How was that again?

I was driving Aisling to her piano lesson today and she spent most of the twenty minute ride telling me about a boy she likes and bewailing the fact that the males of the species are just so difficult to understand.

"Doesn't it make you feel so lucky that you're old and have been married for a million years so that you don't have to worry about this stuff anymore?" she asked me with great seriousness.

I turned my head to give her a long, appraising look. "You might want to re-phrase that, dear."

She sat and thought for a moment, her brow furrowed. "You mean 'married for a thousand years'?" she asked.

Some random thoughts of randomness

1. My dad bought a new bike recently. He's always been a big walker, and goes around the White Estates neighborhood where I grew up, picking up trash with his grabbin-claw or whatever that thing is called and a Wal-Mart sack. He enjoys biking around now too, although I don't think he can still pick up trash, because wouldn't that be kind of hard? You might have to pedal in circles around, say, a cast-off paper McDonald's bag, before you could actually pick it up. ANYWAY, my mom was talking about getting a bike for herself so that she could join him, and I brightly suggested, "Why don't you get a bicycle built for two?"

My dad, who was sitting in an armchair with his eyes fixed intently on SportsCenter, snorted. Mom cast him a brief glance and said, "The last time we rode on a two-person bike, on Mackinac Island? He said he had to do all the work."

"I did," my father said emphatically, his focus on the television unwavering.

"Well, maybe you could promise to pedal really hard," I said soothingly.

My mother sat thinking for a moment and then announced, "I think I'd rather just get a rickshaw. We've been married forty-nine years. Why bother with pretense?"

2. Our new school year starts this Thursday, September 1. Meelyn will be a senior and Aisling will be a junior. I AM STARING DOWN THE TWIGS OF AN EMPTY NEST, PEOPLE.

3. Since school is starting up, I think I'll start Menu Plan Monday next Monday, which is Labor Day, so maybe I'll start next Tuesday. Just keepin' it real.

4. Dobby was barking at the people across the street, who were doing nothing more threatening than sitting on their front porch, talking and drinking iced tea. I know, I can't believe the nerve of those trolls either. Dobby barked at them so violently, he fell off the back of the couch onto the floor. Epic fail.

5. I'm teaching a class in British literature this first semester, plus my usual Shakespeare class. The Shakespeare play for this semester is Julius Caesar, and by some amazing happenstance, because I promise I did not know about this earlier, the Indiana Repertory Theater is doing Julius Caesar this fall! I am very excited, because although I have the three extant copies of Julius Caesar on DVD (one starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and the other starring Charlton Heston as Marc Antony and the other one starring no one I've heard of before and ALL THREE OF THEM SUCK LIKE A SHOP VAC.

6. This morning in water aerobics class, the music of the day was the greatest hits of Elton John and I knew the lyrics to every single song. Did some great in-pool jumping jacks to "Philadelphia Freedom."

7. I've been accused by several people of shamefully neglecting my blog. It's been a very busy summer - that's the only excuse I have. I'll try to do better.

As the mother of teenaged daughters, I'd like to say to God:

Dear God, it would be really helpful if all the crappy, nasty, jerkface teenaged boys could be ugly mutts, while all the honest, nice and honorable boys could look like Greek gods. That would cut down on a lot of confusion for the girls in our house, since recently they've encountered some real wolves in sheep's clothing. Or, more to the point, some truly sucky young men that, as you might remember? -- On Wednesday of last week? -- their father was inclined to punch in the face, but who looked, on the surface, like the handsome and charming proverbial Boys Next Door. If, by chance, you live next door to a brothel-slash-bus station-slash-public toilet.

If you could please see to this straight away, I would be very grateful.

Thank you,

Shelley

Of parental concern

Sometimes it is extra-difficult to parent teenagers. You want them to have enough life experience so that they won't flounder helplessly out there in the big world of a college campus. But then again, you want to limit that life experience in a number of crucial ways, sometimes because you remember from your own painful experiences, or also because the state of the news today and how it tends to stand your hair on end.

Along the way, as your kids make friends, you get to know those kids and their parents, and you hope as your children's friendships develop that you're going to be able to trust the friends' parents to basically have the same goals and values that you do. I mean, we've all heard about the parents who have that notion that kids are going to drink anyway, so "they might as well drink at our house where they can be safe and where we can confiscate their car keys." Which is, let me say, a FABULOUS parenting philosophy until someone wanders off and drowns in the neighbors' pool. Or falls off a second story deck onto the patio below. And just for the record, without mincing any words, if you're one of those parents, my husband and I think you're an idiot and a criminal and our kids won't be visiting.

It's fairly easy to keep your kids away from people like that, although I have to say that home schooling has probably helped us a lot in this respect; our girls' friends are mostly other home schooled kids, and the parents of their public and private schooled friends are generally the more conservative type who'd never dream of doing something as boneheaded as deliberately serving alcohol to a group of minors.

But here's a problem I've come across several times as the girls have grown older and it's one that worries me a lot. This affliction is one that besets Christian parents, both Catholic and Protestant, and it's one that makes me utterly helpless with anger and turns me into the kind of mother who has to tell her children "No, absolutely not. You cannot spend the night at their house" much more often than I want to.

Because it isn't my kids' fault when adults are stupid, but they're the ones who end up suffering.

The affliction I'm speaking of is this: "My kids have been raised in a Christian home and they're very devout themselves, so I know I can trust them to behave in a Christlike manner and uphold the morality of Christianity in general and our home in particular."

This is a hard one. Because I really do trust my kids. I think Meelyn and Aisling are wonderful girls and I'm with them pretty much every hour of the day (or at least in near proximity) that they're not sleeping or working. I'm completely convinced that their relationship with Jesus is real and it's a relationship they experience personally on a daily basis; He's not just someone they take notice of in passing on Sundays as they go forward to receive Communion with a casual and disinterested "Hey, Jesus. What's up?"

However, I also know they're human. And they're young. Since they're young humans, there are things that my husband and I, as responsible parents, need to be on the lookout for, to protect them. Because we don't want bad things -- including unintentional bad things -- to happen to them.

The latest problem that's come up had to do with the prom. Aisling was invited to spend the night at a friend's house to have kind of an afterglow, where several girls could sit around eating popcorn and deconstructing every single minute of the evening. The friend's family lives on the opposite side of Indianapolis, and we had plans the next day that were going to make it difficult to drive all the way to the west side of the city to get her, so I told her no, she couldn't go this time. She was disappointed, but Aisling is a good girl and she understood the logistics of our schedule the next day and didn't kick up much of a fuss.

I'm so glad we didn't let her go. Because it turned out later that the friend's parents had a boy/girl after prom sleepover that night.

I heard later from another mother that the boys slept on one floor of the house and the girls slept on another, but they were all accessible to one another, of course, because they were under the same roof of a single family dwelling, albeit a big honkin' house. But I heard from Aisling that her particular friend, the girl whose house this was, stayed up all night with her date, cozily ensconced in the family room, and talked until dawn.

First of all, let me say this: If the girl told Aisling that nothing sexual happened between her and her boyfriend there on the sofa, I feel I have no choice but to believe her. I know the girl vaguely -- she's been here a couple of times for sleepovers -- and she seems to be a very nice girl. I know a lot of people would just brush this off and say, "Well, it was definitely a provocative situation, but nothing happened so just let it slide." But I don't roll that way, I just don't and I'm too far gone in this parenting thing to start letting situations like this slide now. My point is, something could have happened so easily. Not because the girl and her boyfriend are bad kids. Not because they don't love Jesus with their whole little hearts. Not because they're (theoretically) committed to staying chaste before marriage, which is what I have always assumed other Christian parents of my generation were teaching their kids with something more enlightened than what my parents told me, which was, "Don't have sex because you might get pregnant and we'll kill you."

My beef in this boy/girl sleepover situation isn't nearly so much with the kids as with the adults.

First of all, as I told Aisling when we were discussing the decision to just have her come home after prom, is there really anything wrong with just going back to your own house and falling asleep in your own bed while drowsily recalling all the lovely events of the evening? I really deplore this part of our culture, which has been around since I was in high school, where the prom just isn't a formal dance, but a huge cultural event that calls for dinner beforehand and then the actual dance, then an after-prom party, then an early breakfast cooked by several tired mothers before everyone heads home at seven o'clock in the morning. Often there's the rental of a Hummer limo involved, and not just the one formal gown, but also the cocktail dress for the after-party and a casual outfit for breakfast. It wears me out.

Secondly, this boy/girl sleepover thing strikes me as incredibly stupid, almost as dumb as renting a room at a hotel for a bunch of prom attendees to share. And it's even dumber when the kids in question have been raised in Christian homes where the virtue of chastity has been explained and taken somewhere beyond theory and into actual practical experience as the kids have grown older. Because we all know what can happen, right? An emotionally extravagant evening like the prom, the glamour and romance of formal gowns and tuxedos and dancing in a beautiful place with lots of friends around...and then the intimacy of hours spent together unchaperoned, in the small hours of the night. We all know what can happen. WE KNOW IT.

So why put our children -- and someone else's child -- in the way of temptation? Why would an adult do that? If sex outside of marriage is wrong, and most traditional Christians agree that it is, and we've been coaching our kids to save their virginity for their future spouses (and, as a bonus, avoiding unintended pregnancy and/or disease), then why put them in a situation where their self-discipline is going to put to a test that they might not be able to endure?

It's like saying to a kid, "Look, I know you're really, really hungry. And I know that I've told you that this big dinner, this thick, juicy slice of prime rib cooked to perfection and baked potato with melting butter and a crisp, green salad with garlic croutons and the best and richest blue cheese dressing, topped off with French silk pie, this is food that is for certain occasions only, not just any time you want to sit down and indulge. But listen, I'm going to put all this food on the table in front of you and I want you to sit close enough that you can see it and smell it, but DO NOT TASTE IT. Don't even think of taking one single bite. Because that would be all kinds of wrong, and if you do, I'll be so disappointed in you and so will your dad, and not only that, it will also be a sin. So don't even think about it, all right? Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go set the table."

It's not right and it's not fair. It's wrong to do this kind of thing to teenagers. It's immoral. And no Christian person with a brain in his or her head would ever do something like this, especially if they'd have the gall to be dismayed when their fifteen year old gets pregnant. Because she was a good girl! He was a good boy! And so much was expected of them, what with how they'd been brought up and all, as Christians!

This is the concern we've had lately. And this is why Aisling, who really likes this girl, can't go to sleep over at her friend's house. Not because the friend is a bad girl, but rather because her parents can't be trusted. Their judgement isn't sound. We don't know them all that well anyway, which is a bit of a strike against them these days. But now? Now that we know they feel that there's nothing wrong with hosting boy/girl sleepovers? They are off our list, forever. Let them do their social experimenting with someone's else kids, if other someones are thoughtless enough to let them do it.

Plus, I'm really mad at them for making my job as a Christian mother even harder than it already is. They've given me one more thing that I have to say NO about in a list of no's that's already a long one. And they've let down our side, the side of Christian home schooling parents who I'd imagined before to be fairly well united on major things like this. The only bit of relief I have in the whole situation is that at least they're not Catholics. That would have just added insult to injury and this situation's already bad enough as it is.

This is one of the things we've been discussing a lot in our house lately.

Prom Night - behind the scenes

This picture, taken outside the Indiana Roof Ballroom at about 12:30 Saturday morning, is proof positive that the prom finally got here after months and months of waiting. We bought the tickets in late January. We bought the dresses in early May. We found the shoes, the jewelry, the desired hairstyles....as well as a glittery hair spray that made the girls' hair look like it had been sprinkled with diamonds. Everything was very lovely.

Unless you were at our house about ninety minutes before we left to take the girls to the dance.

You probably suspected that all had not gone smoothly, right? Because these things just never do. Formal dances exist, I believe, to give families practice for weddings, so that when a groomsman's shiny shoes aren't included with his tux, or when the cake turns out to be not exactly what the bride had asked for, or when certain individuals on one side of the family come to the celebration wearing faces more appropriate for a funeral with matching attitudes, or when the service is unaccountably messed up, or when the matron of honor turns out to be three months pregnant by the time the wedding rolls around and can just barely zip up her dress, people can deal with these things without flying into a thousand screaming pieces. I know, because all of the above things happened at my wedding. And see how normal and calm I am, all these years later?

Our only enormous problem with prom arose from something I told Meelyn she should do to treat herself, and that was have her makeup done by an associate at the local Salon Professional Academy. True, the associates are still students, I told her, but by the time they get to the point of being allowed to do prom makeup and hair, as the sign outside the academy advertised, they are competent and well-equipped to make a girl look like a fairy princess.

Or so I thought.

Aisling's appointment was first because she opted for the whole hair and makeup package. The associate who did her face came in, Aisling said, with an enormous suitcase fitted with different compartments for her huge collection of cosmetics. They talked about the look Aisling wanted -- pretty and pastel, no harsh colors -- and the student-artist went to work, creating a look that Aisling was thrilled with, and indeed she did look very lovely when the girls came home later.

But Meelyn, my poor Meelyn....

Meelyn was asked to work the lunch shift at the fast-food restaurant she's been employed at for the past couple of years: the manager is finding it difficult, despite these hard economic times, to find employees who will actually come in when they're scheduled to work, and then lift a finger once they're there. So Meelyn went in to pick up the slack, which meant that she didn't get to go for her makeup appointment until 3:30 (since her hair is short, she felt she could manage it by herself, unlike the updo Aisling had for her longer hair.) Meelyn drove home and took a quick shower and then set out for the salon, where I'd dropped Aisling off an hour before.

Thankfully, Aisling chose to sit in a nearby chair and watch Meelyn's makeup being done instead of sitting in the waiting area with her book: otherwise, we probably would have had to have Meelyn's face sandblasted to remove the thick layer of orange pancake makeup the technician -- not the same one who did Aisling's face -- trowelled on. While watching the student smear the awful stuff on her sister's face, Aisling, whose personality is more, well, forthright like mine, rather than sweet and more aquiescent like Meelyn's, said, "Uhhm, should you be trying to blend that a little more?" when a traffic-cone-colored line appeared along Meelyn's jaw.

"She looked at me and rolled her eyes," Aisling said indignantly. "She ROLLED HER EYES. Like she knew what she was doing over there with her stupid Cheeto foundation!"

"I was turned away from the mirror, so I didn't know anything bad was happening," Meelyn sobbed, bright-white tear streaks marked on her face. "But when Aisli said that about the blending, I could tell something was wrong. And then there was the look on her face, like she was about to scream or vomit or both."

Apparently, the technician replied, "That's all the foundation we have" and went back to slapping the orange on Meelyn's face. You see, the students at the salon academy have to supply their own beauty products, whether those products be for hair or skin or whatever, and somehow, someone missed the fact that Ms. Facepaint was not exactly ready for that advertised prom makeup, especially since her only other accoutrment was a black Sharpie marker, which she used to color in Meelyn's eyebrows.

That was the point where both girls cracked.

Aisling said, "Okay, that is just not right," and she went up to the front desk to request that an instructor be sent over to parlay. When the instructor came over and surveyed Meelyn, sitting tensely in the chair while the associate carried on with the eyebrows, she immediately offered the services of the same technician who did Aisling's makeup.

"The instructor turned me around in the chair so that I could see myself and I knew I was going to start bawling in front of them all, so I said I didn't want anyone else to work on me and that I just wanted to leave," Meelyn sniffled, scrubbing her face with a face cloth and about a pound of cleansing wash.

Horrified, I said, "You didn't PAY for this mess, did you?"

"No," said Meelyn. "I just walked out and Aisling scampered out behind me. She'd already paid for her hair and makeup."

The two of them spent the drive back across the city to our house with Meelyn sobbing and bewailing her fate and Aisling trying to hold back her own sympathetic tears as she came as close to the line between Cussing and Not Cussing as she could without incurring parental wrath, yelping the story out to me via mobile phone. When they flung themselves into the house, I was standing in the foyer, uselessly flapping my hands and trying to keep myself from reeling and writhing and fainting in coils.

"LOOK AT ME!" Meelyn screeched. "I'M A FREAK! HOW'S COME AISLI ALWAYS GETS THE GOOD PERSON AND I GET THE IDIOTS WHO WOULDN'T KNOW A MASCARA WAND FROM A GARDEN RAKE??!!"

I hugged her and she cried into my shoulder and I don't know if I'll ever get that dreadful orange color out of my top, so my Oxy-Clean has its work cut out for it. Meelyn charged up the stairs to go to work with the aforementioned facial wash and warm cloth and I threw myself into one of the chairs in the foyer, aghast.

"What on earth happened?" I asked Aisling. "How could this have gone so wrong?"

"That student was a....a....complete and total beeyotch," Aisling replied flatly.

I gave her a narrow-eyed stare. "Be very careful."

"Well, she was. How could you be that bad without knowing how bad you were? How could you agree to do someone's PROM MAKEUP and not even have a basic understanding of skin tones. And how could you make someone's eyebrows look like that?"

"I don't know," I responded wearily. "It's beyond me. But I do know that I'm going to place a strongly-worded telephone call just as soon as I can do it without screaming."

When Meelyn's skin was purged of the horrible color and the drawn-on black eyebrows, she and Aisling went to work and made her look very lovely indeed. How fortunate to have a young, fresh complexion, because I guarantee if we'd been trying to make ME look better, it just wouldn't. Have. Happened. Once her makeup was sorted and she was glowing, Meelyn did her hair, which looked very cute: a quick spritz with that really very nice glittery hairspray, and the two girls were ready to get into their formal gowns -- classic black and white for Meelyn, apple green for Aisling -- and then into their chariot (otherwise known as the minivan) to be taken to the ballroom for an evening of dining and dancing - the most grown-uppy fancy party they'd ever been to, especially without us.

We picked them up, yawning, five hours later. As we drove home, their happy voices spilled over each other as they told us about the dinner, their friends, the music, the dancing, and most of all, the beautiful Indiana Roof Ballroom, which looked like a fairyland with slowly swirling stars projected onto the floor all evening.

"When I went to the prom," I said reminiscently, "it was in the Girls' Gym at the high school and there were paper streamers hanging off the basketball goals."

"We know," said Meelyn. "You've told us a thousand times."

"Ten thousand," corrected Aisling.

"You both look beautiful, even after dancing for hours," my husband said. He took my hand and squeezed it. "Two young ladies, barely girls anymore."

"Unless they say 'beeyotch,'" I declared.

May I?

It's May, the glorious, blooming month of May. The month when our school year, like everyone else's, starts winding down, but in lots of ways the "winding down" is more like an application of sharp, pointy spurs than a gradual lessening of activity that winds up on Memorial Day weekend with a graceful fall into a hammock.

No, we are going all-out around here. The girls, at my insistence, have to finish every last chapter down to the final period in every book they have. Firstly, because I remember what it was like as a public school teacher, feeling so frustrated because there was never, ever enough time to complete a textbook. Could I honestly say that my students had taken a complete course in American Literature when they didn't finish the last four-chapter unit in the book? Maddening. Secondly, home schooling is really expensive and I want to know that we're getting every last penny's worth out of those books, darn it!

Thirdly, I'm a tiger mom. My friend Shaun called me that last week and I was thrilled. I admit that I have worked the girls really hard: they take about eleven subjects per semester and doing so has given them opportunities that they never would have had in either public or private school. Using the Indiana Core 40 webpage at the website of the Indiana Department of Education, I planned coursework for them that would give them the best education we could manage, so I feel like it's only fair to make sure they work to the back cover of every book. Rowr!!!

So they are working at top speed, remembering that I (tiger-mom) grade them on the 96-100 = A grading scale, trying to finish their books before our last day, which is Tuesday, May 31. On Wednesday, June 1, they're hoping to start Chemistry as a summer school course. Whew.

I am in the midst of preparing transcripts and we're all waiting with bated breath for Mee's SAT scores to show up on May 26. It doesn't leave a lot of time for blogging.

Typing is difficult for tigers, after all.

Why no snow days for the home schoolers?

Last night we all tumbled into bed with a gentle rain pattering down and the (mistaken) idea that we were going to have little to no snow accumulation, according to the posted Winter Weather Advisory. I woke up coughing at about 5:15 and when I got out of bed to get a drink, I couldn't help but notice how strangely bright it seemed in the room. With a feeling of foreboding, I peeked through the blind and sure enough - there was snow. A LOT of snow. And it was blowing horizontally.

"Whuzzerdoin'?" my husband asked me drowsily, burrowing his head into his pillow. Zuzu, sleeping beside him, turned over on her back with all four paws in the air and sighed contentedly.

"Looking at the snow," I replied.

That woke him up a bit. "Diddit znow?" he mumbled, eyes blissfully closed. "Ow mudge?"

"Oh, about FIVE INCHES AND COUNTING," I announced with weary bitterness. Really, this is just ridiculous.

That woke him right up. He thrashed around in the blankets and began spluttering things at me that sounded like this: ARRRGH!!! LITTLE TO NO ACCUMULATION!! SICK OF THIS FRIGGING WINTER!! WHERE'S MY SHOVEL??!! ARRRGHHH!!!! %$#&$!!!!

I silently started getting dressed, thinking that I know two other people who were going to have the same reaction: Meelyn and Aisling. There have been so many snow days for the public schools this year -- and today is another one -- I've lost count. I've mentioned several times on Facebook that we don't have snow days here at Our Lady of Good Counsel and keep on pegging away through snow, sleet, hail and gloom of stormy afternoon. Several people have expressed surprise that I am such a big meanie, so I wanted to explain my bit of homeschooling philosophy in a place that allows me significantly more words-per-post than Facebook does.

First of all, home schooling is a completely different animal than public or private schooling. It just doesn't operate the same way, being a lot more efficient in the way time is managed. We don't have travel time, for one thing, and that makes the girls very happy because they're generally just yawning their way out of bed when their public/private school counterparts are already gathering their books from their lockers and heading off to their first class of the day.

Another way that home schooling is more efficient is that we don't have passing periods between classes or those moments of unavoidable delay when the students are filing into the room and taking their seats while the teacher does the attendance count. And we never have to deal with delaying the start of a lesson because someone doesn't have a book and someone else doesn't have paper and someone else doesn't have a pen and someone else's boyfriend just broke up with her so that she has to sit there and cry while her friends try to soothe her. And we don't have the discipline problems that keep so many teachers from being able to conduct their business and actually get through a planned lesson. These things were enormously frustrating to me as a classroom teacher.

The girls work for about six to six and a half hours a day and that is just what they spend on schoolwork; public and private school kids are actually at their schools for about six and a half hours, but only a portion of that time is actually allocated to study -- the books in the picture above are Aisling's and they include one of our many SAT reference books for her prep course, traditional logic, French vocabulary and world literature....and that's only part of them.

Meelyn and Aisling take a lunch break somewhere around noon and spend half an hour eating and relaxing. Both girls do geometry and composition and classes that require writing downstairs at the dining room table, but for subjects that require a lot of reading (world history and world lit this year) they have their favorite places to go: Meelyn goes upstairs to her room, which is cozily outfitted with a comfy place to read and Aisling curls up in the chair in front of the big window. They're usually accompanied by the dogs, Dobby upstairs and Zuzu down.

They'll be working today when everybody else is having a break for this reason: public and private schools go until the end of the school year: home schoolers go until the end of the books. In other words, even with make up days, there's only so long public schools can convene. Sooner or later, they're going to have to turn the kids loose in the summer. From my own experience I know that every single teacher out there HOPES to come to the end of the textbooks used in his or her classes, but that rarely happens. There's too much interruption, whether it's because of winter weather or too short a class period or a spirit convocation or whatever. It is a constant frustration and worry. One of the most freeing things about homeschooling is that we don't have a break off point where we have to abandon the books and go: the class continues until the very last page of each and every subject.

This is where the superior education of the typical home schooler really comes forward. We know a lot of public school kids and none of them are big, unmotivated dunces; they're great kids and I don't think they're receiving a horrible education by any means. I just think that home schoolers receive a better education. We can do so much more with our six hours, including taking on subjects like logic that most public school kids will never get a crack at. My kids have also studied more than a dozen of Shakespeare's plays (and even been to the Stratford Festival a couple of times), compared to the three studied in public school. Our physical education classes are real workouts at a real gym. (If it's extracurricular activites you want, there's really nothing closed to home schoolers anymore. If my husband and I weren't adamant about having family time and a life free of the stress of constant running, the girls could be in just about any activity you could name, up to and including speech and debate, girls' volleyball - which we participated in for three seasons during their middle school years - and all sorts of other tempting offerings.)

So when it comes to snow days, we just don't have the time. The girls have a lot to accomplish each day and they have to get it done in a timely manner so that they won't wind up sitting at the side of the pool at the swim club finishing up geometry in August. Meelyn had that experience a couple of years ago with Biology I and that was not an experience she'd care to repeat. Aisling learned from that mistake and has kept up with her work diligently.

Home schooling's ways and means are just....different. Snow days are one thing for the majority of students in the area - they have a chance to have a day to sleep in and be free from their normal daily responsibilities. But for the home schoolers, it's pay now so that they can play later, with the knowledge that every single subject has been completed down to the very last sentence in each textbook.

Getting to know you (again)

How could it possibly be that it's been TWO WEEKS since I last wrote on my blog? And perhaps an even bigger question is how have all of you, my twenty-four faithful blog followers (and maybe a few more people who accidentally stumbled across InsomniMom while doing an internet search for hasenpfeffer) been surviving without knowing what I've been serving my family for dinner for the past fourteen nights? How? How?

I'd like to think it's not a question of what Aisling just said as she was peering over my shoulder just now, watching me type: "I never read your blog because I'm already kind of sick of you from just being in the house with you all the time."

Gee, thanks.

Anyway, here's a list of my excuses. I have committed them to bandwidth because I may need to use them again someday and want to remember what they were.

1. I had some kitchen renovation stuff being done that started right after I posted the first French Fridays with Dorie recipe (gougeres) and it continued all week last week. Those of you who cook know that the kitchen is the heart of the home and when your kitchen is in pieces (at one time, I had two large refrigerators in the (small) room, one of which was partially blocking the laundry room door and plugged into the wall where I usually plug in the toaster. My microwave was not plugged in because it has to be plugged in to a special outlet. There was a third refrigerator in the laundry room. My portable dishwasher was in the middle of the room, requiring people to squeeze around it if they wanted, say, a slice of cheese for a sandwich. But if they actually got the slice of cheese it wouldn't have done them any good anyway because no one could find the bread.

2. I made the second French Fridays with Dorie recipe (Gerard's Mustard Tarte) last Friday and took some great photos, but then later that afternoon took the camera with me to a family birthday party at my parents' house -- and left it there. We live just far enough away from one another that there was no just popping over to get it, so I had to wait until they were running an errand in my town and brought it to me yesterday. It seems that I've grown so used to accompanying every post I make with a photograph, I am CRIPPLED without my camera.

3. Blogger has made a lot of changes to the website lately that I find irritating and discommoding, so I was in a snit. It's not as much fun blogging when it's harder to post images than it was before their "upgrade," not to mention all kinds of other glitches that have reared their hissing heads.

4. Shakespeare class, as always, keeps me very busy for the weeks the class is running, in this case, until mid-November. But my students are wonderful and so receptive and Hamlet is just as interesting as always.

5. Then there are my own two students, Meelyn and Aisling, who just took the PSAT last Wednesday. They have a lot more work to do this year, naturally -- Meelyn is a junior and Aisling is a sophomore -- and there are a few classes of theirs that I'm taking right along with them, namely Bible study, composition and SAT prep. It takes up a lot of time, but it is all great fun.

6. And we've been doing a lot of stuff at church. Aisling is doing child care for our parish mothers' group -- she likes it very much because the kids are funny and adorable and they pay her well -- plus all three of us are providing child care for the same mothers' group we worked with last year that meets at a Protesant church in our city, so we're busier than usual. That picture at the top of this post is one I took at our annual Pet Blessing which was held on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi on October 4. It's fun being at the church more often. I use the time while Aisling is babysitting to work on my religious education lesson plans, as well as my Shakespeare stuff.

7. We've had colds. With fevers and headaches and sore throats and a severe lack of energy. Very unpleasant.

So! That's my list of excuses. I think they seem plausible, but I think it's going to be very hard to make my yearly goal.

Little bit of Rosalind on my mind

A few random thoughts, nothing enough to write an entire post about....

The Stratford trip is coming up in a week -- ONE WEEK -- and I am flying around getting things ready for the group and for my own family. Must not, on any account, forget to call the bank and tell them we plan to use our debit cards internationally. Also would be a good idea to remember to bring passports. And I need to get the mail stopped. Wondering about As You Like It and if the actress playing Rosalind will also be able to pull off her role as Ganymede.

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In my city, tattoo places are springing up EVERYWHERE. As the recession grows worse, other businesses fail -- a small used car lot, a former dry cleaner's establishment, a Midas muffler place, a Mom-n-Pop donut shop -- and abandon their premises, leaving them open for these awful tattoo place to move in. The one in the picture above is the nicest place of all, the one place out of all of them that doesn't look you could get a free case of hepatitis B thrown in with your new ink.

One of the others, sadly, is near my house in the historic district, in a building that used to be the office for the used car lot I mentioned. The car lot was small and cute and there were always flowers planted outside in tubs and in the tiny yard. But now? Ugh. The building has been painted black and the name of the joint is painted on the outdoor sign, unprofessionally. It looks like the kind of place that might send you off with the added bonus of typhus with your hep B.

How many tattoo businesses can one city of 60,000 people support?

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Today is our first day of school. I have a junior and a sophomore. PSATs are coming up next month, SATs in February. This is our tenth year of homeschooling. The dining room table is piled nearly up to the ceiling with school books. Meelyn is doing geometry and Aisling is working on French. I am trying to summon the will to soldier through the next hour until 5:00 p.m. when I will legitimately be able to have a glass of wine. I should go fold some towels. The only problem is that the refrigerator where the wine lives is on the way to the laundry room.

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Today is Nanny and Poppy's 48th wedding anniversary -- two more years 'til the Big one. It will take at least that long to convince Poppy that Pat, Angie, my husband and I should throw them a party. It may take that long for him to agree to having a nice little write-up in the Courier-Times. I should get started on this, like, yesterday.

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The girls are practicing saying "à tout à l'heure" really fast so that it won't sound like saying, in English, "I'LL.....SEE.....YOU.....LATER!" They were laughing and laughing, but both of them stopped when I said, "I hope you'll be able to use this admittedly limited French when you're in college; it would be so wonderful if you could both go abroad to study for a semester." They both looked at me like a couple of owls. "Wow, that would be really far from home," said Meelyn, a worried look on her face. "Sacré bleu!" Aisling breathed solemnly. Awwww....they are mes petits choux, alors.

There are some things that make me angry

I firmly believe that every profession has this kind of person in it, but my field is teaching, so I know the kind of person I'm talking about, but I'm sure you'll be able to relate to this kind of person in your profession. If you're moved to make roll your eyes or mime sticking your finger down your throat, please feel free.

But before I explain the person, I want to explain myself: I'm a teacher. It's the only thing I ever wanted to do, other than be, like, a ballerina when I was five. I also wanted to be Ann Wilson for a while, but my singing voice makes the birds fall out of the trees, dead on the sidewalk. So anyway. I kind of feel compelled to teach people stuff and whether that's because I'm really bossy and bossy people enjoy being in classrooms or whether because I enjoy being in classrooms because it gives me a chance to boss people around, I don't know. It's a chicken/egg conundrum.

I love teaching.

But you know what I don't love? Educrats. Educrats are the kind of people who are so bent on EDUCATION that they forget all about teaching. They're about the process and the methods and the theories and all those classes in the university course catalog that start with ED. You can tell who they are because when they get up to talk to a classroom full of people, it's like each person being hit, on an individual basis, in the head with a baseball bat.

Stuffy. Boring. Droning. Dull.

They don't teach. They educate. They are educators or even educationists. Quite often, they're smug.

They are definitely not teachers.

I hate it when I have to spend time with those people. It makes me angry.

Welcome to your life's work. Would you like fries with that?

Our Meelyn, aged seventeen, works in a fast food restaurant because her dad and I feel that fast food restaurants are a microcosm of life and the working world. And also that nothing convinces a person of the VITAL, SEARING IMPORTANCE of a college education like working a drive-thru window.

Fortunately, Meelyn had this figured out before she even began this job a year ago, but today? Today was a banner day. Today she actually had someone illustrate a life lesson that her dad and I couldn't have come up with if we'd ordered it from Amazon.

The guy, who is a shift leader at the restaurant, was talking to Mee about his experiences in high school. "I made me some smart friends," he told her confidentially, "so that I could just cheat my way through and not have to, you know, study."

"Wow," said Meelyn, underwhelmed.

"And you know," he said, with the air of someone revealing a great secret of the universe, "I have NEVER READ AN ENTIRE BOOK."

"Imagine that," Meelyn marveled. "Never?"

"Nope," he said braggily. "Not one single book. But look at me! Here I am, a shift leader!"

Meelyn is a very nice girl, a much nicer person than I am, even though I feel like I am a decent Christian. With thoughts of Jesus in my head, I never would have allowed myself to say something fervent, all wide-eyed, like, "Yeah, you're really livin' the dream, dude!"

But I would have been standing there. Thinking it. Thinking it real hard.

(Actually, Meelyn was too.)

Evening up the score

Today I went to (virtually) visit my friend Amy over at her blog, 4th Frog, where I was unhappy to learn that some hooligan kids at her son Charlie's elementary school are bullying him. Amy's talked to the school counselor and both of them have talked to Charlie, so right now things are in a holding pattern to see if the behavior of the hooligans changes.

I myself am in favor of exploring the option of talking to the kids' parents and other civilized ways of dealing with urgent social problems like this one, but having been the target of bullying in both elementary and middle school, I think there's a lot to be said for tae kwon do or some other martial art that can make a person look really coordinated while kicking another person's teeth down his throat. *ahem*

My first instance of bullying happened my fifth grade year. I was one of those kids who walked home from school, which was a pleasant little journey as long as you weren't being terrorized. I was ganged-up-on by two boys, whose names were Mike and Todd. Those are their real names. I still know their last names too, you dig? Because it was a scarring experience and all.

Anyway, for some reason, Mike took a dislike to me. Todd, who was evidently a weakling of low character, followed along after Mike. Strangely enough, they were both fourth graders. But I was not a super-big kid as an elementary school student and they were two of the bigger boys in their fourth grade class and they were both bigger than I was. They harassed me for weeks on end as we all walked home to the same sunny neighborhood, pushing me down, pulling my hair, grabbing my books and throwing them. When they finally got tired of messing with me, they'd go on their merry way, and I, completely upset, would either cry the rest of the way home or find a convenient roadside shrub where I could vomit in privacy.

They told me not to tell, or they'd really "get me." I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded ominous.

Somehow, I ended up having the courage to tell my mother. She was a teacher in the same school system I attended, although in a different building, and she knew the principal of my school, having worked with him before.

Because I was just a kid, I don't know the ins and outs of the whole deal, but she went to the school and told the principal what was going on. The bullying stopped for a few days and Mike and Todd took a different route home. But just as I was beginning to breathe easier and not feel that clutch of pure terror when I'd glance over my shoulder and see them running to catch me, they caught me.

The two of them pushed me off the street and into the Patterson's yard - I remember hoping so much that Laura was home: Laura was a high school girl who sometimes babysat for me and Pat and I knew that she'd show them a thing or two about picking on a girl. But the Patterson's garage door was down and there were no cars in the driveway and their front door, which usually stood hospitably open behind the big screen door, was closed tight.

Mike and Todd spent a good bit of time that day pushing me down to the ground, yaking me back up by my arms, pushing me down again. I was crying so hard, but I remember REFUSING to beg them to stop. When I tried to defend myself, they pushed and hit harder. When they felt like they'd made their point, they left me sitting disheveled in the Patterson's yard, my school books scattered around me on the neatly trimmed grass. I clearly remember thinking how weird it was, sitting there in our nice neighborhood with the pretty houses and the big lawns and the flowers and all and being beat up by two boys in broad daylight.

There was no problem with telling my parents about that episode. See, there was a creek that flowed at the bottom of the Patterson's property, and Mike strongly hinted that they'd push me in and hold me under if I ever said anything about them to a grown up again. I was, at age ten (I was one of the youngest in my class) literally afraid they'd kill me. One of me, two of them, both of them bigger and stronger than I was -- my odds didn't seem good.

When I told my mother that night, crying, the only thing I can remember about the conversation is the look on her face. I can't remember if she said anything to me or not, but that look -- the narrowed, burning blue eyes, the white dents around her nostrils, the lips pressed together in a tight, thin line -- said IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO MESS WITH THIS WOMAN.

So anyway, she went in to talk to the principal again. And I think she may have talked to Mike's and Todd's parents. And I have the impression that she raised holy hell at the school because Mike and Todd and I were called into the principal's office the next day and they were forced to apologize and then they got spanked with the paddle by the principal while I watched.

It was glorious.

And they never so much as looked at me again, until I met up with Todd years later. He'd gone into his family's business and married an acquaintance of mine from our mutual high school. We saw one another at the wrap party of a play my acquaintance/his wife and I had been in and she said, "Shelley, do you remember Todd from school?"

And I gave him a level look and a small smile and said, "Why, yes. I remember you very well, Todd."

Very well indeed.

The second instance of bullying I had to deal with was in the seventh grade, when I had to ride on a bus from my old elementary school to the junior high. There was some creepy, hoody girl, the kind who already reeked of cigarette smoke at the tender age of thirteen, who rode the same bus, and in the first weeks of school, she decided to make merry sport with me as the bus trundled back home in the afternoons.

It was the same kind of deal: she'd grab my books and scatter them across the floor of the bus, and then when I'd lean over to pick them up, she'd pull my hair, step on my fingers, put her foot on my back so that I couldn't stand up. It was awful. Some of the kids shot me looks of mute sympathy out of the corners of their eyes, but it was obvious that I was on my own. No one was going to stand up to Miss Smoky Breath 1976 and by the third time she decided to attack, I realized that the only one who could save me was.....me. My mom wasn't on the bus and the bus driver looked like he was about a million years old and descended from a line of sea turtles. Neither of them could help me.

It was almighty hot on the school bus that day and I was sitting quietly in my seat, perspiring, hoping she wouldn't notice me. My seventh grade picture shows me looking shy and slightly hesitant, all eyes and teeth. It was an awkward stage in sooo many ways. I was kind of a timid and quiet girl -- yes! I know! SO MUCH HAS CHANGED! -- and I was willing to just live and let live, but she definitely wasn't.

So she knocked my books out of my arms, as usual. And I leaned down to pick them up, also as usual. But the first one I picked up was the thick and heavy math book from Mrs. McBride's fourth period class. I grabbed it in my sweaty, shaking hands and caught the hood off-guard as she was standing there braying like a donkey and smashed her in the face with it full-on, hard enough to send her flying awkwardly backwards, half on a seat and half on the floor, blood spraying out of her nose and mouth like a faucet.

I wish I could remember what happened next. I don't think it was anything dramatic, but I was running on so much adrenaline that a veil has been drawn over the rest of that ride back to Riley Elementary School, where I gathered my books and demurely exited the bus and walked home. Feeling different.

The nasty girl evidently totally understood my message delivered via textbook because she never touched me or so much as looked at me again. I think she ended up dropping out of school when we were tenth graders, which is kind of a shame because she missed my vote for "Most Likely to Spend Her Entire Adult Life in the Indiana Women's Prison" in the senior issue of the school newspaper.

So while I firmly believe that parents need to intervene in cases of school bullying -- and they need to keep on intervening until something changes for the better -- I also think there's a lot to be said for making sure your kid knows how to kick the living crap out of anybody who messes with him or her.

And you know? I am SO not talking about how to get your kid to sit down with a bully and say, "Now, Bruiser, I'm sure you don't really mean to articulate your dislike of me by punching my head out on the playground whenever Mrs. Beezus isn't looking, so let's discuss this using our words instead of our actions, okay, buddy?"

No, I mean literal pain-infliction, the kind that ends with the bully shedding tears and yelling "uncle!" or whatever relative he or she would like to call upon. You know, like in A Christmas Story, when Ralphie had finally HAD IT with Scott Farkus. The kind where other people stand around and watch in wide-eyed, silent respectfulness and a path clears when the bullied-one gets up, dusts of his/her hands and walks on home with head held high.

There's a message in that and most bullies hear it LOUD AND CLEAR.

Triumph!!!!

Yesterday, Aisling came up to me and gave me a sour look.

"You've ruined me," she said flatly. "Completely ruined me."

I was suffering yesterday with what I'll term a "stomach complaint" (I'll spare you the details), so I was feeling a little ruined myself. "What are you talking about?" I asked plaintively. "Can you get me a cup of ginger tea? And maybe one saltine cracker?"

"I mean it. You have ruined me. Every time I see a road sign or some internet posting or whatever that uses there, they're or their incorrectly, it just goes all over my nerves like vomit on a Ferris wheel."

"Nice image," I said approvingly. "Very descriptive and imaginative. Now, tell me....what about to, too and two?"

"Ruined."

"Were and we're?"

"Crushed."

"Its and it's?"

"Devastated."

"You're and your?"

"Utterly demolished. I can no longer tolerate usage errors and want to beat people with a large and heavy grammar book when I read them."

Joy suffused my entire being and my stomach complaint quieted down as I clasped my hands beneath my chin and closed my eyes in delight. "My work here is done. Finished! I have climbed the mountain, braved the elements, struggled over stony paths and come to this place to claim my victory."

She looked at me, one eyebrow raised. "We're out of saltines."

"Okay. Just a cup of tea, then," I said, crestfallen.

Art and the home schooled student

Meelyn is taking an art theory and appreciation course this semester, one of Alpha-Omega Publication's excellent Lifepacs series for middle and high school students. Today's lesson was a study in color-mixing, and although Mee complained that she felt like her next assignment might be finger-painting (an activity she scorned even as a pre-schooler), when she finished up with her brushes and her tempera paint, she said in an amazed voice, "I actually learned something in that lesson!"

Bingo!

First day back

Today is our first day back at school -- actually, the dining room table -- after two blissful weeks of Christmas break, and it hasn't been a marked success. It rarely is. *sigh*

It seems like both Meelyn and Aisling have experienced an unprecedented amount of brain drain in the past fortnight. How? How? I can't explain it. Meelyn has fared better than her sister, but Aisling has complicated the entire day by not being able to find her Biology 1 notebook, her U.S. History notebook and some other notebook...I'm so frazzled, I can't remember which. It is incredibly frustrating and the mood has been dour. To say the least.

Aisling did have a good piano lesson and came out to the van toting her suitcase full of music, as cheerful as a cricket. Meelyn had to work today at the lunch shift and had a pleasant day of it; she came home and immediately went to the gym, where she ran four miles in forty minutes, an excellent time.

Hershey has driven me nearly round the bend by asking to be let out a thousand and three times. "Come on, pleeeeaaaaaaaaase?" he says with his ears aloft and eyes all bright and hopeful. "Pleeeeeeaaaaaase? Just for a minute, I swear. ONE MINUTE. So I can bark at that nanny pushing her little charge in a stroller down the street. They need to be barked at."

I also ordered several books for Meelyn's second semester work, which starts on January 18. I bought the Traditional Logic 2, the next part of her Spanish 2 course and a computer literacy course covering Microsoft Word.

The day is very cold and snowy and to while away the afternoon, I am baking biscotti. The recipe I made, which I put together out of several I found online, features Splenda instead of sugar, chopped pecans and dried cranberries. They're just about ready to go in for their second baking and if they're good, I'll take their picture and post the recipe.

Whoops! Timer just went off! Back to the biscotti I go, while Aisling continues searching for that pesky U.S. History notebook.

Faster than the speed of, er....The Scarlet Letter

Okay, so The Scarlet Letter hasn't exactly gone quickly. Meelyn says she likes it, although she uttered the word "like" in a doubtful tone that made me wonder if she was being completely straight with me. Aisling, when I asked just now what her opinion is, said, "Lukewarm. At best."

At any rate, the first grading period here at Our Lady of Good Counsel is coming to a screeching halt on Thursday. Both readers have been informed that they must finish with The Scarlet Letter on Wednesday. Grades will be figured and posted here on InsomniMom on Monday - or at least that's my intention.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the American Literature classic I plan to assign for the second grading period and both girls are expressing limited enthusiasm for this project, both claiming that I "ruined" and "tortured" them by having them read Tom Sawyer two years ago.

This Friday is -- hallelujah -- our holiday break for All Saints and All Souls. Our enthusiasm for this brief vacation hovers somewhere on the SAT word list between inordinate and profligate.

It's the first day of school and I am going to....

...sleep really well tonight.

Boyoboy, I'd kind of forgotten, during this long, lazy summer, how consuming school days are, as in "eating little bites out of my flesh." Because suddenly? I not only have to do my regular household tasks, I also have to be available to teach certain subjects: I'm helping Aisling with Biology 1; the three of us do the girls' religion class together; I got the girls started on The Scarlet Letter, which we'll be reading and discussing together as part of their American Literature course.

This time yesterday, I was lolling on the front porch with my library book and my iced tea, idly wondering if I had the energy to get up and pop a little bit of popcorn as an afternoon snack.

This school day has gone fairly smoothly though, I have to admit. I think the three of us were ready to get back into our familiar routine, even though the girls stridently insist that "summer's lease [had] all too short a date (that's a little Sonnet XVIII reference there, so you'll all know how DEEPLY COMMITTED I am to the LEARNING PROCESS, because if you're not deeply committed to learning, how will you ever be able to produce stick-up-yer-butt quotes from Shakespeare at the drop of a quill? AND I used Roman numerals too, so please feel free to curtsy the next time you see me.)

Oh, it's been a longish kind of day. New routine with both girls in high school now....Aisling is all "rage, rage against the dying of the light" of middle school (whoooaaaa! Dylan Thomas reference I am ON with the whole English thing today) and is saying plaintively, "Whyyyyyy can't it be eaaaaaasier? I'm so tiiiiiiiiiired!" in a particularly piercing nasal whine that has used up the limited supply of patience I had stored for October's usage.

Meelyn has doggedly worked away, as is her wont, causing little trouble except to finally screech "SHUT UUUUUUP!!!" at Aisling who was warbling a dreadful song by some baggage named Taylor Swift that had a country twang to it. I can't abide country music, so I wasn't as hard on Meelyn as I probably should have been for her rudeness. There's something about a country twang that makes me want to fall unconscious to the floor.

At any rate, the day is nearly over. I started typing this at about 10:00 a.m. and it's now 8:04 p.m. Pork chops & stuffing casserole is simmering away in the oven, the Prince of Salesmen is on his way home, Meelyn is doing her chores and Aisling is in the shower either singing or crying, I can't tell which.

Everyone has heard of breakfast in bed. Is there any such thing as dinner in bed?



Here's my post from September 2, 2008 on the first day of school,when I was seriously thinking about destroying the Rosetta Stone software.

Conversations with our daughters

Oh, it takes nerves of steel to be the parents of teenagers, especially teenage girls. Because why, you wonder? Well, it's for the same old reason that's always been with us: Girls can get pregnant. Boys can't.

In my own personal life, I could clearly see that my brother was raised in a different way than I was. I think that partly this was because he had a lot more common sense and because I was just such an idiot. For instance, my brother got to live in an off-campus apartment and then in a house with a roomie, whereas I lived in the Virgin Vault at Ball State for two years and then moved back home with my parents. I told them it was because they had better food and bathroom facilities, plus no scary roommate who slept with her blankets totally over her head like a zombie. They nodded their heads in agreement, yes, yes, yes.

What they were saying to one another was probably something like, "If we don't want to be saddled with this little Madonna-wanna-be's problems for the rest of our natural lives, we'd better get her back here where we can keep an eye on her."

But my dad, when pressed to explain Pat's apartment and my bedroom at the ol' homestead, would just stubbornly say, "It's different with girls than it is with boys."

At the time, I did not have a CLUE what he meant. But now I do. I certainly do.

As I've made my way through my adult life, I've seen more evidence that girls are raised with a greater degree of parental looming, and frankly -- while I detest and abhor the double standards that take place in our society -- I understand and endorse this "helicoptering," as it's now called. It can be a bad world out there for girls, especially girls who have been taught that they are WOMAN, that they're ten feet tall and bulletproof and have such a vividly developed sense of self-esteem, they don't know the first thing about self-preservation, either with their hearts or their bodies.

Consider that girl, Natalee Holloway, the one who went missing from the senior class trip to Aruba. She was just a regular girl, a normal high school girl. And she went on her class trip with her girlfriends and the rest of the graduates, and somewhere along the line, she got drunk in a bar. And with her inhibitions lowered, she left with a person or persons unknown and she's never been heard of since. Somewhere out on some secluded beach, under the cover of darkness, was a man or a boy who didn't respect her at all, poor soul. Poor girl.

While I'm on that subject, I have a couple of thoughts about adults who think it's a grand idea to arrange a senior trip to Aruba. What? Could this have possibly been a stupider idea? Who needs to go to ARUBA because they've just managed to drag themselves through high school? My gosh, where do you get to go when you graduate from college? Like, JUPITER? Geeeez.

A senior class trip to Aruba, complete with a bunch of seventeen and eighteen year olds, just a recipe for disaster. I mean, even if this hideous thing hadn't happened to Natalee, it would still be utterly ridiculous. I used to be both seventeen and eighteen: I know what kinds of shenanigans kids that age get up to when they're right there in their parents' house. The legal drinking age on Aruba is sixteen. Yes, you read that right: sixteen. The legal age to go into the casinos and gamble is eighteen. Nice choice, adults. You big freaking idiots. What's wrong with your heads?

Aruba is said to have a very low crime rate, but not all the bad things that can happen to teenagers are necessarily criminal. I wouldn't think it would take a genius to figure that out.

At any rate, I am now back from my brief trip to the Lesser Antilles and I'd like to say that my husband and I talk to our girls all the time about their sexuality. The subject comes up at least two or three times a week. We talk as a family; we talk one-on-one. The girls have been very receptive so far, although they were totally grossed out when I showed them some pictures of genital warts I called up on a Google images search. We talk about STDs. We talk about God's plan for sex within marriage. We talk about what it might be like to have sex with your boyfriend and then find out he's told all his friends about what you look like naked.

We're very, very frank.

We have to be.


Here's a list of topics we commonly address:

How Boys Think About Sex vs. How Girls Think About Sex

Breaking Up is Even Worse if You've Had Sex (subtitled: "Seeing Him with His New Girlfriend in the Dining Hall will Just About Kill You")

Hormones Can Trump Your Best Intentions

Some STDs Are Yours For Keeps, Unlike the Guy Who Just Dumped You

Avoiding Near Occasions of Sin (subtitled: "Being Alone with a Member of the Opposite Sex in a Dorm Room, a Parked Car or a Parental Dwelling Place is Just Asking for Trouble")

Pre-Marital Sex is a Mortal Sin* and Do You Really Want Your Guardian Angel to See You Doing That?

Nice Boys Get Nice Girls Pregnant Every Day


We also have a series of talks on 1) the utter stupidity of going to bars and/or fraternity parties; 2) how drinking at age twenty-one or older is fine, but drunkenness is a mortal sin; 3) how girls who stupidly go to bars and/or fraternity parties and drink had better know what a roofie is and other assorted themes.

It can be really rugged. I mean, really. Intense, even. We talk and talk and talk. We don't know yet if what we're saying has taken hold of them, and we hope we're catching their hearts as well as their heads. Because there's an understanding of "Ewwww! I do NOT want to get HERPES!" and there's knowledge of what the Church teaches about God's law concerning human sexuality, but then there's also that part you're hoping is in there where they just don't want to disappoint Jesus and harm their relationship with Him.

Will it all work? Ask me again in a few years, once all the rose petals have been thrown at the last wedding.

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*Mortal sin is defined as a sin of grave matter, committed with the full knowledge and deliberate consent of the sinner. In other words, a mortal sin cannot be committed accidentally. Mortal sin destroys the life of grace in a person's soul and cuts a person off from a relationship with God.

Please don't write to me and tell me that God doesn't see a difference between mortal sins and smaller wrongdoing (venial sins). It's right there in your Bible. Have the courage and intellectual integrity to go and read this excellent article by Mark Shea where he spells it out, complete with verses from Scripture.

And also don't try to tell me that once you're saved, you're always saved. It won't work. I read the same Bible you do and I believe what it says. Just a friendly warning.

A total racket

One of the things Meelyn and Aisling are going to be doing daily in school this year is an SAT preparation course. It not only teaches them the kinds of problems that they'll find when they sit the exam, but also teaches them how to take the test, which could only be a good thing to know.

For instance, did you know that you shouldn't do problems you don't know how to do on the SAT?

I mentioned this to Gary and Katie the other night when the Prince of Salesmen and I were having dinner with them and Gary looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Yes, that's the way it was when we took the SAT."

"I'm sure it was," I sighed. "And I'm sure someone told me. But it didn't compute in my head because I was too busy thinking about lip gloss and boys and wondering what level of death my parents would kill me to if I skipped school to go buy Van Halen tickets in Indianapolis. So I answered EVERY SINGLE QUESTION, sometimes obligingly forming patterns in case just filling in the little 'a' circle a thousand times was very boring for the grader. Even back then, I was always thinking of others."

This would explain why, in the old way of scoring the SAT at 1600 points, I got a 740 on the verbal part and a 10 on the math. And I think I got those ten points because whatever entity grades the exams felt sorry for me: it was an act of MERCY.

So anyway, I want the girls to be prepared. I wish I'd done this last year with Meelyn instead of the way we DID do it, which turned out to be not as good as what we're going to do now and if you understood this sentence, you either know me way too well, or you yourself scored 900 out of 800 points on your verbal SAT.

My original way to handle SAT prep was to sign them up for an online course. I had some friends who recommended different thises and thats, but the one I latched on to seemed very comprehensive and the format was user friendly and the website looked well-maintained. "Yep, that's the one we'll go with!" I said to myself last April when I was researching these things.

The only problem was that my research neglected to extend to the COST of that online course. When I went to the website last Friday to enroll the girls, I was rendered temporarily unconscious when I read that a one year enrollment was SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS.

"Whoaaa....wait a minute. I must have momentarily blacked out, because I thought I just read that this online course costs six hundr...." and then I blacked out again, because my eyes once more fell on the button that read "One year course, $600. Click here to enroll now!"

I don't want to seem harsh, but OH MY GOSH HOW STUPID WOULD YOU HAVE TO BE to enroll your kid in an INTERNET course that costs SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS??!!

It's like my fingers won't even allow me to type that number in small letters. It's SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS, no matter how many times I press or unpress the caps lock key.

This is a course, please understand, where there is no human interaction. No instant messaging, no phoning, no mail-in-your-essay-and-we'll-grade-it, none of that. Zip! Zippo, zero, nada! SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS so that some bored techie can work from home making sure that all the buttons are clickable and that the shopping cart works because the owner of this site? He or she is probably off on a tour of the world on the new yacht. Which is probably named The Scammit or The Six Hundred Clams or something like that.

And if you think that's expensive, you should see how much some of the online courses that do offer personal interaction with a tutor cost.

Well, you know what? They're not getting my six hundred dollars. (There. It finally worked.) The fact that I don't have six hundred dollars is beside the point. The POINT is that I may have goofed up my own SAT all to heck, but I am not stupid. Shut up. I'm not. And there's no way non-stupid me is going to pay that much for an SAT prep course.

So I picked up the Barron's 2009 SAT prep book (see photo above) I bought last year at Amazon.com and grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper and a calendar and began meticulously going through that big thing, mapping out a strategy for the girls to study for the SAT. I hope it works. I don't know why it wouldn't. It isn't fancy, but it did cost me only the price of the book ($12.91) and about four hours of my time. I just can't see paying SIX HUNDR- oops, there it goes again -- that much money for an online course.

It's that time of year again!

I spent a few hours online yesterday ordering alllll the school books for the coming year. Meelyn will be a sophomore and Aisling will be a freshman. She's been a freshgirl for quite a number of years now, so it won't be much of a change.

There's a detailed list I need to publish here at InsomniMom so that I can keep track of these things, but for right now, let me say that I ordered Algebra 1, English Comp, American Lit (including three copies of The Scarlet Letter), Vocabulary, Traditional Logic 1 (Meelyn is so excited about this course, she can barely stay awake), French 1, American History and a bunch of other stuff. It was great fun, but I suspect that's because I'm not going to be the one studying all the books. Muuaaahahahahaa!!!

One very nice thing about this year's books is that we already have a lot of them: Aisling is moving into the books that Meelyn used last year. We already have Spanish 1, Biology 1, Analytical Grammar, religion, SAT prep and something else I can't remember right now. Once again, MANY thanks to Katie, who lent us her Apologia Biology book set AND her microscope AND her set of slides -- that would have been a huge outlay of money for us, but we have it all free because she is so generous. Katie, you'll be happy to know that your microscope has been with us for a whole year now, yet it is still intact and not sticky with nacho cheese.