Catch Up

Why do I do it?  Why do I allow myself to get sucked into conversations about homeschooling with folks who either A: want to argue or B: are arm-chair quarterbacking the issues?  Why do I read someone say “for the sake of the children and society in general, there should be some accountability of parent/teachers” and WANT to respond?  I’m not even good at those responses!  I need to just stop.  Is there a 12 step program?  But since this is my blog, what I would have said (yes, I did stop myself from responding… see!!  Aren’t you proud of me already?) may have contained some of the following:

Accoutability doesn’t seem to have helped the public school system out any… what would more accountability accomplish for private homeschools?  See, I think most of these quarterbacks choose not to acknowledge that homeschooling works to the advantage of society.  Or if they do, they just don’t want to admit that it works without somebody outside of the homeschool watching over the school’s shoulder.  “How can something work if society doesn’t have concrete knowledge of how it works?”  Here’s a good article: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/29/e6/28.pdf

So, are they just nosey and saying it’s for societal good alleviates the guilt of being nosey?  Can folks truly just not be content with staying out of other people’s business?  Yes, I know there are bad things that happen in isolation… but why is it better to regulate and limit innocent whole groups to save a small number of bad things from happening than just punishing those guilty of doing these limited number of bad things?

So, when I made that point on a messageboard I was told that the libertarian philosophy is nice but just like communism, doesn’t work in practice. *sigh*… I really don’t belong in debate circles… I’m not cut out for it.

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The holiday weekend was very nice.  P participated in a “Day Between” service at church meant to make you more aware of the depth of loss the disciples would have felt and therefore, the great hope that we have after resurrection.  It was a poignant service… all the teens were dressed in theatrical black, there was a Mary and Joseph carrying in a baby Jesus to begin and a reverse advent candle ceremony where candlelight was extinguished one at a time to emphasise everything the disciples believed they had “lost”.  At the end, each teen walked out and flanked the door with small votive candles in hand.

Easter dinner was here at home and my family came up but my in-laws didn’t want to be caught by bad weather.  Did I tell you we had about an inch and 1/2 of snow on the ground Monday morning?  It was gone by noon, but still!  Anyway, their Aunt surreptitiously hid eggs in different rooms of the house for them to hunt (I would have made them go outside) and I lazily put together different aspects of the meal all day long.  We had ham, Sam made biscuits, asparagus, steamed peas, baked beans and potato salad.  I had made a cheese torte the night before that was highly addictive with wheat thins and my cheese cake was a mess (I don’t know what happened… it was floating in water when I brought it out of the oven, but the springform pan was tight… don’t know.  So I bought a cheescake and everything was fine).  The tweens played darts with their aunt and the little one just flitted from one endulginf relative to the other.

Did I get my grand plan of home cleaning completely accomplished?  No, but we did make a lot of headway.  I still have some broken Christmas ornaments on my mantel that need to be repaired before packing up… still several boxes that need to be stored (including toys that overwhelm the upstairs spare bedroom) and ceiling tiles that need to be replaced in the kitchen AFTER I get up on the roof and sweep off the puddles of water (flat roofs are ALWAYS wrong!).

I rearranged my bedroom and that’s nice and the office is clean and orderly – that’s VERY nice.  Laundry is a constant and it seems the refrigerator stays messy and yucky.  Oh well.

Yesterday found the children and me dying Easter eggs and beginning to craft a tree to hang them on for a spring centerpiece.  Yeah, it’s a day late and a dollar short, but I’m not terribly fussy.

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Our itty-bitty production of Act 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in full swing.  My dancers are all picking up the 3 dances and one variation (Heart’s Ease, Maypole, Petit Reinse and a variation of that) nicely and we have 5 more 2 hour meetings until the event.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate with us as we are having it at the local nature preserve in a huge open meadow.  Tempting fate?  Probably, but we have a raindate and it’s free!  P is Puck, so she has a lot of lines to memorize… *biting fingernails and hoping she doesn’t see me*

And life goes on!  How is your spring going?  I’ve got some pictures I’m going to try to post soon and maybe a link to a video…