Space For Jean

Spring Reorg

Spring time, it turns out, is a good time to rethink ones plans. Or so it seems because this is the time of year I inevitably fear that we are going down a useless path and need to rethink what we are doing. I'm calmer about it this year thanks to my new prescription drugs. They work pretty well, by the way. I'm glad I'm giving it a try.

Nonetheless I often contemplate drastic changes in the spring for Heather's education. I suppose it has to do with looking ahead and what I had hoped to accomplish by the next fall or what we expect should take place next fall and what needs to be done to be ready. To tell you the truth we are doing very well and what I take to be major changes are closer to tweaks and realignments. I'm dramatic that way.

Next fall is high school. That's a biggy. Even if Heather doesn't spend much time in a classroom I think she will spend some time. What will that be like for her? And will she feel uncomfortable with what we haven't yet done? Yes, I do have a tendency to look on the negative side. I'm working on it.

I'm glad I started tracking our educational time and studies in a Home School database. Eighth grade isn't as important as the four years of high school and I've had a school year to get used to the the program and information I want to follow. So no matter what we do I'll have a record of it. I don't want to rule out any options for her and this way we know what we did.

It's never perfect but it is the best we know to do at the time we make our choices. She's bright, I'm in it for the long haul, and we'll make it.

Grammarian Delight

I don't know how this happened. It definitely was not intentional. It was a by-product but a very interesting and lovely by-product. My daughter will be excited to learn that today (March 4, 2009) is National Grammar Day. She loves language and revels in it when it is done well. She cringes and huffs when it is not. She dislikes text-speak: lol, omg, bff, etc. When we text each other on our phones all the words are spelled out and there is punctuation. She loves to write stories. She has a knack for it. When I ask her to write an essay I know that not only will she go deep with her thoughts but will say it intelligently. She wrote an essay for a friend who has been guiding her in the study of WWII. This wonderful woman responded to the essay by saying she thought it was so good that if she taught her in school she would want to be her best friend and go to coffee shops together and discuss great literature.

Where did this start? I tried to remember what we did together. I should say that I love language,too, but I don't take a particularly strident view of how its used. I didn't sit down with her and do a detailed study of grammar. When she was younger we would fill empty time in the car or doing dishes discussing the way words were interesting and worked together. I think I recall sharing examples of regular verbs vs irregular verbs. How verbs are sometimes transformed into nouns and what that looked like in a sentence. Or a similar transformation that can occur with adjectives. It wasn't intended to be "school" it was just conversation that was interesting to both of us.

Then last year she asked to study Latin. I looked into it and found that a homeschooling mom I know had the same request from her son and before they jumped into Latin they studied grammar to prepare for it. It is easier to study another language if you can easily identify parts of speech. She pointed to a sentence diagramming book that wasn't in print any more. I searched for it and found it anyway. We sat down together and worked through the exercises. It was amazingly fun. This was what I got out of my linguistics classes in college, the ones I loved so much. We were uncovering the structure of our language, we were mapping the consistent form we use as English speakers. It was great.

Still, the simple knack for "getting it" seems to me to be a product of observation and internalization of the written word. Before my daughter would read to herself I was reading plenty to her. I reveled in the well-written books and scoffed at the poor ones. I grabbed old texts from the 19th and 20th centuries and read them to her. I read current works but bristled at the too simple sentences and the artless prose. The last two books of the Harry Potter series were sour-tasting indeed. They felt hacked out to finish the series with none of the finesse of the first few books. Enough reviewing. See, it doesn't take much.

Nonetheless, all this seeped into her without my even being aware of it. And yet I knew it had because it was revealed one fun evening with a group of people who were playing a game. The game involved guessing how a family member would answer a question. A question was asked and I knew exactly how my daughter would answer it, but it would be an odd answer.

The question was, "What is your biggest pet peeve?" I knew immediately: bad grammar! However we got here, it's nice to know that we have.

Living with Family

January was all about getting back into the routine and making the routine easier and easier to do. I think I have been successful. However, February has been a different game altogether. I must keep in mind that my successes of the previous month (and several months before that) are holding me in good stead as we march forward with dramatic changes.

We are hardly the only couple attempting to navigate the waters of aging parents. Nor are we the only couple found shipping water as one of those parents is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. However, I have not yet found a couple who, in the same week they are trying to assist these same parents in a traumatic and exhausting move from their home to a smaller apartment that requires endless trips back and forth over the Coast Range ("I'm not going to spend $95 an hour for movers!") is also flying out to Chicago to help an incapacitated sister move from an assisted living facility there to an assisted living facility here.

Then there is the little matter of the art show that comes around every year the first of March and takes ALL my time in the sales area. No, I did not abandon my associates there as this show takes a year to plan and put on and these family issues have only just started to take shape. Next year looks to need a complete planning  revamp.

Did I mention I started taking a low level anti-depressant at the beginning of the year? I cannot tell you how much it is helping. Seriously. I was at my wits end to find a solution to the emotional anxiousness. My blood pressure has been going up and up over the last few years and before I tried blood pressure medication I asked my doctor if we could try this option as I felt my blood pressure was responding to my anxiety. We're still trying to figure out if I'm helping the blood pressure but it is definitely helping my anxiety.

I spent some time trying to decide if I wanted to post about this. There is a stigma in our society about using these sorts of drugs. I find that totally ironic as it is very hard to live in this modern American society without some sort of medication. You know, though, that some people don't take their medication in a pill. Some drink it (liquor or caffeine). Some smoke it (tobacco or pot). Some eat it, or refuse to eat (does any society have the food issues we have??). Some use work to avoid stress, some use religion, some use ______________ (insert any personal obsession). Personally I'm big on using food. Which is why one side-affect of the particular anti-depressant I am using is a reduction in appetite.

Can we just stop here and say one thing?   HALLELUJAH!

This post was going to be about family stuff happening right now. But really, I just wanted to say drugs are making it possible for me to function and no matter what is transpiring in my life it is never going to be constantly placid. The water is rough but someone gave me a pretty good flotation device. I'm going to just hold on to it for a while. When I learn how to swim better I can let it go. Wish me luck.

Energy

I have more of it now than I did a while back. What a relief. It took effort to get there though. Who would have thought? Not only did it take rest, it took effort to get energy. I had to use some to get some. I lost quite a bit having cancer and being treated for cancer. I became terribly used to operating at a very slow pace. But post-treatment found me bumping into walls as I tried to ramp up (see this post).

At first I thought it was still part of the recovery process. But now I think it may be something different. I think I'm in training, sort of. I'm in training to work longer and maybe a little faster. I'm building my endurance. It's a very physical thing. Like runners who train to run farther or faster or both. It's hard and then it gets easier with repetition. I SO cannot relate to this as I'm not physically oriented at all.

The part that throws me is that it shows up emotionally. I get very down and depressed and don't behave well.

Will I ever get it?

One Week at a Time

This week went a little more smoothly, especially the part where I come to the end of it and organize for the next week. It's not even noon on Saturday and I have figured out the menus for the week, balanced my checkbook, and gone to all three grocery stores. It's not a competition or anything. I look forward to the weekend as a time to do less and be less under the gun. So if I haven't finished this part of the process I have it to look forward to, which I don't. Now it's done.

These organizational processes are partly a way to clear my head. If I don't do them, some part of me will anyway, all the time. And that background chatter keeps me from relaxing for one thing. It also keeps me from focusing my energy on real problems. This applies to the work I do with Heather as well. If some of it isn't just routine (e.g. going through the chapters of a workbook week after week) it's too much to organize. I don't want to create brand new lesson plans every week for four academic subjects. That would kill me! Not that I haven't tried, mind you.

I think I'm probably pretty late in the game with this stuff anyway. I usually am. It takes me a while to take in all the details of what I need to do and then stream line them so they make sense to me. At any rate, this year I have made improvements.

I should add that none of this has actually led to joy for me. My original ambition two years ago was to find my way to happiness. It does seem to be rather hard to do if your path is cluttered with jobs and responsibilities for which you have no plan other than to stop each time you bump into one and deal with it. What a mess that has been. The jobs often overlap, take a variety of knowledge and creativity to solve and if I planned ahead I could scoop a bunch of them up at once and take care of them. But joy? Satisfaction, maybe. A reduction in stress, maybe. But not joy yet. That will take more time.

 

Crashing

OK, I crashed. Complete meltdown, tears, exhaustion, wipe out. Striving to do more, be more, carry my head up, cover the bases, keep things moving has this effect on me. It's a thing I've been doing and learning about since the cancer treatments. They drained me of physical and emotional energy like nothing I had experienced before. It was a bit of a surprise to find that when I recovered from them it still happened! Not as frequently and I do recover a little faster but I still fall into a huge pot hole that only doing nothing of consequence, or requiring any creativity or problem solving, will resolve.

It's more than a little humbling.

I took a day to do only things that didn't require thought, kept to myself, read, sat, recouped. I feel better today. From now on I'll try to act a little less frantically, pacing myself again, like I did before; wish like anything I could see the signs before the meter goes into the red. My progress, I guess, will be measured by the length of the interval and the ensuing trauma when it happens. How fast can I keep from inflating it into a national catastrophe and just stop to rest?

Sooner rather than later I hope. Sigh.

Reorg - Week 2

My first week back in the swing of the things went really well. I enjoyed sharing some of my steps with you and patted myself on the back for being such an organized mom. Then there was Week 2.

I'm not going to say I was disorganized. Things went off as planned. But I had three separate appointments that were just for me, squeezed into the tightness of our days and before I knew it, my planning Friday was given over to other things. My Saturday was spent doing something fun and away from the house so I couldn't do a quick makeup the next day. So, I am punting. That's life in the 21st century.

That said, if I didn't already have these planning processes in place this kind of thing would have completely undone me. However, I do have processes in place and I implemented them, though not in the order or way I would want. But they got done! That's something I feel very good about.

The week ahead looks to be packed as well. We have little windows of time sprinkled through the week, largely eaten up by my appointments last week. I often wish I could fill them with some literature sharing with Heather. Instead this week she will get a watercolor lesson with a friend which is all good. What I could do if only . . .

I keep working on getting there. Better to have more than we need than to run dry of ideas and sit and twiddle our thumbs.

Shopping

Heather and I rarely get a chance to go shopping together. It's not an activity I enjoy just because I don't much care for the in-store experience. But with a growing teen it's frequently necessary to replace clothing that just doesn't work any more. But where to fit that kind of activity into the schedule? It's hard. But we did take some time today to look for a few things. It was fun to do this with her.

During our excursion she told me that she observes among some of her girlfriends a real friction with their mothers. We talked a little about what it takes to have a good relationship with anyone, let alone with ones mom.  How the responsibility for that relationship falls on both people. And we mused on the peer pressure that makes some girls who would otherwise love to be with their moms disdain them because that's how all their other girlfriends treat their moms.

Sometimes personalities in a family just don't mesh. Sometimes they run afoul of the pressures from outside. We're lucky. We've always believed that the relationship between all three of us was more important than just about anything else. And it shows now when Heather is moving into the strange vortex of adolescence. I'm so very pleased that she still wants to be with me. I'm not naive to think there will never be a moment in which she isn't just a little embarrassed by her frumpy, clueless mother. However I'm pretty confident that she respects me enough not to let me know when that moment happens, at least not until it's long gone.

Keeping Track

I am so IN to keeping track these days. I mentioned the home school tracking program I used before. I have also gone a little wild tracking my checking account. I've applied the same level of attention to other things. I am in a committee at church that supports the youth program. I'm the administrative head but I am not qualified to do more than that. I tried Google Calendar to allow all the members to see what was ahead of us as we plan activities. I don't know if anyone else looks at the calendar but I do try to keep it updated. It's an easy tool to use. I'm also a bit obsessive with my own handwritten calendar at home. I write down everything I need to do or it will be forgotten, that's for sure.

There are so many threads of activities going on in our lives. As much as I would like to have a routine that could be easily memorized it rarely turns out that way. Because of my cancer treatments I have regular doctor appointments and test-taking appointments that have to be squeezed in and around homeschooling and classes. I am getting older and need to generally go in to check on things I didn't think would ever be a concern, like blood pressure. Heather certainly has her activities and needs. Gosh, think we should maybe buy her some clothes this year? I wonder if she's 5'9" yet? Those sleeves do look sort of short on her. I hate going to the mall. And groceries! Oh my goodness I have to start a list.

Keeping track is one way to keep my blood pressure under control. Not doing much left me at my whit's end when things suddenly needed to be done and there was no time. Or punting when it came to either a meal or what to wear for a special occasion. So I will continue to use the tools that I come across to make sure we get as much of it in as we can with the least amount of stress.

Learning to do Things Over Again

I did not realize how big a hole our dog would leave. Every day I feel the oddness of the house as we put our pre-Christmas routine back into play. She was old and slept most of the time. Apparently not as much as I thought because there is a strange silence where there used to be the clatter of her nails on the wood floor and the jingle of her collar when she shook her head.

She was a golden retriever and so I have lots of golden hair about the house. I managed to keep the floors mostly clear of it but I've been working to clean up my car and her travel bed in it and her regular bed in our room. It makes me sad to do these things even though it used to gripe me that I had to deal with the dirt.

Everything we have done this week has this odd self-consciousness about it. It's like we are starting over doing things in a new way. Every event is cast in a new light. The most noticeable was when the gardner came yesterday. There was no one to bark fiercely at him when he blew the leaves away from the doors. No, the most noticeable was NOT taking her with us to the art center.

Heather is at a drawing class there today. She gets a lot out of this class designed for adults. She just makes the cut age-wise but her classmates are all much older than her. It's a good thing she has lots of experience with older people because she holds her own quite well with them.

Wednesdays are a little light due to this long afternoon class. Heather worked on her math this morning and we did some reading of a novel. Math used to be torture but she turned a corner last spring and now it's just regular work. Reading any literature together is pure joy. We try to do that as often as we can during the week. We read it aloud. I used to do all the reading but this year we trade off. For some reason we are always reading long books together. So it will take a long time to read the whole book. Good thing we both have stacks of books on our nightstands to read alone at night.