Rather quiet day. Sunny, cool. Abby and I left early to feed the horses we are watching for Christine. Abby picked the stalls to make it easier on Jesse tonight as she will have to feed Christine's horses and clean their stalls, feed Al's horses and feed the black cat - all after working half the day at the barn she manages and the other half day at the toy store. Abby got dropped off at her Friday babysitting job where the children were in the process of getting their hair cut. She said they were so adorable. Dave and Boy spent most of the day repairing Uncle Mike and Aunt Paula's computer so they can take it home with them when they come visit Sunday. They'll be awfully happy - they've been computerless for months and thought it was a lost cause - but we have Dave, so there is hope, always!

We had a treat, Kyle, Abby and I - a nice lunch out with Dave. After we got home, Abby and Tombo fell asleep on my bed while I tried to plan out the menu for the next two weeks - but their sleep rays socked me, too and I had a little nap. How decadent!

Jess just got home a little bit ago and the three white belts left to set up for the tournament tomorrow. It'll be Dave's first tournament - we're all excited. Jess has to work, but she'll be there in spirit. I'll join them there after I feed horses, so I think I'll go bake something for their breakfast tonight. Hmmm - muffins or oatmeal cake?

Dave, Bubba and Boy had Ketsuka class tonight. Boy got tested - we knew it was coming, you just never know when it will be. He scored high and got his white belt! So, now there are three white belts in the family. Bubba and Dave had good sparring matches. Kyle will be able to spar when his equipment comes in. I'll post a picture of all three as soon as he gets his gi.

Boy turned 15 today!

Half boy, half man, all loveable.

We enjoyed a quiet celebrationtonight. His aunt, uncle and cousin are coming down Sunday to celebrate, so he'll get another birthday cake and some spoiling.

It was supposed to rain today and be cold - but we got a reprieve - at least until tonight, that is. The sun started weakly poking through the clouds about 8:15 this morning, then it grew in strength. By the time I had to drop Abby off to babysit at 10 it was starting to get warm. We looked at each other and decided that we would go groom Spencer and Cherokee. While she babysat, Kyle did his math and a chore or two, I did some laundry and rode the bloody exercise bike (IhateitIhateitIhateit) and then just after noon we met Bubba at the barn. She cleaned and organized the barn because its dissarray offended her, Kyle curried and brushed Spencer in the barn (because Spencer was terribly jealous that I was grooming Cherokee and would not stop nibbling me all over, pulling my hair and rubbing up against me. Believe me, you really feel it when a 16 hand 'teenage' horse rubs up against you). While Kyle paid some attention to Spencer, I used the shedding blade on Cherokee, then curried and brushed her. She was a very happy horse and her white positively glowed while her black was nearly black - no longer mud-soaked brown. As I sit here and write this post, the lovely scent of horsey mud is rising up from the bottoms of my jeans. I am gritty and dusty and it feels lovely.

After the horses were all clean and the barn neat, Abby and I free lunged them. How they loved it - they did not want to stop! So, they got an extra long workout and then came over and blew all over us. And then, because the flies were so bad, we sprayed them. After some initial panicking, Spencer settled down and let Bubba spray him all over. Cherokee, who would not let anyone near her with a spray bottle, let Bubba and I sweet talk her and let Bubba spray her legs, belly, back and neck. We felt it best not to spray her head, so Bubba sprayed it into her hand and then rubbed it on Cherokee's face, into and around her ears and her forelock. We praised the mare and she arched her neck, clearly proud that she had been brave enough to endure this terrible torture. And then we had to praise Spencer again, because he got jealous that Cherokee was being praised.

I wish I had brought the camera with me - it was such a beautiful time.

Monday. Grey, cold, wet. Uck. But, the warm weather last week and the torrential rain on Saturday have forced Spring's hand. Fruit trees are just breaking into blossom, the maples have popped their flowers (for those of you who don't live in the Great Northland, most maple trees blossom before they pop out leaves). Some of the grass is even starting to green up in places, and some other trees and bushes are beginning to pop their buds. It is looking less grey and a little more green here. One's heart begins to swell with joy as the green comes.

Jess was to be alone at the barn today, and the vet was coming, so she brought Abby along to ride Jake. Give the chubby quarterhorse his workout. And, if she plays her cards right, Abby will help out. That big sister/little sister dynamic. Gotta control it - and it's hard when you're the oldest and you know everything. Just spoke to Abby and she sounded happy (yippee!). She said "I forgot how fun it is to ride!" Well that's good. She may be moving beyond her tendency towards perfectionism - which means her riding will improve if she relaxes. Good, good. And no acerbic comments about big sister. Good, good.

I had to run into the office this morning and punch out some work, so I left Kyle with a detailed list of specific chores and schoolwork to complete before he could turn on The Computer. Although I did initially get a little attitude, when I got back an hour-and-one-half later, I was pleasantly surprised to find a cheerful, happy boy who gave me one of his rib-crushing bearhugs and who had completed 80% of the list! What joy! Yet another surprise awaited me - when I asked him to come along while I ran some errands, he cheerfully agreed! No complaining, no trying to sneak computer time. He wanted to be with me, was delightful company while we were out, very helpful and now that we have returned is finishing his math. What an about-face from Friday morning. Is that like the coolest, or what? I am on Mommy Cloud Nine. TYG.

Abby went off to babysit her charges this morning and romp in the sun with them. Kyle was resistant to editing his newspaper article, so he, his dad and I had a talk. You know what kind of talk, the kind that takes over an hour, is calm and involves concepts like responsibility, effects, consequences, how choices you make now affect you long term. yes, one of those. They can be rather draining, but they are periodically necessary when you are parenting. It had an effect, though. Kyle quite cheerfully did an edit, then found on his own the punctuation and structure mistakes he had missed and corrected them. And, even better, when Abby got home from babysitting, he was pleasant, cheerful and non-confrontational. Abby worked on her article - it did not take long and did a little cleaning and all was peaceful. How nice.

It was warm and sunny - not as warm as yesterday, but low 60's is still pretty respectable, so I shooed Abby and Kyle outside. Let them soak up sunshine, tramp through the woods, wade in the river and be free. There'll be many more days for seatwork. And some important lessons were grasped today. One can't see them on paper - but they shine through all the same.

We're scheduled to have rain and cold (near freezing temps) for the next four days, so I'm sure we'll all be glad for the sun we got today. The trees are still just on the brink of budding, and the only blossoms are the occasional bulb or forsythia. Soon, though, spring will be here. Soon.

Today was chess club. We had a good turnout - there were six games going on at once during much of the hour-and-a-half! It was hard for me (and Dave) to be inside, as today was utterly beautiful, sunny, breezy and 74 degrees!!!!!! A veritable heat wave!

Abby went off to babysit after, Kyle and Dave came home and cut up the tree in the river and dragged it out onto shore. When it dries a little more, it'll be cut up for firewood. Heat for next winter.

The three of them, Dave, Abby and Kyle are at ketsu-ka class now, Abby had her first spar on Tuesday, Dave had his first judo lesson on Tuesday, and Kyle is getting closer to being tested for his white belt. They'll be coming home, all happy and relaxed in about half-an-hour.

Jess got home from work a little bit ago and is showering. She's going to go watch her friend Veronica bowl and cheer her on. Exciting social life here in the sticks!

That's about it here - Abby and Kyle have been working on their newspaper submissions most of the week. The submissions are due tomorrow, and then Kyle will be editing the newspaper before it goes to print.

Tonight, I found a moving charity project for a little girl named Grace, who had luekemia but is in remission. You can find out more at her aunt's blog- Two Wooden Sticks and a Ball of Wool: Warming Grace . Abby is going to join me in knitting 5" squares to donate, so we'll have to take a run to the LYS and get some soft pinks and purples in wool and cotton. We have plenty of green, white and red in wool and beige in cotton, but no pinks and purples.

Such a nice day. Sunny, birds singing, gentle breeze blowing, lovely fluffy white clouds sailing across a beautiful blue sky. Just makes me so happy to be alive! I got up before Dave, Bubba and Boy - Jesse had already left for work at 6:30 this morning, and kept company by the cats made brunch. It seemed like a good day for muffins from scratch, so I had a lovely cup of coffee while I mixed up the batters.

After I made some spice muffins, blueberry muffins and the evil chocolate muffins, I sat in the sun by the back door, sniffing a spring breeze, eating chocolate and drinking Earl Grey Tea . . . what a good way to start a day.

Then, Bubba and I hung out in the yard, chatting. She had brought out her art pad and pencils to draw but just lay in the sun and talked while I knitted. It was good time. Tombo came by to visit us and roll in the gravel.

We could hear Boy and Dave talking inside about military strategy, then about the game they were playing together online. It got up to a very rare 71 degrees today, and the ground was quite wet as it was melting up. The river was roaring and Bubba went on down and found or woodstove and dock which had been swept away in the big flood a few months back. She took great joy in wading down the river and floating one of the dock pieces back up, then dragging it up onto shore. She plans to get Kyle to help her drag up the other dock piece and the woodstove on Monday, and then they'll trek down the river a little later to the swamp and see if they can find the rest of the dock and our adirondack chairs which were also swept away.

Sunset came to quickly for us who are sun-starved, but we can still hear the birds calling every now and then as they go to sleep. The Great Horned Owls are nesting, so they are calling, and we get to hear the screeching of amorous raccons along the riverbed. The foxes are also barking, so the sounds of life are all around us - a lullaby I enjoy. Except for the racoons.

Bit of a challenging week - but a very successful unschooling week. We've had major computer troubles, so we've completely rebuilt and swapped around all the computers - well, not Bubba's (and I say we loosely, as I have been mostly Step and Fetch It and running the office because compared to Dave, Bubba and Kyle {the resident geeks}, I am rather computer illiterate - although to most of the moms I know, I am rather geeky - life is contradiction). So, we've been flashing the BIOS and reformatting and wiping and reformatting and removing hard drives and installing harddrives and installing video cards and sound cards and then partitioning drives and reconfiguring and wow, I am getting worn out just typing this. But, now, success.
The computer at the office is all set up and operating perfectly (yes, that is a bit of an euphemism when one is dealing with the Evil Empire, Microsoft) - we took the old HP bought in 2001(read obsolete) (which used to be the office computer until the power supply died several months ago) , replaced the dead power supply, swapped out the hard drive from the newer computer (which used to be Kyle's - Kyle having gotten a new computer when we needed to take his for the office when the HP died), brought the newer computer home and put the hard drives from the 2003 Dell(read obsolete) (which used to be our home office computer) into it so it would be our at home work computer. Then we took the Dell and set it up for Jesse, as she has been computerless (and very vocal about that situation - 'tho, to my annoyance, has had no interest in putting any of her money toward remedying that situation - clothing, ice cream and anything horse being much more important uses of her earnings), but Dave, ever the Dad, felt badly for her and wanted her to have a computer. I'm sure that the many evening arguments between the girls over whether or not Jesse could push Abby off of her computer so she could look at pictures of saddles and boots and read online comics had nothing to do with his decision. And you may wonder why Kyle and Abby have their own computers? Well, Dave feels that they need to be very familiar and comfortable with them as they would be severely disadvantaged in their adult lives without that knowledge base. He feels the future belongs not just to the computer literate, but to the computer savvy - which makes that rather large luddite part of me shiver - but, I have learned to trust his instincts, which almost always turn out to be eerily accurate. And to that end, they were very involved with the formatting and wiping and hardware and software swapping and loading and deleting and all that. Kyle, at points was running the formatting completely on his own. Abby has no qualms about opening up her cpu, removing one video driver and installing another one. And, they both have figured out how to hack into their own computers to do things like remove parental passwords set up so that the computer can't be used until seatwork is done (which infuriated me, but made Dave very happy - although he never let them know it) or to figure out just where spyware or BHOs (browser hijacker objects) were hiding after failing to remove them with the cleaning programs. So, that took up the last four-and-one-half days and quite a large chunk of the nights as well. But, knock on wood, all systems seem to be running well. I just have to get my desktop shortcuts and email account set back up on my user account on my computer (the work at home and spousal sharing computer).
One would think that children having their own computers would lead to them spending extremely large amounts of time - too much time - on them every day and doing nothing else of value. I, at least, was very concerned - but keep in mind I was also the one in this relationship who wanted to get rid of the tv when I got pregnant with baby number one and remove all refined sugar from the house. I lost on both points because of Dave's overwhelming logic. After the first week of what seemed to me to be non-stop computer usage, the children lessened their time on the computers substantially with each passing week. Many days go by without them ever getting turned on. They do a lot of research on them as we have a very small country public library. Abby is quite thrilled that she can find entire books online which she cannot get at our library (like the complete Grimm's Fairy Tales). Yes, there are days where Kyle, a typical teenage boy, would like to spend the entire day gaming as well as days like today where Bubba, engulfed in the seemingly bottomless enoui which comes with being 16, spends much of the day drawing on the computer, but those days are not that often. They are more likely to be found outside or practicing their katas or reading or cooking then on the computer. And, I guess, at the heart of it is also my belief that they will have to learn to manage their time, their responsibilities and their resources at some point in their lives - and if they figure it out now instead of when they are thirty - well - that'll be good for them. Because, in the end, I think most parents want their children to have a better life than they had - and that does not necessarily mean financially. But that's a discussion for another time and this post has been more than long enough.

When we put the house on the market last year, we packed out most of our possesions and put them in storage. When the house didn't sell, we brought all those boxes home from the storage area and put them in the garage which had been remodeled into a workout room. Clearly, it is no longer a workout room. unless you count the workout the cats get when they escape into the garage and spend two hours climbing all over the boxes and mewing pitifully to be released - which can not be heard unless one is standing right outside the door, which usually happens after one of says "Hey - I haven't seen the cats for about two hours - have you?" So, keeping in mind there is a two foot clearance the length of the garage for egress, you can imagine how many boxes there are in there. Today, the children and I (then Dave at the end) sorted, shifted, moved and brought out into the driveway all the boxes in what turned out to be, by the end of the day, a vain attempt to locate the Windows XP cd which magically went missing when we were packing out the house. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Microsoft and how much I miss the Apple we used to have before my husband decided to go to law school and we had to convert to the Evil Empire? Perhaps, one day, I will post a sonnet about my hatred for the Evil Empire, but I digress. At any rate, Kyle, being true to his gender said in all seriousness "Just throw all my boxes out" before going back inside to help his father. Being the mother, I could not. The thought of his little wooden trucks and his legos and his fair ribbons being summarily thrown out, never to be shared with his future wife and children saddened me immensely, so I tucked them all back into the garage. Abby kept nearly all her boxes out and as I unpacked all our linens and much of my kitchenware, she went through them, sorting out toys which she no longer wanted in order to donate them to some charity (once we figure out who will take them). She kept up a running conversation with me about all her treasures and how funny it was when she was little that toys were so important and she could not ever imagine giving up any of them, but now, she only wanted to keep the most special. She took pains to put aside a nice assortment for the four little ones she babysits, and she took care to try and figure out what each child would like. I enjoyed this time with her, listening to her, seeing her maturing before my eyes, feeling the sun on my skin, smelling the fresh scent of spring and listening to the birds. It was a beautiful afternoon, I hope I remember it when I am very old.

Today is mild and sunny - such a nice break after many days of cold rainy yuckiness.

The house is peaceful now as Kyle is doing his math, sharing the sunspot with Otis the dog (AKA Woogie).

Tiger Lilli, Kyle's cat is curled up in a ball on my bed as I do the time entry for the office. Abby was reading this morning, but now she's finally off to take her shower - now that her big sister has, at last, freed up the bathroom. Her cat, Tombo, is sleeping on her bed. Abby is so blissfully happy because we found a volume of the complete Shakespeare at Borders (for 30% off of $19.99 - gotta love that educator's discount and extra coupon).

As this is Jesse's one day off, she has headed off to meet up with her friend Veronica for about an hour, then she'll work a shift at the toy store this afternoon and, at the end of the day, wind up at the barn she manages, feeding Spencer and Cherokee and then cleaning out the barn.