Haus of Holmes

Spring Break

maternaturalis — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:50:55 +0000

We’ve been on spring break this week, and using the time to do some much-needed spring cleaning. We’ve noticed a couple things while doing this. 1) The more you clean, the more you notice that needs cleaning. After having cleaned for several days, my list of what needs to be cleaned/organized is now longer than it was when I started. Much of this will end up being summer cleaning! 2) If you put all your time into deep cleaning, and don’t keep up with the daily cleaning, then you can get to the end of a day of cleaning and have the house look worse than it did at the beginning. That’s kind of discouraging, although the truth is that then after doing the daily chores the house will suddenly look much better.

We took a break from the cleaning this morning to bottle our strawberry wine, which has been ready to be bottled for a little while now. I calculated that we would need twenty-five bottles, and brought them up last night. This morning we sanitized the bottles and equipment, and bottled the wine. We filled all the bottles, which somehow turned out to be only twenty-three, and ended up with some wine left over – probably about two bottles worth! Apparently I can’t count late at night. Oh, well, that’s still a pretty good result. Hopefully it will turn out well. We tasted it, but young wine doesn’t really taste very good. It will have to mature in the bottles for at least a couple of months before it will be worth drinking.

Sound Effects

maternaturalis — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:37:53 +0000

Isaiah had his sixth birthday a few days ago. One of his gifts was a popgun, and another one was a book called The Rattletrap Car, which has frequent repetitions of the word “pop”. You can see where this is going, right? That’s right, he’s been reading the book, popgun in hand, and adding the appropriate sound effect every time he gets to the word “pop”. This has been motivating him into some pretty good reading practice, as this book has some complicated words like “chocolate”, “fudge”, “razzleberry”, and so on. Not an anticipated result of the popgun, but welcome none the less!

Mystery Solved

maternaturalis — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:56:09 +0000

I mentioned in an earlier post that when I don’t do school with the boys somehow I don’t have two extra hours in the morning, even though I spend about two hours working with them. I think I’ve solved the mystery there. I paid close attention today to just what was happening through the morning, and realized that in fact I am multi-tasking through most of that time. For assignments that are basically recitation I will have whomever is doing it follow me around while I do something else; while D. is doing math I help him with the beginning of his lesson, but then I do kitchen clean-up during the rest of it, where I am available if needed but not actually sitting with him. For part of our “couch school” time (which consists both of them reading to me and of me reading to them), I am usually nursing the baby. In all, during the time that we are doing school, I am also doing laundry, putting away breakfast dishes and clearing the kitchen counters, stoking the fire, nursing, pottying, and changing the baby, and supervising the non-school age children. All of which still has to be done on non-school days. There is actually not more than forty minutes or so when I am only doing school with them, and so forty extra minutes is about all I get when we don’t do it. In a way it is encouraging that we are able to pull it off so efficiently, but in a way it is discouraging, because, well, see above. At any rate, I can see that I’m actually not wasting time on those days when we aren’t doing school, but just doing fewer things at one time.

Still in the Running

maternaturalis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:00:57 +0000

I’ve completed the third week of my “couch to 5k” program, and so far have been able to keep up with it. Assuming I don’t get off track, this puts me a third of the way through it now, since the full program is nine weeks long. However, next week gets significantly harder, so I may end up repeating this week again. Which would be fine, as I can already see a difference in my fitness after only three weeks. I’ve been tracking my heart rate with an oximeter, which also tells me my o2 level. That has been interesting to watch. On the first day, my o2 bottomed out at 92%; yesterday, exercising to the same heart rate, it never got lower than 95%. One of the few advantages to being out of shape is that you do get to see changes faster!

Two Months Old

maternaturalis — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:41:36 +0000

Faustina’s biggest change from last month is that she is much more interactive now. She loves being talked to, and will readily smile and coo at anyone who gives her attention, even down to the other little ones, like Regina and Teresa. She has also much improved in her ability to take in what is going on around her. This is where it really comes in handy having older siblings: she now can enjoy spending some time sitting in her seat and watching the others play. Another change she has made that has made her a little easier to take care of is that of consolidating her naps, taking fewer and longer naps than she was before. Beyond these things there has not been a whole lot of change. These early months are generally pretty quiet as far as outward development goes, though of course there is a lot going on inside.

It would have been appropriate to add a smiley picture of Faustina here, but unfortunately she has spent the last two days being uncharacteristically grumpy. Rather than put in a grumpy picture, I’ll come back later and put in a nice one after she has returned to her cheerful self.

Lesson Planning

maternaturalis — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:00:56 +0000

One project I managed to do this weekend while I wasn’t feeling good was finishing up the lesson plans for the rest of the school year. Ideally I would have had them all done last summer, but that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen last year either….

One thing I’ve noticed about doing my lesson plans this way is that I’m not very good at getting everything to come out evenly. We do lots of everything at the beginning of the year, and more moderately in the middle, and then by the end of the year things start getting spread pretty thinly. By the last month or so we end up having finished off most books, and just having a few subjects left, or just a few pages a day in each subject. I think part of the reason this happens is that I worry that something might make us fall behind, and in order to make it easier to catch up if that happens I assign more than is necessary at the beginning of the year. Then if we don’t fall behind, we finish some things early. One upside to this is that we tend to be getting tired of school by spring time anyway, and this gives us less to do at that point. A downside is that the end of school becomes a little less definite. Instead of a normal finish, it kind of just tapers off, especially if we continue until every lesson in every book is done, which would result in a week or so of just one subject per day. This taper-off and never-quite-finished effect is made worse by the fact that we continue some school work through the summer, so they don’t forget everything.

Well, maybe I just need to plan an end-of-the-school-year party at the point where we are pretty much done, to put an official end on things, and then take at least a couple weeks completely off, before picking up again. Then I can call what we do during the summer “Summer Term”, to distinguish it from the previous school year, even if some of what we are doing is actually finishing those last five lessons from the year.

My Turn

maternaturalis — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:35:23 +0000

My turn for being sick, that is. That was yesterday; today I’ve been recovering. I am assuming it was the same bug the kids had, though my symptoms were not exactly the same. I never did throw up, though I felt like I was going to all day, and wasn’t able to eat or drink normally. I ran a low-grade fever, with all the chills and aches that go along with that, and so was unable to do much at all. Faustina may have been fighting the same bug, which was kind of a mercy. She didn’t act sick (no fever, fussiness, etc.), but she slept much more than usual all day, mostly just waking up to go potty and nurse, and then go back to sleep. When we got to night time she even went down easily with me at 9:00. Today she is back to normal, and I am almost there.

A Return to Warmer Weather?

maternaturalis — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:15:16 +0000

Our thermometer has read 48 degrees today, the warmest it has been in quite a while. The snow has started to melt, and the icicles on the back of the house drip, drip, dripped all through the morning, and finally fell down when the sun shone directly onto them in the afternoon. And the snow plows finally came through and plowed all the back roads! Hurray! I’m just not an icy-roads driver. Maybe now I’ll get out this weekend.

The kids are all out now, sledding while there is still snow there. I’m pretty much stuck inside with Faustina, though. I look forward to next winter when she will be old enough to bring outside for at least short periods, and then I can get outside to soak in some of this winter sunshine. Admittedly, even more I look forward to this summer! But for now, we’re still waiting for that early spring….

Sick Day

maternaturalis — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:41:57 +0000

We had to take a sick day today, since the two boys I work with were both feeling too bad to concentrate on school. Isaiah seems over being actively sick, but is still recovering from the effects of not having eaten or drank anything yesterday. David went to bed last night feeling fine, but knocked on our door in the middle of the night to say, “Papa, I do believe I have gotten sick. I just threw up.” (Thankfully, he had enough self-awareness to make it to the bathroom and take care of it himself, unlike the younger ones.)

Since I am fortunately still not sick myself, not doing school with the boys in theory meant I would have an extra two hours in the morning. Somehow by the end of the morning, it didn’t seem like there had been much extra time, though. I did manage to bake some bread and muffins for the freezer, to partly replenish the supply we have used up since Faustina was born. That wouldn’t have taken two hours, though, so I’m not sure what happened to the rest of the time.

Sometimes it seems that taking care of children is like a gas: it expands to fill whatever space of time there is for it. However, it doesn’t work in reverse: when there is less time for taking care of them, there is not less work to be done. This might sound unrealistic, since that would result in the work to be done endlessly increasing, but at the moment it kind of feels as though that is what’s happening. First Faustina and all that a new baby involves, then the inevitable extra attention the toddler needs when there is a new baby in the house, then potty-training, then sickness, and so on. I have to keep reminding myself that all of this is in God’s plan (even the sickness!), and somehow it will all work out for our good, if we just keep on loving Him and doing His will. (Romans 8:28)

Illness Update

maternaturalis — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:01:13 +0000

I was hoping not to have to update on this topic again for a good long while, but things have not gone as I had hoped. After two days with everyone well, three more children have succumbed to the illness, all within hours of each other. These are the younger ones, who apparently don’t have much awareness of what is going on inside until it is too late. It’s at times like these that I really wish we didn’t have carpet.

I’m feeling just a little bit queasy myself now, and am just a bit panicky about what will happen if I get sick. I have not been sick this way before with such a young baby, and I don’t know how complete fasting from food and liquids would affect my milk supply. Plus, with everything J. needs to be doing this week, I really need to not be out of commission right now. Ora pro nobis!