More YouTube

Just haven't been very inspired lately, so nothing much to write about. But some Belgians were pretty inspired, and came up with this great commercial. So few words. So much meaning.

Dramatic Chipmunk

Being overly dramatic over and over.




Saw it on Ace O'Spades, put it here. (I have this thing about not saying hat tip. I just don't wear hats, and if I did I would look really stupid tipping one.)

There's an Emu In My Car!

Today we went to Briarwood Ranch Safari Park. It was a blast, but let me say it's not for the faint of heart.


When we first drove in the deer came running up to us. We were delighted that they were so friendly. The baby deer were so cute. Then we got into the woods and more deer ran up to us. The thing is, they wouldn't get their heads out of the door, so you just had to drive until you sort of disattached.


At the next stop the emus poked their heads in, they freaked out Dharma's kids a bit. Then the buffalo came galloping, that's when the children started screaming, pushing emus, and closing doors. I wonder if the safety mechanism on my sliding side door takes into account the necks of captive emus? Good thing I didn't have to find out.

The floor of my car is covered in animal feed. I made the kids promise not to make a mess with it. Well, it really isn't their fault it's messy. If you fall on your butt in a minivan because a zebra is trying to pull a feed bucket out of your hand what can you do?

I was leaning back to take this picture.

Jake was whining after the trip that one of the zebras nipped him on the arm when it was pulling on his shirtsleeves. The man who works the ranch asked him "Do you know any other boys who can say they were nipped by a zebra?" That made my kid pretty proud.

Oh, and the three little pigs were there too. (Awww.)

These Things Happen In Threes

The other day I walked down to my basement to find the floor of the bar area covered in water, and a fast drip coming from the light fixture over the sink. I called hubby home to fix it. It wasn't a problem with the pipes. It was ADD on the part of our youngest who thought it would be okay to fill his bathtub up to the rim, sending water over that little round thing, down through the floor to the ceiling of the basement. Now there is a big new chunk of drywall to patch, sand and paint.

The next evening I was reading a book to the kids in bed when I was overcome with how hot the room was getting. The kids were glistening a bit too. So I leaned down by the register and put my face over it. No air. So I called hubby to come look at it. He went downstairs and checked. AC was broken. So we're very hot right now while we wait for the pros to come and replace the motor and the other doohicky. On the plus side, my eyeliner has been going on very smoothly for the past two days. On the minus side, I sweat it off in the first few minutes of wear. I know, I'm such a girl.

Last night our boy got locked outside. He was pushing and pushing on the front door. He called to me through his open window to let him in. I wondered who could have locked it behind him. When I opened it, I saw that the door handle had finally broken. Which is really a good thing, since it was sticking, and corroded, and I'm not too fond of brass.

So it's all over right?

( One more house problem and I'm calling Dharma to come and Feng Shui it again.)

Some Domestic Advice

Make sure you regularly inspect your canister vacs. Especially if they are very expensive.This here is my excellent Miele vacuum cleaner. I got my vacuum before I got my dog. My vacuum used to suck in a good way. The way vacuums are supposed to suck. Since I got my dog, my vacuum has been sucking in a bad way. I would go over the floor thoroughly, then walk a little down the basement stairs where my eyes would be on floor level. I would still see a fine carpet of white hair. I would go over the whole house and still find pet hair in the corners a couple of hours after vacuuming. I thought my dog was just a never ending shed machine. And she is really. But she would have to be going into corners and intentionally dropping hair for it to accumulate that fast. I could see my cat doing that, but not my dog.

Anyway, today I was in the laundry room with my trusty Miele turned all the way up to 1200, and it was kicking kitty litter at me, and pushing hair into the rug. If you know how expensive these canister vacs are, you would know how hopeless this made me feel. So I took her apart. I cleaned the brushes of strings and such, and made sure nothing was stuck in the handle end. Then I looked down the long metal tube.

There was no light coming through.

So I stuck my finger in, and it felt all soft, and kind of fuzzy. So I turned it around and looked in the other end. I went to the closet and got out a long dowel rod and pushed it through the tube slowly. Oh! A little clump of hair! So I blew in it. With some force, about three meters of compact dog hair in the shape of a long cylinder came out the other end.

Now my vacuum sucks in a good way again.

All Touching is Bad Bad Bad

I've got a long haul ahead of me teaching my children to know what is appropriate. Lot's of parents with aspie kids have this problem to deal with, and spend a lot of time telling them when it is appropriate to touch. We want them not to be over affectionate, or severely withdrawn. I contend that neurotypical kids know right from wrong when it comes to getting physical in public. I'm talking about fighting too.

Well, some school teachers in Fairfax County Virginia don't think kids have the ability to function within society's boundaries, they've solved the whole problem for us. No touching at all!

One administrator complained of the gang handshakes and the kids who rapped each other's knuckles until they were bloody. Well I don't think if you eliminate gang sign handshakes, you'll eliminate the gang problem. And the bloody knuckles belong to the kids who played the game. Why is that the school's problem? Let them play the game, just make sure they get to class on time.

You can't raise any child well, much less one who has social difficulties if the rules don't make sense in greater society. I don't want to raise mine in a bubble, or a prison, or a factory. I wonder what kind of rebellion we will see coming out of these repressively coddling arbitrary rules.

I think I'll go downstairs and watch Equilibrium.

Whoops. I want to touch Christian Bale a bit. Now that's bad bad bad.

MONCHICHI!

Oh this is getting crazy. This one's for Anna.

Monchichi Monchichi
Oh so soft an cuddly
Put her thumb in her mouth she's really neat
Love to cuddle those little feet
Mow Mow Mow
Mow Mow Mow
Happy Happy Monchichi!

Well You Know My Name is Simon

I used to watch this one on Pinwheel too. I told my hubby that I remember thinking that I recognized Simon from a much earlier pre-Pinwheel time in my life. He's older than me, and he remembers Simon from Captain Kangaroo.

I still sing this song whenever I see a guy with big shorts and chicken legs.

I Found Chapi and Chapo!

There was this little song. I sing it to myself not knowing what it means. I connected it to two colorful claymation characters from my tween years. Years spent watching Pinwheel in the morning, it seemed to last for hours and hours, and MTV in the afternoon. A part of me thought that there was a schizo part of my brain that invented these characters. Well, it wasn't a dream. It was a real weird little show from a long time ago, when kids had long attention spans for really weird stuff. Here they be.

Teacher Terrorism? Part 2

Well, it's not exactly teacher terrorism, but it's right in line with this earlier post.


Tell me, are these kinds of awards going to help the children? I had a friend in middle school who was a very nice girl. She had a lot of problems in school even though she was in gifted and talented programs. Looking back today, I can see that she probably had some attentional issues that caused these academic problems. I really wasn't a very supportive friend to her, but it was always the teachers who seemed to understand her the least. She confided in me once, that her second grade teacher picked her up in front of the class and held her over the garbage can, and asked the other students if she could throw her in the trash. That story kind of stuck with me all these years, and I still hurt for this friend. I can't imagine how it would have felt to actually be her right then. I don't know what is worse: the thought that these teachers who did this to this boy have so little common sense, and still get paid to teach our kids "how to think", or that they have common sense and choose to be sadistic.

BTW, there are plenty of teachers out there that I positively adore. I just don't think these kinds of stories should be ignored.

Thought You Might Like to Know....

That I can be really morbid sometimes.

Here's some good reasons that Knoxville is a great place to live.

There are no Hitlers in Knoxville, but there are two in Nashville.

There's only one Dahmer in Knoxville. Probably a college girl.

Of course there are about 19 Mansons. So the Manson family does live here.

But there are no Gacys.

Are there any serial killers named Johnson? Or Smith? Probably.

I wonder if people with really recognizable serial killer, or bloodthirsty dictator names, consider getting their name changed, and if so, how many have actually done it.

No, I don't have too much time on my hands. I'm just a really quick searcher. Took me 5 minutes to reasearch and write this post. Came up with the questions while I was cleaning the house. This is what happens to me when you give me a mind numbing job like ironing. I desperately look for something else to do, and it's usually not quite as productive.

Just a Flesh Wound

I was just reading this post on no school, just learning, and instead of blogging in his comments section, which I tend to do after a couple of cups of coffee, I thought I'd post my story on my blog.

Last week, me and Josie were at the doctor's office, and he was checking her reflexes. Now this wasn't a pediatrician, but a psychiatrist, and they ask a lot of personal probing questions. I felt fairly confident that I had presented us as the relatively healthy family we are. By no means are we perfect ( who is?), but we're not dysfunctional or anything. You know, I get 45 minutes to stammer that fact out in a myriad of ways to someone I hardly know, when I really should be finding out whether this psychiatrist is familiar with Asperger's and fit to treat my kid, but I digress. Back to the reflexes. He got his little hammer out and straightened out her left arm, palms up, and there on the inside of her forearm was an oval bruise. He asked her where she got it. She replied "My daddy bit me."

Oh sheesh.

You should have seen the look on his face when he turned around.

I know my husband didn't bite her, not in the werewolf sense of the word. There's a lot of roughhousing that goes on around here. Kids get thrown all over the place. After daddy gets home, I go immediately into the kitchen and look for my headphones, because the Screaming and Squealing hour has arrived. There's no safe way to walk through the living room after 5:30 pm, without risk of being knocked on your rear by some blond child being catapulted across the room. I imagine that her arm must have been pretending to be a turkey leg or something, and Daddy must have been chewing on it. I can also imagine that there was a lot of maniacal laughter involved in this, and quite possibly an "Ow!" and a "Sorry sweetie." Who knows.

But I could just see the gears in his head. "No wonder I'm treating this kid for anxiety. Her dad bites her."

Oh sheesh.

Weird Moon

I stayed up late watching a movie tonight, then stumbled up to bed ready to sleep. As soon as my head hit the pillow, bing!. Mental gears turning, rewinding, pausing, replaying. Occasionally, I like to stay up really late and do one of those "flashback episodes" on myself, which isn't really healthy, but my mind gets a sick thrill from playing reruns when my body is trying to sleep.

The dog seemed to be a bit fidgety too. Her toenails were endlessly clicking on the hardwood. She must have had something on her mind as well. So I asked her if she would like to go outside, and I offered to accompany her.

As we passed through the living room on our way to the back door, I grabbed my guitar. This should be novel, I thought. I'll see if I can play this tune without the sheet music, at midnight on the back patio with my dog . The moon was exceedingly bright, I thought it was a full moon, and it seemed friendly enough to sit beneath. The guitar sounded very loud at first there in the dark stillness, so I played very softly. The thing is, playing this particular tune, softly, at midnight, made me think of soundtracks to cheap horror flicks. It was simply too cheerful in a morbid and eerie way, and then the night seemed a bit threatening. Couple that with the dog getting on her hind legs against the chain link fence and growling at the rustling bushes, and suddlenly the hair on the back of my neck was telling me that my dog, my geetar, and my butt needed to get themselves inside.

Now here I am in the basement and the dog's sniffing around as if she'd never seen the place before. We're back where we started, only now my brain is writing scary movie screenplays.

Bohemian Rhapsody On Classical Guitar

There's a really excellent guitarist named Edgar Cruz who plays and teaches a lot of these great classic rock opera songs on guitar. There are two videos by Cruz, but one of them has a lot of infuriating crowd noise in the background (why come to a concert if you're going to talk the whole time?) This is a cut up version, where Cruz includes some instruction.



If I start learning it today, and you stick around until I'm about 70, maybe I'll play it for you, no?

What We Did This Year

I figure I need to post something about what we did this year since much of the point of this blog is to keep a journal of what we've done school-wise.

I advanced the kids up a grade last week, so now Josie is in the fourth grade and Jake is in the third. They are still doing the same schoolwork. Jake is young for his grade, but he has moved up to fourth grade math. He is an "A" student in math as well and that makes me very proud. We haven't used a math curriculum this year, we have just bought a few math workbooks and when they finish one for their grade, they move up to the next.

They both started gymnastics last month, which was a big milestone for Josie, since I haven't had her in any type of class situation since taking her out of school last year. She has a very patient coach, and is learning little by little some of the social rules that go along with taking a gymnastics class. Jake is practicing his handstands every day trying to see how many seconds he can stay upside down. I like that he's set himself these goals. That's a real little-boy thing after all.

They have two notebooks each that are full of schoolwork that we started in on around January. We signed up with Oak Meadow School and that got us jump started. Every day we read a story or a fable or something from history and they draw a picture and practice their cursive writing with a brief summary of what they have drawn.

We also have learned about the Babylonians, the Phoenecians, the Romans and Greeks, the Assyrians, the Spartans, ancient Egyptians, and the Jews and their nomadic travels. We have a large timeline made of foam core board that we label with major events and people after reading a chapter from our favorite little history book.

We've read so many books this year. Together we read Alice in Wonderland, Despreaux, The Higher Power of Lucky, and we're currently reading The Wind in the Willows. We have also read about 25 fables since January, and the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. Josie has read everything I could get her by Roald Dahl, and Jake has read most of those too. Once I'm unbanned from the library (darn those hidden pockets in backpacks!), I'll begin to get some audio books for the car.

This year we went to the Human Body Exhibit in Atlanta, missed the shuttle launch in December, but it still counts, visited the nursing home at Christmas time to pass out cards and sing songs, went to Safari Adventure in Pigeon Forge, recently we visited Liles Acres, a really neat little farm in Maryville with llamas and chickens and organic gardens. We've done countless other little trips too.

The major thing we did this year was join a homeschool co-op. The kids have made some great friends and so have I. If I hadn't met all of these great folks, I might not be the confident homeschooler I am right now. I have gotten so much support and so many ideas from them. Most of all, I've gotten the comfort of knowing I'm doing the right thing, by hearing about their trials and triumphs, by seeing how well their children are doing, and laughing together about the things our kids do, when at one time many of us were consumed by worry.

Keeping this blog has helped me as well. Whenever I feel like we've slumped out, I can look back and see how busy we have been, and how much has been accomplished this year. I can safely say I'm proud of myself and truly proud of my kids, and blessed to be able to take this responsibility to help them grow and learn.

Spelling Bee

We watched the spelling bee last night with the kids. We enjoyed it. The best part for me was listening to Josie come up with all kinds of hypotheses on how these kids managed to spell these words.

"I figured it out! They can see the bottom of the screen!"

When I explained that the word printed on the bottom of the screen was broadcast only to the TV audience, she thought about it a bit.

"Well, they have special powers!"

I asked her if she really believed that it was more likely that these kids had psychic abilities, than that they were simply brilliant spellers.

She preferred the "psychic powers" scenario.