perfect imitation of her amazing mom.

While we were really at the museum to celebrate Verdi’s birthday, I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Survive the Experience clan in sciencey action. I jokingly told Saille last spring that my science plan is to do whatever she does, but it’s so natural that it’s hard to get a distinct picture of it. They live out their curriculum. She makes the content a part of their lives and it doesn’t come off contrived like when I try to make science apparent and relevant.

There was much fun to be had, however, besides of the geeky homeschool mom sort. The kids saw a planetarium show, a simple introduction to identifying the elements of the summer sky. I loved watching their minds work together as they conspired to figure out how to build a bridge with tinker toys, which way to adjust a sail to control the direction of a boat, and what killed the saber tooth tiger in the sandbox dig. The information we picked up about vugs and druzy at the Herkimer Diamond Mines a few weeks ago was reinforced by the earth science exhibit. It featured a cave installation, and I shall always remember the image of Brett’s bottom sticking out of the very small hole into which he followed Jasper.

I picked up a $0.95 coloring book on the geology of NYS which will help us meet our state requirement that we cover information about NY some time between grades K and 6.

All in all, though, kids picked up less information about science than combat. There’s a “Science Playhouse” in the M.O.S.T.: a large climbing structure, full of tunnels, ramps, nets, and slides. In the center of this, there are two platforms with guns attached, so kids can shoot foam balls at each other, or, more likely, at the kids below them. You’re pretty well protected on the platform, behind a big gun and a net, to boot. The thing is, to load the guns, you have to run down on the shooting range and make yourself an easy target. If we let them, M., Will, Sterling and Verdi would have hung out in there all day.

But they had to come home, so we could eat and sleep and get some Latin done before we run off to a different museum with the same gang and more of our Spiral Scouts group next Friday.

1. Cichorium intybus (Chicory)

My friend Ami pointed this out to me a few days ago, and I finally sent Verdi over to fetch one so we could look it up and see if she was right. She was. It grows tall along the side of the road across from our house, until the neighbor’s landscaping guy mows them down. 

2. Acer negundo (Box Elder Tree)

I identified this one earlier in the spring, when it was dropping unusual flowers. While looking up the sort of bug that this tree attracts, we learned that only the female box elder tree will attract them. So our tree’s a girl. We had no known that some trees come in genders. Did you know that the mulberry sometimes switches genders?

3. Boisea trivittata (Box Elder Bug)

Bear went outside to catch one of our little red and black bugs so we could tell if it was a milkweed or a box elder. He’s really good at catching these teeny things alive and intact. It really didn’t look like either a full grown box elder or a nymph or a milkweed bug. We decided on box elder mostly on the basis of it’s attraction to our tree, but it kind of looks like it might be between the middle one and the second to largest on this chart.

1. Daucus carota (wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace)

Verdi knew where this was, and what it was. We looked it up in Wikipedia, reading about the teeny red flower in the middle, then ran across the street to pick one for comparison. All of us felt a loony sort of awe looking at the red dot in the middle. We learned that it is an antiseptic diuretic.

2. Bombus (bumblebee)

While looking for the wild carrot, the kids saw one of these. We think the species name is funny.

3. Solanum xanti (purple nightshade)

Bear brought this one back, excited to tell me it’s poisonous. Verdi said, “It grows in a kind of vine. I can’t remember it’s name but it reminds me of night.” I used my favorite search engine to look up nightshade, but still had a hard time finding the specific species until I thought to add the word, “purple.” Then we were able to verify Bear’s assertion.  We had a hard time finding much other information, and the kids wandered off to do other things.  I did find a lot of interesting information about related plants.

After I read the instructions to Bear, he, Verdi and I decided we’d like to participate in PariSarah’s challenge to name 100 species living within walking distance of our home. Here are the rules.

The 100-Species Challenge

1. Participants should include a copy of these rules and a link to this entry in their initial blog post about the challenge.

2. Participants should keep a list of all plant species they can name, either by common or scientific name, that are living within walking distance of the participant’s home. The list should be numbered, and should appear in every blog entry about the challenge, or in a sidebar.

3. Participants are encouraged to give detailed information about the plants they can name in the first post in which that plant appears.

My format will be a numbered list, with plants making their first appearance on the list in bold. I will spare you my awful photography, unless we manage to miraculously get a decent shot.

4. Participants are encouraged to make it possible for visitors to their blog to find easily all 100-Species-Challenge blog posts. I made a category just for the Challenge. See my TOC to the right there?

5. Participants may post pictures of plants they are unable to identify, or are unable to identify with precision. They should not include these plants in the numbered list until they are able to identify it with relative precision. Each participant shall determine the level of precision that is acceptable to her; however, being able to distinguish between plants that have different common names should be a bare minimum.

6. Different varieties of the same species shall not count as different entries (e.g., Celebrity Tomato and Roma Tomato should not be separate entries); however, different species which share a common name be separate if the participant is able to distinguish between them (e.g., camillia japonica and camillia sassanqua if the participant can distinguish the two–”camillia” if not).

7. Participants may take as long as they like to complete the challenge.

Verdi and I went mining today, along with eighty-five other homeschooling families from all over New York.   There were a series of classes, also, on everything related from jewelry-making to ecology at the site.  It was a whole geology unit study packed into one day.   My legs feels like they’re going to fall off, but here are a few highlights before I crash.

1. All the creationist kids took a turn arguing with the instructor, who kept saying, “This is one view, and others have a different view, and both are great choices.  I’m teaching the scientific one here today.”   Then Verdi brought up the minority-view theory that life came to earth in a meteor.   The instructor brushed him off and went on to the next subject.   At no other point during the day was he anything less than cool and collected.  He just couldn’t handle a roomful of informed and passionate children arguing so socratically.  I admit, it was a little weird for me to watch, too.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polite argument among adults, even.

2. Verdi’s horrific lack of fine motor skills extend to making jewelry and dusting rocks.  (Why can he play piano?)

3. Verdi has a lot of weird science in his head.  I try my darndest to make sure that he gets current information, but after a little discussion today, I discovered that he tends to believe whatever he wants to believe about stuff like how life originated.  He likes the alien theory; that’s why he believes it.  This sort of unresponsiveness to logic drives me to tantrums.

4.  Mining is hard work.

5.  All of my parenting woes are related to having more than one kid.  Being alone with Verdi was like not parenting at all, just being a person with another person.  It was fabulous.

6.  I really really love that kid.