Everyday Intensity July Challenge

The website, Everyday Intensity, posts articles, topics and questions pertaining to overexcitabilities, giftedness, Dabrowski, and sensitivities. For the month of July, which is also my birthday month, there is a new challenge everyday regarding our intensities; living with them, getting to know them, respecting them, controlling them, etc.

From Yesterday's post on Everyday Intensity:

“The essential characteristic of nervousness is an increased excitability, symptomatized in the forms of sensual, psychomotor, affectional, imaginational, and mental hyperexcitability. It consists in an unproportional reaction to a stimulus, an extended, long-lasting, accelerated reaction, and a peculiar reaction to a neutral stimulus.” (Kazimierz Dabrowski, Personality-shaping Through Positive Disintegration)

To begin, think about some really good things you have done with your life, or some personal growth you experienced, especially if it came after a period of internal struggle. How did overexcitabilities play a role? What did they help you to notice in yourself or in your environment?

For me it was always difficult to leave relationships that were no good for me.

I remember when I broke off with my first no-goodnik boyfriend I was so stressed out contemplating my exit strategy that I couldn't even talk. I just went silent. For days.

Even today, I go silent when I am really upset. Though, I have much better coping skills now (as I am almost 20 years older) and my silence never lasts for days or even hours.

What I am talking about is not the Silent Treatment. I am not that passive aggressive. I like talking to people I am close to and I strongly believe it is important to confront issues and talk things out, even if it means staying up till two a.m.. (my poor husband.)

But when I'm really upset or really stressed, I find that words escape me. Or rather, I go live inside my head, which a whirlwind of words, none of which can be caught and uttered aloud.

I see this as one of my many extreme reactions or my "unproportional reaction to a stimulus".

I think I need my silence. My silence gives me time. My silence allows me to listen to a voice inside me that is whispering, barely audible, what I needed to do protect myself, when the voices telling me what I OUGHT to do are so much louder. My silence keeps me from saying things that I might regret. When I am silent I can sort out the unreasonable demands other make on me, or that I make on myself. When I don't speak it is because I need time to think. In silence I gather my strength.

After a few days of silence I knew what I needed to do and I broke up with that bullying boyfriend. It was a struggle. It took a long time sitting with silence, but eventually I heard the truth ringing out with clarity.

A few pictures from our trip out west and back



Hoover Dam


I like how you can see the white line of the water level.


A beautiful deep blue lake between Vegas and Reno.


Gorgeous red mountains in Utha or Colorado


A rest stop in Colorado.


Climbing around


I tried to include some pictures with cars to show scale.


Those pine trees are HUGE!


Huge mountains and fast rivers. My favorite part of Colorado.

My Education

At any one time I might have a dozen tabs open on articles I want to read for self edification or reviewing stuff I might want to teach Zoe. For example:


River of Time - NOVA

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III explains academic gifts

Japanese space agency set to make history with launch of the solar-sailing IKAROS probe

Whale diversity driven by diet

NOVA - teacher's guide on Sleep

Hamlet, a teacher's guide

Genie Scott talks with Skepchick.org's Sam Ogden about the evolution of creationism, the Texas board of education, women in science, and more.

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Response Resources

An one Twitter post might lead me down a rabbit trail of articles about the same subject

Healthy Intoversion

Caring for your introvert

Introverts - strength in lack of numbers

Introversion verse Shyness

I found these blogs - The Introvert Zone and Living Introverted

Which lead to some articles about being a gifted adult - Lisa's Ginormous List of Gifted Grown-up Traits and Exploring Grown-up Giftedness

All this doesn't include facebook, twitter and the blogs I read. Thank goodness I read fast.

Some movies and updates

Zoe's reenactment of Emily Dickinson's poem The Lost Thought

Zoe singing Pi Day at the math party

Community Research Project on Exploding and Collapsing Boxes (of numbers)

Other recent fun learning:

Science - Biology, Creative Thinking, Greenhouse Effect, Evolutions, Bacteria, Genetic Mutations, Basic Electronics, Cell Turnover, Optimization/Maximization, Opportunism, Ecosystems,

The start of the American Revolution - The Boston Massacre, The Battle at Lexington and Concord, Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, and The John Adams HBO mini series

Reading - Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett, Emily Dickenson Poems, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and other fiction and non-ficiton.

Math - Programming JAVA, Quadratic Equations, and Fractional Bases

Music - Piano

Music History - Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Pushkin, Wagner and The Ring Cycle, Liszt, Opera - Puccini, Verdi, Giselle, Chopin, Mendelssohn

Language Arts - Greek and Latin word roots, aesthetics, analogies, Spanish Cognates, synthesis, divergence, analysis, evaluation, and intuition.

Dance - preparing for recital in June

Other - writing a couple books, a shot movie, songs for the movie, chatting, Skyping, playing, watching three versions of Hamlet and Looney Tunes.

Japanese

Zoe is going to be taking a break from Japanese for awhile.

She has been studying Japanese for 4 years and is getting close to taking the proficiency exam, the JLPT. But, it is a struggle for her to retain all the vocabulary she has learned over the last four years, since she rarely has opportunities to speak Japanese.

She has an hourly lesson with her teacher once a week, of which little or no time is spent on vocabulary she learned 2, 3, 4 years ago. She spends 30 minutes a day, four days a week doing homework, but that is all new stuff. I have a Japanese girl come over for an hour once a week to "play" in Japanese with Zoe. But, you would be surprised how little actually get accomplished during that time.

Zoe is taking a college level class and the college kids have 4 1/2 hours a week of class time plus homework. Zoe gets one hour class time and 3 hours of homework and I am not really willing to spend more time on this at home. Not unless Zoe wanted to and she doesn't.

Don't get me wrong. Japanese is a fine language to study. It is extremely difficult. The U.S. Gov rates it as the hardest language for native English speakers to master. And, depending on where you live and your personal situation, there can be limited opportunities for speaking in Japanese.

If Zoe wanted to continue Japanese I could have her supplementing with Rosetta Stone, watching Anime with Japanese subtitles and language options on, and writing to a Japanese pen pal. There is more we could do to help her retain everything she learned. It would require devoting more time to the subject each day.

But, Zoe is losing interesting in Japanese. She and her teacher are not totally clicking and I know that is affecting her. And I don't want to force her to pursue a language that she chose when she was 5 years old. Even if she forget everything, which I doubt, I believe it has developed some important pathways in her brain and she has enjoyed herself most of the time.

Recently she asked if she could take a break from studying Japanese and try Spanish and Latin. Sure! Why not? I know she has invested years in Japanese and is close to gaining at certificate, at a very young age, but I think it is important to allow her this choice. I can tell she is not as excited to study Japanese as she used to be and I think 4 years of Japanese is a good enough accomplishment.

Zoe has always had an interest in languages. I remember, when she was 2 or 3, asking how to say different words in Spanish, French, Japanese and even Russian. I remember her taking language dictionaries to her room for some "light" bed time reading. Zoe also takes Hebrew twice a week and we will continue with that. But now she is asking to learn Spanish and Latin. She is excited about it. So we are going to switch to that for the summer and see what she want to continue with in the fall. Maybe she will want to go back to Japanese, maybe she will want to get more proficient in Spanish or maybe she will want to try something else.

I am excited too because delving into a new language is fun!

Personal Stuff update

One year update Recovery: It Works

So I have been in therapy for 20 months now. About 2 months ago I started going every other week instead of every week. I just didn't have that much to talk about anymore.

Sometimes it is hard to sort out how much the therapy helped me and how much is due to books I read on my own and going no contact with my mother.

I admit I am still angry at my mother. But I don't think about it that much anymore. I realize it is her not me. And I am even sorry for her. I wish her well. But all the love a daughter has for her mother is not enough to fix or change a mother with a personality disorder. And I know that it is not healthy for me to be in a relationship with someone whom I love but who doesn't love me.

It is actually really sad. I wish my mom weren't an angry, damaged, abusive person. I want her to be happy. But not at my expense. She abused me and if she were a man everyone would tell me to get out of that relationship. People have a harder time accepting a separation between mother and child, even if the mother was abusive.

But I have basically been No Contact with her for a year and a half and most of my issues have receded. I live more often (most often) the kind of life I want to live, without the painful soul-crushing interruptions and detours.

I was always very capable and rational. But I had a few triggers that could send me to a state where my rational brain wasn't in control.

For example, when I was 5 my mother picked me up from my nanny and drove 4 states away, kidnapping me from my father. I didn't get to see or talk to him for three years after that. Then, when I was 11 she abandoned me.

So I have what they call "abandonment issues." The way I dealt with that, as I grew up, was to be very independent, i.e. if I don't rely on anyone they can't abandon me. That worked for me as a child. It made me feel somewhat safe in a world where my main caregiver was mentally disordered.

Most adults that had dysfunctional childhoods still have behaviors from childhood that worked for them at that time. They were necessary to get by when we were small and relatively powerless. But, those behaviors often get in our way as adults. Traditional therapy and bibliotherapy helped me suss out which behaviors I could let go of. And helped me recognize my triggers and talk to myself rationally when I was going back to my childhood defense mechanisms.

I used to have various triggers, now those same things don't really bleep on my radar. I am SO happy about that. But the behaviors that kept me "safe" as a child are harder to change. And I am still not sure which of those behaviors are truly me and which are just defense mechanisms and I may never know. It doesn't really matter. I can still change to be the kind of person I want to be. What helps is avoiding unhealthy relationships where I am reenacting my unhealthy parent/child dynamic. (We do that because part of us wants to "fix it" this time or because we want to validate the damage done to us or to excuse our parents... actually we do that for a lot of reasons.)Eschewing toxic relationships for healthy, supportive, safe relationships has helped me let go of my defenses and reinforce healthy behaviors.

I also used to believe that I was deserving of the treatment my mother gave me. But, of course, all babies and children deserve to me loved and no child deserves to be abused. I knew that, and yet I still spent most of my life wondering what I needed to do to get my mother to show that she loved me. I thought it was my responsibility to earn her love by putting up with whatever she was dishing out. That is exactly how she wanted me to feel. That was how she trained me to feel. But, after one and a half years of therapy, I am happy to say that I no longer think or feel that way.

Having my own child, nine years ago, set the ground work. I started to get really angry at my mother after I had Zoe. I loved Zoe with all my heart before she was even born. I could never behave like my mother did. Still, I had this disconnect between a love that was so natural and strong between Zoe and I and how hard it was to feel safe around my mother and how sad I was for the love I had missed out on.

It is still sad. Right now I think it will always be sad, like the death of a loved one, over time you think about it less but it always hurts. But, I am different now. I am a lot better. I have changed in ways that I never thought I could. I never thought I would be so self-accepting or that I could get over my abandonment issues. Truthfully, my issues are not totally gone, but they hardly affect my life anymore.

I will probably stop going to therapy soon. There is not much more that I need to work on with my therapist. Healing is a process but I am at the point where I can take my training wheels off and ride on my own. I know I will hit some bumps and even fall down again. But I can pick myself up because I know what to do.

Here are some of the resources I used to get me to this point:

I highly recommend the book A Gift to Myself by Charles Whitfield. I worked through it at the beginning of my therapy and now my therapist thinks I should go through it again. It was one of the books that helped me the most.

I read books about being gifted because some of my issues are just about accepting what that means and how it affects my life and relationships. The first two are must reads for any gifted woman who thinks she might need to deal with any issues she has regarding her giftedness and, you can take a test on the Highly Sensitive Person website and if you think you are a HSP then read this book. The Whitefield book, the Jacobson book and Aron's book helped me the most out of all the books I read.
The Gifted Adult by Jacobson
Smart Girls by Barbara Kerr
The Highly Sensitive Person by Aron

and I read these books about Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Disarming the Narcissist by Behary
Trapped in the Mirror by Golomb
Children of the Self-Absorbed by Brown
The Narcissistic Family by Donalson -Pressman and Pressman
And I read pretty much every website and article on Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder there is online.

When most adult children of a Narcissist first learn about NPD they get a little obsessive. It is so eye-opening and validating to read stories that really mirror your own crazy, secret, abusive childhood. It is so bizarre to find out that almost all of our mothers cut their daughter's hair really short. (Narcissists need to be the center of attention and they do all kinds of things to either keep their child from "stealing" any attention or use their child as an accessory for themselves to get more attention.)If you dealing with something like this I recommend educating yourself on it. It really helped me to understand what was going on with my mother.

So, that is it really. I thought I was pretty good before. I would never have gone into therapy if I hadn't moved to life one block from my mother. But I am glad that I did, on both counts. Because I was forced to face my issues and deal with them and I am really happy that I did.

L.A. Trip April 2010 part one

We have come out to Los Angeles to visit Pere's family and see Grandmere, who is suffering from terminal brain cancer and near the end of her life.

It all came about quite quickly. Last year, at this time, she was first diagnosed. She had brain surgery and chemo and a gamma knife and a new drug on a clinical trial and she was doing well, until about 2 months ago. Since then her health has gone down very quickly. We were planning to come to L.A. in June but the doctor said that might be too late.

I wasn't sure how Zoe was going to handle it. She has always been close with her Grandmere. Zoe was scared, for her Grandmere, at first. But soon she was helping feed Grandmere and give her water, and she read to her and talked to her, even though Grandmere can't talk back.

Grandmere sleeps most of the time and has a hospice caregiver that comes during the day. After the first couple of days it was boring for Zoe to be at the house all day so I took her to visit friends, and I visited their moms, who are my friends too.

We had blueberry muffins and tea with A.B. and E. The girls put on a magic show and made a song on Garage Band. A.B. and Pere and I talked about movies and sexism in Hollywood and private schools.

Then we visited L.T. and C. The girls played detective almost the whole time. We ate at our regular sushi place. L.T. and I talked about everything,(for four hours!) It was great, made me almost want to move back to L.A.. Then I looked at the housing prices and remembered why we moved away in the first place.

When we are at Pere's family home we eat, and play Uno, and sit with Grandmere and color and read. It is pretty quiet.

We celebrated the birthdays of Grandpere and Tante Juliet with chocolate cake and sushi. And that was nice, but I kept noticing how different things are without Grandmere. She is there, but it is not the same because she is so far gone.

It is very sad. Everyone keeps asking me how Pere is. I can't really say. Obviously he is really sad, and he has always been quiet. He still is.

I am trying not to cry too much myself because... I'm not sure why. I have been crying off and on for months now. The enormity of it is still there. The tragedy of it all hasn't gotten any easier to accept. I don't want to think about it because it makes me so angry and sad.

I have been struggling to defend my faith in God for a few years now. These days the idea that I keep coming back to is that if God did exist he/she is irrelevant. If there is a God, he/she has stopped involving him/herself in the affairs of man long ago. There is no one that hears our prayers. There is no greater being with a plan that makes all the tragedies make sense. He/she has abandoned us. Then I remember that I don't believe God exists. But either way, irrelevant.

Sunday - Hiking

Math

The head of Zoe's Math Center helped her with factoring trinomials on Tuesday. She gave her a college algebra book that has almost 100 problems for each way of factoring. She thinks the best way to really learn how to factor trinomials is to just do a lot of them. I think Zoe has it down because she did 20 problems in half an hour yesterday and got them all correct.

I so grateful that Zoe seems to have inherited Pere's math talent rather than my math anxiety.

I am not sure what my problem was. When I think back I remember feeling rushed all the time. Part of my reputation as the "smart girl" in class was always finishing my in class work first. The faster I got it done the smarter I felt. And, it wasn't like I did a half ass job either. I did it quick and I did it well. All the Humanities came easily to me, and, for awhile, so did math and science.

But, there were times when I couldn't be right and first in math and that made me feel anxious and stupid. I got all choked up and some part of my brain would just shut down, out of fear.

I never learned that it was okay to spend a long time trying to figure out a math problem. I thought that if the answer didn't pop into my head immediately then I was "bad" at math. I hadn't really been bad at anything before and it threw me for a loop.

I can kind of see some of that same attitude in Zoe. She will say a type of problem is "really hard" but I maintain that if you can do a whole page of problems and get 90% of then correct, then it is probably not too hard. That seems the appropriate level of challenge to me.

I have made an effort let Zoe spend a lot of time on one problem. I want her to get the idea that the answer is there, and she is allowed to take the time she needs to find it.

Life of Fred Algebra is interesting because in almost each set of problems there is a problem that the book hasn't covered yet. There is really no reason she would know how to solve the problem. It was really frustrating at first. But, now we expect them and I use them to give her the experience of searching and trying and getting things wrong and trying again and utilizing her resources to find the answer (her resources are the book, the internet, me, her dad and Math Center tutors)

Zoe is a very quick learner in math. She had no problem with long division or fractions. She is zipping through algebra pretty handily too. So I think these challenging questions are really helpful. I am hoping she wont be afraid like I was (sometimes still am). I am hoping she learns that math isn't about being first. I hope she can learn to enjoy the mystery and the hunt and not run away when things aren't easy.

Homeschooling today and Rebecca.

Zoe wanted to use different materials to homeschool today.

So we read about prime and irrational numbers in her Cool Math book. Zoe says "Pi is my favorite irrational number."

We read poetry by Shakespeare, William Blake, Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barret Browning. Zoe loved E.B.B.'s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

She read a Horrible History about Wicked Words to me. Balderdash means cheap bad wine.

For science we tried to use our deductive skills to solve some crimes from her Solve It book.

Then she practiced kanji, read about Mozart's father, read Huckleberry Finn, practiced the piano for 45 minutes and made a Mud Pie Feast out in the yard with eight different dishes.

She helped her father make Charoset (minced apples, walnuts and wine.) She set the table for Passover and read about 1/3 of the Haggadah, including lots of Hebrew.

Since we told her that her grandmother's brain cancer has worsened Zoe has been carrying around the American Girl doll, Rebecca, that Anne bought her for Hanukkah last year. Rebecca is now her "daughter" and Zoe is bringing her to meals and Rebecca is joining us for homeschooling and she now holds an exalted place among the other AG dolls. I am not sure what is going on there but I imagine that Zoe might be giving the love to her doll that she wishes she could be giving her grandmother.

My girl

Dissecting a crawfish.


Dressed up for her piano competition. She score in the very superior range with a 91%


Doing her online Music History class


Dressed as Queen Ester for Purim

Very mathy weekend

Saturday our downtown had an Easter Festival and the Math Center participated by developing a Math Trail, which was an activity sheet with math questions to do at different downtown businesses.



Zoe is was conscientious player, she wanted to do all the problems and do them by herself, though we did help her count the Fleur de Lys at the New Orleans style coffee shop. There were a over 600.



She designed a protective shell for an egg and dropped it from 12' high, and the egg didn't break! Then she got to throw the egg at a physics student from the local college. After that exciting event the physics students showed her the math behind her egg drop.



She was the last kid to finish, just 15 minutes before the closing of the last shop, though we also started really late. For a prize, the bakery gave her a giant brownie, a cupcake and three cookies.




Today Zoe was at Math Center for three hours. She worked on the video game she is programming in JAVA and the community project about fractional bases. She told me she was very proud because she was chosen to be one of two student teachers and teach the other kids binary.

She noted that today she was the only girl working on the community project. I pointed out that the leader of the math center is a woman. Zoe and I talked about why women are underrepresented in math professions.

She told me that she doesn't think she will succumb to peer pressure and drop her interest in math because she already stands out in her Hebrew class as one of the best students as well as the only kid who says they like learning Hebrew and she said, "I am not going to change. I don't care about fitting in or not fitting it. I just am what I am."

I hope she retains that strong sense of self when she gets to her middle school years.

Why I could write

Yesterday Pere asked me what made me finally decide to write my book. I have been thinking of it and developing it in my head for at least eight years.

I decided I could write when I stopped talking to my mother and went to therapy.

See, I've wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember thinking about things like that. Actually, most of the time I was a storyteller rather than a writer. It is hard to write when you are riding your bicycle or wandering through the woods. I made up stories all the time, for far longer than most people do.

I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut or Jack Kerouac. I even smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. But before that I was a little girl with a prodigious vocabulary who wanted to be a writer. And I would read my stories to my ever loving (yeah, right) mother. I still remember what she said because she sliced each letter of each word was into my heart with a razor. I still have the scars.

I know it wont sound like much. But I thought my mom loved me and I thought she was right. So when she read one of my little handwritten stories and she said "You should learn to type so you have something to fall back on when this writing thing doesn't work out." I was devastated.

Think about that. Who says that to a young person? And she wasn't joking. She wasn't being playful. She took my childhood dream and she told me that it wasn't going to work out. And not only that, she told me that I should set my sights lower, like being a secretary.

Some of you who read this might not be parents, but you might have interacted with children. If young child said they wanted to be an artist and showed you their drawing, would you just say "Oh! What a lovely drawing!" Any normal person could at least muster fake support.

If the drawing really was quite nice for the child's age you might say something more specific like, "Wow! That is a very realistic looking cat. My, my, you are going to be artist someday." If the picture was just some terrible scribbling you are still obliged to say, "Very nice!"

Parents are supposed to be biased towards their children. Parents are supposed to think their children are pretty darn great and possibly the best child ever. Some parents don't, of course. But does the child ever think it is the parent who is wrong? No. Children who are burdened with a parent who doesn't see them as extra special or worse, doesn't even love them end up thinking that they are nothing special and not lovable.

None of the praise I got at school, from friends, and from strangers who read my writing ever kissed away the hurt my mother caused me by telling me that I wasn't good enough and that I needed to set my sights much MUCH lower.

I had so many other scars that said I was not pretty, too skinny, and later too fat, that I was a mean horrible person, that I was a fool, that I was laughable, forgettable, and unlovable. And every time I went to her with my heart in my hand and asked 'Am I good enough now, Mom?" and she say "Of course not" those old wounds would reopen and bleed.

Then, when my own daughter was eight and a half, I realized that no mother, no normal mother would tell their child, who dreamed of being a writer, that their childish storytelling was so bad that they should give up now and set their sights on being a secretary.

I had to stop taking my heart to my mother and allowing her to stomp on it to be able to write. I had to see what a crazy f'ed up bitch she is to write.

It is a daily struggle to write. All the scars are still there and I can't tell you if they will ever go away. But, by not subjecting myself to her special brand of evil, I am at least giving myself a chance to heal.

Some days I am happy with my writing. Some days I reread what I wrote and I can just hear my mother's voice in my head laughing at me and telling me I am a fool to even try this.

But mostly I want to try. I don't want to be an old woman and look back on my life and say "I didn't even try to fulfill my life long dream because my mother told me I wasn't good enough." She doesn't get to have that. I am not listening to her anymore.

Spring Fever

I am ready for spring! Today I went out for a walk with only a long sleeve shirt and hoodie (well I also had pants on... oh, and shoes.) No huge winter coat for me!

I am looking forward to seeing the first crocus buds spring forth, but I may have to wait.

I can feel a big spring cleaning coming on. I keep rearranging all the furniture in my mind. I am prettifying my nest. :)

I repainted the upstairs bathroom but the color is too subdued and now I am thinking I will repaint it a vibrant green.

Zoe has been begging to get back into our roleplaying game, but the idea of focusing my creative energies away from my novel makes me resentful.

I will have hit 100 pages any day now. Pere promised me a celebration. But we have something else to celebrate this week, our anniversary. We will have been together ten years on the 9th!

I love that man of mine!

Homschooling Wednesday

Math - graphing and multiplying exponents
Math Center - Archimedean Solids

Language Arts - Finally finished Essay Voyage

History - the life of children in 18th Century Virgina

Science - using microscopy, scanning electron microscopes, and x-ray diffraction to see minuscule structures.

Read Aloud - Another version of Prometheus and Pandora which lead to a long discussion about the roots of historical anti-feminism.

Japanese - Katakana and predicting weather

Watching - Xena

Reading - Uncle Tom's Cabin

Piano - practice practice practice

Hebrew School

Just a small town girl

Today I am feeling grateful for the small town we live in. I am inspired to make a top ten list of things that made me happy today.

1. Living one block from the river. Recently it has been steely gray with white snow banks reflected on the edges. It's poetic.

2. That Pere job downtown is so close that he can come home for lunch everyday.

3. Looking out the window high up in my therapist's office where I can see half the town at the many historic churches, and buildings.

4. That we have a Chocolate Cafe.

5. The girl with pink hair at the Chocolate Cafe. I wanted to say "I love your hair." But she walked by to fast.

6. That we can afford a house that it large enough that we can have a baby grand piano.

7. The 24 hour Poetry Reading Event coming up.

8. Our AWESOME and FREE Math Center downtown.

9. Our Temple that has a young Rabbi and so many friendly congregants.

10. The many smart, interesting, nice people I have the good fortune to meet.

It's been too long since I last posted. Honestly, I am spending more time on Facebook.

But I need to remember that this blog is also a journal for me, a history of our lives together and a portfolio for Zoe's education. And, with that in mind, I am inspired to post more often.


For Zoe's 9th birthday we gave her the present of sleeping over at the Field Natural History Museum.


There best part was running around the different exhibits all by ourselves. I mean, isn't that something you've always wanted to do? We weren't really in there alone, but in certain places we could pretend we were. The tour of the Egyptian exhibit by flashlight was second best, only because it was a bit crowded. Overall it was great, though next time I would bring an air mattress rather than try to sleep on the hard floor with only a sleeping bag.

Here are just the highlights of what Zoe has been doing in her homeschooling

Math - Life of Fred Algebra and going to the Math Center 3 times a week. Yesterday one of the mom's at the Math Center asked me how old Zoe was and what math curriculum I used and then she complimented Zoe a lot on her math knowledge. One of the projects Zoe is working on at Math Center is writing an explanation of Base 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. for their website. They will also be doing a project on fractional bases.

Language Arts - Zoe has finished the Michael Clay Thompson Voyage series and will be starting the Word Within The Word and Magic Lens series. This is a secondary curriculum for gifted students and one of Zoe's favorite classes. She especially loves the poetry component.

History - Reading about Colonial America. Last week was a perfect storm about Slavery. She was reading about slavery in history, reading excerpts from Abraham Lincoln's speeches in Language Arts, reading Uncle Tom's Cabin in Literature and watched an episode of Hercules about slavery.

Science - I just got a new high school biology book for Zoe. It was written by biochemist Mahlon Hoagland, who discovered transfer RNA.

We talked to some science savvy friends and decided we could skip middle school science now that she is pretty solid in her algebra. We will problem just end up doing Biology, Chemistry and Physics in a loop with more advanced material as we go along.

Literature - Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin. Zoe is loving this literature choice. She says she is excited to be learning so much about slavery and that she really likes how Harriet Beecher Stowe brings the reader into the story. Did you know Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best selling novel of the 19th century? It was the best selling book of that century after the Bible.

Music History - Professor Carol is doing a great job teaching us both about music history. The videos are very interesting, and I really feel like I am learning a lot about music from a cultural perspective. I know Zoe is too.

Japanese - more of the same. This week she is focusing on reading katakana and describing what people look like and what they are wearing.

Reading - Zoe has been really into acting out Shakespeare's plays with her dolls. She spends a lot of her free time doing this, in the afternoon and before bed. Brian and I sometimes do it with her.

I realized that she would get more out of Shakespeare if she was more familiar with the Greek Myths. She has already read D'Aulaire's Greek Myths a few times, that is a great book. But I felt like she needed more. So we started reading Nathanial Hawthorn's Tanglewood Tales, but even that, whilst having excellent vocabulary, was still edited for children. Much of the passion was taken out, which is kind of misleading, in my opinion. For example, the book doesn't mention that Zeus was the white bull that took Europa, nor why.

Bulfinch's Mythology was a little better but still written for children in 1855, so there was censorship of the passionate appetites of the Gods. And hey, the passionate appetites of the Gods is what a lot of the stories are about.

So this weekend I found Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece, an English Edition from the German author Gustav Schwab. These stories seem to be oriented towards adolescents, at least as far at the content including Zeus's exploits with mortal women.

Zoe is enjoying the Hunger Games and Catching Fire, both by Suzanne Collins. Other books she has read recently are Gregor the Overland and City of Ember. She liked them both.

Mostly though she has been rereading/staging Shakespeare and reading her new Spyology book, which is really cool.

Whew! That is a lot but I am not done yet.

Zoe has a piano competition coming up in two weeks so most of her piano time has been spent getting ready for that.

She also auditioned for and got into a local performing dance troupe. They started rehearsals last week. They perform mostly over the summer, doing over a dozen dances at festivals, charity events, and in small theaters. Zoe is extra excited because one of her good friends from the neighborhood is also in the group.

Zoe also auditioned for a part in Seussical the Musical which is playing downtown South Bend at the Civic Theatre. She got in the Who Chorus and a part as a Fish Lady. But, unfortunately, the Seussical rehearsal times conflicted with her dance group's rehearsal, so she is not doing the play.

She is pretty busy. It can be a struggle to make sure she has enough downtime to just play and be bored and then inventive (because that is often the order of things.)

These days she is homeschooling from 8:30 - 3:30 with an hour and 10 minutes for lunch.

I am keeping busy too. I have been running for seven weeks now. I am up to running for 30 minutes at a stretch. I am really proud of myself because I have been able to keep this up and also because I am enjoying it. I really never thought I would enjoy running but I do. I imagine I will like it even more when I am not running in the snow.

I have also been eating 1200 - 1500 calories a day since the new year. Though I don't really stick to the calorie limits on the weekends. But I don't gorge myself either. But I eat what Pere cooks, which is usually high in calories, or we go out to eat. But I have been losing weight and it makes me happy to be taking care of myself.

My book is going pretty well. Some days I can get five or six pages written. Some days I feel like my writing is crap and no one will want to read it. But, I know I have written some good stuff, so I can keep on editing the parts I am less happy with until I am happy with them. Writing is so much about editing.

I am also reading Mean Mothers by Peg Streep. It is REALLY good. It has made me cry several times and I realize that I am not done with my grief and maybe I never will be. But I guess that is natural. Here is an excerpt from Mean Mothers

Starfish and Poetry

Zoe started off with some Life of Fred Algebra.
Then she wrote three poems with instructions from the back of the MCTLA poetry book.
Then she read a chapter on the history of New Netherlands aka New York and New Jersey.
She loved dissecting a star fish for science. She was not squeamish at all.
She did her Professor Carol music history homework.
For lunch she watched a British television show called Primeval. It is from the people who did Walking With Dinosaurs. It is fictional but has dinosaurs in it.
Then for Mommy Time she wanted to take turns reading from Midsummer Night's Dream.
Then she read 4 chapters from Uncle Tom's Cabin and did a little narration on it afterwards.
Lastly she spent an hour working on her piano piece for the Stickley competition.
After homeschooling she had her Pet Shop dolls perform Shakespeare's MSND.
and she helped her father make a google site for his music and created a google presentation... for me.

If you are squeamish about dissections don't look below
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Math - factorials and exponents

Language Arts - Read bit of of U.S. Grant memoirs and looked on a globe the geography around the Aegean Sea, and created a Works Cited page for her DNA essay.

History - the Dutch colony in America. Identifying primary and secondary sources.

Science - Hatching brine shrimp for her microscope. And compared a Zoe hair to a Charlotte hair under the microscope. And looked at a Cicada leg.

Japanese - Describing people using nouns and modifying clauses

Reading - Finished The Minotaur in Nathanial Hawthorn's Tanglewood Tales and began reading Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing

Art - painting

Music History - OnlineG3 Webinar The effects of the printing press on music and the gramophone.

Lightening Literature - Walt Whitman and Voice Thread on Leaves of Grass.

Piano - practicing for Stickley competition.

Zoe's 9th Birthday and Slumber Party

A salt snowball from the Mojave desert from C.T.


Matching Outfit and clothes for American Girl Rebecca from Grandmere and Grandpere


Mircoscope from Tante Juliet


Look of surprise at the Night at the Museum gift.


Dissection Kit


Cool but ewwww! :)


SLUMBER PARTY

Happy Birthday Zoe!!!

Just Born


One


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Three


Four


Five


Six


Seven


Eight


Nine!!!