today

I thought the Storyteller was okay with school now and wanted to stay, but last night he said to me, just before bed, "Tomorrow is November 15th." I froze in place with the laundry in one hand and the spare pillow in the other and the read-aloud between my shoulder and neck and a bunch of Lego on the edge of my foot about to be shooed. November 15 was the day I had promised he could come home from school, back when I thought that was going to be possible.

I said, "I thought you wanted to stay in school."

Now it was his turn to look horrified. He took a deep breath, observing carefully my rule about not getting anything that you whine about. He said as calmly as a clearly upset seven-year-old can, "No, I don't."

I told him I'd talk it over with the other people in the household regarding whether they're up for dealing with kids during the day should I get sick, but that, as he knew, I'd been sicker lately than I was before I put him in school, and that my illness is why he's there. This was just a way of managing due process in his eyes. I've been sick and he can't stay home.

Well, I didn't get to go over it with everyone else before the next morning, this morning, so I defaulted to my promise to the kid. He stayed home today, but with the understanding that this is probably temporary.

That is how we came to be have a day of homeschooling.

I set my alarm to six. It woke me up out of a nightmare about being in a quiverfull family that was being visited by another quiverfull family. In case twenty-four children in denim skirts and pleated khakis wasn't enough to scare a woman, the father in the visiting family had purchased part of a Bodies exhibit and was showing it to all the kids. It was slices (like these) of a woman's genitals. He had it all wrong, too, piling it up backwards so you couldn't really see how they function, just get an academic sense of the anatomy. My dreams are so blatantly symbolic, it's sad. There's no mystery in that, nothing to unravel. It's because my moon is in Pisces.

Anyway, I set my alarm to six, woke up, told a cousin about the dream, and went to get dressed and washed. I strongly considered showering. My shower is newly free of cardboard furniture boxes. The boys dragged them out back this weekend to build a fort. I did not take a shower, however, because I was not smelly. I stood in the bathroom and wondered at this fact, especially since I've been using aluminum-free deodorant from the healthy foods coop that you have to shop at in order to be cool. I'm pretty sure aluminum is what keeps underarms from smelling like poop. Yet mine did not. Hm.

Anyway again, then the five-year-old started screaming. I went to the bedroom where I found that he was afraid he could not get out of the top bunk. This is a fear that only lives when he is half asleep. The rest of the time he's an ibex. I told the boy to try with me standing there, and if he fell I'd catch him. He was down in half a second and off to the bathroom. The ten-year-old was awake already on the trundle bed, I then noticed, and he was reading . . . "Hey! Don't read the read-alouds ahead of everyone else!" I said. We've been reading Patricia Wrede's dragon series. If you haven't read this, you should should know that there's a lot of pro-Latin propoganda; in the first chapter the protagonist fights for Latin lessons, and in the second chapter her little Latin wins her a much-needed position.

The boys all stayed in bed for about another half-hour, then began to trickle out and get dressed and find themselves breakfast. I had granola and bananas. I actually kind of really dislike bananas, but I have a chronic potassium deficiency because seizures zap me of it. Storyteller had yogurt and Hero had cheese toast, and Scientist was going to eat breakfast at school. I gave Scientist a dollar fifty because his bus pass (he takes the city bus) had just run out of rides, and he said, "but how will I get home?" and I said, "why didn't you tell me this on Friday?" and he said, "yeah, that would have been better." Then I handed him another dollar and a half, and I said, "Bye. Love you. Tell your brother's teacher he won't be in today."

It was while this was going on that I heard the doorknob twisting. N., the four-year-old girl cousin from upstairs, is unable to open a surprising number of doors. I let her in. She was groggy and wearing a floral nightgown and said, "No one is awake upstairs. I'm lonely." I said, "Oh. You're welcome to hang out in here with us." She went straight to the gnomes section of the apartment.

I began to gather schoolbooks from the various places they had gone during the period in which I was too sick even to afterschool. This is the crazy thing about today. I've been too sick to do an hour of math and Latin with the kids after school, but I'm going to homeschool? Yes. Yes, I am. Today anyway.

I pulled up the spreadsheet I'd made so that I could school even while brainless, even though I don't feel brainless today. I copied the next day's work into Storyteller's planner. I stacked his books on the dining room table. I said, "You'll probably want to find a pencil before you sit down."

He started with The Drawing Textbook. He was only copying a witch's hat, but he had a heck of a time foreshortening the circle, making the point pointy, echoing the curve of the base in the curve of the pointy part. I sat with him to correct and direct as he went.

Then he did Math Mammoth. While he was working mostly independently on that, I set the little guy to phonics on the computer. We use Click n Kids because it's the least annoying and the most to-the-point. It doesn't say, "YOU ARE THE BEST! KID! EVER!" with every right answer and it doesn't pretend to be a garden or a carnival or something besides phonics lessons. As soon as the boy started, N. was interested. She snuck up to the computer and watched intently as the Hero sounded out MAT, TAM, AT, SAM. When he was stumped and asking me for help finding SAM, N. jumped in with, "It's this one." She was right, and I asked her if she wanted to do some too. "Yes please," she said. At first she did Hero's lessons with him, but then he was antsy and frustrated (with phonics, not his cousin) so I reset the program to lesson one for N. She breezed through three lessons, saying every time I asked if she wanted to do another, "yes please," but when she saw that the fourth one was mostly on all the same letters again, she declined to do it. I think she had the idea that she was going to learn to read today. I think she could have, too. The Scientist was like that, and he used a primer in a book so he could go as fast as he wanted to go, but I still had to make him do it some days, and I'm not sure N.'s parents are cool with coercion.

Story's teacher called while I was watching N. do phonics, trying to keep Hero involved in the kitchen so he didn't bug N., and supervising Storyteller's Latin. She wanted to ask me if I knew why Storyteller had left school an hour early by himself on Friday.

"What I heard from him," I told her, "was that he figured there was no reason for him to stay, nothing left to do. He told me finished his end-of-day chores, told his brother where he was going so he wouldn't worry, then walked home." Across the city. By himself. For forty minutes. Using big roads. His teacher apologized and told me she'd never had a kid just leave without her knowing. I tried to tell her it wasn't a horrible thing. He's capable and independent and, well, kids do these things, especially this kid. But I wonder, how would she know it had never happened before? It was a cousin at home who called the school, thinking to let Scientist know not to worry. But his brother and indubitably the friends that he and his brother hang out with knew; it was just the teachers who were unaware. So maybe children leave the Free School all the time. That's a positive as far as I'm concerned, just so long as this blog entry doesn't alert predators to the easy pickins. Dear predators, Free School kids will cut you. Also, they're noisy like a den of hyenas and no one has ever taught them they have to do what grown-ups say.

When I got off the phone with Storyteller's teacher, I quizzed him on Greek and Latin and looked at his history narration. Narration in our house right now means he uses one of those half-unlined composition books to write a summarizing sentence and illustrate it. N decided then that she was done with phonics and she went back upstairs.

I joined a reluctant Storyteller at the spinet to re-introduce basic piano stuff. Have I mentioned that we haven't done anything in a while? He finally got the concept of keeping to a rhythm, though, of whole notes and half notes, when I asked him if he could whistle in time. The boy is a master whistler. He can whistle two notes simultaneously; he can whistle any melody he hears.

Then a cousin came down with my dog to feed and walk her. Oops. I told him about his daughter doing phonics lessons and he told me he could recognize the song Story was playing.

As I type, Storyteller is sitting on the arm of my computer chair, pressed up to my shoulder. He's just had a frustrating moment trying to remember some Hebrew vowels he'd forgotten, but now he's had a few successes and the positive momentum is building. He's reading these few bits of Hebrew with competence and I can feel the lightening of his aura, the little careful excitement. He'll be done for the day, done with formal lessons, as soon as he gets to the end of the page. We did it.

This was it. This is homeschooling. It feels good. So very good.

Let me hold my babies warmly against me and feel what they feel as they learn. May they find me when they need to learn and be guided gently by the little turns in my way of being with them in those learning moments. We want to homeschool again.