The heat is back, the drought is back, and we were back at lessons today. Brighteyes didn't want to at first, but after trying it she soon found that she liked it.
Sunshine is really getting into coloring. I found some downloadable pages with extra-big spaces and she's experimenting with blending and adding details with crayons.
Speaking of coloring, I found some prehistoric art coloring pages in a 59-page free coloring book for Pagan children I downloaded a while back. We colored them after meeting Homo sapiens sapiens in History today. I haven't relocated the URL for that one yet, but I'll post it when I find it. There's also a coloring book of prehistoric symbols available that we'll be using later, just click on "Petroglyphs".
This afternoon the girls made stick puppets by drawing pictures, cutting them out, and stapling them to popsicle sticks. Brighteyes set up a shadow theatre for them with a broom, a sarong, and a flashlight. I'm thrilled, but we need to work on the meanings of words and phrases. For instance, "Mommy's taking a nap" doesn't mean "Sit down next to Mommy on the bed and begin a major craft project, talking as loud as possible, and pausing every few minutes to show Mommy something or ask her to get up and get you some craft supplies." Yep, we're definately having a problem with definitions here.
This weekend the girls went to the birthday party of a cousin at a park in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Mississippi. There were four families present including ours. One of the mothers chose not to speak, but of the other women present I was a full-time homeschooler, the second mother had recently homeschooled her daughter for a year while sending her younger child to school and the third mother was currently homeschooling her 14 year old son while sending her younger children to school. All of us were homeschooling for secular reasons. I was impressed with how pervasive homeschooling is becoming.
And for those of you following the Soap Opera Mom just forwarded me the picture of her and my sister at the wedding which my sister emailed *her* and not me. I tried to figure out the exact proportions of stupidity and meanness that went into that gesture, but I don't have enough data to work with. All I know is that it's Too Much of Both. This morning Mom informed me that, "When you left for collage you left this family" 21 years after the fact, and that "You are the one that needs to make A LOT of changes." I fear my father's death has taken the brakes off her sense of drama. My sister's line boils down to, "I knew you were going to be mad, so the fact that I was correct about you getting mad confirms that I made the right decision by not inviting you to the wedding." My husband thinks this line is her favorite justification for everything. I think I smell a self-fulfilling prophecy here.
This, folks, is why its so important to me that my daughters have a chance to grow close to each other. There's enough soap operas and bad drama in this world already.
2 comments:
I'd have to hear your sister's rationalization in the original wording to make more sense of it.
Under the logic presented in your paraphrase, she would have been "right" to not invite pretty much everyone who cares about her, and her guest list would have been composed entirely of people who really didn't give a crap whether she got married or not.
As far as Mom goes, the comment about "college" reeks of red herring. No clue in your post whether she mentioned specifics when she talked about "A LOT of changes", but I would hope she isn't so foolish as to deem you "uppity" for daring to educate yourself.
Don't let your mother get away with shifting the blame for her acts of ostracism onto you. You are not excluding her from your life; SHE is excluding YOU from HERS. She needs to own her own stuff.
What a painful thing! I'm sorry you are going through it.
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