Wait! Come back!

Erm, let me explain this better… I work on the Internet. Yes, it’s legit. Yes, it’s FINE! Okay, one last try – I help build people build websites on the Internet.

(there. sounds perfectly normal).

Okay, I work on the Internet in a great community. If you become a member of the community, and you help people, you get known for your work. Especially for your work. If it’s really good work, you get really well known. You could say you’ve made a name for yourself.

Sometimes this work involves a lot of free work. Yes, work you don’t get paid for. It leads to work you DO get paid for, sometimes quite a bit. And like I said above, if you do good work and people know it, you get recognized and then you’re able to do well-paying jobs for other people.

This is how I got my job today. In fact (since maybe you don’t know me) both my husband and I work from home doing this very thing.

Well that’s all fine and dandy, you may be thinking, what’s this got to do with my kid?

I know your kid.

Yeah, YOUR kid. No! Not in a creepy way! See up there where I wrote about community? You might think your kid spends too much time on his computer, not enough time on homework. Your kid is also spending time helping other people. He’s also working. Yes, it’s a real job for some people, and your kid has done it on his own too. Pretty adult and mature of him, really.

And I know you’ve said to him he has to study hard to go to college to get a good job and make money.. but…
but…

He is.

He has a good job, though right now it’s part time because he has school. He makes good money. Or, at least he could make more if he had more time. There’s a few things he even does better than I do. I’ve seen his work.

He can’t learn this in university or college. Well, some of it he can, and maybe it’d be useful eventually, but he’s learning right now. He’s working right now. All on his own.

You should be really proud.

And lighten up, will ya? He’s a good kid, and he’s smart. Let him take a year off after graduation. I bet he’ll earn enough to pay for at least one year of university – if not two – and maybe by then you’ll see he doesn’t really need that at all.

But mostly? Maybe you’ll see he loves what he’s doing.

By short week, I mean I’m not sure where even the last two weeks went. It’s been a blur of work work work. We got our phone fixed, spent some time talking to customer service to get our internet fixed (mostly), and then just tried to play catch-up with whatever else before I fell into bed every night.

Turns out the satellite dish for our internet was tipped and possibly had water in it, which was bad, so the guy moved it and put a new… thing… on it. I’m trying it out for a bit to let him know and he’s testing that part he replaced to see if he really has to charge me for a new one. But the interesting thing he said was with the weather issues we should have called him right away (the installer) and not customer support. They only had ONE record of me calling last August. He got here around 9:30 and left about 12.

Anyway. He was literally just finishing up when I had to call in for a conference call. That went on for an hour and 45 minutes, then I finally had my lunch.

Somewhere in there Emma lost another tooth. It was hanging on bravely and the big tooth was coming in behind it, not directly above. The tooth fairy again forgot to place money under her pillow, but it showed up the next afternoon.

The US holiday slowed my stuff down enough I could catch up a bit work-wise. Intense focusing on one project makes it really hard for me to even remember much of anything else. (and then I have to switch gears and focus on a different project, but that’s work stuff)

And I just drew a blank on what I did yesterday. Work, I bet. And laundry. Oh, and Rosella brought me over a few stems off her peony bush.

I got up early this morning. A woodpecker was on the tree next to my open bedroom window, and we’re waiting for windows to be delivered, so we didn’t know if they’d show up at 8am. Sometimes on my morning walk, I see a couple families of ducks. This morning I saw some Canada geese and their babies, with the mist coming off the water.

Of course I didn’t have my camera.

I did get out to take pictures of the neighbour’s flowers, and this afternoon all the girls and I went down the road and picked a flat of strawberries. That’s twelve of those little wooden baskets they come in. They were charging $1.70 each, but she said I didn’t overfill so she gave me $2 change from my $20. Emma talked the whole entire time, and yes Mom she wore her sunhat. In among the rows of berries were blooming wildflowers, johnnyjump-ups and some other familiar ones I can’t name. the owner said it wasn’t on purpose, but I appreciated it anyway, sitting in the straw. We were there and back within an hour.

I also finished potting my tomatoes I had growing in the unused upstairs bathroom. When I told Rosella I did this, she asked me if we were into hydroponics and maybe we were secretly growing pot.

Ron is working on the front porch and the side porch today, and we just discovered it’s leaking again under the sink.

oh, and my flickr stuff is missing from my sidebar, no idea why. click here for the pretty pictures.

(Edit: I had connection issues posting this, so if half of it shows up in your feed reader… oops. You love me though, right?)

Added bonus: see Sarah using the computer at age 2, and in diapers (cloth, naturally way back in the dark ages when you had to pin and fold them). And yes I did ask her permission before posting that. Sarah has recently done some work for a local small business, designing posters and brochures, all on computer.

Boy, the first time in a long time where I write pages about some homeschooling topic, and it’s for someone else’s site.

See huge original (and readable) size here. I would have posted this earlier, but my connection crapped out on me and I had a meeting. (To which I was a minute late, but one guy said it was okay, cuz I’m a celebrity.)

Bobby is a result of taking Emma (and the others) out for a wee bit of shopping, where we did not aim for the Dollar Store for a treat, but bumped it up a notch. This is what happens sometimes.

Now Bobby has made friends with Mr Bones and the Visible Woman. Sometimes I find Bobby and his parts in odd places, but mostly I’m just glad the CSI team has not stopped by.

Emma tells me that Visible woman and Mr Bones are an item, and in fact the parents of Bobby, but Bobby himself looks at us haughtily out of his one good eye, and Visible Woman already has a plastic fetus to take care of.

Yeah, I know. We ARE weird.

They made us sound pretty awesome, I think.

My longish point there is we still have family “over there”, and every Christmas we all exchange cards and our cousins send over a monstously huge 1 kilo bar of English Cadbury’s milk chocolate. It is slightly different than the Canadian Cadbury’s chocolate, is why.

So last Thursday, there I was, out and about doing my shopping. (See? The British phraseology is slipping in there. Between this and the over-indulgence of Jane Austen over the holidays, we should just pack our bags and head back to the Queen.) The children were naturally with me, and we split up when we went to the mall.

Sarah came running up to me as I was once again perusing the scrapbook aisle of the Great Canadian Dollar Store.

“Mom! In Shopper’s they have a big Cadbury bar! And it’s on SALE! And it’s the LAST ONE!”

At this point we had no word about the annual chocolate from England, only that it was somewhere between here and there. Ron had said if ever we saw one of those bars here, we should grab it. We *had* seen it before, but it was elusive. Always when we didn’t have the extra cash, or it was heavily pre-holiday priced.  I hemmed and hawed a bit, waffled some more, and in the end got it. The clerk even thanked me profusely for “getting rid of it”.

On the way home, we stopped at the post office to pick up the mail. Sarah came back to the car grinning, carrying an armload of packages. She tossed one to me. “Guess what Mom? It’s from England!” It was suspiciously chocolate-bar sized. Now, normally the cousins send the whole thing to my aunt, and she divvies it up and sends along our portion. But I suddenly thought, what if it had been done on their end?

I laughed and laughed.

When we got back to the house, I opened up the parcel, and instead of chocolate, there was a book. I gotta tell you, I actually love new books *more* than chocolate. It’s true. Even better, it was a book our cousin had co-authored, AND it was on a portion of British history. Enclosed was a note stating he hoped we liked it.

I think I may have swooned.

The Battle of St Albans tells the story of two epic battles during the War of the Roses. These took place in the city of St Albans, which not only stands today, but that’s where some of my family now lives. The authors help clear up some of the confusion and legend surrounding the War of the Roses, explaining the political landscape of the time. They bring the battlefields to life, thorough series of diagrams, modern-day photographs of actual places and generous descriptions of the time and places. There’s even pictures of reenactments of soldier’s uniforms and fighting techniques, even snippets of text from documents from that time frame, in the  participant’s own words.

As Emma and I flipped through the book, we seriously got lost in the 15th century. We were immersed. And I longed for England once again. Mike did a bang-up job, and I’m sure our family could not have been more proud.
Back to the book – it’s jam-packed at 182 pages, 5.5″ x 8″ bound format and loads of b&w photos. By the time I got to the back cover, I was absolutely delighted to find it was part of a series of books based on all sorts of battles in Britain – all the way up through the Second World War. I immediately though of all our homeschooling and/or history buff friends who would *love* to get their hands on such books.

You can buy the book on Amazon.com  and visit the publiser’s site, Pen and Sword books for more historic battles. I’ll be over here, curled up with the book, noshing on chocolate.

Well, I wrote a whole article. You should go read it.  There’s even a picture of me not smirking like usual. Then you should poke around the rest of the site and bookmark it and stuff. Elle is my new bestest friend.

“What’s your average?” she fired back.

“85.” Sweet. She grinned. Then she related to him that she was thinking of homeschooling her own children.

Why yes, I am feeling rather smug about this at the moment.

***

For the backstory,  because this is spread out in the archives, Addison’s last few years of homeschooling were mostly interest-led and self-directed. That’s the scary unschooling word, folks. Plus he had a major accident and recuperation time, and then worked full-time for a year. When we applied for him to go to college, we talked to the lady mentioned above who is the one contact person for the entire province for alternative admissions in the the provicial community college system. I engaged in a dialogue with her before I even considered filling and sending an application form. We were able to prove to her satisfaction – without transcript or test results – that Addison was a smart guy and they should let him in. And they did. By the time we sent in the application with deposit, it was on her say so and pretty much a done deal.

“Poorly educated parents who choose to teach their children at home produce better academic results for their children than public schools do.”

“The research shows that the level of education of a child’s parents, gender of the child, and income of family has less to do with a child’s academic achievement than it does in public schools.”

“The average Canadian home schooled student is regularly involved in eight social activities outside the home. Canadian home schooled children watch less television than other children, and they show significantly fewer problems than public school children when observed in free play,”

“While home schooling may be impractical for many families, it has proven to be a successful and relatively inexpensive educational alternative. It merits the respect of policy makers, the attention of researchers, and the consideration of parents.”

To all that, I say a big fat, “DUH!”