A while ago I wrote about my job and how I was learning to balance work, home, and fun.

I’ve learned the lesson, except it’s not quite the way I envisioned learning it:  I quit my job.

I’m not in any way suggesting that everyone has to do what I ended up doing in order to find balance; heck, given a different job, I’m not sure that *I* had to do what I did in order to find balance.  But life is what it is and honestly, I’m not sure I would do it differently if given the chance for a do-over.

The job was always interesting, always busy.  I never (ever) stopped from the time I logged in until I signed off for the day – most days I never took lunch, either.  A bad precedent, I’m aware, but such is life.  I wanted to make a good impression and give my all for the company.  I did that – and for the first several months, all was well in the work-world.

However, all was not well in my home.  I was getting sick (weakened immunity from constant stress) and I was finding that I was becoming someone that I simply didn’t want to be around.  I was grouchy, stressed-out, and I didn’t find joy in the normal things I do for my family – like experimenting with cuisine, chores & organization, and having fun with them spontaneously.  I dreaded the start of the work-week and began to resent homeschooling – and the latter really, really bothered me.

Through a confluence of events, I got sick, took 1-½ sick-days, and heard God clearly tell me that I was neglecting my first responsibility and priority:  my family.  The second sick day, I found myself homeschooling our son (because unless I’m dying, school must go on) and actually *enjoying* it.  Which meant that I had begun to resent it because it encroached on my work-day, not because the actual educating of my child was untenable to me.  This was GOOD news.

And so I told my husband what I needed to do:  quit.  And I did.

I achieved a goal for us as a family during the few months I worked – I paid off one entire credit card.  I was pretty stinkin’ happy and proud of myself with this accomplishment, and the debt-snowball continues.  I didn’t want to lose steam on our debt chunk-down, but I also realized that my family couldn’t be sacrificed in the process of achieving my goal.  And so when people asked me “What are you going to do?”  I was able to answer honestly:  I don’t know.  But I wasn’t worried.  I truly believed that God honours the desire to get out of debt and that He would bring opportunities my way in the meantime.

Just like clockwork, opportunities have been coming my way.  I’m writing for a few other outlets and clients now (you can also find me at The English Tea Store Blog and The Taste of English Tea).  I’m also in the process of setting up my photography studio and working on my business site at the same time and have enjoyed shooting at every opportunity.  I’m content to let these opportunities come as they will and am enjoying my renewed existence here at home.

It took working my heart and soul out for a company to remind me what I really enjoy doing and how blessed I really am.  We’ve made huge sacrifices to allow me to be at home, to homeschool, and to have time to experiment with gardening, sewing, baking, canning, etc.  I don’t want to minimize those sacrifices or try to sell a bill of goods that says it’s “easy” or “not a big deal.”  It IS a big deal, but it’s also one that I took for granted and it took working full-time to allow me to remember exactly how much I like following my heart and being at home.

Dorothy was right:  there really *is* no place like home.  But I’ll skip the sequined shoes.

RSS readers – hop on over – the pictures on the site are unlike any you’ll see anyplace else.  This is momentous stuff! 

So while our Big Boy is eating (why I assume a male gender for these caterpillars, I don’t know) … and eating … and eating, our Little Boy is getting big.  You can see Mark’s thumbnail (it’s not a giant thumb, just a regular sized one) as a point of comparison.

Big Boy is eating the heads of the flower-buds, which we’ve not provided for lunch before this.  It’s an interesting thing and seems to have produced some of his massive growth.  In past years, we simply cut leaves and put them in the container with the caterpillars.  There are always circumstances that change and things you cannot control (heat, humidity, etc.) which might affect a growth trajectory, but my hunch is that the flower buds make a difference.

And then it happened.  Yesterday morning, Mark said, “Oh, we’re headed to chrysalis!”  I came over and looked – sure enough!  Monarch caterpillars only hit this “J”-shape for one reason – to rest and begin chrysalis.  I couldn’t remember how long it took our last batch to form their chrysalis, just that it happened when we weren’t watching – or couldn’t watch (i.e., overnight).

Later yesterday morning, I went to the kitchen (where this science experiment lives) to make Brendan’s lunch.  I looked at the container to see the strangest thing … our Big Boy had a blob of green on him.  I grabbed the camera to document, and lo & behold … he formed his chrysalis right before our eyes.  I hollered for Brendan and this is what we saw – shot at about 10 second intervals.

from left to right, you can see the chrysalis forming and climbing up its body, ring by ring.

A little more now ….

Almost there….

As the chrysalis closed in over his body, Big Boy looked a little uncomfortable to me.  I wasn’t quite sure how he would get his legs and antennae in the chrysalis as he finished making it, but then I realized ….

… it wasn’t his legs & antennae, it was a skin that he shed.  I’d forgotten that as they grow, monarch caterpillars shed their skins.  Apparently, Big Boy decided that he could do that once & for all when he formed his chrysalis, and so as it fell off (when the chrysalis closed at the top), I realized what was going on.

It’s cramped quarters in there and even now, his chrysalis is undergoing changes.  But this is, by far, one of the coolest things I’ve ever witnessed.  Amazing.

This is another post that is better read on the site than in an RSS reader – the photos will not show up in RSS.  So, c’mon over!

Wow, this caterpillar just keeps on growing!  Two years ago when we hatched them and took photos, the whole process took about 3.5 weeks.  The growth was incremental, but this little guy’s growth has been astronomical in terms of rate & comparison.

Brendan’s favourite thing to point out is the caterpillar poo – they are known to “eat and poo” as a matter of course.  And of course, as they get bigger, their poo increases in size.  Which, for whatever unfathomable reason, is fascinating to a 7 y/o boy.

These shots were taken with my Nikon D70s and a 70-300mm lens with macro setting.  So honestly, although he looks huge here, Mr. Caterpillar isn’t *that* big.  But it was the best way to show off his details and cool body.

We also found a new baby caterpillar at the same time – Karen said that she’d found some inadvertently when bringing in the budded stalks, and so did we.  This little guy is about the size of a grain of rice in this picture (again, shot in macro).

The big guy gave me some cool angles to shoot him – instead of placing him in a jar, we maintained the stalk-setup (which I prefer), partially because it was easy, and partially because it mimics what they would do in nature, if not already eaten by a predator. So popping over the top of a leaf to munch was pretty fun to grab on camera.

Apparently, having multiple sets of legs also makes Mr. Caterpillar quite agile & having a long, segmented body makes him quite flexible.  I’m not sure it would help my perpetual clumsiness or not – it would probably magnify the fact that I cannot maintain vertical presence.

So watching and waiting – the growth is unprecedented in this guy, and our newest hatchling is doing quite well, also.  Stay tuned!

Oh, and all of these shots and more are over at my Flickr account – check out the badge to the right and go take a look in full size & high res!

Here’s another post, that if you’re reading in RSS on a reader, you’ll want to check out the actual blog.  The photos are worth it.

So two years ago, we had a summer of bullfrogs & butterflies, as we hatched tadpoles in to frogs & released them and hatched monarch eggs in to caterpillars, watched their chrysalis, & then released them as butterflies.

And we’re having one again – minus the tadpoles.

My friend Karen, who is a butterfly afficianado, welcomed us to her home and found a caterpillar for us.  Our milkweed has yet to turn up any eggs, but I keep checking & looking.  Karen said that this year, the butterflies seem to be laying eggs in the flower of the milkweed, not on the backs of the leaves as we’ve seen in the past. 

The first day we brought the little guy home, he was pretty quiet.  Hidden in the flower of the plant, he seemed content to nibble here and there, and short of seeing tiny bits of caterpillar poo, you wouldn’t have a clue.

He’s tiny – this shot was taken without a macro lens and he is about 1/4″ (2.5cm) long.

The next day, I caught these shots with my macro:

He looks much bigger than the day before, but he’s only about 1/2″ long (5cm).  While it’s tiny, he’s essentially doubled his size in 24 hours and will continue at this phenomenal growth rate until chrysalis.

Right now, a grain of  Japanese (sticky) rice is about half of his size – in previous years I put a dime on the leaf for comparison, but these leaves are being held up vertically, so that doesn’t work.

I also have a leaf with an egg on it – the egg hasn’t hatched and Karen thinks it’s something other than a monarch egg.  We’ll keep watching it to see what comes out of it (if anything – two years ago we had a dud that never hatched).

Stay tuned – I have more photos and more updates to come!

There’s this place in life that comes naturally but isn’t all that attractive.  I call it the “My Kid is Amazing… How ‘Bout Yours?”-stage.  It’s the uncomfortable place of comparing kids, abilities, and doing so in a way that expresses superiority to other moms and those around us.

I have tried really, really hard not to fall in to that trap in Brendan’s 7 years.  And for the most part, I’ve succeeded.  My kid is healthy, growing, and on his own trajectory.  He’s bright, makes good connections between things, events, and words on a page.  We don’t even use letter grades in our homeschooling, mostly because I don’t think they are useful.  When he makes a mistake, I give him the ability to correct it and learn from the mistake, and we work through any difficulties that way.  There is nothing redemptive or helpful, in my opinion, about putting an A, B, C, D, or F (although it was E when I was in high school) on the top of a page.  The learning comes in when the mistake has the opportunity to be corrected and turned in to a chance to master something a bit more.

But I was bothered a few weeks ago when a friend posted on Facebook about her child successfully completing the year-end assessment that her state requires.  I believe her words to describe her child’s work were ‘with flying colours.’  I like my friend and I’m glad her child did well, but I found myself in an uncomfortable place of feeling as though what we do for school simply wasn’t enough.  I don’t want to add in year-end assessments and make it all about “passing a test” (one of the main reasons we homeschool is to avoid the No Child Left Behind madness and testing-til-you-drop garbage).  Brendan’s reading well, made it through his entire math curriculum, (which as a first-grader, is about what I was doing in third grade), loves learning, and did well.  We had rough days when he was tired, frustrated, or whatever, but every kid has those, public-, private-, or home- schooled they may be.

Combine that with my child’s insatiable curiosity and desire to read and we end up at my conundrum.  He went from easy word recognition and Level 1 readers in the fall of last year, straight through to Level 2s (some of the harder ones like Amelia Bedelia), plowed through Level 3s, and today just finished his first Level 4 book (The Titanic: Lost and Found).  My dear friend even tested him back in March when we visited (she teaches public school down south) with the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA).  He tested back then at an 18-20, and was expected to be at a 12-14 by the end of first grade.  So he was reading ‘above level’ back then, but what exactly does that mean?

I set out to research and try to figure it out this past week.  What I learned will not shock many (any?) homeschooling parents, but might surprise non-homeschoolers.  There are a TON of reading assessment programs out there! And absolutely none of them correlate with anything comprehensible to anyone outside of professional educational theory or practice. 

What follows is a smattering of different testing programs and “reading level assessments”:

• Rigby Leveling System Comparison
• Accelerated Reader
• Fry Readability Graph
• Lexile Level
• SMOG Readability Formula
• Professional Achievement Testing
• Five-Finger Method
• Schonell Reading Test
• Jerry L. Johns Reading Inventory
• Fountas & Pinnell’s Levels
• Reading Recovery Level
• Developmental Reading Assessment
• Qualitative Reading Inventory
• Flesch-Kincaid Index
• Edit Central Style & Diction evaluation
• and more…

Clearly, it’s overwhelming.  What I really wanted to know (and understand) was whether my son was reading at, above, or below where he “ought to be” if he were in public school.  Reading is an incredibly important part of my life and one of the things I prayed for when I was pregnant with this little guy was that he would love to read.  Seems silly, but it was (and is) that important to me.  I probably should have been satisfied with what my friend down south told me, but Brendan’s reading was above what it was when we last saw her and my curiosity got the better of me.

I know, curiosity KO’d the feline. 

So I tried a few things.  I printed off the Schonell reading test, which was actually interesting.  What’s nice about it is that it can be used to assess and keep track of word recognition ability as the student grows and continues to learn.  What’s not so helpful is that it appears to have European roots and gives a “reading age” assessment result, which basically tells me nothing.  Brendan came up with an 8 for “reading age,” but that converted in to gibberish in my head. 

The DRA, which appears to be used in many public school systems here in the US, is good, but not understanding the seemingly-arbitrary levels it has as results, is fairly useless to me as a home-educator.  And in order to use the product, one must purchase a lot of expensive materials.

The assessment that I found the most accurate and best indicator for our needs was the Leveled Book List.  The LBL is hosted by a private citizen and merely lists common elementary-level books and their grade-level assessment.  It doesn’t assess the child, but allows the parents to do that.  The indication of how the child is doing is based on the child’s aptitude and frustration level – if the youngster gets too frustrated, the book is too hard.  It is as simple as that.  Based on that list, I was able to look at books that Brendan has read and mastered and determine at what “grade level” he is currently reading.

What’s ultimately useful to me in this whole exercise and experience is that I got my frustration about feeling as though I was “competing” with other parents and how their children are doing in educational pursuits, but more practically, it gives me a good idea what to purchase for next year’s school books and materials.  Although we don’t use grades and whatnot to mark achievement, I still need to know what’s age-appropriate before I make the purchase(s).

So there it is – more than you ever wanted to know about reading assessment and what it means (and what it doesn’t).  I’m glad I worked through it all, but I’m not married to the fact that my kid is reading at a certain level at this point in the summer.  He’s headed in to 2nd grade (officially) and reading solidly at a 3rd grade level – but this too will change.  The important thing is that he enjoys reading, learning, and that it’s fun.   And based on the fact that he brought me his Titanic book to finish at 8:30 a.m. today, I’d say that those goals are being met. 

I am really, really enjoying homeschooling. For having such high expectations (it was something I wanted to do from the day Brendan was born), it is really panning out to be all that AND a bag of chips. Some of it probably has to do with the curriculum we’re using~which (as it turns out), really *isn’t* curriculum so much at all, more than a shared reading and learning experience.

I’ve been reading books about Charlotte Mason, who is considered by many to be the grand matriarch of home education. And as I read about her philosophies and whatnot, I realize that although I purchased instructor’s guides and schedules from Sonlight, Sonlight merely provides me with a guide to share some fantastic books with Brendan and lets him take the learning from those books. Which is pretty cool, really.

I’m learning more than I thought I would~despite a Master’s degree, I honestly didn’t know much (at all) about William Tell, yet I’m learning more and more as we read through “The Arrow & The Apple,” which although it has some arcane language, is really quite riveting. I’m changing some of archaic words to contemporary ones as I read aloud, and Brendan is eating it up. I knew Tell shot the apple off his son’s head, but I didn’t know the surrounding circumstances or *why* he did it. Turns out, it wasn’t an act of foolishness or showmanship, but a test designed by a cruel governor and used to save both Tell’s and his son’s lives. Fascinating stuff!

Brendan is also becoming the king of read-alouds. And I don’t mean he’s reading to me, although his reading skills are coming along quite nicely for a kindergartener. I read to him, and he’s devouring books left and right. We’ve been slowly working through the Little House series for about 15 months now, and we continue with that. But when we finished “The Boxcar Children” (part of the Sonlight’s “curriculum”), he was begging for more reading on my part. So we plowed through a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book and then through another.

And now we’re reading the first (chronological) book of The Chronicles of Narnia, “The Magician’s Nephew.” I am only permitted to stop reading to moisten my mouth or do chores. I have read this book for 3 days, and we’re set to finish it tonight. He’s even given up his precious TV tokens and has asked that I read through dinner. Like I’m gonna say, “No!”?? No way, jose! Let me say this again: my. child. has. given. up. television. time. and. asked. me. to. read. aloud. instead. And it’s from CS Lewis’ tales? Oy! I think I’ve died and gone to heaven!

I know it might not always be this way. I really do. But I’m eating it up while it lasts. The other morning, Brendan was sitting on my bed, watching me apply my makeup and commented, “You know what, Mama? I really LOVE homeschooling.” When asked what his favourite parts were (we weren’t even talking about schooling at the time), my 5 year old said, “All the read-alouds and math.”

He’s learning. And I’m reading.  And my heart is smiling.

I’m not sure it gets much better than this.