Sigh.   We lost yet another puppy.   Spent yesterday thinking that this really isn’t fun, or rewarding, anymore.   I was overcome with guilt at both what my kids were going through and what my level of ineptness must be that three puppies had now died on my watch—the latest with no warning.   The vet at the shelter did a necropsy and let me know that there were multiple organ anomolies, one of which caused her death.  As all of the puppies who died had the same markings (white with brown spots), the current theory is that they all shared similar congenital defects.   Still, so hard to go through and I find myself obsessively watching over the remaining five puppies (who appear to be thriving). 

Here is a shot of them today, at 2 weeks 2 days old.   They have really grown.

Tomorrow should be a day of much needed frivolity.  Going to see High School Musical on Ice with Jordan and her cousin (thanks to the generosity of my mil).  Not my thing, but my little pop diva princess is over the moon.  Then, tomorrow evening, a “dance” with Aubrey (still not used to the idea of her doing such blatantly teen things, gulp). 

The puppies are now two weeks old, which means they are opening their eyes.    Which of course means it is impossible to be in their vicinity without your voice raising a couple of octaves and before you know it little cooing noises are coming out of your mouth and you’re saying “Aren’t they so CUUUUTE!!”.  

But me and Mama Mia are bonding.  Yal, the puppies are cute, but Mia and I know how it is.    I take her out to run around in the back yard and for a couple of minutes she’s all waggling tail and running around in circles feeling the freedom and then suddenly a guilty look crosses her face and she races for the back door and as quick as I can open it for her she’s down to her babies checking on each one, licking and fussing over them.    Even as she feels the need to take a break, her attention is never far from them.   I know how she feels.  

 We did lose the second puppy.  After a week of feeding him extra formula out of a medicine dropper.  He just wasn’t growing.  And then one morning, it was clear he was fading.   Now there are six-Bonnie, Clyde, Bandit, Kissin’ Kate, Brownie Bear and Carl.   Did I mention they are cute???     Mama Mia is so proud.

Sigh.

One of our foster puppies died early this morning.   Yesterday afternoon the mom rejected him, presumably because he was failing to thrive.  We held him and kept him on heating pads and tried to feed him puppy formula yesterday evening and through the night but he didn’t make it.   Although I did feel like we were mostly prolonging the inevitable, I felt we needed to do everything we could.

 There are just a lot of puppies.  Most of them are getting fat and roly-poly but the one that died and one other one just aren’t getting tubby.  We’ve started supplementing the other scrawny one in hopes of giving him a boost.  

 It is hard—we foster to give the kids the experience of nurturing and caring for animals and this is part of the package, but it feels rotten.  I can’t help but feel that I brought this totally avoidable grief to them.

We got a new puppy foster assignment from the shelter.   We’ll have all 8 puppies for a few weeks and then when they are weaned some of them will get divided out until they are 8 weeks old. 

Monday morning my mother in law picked up Aubrey and they headed north to take a tour of a wind farm.   A bunch of acres of farmland with 27 wind turbines.  The co-founder gave them a little tour.   My mom and Jordan, Alex and I met them half way between there and our house so that we could head out for our own road trip.

First we went to the Pony Express musuem.  Here is Jordan checking out what it would have been like.

And serving up some frontier cooking…

Then we went to the Squaw Creek Nature preserve to see if we could see some Bald Eagles.   We saw lots and lots of snow geese and wild ducks and we saw two (we think) immature Bald Eagles.  

Our final destination was the Henry Doorly zoo.  Ah, my favorite thing about being a homeschooler.  Going to places that are usually crowded on a Tuesday.  We enjoyed wonderful zoo exhibits with absolutely no crowds.   The kids took over the camera, so I have about a 100 blurry shots complete with glass glare/nets/cage bars, etc., but I thought this one Aubrey took turned out pretty decent.

We even got to pet a penguin.

Not bad for a couple of school days.

What homeschooler hasn’t fretted at least occasionally about her kids’ writing?   Writing should be my strongest topic.  I even entertained the idea in college of becoming a high school English teacher and have several credits to that effect.   I ended up with a degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing.  So, of all the subject areas, this should be a piece of cake, right?

Unfortunately, nothing prepared me for kids who detest writing.    As a child I wrote journals—notebook after notebook of thoughts.  I wrote stories, made my own newspapers and magazines, and I even enjoyed research papers.   My kids….Not so much.

I tried Writing Strands with Aubrey.   It worked minimally.   Lately, I’ve completely dropped it and lo and behold she is working on a novel.  Not great literature, and it is fan fiction (of the Warrior Cats variety, so not even fan fiction of great literature), but she is writing.   She said it was over 10,000 words now.  I’ve not read it yet, but she talks about it and is excited about it and begs for computer time to work on it.  I figure practice in the process of converting thoughts to words on paper is the best thing for her right now, though I do hope to steer her towards at least mastering the basics of compositional writing sometime soon.   

With Jordan and Alex, I’ve tried to get them to do some journal writing.  But the entries quickly turned into a minimum number of sentences that generally started with “Today is Monday” and ended with “We are going to soccer today”.    So, I moved towards story starters.  But Alex never knows what to write about.     IF he gets started, he usually gets into a story but runs out of steam before finishing.  His ideas are often more grand than can be contained in an 8 year old’s writing stamina.  But more often than not I hear “I don’t know what to write” and frustration sets in.   I’ve had them verbally narrate and summarize stuff we’ve read and this week I asked them to write the summary.  Last year, this was completely beyond them.   This week they ran off to their rooms and came back with several paragraphs.  No tears from Alex, because he wasn’t faced with coming up with ideas on top trying to write.

So, for one kid what is working (today) is to let her be completely creative and do her own thing.  And what is working for another kid (today) is providing a comfortable framework of summarizing information.

 And there is always hope that I’ll have at least one kid who loves to write.  Jordan has a journal!

Living with someone who responds negatively to almost anything new is exhausting.  Homeschooling one can make you want to pull your hair out some days.   In contrast to my girls, whose response to any outing, project, or class is an exuberant “YES!”, Alex says no to anything that he doesn’t already know he likes (Unless it involves sports.  Somehow they are all lumped in together as a good thing.)

As both a parent and a homeschooling mom, I feel like I tread a cautious push/pull trying to let him lead to where he is comfortable and pushing him a bit beyond his comfort zone.  The frustrating thing is, it isn’t a fear thing.  He just has no interest.   Or he’s afraid of being bored.

Take the Friday a couple of weeks ago.  My mom had the day off and wanted to go with on a fun outing.  Everything we came up with got a “no” vote from him except for things we do regularly.  Everyone (except him) decided on the cider mill and corn maze.  Fresh cider and apple cider donuts and a corn maze–what is not to like?  No, No NO he did not want to go.  Asked me to leave him home.  Asked me to drive 30 minutes (each way) out of my way to take him to his great grandma’s house.  The thing is, I probably WOULD have let him out of it if I’d had some place convenient to send him.  But, I ended up telling him, as I do on most of our field trips, that he would need to go along but he was free to not participate.  And, as always, he hung back for approximately 45 seconds before leaping into the action.  He LOVED watching the cider mill working and long after we were done he was plastered to the viewing window watching the machines and workers do their job.   And need I even say that the corn maze was listed as one of his most favorite things ever?

So, I find myself conflicted again and again.  I want to follow his lead.  But, if I did he would miss out on so many things that he ends up truly enjoying. 

It plays out in even less fun ways on more academic days.   Doesn’t matter how fun I try to make a “lesson”, he thinks it is going to be boring.  For a while, when I really was mostly unschooling, we ended up not doing much at all because he never wanted to do anything.  I would have to trick him into things by starting without him and letting him watch long enough to be sucked in.  Or I would play a new game right in front of him so I could hope he’d beg to play next round… It gets exhausting.  And it causes friction because even though 9 out of 10 times I am able to brush off his negativity, some days I really don’t feel like hearing that he thinks the project I’ve spent significant time planning is going to be boring.   And the thing is, once he’s doing something—even those boring lessons–he really tends to mostly enjoy himself.   Even sometimes if it involves writing (but only sometimes) and almost always if it involves a game, math or an experiment. 

We have a fun road trip planned for next week.   Guess what—he thinks it sounds boring.  Sigh.

Why, use it as organelles in your cell model of course!   Aubrey has been studying cells in her cyber-ed Biology and so I got some books and a Bill Nye episode on Jordan and Alex’s level and we read about cells this week.  To end the study, we made a model of an animal cell and a plant cell out of cake (an idea I saw here, no doubt, and really wish I remembered who from so I could give proper credit!)

This is our animal cell:

Jordan and Alex did the nucleus (reeces peanut butter cup), cytoplasm (frosting) and mitochondria (smarties) and Aubrey did the golgi apparatus (formed laffy taffy) and the smooth and rough endoplasmic reticulum (tootsie rolls heated and formed–the rough ER had nerds attached as ribosomes and then there were also nerds throughout).  M&M’s represented vessicles.

Here is our plant cell:

In addition to the organelles listed above, the chloroplasts are green taffies/now and laters and the filled marshmallow represents a vacuole (a little small, but we were working with what we had). 

 Lest you think this was an idyllic homeschool assignment, Jordan and Alex were unable at first to adequately present the project to dad, which made me feel like it was all a lot of candy, but no learning.  But, with a little refresher they were able to point out and tell a little bit about the function of the organelles they placed.

In other news, I’ve not been blogging for a while because, well, sometimes just making it through the day is all I can hope for!   Jordan shared her chicken pox with Alex, who got a very high fever and then an asthma flare up.  In addition, he is having some bowel problems that seem to defy the modern over the counter pharmacy’s ability to rectify and it is adding stress to our day (not to mention multiple dr. visits) and most certainly is at least a part of his miserable irritability. 

In between that, I was able to take Aubrey and Jordan to the homeschool Halloween party (Alex was not out of the contagious phase of pox yet).    I was in charge of bringing games and I admit to wishing briefly for a little bit of that public school conformity.   Getting everyone organized to play structured games was challenging, to say the least.  But, it was nice to be able to convince Aubrey to do all the crafty prep-work for the games (a win-win–I didn’t have to do it and she really enjoyed it). 

We spent the week doing Halloween themed math and language arts with projects pulled from my new favorite math site http://www.mathwire.com/.  

 And yes, the “cells” were quite yummy.