It's Official

I officially have my hands full.

Today I played Battleship and Bingo with Bear. He read the letters and numbers on the bingo chips (B-1-0, not B-10, but still...). He picked the letters and numbers for Battleship. Then he was looking at a pile of crayons, some of which were a particular brand of chunky style ones called "So Big," pointed and said "So Big!"

Pretty much everyone's response has involved blinking and "Oh boy."

Oh no, I have two of them!

During Wolf's martial arts class, Bear likes to play with an alphabet train puzzle they have there. Yesterday he put the whole thing together, almost totally by himself, and named all of the letters correctly except 2! He is two years and seven months right now. I might have to accept that Bear picks things up as quickly as Wolf does if he keeps this up.

A Day in the Life

This morning Wolf, Bear and I drove about an hour up the coast to meet up with with our Independent Study group for a field trip day. The usual crew was there, two 11 year old boys, their families, the teacher and us. There are more kids in the program but we're the core group that always shows up for the hikes and geo-caching. I don't mind though because the boys get along great and are a really good match even considering the age difference.

Today's trip was a visit to a couple of different beaches, finding four geo-caches and ending up at a pumpkin patch. The first beach had some pretty steep rocks so I put Bear's leash on. It might look silly, but he has a tendency to run off and intentionally ignore people trying to stop him. We walked down, looked at some of the rocks, learn a bit about them and then took a walk down the beach. Now, I seem to have developed an uncanny ability to spot dead animals and today was no exception. Part way down the beach I found a very dead seal. I'm certain that has an extreme EWWWW factor to many people, but as usual my first reaction was to yell to the kids, “Hey! Check out what I found! It's a dead seal!” All of the boys came trampling over ready for an inspection. It was missing all of one eye and most of another and some of its entrails were spilling out, but dried and there was no smell. We decided a bird probably took the missing eye and wandered off to the next adventure.

The boys stampeded off, except Bear who was literally attached to me at the hip. They ended up climbing on on some sandstone near the water and Bear wanted to join them so we walked over. We were deciding if we should let him join them when I noticed that the tide had decided to come in vigorously right then. I yoinked Bear off the ground and was promptly standing in shin deep ocean water. Hooray for wet sneakers... Bear was dry though and that was a good thing since he would have A. hated being wet, B. hated being cold, and C. hated being changed to fix the prior two problems. Luckily Wolf's teacher had some shoes she could lend me and they almost fit.

Oh and on the way back to the car we found a seagull head, mostly skull really. Told you I was good at spotting these things! Last week it had been a tiny dead mouse.

We found all the geo-caches we were looking for and we eventually ended up at the pumpkin patch. It had a corn maze. I have never been in one so I was all for trying it. It ended up being me, Bear, Wolf, the teacher, one of the boys from earlier and another one that had met up with us there. We got wonderfully and hopelessly lost very quickly and they boys spent most of their time running ahead and then waiting for the adults to catch up. Wolf had been told to stay with the boy from earlier and that boyhad been told to keep an eye on him. Bear spent most of his time with the teacher and I since the ground was very uneven and he kept falling over.

Finally we turned a corner and found the boys, well the two older ones at least. I asked them where Wolf was and they looked around, at each other, and pretty much shrugged. The teacher and the boys started shouting for him and we soon heard him yelling and sent the boys to retrieve him. He was a bit shaken, but not much worse for wear. His teacher was impressed at how un-paniced I seemed. The thing is that, honestly, it was a corn maze. It's not like he could have gotten far in the amount of time since we had seen him last and even if he found his way out we had parents waiting outside. Besides Wolf and I have been over what to do if (when) he got misplaced in situations like that.

After that we still had lunch, schoolwork, martial arts, more schoolwork and a good amount of brotherly bickering and wrestling before dinner.

So I'm sitting here typing this sometime after midnight with a sprained wrist that I got from grabbing Bear away from the water just so that I don't forget anything. Thanks to unventilated classrooms in painting classes in college my memory is unreliable at best and today I really do not want to forget.

National Novel Writing Month

Wolf and I are signed up to participate in National Novel Writing Month ( www.nanowrimo.org ). Basically adult participants try to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Wolf, since he is in the Young Writer's Program and only in 1st grade, will be writing a 1000 word novel. I think that will be an amazingly fun school project.

We already have our ideas ready to go. I am planning a sci-fi spaceship/station based Utopian/Dystopian novel and Brendan will be working on a fantasy novel based on a video game he loves to watch called Zelda.

We'll keep everyone updated on our progress and sanity.

This Poem Is on My Fridge

I Took His Hand and Followed
Mrs. Roy L. Peifer


My dishes went unwashed today,
I didn't make the bed,
I took his hand and followed
Where his eager footsteps led.

Oh yes, we went adventuring,
My little son and I...
Exploring all the great outdoors
Beneath the summer sky

We waded in a crystal stream,
We wandered through a wood...
My kitchen wasn't swept today
But life was gay and good.

We found a cool, sun-dappled glade
And now my small son knows
How Mother Bunny hides her nest,
Where jack-in-the-pulpit grows.

We watched a robin feed her young,
We climbed a sunlit hill...
Saw cloud-sheep scamper through the sky,
We plucked a daffodil.

That my house was neglected,
That I didn't brush the stairs,
In twenty years, no one on earth
Will know, or even care.

But that I've helped my little boy
To noble manhood grow,
In twenty years, the whole wide world
May look and see and know.

A Year of Advocacy Hell

I figured I would add this for those of you who haven't heard the trials and tribulations we went through to get Wolf into the school he is in now.

In July 2008 I read an article about gifted kids and said "This sounds like Wolf." I went online and did some research (ok, a WHOLE lot of research).  It turns out that most kids aren't doing math when they are three, I honestly had no idea that was out of the ordinary.  In my research I found out about early Kindergarten entrance and contacted my district to find out if it was an option in our area. Mind you, at that point I wasn't gung ho about placing him in K early, I JUST wanted to know if it was possible. Mid August 2008 I finally found one person in the school district who actually knew the answer and wasn't rude which was a nice change. I was then put in contact with the charter system and told that Wolf could start with one of their schools (homeschool based system) that fall. Shortly afterwards I was told he couldn't because the school was full (which the principal later told me was a lie). I was told by the district to homeschool Kindergarten in 08-09 so we did and I just let him go at his own pace.

I quickly realized that grade skip, in other words starting 1st grade when he was five, would do him a lot of good.  It would be a closer academic fit, he was ready for it socially and then he wouldn't have to skip later when there was more social stigma and stress involved.  I talked with the principal of the charter schools again to see about getting him placed in 1st in fall 2009. There was much hassle and much disbelief in his abilities.  The principal finally suggested that I give him grade assessment tests at home. I think they wanted to prove to me that I was seeing things that weren't there, was pushing him, ruining his childhood, etc... I asked what to do if he aced them, they said come back and get the next level. By the time I asked for grade 3 math they were getting really tired of us.

I talked with one charter and both Wolf and I were treated rudely. Wolf was talked down to and we were pretty much disregarded.  One teacher even said, "Oh don't worry some of the parents bring their preschoolers so he'll have kids to play with."  We finally had an appointment with the teacher of the charter he would probably end up in and I spent a half an hour being lectured about how I was not allowing him to be a child. I didn't get to ask most of my questions about the program. That was the last straw.

I called the Independent Study program in the public school system of the neighboring district. I had talked to them before when we had thought about moving there. I told the head teacher all about Wolf and what he could do. She loved the idea of having him as a student. Then I told her the thing that turned everyone else off, he would be 5 in August 2009. She had no idea what the problem with that was. He was my kid and I knew him better than she did. She was willing to take everything I said sight unseen. She also specifically requested that he be her student and was willing to fight to get a transfer to go through if that was what it would take.

We applied for a interdistrict transfer and they were going to make us go through a bunch of red tape since we hadn't even enrolled in our home district yet.  However the person in charge was the first person I had talked to originally and I told her exactly what had happened and she pushed it through on her end. We had to wait till the day school started here to get the official confirmation that it went through though, but it did and now Wolf is blasting through his 1st grade work and his 2nd grade math.  He's even getting to study Logic and Spanish o keep him challenged.  He is loving it and the fit is perfect.  It took a year of being taught very roughly that school districts and most school staff are less interested in a child's education than keeping the status quo and fitting all the pegs in their round holes whether or not the pegs themselves are round or square, but we found the perfect fit in the end.

An Introduction

So many interesting things happen in our lives that we would like to share with our close friends and family that I have decided to start a family blog to do just that.  Since this is online I will avoid any obviously recognizable personal information, but you should figure out who is who pretty easily.

I am Wyldkat, mom, independent studies teacher, artist, daycare provider, author, minister, general contractor, craftsperson, interior designer, cub scout den leader and general all around jack of all trades. 

Dragon owns his own business, a game store, in a nearby town.  He is very dedicated to it and even with all of the economic problems it has stayed afloat even if it has been close.  He is also a great dad who takes mornings and evenings with the boys to allow me to retain some of my sanity.

Wolf recently turned 5 and started 1st grade.  That one tends to throw people a bit, but a grade skip was the best accommodation we could come up with for him since he was assessed at the beginning of 3rd in math, mid to late 2nd for reading and mid first for most everything else.  That was when he was 4.  He is currently in an Independent Study Program in a neighboring school district.  To find the a place where he would be accepted for who he is took a year of hard work and an interdistrict transfer, but he is happy and thriving now.

Our baby Bear is 2 1/2 and the most intense child I have ever worked with.  For a very long time he had horrible tantrums that would last for an hour or more.  They got better after we tried chiropractic with him, but he is still very much a child of extremes.  He is either the happiest, cutest child on earth or the most miserable.  He is also very sensitive to changes.  In addition to that he has almost his brother's vocabulary and can already count and understand number values up to at least 5.    It makes like interesting to say the least.

We also share our lives with an old diabetic cat,  three little dogs (if you combine them they almost make a whole dog!), a rat, lots of fish and a turtle.  There are also the deer, raccoons, and gophers, but we try to keep them out of the house.

Well, that is us in a nutshell.