Please welcome Lila!

Emma and Ella have a new sister! Lila Elita Jean was born at 4:16 Saturday morning. She was 9 lbs., 6 ounces, has lovely dark hair and eyebrows, and is sweet and calm. Mom Erin and Dad Erik were both troupers (Mom through labor and delivery and Dad through a nasty bout of food poisoning).

In addition to her immediate family, Lila's arrival was attended by her aunties Megan, Denise, and Ronnie, and cousins MJ, Chloe, Chelsea, and Megan. The livingroom was a bit crowded, but it was sure a special time!

Blog neglect

I know, I know, no posts in weeks. Sorry! September is always a busy month for us, usually with at least one birthday party each weekend. This September has been even crazier because I had a big deadline last Thursday. I made my deadline, but that's about it for my news because I've spent so much time at work.

MJ and Chloe have been quite the social butterflies. In addition to all the birthday parties, they've had a couple of get-togethers with some of the kids from Not Back to School Camp. They spent one afternoon in Seattle, first in the University district and then downtown at the new library and beyond. There was a pack of about 12 of them, and they ended up having so much fun together that they organized an impromptu slumber party at one boy's house (a boy who obviously has very accommodating parents). That was so much fun that MJ and Chloe invited several kids over here for a sleepover the next week. It ended up being 5 girls and one outnumbered-and-loving-it boy.

As you can see, we have definitely entered the teen years. It's going to be fascinating.

Perhaps because of all this new exposure to other kids, we've had two different colds hit various family members this month. I got both of them, of course. Fortunately, the second one didn't attack until after my deadline.

Frank has been working pretty consistently, doing a second pass on all the files they threw at him so hurriedly in order to make one of their legally mandated milestones. But he's finished that now, so he should get a couple weeks of getting paid for being on call. I'm sure the girls wouldn't mind a tad bit more attention.

MJ continues her work at Hope for Horses. She got to be one of the bosses the day 30 or so Microsoft employees showed up at the barn for the Microsoft/United Way Day of Caring. Also, HFH is gearing up for their annual fundraiser auction, so she helped put together the packets and invites for that. She plans to work the auction, so we went to our favorite thrift store to find appropriate attire for an event at Bellevue's swank Meydenbauer Center. Mom and daughter disagree just a bit about what "appropriate" means. I found her this gorgeous, 100% silk Georgiou dress that looks fabulous on her -- the steal of the century at $5 -- but she thinks it's too boring. She prefers a cute spaghetti-strap number in blue (that I think is a bit casual). Her opinion will no doubt rule the day.

That thrift store is so fun! The three of us spent about $70 total and ended up with six dresses, a skirt, a jacket, and several shirts between us. All like new. Love it!

As you might have noticed, Chloe has not returned to Summerhill. In late August, she started expressing serious reservations about going back. We had a number of conversations about it, and Frank and I shared our best advice ("Go back"), but ultimately she decided that the good times she had there didn't outweigh her loneliness and boredom and some things about the school that made us all uncomfortable. (Here, I'll just say there was an incident that left us with serious doubts about the headmistress' competence. If you want the gossip, send me an e-mail.)

So, we have our daughter back. We felt compelled to advise her to go back, but Frank and I couldn't be happier that she ignored our advice! :-) She's been filling her time with the usual Chloe Variety Pack, but the last week or so has been devoted to watching over a hundred episodes of Inuyasha (anime) on YouTube. She is quite excited about it and now wants to learn Japanese. She's already putting together a bit of vocabulary, just from reading subtitles. The series is set in feudal Japan, so we've made some neat connections to other video ("Shogun" especially) and Dad's sword-based Japanese martial arts.

She's also conducting a bit of an experiment on herself. All this Inuyasha watching has taken place mostly at night, so she's started charting her sleep hours to see if her body runs on a 24-hour clock or not.

Anyway, all is well at our house (except maybe our upper respiratory systems).

Big news from New Orleans

Judy and Gary are engaged!!!!

No date has been set yet.

Happy Birthdays

To Gabrielle yesterday (12)
To MJ, Pam, and Judy today (14 and never you mind)
To Madison tomorrow (8)

The latest on Marty

Judy says:

"We're not real happy with the nursing home. It seems that another nursing home wouldn't be any better. We're VERY seriously considering taking him home once he's done with therapy. I need a little more info on what Medicare will cover and we need to see if we need to make some modifications to the house... I'm just not comfortable with him there & Gary has been very unhappy with their performance even with us going every day & keeping on them about stuff."

We'll keep you posted.

MJ the college student

We enrolled MJ in a drawing class at the community college today. Art 100. At the end of Fall term, she'll have her first two college credits. Not too shabby for a 14-year-old, eh?

Unschooling and allowance and math

Each of my kids gets an allowance. The amount has varied some over the years. Right now, they each get $10 per week. They don't have to do anything to earn that money; it's simply their share of the family income. (And when you think of it that way, $10 per week is not so much!)

The idea is that having money to spend will help them learn how to spend money. I think having a relatively generous allowance gives them more room to learn. I mean, about all you learn when all you have is $2 is that $2 doesn't buy much! At the level they're at, they can actually buy something now and then. They get practice choosing between desired items and saving for more expensive items (without being completely discouraged about how long it's taking), and they are learning how to make a dollar stretch.

The other area that this ready money addresses is math. Every time they go shopping anywhere, they get some math practice. They don't think of it that way -- they're just shopping -- but math happens anyway. Without teaching, they can figure percentages, estimate totals, multiply prices by quantities (or, in Chloe's case, add all those like prices together impressively quickly), and so on. This real life math is natural to them, stress free and practical. It's a far cry from the "I hate math" comments we were hearing when they were in school.

In fact, for most of us, it is only in school that math is something separate. The reality is that math is as much a part of everyday life as reading, writing, and speaking. Here's something I wrote recently about math in our lives:

"I've noticed quite a bit of math going on in our house lately, but I'm probably the only one who characterized it as such. My daughters were figuring out how many of these, estimating how much of that, playing with a new calculator, figuring a tip, calculating how many dollars this many [British] pounds is, measuring each other for their passport applications and talking about converting inches to feet, noticing patterns in some fractions, figuring out which new cage would give the rats the most floor area, asking questions about sales tax percentages, figuring out how many notebooks they could get for so many dollars at Target's 10-notebooks-for-a-dollar sale and how many pages that would be at 70 pages per notebook, and so on. They did all of this in a very matter-of-fact way: I need or want this information, and I'm going to figure it out. It's not 'math' to them, it's just taking care of business."

And how does all this translate to the math-on-paper skills the schools hope (but so often fail) to impart? Very well, actually. Neither girl has plans at the moment for going back to our lovely public schools, but I have every confidence they could slide back into the school flow with their former classmates without any difficulty. Except perhaps extreme boredom! ;-)

Artist Trading Cards

MJ has started making Artist Trading Cards. These are baseball card-sized pieces of art that can be collected, traded, or given away as a friendly sort of business card (title and artist information goes on the back). The content is as varied as the artists who create them.

Here are four of MJ's creations, our mutual favorites:





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To my Republican readers

I would be curious to know if your continuing support of the Republican party (meaning the more traditional, small-government, fiscally conservative Republican party) extends to Bush and his cronies. The speech linked below, delivered by Salt Lake City's mayor on the occasion of Bush's visit there, outlines several of the reasons that I, even if I were Republican, would find that particular group of people beyond tolerance.

I am aware that parts of the speech are easy-to-spout one-liners, especially near the end, but the middle part -- where he's describing the deliberate misinformation that led us into the war in Iraq -- outlines some of why I consider GW terrifyingly incompetent at best and a traitor and criminal at worst.

I am truly puzzled about why anyone would support him after all that. It's one thing to be determined to continue to vote Republican, whether due to concerns over a particular issue or because of a lifelong affiliation with the party, but why support Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld in spite of their clear failings?

Here's the speech: http://www.slcgov.com/mayor/speeches/2006%20speeches/SPdemonstration83006.pdf