To: all family members ages 5 and up

From: The Lady of the House and the Laundry Mistress

re: Mandatory Laundry Seminar this Saturday

The Laundry Mistress will be conducting the Semi-Annual Laundry Seminar this Saturday beginning at 1300 hours. Attendance is mandatory for all family members over the age of 5.

The seminar schedule will be as follows:

1300 – 1305 How Clothes Are Cleaned – The Laundry Mistress will walk attendees through the laundry process from dirty to clean. This will include a tour of the laundry room and general instructions on how the washer and dryer operate.

1305 – 1310 Hands On! Laundry Recepticles – Attendees will locate all the proper laundry recepticles in the house and search for dirty laundry not in the proper place.

1310 – 1315 A Week in the Life of Your Favorite Shirt – Why does it seem to take a whole week for your favorite shirt to be cleaned? The Laundry Mistress will point out common pitfalls in the laundry process from dirty clothes being shoved under the bed to folded laundry not being put away in a timely fashion. This portion of the seminar will also consider the impact of wearing two or three different outfits every day and how all that extra laundry can clog the whole process.

1315 – 1325 Hands On! Right Side Out – Yes! Socks, pants and shirts can be removed from the body without being turned inside out! This most important portion of the seminar will include a discussion of how stains and stinks can best be removed from soiled clothing if the clothes are washed right side out. Attendees will have a chance to practice clothing removal techniques that will minimize the amount that clothing is turned inside out and will practice turning clothes right side out if those techniques fail. PLEASE NOTE: once this seminar is completed, all family members over the age of 5 will be required to turn clothing right side out before placing it in the laundry recepticles. The Laundry Mistress may reject inside out clothing from the cleaning process or may return cleaned items folded inside out.

1325 – 1330 Q&A – To conclude the seminar, the Laundry Mistress will answer questions and offer additional help for anyone interested.

Please note the day and time of this seminar on your calendars. Being absent or late to this seminar is punishable by up to three hours of laundry duty service.

…and by his own free choice, my 8 year old is watching Singing in the Rain.

But would he take tap classes if I asked him? No way.

Despite having completed ten miles the other day, I still consider myself a non-runner. My body seems to agree, and I am stiff and sore. Yesterday morning, I took Greta for a walk. She kept pulling the lead, wondering why I was going so slowly. This morning, I took her for a very slow jog. The first half mile was pretty pitiful, but finally the muscles loosened up and I managed to go the 1.6 miles necessary to just complete my second PT goal for the year: to run 250 miles.

When I established the goal of 250 miles, running one full mile was quite a feat for me. I thought if I ran one to two miles three to five times per week, that would be really good. Since I had already decided to run the Army Ten Miler, I knew that I would likely run some longer distances at some point, but that was too far away to really think about.

A friend of mine was really surprised to learn that I had run the race (her reaction to this fact really convinced me that I am truly a non-runner…I mean runners are thin! runners have that lean hard body that I covet! runners run everywhere all the time! runners exude runner-aura!). This friend had taken her kids to do all the kid-stuff at the Ten Miler while her husband ran. That was one thing I thought was great: seeing nursing moms with little babies on the train headed to the race…and DAD was wearing jeans and MOM was wearing running clothes, and seeing other whole families going together. It was really nice. I was happy my kids were still in bed, but it was nice to see others doing it nonetheless.

This friend seemed to think running this race was an unachievable goal for her, but since I had done it (I, the non-runner with a non-runner-aura) maybe she could do it too. She asked me how. I told her that the first hurdle was one full mile. Our neighborhood happens to be 1.06 miles in circumference. I told her to set one lap around as her goal and to do the whole distance even if she had to walk most of it. Run 3 houses, walk 3 houses, run 3 houses, walk 3 houses……run 6 houses, walk 3 houses……run 8 houses, walk 2 houses……after she manages to run the whole thing, go for 1 1/2 laps, then 2.

It really is easy. Sure it is! Granted, I have another friend who has been trying this for months, and she can’t get up to 2 miles. Every person is different, and I can’t promise results. This same friend who can’t run two miles can do 50 pushups and I can’t do 4, despite trying for months to increase my upper body strength. That lamentation will be spelled out in another post about PT goal number three, which sadly seems to me to be unattainable.

I do encourage anybody who thinks they may want to run to try it. 5k races and fun runs abound, and that is only a bit over 3 miles (not 2 – thank you, Bill, for pointing out my glaring error from early this morning). I think training for this Ten Miler motivated me to get up early to do my morning runs when I overwise would have preferred to sleep another hour. I recommend going online and searching for races in your area that are several months away and aiming to compete. I intend to find another (much shorter) race to enter in a few months to keep me going out. Two goals down. I don’t want to be like several women I know who have not run at all since their big races last fall!

…at the Cub Scout den meeting…

Den Leader: Has anybody ever been on a boat?

Tiger Scout: I have!

Den Leader: That’s great! What kind of boat was it?

Tiger Scout: A big ol’ money pit.

Well, I did it. I ran all ten miles. Around 4 1/2 miles I was getting tired, but once I hit the half-way mark at 5 miles, my spirits boosted for a bit. Then came mile 7, and my split times started to creep upward. My fastest mile (mile 3) was 10 minutes exactly, but that last mile was 11:11. Later, Bill said he just wanted to get behind me and push. I kept waving for him to go on without me, but the knight in shining armor refused to leave the side of his beloved.

Our final time was 1 hour and 44 minutes, which puts us just under a 10 1/2 minute mile pace, which is what I had been doing on my longer runs. So I’m pleased. And tired.

I have three PT goals this year, and that was one of them. I’ll talk about the other two later this week, as I should accomplish the second one in a few days.

It’s not merely a Homeschool Carnival…

It’s not merely a Catholic Carnival…

…it’s a Catholic Homeschool Carnival!

Check it out!

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the ticker at the top of my blog, you’ll know that the Army Ten Miler is TOMORROW.

I have never run in a race before (a real race).

I have never run ten miles before.

I have never run with my husband before.

This should be fun!

We’re having lasagne tonight. That’s a real treat because pasta is a banned substance for my husband, and I avoid tempting him by simply not making pasta dishes (pasta, bread, potatoes and stuff like that send his triglyceride levels through the roof…like to the 6 or 7 hundred range…very very bad). I love pasta and miss eating it (but my hips don’t miss it a bit!). One night of carbo-loading is okay for us both.

My lovely sister-in-law has graciously agreed to come to our house tonight, spend the night, and babysit the kids tomorrow. I’m looking forward to a solid 6 hours of time out of the house with no kids but with the charming company of my dear husband.

My goal is to finish the race in one hour and 40 minutes (that’s a ten minute mile pace). Most of my shorts runs fall in that range, but the long runs are usually 10 1/2 minutes per mile. I’m hoping that the energy of the other 23,999 runners will carry me along.

Bill’s goal is to not hold me back! Poor guy did a 25k ruck march on Thursday to earn a gold German Army Proficiency Badge that he can wear on his uniform. He’s still hurting a bit from that hike which he accomplished in 3 3/4 hours. The timing between that event and the Ten Miler could have been better.

And speaking of bad timing…I think that the penultimate sacrifice someone can make is possessing 4 free tickets to a Toby Keith concert and giving them all away! Okay, perhaps it’s a bit lower down the list than that, but still, I am very unhappy that the concert is the same day as the Ten Miler. There is no way I will have the energy to attend an evening concert after running that distance. I know I will be sore and exhausted. So, even though I picked up the free tickets at the USO office, I have given them away to other country music fans. Maybe next time…

..so, wish me luck for a good race tomorrow!

Toby Keith’s You Ain’t Much Fun

Katie: Why did he quit drinking, Mommy?

Me: Because his wife was getting mad at him.

Katie: Why is he upset?

Me: Because his wife is making him work now.

Explaining song lyrics to children is so tedious I try to avoid it as much as possible. Next on the radio…

Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire

Katie: What’s a ring of fire?

silence

Katie: I think it’s a bunch of rings and there’s a fire…

Billy: It’s a circle, Katie, and it’s on fire.

brief silence

Katie: I think he must know stop, drop and roll, so he’ll be okay.

Yes, let’s remember that advice, dear, when you begin dating. Things getting a bit too passionate? Just stop, drop, and roll. You may have some grass stains, and possibly a dent in that chastity belt your father has picked out for you, but you’ll be okay.

The phonics program I use is Little Angel Readers. I love it. It’s sweet, it’s Catholic, but not Catholic-only (the stories for the kids to read include Aesop’s Fables and ones like the Little Red Hen as well as stories about families going to church and doing little acts of kindness), and it has worked for two of my kids thus far.

The first eight lessons are about recognizing the sounds made by eight different consonants: S, T, P, H, D, M, C and N. Lesson 9 (of Reader A) introduces the vowel A and begins blending the sounds together to make words.

When Fritz was in kindergarten, we stayed on Lesson A9 for an eternity. He just didn’t get it. I would drop it for a week and do other things, then come back and try again. Even after he began to blend it all together, it remained a struggle for him for quite some time. We went on and added other consonants and other vowels and began reading stories, but it was only recently that he’s become more at ease with reading. And he is still not wholly comfortable, especially if there are lots of big words he thinks he’s never seen before. He is easily frustrated, and I am easily frustrated by his frustration. But we’re getting there.

Last year, I used the same program with Billy and planned to be at Lesson A9 for a while. But Billy figured it out right away and we spent little additional time on that lesson than any of the previous ones. What a blessed relief. Billy is now in Reader B and has learned that vowels make long sounds too. He’s doing great!

Yesterday was Katie’s turn for Lesson A9. Although I crossed my fingers and wished for this lesson to progress like it had with Billy, I know my daughter. Even though she loves to do schoolwork and I have to work hard to keep her busy, I expected that she would be more like Fritz. Sure enough, she can identify the sounds made by the letters C and T and she learned A, but could not blend them together to sound out the word CAT. We went through about a third of the page. She would identify the individual sounds made by the letters, and then turn her bright expectant eyes to me and listen to me repeat what she said, but maybe a bit faster and then again, a bit faster, and then she would get very excited as she would say the word we were sounding out. It was really cute to see her eyes light up and watch how thrilled she was to witness the sounding out of real words.

But I can tell that the little light bulb is not going off in her head. And I sigh a heavy sigh. Truth be told, I just want it to be easy. I want my kids to know how to read, and how to read well. I want my kids to enjoy reading. I would love to be able to say, “Ah, look here at my 6 year old reading chapter books and my 3rd grader selecting novels off the junior adult section at the library.” But more than that, I just want the whole reading thing to click with little to no trouble at all. I don’t want to have to actually work for success.

But this is not to be the case, apparently.

In all fairness to Katie, she only turned 5 in August. Fritz was also just over 5 years old when I tried this with him. Billy was at least 5 years and 7 months when he got to Lesson A9, since his birthday is in February. So, today, I will show her a few more words on that page and see if it makes any more sense to her. If not, then we will just drop it for a month and learn about other consonants.

It is very frustrating. But if she’s not ready, she’s simply not ready.

I don’t intend to make this a daily thing, but it’s what is on my mind right now.

Yesterday I looked at a few ways I do things.

Number One: laundry. In August, SFO Mom talked about using less laundry detergent. I’ll admit that I am somewhat lazy about measuring the amount I use. I do recognize that the scoop is bigger than even the large-load amount (and recognize that this is done intentionally to get us to use that powder faster than necessary, making us buy more), and so I will, at a minimum, make sure I use no more than the recommended amount and begin experimenting with using less, since my washer is pretty new and should be able to do the job efficiently.

Also, I ran out of those dryer sheets that prevent static cling, and keep forgetting to put them on my shopping list. For a few weeks now, I’ve been doing laundry without any, and I haven’t really missed them too much. Perhaps once the colder, dryer weather kicks in, I may need to restock, but for now, I’ll live without them.

Number Two: doing dishes. Here’s another area where I’ve developed a bad habit. I am very grateful for my dish washer, which is filled to the brim at least once per day. I avoid doing small loads, and will sometimes wait for the next day’s breakfast dishes if one day produces one and a half loads. Of course, there are always one or two dishes that can’t go in the dish washer, and they get washed by hand. My habit is that I will squirt out a small amount of dish soap on a scrubby and wash the few items. That’s fine for one or two things. But if I actually have a sink-full of things I intend to wash by hand, I will waste quite a bit of soap doing it that way. So, I will work on a new habit wherein I make nice soapy water and wash the dishes the right way.