Spring is here. At least that's what the calender tells me. But today it has been snowing. Not enough to stick, just enough to keep everything sloppy, wet and cold. I walked up to the store today to pick up a few things, planning to get home and do the paperwork that has been hanging over my head like a wet, depressing, fog. I know I'll feel so much better once I get it done, but somehow I keep thinking of other things I need to do first. Grocery shopping, dishes, and hey, I haven't undated my blog in a while. Truly. When I'm done with this I will go and get started on it. Ugh.

I've been so tired lately. Maybe I have the residue of the cold/cough thing that seemed to linger over us for the past couple months. But I don't feel very motivated to do anything. I'd like to just turn the telly on and sink into mindlessness. It seems like I always mosey to the computer when I'm tired. Ya'all probably think I'm always tired!

I saw at Marbel's site a meme I thought was pretty good. It was from site and invites us to share our thoughts on this quote:

"Clearly there is an appropriate kind of sheltering. When those who are opposed to homeschooling accuse me of sheltering my children, my reply is always, 'What are you going to accuse me of next, feeding and clothing them?" ~R.C. Sproul Jr

That always kind of strikes me as kind of a "duh" moment, when people accuse me of sheltering my children. Of course I'm sheltering my children! Haven't they kind of noticed that this culture is just eating children alive? If I don't protect them, who will?

I'm protecting them from bullying, abusive teachers, over zealous social workers, and math phobias. I'm also sheltering them from having to walk top the bus in the cold morning, that noisy, obnoxious bus ride itself, classrooms with no windows, cafeteria food, and most especially, the gym locker room. From not having time to read the books you want to because your teacher said you HAVE to read Flowers for Algernon. (A most depressing book.) From the sinking fear that comes over you on Sunday night because you realize you are having a quiz in the morning and you completely forgot. The humiliation of having a teacher berate you in front of your whole class because you haven't figured out how to borrow in math. Hiding under the bleachers during PE because the boys in your class play dodge ball rather roughly and it scares you. And especially those politically motivated movies about global catastrophes like global warming, nuclear war and the clubbing of seals in Canada. From kids who thrash on other kids to hide their own insecurities, and from BECOMING one of those kids.

Yeah, I guess I shelter my children a little.

Karen @ Engstrom Family has certainly been coming up with some good videos lately. This one is an absolute treasure. This woman know what it's all about!

We are the Pirates who don't do anything!!!!

No, wait-

We are the candidates who don't believe anything!!!!!!!

Yeah-that's it.

Found this at the Anchoress. I thought it was rather funny.

It's late in the winter of 2005. Hillary and Obama are having lunch in the Senate Dining Room, brainstorming campaign ideas to pitch to the Democratic National Committee.
Obama: Why don't they have salsa on the table?
Hillary: What do you need salsa for?
Obama: Salsa is now the number one condiment in America.
Hillary: You know why? Because people like to say "salsa." "Excuse me, do you have salsa?" "We need more salsa." "Where is the salsa? No salsa?"
Obama: You know it must be impossible for a Spanish person to order seltzer and not get salsa. (Angry) "I wanted seltzer, not salsa."
Hillary: "Don't you know the difference between seltzer and salsa?? You have the seltzer after the salsa!"
Obama: (Just throwing it out there): This should be the campaign.
Hillary: What?
Obama: This. Just arguing. Arguing about nothing.
Hillary (Dismissing): Yeah, right.
Obama: No I'm serious. That sounds like a good idea.
Hillary: Just arguing? What's the campaign about?
Obama: It's about nothing.
Hillary: No real policies?
Obama: No, forget the policies.
Hillary: You've got to have policies.
Obama: Who says you gotta have policies? Remember when we were voting for... for that Senate resolution that proclaimed 'making good people feel good is a good thing' that time? That could be a whole presidential campaign.
Hillary: And who is running in this campaign about nothing? Who are the candidates?
Obama: I could be a candidate.
Hillary: You?
Obama: Yeah. You could run for President as a woman who is not really a woman, except when you cry, and I could run for President as a black man who is not really a black man, except when I go to church. Democrats would buy it. They really would. They're Democrats!
Hillary: So, on my campaign trail in 2008, there's a candidate following me around named Barack Hussein Obama?
Obama: Yeah. There's something wrong with that? I'm candidential. People are always saying to me, "You know you're a quite a candidate."
Hillary: And who else is on the campaign trail in this campaign about nothing?
Obama: That poof Edwards could be a candidate. Kucinich....
Hillary: Now he's a candidate..... So everybody I know is a candidate in the campaign?
Obama: Right.
Hillary: And it's about nothing?
Obama: Absolutely nothing.
Hillary: So you're saying, I go in to the DNC, and tell them I got this idea for a campaign about nothing.
Obama: WE go into the DNC.
Hillary: "We"? Since when are you experienced enough?
Obama (Scoffs): Experience. We're talking to Democrats.
Hillary: You want to go with me to the DNC?
Obama: Yeah. I think we really go something here.
Hillary: What do we got?
Obama: A concept.
Hillary: What concept?
Obama: A concept for a winning presidential campaign.
Hillary: I still don't know what the concept is!
Obama: It's a campaign about HOPE AND CHANGE. It's about nothing!
Hillary: Right. Who does HOPE and who does CHANGE?
Obama: I'll do HOPE and CHANGE because I can do nothing about them. You can do EXPERIENCE because you don't really have any. All these Republican candidates are going to campaign on something. We'll campaign on nothing!
Hillary: So, we go into the DNC, we tell them we've got an idea for a campaign about nothing.
Obama: Exactly.
Hillary: They say, "What's your campaign about?" I say, "Nothing."
Obama: There you go.
Hillary (After a moment of pause): I think you may have something there.




I especially like the part about "that poof Edwards." HEHEH

Well we are back up and running. :) The old computer seems pretty shot but some kind friends had mercy on us and gave us one of theirs. So, we get buy with a little help...

S. has one of her best chums over for a few days this week and they stayed up late watching movies so I have a bit of time this morning to put something up here. They have been eagerly awaiting a new Stargate movie coming out and wanted to all go to the theater together to watch it. Well, as it turns out it wasn't coming to the theaters, only DVD, so after recovering from their disappointment they decided to get the DVD and watch it on the big screen in the basement. And S. and Bethany slept down there-WITH THE HOBOS!!!!(spiders, that is-not the human type.) (Mrs. D. tell Tink they slept down there with the Hobos! I haven't checked to see if they were eaten yet..)

We have a sort of family rule that we can't do anything or like anything that is super, super popular. My dad says we are "reverse snobs". So everything we like is sort of the underdog type things. But the down side of that is that the bands we like hardly ever come, the movies we like only come out on DVD etc. *sigh* Oh well.. We still aren't going to do anything popular. So there!

The weather has been beautiful lately. I love spring in Oregon. I took some pictures of the boys playing outside but I have to figure out how to load onto this thing. Or I'll ask the kids to figure it out. They seem to have a much better instinct for these kinds of things. The cherry trees are blooming and the daphne which is so lovely. I love it when I go on walks and suddenly I can smell that sweet, sweet smell and I think "Oh, there must be daphne about" and sure enough, I look around and there it is.

Tonight there is a music performance thingy at church. My little girls are all singing in the girl's choir, F. is playing guitar and S. is singing a solo. I get so nervous when my children are going to perform something. I think it is harder on me than them! What is it about that? I'm so afraid of them messing up and taking it hard. But they also seem a lot more able to cope with those sorts of things than I was when I was a kid. I guess they have less of that peer dependency which made me so anxious that I would be made fun of when I did something in front of my friends. S. worries about where to put her eyes, though. She's afraid that if she looks at any of us in her family we will make her laugh. Now why would we do that? She has been working so hard on her song. Ack! I hope it all goes well.

I'm so thankful that our church has been such an aid to us in the musical education of our children because if it were dependant on R. and I it would have been sadly lacking. Music and sports. F. would never have learned the rules to basketball if it were up to us. But in our church my children have had the opportunity to learn violin, piano, guitar and voice so far. Hilary is wrong about it taking a village. It takes a family-and a church. :)

I'm hoping to get E. a mandolin. Then I would have a fiddle player (well, in years to come, Fi. is just starting on violin.) a guitar player, a singer, and we would about have a bluegrass band. Now, wouldn't that be fun? We have been listening to a lot of Nickle Creek lately. Sarah Watkin's voice reminds me of S's and we really like it. We saw them when they were just kids-I think Sarah was about 16, though that was about 7 years ago. Now they are getting pretty well known, at least in bluegrass circles, though they aren't strictly bluegrass.

Well, I guess now I will tootle around and see what is up with all of you. If I can. I am hearing signs of life downstairs...

Oh, if you need a little laugh, check out this video Karen has linked @ her blog. I wanna do it, like at Pioneer Square or even better, Saturday Market downtown! Wouldn't that be a kick?

Have you ever heard the Bob Dylan song "Everything is Broken"? It's the story of my life. Including my computer right now. So I'm at the library.

Boohoo.

S. has demanded that I post today. Heheh. I guess I'd better comply. She looked pretty stern. Well, I don't really know why I haven't, just busy, I guess.Last week O. was upstairs jumping on his little brother's bed. I told him "Get off Z.'s bed and come downstairs." Well, he did obey about the coming downstairs part but not about getting off Z's bed. That is he decided to slide down the stairs on Z's mattress. Unfortunately his forethought ended at the bottom stair and failed to take into account the bookshelves that are about a foot or two out from the stairs. The mattress came to an abrupt halt but O. went flying and smacked into the corner of the bookcase. Ugh.The blood didn't really start for a second or two and then he moved and it just started pouring. He started screaming and yelling "I'm dying I'm dying, somebody call an ambulance I'm dying!" Poor guy, I guess it is pretty scary to see all that blood. Well, we got him with a towel and called R. to pick me up some skin glue and such and we pasted him all back together. Had to put a few spare parts back, but he seems OK, only twitches a little bit. :)

See, he's back to normal. :)

Also I finally read the book Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher. I kind of wasn't really excited about reading it at first but a friend recommended it so I thought I'd give it a try. I was really pleased with it and liked it a whole lot better than I thought I would. It had a lot more depth to it than I thought. I guess I was kind of suspicious that it would be a sort of massage on the conscience of those who would really like to bow to the left on environmental type issues and so forth but can't leave their free market sensibilities, if that makes any sense. Or that it would have that kind of self righteous legalistic tone that sometimes comes from the agrarian side of the Cristian homeschooling group. I just didn't feel like I wanted to take time with either of those scenarios. But it was actually quite refreshing and not legalistic in it's tone at all. I'd like to get my own copy of it, if I can find it used, cheap somewhere. :)

Before I read it though, S. stole it and read it in a couple hours. (I used to not believe her when she said she read books that way, so I asked her questions and she could always answer.. so well.. It kind of reminds me of the way Agustas Gloop eats chocolate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the way that girl reads books.) When she was done I asked her what she thought and she said "Well, it was all pretty much the way I was raised." I guess it is that way because I think in Oregon Republicans just do tend to be more "crunchy" than the way they may be in say, Texas or something. But I thought it was really interesting and fleshed out a lot of the lines I've been thinking on.

The trick to this sort of thing, though, is not to make it a creed type of thing. You know, like the way certain groups all start imposing certain rules of the group on each other-like say you are in a certain group of homeschoolers and they all bake their own bread and if you don't it's kind of looked upon as a betrayal of the creed of the group? Or I remember during Y2K it almost looked like you were questioning the book of Revelation or something if you weren't saving up food.

Isn't that such a gracious approach? I remember once RC Sproul Jr said that writing a defence for reading to your children was like writing a defense for butterflies. (In a book catalog) Who wouldn't want to? Who wouldn't want to turn off the TV and spend a little time with your kids, go to a farm and eat a fresh tomato, spend more time just together as a family and a worship community?

Well, as I was going to Rod Dreher's blog to check how to spell his name, I saw this troubling post, and was reminded who wouldn't want us to do these things-teacher's unions aren't real thrilled at the idea. I hadn't heard anything about this. Better pray for the homeschoolers in California.