back to school

For most normal people, the arrival of Labor Day is met with mixed emotions - summer is winding down and in Minnesota, that means winter is about a month away. But, on the positive side, it also means that the kids are finally going back to school.
I’m sure there are a few half-insane people who anticipate winter, and there are probably a few sentimental types who are actually sad that the kids are leaving.

I however, am not maudlin. I would welcome the quiet that would come with three out of the four kids heading out each morning, leaving me with the only one who seems to know how to play by himself. I would not mourn the noise, the mess and the begging for snacks. I think I might actually dance a little jig if Labor Day meant that my boys were going back to a school that wasn’t at home.

As it is, we are a homeschooling family, so this time of year means much more than popping kids on a bus and packing lunches.
It means tears and whining (from me), planning and purchasing (again me), discipline and maybe even a little sisu. (For those of you non-Finns, sisu is a bit like moxie – super guts is how we always translated it.) And this is just for starters.

It will take approximately a month to settle into a routine that looks a bit like this: endless questions like “What do I do now?” when the schedule clearly says math, an hour’s worth of nagging to get a half hour of language done, begging for recess and two kids who will somehow disappear when Mom is working with the third.

I can guarantee that we won’t be even that far into the school schedule when two boys will have lost every pencil that was purchased for them (all 27.) The third will have scribbled his name on someone else’s workbook. One will hide his monthly schedule and claim he doesn’t have to do any school. And at some point in the first month or so, someone will pull out brand-new markers (the non-washable kind because Mom forgot to buy those) and tattoo himself and his little brother.

And to make matters worse, the littlest one - the one who doesn’t have to do school - will be the only one begging for a school book.
The bright side is that when they do disappear on me, they’re likely to have a book in hand and I will find them in some random spot, hunched over reading How to Eat Fried Worms or some other delightful tale. Last year I measured my success as a teacher/mother not in test scores, but in the fact that boy #2 wanting to read his library book during his traveling team’s wrestling match. Anything else that happened that year was gravy.

All complaining aside (and mostly from me), homeschooling is not much different than parenting. It involves focus and discipline and consequences and love. I need to have a keen eye for how my children learn so that I can best know how to teach them. I need to have the will power and strength to maintain a schedule and not back down from their challenges. I need to be able to enforce missing football practice if schoolwork isn’t done. And I need to do all of this with mercy and love.
So, it’s not any easier than parenting.

But, the rewards are there, just as they are in parenting. Occasionally you’ll get a glimpse of a job well done or a lesson learned or even a new skill acquired. And that’s just on my part. They probably get much more out of it, although I doubt they’d admit it.

Knowing all of this, I probably shouldn’t dread the approach of Labor Day. Every year, it’s the same thing - a bit of anxiety in the planning stages (what curriculum should I use? Rosetta Stone costs how much? It’s how many days until Christmas break?) but the end result is usually worth it.

This is not a journey for everyone, and sometimes I question if it’s the right journey for us, but so far, one year at a time, we’re doing our best to follow the path God has laid out for us, even if it doesn’t mean orange school buses and the local elementary school.

Who knows what I’ll learn this year...

boys say the funniest things...

So the big discussion last night was whose muscles (biceps) were bigger - Mom's or Dad's. After both of us flexed for Number Four, he decided that Mom won because Dad has a "flab on his muscle."

However, in Dad's defense, his muscle is actually bigger, but bulgier (is that a word?) and that's what Number Four decided was flabby.

I'll take any compliment I can get, even if it's not truthful.

it's nice to have boys...

because they crack me up.

Boy #3: Are we gonna have any more kids, Mom?

Me: Do you want more?

Boy #3: Only if it's a brother.

Boy #2: We got four boys, so it'll probably be a girl.

Boy #4: Well, it can't pet my kitten!

boys say the funniest things...

‎"Mom how come you get creamer?"

"It's for my coffee."

"How come you get creamer and coffee?"

"Cuz I'm special."

"No you're not special. Dad is. "

And that it precisely why I get chocolate too.

maple flooring reveal

I hope we don't regret doing this, but we stained the maple flooring three different colors. The landing at the top of the stairs and one bedroom have two coats of Minwax's Early American. Two bedrooms were left clear with only the poly on top and the last bedroom was white washed so it would stay more whitish gray (which it didn't because the poly has such a yellowish cast).

The dark stain color was a compromise. I wanted walnut and hubby wanted to keep it looking natural without stain. We settle somewhere in the middle with the Early American. I will probably go a bit darker on the main floor, but at least he can get used to the color for now upstairs.

We lucked out with the direction that the wood runs so we weren't changing the color across the grain, but ended on the edge of board. Does that make sense? See what it looks like in the bottom picture. Maybe that will help.

Notice how only the windows are trimmed out? The rest of the casing around the doors and floor boards is my responsibility. I'm guessing it will take awhile - four rooms, plus oil-based trim paint might mean the boys will be lucky to get in their rooms by next summer.

setting an example?

As far as we know, hubby and I are supposed to be setting good examples to the four offspring hanging on our every word and watching our every move. And, unfortunately most of them have good hearing and all of them can see.

So when we screw up - they notice. They will gag and run away when Mom and Dad kiss in front of them (mission accomplished), but will stare fascinated at how we react when we stub a toe or pound a thumb with a hammer. And then they can repeat word-for-word what we said.

But, it’s worse than that. I think they’ve actually developed some sort of tag-team system to purposely drive us crazy. A typical game (one in which I’m a very unwilling participant) goes a little like this: Contender #1 will beg incessantly for a snack. When he’s accomplished frazzling his mother’s hair, he calls in the next competitor. This one will crank his iPod to obscene levels and beat box to TobyMac until either Mom is singing along to Christian rap or she yells at him to go somewhere else. He usually cannot hear above the “music” in his ears, which only gives him more points in this crazy game. After Mom has sufficiently expended enough energy with the yelling, he calmly tags out and the third opponent comes in. This one will not stop talking - no matter what. He can chatter about the dust under my desk and how he can make a guitar strap from his belt. Then he will rattle on about dirt bikes and baseball cards and the fact that he should really have a bandage on the miniscule cut on his palm.

Some days the third round goes to Mom, but only because she developed a pretty good talent for in-one-ear-and-out-the-other as a teenager (just ask her mother.) Other days, she will try to physically walk away and lock herself in the bathroom. But mostly, she has to resort to yelling again.

This only serves as a battle call to bring in the fourth challenger. He arrives with questions: “Can I get my bb gun out and shoot a bird?” “Can I play MouseTrap?” “Can I make frozen bananas on a stick?” The questions alone aren’t enough for him to win - he accomplishes that by asking all of this in spite of not having his chores done. Or by picking up one thing in the room when there are 27 left and making his mother check every time if he’s done.

It’s really a small miracle that she is still around to talk about all this.

We learned this past week at Wood Lake Bible Camp that we are to set an example in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity (straight from Scripture - 1 Timothy 4:12). Pretty convicting words because when I look at those examples, I fall flat on all of them.

My speech is not always positive or edifying. My life is usually a mess and busy and stressful. My love is sometimes conditional. My faith gets shaken. And I’m far from pure. Many days, I’m about as far from setting a good example as a mother could get.

My only hope is found in the verses that follow this passage which promise that if I am diligent people will see progress in me and there is salvation if I persevere.

But, it’s the persevering that has me worried. I’m not really sure how much more I have left in me to “keep on keeping on.” It’s a good thing these boys have two of us to take on - one of us can sit back and laugh at the whole insane game while the other engages in a competition that never ends.

There does appear to be some hope in sight, however. We just noticed that as they get closer to becoming teenagers, they also get quieter. Not sure if that’s due to hormones causing sullen attitudes and less communication or if it’s just the iPods jammed in their ears.

They are also starting to debate instead of duel. Twice now, hubby has had to backtrack on his discipline of taking snacks away because two boys have convinced him that he misread their actions and they didn’t deserve the punishment. Not sure if that will make for more discussions or more conniving to come up with good arguments, but it should make for less doors being slammed.

Either way, I’ll take it. Quiet is a hard commodity to come by in this house. And peace only comes when they’re sleeping.

it's nice to have boys...

because the fun doesn't end when you get home from camping. One boy keeps beating up the others. One boy wants a new family (and has his bags packed ready to leave to find one). One boy is lost in ipod land. And one boy is acting out a one-boy drama in the living room because he thinks he's dying of hunger since he hasn't got an afternoon snack yet.

I love my life.

talk of the camp

Caveat: I claim no responsibility in this next post. I do not know if you will think it funny or bawdy, but either way - I did not teach my son this phrase.

First day at Bible Camp, my four-year-old wants to go swimming. We sent him in the lake with his older brother as a buddy. Hubby and I were sitting a little ways away from the swim area, barely within earshot. I looked over to see him standing just over knee-deep in water that apparently was very cold, because he was hugging himself and shivering. Then, I noticed the lifeguard doubled over in laughter.

Pointing this out to hubby, I had a feeling of dread - mainly because this child is well known for entertaining people (and mortifying me) with what comes out of his mouth. As soon as hubby looked over, the lifeguard attempted to walk down the dock to his co-lifeguard. I say attempted because he was having a difficult time walking while belly-laughing so hard. He managed to make the 20 feet and then both guys were looking over at my son, laughing hysterically. By this time, we were a bit uncomfortable and curious as to what was going on. The first lifeguard walked back over the source of his merriment and asked him, "Are you all right?" (Hubby figured this was in hopes that he would say something even more entertaining.)

Later that afternoon, when swimming was over and suits were off, we learned that the lifeguard had asked our precocious four-year-old if something was wrong because he wasn't swimming. He apparently replied to the guy, "My nuts are freezing."

It didn't take long for the story to spread across camp to the nearly 200 people in attendance - much to their amusement. People were coming up to me and telling me things like: "The first thing I heard when I got to camp was..." and "I just love your son."

Later that evening, the lifeguard came up to Number Four and told him, "You're my FAVORITE camper!"

Apparently the rest of camp felt the same way - even the pastors. Well, everyone but me. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry.

acting like a child

Vacation is the perfect time to act like a child - only in a wide-eyed, life-is-an-adventure kind of way. Not with temper tantrums or pouting.

In our defense - here are all the things that went wrong (on the way to the campsite.) We found ants in the camper because chore boy didn’t vacuum it out very well from the last trip. There is a random dead mouse smell for the same reason above. One boy busted a two-gallon water cooler and spilled 2/3 of the contents on the camper carpet, so we spent an hour in the Fleet Farm parking lot sopping it up with our beach towels. Our resident bloodhound smelled transmission fluid. We drove 100 miles without air conditioning in 94-degree weather because there may have been a loose wire on the alternator. And we very nearly avoided salmonella poisoning from thawed chicken breasts when we had to shut off the fridge due to the issue above.

Truth be told, in a few of these instances, we probably didn’t act like adults. Okay, in most of them. Packing four kids (okay... six) in a camper to drive 11 hours is stressful enough, but when things go wrong (which they just will), we lose our cool.

Thankfully none of the boys seem to have picked up on our low stress tolerance and are able to endure much more than we can. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches four days in a row? No problem. Listening to your older brother beat box incessantly. A little bit of a problem. But, the heat? That was a problem. Perhaps they were worn out by the sauna we were driving or their father's recollections of summers without air conditioning weren’t well received. Either way, you never saw eight eyes light up so fast when they learned we were meeting up with Grandma and Grandpa so they could ride in their air-conditioned camper the final 20 miles to the campground. All four of them were ready to ditch us.

The good news is that (tantrums aside), vacations are intended to allow you to act like a child.

You can sleep in a sleeping bag - even if you’re freezing cold or boiling hot. You can wear flip flops until someone peels off half a toe nail. You can collect rocks and steal ziplock bags from Mom to house your collection. You can go to bed late and get up early. You can hang out with your cousins and snag snacks off Grandma and Grandpa. You can go airborne on your bike. You can try to catch fireflies.

And you can do it all over tomorrow - or as long as the vacation lasts.

It’s nice to have respites like this in our too-serious, too-stressful adult lives, where we can act like kids (in more ways than one.) Besides, as one of the not-so-young-adults perceptively realized - you remember all the times when things go wrong anyway.

That’s the stuff camping trips are made of - flat tires, no air conditioning, gobbling down all-you-can-eat pizza while the camper is being fixed, enduring sunburns and gross showers and maybe even a burnt marshmallow or two. Hopefully, our children will remember things like spilled water and not that Mom and Dad had a “discussion” in the parking lot.

God grant them selective memories.

bathroom progress

Who would have thought it would take me nearly nine months to get this project finished? Nothing moves fast around here, unless it's boys chasing boys when they're fighting.

Tiling is tedious work, especially when you take a wall down because you forgot you wanted to put cubbies in the shower.

Then I decided I didn't want to put the tiles all the way to the ceiling, so I had to mud the walls above to smooth them out to match the sheetrock.

And I had planned to put the tile all the way around the edge of the wall, but ended up deciding it would look funny, so I had to put a sheetrock corner in. First time I'd ever tried that. Wasn't too bad. Just made a mental note to put more mud behind the paper/mental corner next time so there wasn't any air bubbles. Also using at least a 5" putty knife is key, proving once again that bigger actually is better.

I'm pretty happy with my solution for not being able to use the granite backsplash. I used extra pieces of slate from the flooring and the tile design in the shower. The stones were a first for me - but they went up just as easily as the lady from The Tile Shop said they would. Rough up the back sides with a file and stick them in mortar. Easy as that. I cheaped out and made the outlet covers myself. It took me a full day to do all four. Not exactly time well spent, but it didn't cost any extra money. Same goes for the edge tiles - I spent a lot of time sanding the edges to round them down.

The grout in the shower was another case altogether. Apparently I used too much water or too wet of a sponge when I wiped the tiles down after applying the grout. The color ended up looking almost like a pasty white, definitely not the beige I was going for like on the backsplash.

Here's where asking a lot of questions comes in very handy, as does being fully ready to admit that something went wrong when you go back to the home improvement store with all your questions. Turns out there is a cool product called Grout Renew that actually paints the grout with a sealer and covers up the too-light color that I created. And even better, I was able to choose a different color that was closer to the actual color of the tile for a more uniform look. I used a small paintbrush to paint it on, but it wasn't an quick process.

I could only paint small sections at a time, so that I could wipe off areas that I put too much on before it dried. It will stick to tile and it will be very difficult to get off. It looks just like the grout was that color to begin with and keeps the texture of the grout intact. Would definitely use it again, but hopefully next time I'll not remove all the coloring out in the first place.

The only other thing I'm not sure about it how well slate will hold up in a shower, but I sealed it at least six times just in case. I'm not thrilled with the sanded caulking that is supposed to "match" the grout. Mainly because it doesn't match - it's much lighter and took FOREVER to dry.

Update: Two years later and there is still a couple spots where I got the Grout Renew on the slate and it hasn't come off, in spite of multiple showers every day, so I'm fairly certain it will hold up as advertised. Also, the slate still seems to be waterproof - in other words, water still beads up on it and doesn't soak in. I don't think that would be the case if it were a slate floor in a shower, but on a vertical surface the sealer seems to be holding up fine. I read somewhere you were supposed to re-seal once a year, but I haven't yet. 

Also, a note on the caulking: it has refused to stick to the edges of the tile, in spite of being redone once along the whole long side of the tub about a year ago. At this point I've left it until I can do it quickly before we're gone for a few days because it will likely take 72 hours to cure. It's frustrating because I took the time to clean all the tiles after grouting and sealing and it still didn't stick. The tile guy at Menards told me I should have used rubbing alcohol to clean the edges, but I've never, ever had to do that before. I'm left to choose from another brand of caulking or to use the shiny white stuff, which I know won't look as nice. The brand of caulking I used came from Home Depot, so I will definitely not be purchasing that again. I'll probably visit a tile shop to see what they recommend.

boys say the funniest things...

‎"There's one thing that fweaks me out Mom."

"What's that?"

"Jumping off the Eiffel Tower."

Didn't even have a response to that one.

take me out to the ballgame...

Apparently I am either too old or too uptight for baseball games. Or rather for YOUTH baseball games that drag on an interminable six innings. Four-year-olds do not belong there either. They are too young to follow the lack of action and too old to be distracted with a Tootsie Pop. A three-year-old might take an hour to get to the bottom, but a four-year-old will down it in two minutes.

But perhaps it’s just our four-year-old.

His oldest brother is playing baseball for the first time this summer. And Dad is helping to coach, which makes it next to impossible for him to keep eyes on the ball and the little clown running all over the stands, in the batting cage and chasing the random cat that keeps showing up trying to do his business in the outfield. (Believe me, he’s in no danger of being hit by a pop fly there.) So that means that Mom gets dragged along to the ball game to watch three boys who have little to no interest in watching 11- and 12-year-olds make errors and strike out. They’re probably just as bored as I am - the only difference is they are more capable of creating their own fun and they don’t care what anyone thinks about their diversions.

Here’s all the fun a four-year-old can find in six innings:

Game #1 - He discovered there was a water fountain behind the concession stand. By the time his brother’s team was 10-run-ruled after four innings, he looked like he fell into a mud puddle. He was wet from his outgrown buzz to his good tennis shoes. Apparently, he was too short to reach the water fountain’s spurt, but tall enough to reach the button and stand in the water’s reach as it soaked him and a 10-foot radius around. After that, he decided to play in the batter’s cage, with sand and dirt. I was so proud. So was he.
Game #2 - He spent most of the time collecting chunks of asphalt as his “special rocks” to take home. When I told him they weren’t rocks, he said that it was okay, because he wanted to make us a tar driveway.

Game #3 - He entertained the mom of a boy on the opposing team by discovering his shadow. (Yes, perhaps he’s a little late with this revelation - he doesn’t get out much.) But really all he cared about was her attention and trying to make the shadow as big as possible, and then make it dance around.

Game #4 - I looked over to see him leading a group of five older boys in the chicken dance - didn’t matter that they were within sight over nearly every person in attendance. I should find a chicken costume and dub him the unofficial Red Team’s mascot, but I really don’t want to encourage him.
Game #5 - He discovered sunflower seeds when a friend bought a bag for them all to share. He was given explicit instructions not to chew the entire seed, but to spit out the outside. After making him practice, he was allowed again to roam. But a half hour later, he came up to my friend and I and announced that he “could too” eat the whole thing and that it didn’t hurt when he swallowed it. So much for scare tactics.

Game #6 - We stayed home.

So what’s God’s game plan? He doesn’t seem to be answering my prayer to get me out of going to the game, so maybe he’s trying to teach me something. Humility perhaps? Or to appreciate the value of a four-year-old who provides entertainment while entertaining himself? Or maybe how to have fun for two hours at a baseball game?

Next game, I’ll be singing my own song: “Take me out to the ball game. Keep my boys off the field. I bought them some peanuts and cracker jacks, but somehow they still find their way back to get, get, get into ‘trouble.’ Now I just missed a double. For it’s one, two, three boys and FUN at a youth ball game.”

Feel free to join along in the fourth inning stretch.