September 2020

 In September, the littles were cute and loved each other.

Also in September, Tiny bit Wrenzy on the back, and it was horrifying.

From the kitchen, the girls and I spotted a dead rodent under our outside table. I was calling it a rat, but Jim later said he thought it was a gopher. Wrenzy wrote and illustrated a story about it. The pencil is hard to see in these pictures, but it says, "One day there was a rat under our table outside. I saw it. It was outside my window. This is how big he was. I wrote it when I was five. It was brown." 

Tiny, the nearly naked wilderness child:

It ticked me when I looked out the window to see Tiny, dressed as Cinderella, on the fence. Except then I had to tell the girls that I don't like them climbing that fence. 

Leela and Ever did a Zoom cooking class for Girl Scouts. They made homemade pasta and sauce and chocolate-covered strawberries. It was really stressful and hard for me to help them both with the pasta and try to keep up, and the pasta totally did not work. It wouldn't cook. I don't know what we did wrong, but we couldn't make it not raw. The chocolate-covered strawberries were more of a success. 

Wrenzy started dance at Cadence.

Daddy/daughter dogpile. 

I found this thing that Ever made, and I thought it was hilarious. 

Zoom piano recital.

Tiny started preschool at Meagan Bunnell's Little Bugs (she took it over after Miss Paula moved).

Sweet Tines got all tuckered out from fake reading.

The children love climbing the wall on the other side of Cikaneks' house. If they fell, they would land on concrete. Cikaneks' neighbors on the side finally regulated at some point because it terrifies them. 

Wrenzy is on the far left side of the wall in this pic; Nathan is crawling near the lamp.

The girls went to the beach with Karners (and Oddous, I think).

Trail walking with Rafi and the Cikanek boys. 

Scott and Rebecca printed lots and lots of worksheets and coloring pages for the children, who would spend long periods of time on them. Often I would realize I didn't know where the girls were, and I'd text Rebecca and find out they were over there working.  

Noah and Tiny shared some sweet moments.

Other than what is captured in pictures, I suppose it was homeschool, homeschool, homeschool. The Coastal curriculum was great. The English program (Logic of English) was super intense but amazing. I learned tons from it. Ever was able to go ahead in math. We got permission to do fourth-grade math instead of third-grade math. Most of that was stuff we had already covered, though, so I later discussed with our advisor and decided to do a program called Beast Academy instead. It covers everything on a way deeper level and encourages kids to understand math intuitively rather than to just solve problems mechanically. It was really challenging but fun, for the most part. The flexibility Coastal offered was amazing, and the kids learned so much. They were amazing and motivated students. 

Susan was working three days a week, and we came up with an arrangement wherein I did school with Luc and Amelie at our house a couple days a week, and Susan took the kids another day or two. I don't remember our exact schedule, and I think it changed over the course of the school year. But it ended up being incredibly difficult. Luc made me crazy. He complained about everything. He fidgeted and created nonstop distractions whenever I tried to teach something. He always gave silly answers that he thought were clever. Amelie was hard for me, too (she's really into whining), but Luc was a nightmare. I was super mean, which I always regretted but could not seem to control. It was awful. Later in the year, I started having problems with Ever and told Jim I wondered if it was Luc's influence. He threatened to talk to Susan if I didn't, so I ended up telling Susan that I had to cut back on the togetherness because I thought maybe Ever was acting up to impress Luc or something. It totally screwed Susan over because she was already overloaded with work and homeschool and everything else, and she simply could not be home to do school with them. On days I didn't take them, she was coming home from work and doing school with them at night. I could tell she suspected that I wasn't telling her everything and that it was really her kids' fault, and she was really stressed about how to manage everything. It was such a disaster. She is so good with kids. She's super patient and kind and does fun things with them. I am the exact opposite. I have no patience, am not fun (and don't want to spend extra time coming up with fun things), and expect a lot. I've always known I wasn't a kid person and didn't do well with other people's kids (even worse than I do with my own), and this experience really solidified that. Susan was able to homeschool her kids just fine. Luc is a bright kid and not a troublemaker in a classroom. I just could not do it. Anyway, that happened down the line. In the beginning, I really enjoyed homeschooling my kids.