Camian Academy

Fritz rarely plays peek-a-boo in the traditional way. Occasionally he’ll cover his face with a blanket and pull it off saying “Boo!” Usually, though, he covers his ears. It makes sense really. When we say “Peek-a-Boo” he can hear us and so by covering his ears he is “hiding” from the sound.

If we say “Where’s Fritz” his hands fly to his ears…

And then he pulls his hands off his ears to complete the game.

I try to limit my kids to one activity at a time until they are 8. At 8 they will add a church activity as well as whatever else they want to do. It’s not working. Ani’s going to have two activities this year and then she’ll turn 8 in 6 months and have three at once. At least she won’t be going to school all day on top of it.

Ani will be stopping gymnastics the end of October (we’re paid through then). The first week of September she’ll be starting Brownies. We found a local homeschooled girls group. She’s been wanting to do Girl Scouts for a year but the school-based group was less than thrilled at the prospect of a homeschooled child joining them. Mid-September she will be starting Irish dancing. And then of course in 6 months she will start Achievement Days at church. They meet twice a month.

Cameron has decided to stop gymnastics as well. This summer has been awful with new kids who have never done gymnastics joining and the recreation class kids unable to do much of anything fun because the team kids are on the equipment. Today it goes back to just the rec classes there during my kids’ time slot so we’ll see if it’s better. Anyway, Cameron wants to start taking golf lessons. We have a place near us that has lessons for kids 4 and up so we’ll be signing him up for 6 lessons to try it out. We haven’t decided if we’ll sign him up for lessons while he is still in gymnastics (since we’re paid through the end of October) or not. We probably will so he can decide if he really wants to stop gymnastics or not. He’s also interested in learning how to swim. I’m all for him trying out lots of different things.

On top of all that a friend at church is one of the leaders of Spring Tree, a homeschool support group, and they do weekly field trips. We’ll probably go to some of them over the course of the year. And then there are playdates with friends. Having my kids get a little older makes things busy!

I’ve noticed more and more that when homeschooling is mentioned in books or TV shows it is neutral or even positive, as opposed to a couple years ago they always seemed to be negative. For example, in Mean Girls the previously homeschooled girl is presented as naive and totally unaware of what the world is like (though, honestly, I’d much rather my daughter be like that girl originally was than the girls in the high school and what the girl turned into but I digress).

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - It says that most wizards and wizards from Britain went to Hogwarts, but parents had always had the right to choose to send them to a school out of the country or teach them at home.
• The Suite Life of Zach and Cody - A girl was swindling everyone out of whatever she could get from them and one of the twins says that she’s only a third grader how could she do that and the other twin says “She must be homeschooled!”
• Hannah Montana - Lilly as Lola is trying to tell Jake that she can’t be anyone he recognizes and says “You’ve never seen me at school because I’m homeschooled… in Canada… where the moose are.”
• Hannah Montana - Miley is muttering to herself that she could have been homeschooled but nooooo she wanted to go to school like a regular kid and how could she be so stupid.

So while they definitely aren’t presenting homeschooling as “normal” (and in the context of our society and the vast majority of kids attending school outside the home, homeschooling just plain isn’t “normal”), at least homeschooling isn’t always presented as dumb and the homeschooled kids as naive idiots anymore.

Having done A Day in the Life of Fritz and Ani, yesterday was Cameron’s turn.

When I got up in the morning Cameron was asleep on the floor of my bedroom. He had started out the night in his own bed for once. I have no idea when he came to our room.

Around 8:30 Cameron woke up and came downstairs.

Soon after he woke up he went back upstairs and got dressed for the day.

For breakfast we had cereal. Cameron chose wheat puffs with “lots of sugar.”

After breakfast Cameron went to dig in our backyard. He chose his hammer as his digging tool.

The three kids played in the basement for quite some time. The big ones said they were trying to get Fritz to go to sleep. He didn’t.

The kids were playing outside when Cameron ran in and excitedly showed me the wasp he had caught. The wasp is in the plastic container he is holding.

For lunch we had homemade chicken and rice soup.

After lunch we did school. In this picture Cameron’s listening to the first chapter of our current read-aloud, Mary on Horseback.

For our snack we had apples with brown sugar and cinnamon.

Cameron went and got Fritz up from his nap this afternoon.

Cameron helped clean the table before dinner.

For dinner we had Mexican Rice. Cameron isn’t a huge fan, but he ate it.

We went to Borders, Michaels, and McDonalds to use some coupons the big kids got from the library summer reading program. Cameron chose a Ratatouille book at Borders and a basket full of shells at Michaels. From McDonalds he got an ice cream cone.

For the first time in over a month Cameron slept in his own bed all night long.

My baby loves the Doodlebops. Enough said.

I finished reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann. At times I felt like the author was just droning on and on and on and on while at other times I felt like it was a rather exciting read. I think the book could have been shorter.

It was very interesting overall. History is written by the victors and so the history of the Indians is written by Europeans. As is typical when a different group writes your history, a lot has been gotten all wrong. What really happened in 323 BC or 731 AD we’ll never really know, but we can make some educated guesses.

In a lot of ways the book was kind of a “duh” to me. I never believed the natives in the Americas were low in numbers or lacking a well developed society. Now I just have the information - much of which has been available and ignored for many years - to show that what I think is closer to the truth.

Chronicling Fritz’s day was fun, so yesterday I took lots of pictures of the things Ani did.

Ani was sound asleep when I got up for the day. This is normal. Ani is a nightowl like her father and so she sleeps in.

Around 11 am she woke up and came downstairs. This is actually a little late for her to get up. Typically she’s up by 10:30.

Also like her Daddy, Ani takes a bit of time to really wake up in the morning. While she was still “half asleep” (her words), she once again watched some of High School Musical 2 with her bothers.

By the time she woke up the rest of us had already eaten breakfast so I just gave Ani’s to her on the couch. We had homemade granola bars. A huge hit with everyone.

Before lunch Ani decided she wanted to do some cooking. Her specialty is cooking sliced carrots.

Once her carrots we done, we had lunch. We ate club sandwiches and Ani and Cameron had Ani’s carrots on the side.

Eventually I convinced Ani it was time to get dressed.

I put her hair up in two ponytails with a pair of pony-o’s from Five Blessed Bows.

Here Ani is all ready for her day… at about 1:30 in the afternoon!

We started school around 2:30. Ani did her language arts and math upstairs in the library while I did language arts and math with Cameron downstairs in the living room. Once Ani finished she came downstairs so we could do everything else together.

After school, Ani went to get the mail. She loves getting our mail and does it pretty much every day. The worst punishment she ever had was a week of not being allowed to go get the mail.

She helped straighten up Fritz’s toys. I think there was only one grumble about not being a maid as she did it.

Ani played with Fritz for a while before dinner.

For dinner we had cube steak and mashed potatoes and gravy.

The big kids love to “do fire” with Jamie. They are highly supervised and Jamie has taught them (and continues to re-teach) fire safety. This time they set fire to a torch Jamie made and they were all, Jamie included, so excited about how it turned out. He had wound twine around the end of a long stick and dipped it in oil before lighting it.

Jamie enjoys watching Doctor Who and recently the big kids discovered they like it, too. So they watched an episode all together before bed last night.

Ani read some bedtime stories to Cameron.

Ani ended up sleeping on the floor of our bedroom last night. She went to sleep around midnight. We don’t much care where our kids are sleeping as long as they are sleeping. For some reason their own bed is not the most common place the big kids sleep. They both seem to prefer the floor (any floor - their bedroom, the library, our bedroom, the hall closet…).

Last night after their bath Ani and Cameron got all dressed up to compete in a “beauty contest.” They wanted us to pick one of them to be the winner. I gave my vote to Ani and Jamie gave his to Cameron. Seriously, how in the world are you supposed to pick one of your children as the best looking? Cameron voted for himself. Ani initially voted for herself making the score all tied up again. After a while she decided to give her vote to Cameron so he was the winner. The things these kids come up with.