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Ebenezer
Oct. 28, 2006
Catching up
Staying on course with homeschooling means getting off course with the extras -- or, my new favorite word, "frippery," direct from Witch at Blackbird Pond. That means blogging is about 212th on my list.
So, with apologies, here's what's been 1, 2, 3 and possibly more:
1) My mother. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about six years ago at the appallingly young age of 58 (recently the diagnosis is being refined to Lewy Body dementia, which you can Google if you're interested, but of course it doesn't really matter at this point, and no one can know for sure except via autopsy). Of late she has been declining rapidly. My dad, now 68 and in pretty good health, has been caring for her by himself until recently -- a couple of months ago he got some small bit of respite care for himself, but as of this week that is up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with some nursing care for my mother. Thursday we visited the hospice nurse, as my mother had been in the hospital twice in ten days for tremors and hypotension, and she was mostly refusing food, drink and medicine. She was slurring speech (such as it is) and was spending most of the time slumped forward in her wheelchair semi-conscious. We are thinking six months to live is not pessimistic.
(Side note: this dementia thus far has affected physical abilities even far more than mental abilities. She can still follow conversation and respond with a couple of words, but memories of the past come more in flashes. On the other hand, she can't walk and has little vision on one side, and can't coordinate her body well enough to feed herself, really, and has swallowing problems that means a soft diet and crushed pills.)
Well, yesterday, one day after the 12/7 care started, I went to visit with my kids. You could have blown me over with a feather when I saw her -- the help has apparently been able to get her to drink appropriate amounts of fluid and get medicine down along a little more food. She'd just finished a sponge bath and was quite alert, saying "hello" to us and responding to questions, and sitting up. And even -- get this, after what I described earlier -- she bopped a balloon around with the kids and even engaged in her old trickery of looking at one kid and tossing the balloon to the other. (Clearly on purpose.) She remembered a visit she'd had earlier in the week and put together a few sentences of five or six words. This is the woman we thought could die at any time.
Of course, I don't know if this is just a sparkling anomaly or something that's happening because of improved hydration and diet. But it seems as if she's regained a will to live, even some joy! Praise God.
So that has been occupying much of my actual time -- sitting with her while my dad went to the doctor himself, going to the ER, meeting with care people, etc. -- as well as my mental time.
Now, thing 2: school. We just finished Week 10 of Sonlight 3 (Year 1 of American History). My son,8, seems to be enjoying it. We have been remarking on the similarities and differences between our church background and beliefs and Puritanism. There's quite a lot of overlap, especially historically. In fact, my little denomination has often been labeled as Puritanical. On the other hand, it's also been labeled heretical by those who are apparently even more Puritanical.
Math: Methinks this is Comet's cup of tea. He is a young third-grader (turned 8 at end of August) and finished Singapore 4A in nine weeks. We're doing Challenging Word Problems for a bit before we move on, not to hold him back but to cement the ideas and give us some flexibility to skip math while he....
Takes the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the Cognitive Abilities Test. He has never been tested for either ability or achievement, and, at the recommendation of a homeschooling friend, thought it would be useful to refine my teaching -- to see areas I've missed and to compare academic potential via the CogAT to progress via the ITBS. I administered the verbal battery portion of the CogAT yesterday and will do the math battery today. We'll put in an hour of testing each time Dancer is at preschool and hope to be done in another week or so. I'm eliminating some things from the school schedule during this time, but keeping up with the SL schedule for history, reading, and so on. We're in the experiment-intensive portion of NOEO Chemistry 1, so we do a week's worth of experiments on Saturday with dad.
Four-year-old Dancer, meanwhile, is plugging away at Saxon Math 1. She is not necessarily mathematically inclined like Comet but doesn't have big problems, either. She had been doing Singapore Earlybird and almost finished all of those, and I saw that we needed to make sure there were no gaps in things like calendar, clock, right/left, and other stuff I wasn't even thinking of since I never did K/1 math at home with Comet, and she has a habit of skipping 15 when counting and isn't entirely clear on other math basics, so we went ahead and got Saxon, thinking I'd move back to Singapore afterwards.
She's also working steadily through Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which is more for me than for her because, well, she can already read, but I need to know she can also read words phonetically out of context. I'm seeing that it's a good idea we're doing so, even though she is frustrated with having to do stuff she already knows just to tease out the stuff she doesn't. But the other night she wondered if we had any "Laura and Mary books" -- we had gotten some of those easy-reader versions of single Little House stories from the library that she enjoyed. They'd been returned, and all I had was the real deal, full-scale Little House on the Prairie. "Okay," she said, and started reading to herself. The only thing I heard in the next half-hour/thirty pages was "Mom, what's a powderhorn?"
I hear my children are awake now, so I will finish here. I appreciate the patience of anyone who's still reading -- either this post or this blog at all!
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Nov. 11, 2006 - Were you volunteering?
Blessings
Jessica