jump to navigation

Running with kids…or maybe from them September 7, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in family, older son, running, younger son.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

Even a couple years ago, it was hard to get a workout in once the younger son was home.  I was lucky in that the older son is a bit of a homebody and could watch his brother if Mike wasn’t around.

Now, however, I have a new dilemma.  The younger son has decided he’s over this “kid’s race” stuff and wants to start doing 5ks.  The older son likes doing 10ks.  I’m currently training for my second half marathon this summer.  How am I supposed to train with my kids??!  They’re not terribly motivated to train on their own, but they like going with me.  I suspect this is because I turn into a zombie when I run so the kids have my undivided attention and I don’t say much.  They can speak unimpeded for a long, LONG time.  On the other hand, they like doing races because of the freebees.  However, training with them on top of my own running is a bit too much, so I started to get creative.

This morning’s training run was 12 miles, so I decided to break it into a loop of three miles.  I did one loop by myself, ran the loop twice after that with the older son (who is starting to have a hard time keeping up with me), and did it one more time with the younger son (who apparently decided after a mile that we needed to walk…and my feet agreed with him).

This worked great because I also found out that this eliminated the need to find gas stations along my running route.  Unfortunately, gatorade bottles don’t sit nicely in my race belt.  Also, my husband wasn’t expecting me to try to give him a sweaty hug until the end (doesn’t everyone do this to their spouse?), and I was able to nab him mid-route.  He still went and got me some post-run celebratory ice cream, so I guess that was okay.

I just imagine that there were some people scratching their head as I walked past for the fourth time this morning…

Cooking up a storm August 31, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in family, food/cooking, older son, younger son.
Tags: , , , , ,
add a comment

I have to admit that I think we’ve finally got the hang of this whole cleaning/cooking thing.  A while back, I mentioned that we’d gotten a housekeeper.  That lasted for almost a year, but then we decided that it wasn’t working as the housekeeper couldn’t keep up.  I suspect it’s because of the overload of fuzzy creatures.

We changed tactics: basically, we just pick a time every weekend to spend a couple hours cleaning (although it doesn’t work so well when we’re gone for multiple weekends in a row) and we all spend an hour or two working through the list.  Each item on the list is worth a certain amount, depending on the effort involved, so this is what the kids get for an allowance.  I think we spend 1-2 hours every week cleaning, and while the house is more cluttered than I like, it’s actually staying reasonably clean.  Also, I no longer have to spend tons of time instructing the kids on how to clean the toilet AGAIN since it has only been a week or two since it was last cleaned.  (Our biggest problem comes in the fact that every one likes to put the cleaning supplies in different places…)

In the past year, though, I found that I am sensitive to even tiny amounts of contamination in a lot of gluten-free foods, and this resulted in a shopping list that involved almost no processed foods.  The amount of time I spent cooking increased drastically, so I recently decided to try this same approach with cooking: the kids now spend about an hour in the kitchen getting dinner ready or helping with other things (baking bread, making snacks) 3-4 nights a week.

It’s only been a short while, but this seems to be working, too.  I’m not sure why I never tried this before, although I suspect some of it is that I was nervous about the younger son handling certain cooking activities, particularly those with knives.  (I have to admit that I still give a lot of those chores to the older son.)  He loves to bake, though, so as long as I get the ingredients out for him, he’s getting pretty good at following recipes.  He makes a pretty mean beer bread…(with gluten-free beer, of course).

I’ve been very surprised how positive their attitude about this has been, particularly since they don’t get allowance for this.  (It wasn’t quite pitched as, “You don’t help, you don’t eat,” but I think they understood that my frustration was almost to that level.) However, I uncovered another reason why this may be working: I suspect the real motivation is that they’re tired of waiting for me to make their favorite foods.  The baking, in particular, tends to be put off in favor of making dinner.  They must’ve realized that if they learn to do it themselves or help take care of some of the other cooking chores, they don’t have to wait as long.  I have to admit that if there’s something they really want to cook, I’m not inclined to say no.

The alpha and the hungry August 30, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in older son, pets.
Tags: alpha, animal behavior, , ,
3 comments

 

 

 

The older son mentioned at dinner that dogs equate food with love.  This was, of course, a response to Gigadog trying to stick her nose on the table to horn in on our Friday night pizza.

Wanna share that? I'm kinda hungry.

Wanna share that? I’m kinda hungry.

I said that actually, he wasn’t that far off.  The alpha dog of a pack is actually supposed to determine what it is that the pack hunts for and, in a sense, is responsible for providing the pack with food.  Therefore, it sort of makes sense that food and love are equivalent in dogs.

After a brief pause, I said that Teradog was a prime example of a good alpha given he really knows how to look forlorn so that the human will provide the pack with food.  In that sense, he’s a very highly successful alpha dog.

rainier_front

This prime newfoundland specimen is on the hunt for treats…

 

And you thought puppy dog eyes were all about being cute…

Oh, that’s right! I have a blog! August 29, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in family, grad school, older son, personal, work, younger son.
Tags: , , , ,
add a comment

Summer, at least the social construct of summer, officially comes to a close this weekend for most people.  The younger son has been in school for a week, and I’m scratching my head, wondering where the time went.  It was the summer of “the best laid plans of mice and men,” if you get my drift.  

I did accomplish a lot at work.  However, shifting deadlines there required I push off other stuff.  In response to that, I decided to take some time off and get caught up on some of those other things, which will be easier now that the younger offspring is busy plodding through the halls of a reputable educational institution rather than ones created in Minecraft.  I have a couple weeks of crunching numbers at home before going back to work to do it.

The other thing that will help is that the older offspring has decided that his odd work schedule really isn’t doable, despite a serious effort on his part.  I am relieved because I seem to be getting more sleep again, which has made me a saner, kinder, and more productive human being.  Also, I appreciate being able to form a coherent sentence…

I hate to say it, but I’m glad school has started again.  I usually love summer, but I’m very glad to have a routine and time to work on my own stuff back.

How was your summer?

I walk the line June 24, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in education, gifted, homeschooling, older son.
Tags: , , , , , , ,
3 comments

I’ve been watching the older son grappling with his courses for the past year.  He was taking courses through an independent study organization to finish up some credits he needs to enter college.  I didn’t feel comfortable with some of these (especially literature classes), so we decided to go this route.

In doing this, I’ve discovered that the older son has a deadly combination of issues: ADHD and perfectionism.  I didn’t quite understand how the two fed into each other, but I can definitely see it now.

The older son also had the disadvantage of not working in the classes with peers.  The first few he did were in print rather than online. He would struggle for days to complete a single assignment, and it didn’t make sense to me at first.

Another thing I found odd was how one of his teachers was initially very abrupt with him.  It didn’t take long before she had completely changed her tune and was being incredibly nice and encouraging, which I thought was odd.

The second set of classes have been online and part of the assignments involved discussing things in a forum, so the student could see what the other students had submitted.  This was an eye-opening experience for me.  It also helped me make sense of his teacher’s dramatic change in behavior.

After watching him and seeing what other students have submitted, I realized three things:

1 – He can easily and quickly finish things that are simple.

2 – When things appear to be more difficult and/or time-consuming, he has difficulty concentrating and finds himself unable to stay on task.

3 – Part of the reason things are difficult and/or time-consuming is because he has seriously high expectations for himself that are way beyond what is often required.

I’m not saying he doesn’t have ADHD, because he most certainly does.  We tried for years to forego medication.  One day, he came to me and said he couldn’t even concentrate on projects he wanted to do for fun, so we opted at that point to look at something to help.  (He does take meds, but it’s the lowest dose that’s effective.)

However, in homeschooling him, neither of us had a reference for what a ‘typical’ high schooler should be doing in his classes.  He would give me an assignment, and we would spend a lot of time revising it.  He worked very hard, but progress was slow.  In one or two cases, he would hand things in half done because of lack of time.

What surprised me is that even the items he handed in half done or that were rough drafts often came back with exceptional grades.  I remember one assignment full of rough drafts of short essays which he aced.  I couldn’t figure it out.

The problem is that both of us really expect a lot out of him, and I learned, after seeing work that other students were doing, that it was likely too much.  Far too much.  While he was going into a detailed analysis of similarities because characters from two different novels set in two completely different cultural and temporal reference frames, it appears his fellow students who likely are trying their hardest, are writing something much more simplistic.  They are being told to elaborate, and he’s being told to eschew obfuscation.

The thing that has me concerned is that college is around the corner, and I worry that he’s going to continue to hold himself to those standards, even when it is so obviously working against him.  He struggles with the idea that it’s better to just hand something in, even if incomplete (by his standards), than to turn it in late, though perfect.

A lot of perfectionists deal with this.  I have told him that it’s not a bad trait, but that he needs to save it for the things that are really important to him.  If he wants to write the Great American Novel that people will pore over and debate and analyze, that is the time to be a perfectionist.  If he’s handing in an assignment that fulfills the requirements laid out by the teacher, who likely will spend ten minutes skimming the entry, being a perfectionist is really not going to help.  He needs to learn to walk that line.  To some extent, we all do.

Travelin’ Whovian June 21, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in family, older son, science fiction.
Tags: , , , , , ,
1 comment so far

The older son travels rather frequently to see family, but he’s had rather lousy luck with TSA.  Almost every time he’s gone through security, he’s had something happen.  When he was younger, it was often his own fault.  For instance, there was the time that he decided to bring some spending money…and had about three dollars in pennies in the bottom of a carry-on.  The folks manning the x-ray machine were not happy with him, and he had to fish all the coins out of an exceptionally full backpack.

As he’s gotten older, the incidents have been more innocuous.  There was one time where he had too large a container of toothpaste (they threw it away) and another time where he had a nail clipper.  (I think I wasn’t flying with him that time, but I had a gate pass as he was flying as an unaccompanied minor.  They gave it to the security guard who held it and gave it to me when I returned the gate pass.)

Today, he flew out again (from Fargo, which is a rather small airport) and had yet another fiasco with security.  Apparently TSA noticed something in his carry-on as it passed through x-ray.  I was actually waiting near the entrance to security (no gate pass this time) and he was about 100 ft. away.  I could see something had happened with his bag and there was TSA agent riffling through it…and older son didn’t look happy.  Finally, the agent reached in and pulled out…the older son’s sonic screwdriver.

From the look on the agent’s face, it was very apparent he had never seen an episode of Dr. Who in his life.  He was holding it in front of himself, quite gingerly.  I could easily see the furrowed brows and potential fear in this guy’s face, even 100 ft. away.  He was obviously thinking, “What this hell is this thing?!”  And I burst out laughing, definitely out loud.  I’m sure the security guard next to the exit gate, along with everyone else standing near me, must’ve thought I was disturbed.

Fortunately, however, the screwdriver was returned and the older son made his flight…just barely.  Maybe next time he’ll bring a banana instead.  They’re a good source of potassium, you know…and, well, TSA probably won’t freak out over that.

I still haven’t figured out why the older son had a sonic screwdriver in his carry-on to begin with.

A Rite (Triangle) of Passage May 13, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in education, family, gifted, homeschooling, math, older son, teaching, younger son.
Tags: , , , , , ,
1 comment so far

pythagorean_catThe younger son recently started his pre-algebra class.  Somehow, this has made math a bit better.  I think the fact that it has algebra in the title makes him feel very accomplished and that, in turn, has made him more enthusiastic about math.

The other day, he was doing some of his homework, and the lecture was confusing to him.  I listened to the lecture and then said, “It makes more sense if you draw a picture.”  He responded that, “Pictures always help me learn better.  I guess the math program doesn’t realize that some of us are visual learners.”  I was both amused and quite stunned.  I think I’ve been discussing educational theory a bit too much at the dinner table.  I can tell he’s listening to us.

Tonight, he hit a milestone.  He called Mike over, and I followed, so he could ask us how to pronounce “pythagorean.”  He was sure he’d heard us talking about it before (yeah, we discuss this stuff around the dinner table), and he wanted to be sure that was what it was.

“Oh, wow!” I said.  “You’re doing the Pythagorean Theorem.  That’s awesome!”  Suddenly, there was an impromptu round of cheering and high-fiving.  The older son even came over and gave his little brother a big hug, saying, “Woo hoo!  The Pythagorean Theorem is awesome.”

As the lecture progressed, it reiterated the terminology, focusing on right triangle legs and hypotenuse.  Given I’ve had ZZ Top in my head, I had to immediately sing, “She’s got legs!  She has a hypotenuse!”  I wasn’t able to come up with much more, though.

Yes, I have to admit that I realized how odd it was, in retrospect.  We were having a celebration that younger son had made it to the Pythagorean Theorem, and we were all making a huge deal about it.

But younger son didn’t think so.  He thought it was awesome and giggled continuously for the next few minutes. I guess he likes having a math cheer team.

 

The Fellowship of the Relay May 12, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in Fargo, older son, running.
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
5 comments

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that I enjoy running.  Or I used to.

I lost my motivation.

Part of that is because the older son got a job with very odd hours.  Because he does not yet have a driver’s license, Mike and I have been taking turns getting up at obnoxiously early hours to take him.  Then I went on a trip to a conference.  Then we all got sick.

The list goes on and on.  The result is that I found it nearly impossible to run except right before bed…and running right before bed has this tendency to keep me awake all. night. long.

However, back in December or January, when I was motivated, a friend and I began talking about doing a relay for the Fargo Marathon.  Then we found out there was a costume contest with the relay.  Well, obviously we had to do it!  If you’d like the full details, you can visit Kari’s blog and check out her post: How to be the biggest geek at the marathon.

We chose Lord of the Rings as our theme, and I got to be a Hobbit.  Except I was a hobbit with calf sleeves.  (Don’t you wonder if Frodo and company would’ve gone faster if they’d had compression sleeves and a great pair of running shoes?  And headphones?  Definitely headphones would’ve helped.)

cherish_as_hobbit

 

The beginning, of course, was packed.

underpass

This is what it looked like until the 10k turned off from the route, at which point, it became very sparse.  I suspect that’s because I was running in the opposite direction of most of the marathoners, almost all of whom are much faster than I am.  I have to admit that I would like to do the relay again just because I won’t have to dodge around so many people.

Unlike most of my team, I apparently was more confusing than anything in my costume.  No one yelled, “Go Frodo!” or, “Destroy the Ring!”  Perhaps I needed a wig?  Anyway, most people apparently are unfamiliar with hobbits, and the fuzzy feet only added to their confusion.  I did ask someone if they knew where Mt. Doom was, but they just said, “Huh?” and shook their head.

The one person who did recognize me was (Danny) Elvis.  I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of him because I was too busy high-fiving him.  After I ran past, he announced, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have the One Ring right here at the 2014 Fargo Marathon.”  I’m really happy that Elvis is a geek, too.

fellowship1

Once we were together in a group, I became recognizable.  This is a pic of our team at the hand-off between Legolas and Gimli, who was kind enough to take a break from his gig with ZZ Top. (Anyone else have “Cheap Sunglasses” running through their head?  I thought so.)

After Legolas, Gimli, and myself finished our respective relay legs, we went downtown for some free munchies.  Apparently all the marathoners beat us there, too.

downtown_marathon

Even the street fair isn’t that packed.

While waiting for Gandalf (have you noticed he always shows up at the last minute?), we decided to get out of the heat and took a stop at the Prancing Pony Atomic Coffee.  I’m sure the usual patrons were thinking that the place had gone downhill since they were starting to let dwarves and other unsavory folk in.

legolas_gimli_atomic

Finally, Gandalf came in and we raced to the finish line together to receive our medals…half an hour before they closed the course down.  One thing I learned is that quests can take a long time, and Peter Jackson really glossed over that particular aspect.

Either way, we all had a lot of fun and are already planning for next year’s race.  Better yet, I think I’ve found my motivation again.

fellowship2

A filtered education March 3, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in education, homeschooling, math, older son, physics, science, societal commentary, teaching, younger son.
Tags: , , , , , ,
add a comment

The older son is a lot of fun.  Despite his statements that he has no desire to go into science, he seems to get and make a lot of science jokes.  I know he’s not a scientist, but I feel comfortable that he’s scientifically literate.  As he was homeschooled, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself.

I’m more anxious about the younger son, though.  This weekend, he brought home his science homework, which focused on optics.  The kids were studying filters, and one of the questions asked about what kind of light would you see if you shined a flashlight through a blue filter and then a red one.  I asked him what he saw, and he said nothing.  Unfortunately, he was told that he saw nothing because the flashlights just weren’t bright enough, but that what he should have seen was purple.

I’m pretty sure that if I had ever been bombarded with gamma rays in the past, I would’ve turned into She-Hulk at that very moment and started smashing things.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, if being She-Hulk happens to be a goal of yours), that didn’t happen.

I find it infuriating that, throughout my years of homeschooling older son and teaching younger son math, I have constantly been questioned about my ability to teach them.  The implication has always been that I may have a degree, but they are experts on teaching.  In fact, this particular teacher attempted to take me to task earlier this year about the younger son’s math curriculum…the same teacher who apparently doesn’t understand that light and pigments work completely differently.

After I managed to calm down, I explained that light filters are like sieves, except that they only let one size of particle pass through: nothing bigger can pass through the holes, but nothing smaller can, either.  After this explanation, the younger son was able to correctly explain that the reason he saw no light from his flashlight is that the two filters together had blocked all the light.

I’m going to be watching very carefully to see what kinds of scores he’s getting on his answers and whether the teacher realizes she made a mistake.  This was very disappointing.  There was a new science curriculum introduced this year, one which I was very excited about.  The focus was supposed to be on hands-on, problem-based learning, which is great for science.  Despite that, it seems that younger son’s science education may be lacking.  What good does it do to have a top of the line science education curriculum (or math…or anything else) when our teachers don’t understand what they’re teaching?  And how is it that these same teachers can justify questioning the ability to teach material that some of us understand far better than they do?

To borrow or not to borrow… February 6, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in education, homeschooling, older son.
Tags: , ,
7 comments

Some of you may remember that, about a year ago, I took the boys on a big tour of colleges.  I wanted the older boy to see what his options were and make an informed decision when it came to college.  (I have to admit that this was a result of the fact that I only was able to visit one college before choosing, and I felt like I would have made a better choice if I’d been able to see others.)  The older boy surprised me when, late last year, he informed me of his decision to live at home and go to college locally.

To be rather blunt, I was disappointed.  I felt like he could go to a much better college if he chose.  However, he said that he was nervous about starting college and moving out and basically jumping from being a high schooler to an adult all at once.  I was surprised at this, but it really did make sense.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to try to force him to go someplace else for school.

(I was also amused because, when I was his age, I deliberately chose to apply to colleges that were as far away from home as physically possible.  This is how one goes from North Dakota to Los Angeles.)

I’m now even more convinced that this is a good decision.  The older boy started a part-time job.  We sat down and ran the numbers and determined that his income from the job would pay about half of his tuition and give him some spending money.  Because of the hours, he can also work another job over the summer and probably make up the difference in tuition costs.

Finally, he will likely start as a sophomore because of all of the college credit he has earned or will earn through CLEP exams.

Based on this, he can likely get through school in three years and come out potentially debt-free because he will be able to pay his tuition himself.  When I look at how much he would have had to go into debt to earn his degree at the other schools we looked at, I have to admit that this is a pretty intelligent way to go.

The one reservation I had about this is that I felt like he needed to get out of the house.  I don’t want to stifle him by living at home all through college.  As I was pondering this toward the end of the semester, I had a speaker come to my class and discuss the study abroad program at the school.  I was surprised at how affordable the program is.  I brought a brochure home for older son, and we discussed it.  Rather than transferring to another school later, like he initially thought, he’s going to try to go abroad once or twice.  That way he can get the experience of not only visiting another school but another country.  Even with this, he can still probably get through school without any debt.

I’m surprised how much the financial aspect of this has changed my perspective.  Maybe because I and other people I know are still paying off student loans.  I’m curious what my readers would say to their kids if they were facing the same choice.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,260 other followers