A summer scholar hour

While my husband is off "playing army", I put my boys to work.  Many kinds of work.  We have indoor chores, we have outdoor chores, and we have academic chores.   In fact, I might be the only person I know who home schools my kids during the summer only.

But these boys, oh these boys.  Learning is so very hard for them that if I didn't drill them, any summer learning loss would become doubly dangerous.  And from my end, summer is generally the only time I have to teach them material the way that *I* think it ought to be taught.  Last summer, we had a "Financial Curriculum Summer camp", but timing conflicts this year kept me from repeating that glorious camp. (Sigh).  So instead, this summer we have a daily hour or two of scholarly work, broken into three pieces:

• Current events.  As I read the paper each morning, I choose an interesting article or two, and I write up a series of questions about it; I have the boys read the article(s) and answer the questions.  I want my boys to work with close reading of text, and also to make inferences about how the subject connects to their lives.  Then we discuss the article together and re-read the relevant parts to support our answers.  Dang, but my boys have trouble reading an article and answering questions about it!  Still, this is a low-effort activity from my own end; I like it as a way of holding my sons accountable for reading and for understanding something of the world around them.
• Quiet reading for half an hour.  ahhhh, peace and quiet.  There's nothing quite as lovely as sitting together in the living room, all of us curled up with our books, dog snoozing between us, and hearing J-son break into giggles over what he just read.  Very pleasant.  
• Math Problems.   This, although it is hard going for the boys, I love most of all.  I mean, obviously.   Darn poor kids have a mathematician as a mom!
  
  I especially love giving  the boys problems that require a mix of arithmetic, words, geometry, and strategy.   For example:  How many triangles can you make from these numbers: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9?   We reframed the "triangle inequality" as the "T. Rex inequality", deciding that the long edge of the triangle was like the body of the T. Rex, and the shorter sides were like the arms; they have to be long enough to reach the mouth.  That's not quite correct science, but it's a great analogy for working the problem.  (By the way, there are nine triangles.  Can you find them all?  How do you organize them, or do you organize them at all?  Good questions for kids and their parents to play with).

In fact, I like working math problems with my boys so much that I made up a series of worksheets for the boys to play with.  Here's the first worksheet in a trifecta of three; this little trifecta explores "Triangular Numbers".  (To see a picture of why 153 is the 17th Triangular Number, click here).  

On Day 2 of the trifecta, the boys used the birthday candle version of the question -- eventually, and with lots of false starts -- to figure out a way to add up the first one hundred natural numbers, that is, to create a shortcut for summing 1 + 2 + . . . + 100.  They're not quite Gauss yet, but I like giving them a chance to play with these famous problems and making the math their own.

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Per a reader request, I've put a pdf with the first 5 pages of math problems here.  More will follow eventually . . . .

How my dad spoils my sons

This is a photo of my dad, a mild-mannered gentleman pushing 80 years old.  

He's been cleaning out his home of 45 years, a project that has taken him well over a year now.   He thinks he's finally close to being done.   With school out for the boys and with our family needing a couple of projects to keep ourselves occupied, my sons and I went down earlier this week to help their Grandpa out.

And helping Grandpa is fabulous.  Because Grandpa is no ordinary 80-year-old guy; he's a Tool Guy, and helping him means getting to use his tools. 

Here's N-son, using the circular saw to take apart an old fiberglass fish pond (actually, we'd used it for turtles instead of fish). 

Note:   N-son (the one who had the stroke in utero so has trouble with the right side of his body).   Circular Saw.  Plugged in.  Even me, who grew up around these beasts, I made sure I knew where the tourniquet supplies were, but Grandpa just shrugged, and N-son was delighted.

Both boys asked me, "Mom, did this make you nervous?".  Me?  Ha-ha-ha.  Not telling.

Grandpa sent J-son up ladders to fix the gutter.  (My dad told me helpfully, "I told him not to fall off").

And J-son obeyed orders, not falling off, but working on the gutters high up in the air.

J-son is a kid who loves tools, but he hates heights.  And yet he was in his element; the gutters are fixed.

There were some ordinary pleasures.  That is, almost every kid gets to have fun cleaning things with a hose.  And yes, playing with water is a treat.

But using Grandpa's Power Washer, well, that's totally cool.  N-son started this project, and then jealous J-son took over.

We did more mundane tasks, too, like emptying out a tool shed or two.  But the equipment part of the visit was the part that creates the memories.  The boys had a blast.  Every kid should be spoiled with power tools every once in a while, right?

And we came back with all our fingers and toes.

Phew.

Dog food cans.

Just as I was getting ready to put a graceful end to this whole Canning Jar Fetish theme and move along, people, THIS happened.  My boys and I spent the day helping my dad clean out his old home, and he loaded us down with stuff for our home, including 6 cans of dog food.

Miser Dog seldom gets canned dog food, so we're mixing in half-a-can at a time with his dry dog food, spacing the pleasure out.  And when you have a half-full can of dog food that you're saving for later, how do you cover it up so that it doesn't stink up the refrigerator?

Out of canning jar habit, I reached for a large lid and ring.  And behold.

Oh, this is too funny.  The lid/ring combo is a perfect fit.

(This must mean that if you buy one of those snap-on-lids to go on top of pet food containers, it fits on canning jars, too?  I don't know if it would work in that direction.)

Hardly earth shaking -- but just too funny a coincidence for me to not share!

Paper, Plastic, Squirrels, and the F-21 washer constipation

Here's a little story about newspaper, plastic bags, dead squirrels, and constipated washing machines.  And the story has a happy ending (except for the squirrel).

The backdrop to this story is that I've worked hard to convince my local paper carrier to bring my newspaper "naked", meaning with no plastic bag.  This is harder than it seems; first, I made a newspaper box to keep the paper dry and clean, but even so, every time we switch carriers I have to call up and re-request no bag.  

Still now, mostly, I get naked newspapers.  Well, the papers do come wearing rubber bands, but I can live with those.

People have pointed out to me that plastic newspaper bags are great for picking up dog poop -- and this is true.  (More on that later).  But I do believe plastic bags are evil, and so I'd like to point out that it is also possible (although perhaps a bit more icky) to pick up disgusting things with the newspaper itself.  For example, we recently proved by example a person can pick up dead squirrels with newspapers.

It just so happens that Saturday morning we discovered a dead squirrel lying in my garden, looking for all the world like he was just taking a nap there. Weird.  (Lewis Thomas in Lives of a Cell remarks on how seldom we see death -- we'll see animals that get hit by cars or killed by our cats, but we don't often see animals that die of natural causes. Somehow, they seem to find private places to die. So seeing a dead squirrel curled up by my tomatoes was really an odd occurrence).

N-son christened the squirrel "Jimmy".  We used newspaper (the obituary section, naturally) to pick Jimmy the Dead Squirrel up, make him a little newspaper coffin, and bury him in a leaf pile

Poor Jimmy.

Jimmy's final resting place.  

But even despite my best "please-no-plastic" efforts, we do get lots of plastic bags in the Miser Mom household, and the boys do stuff these bags in their pockets when they walk the dog.  The boys do not always take the bags back OUT of their pockets.  And hence, the bags recently have ended up here . . .

. . . in the washing machine.  Sigh.

More specifically, said bags ended up lodged in the washing machine filter, causing an error light to flash "F-21!!!" at us, with all other lights blinking stridently at us to let us know that the washing machine was VERY unhappy.  Constipated washing machines are not cheerful appliances.

The last time our machine was constipated (which was in April, so really not very long ago -- sheesh), I was 10 feet deep in paperwork.  My husband called the appliance repair folks, who cheerfully came over to do their enema thing.  They also charged us $111.

But can I say, a clogged washing machine filter is REALLY easy to clean?  I mean, really really easy.  The hardest part is knowing whether it's actually possible for an untrained person to do it, and the easiest way to find out that the answer is YES is to do an internet search for the error code.  Here's the fix, in three easy steps.

1.  Take off the front panel.  It helps to have the right kind of hexagon socket wrench (those generally cost a lot less than $111, by the way).  Our panel has just one screw holding it on.  (Did I mention this is easy?)

2.  When you remove that front panel, theres's a white tube with a knob.  Unscrew that knob, and then stand back . . .

. . . because the washing machine feels blessed relief!  If you don't  have a drain in the floor like I do, you'll want a bucket or two.

3.  When the water is done gushing out, fish out the pens, the coins, and -- yes -- the plastic bags.  Then reassemble.

The fix took me 20 minutes, and that time included looking things up on the internet, searching for the right socket wrench, waiting for the water on the floor to go down the drain so I could reassemble everything without getting soaked, and basically the entire repair.  It's funny to see other people on the internet marveling at how quick and easy this is, too.   My favorite site was fixya.com, where people gleefully shared what they'd found in their clogged filters.  The list includes

• an ink pen, a green scrubby and several coins 
• I found $1.37 worth of change and a pair of thong underwear (not mine)! 
• Two Dimes a peace of 1*2 Plastic in line and a babby sock and STAPLES YES STAPLES 
• a pair of baby socks, hand full of pony tail holders and a pocket full of change! 
• 2 pairs of kids socks, a pocket full of change and some bra wires.
• I found a bunch of change 300 dollars and ton of lint. Make sure to take your money out of your pocket! 

I think I'm the only one with newspaper bags, and I only snagged 15¢ --- but then again, we've only been collecting money there since April.  And the $111 that I didn't spend on appliance repair?  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I'm definitely not leaving it in my pocket.

Goals and plans and summer and kids

Summer has arrived, and that means it's time for  . . . spreadsheets!!!

(Doesn't everyone start off the summer with a family meeting involving lists, calendars, and giant piles o' self-generated paperwork?)

Around the Miser Mom household, the kiddos have come to expect this sort of insane level of organization.  My own mom used to start us off each weekend with lists: my dad would make a fantastic Saturday brunch, and while we were eating, my mom would draw up the list of weekend chores, filling up a sheet (or two) of 8.5x11" paper in her elegant handwriting.  Over the course of the next two days, we'd all chip in, crossing items off the list as we finished them.  The list was awful/wonderful.  It was awful because it was full of chores.  It was wonderful because it was all there; you knew exactly what to do next, and you could see how close you were to being done.  After my mom died and my sisters and I reconvened to help Dad plan the memorial service, the first thing my sister did was draw up a list of household tasks that would get the place ready for the post-service reception.  We all gladly fell to working together, just like old times.

Although I don't start each weekend with a chore list, there are ways I've done my Mom one better.  My own summer spreadsheet has four or five categories (home tasks, once only; home tasks, repeated; garden; scholarly tasks; exercise).  I keep both an electronic version that I update year-to-year, and then I print out a specific year's version to share with the kids.

Late last night I pulled out the lists and the calendars and sat the boys down to map out the summer.   When I say "late last night", I mean 8 p.m. -- my brain starts to fry about 9 p.m., so this was my last mentally serviceable hour.  I chose this time so that I could bribe/threaten the boys into listening:  I cheerfully told them that if we couldn't finish planning before my brain fried, I'd just wake them up early to continue the discussion.

By the way, I have to say that this version of the bribe/threat has been my Hands-Down-Most-Successful summer parenting trick.  Ever.  The boys stay up way later than I do (theoretically, until 10:30, but actually, who knows???).  Do they make noise at night? They used to, but if they wake me up at night, I wake them up in the morning.  No more noise now. Do they leave a mess in the kitchen and living room?  They used to, but now if I wake up to a mess, I wake them up to clean it up, and so nowadays I arise to a tidy home.    Ergo, the bribe/threat of continuing the planning discussion in the morning was all that I needed to ensure we'd finish our planning session last night.

I was glad to see that, after several years of this ritual, the boys have come to appreciate the awful/wonderful dichotomy of lists.  I pulled out my spreadsheet and they grabbed for it, curious (in a semi-morbid way) about what was in store for them.  J-son asked about tasks I hadn't included on the list that he wanted to include, so I added those.  In the same way, we went through the summer calendar of trips and volunteer weeks and sports camps, noting when the boys would have open spaces for hanging with friends. N-son did a happy dance about his squash and tennis weeks.   J-son confidently pointed out weeks where he was sure his dad would take him boxing.  Afterwards, we put together a cooking plan and a grocery list.  By 9:00 p.m., just as my brain was beginning to mushify, J-son helped me prepare our latest box of CSA vegetables, and by 9:30 I was in bed.  The boys switched to quiet mode.

It's 8 a.m.; I've been up for two hours and the boys are still asleep.  Lovely.  Hello, summer!

My Viktor Frankl summer plan

Summer is supposed to be a time of fun, relaxation, and merriment.  It doesn't seem like the time to invoke the name of Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust Survivor and author of the influential book, Man's Search for Meaning.

And yet.

And yet, here in the Miser Mom household, summer is not always the carefree and joyous time that it is for other families.  The upcoming summer doesn't threaten to be as overwhelmingly oppressive as the summer we took care of a troubled teenager (C-son), who turned our days and nights upside down and eventually left our home under police escort.  But even so, both of our boys have a heck of a lot more energy and a heck of a lot less impulse control than our daughters ever did.  Caring for them during the summer takes a lot of pre-planning, and it takes a lot of hands-on time.

And even with pre-planning and hands-on time, the boys can spiral into really rotten behaviors.  The swirl of stealing and other bad behavior that J-son got into two years ago during that time we still call The Horrible Week-- that swirl of behavior started in August 2013 when he was getting bored and looking for something to do.  The Something-To-Do he stumbled upon was Not Good Activities.  With time and energy and effort and drugs and locks and persistence we managed to drag him away from these, but the lure of Not Good Activities occasionally still beckons to him.

Compounding the boy-care problem is that my husband and I are each facing transitions of our own.  Me, I'm still climbing up out of a boggy cave of insanely mucky and intensive committee work, and I'm turning my face toward the glory of a sabbatical shining down upon me.  My husband, he's facing a retirement that officially begins June 30, a date we expected, but that is not entirely of his own choosing.  The transition to retirement has its own psychological challenges, and my husband is currently battling some of those particular dragons.

So the approach of summer creates a kind of an existential crisis for my family, particularly for the guys.   My husband wonders, will he throw away his last few bike-racing-years guarding hooligans?  My sons wonder if they will ever have money, or the ability to drive, or the kind of social lives they imagine that their friends have, or control over their own lives.  Even me, I wonder if I will finally have a chance to do math anytime soon, or whether I will have to wait until school begins to re-kick-start my research.   So we're not exactly saying, "Woo-hoo!  Beach, here we come!"  Instead, we prepare almost as though for hurricanes.   In spite of all my best attempts at bubbly-ness, the past few weeks of anticipating the end of school have been dreary and dreadful for my guys.

Enter Viktor Frankl.

Frankl wrote that the will to continue through rocky times (like camps, either concentration or tennis) follows from having a greater purpose in life.  To buoy up my guys, I've been interviewing them about what it is they want to get out of the summer.  I will be rounding this out by asking my daughters the same thing.  I've been taking Frankl's advice a step further, sharing the answers around the family, having us pledge to try to support one another in our goals.

• My husband wants to race bikes.  He wants to train to the point of exhaustion, to throw himself into competition and camaraderie.  He also wants to learn Russian and to write a book and to go to coffee shops with friends.
• J-son wants to get a job, to learn to box, to go to the library, to play Lacrosse, and to hang with his friends.
• N-son wants to play with J-son, he wants to join a drum line, and he wants to ride his bike.
• Our recent addition, Y, new to our city, wants to do local-county things: yard sale, go to Farmer's Markets, pick peaches. She also wants to prepare for her InterVarsity ministry.
• I want to repair broken things around the house, and garden, and do some friggin' math.

I observe that nobody wants to clean the house or make dinner.  Notice that? So we'll all share in these chores.

Just knowing this, just naming our various aspirations out loud, it helps.  My husband and J-son were both surprised (in a good way) at each other's lists.  We are, perhaps, not quite as apprehensive and maybe even a bit excited about working on projects we all like.  We've worked with J-son on applying for jobs.  We've made a bit of time for my husband to ride his bike unto exhaustion.  The boys have planned meals they will cook.

The summer for us officially kicks off on Friday morning, when the boys wake up to their first day of of school-less-ness and my husband heads to army camp for two weeks.  I'll do my usual stint of solo parenting as the boys transition away from a daily institutional schedule into a self-determined calendar, and after that we'll figure out how to navigate the wide open, scary spaces of free time.  

Breaking up is good to do

From the ongoing bedtime story called If You Give a MiserMom a Canning Jar . . . comes this one obvious chapter on the use of canning jars: you can use them to hold food.

Like, of course.

You can even use canning jars to hold food that you didn't even bother to can.

Still a no brainer, I know.  But it's one of the most common ways I'm using jars nowadays.

There's a purpose beyond busy-work for transferring food that comes in bags, boxes, and bins into these jars. I don't put my food into jars just because everything is prettier that way than when it's heaped up in bags and boxes (although I do think jars of dry beans have a certain aesthetic quality to them).

Pretty beans?

The reason I use canning jars is not so that I can store the food; it's so I can retrieve it.

I buy most of my dry goods in bulk. If I tried to store it all in the kitchen, my shelves would be so full I could never find anything.  So I store most of my food in the pantry in the basement, and I keep just enough upstairs that I can see it and use it.  If I need more, I just go "shopping" in the basement. I could store all of that food in large bins, but I use small jars instead:  I'm a lot more likely to grab a pint of dry beans off the shelf than wrestle with some giant bag or bin.  That means I'm more likely to use the food I already have.

For my hungry family, a pint jar of dry beans happens to be just about the right amount to toss straight into a pot of water to soak overnight: no measuring cups involved.  For the same ease-of-use reason, I've divvied up what was left from a bag of rye flour into pint-sized canning jars.  Before I put it into jars, the bag sat curled up in a drawer staring at me balefully and taunting me, for months.   Bags of rye flour are just messy beasts to use, aren't they?.  But once the rye was corralled and pre-measured within easy grab-n-go jars, it was a cinch to use the flour up the next few times I made bread.

The grab-n-go is why I put our leftover Swiss Chard salad in a quart-sized canning jar one night.  The next morning, it went straight into my lunch bag along with a small jar of cashews.  By lunch time, all was history.

It's why, when I make pots of soup, we don't put the leftovers into the fridge until we've transferred everything to jars.  (Canning jars don't leak, and once you remove the lids and rings, canning jars can go straight into the microwave).

What you're looking at above is lunch-lunch-lunch-snack-lunch.  No prep time, just yum.

If you give a Miser Mom a Canning Jar, she can take it anywhere.